o1mnikent

I figured out this morning that the hymn, “Praise to the Lord, the Almighty” and the neanderthals have quite a bit in common. The hymn was written in the seventeenth century by a German poet incidentaly named Joachim Neander, who often went to a valley called Düssel to find inspiration. After his conversion, he became a famous German reformer and held services and preached in his beloved valley. He died in 1680, and the valley was posthumously renamed Neander Valley in his honor.

Coincidentally, the nineteenth century brought the advent of paleontology, where scientists scoured the earth for old bones from whatever species they could find. A skull cap, two femora, three bones from the right arm, two from the left arm, fragments of a scapula, and ribs of one of those species was found in Neander Valley and became known as homo neanderthalensis, which common parlance has renamed to Neanderthal.

Thanks to Joachim Neander’s influence (and hymn writing), those primitive bipeds weren’t named homo dusselenthis or something of the sort.

Two new blogs this week:

Sean, a friend and roommate from college, and now a friend from seminary. He resides near MLK park and reflects on – so far – residing near MLK park. Future reflections might include: “How my life changed after Kent linked to me.”

Sonny, the sister of the woman I’m dating. She works in a church and makes excellent hot chocolate mix from scratch – two virtues that I wholly commend. She reflects – so far – on the pause in life that blogging affords, which coincidentally happens to be the same reason I blog. Future reflections might include: “How my life changed after Kent linked to me.”

I spent a couple of hours of last week doing research for an upcoming textbook on the history of Christian worship. Research is a glorified way of describing what amounted to reading three month’s worth a newspaper of a small town near Jackson, Mississippi. The year? 1898. One of the pastors in the town – Charles Jones Price – did a few things at the Mount Helm Baptist Church that were shady in character. Price’s whole ordeal inadvertently contributed to the beginning of the holiness movement. But exact details aren’t known – who said what, when the church kicked him out, when he actually left – it was like picking apart a church split that happened over a century ago.

Every day, this newspaper included a brief editorial section, local happenings, and national news (down with Spain!). But two of its six pages were daily devoted to coverage of Congress and the state house and senate. Every day, debates, discussions, and conversations were described in details. Newspaper reporters reported the events in Congress in a style similar to today’s play-by-play by announcers at sporting events.

The situation today is far different. Most reporters have left congress. Large newspapers and broadcasting networks have correspondents in Washington, D.C., but for the most part news comes in over the wire and we’re told what to think about it on the evening pundit shows.

I’d like to see a recovery in better coverage in Washington, D.C. I’d like to see news outlets cover more than just one or two stories a day.

Warm air can hold a lot of water, but when it cools it can’t hold as much water. The extra water condenses into droplets on your yard, grass, car, or whatever else you happen to have outside. That’s called dew, and the dew point is the temperature at which this happens. Temperatures in Michigan this week will be higher than normal and the dew point will, too. That means that, at night, the temperature will be falling further than normal below the dew point. The result? Thick, dense fog.

Look for kick-awesome thunderstorms to break this cycle when a cold front approaches early next week.

The chorus of a song I came across today:

I love to love you O Lord, my God
I love to love you, O Lord, my God…

For real?

Yesterday afternoon my housemate observed that many folks on our street were already putting their trash on the sidewalks for pickup on Monday morning. In my former neighborhood, this ritual usually didn’t happen until very late Sunday night or very early Monday morning. This got me thinking about the ideal time to put trash on the curb. It seems that the earliest would technically be the previous Monday night before, and the latest one could put their trash on the curb would be as the garbage truck pulls up (you know the drill – you hear the breaks screech as the truck stops in front of your house, jump out of bed, grab your trash, and get to the curb just in time). The last minute is not ideal for obvious reasons, and a week before is not ideal for practical reasons – garbage disposal happens only by going out to the curb everytime you need to throw something away – not to mention how terrible neighborhoods would be if everyone left their trash on the curb all week long. Factoring in all these variables plus a few more, I wonder what an equation for this might look like. I’m sure it would be easy to calculate a relatively small window of time that would be ideal for taking out the trash.