Cave of Adullam - Volume 18, Issue 4

A Problem of Definitions
A judge in Pennsylvania threw out a case where a man was accused of obtaining beer for minors. His grounds for throwing it out was that the prosecution had failed to demonstrate that Miller Genuine Draft was, in fact, beer. A superior court intervened, and the decision was swiftly overturned.

But still. The superior court judge probably had a good laugh over it in his private chambers. Or not.

Oh, Great
The Synod 2006 for the Christian Reformed Church (CRC) has declared that "children are part of God's family and should be invited to take part in the Lord's Supper." The decision will take a couple years to implement, but still, there it is.

And who would have thought . . . the most conservative and most liberal wings of the Reformed world in North America still have almost nothing in common.

Our Scientists Are Smoking
A recent report published this summer in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has shown that kids thrive when their parents pay close attention to them. "A child's eventual ability to learn calculus or a second language, he explained, starts with the neurons that are shaped by positive interactions with nurturing adults." "Working independently, the four authors each came to the conclusion that the earliest years of life forever shape an adult's ability to learn."

What this shows is that we have to increase our funding for day care centers, appropriating enough to hire all the moms to watch over their own kids. And then say, "that makes no sense," before sending them all home. And then we could afford a hefty tax cut.

Payback Time
Just so you know, a lady in suburban Burbank has a pet turtle with an image of the Virgin Mary on the bottom of its shell.

Oh yeah? Well, I have a picture over my mantle piece that has an image of John Knox on it.

At Least Not Yet . . .
As everyone has heard by now, the newly elected leader of the U.S. Episcopal Church is a woman, Jefferts Schori, who is entirely supportive of the kind of stuff that has been going on in episcopo-land. After she was elected, she said that "she believed homosexuality was no sin and homosexuals were created by God to love people of the same gender." This sort of theological insight didn't just come out of nowhere—her early training was in marine biology. She has a doctorate specializing in squids and oysters.

To her credit, she is not in favor of the ordination of squids and oysters. As far as we know.

Good Mileage to the Heartache
Ford Motor Company is trying to jumpstart their way into profitability by running a commercial highlighting a painful divorce. A happy family is toodling along, you know, like they do in car commericials, and at the end of the mini-saga, they drop dad off at his lonely little place.

Somewhere, somebody is taking home a nice-sized paycheck for thinking things like this up.

One Donny Johnson is serving three life terms in solitary in California. But despite his isolation, or perhaps because of it, he was recently honored through a showing of his artwork in the Mexican village of San Miguel de Allende. According to a New York Times story, Johnson makes brushes out of his own hair, paints on blank postcards, and uses decayed M&M candies for paint. At least six of the paintings have sold for 500 dollars each.

I have some grandkids with the same M&M technique, but their canvas of choice is more likely to be the walls and furniture.

What Next?
Pope Benedict is being given the bum's rush by fanatics in the intelligent design movement, up to and including actually meeting with them. This indicates a possible change because Pope John Paul II said, in 1996, that Darwin's theories were "more than a hypothesis." But Pope Benedict is thinking of giving the okay to an RC alignment with the theory of "intelligent design."

Of course Darwinism is more than a hypothesis. It is also a crock of something or other. Why does this have to be controversial?

Mutterings on the Regnant Follies