When the minister arrived at the nursing home, he found his parishioner sitting alone in her room. “I am worried sick,” the 95-year-old woman explained. Trying to pinpoint the source of her anxiety, her minister began to question the woman.

In the last two weeks, Terry and I had friends pass away. Both were elderly, hers was 82, mine 94. The contrast between the final services for the two was striking. It was also saddening.

Don “Big Daddy” Garlits has broken nearly every drag racing record that can be broken. He was an innovator behind the drag car design. And he’s one of the fastest racers to reach 326 mph and live.
He’s so well known, in fact, that one of his cars, the Swamp Rat XXX is enshrined in The Smithsonian museum.
He is the father of drag racing. 

After decades of space missions costing billions of dollars, NASA found life on Mars.  Here’s the sequence of what happened.
On May 25, 2008, the Phoenix Mars Lander touched down in the icy polar region of Mars.  Phoenix had barely deployed its little robot shovel and begun to dig when it unearthed the life-form.  It was a tiny, hairy, slimy, smelly snail with exaggerated head and atrophied feet.  Scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena went bonkers, and classified the thing nematoda Martianus.  Pictures and descriptions of the barely moving snail were flashed worldwide.  For the first time, the Internet broke down with an overload of megabits and bytes as the news traveled.
But the celebration at NASA was muted compared to the paroxysm of activity in Japan.  The Japanese love raw fish and snails and seaweed.  They will eat things that you and I don’t even want to touch, so the anticipation of a new delicacy quickly reached fever pitch.

According to the Catholic Church, my father had something in common with polygamists.  Since the sacrament of marriage is insoluble, a person who receives a civil divorce is still married in the eyes of this church.  If he weds another woman, as my father did, outside the bonds of Holy Matrimony, he may well end up on his deathbed, as my father did, assured by visitors that he does not deserve forgiveness for his sins because he thought he could marry two different women.

“He’s got the whole world in his hands…” Laurie London first recorded this popular spiritual in 1958; it eventually went all the way to # 1. Simple lyrics coupled with a melodious tune have sustained the music’s popularity through the years. Most of us find it comforting to think that the world and our very lives do not simply spin unfettered in space, but rest firmly in the grasp of the almighty. However, I wonder what the song sounds like in Cantonese. I wonder if they have ever sung it in China. If so, do they still?

It is a strange country we live in. We have a government that is both the best and worst in the world.

I continue to be amazed at how, over 25 years, Plumb Alley Day has grown from a neighborhood yard sale into one of the major events in the Southeast.  With an estimated 10,000 people expected this Saturday, public figures know that the Day is an ideal venue to attend to advance their agendas and enhance their images. 

I read “Tale of Two Cities” in the ninth grade.  There I met Madame Defarge, a character who quietly knits the names of victims into a threadscape to do her part for the French Revolution.

There is a new church in Wales. Founded by two cousins, Barney and Michael Jones, it is the Church of Jediism.