Sarah A. Hoyt's Blog, page 252

Scandal

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Among the many moral precepts I failed to heed, mostly because I could make neither heads nor tails of it, was the “woe onto him who gives scandal. It were better for him if he were tied to a millstone and thrown into the sea.”

The illustration on that page of the cathecism was amazing, with all the vivid emotion of a Victorian lithograph, showing a man having his neck tied to the millstone, which of course led young geek me to stare at it and go, “Well, no worry throwing it in the sea.  The...

Leaving Your Mark By Christopher M. Chupik

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*Worry not.  I am all right.  But taking two days of doing bloody nothing this week left me with two days worth of what Dan calls “administrivia” in both house and business to do, which means I’ve spent te morning running around like a port-wine drunken turkey with its had cut off (a story for another time.)  So…. Thank you to Christopher Chupik who doesn’t mind my putting his post up late. – SAH*

Leaving Your Mark

By Christopher M. Chupik

I open the book and see the name inscribed in neat h...

But It’s My Vocation!

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Last week, Foxfier mentioned vocations.  I don’t tend to use the word because it’s too fraught with religious meaning, (being a specific thing of many religions) and also fraught with the meaning of predestination, destiny, fate, and things you are “meant” to do.

It’s also fraught with crazy, because all of those invoke crazy in our culture.

There are a lot of strange thoughts in all our heads, un-examined, about vocation and “what you were born to do.”

Forgive me if these sound erratic and...

Vignettes by Luke, Mary Catelli and ‘Nother Mike & Sunday Book Promo

Vignettes by Luke, Mary Catelli and ‘Nother Mike & Sunday Book Promo

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*First, a brief announcement/forewarning: if I don’t put out a post tomorrow morning, do not be alarmed.  I have a fairly harmless and routine procedure at 8 am, which will necessitate leaving the house at something like 6 am.  Now, because I’m very slightly nervous — I always am — I’ll be up probably in the VERY cold light of dawn. So I might put a post up.  Or I might not.  There is no telling.  It’s also possible I’ll pu...

Social Apes

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Let’s establish something at the outset.  Humans are social apes.

Sure, okay, we’re also rational or at least reasoning creatures, and we’ve changed our environment and mode of life so much, and made so many adaptations that you can say “are we still?”

Yes, we still are.  The place where rising ape meets falling angel is a pretty decent description of being human.  We aspire to more.  This is good.  Our minds — souls? — can conceive a fantastic vision of eternity (except mine.  I’m really ba...

The Blue Schism and Why We Should Care – By Amanda S. Green

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©geralt@pixabay.com. Released under a CCO creative commons license.

The Blue Schism and Why We Should Care – By Amanda S. Green

Well, it’s done. With the exception of Louisiana, all primaries leading up to the mid-term elections are decided. Louisiana will hold its primary on, well, the day the rest of us hold the general election. New York closed the books on the primary season and each of us should look at what happened and learn from it.

Since Trump beat Clinton in 2016, the Dems have been...

I Feel The Ground Shifting

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Cats are more sensitive to noise than we are.  When I was doing work with orphan kittens — most of your local shelters will take kittens any age.  Most euthanize those under 8 weeks of age, which most state laws view as being too young to adopt.  Some people like me volunteer to raise litters to 8 weeks of age, which is often 7 week stints of having infants, with all that entails.  As my health got worse, I stopped doing it, so I haven’t done it in close to ten years.  Might do it again, whe...

Lights and Bushels

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There are a lot of sayings (yes, a lot of them from the Bible) that seem pretty silly when you’re a kid.  Take the thing of hiding your light under a bushel.  I knew what a bushel was because they were these reed things used for measuring corn when you bought it (mostly for the chickens) by the bushel-full.  I also knew what the lamp referenced was, because we still had a ton of them around — electricity supply being spotty and the house weirdly wired — they were the oil lamps where we would...

The Mirror Cracked From Side To Side

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By Grandmaster E, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2514397

It was a clear day like today.  A Tuesday in September.  Still warm enough, but with a chill in the air.

Before I walked the kids to school, I’d checked the internet and seen that a plane had hit the towers.  I didn’t think anything of it, because recently, a small plane had hit the Empire State Building.  I thought the same thing had happened again and remember a vague annoyance.  Was this going to be a t...

Utopia Means Death

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It never fails.  It’s kind of like, you know, going out side when it’s raining and getting wet.  Or being hungry if you don’t eat or sleepy if you don’t sleep.

If you go to a blog in which someone has denounced the crimes of communism, you can expect two things in the comments: one, that there will be idiots saying that what we’re talking about is not communism, because true communism has never been tried.  The other is that there will be idiots saying that our system has too many issues NOT...