You need to watch it all, the picture of the mile wide tornado takes one’s breath away.

Some 12-16 named storms are expected, 6-9 of them hurricanes. 2-5 hurricanes are predicted to be major hurricanes.

While our friends from India traveled around California on business, they left their 11 year-old daughter with us. Curious about my going to church one Sunday morning, she decided to come along. When we returned home, my husband asked her what she thought of the service.

“I don’t understand why the West Coast isn’t included too,” she replied. When we inquired what she meant, she added, “You know, in the name of the Father, the Son, and the whole East Coast.”

–Ann Spivack in Reader’s Digest

A lovely story–watch it all.

Go here, then click on the cartoon for today, then scroll back to the cartoon for May13th. LOL.

“The superiority of pagan over Christian truth was believed by Catholic Christianity’s critics to subsist precisely in the fact that ‘these things never happened, but always are.'”

–Markus Bockmuehl, quoting Sallustius (4th cent.), De dis et mundo 4 (tauta de egeneto oudepote, esti de aei), against Hauerwas’ Matthew; Pro ecclesia 17:1 (Winter 2008): p. 27

Don Mathis was in for some good news ”” sort of. He wouldn’t have to pay another water bill for 600 years. But the circumstances of such good fortune left the Houston man sourly dismayed.

Mathis thought his check for $99,000 was safely en route to a Dallas securities firm where it would be used to purchase a certificate of deposit. Instead, it arrived at Houston’s Department of Public Works and Engineering office, where it was automatically processed, endorsed and deposited.

“It’s a comedy of errors,” Mathis said, noting that he never suspected anything was amiss until he received a nervous phone call from Dallas. “I have no idea what went wrong. I’ve done this a jillion times.”

Read it all.

For two weeks starting Monday, Hyatt’s new Andaz Liverpool Street in London will host the hotel world’s first “Reader in Residence.”

Writer Damian Barr, 31, will read to guests or talk literature with them. “Most people haven’t been read to since they were children, and they don’t bring a lot of books to hotels,” he says. “I always pack a selection, because you get tired of being in the CNN world.”

Read it all.

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — What’s black and white and warm all over? A penguin in a wetsuit, naturally. Sounds like a joke, but it’s quite serious for biologists at the California Academy of Sciences, who had a wetsuit created for an African penguin to help him get back in the swim of things.

Interviewing a college applicant, the dean of admissions asks, “If you could have a conversation with someone, living or dead, who would it be?

The student thinks it over, then answers, “The living one.”

–Reader’s Digest, May 2008, p. 187

A nice story–watch it all.

From here:

[This past Wednesday] We heard a feature about noisy restaurants. Food critic Tom Sietsema of The Washington Post surveyed a number of hotspots in the Washington area. He told me some of them topped 90 decibels, that’s like standing next to a lawnmower.

[ROBERT] SIEGEL: Thank you for doing this story, writes Ann Rabelfetcher(ph) of Atlanta. I wish you all restaurant reviewers would include noise levels in their coverage. The woman who said she liked noisy restaurants embodied the reason we detest them, quote, “I can bring my kid into there, he might be screaming and banging on the glasses or whatever, and no one notices.” Oh good, I’m so happy for pay for that ambiance.

[MICHELE] NORRIS: Jennifer Woods(ph) of Frankfort, Illinois, adds this: Your guest failed to mention what I think is another major reason for noisy restaurants. Most of them play music or television too loudly, so even if there are only a few diners, right away the conversation level has to overcome the entertainment. I once asked for the music to be turned off. The response from the waiter: Oh, we couldn’t do that; silence is oppressive.

Love that last line–the emphasis is mine–KSH..

Complaints have been on the rise in recent years about the volume level in restaurants. Washington Post food critic Tom Sietsema took a noise monitor to some of the hottest eateries in the nation’s capital.

Listen to it all from NPR.

Free tickets to see the Dalai Lama selling on ebay and craiglist for $100 +

The sure mark of an unliterary man is that he considers ”˜I’ve read it already’ to be a conclusive argument against reading a work. We have all known women who remembered a novel so dimly that they had to stand for half an hour in the library skimming through it before they were certain they had once read it. But the moment they became certain, they rejected it immediately. It was for them dead, like a burnt-out match, an old railway ticket, or yesterday’s newspaper; they had already used it. Those who read great
works, on the other hand, will read the same work ten, twenty or thirty times during the course of their life.”

–C.S.Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism

One of the all-time greats in baseball was Babe Ruth. His bat had the power of a cannon, and his record of 714 home runs remained unbroken until Hank Aaron came along. The Babe was the idol of sports fans, but in time age took its toll, and his popularity began to wane. Finally the Yankees traded him to the Braves. In one of his last games in Cincinnati, Babe Ruth began to falter. He struck out and made several misplays that allowed the Reds to score five runs in one inning. As the Babe walked toward the dugout, chin down and dejected, there rose from the stands an enormous storm of boos and catcalls. Some fans actually shook their fists. Then a wonderful thing happened. A little boy jumped over the railing, and with tears streaming down his cheeks he ran out to the great athlete. Unashamedly, he flung his arms around the Babe’s legs and held on tightly. Babe Ruth scooped him up, hugged him, and set him down again. Patting him gently on the head, he took his hand and the two of them walked off the field together.

–Source Unknown

A lot of fun.

Watch it all.

This was really very entertaining from NPR–listen to it all.

My wife caught this on Wednesday night and showed it to me–hilarious.

Watch it all.

The dogs next door get a little noisy, so one day somebody called animal control to complain. When the officers arrived, I heard my neighbors tell them, “Hey, dogs bark. It’s human nature.”

–Kent Kollmer in the December 2007 Reader’s Digest, page 190

Corrie ten Boom told of not being able to forget a wrong that had been done to her. She had forgiven the person, but she kept rehashing the incident and so couldn’t sleep. Finally Corrie cried out to God for help in putting the problem to rest. “His help came in the form of a kindly Lutheran pastor,” Corrie wrote, “to whom I confessed my failure after two sleepless weeks.” “Up in the church tower,” he said, nodding out the window, “is a bell which is rung by pulling on a rope. But you know what? After the sexton lets go of the rope, the bell keeps on swinging. First ding, then dong. Slower and slower until there’s a final dong and it stops. I believe the same thing is true of forgiveness. When we forgive, we take our hand off the rope. But if we’ve been tugging at our grievances for a long time, we mustn’t be surprised if the old angry thoughts keep coming for a while. They’re just the ding-dongs of the old bell slowing down.” “And so it proved to be. There were a few more midnight reverberations, a couple of dings when the subject came up in my conversations, but the force — which was my willingness in the matter — had gone out of them. They came less and less often and at the last stopped altogether: we can trust God not only above our emotions, but also above our thoughts.”

–Quoted in this morning’s sermon by yours truly on forgiveness

The temptation to form premature theories upon insufficient data is the bane of our profession. –Sherlock Holmes

–I have tried to keep things in my hands and lost them all, but what I have given into God’s hands I still possess.

–Martin Luther; quoted in this morning’s sermon by yours truly

Try to do the top ten in order before you look.

What a lot of fun.