A remark made in the midst of a group conversation came back to me recently. After someone shared a touching picture of a child with a puppy, one of the women in the group took a deep breath and said, “Awhh… can’t you just feel the love?” I don’t know what she might say about a scene like the one we’re facing right now, maybe something more like, “Oh, my… Can’t you just feel your toes curl under and your Continue reading
My heart began to race as the apparatus began to move, and I instinctively grabbed the metal bar in front of me. I was entering uncharted territory that day, because until then, I had never been to an amusement park, as they were called back then, nor had I ever even seen a roller coaster, much less climbed aboard one. As the white wooden framework forming the mountainous trestle we were about to climb came into view as we pulled slowly out of the boarding area, I remembered how scary it felt to look down from the upper level of the tobacco barn back home. That was nothing compared to the dizzying height of the track ahead. Continue reading
The SCOTUS hearings that took place in our nation’s capital earlier this week, coupled with the way other recent news events have been handled, have made the simple matter of asking questions an issue worthy of our attention. Since human history began, questions have been an indispensable tool in the development of interactive communication. And as we’ve seen lately, the process of investigation, discovery, and learning at any level can be severely impaired or dismantled altogether when that basic process is manipulated or completely disallowed. It has also been clearly demonstrated that punctuating a sentence with a question mark doesn’t always indicate that a simple answer is all the interrogator wants to achieve. When the privilege of direct questioning isn’t categorically denied, the questions asked are sometimes designed to be used more as a means of delivering an accusation than obtaining an answer. Again and again, we have watched interviewers twist questions into something more like an “interrogatory indictment”. Continue reading
In the ongoing theater of human history, the contest unfolding on the American stage of governance right now is more dramatic and intense than any we have witnessed. The hyper-contentious atmosphere prevailing in the land has spawned conflicts and confrontations in nearly every category of human contact. Unknowns abound and new questions create another frantic search for answers on a daily basis, but one question seems to overshadow them all . . . Continue reading
Alarms come in lots of different forms. Sometimes they are simple, multipurpose instruments, like bells, whistles, lights, or flags that have been adapted for use as a warning that danger is imminent. Other times they are more complex devices whose only purpose is to arrest attention and warn those who may be at risk. Our household fire alarms are a familiar example of the second category.
Smoke detectors had an interesting beginning. They originated from the work of a would-be inventor named Walter Jaeger in the late 1930s. The interesting thing is that he Continue reading
The group of guys nearby may have been trying to see who could come up with the most extravagant understatement. I can’t say for sure, but if it was a contest, my money would have been on the bearded guy in the baseball cap. You could tell he was having a serious moment because he Continue reading
