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The Strong are Saying Nothing

Robert Frost is one of our greatest American minds — and the delivery method for sharing his genius was the poem.  On November 17, 2005, I wrote — Humility in Adoration — for Urban Semiotic, where I described the moment Mark Van Doren introduced Robert Frost to adoring fans at Columbia University in the City of New York:

The lesson of Coriolanus was echoed decades later by the genius American poet Robert Frost in 1950 when he was accepting an award at Columbia University. Frost whispered to his good friend — and fellow genius — Columbia Faculty member Mark Van Doren, that he didn’t think he deserved the award he was getting, but he felt it would be rude to go against the will of the people who wanted to honor and admire him.

Van Doren smiled, agreed, and introduced the great poet to a Columbia crowd who provided a thunderous standing ovation for Robert Frost. Mark Van Doren used that private discussion with Robert Frost to explain Coriolanus’ downfall in human terms his Shakespeare literary students could understand. The learning we must curry from Coriolanus and Robert Frost and Mark Van Doren is how we must all willingly accept praise and compliments from others without questioning intent or assuming there is a hidden purpose behind the kindness.

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Is the Zapruder Film a Fake?

The other day, I was doing a Google search on how to deblur an image that had the Photoshop box blur filter invoked when one of the search returns was an interesting website that graphically, and scientifically, put the lie to what we all thought was the ultimate truth of the JFK assassination:  The Zapruder film is a heavily edited fake!

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Gullible Part of Brain Found

It happens at least once a week — I open up my email and find in my inbox a message from an older family member, always a forward, containing a warning about the dire warning about the crumbling economy, the threat from various terrorist organizations, and computer virus warnings. My reaction is always the same — I go to a fact checking website and find a link to a page that refutes the e-mail entirely and send it as a response. I wondered how it could be that the e-mails keep coming and how the forwards are not questioned for validity before being sent. It is possible that it is related to gullibility which scientists have located in the brain and moreover have determined that people in two age ranges are more gullible. Those are young people and older people.

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…Oh, and By the Way… when the Christ Child Grew Up, He took a Wife and Made Her a Disciple

I find the news striking that our favorite former Jew, Jesus Christ, was, in fact, married, and we have the paper to prove it!  The papyrus tells us so, and if we believe in one Holy papyrus, then we must have enough faith to believe in other verified bits of writing, right?

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — A historian of early Christianity at Harvard Divinity School has identified a scrap of papyrus that she says was written in Coptic in the fourth century and contains a phrase never seen in any piece of Scripture: “Jesus said to them, ‘My wife …’ ”

The faded papyrus fragment is smaller than a business card, with eight lines on one side, in black ink legible under a magnifying glass. Just below the line about Jesus having a wife, the papyrus includes a second provocative clause that purportedly says, “she will be able to be my disciple.”

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The Laser Shooting Air Force Candidate

Parents love their precious little snowflakes and will do anything for them. It doesn’t matter if they are completely guilty of a crime. Case in point — the mother of one Corey Miller, aged 18, who was arrested for pointing a laser pointer at a police officer’s car and then at the police officer’s face when he went over to investigate why this was the case.

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Are You an Ohio Drunkard or Just an Iowa Cyclones Fan?

I love the peril of unintended consequences.  Ohio, in order to scarlet letter drunk drivers, requires the convicted to change their license plate to one that consists of an obnoxious yellow background and red alphanumeric identifiers.  The result is a modern day Mark of Cain and an identifiable public shaming.

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