One of my favorite stories of the week; I am not going to spoil it by excerpting it you need to listen to it all (almost 6 minutes)

Our youngest daughter Selimah showed us this one–adorable!

You might know that the tantalizing combination of peanut butter and jelly you’re eating between two slices of bread was named after a certain Earl of Sandwich, but how many other words that we use every day are named after real people?

How about galvanize? Silhouette? Leotard?

These words ”” called eponyms ”” and many more fill a new book called Anonyponymous: The Forgotten People Behind Everyday Words, written by John Bemelmans Marciano.

Some of the people who donated their names to history did it by accident.

“There was a woman named Mary Frisbie who made pies in Connecticut,” Marciano tells Renee Montagne. “Students would throw around her pie plates after they had finished her pies, and kind of like you would say, ‘Incoming!’ they would say, ‘Frisbie!’ just to give people the heads-up that there was something spinning and flying coming at their head.”

I caught this on the morning podcast. Please listen to it all–it is a delight (7 minutes, 20 seconds).

Watch it all.

Wisdom is the power to see and the inclination to choose the best and highest goal, together with the surest means of attaining it.

–J.I.Packer, Knowing God

In the autumn time feels short, but that there is enough of it, which is paradoxical. Time being a tricky thing to think about is best done alongside Nature, where it seems to make more sense than it does by clock or by calendar. And the memory place that autumn is uses time itself as a container for the things that we keep returning to and trying to understand.

The reflective melancholy of autumn helps me to cope with change and loss, and to find both beauty and necessity in things passing. Ageing has a splendour to it.

Our culture cannot accept that. I think of those lines of Donne: “Nor spring or summer beauty hath such grace/ As I have seen in one autumnal face.”

Read it all.

Islands are often the playgrounds of imaginary scientists, from Dr. Moreau to the researchers on the TV show Lost. But this place is real: an island where every single plant species has had its DNA analyzed and cataloged.

Plummers Island is just on the edge of the Potomac River and holds the distinction of being “the most studied island in North America.”

That’s according to John Kress, a botanist at the Smithsonian Institution. “There’s been more biologists out here looking at everything from worms to flowers to birds, mammals, snails … than any other spot on the East Coast,” he says.

Read or listen to it all.

Asked whether it absolves the critters of past or future sins, Rev. Brad Beale smiled.

“Maybe, in the eyes of the owner,” he said, explaining it may bring “the hope they won’t be quite so naughty the following year.”

He began the service by noting he might have to improvise depending on how the furrier occupants of the pews behaved.

But he and worshippers said it’s a fun time.

“It’s about environment for us, too — to remind us that we’re connected to the Creation, very connected,” said Beale.

“It’s a nice alternate service,” said Anne Clark.

Read it all.

In terms of numbers, the Anglican Church isn’t a very big player in Samoa.

But the scale of the tsunami disaster is such that no-one with any Pacific connections has been left untouched by it ”“ including some leading figures in the Diocese of Polynesia.

Take Taimalelagi Fagamalama Tuatagaloa-Leota, for example.

Archdeacon Tai, as she’s known to hundreds in this church is a Samoan living in Auckland. She has served as the Anglican Observer at the United Nations, on the Anglican Consultative Council, as a Diocese of Polynesia representative to the General Synod, and earlier this year she was priested.

For her, the impact of the tsunami is profound.

One of her adult sons was in a van that was swept out to sea by the tsunami. He finished up half under the van, impaled by roofing iron. He’s critically injured, and is in Apia hospital.

Read it all.

Quite something–watch it all.

A boy was watching his father, a minister, write a sermon.

“How do you know what to say?” he asked.

“Why, God tells me.”

“Oh, then why do you keep crossing things out?”

I remember standing at Meeting and Broad streets, the famous Four Corners of Law, thinking this was a historic moment. As a reporter, I felt lucky to be there. As a citizen, however, it was devastating.

A few hours later, I waded onto the barrier islands and witnessed firsthand what looked like a war zone. The power of such a storm made houses on the island look like they had been inside a blender.

