Mark's Views, Perhaps — from behind my eyeballs
They were stopped (or mostly so) in traffic.
Til he came along. 😯
And gave them a push. 😐
OK, more than a push — a whiplashing bash. 🙁
It happened on her birthday. In Sandy, Oregon.
Thankfully, Mr. Regretful Cruiser Read it all
I was taking a break from work while I waited for my computer to update and reboot when I saw on Reuters (HT: Google News) that much of the US government is shuttered. 😯
Seriously? I thought it was only 17%. 😳 Reuters? Are Cowan and Reid stretching things?
Or maybe there’s a subliminal message intended:
Maybe that’s the explanation. 🙄 Richard? Tim? Am I on the right track? 😉
Well, here’s my screen capture of the report in question: Read it all
For my high school Spanish class today, the students are planning to take a written quiz on the proper uses of the present tense conjugations of ir, ser, and estar. That is, they’d better be planning that way; I am!
After that, we’ll do oral pronunciation and translation work using these two lists:
And these statements: Read it all
Apparently a cat in the hood left this by our garage door: Read it all
Goody two-shoes? What does that mean?!
It must be something bad. Really, terribly bad. I’ve never heard anything positive about a goody two-shoes. I’ve never heard anyone aspire to being one. Obviously there’s no good in that kind of goody.
Goody two-shoes are mocked, derided, and scorned. They are held in contempt and as a standard of what not to be.
Why?
OK, after writing all that, I looked up the term and found these two helpful entries:
A prudish, self-righteous individual, a goody-goody. For example, Phyllis was a real goody two-shoes, tattling on her friends to the teacher. This expression alludes to the main character of a nursery tale, The History of Goody Two-Shoes (1765), who was so pleased when receiving a second shoe that she kept saying “Two shoes.” The goody in the story is short for goodwife but means “goody-goody” in the idiom.
Source: dictionary.com
That helps. I’ve even met people like that. And people I thought were like that, but I discovered later my own weakness propelled me to a huge leap onto a wrong, unjust conclusion. Andrée over at World magazine experienced something similar: Read it all
Since some friends have served in Bangladesh and one of them plans to return later this month, this story of forced conversions to Islam drew my attention:
A local government official in central Bangladesh has halted the construction of a church, forced Christians to worship at a mosque and threatened them with eviction from their village unless they renounce their faith.
[…]
“Their threats chilled me to the bone. That is why I pretended to accept Islam, but faith in Christ is the wellspring of my life. Now I am no longer a Muslim; I am a Christian.”
[…]
Eight Christians agreed to return to Islam since Sept. 14, under the chairman’s orders. The chairman and his associates had already beaten some of those Christians three years ago for accepting Christianity.
[…]
Local chairman Faruk told World Watch Monitor that some Christians had been acting against Islam, due to their incorrect interpretation of the Qur’an.
“The Imams and other elders of the society called them for rectification because of their aberrant behaviour. They were derailed, so we tried to put them on the right track,” he said.
“Eight people who had deviated came back to Islam. We are trying to bring back others. To change a religion, a person needs to swear his or her name, and should inform a local magistrate. If the magistrate permits, then he or she can change religion. But what they are doing is completely wrong.”
To read the full article I quote above, read Bangladeshi Christians told to close church, convert to Islam.
HT: persecution.org
The Wall Street Journal had a piece about The Budget, which we get third-hand.
The corn stands 5 feet tall, the temperatures are in the 90s and Johnny Byler got hooked on his head while fishing with a friend, reported Mrs. Jerry Ray Byler in a recent front-page article of the Budget.
Mrs. Byler is one of about 860 correspondents for the Budget, a 123-year-old weekly newspaper, which carries the news of Amish and Mennonite communities […]
They write about who got married, who went to church, who received dentures—and how 11 chickens went missing when Toby Schrocks of Cisne, Ill., forgot to close the chicken-house door.
Budget Correspondent Paul Troyers in Genesee, Pa., reported that family members held an auction with good results. “The medium-sized dinner bell that mom wanted to throw out brought $400,” he wrote.
“It’s like someone talking over the back fence to a neighbor,” says Budget publisher Keith Rathbun. Mr. Rathbun, who isn’t Amish, covered sports and put out an alternative entertainment weekly before coming in 2000 to the Budget.
The Budget runs about 500 letters a week on 44 to 46 pages that contain no photos. It costs $45 a year; newlyweds pay $42.
It does have competition. Die Botschaft—German for the Message—costs $44 a year, has a circulation of about 12,000 and also consists of letters and reports from contributors. It’s a more conservative alternative to the Budget, which some Amish readers thought was too liberal, say Amish scholars.
Of course, there’s much more to the WSJ article — Amish Newspapers Thrive in Digital Age — but in closing I offer you its crowning paragraph:
Both papers like variety—and letters about interesting, if benign, events. Included on Die Botschaft’s recent Worth Mentioning list: “Mineral deficiency causes a dead cow” referring readers to a letter from a man in Plains, Montana, who found his only milk cow dead one Saturday morning. One woman wrote about her cousin who stuck something up her nose and didn’t tell anyone. Sometime later, her mother noticed a sprout growing out of her nostril, pulled on it and out came a corn kernel.
Have you read the Budget?