In the days to come, the sound of chain saws would dominate our senses as we all witnessed the aftermath of a nightmare.

I remember walking through the rubble of people’s homes and wondering how long it would take for us to recover from such a disaster.

Turns out, some of us never will.

Read it all.

An old city, like anyone who has lived a bold life, will have many scars. Over its lifetime, Charleston has weathered plagues, wars, fires, storms and earthquakes ”” events that left the city in ruins and terrified its residents.

Some scars from these traumatic times are still visible today; others healed outwardly but remain part of the city’s collective memory and are as real as the morning light.

Twenty years ago, Hurricane Hugo, a dark mass of spinning winds and vapor as big as the state itself, tore into South Carolina.

Those who went through the storm will never forget the rising waters, the freight-train wail of the winds, the Ben Sawyer Bridge tilting in the marsh, the pines snapped halfway up their trunks, the pink insulation everywhere, the convoys of people coming to help, the exhaustion at the end of a day trying to make things normal again.

Hard to believe it has been two decades. I remember a lot of things, but most of all the sound the wind made. It is a sound I never want to hear again. Read it all–KSH.

I caught this this morning on the way to the dentist–very funny.

A devastating drought is sweeping across Kenya, killing livestock, crops and children. It is stirring up tensions in the ramshackle slums where the water taps have run dry, and spawning ethnic conflict in the hinterland as communities fight over the last remaining pieces of fertile grazing land.

The twin hearts of Kenya’s economy, agriculture and tourism, are especially imperiled. The fabled game animals that safari-goers fly thousands of miles to see are keeling over from hunger and the picturesque savanna is now littered with an unusually large number of sun-bleached bones.

Ethiopia. Sudan. Somalia. Maybe even Niger and Chad. These countries have become almost synonymous with drought and famine. But Kenya? This nation is one of the most developed in Africa, home to a typically robust economy, countless United Nations offices and thousands of aid workers.

The aid community here has been predicting a disaster for months, saying that the rains had failed once again and that this could be the worst drought in more than a decade. But the Kenyan government, paralyzed by infighting and political maneuvering, seemed to shrug off the warnings.

I caught this one coming home last night on the plane. Read it all and look at that remarkable picture.

Giant engineering schemes to reflect sunlight or suck carbon dioxide from the air could be the only way to save the Earth from runaway global warming, according to a group of leading scientists. But they say that these schemes could have their own catastrophic consequences, such as disrupting rainfall patterns, and should be deployed only as a last resort if attempts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions fail.

The Royal Society, a fellowship of 1,400 of the world’s most eminent scientists, published a report yesterday on the feasibility and possible dangers of technologies for cooling down the Earth, known as geoengineering. The ideas include artificial trees that draw CO2 from the air and mimicking volcanoes by spraying sulphate particles a few miles above the Earth to deflect the Sun’s rays. The most far-fetched would would be to launch trillions of small mirrors into space to act as a sunshield.

A far cheaper solution would be a fleet of 1,500 ships that would suck up seawater and spray it out of tall funnels to create sun-reflecting clouds. However, the report said that these clouds could disrupt rainfall patterns and result in mass starvation in countries dependent on the monsoon.

Read it all.

This is just a gem, especially the section on the spider. Make sure to find the time to listen to it all from NPR (over 14 minutes in all).

Take a look.

There was an elderly lady who had great faith in God, and also was very exuberant about expressing it, and it was her practice that every morning she would go out on her front porch and raise her arms to the sky and shout “praise the Lord!”

Well, it happened that her next door neighbor was an atheist who would shout back “there ain’t no Lord!”

So every morning this little routine went on, and it came to pass that this woman of great faith was experiencing financial difficulty, going through very hard times, so one morning she went out on her front porch to do her normal routine and said: “Lord, you have to send me some groceries, I don’t have enough money to buy the food we need. Lord, send me some groceries, and praise the Lord!”

So the next morning she went out on her porch and lo and behold there were two big bags of groceries, all the food that she needed, and of course didn’t hesitate to say “Praise the Lord!” But her neighbor had been hiding in the bushes, and he jumped out and said: “Ha! I put those groceries there! There is no Lord!” Well, that didn’t stop her for a second, she jumped up and down with even more Joy than ever and yelled: Praise the Lord! The Lord bought me groceries and even made the someone greatly resisting your goodness pay for them!”

Elizabeth caught this one in last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine. Do not just drive by the blog entry and miss it–it is simply hysterical! KSH.

Our worst fear has recently come to pass: the dementia ward of the veterans’ home where my father had been living transferred him to a psychiatric hospital. But when I met my mother there on the day they brought him over, I wasn’t really surprised to see her waving from across the hall with a big smile on her face, about to laugh. We’re a family of laughers. We laugh when we’re happy, when we’re angry and, most of all, when we’re frightened.

“That’s him,” she said, chortling and pointing to the ambulance in the bay. “He just arrived, and he’s mad as a wet hen. But the ambulance driver said he didn’t slug anyone, so that’s an improvement.”

Read it all.

The shot when they get to the top of the tree is just amazing–watch it all

Q. Could you give us a brief definition of “the gospel”?

A. I could try taking a Pauline angle. When Paul talks about “the gospel,” he means “the good news that the crucified and risen Jesus is the Messiah of Israel and therefore the Lord of the world.” Now, that’s about as brief as you can do it.

The reason that’s good news”¦ In the Roman Empire, when a new emperor came to the throne, there’d obviously been a time of uncertainty. Somebody’s just died. Is there going to be chaos? Is society going to collapse? Are we going to have pirates ruling the seas? Are we going to have no food to eat? And the good news is, we have an emperor and his name is such and such. So, we’re going to have justice and peace and prosperity, and isn’t that great?!

Now, of course, most people in the Roman Empire knew that was rubbish because it was just another old jumped-up aristocrat who was going to do the same as the other ones had done. But that was the rhetoric.

Paul slices straight in with the Isaianic message: Good news! God is becoming King and he is doing it through Jesus! And therefore, phew! God’s justice, God’s peace, God’s world is going to be renewed.

And in the middle of that, of course, it’s good news for you and me. But that’s the derivative from, or the corollary of the good news which is a message about Jesus that has a second-order effect on me and you and us. But the gospel is not itself about you are this sort of a person and this can happen to you. That’s the result of the gospel rather than the gospel itself.

It’s very clear in Romans. Romans 1:3-4: This is the gospel. It’s the message about Jesus Christ descended from David, designated Son of God in power, and then Romans 1:16-17 which says very clearly: “I am not ashamed of the gospel because it is the power of God unto salvation.” That is, salvation is the result of the gospel, not the center of the gospel itself.

—Please guess who is speaking before you look and find the answer.

A single mega-colony of ants has colonised much of the world, scientists have discovered.

Argentine ants living in vast numbers across Europe, the US and Japan belong to the same inter-related colony, and will refuse to fight one another.

The colony may be the largest of its type ever known for any insect species, and could rival humans in the scale of its world domination.

Read it all.

This is Kendall Harmon and Temah.

Wedding attendants are going to the dogs.

Pet-loving couples are increasingly including their dogs (and other pets, to a much lesser degree) in the wedding parties of some very formal weddings — decking them out in silk and satin and including them in the receiving line, on the program and in the portraits.

“Many people think of their pets as family members, and they wouldn’t think of having a special day like this without that member,” says Celina Bojorquez, co-owner of Beverly Hills Mutt Club, purveyor of upscale accessories like doggie tuxedos ($70 and up) and couture dresses ($170 to $500).

Read the whole article.

My sister-in-law, a professional storyteller, was in Europe speaking at various libraries. Later, she called her mother and told her that she’d just given a speech for 250 librarians.

“Great,” said her mother. “How much is that in American money?”

–David Rumpeltin in the July 2009 Reader’s Digest, page 175

This is just fantastic.