These messages are said to have appeared in church bulletins or were announced at church services:

The Fasting & Prayer Conference includes meals.

  
The sermon this morning: ‘Jesus Walks on the Water.’ The sermon tonight: ‘Searching for Jesus.’

Ladies, don't forget the rummage sale. It's a chance to get rid of those things not worth keeping around the house. Bring your husband.

Miss Charlene Mason sang ‘I will not pass this way again,’ giving obvious pleasure to the congregation.

 
For those of you who have children and don't know it, we have a nursery downstairs.

Irving Benson and Jessie Carter were married on October 24 in the church.  So ends a friendship that began in their school years.

At the evening service tonight, the sermon topic will be ‘What Is Hell?’ Come early and listen to our choir practice.

 
Eight new choir robes are currently needed due to the addition of several new members and to the deterioration of some older ones.

 
The ladies of the Church have cast off clothing of every kind. They may be seen in the basement on Friday afternoon.

 
This evening at 7 PM there will be a hymn singing in the park across from the Church. Bring a blanket and come prepared to sin.

The pastor would appreciate it if the ladies of the Congregation would lend him their electric girdles for the pancake breakfast next Sunday.

 
Low Self Esteem Support Group will meet Thursday at 7 PM. Please use the back door.

 
The eighth-graders will be presenting Shakespeare's Hamlet in the Church basement Friday at 7 PM. The congregation is invited to attend this tragedy.

 
Weight Watchers will meet at 7 PM at the First Presbyterian Church. Please use large double door at the side entrance.

Phil  

Homographs, homonyms, heteronyms, and polysemes

   No, these are not new preference designations for recreational sex.  We perhaps have enough of those already (seven, last time I counted: LGBTQIP).

   Homographs are dozens of words with the same spelling but more than one meaning.  If these different meanings are pronounced the same, they’re homonyms, many of which can be either a noun or a verb, such as down, effect, tie, exploit, file, implant, insult, sink, sign, and kiss.

   Homographs that are pronounced differently according to meaning are Heteronyms, such as invalid, lead, minute, pervert, progress, rebel, record, and subject.  This can lead to some interesting sentences:

The doctor wound a bandage around the wound.

Sometimes the dump will refuse more refuse.

A soldier decided to desert in the desert, but only after he’d had his dessert.

The dove dove to avoid the hawk.

We don’t object to the object.

He painted a bass on his bass drum.

It was like trying to wind string in the wind.

There was no time like the present to present his present to her.

   Polysemes are cousins to homographs of both the above homonym and heteronym varieties.  They’re words that started out meaning some activity but later began also meaning the people engaged in the activity, or products of the activity, or that became verbs concerning the activity.  Traditional examples are: ministry, nurse, service, court, delegation, and police.  Some techy recent additions to this family are Facebook, Google, and hack, which began life as ordinary nouns but grew up to become verbs as well.

  All of this makes me exceedingly happy I’m not an adult laboring to learn English.

Phil

Who on Earth is the happiest?

  A recent survey attempted to find out which are the happiest nations on the planet, based among other things on life expectancy, degree of freedom, social support, general trust, and generosity.  The top countries are Scandinavian.  Finland, Norway, and Denmark, followed by Iceland and Switzerland, in that order.  America was eighteenth on the list, the study citing obesity, wealth disparity, and business and governmental corruption as partial reasons.

  Of the ten least happy countries, eight are in Africa, with badly overpopulated Burundi at the top of that list.  Dense population and resultant poverty, poor health care, entrenched bloody tribalism clashes, lack of education, and endemic corruption all contribute.  Some 600 million people on that troubled continent don’t even have electricity, much less electric toothbrushes.

  What rank on which list will the United States earn in coming decades?  That’s largely up to us.

  But surely virulent partisan politics, continuing degradation and dumbing down of our educational system, rampant drug abuse, an ever-burgeoning deficit, increasing population numbers, and spreading distrust of all government levels are not going to help.

Phil

The New Killer Addiction

   It’s epidemic.  All over the planet.  And there doesn’t appear to be a cure.

  People, especially young people, are increasingly no longer involved in the real world around them but are almost constantly engrossed in the shallow artificiality that is flipping past their emotionless zombie gazes on their smartphones and tablets.  Take a short break from your own cell and look around in any public park, at the beach, on school campuses, in airline terminals, on buses and in airplanes.  Nearly everyone is immersed in Phoneworld.  You see couples on the street far more engaged with their phones than with each other.  People ostensibly go out for a group dinner, then rudely ignore each other so they can receive messages and feverishly thumb texts off into the ether.  Tourists standing before nature’s splendors take endless phone shots and selfies rather than indulge in old-fashioned experiencing and enjoying.

   The addiction all too often has gruesome and deadly consequences.  Driving while texting and talking on cellphones is killing 5,000 people a year and injuring thousands more across our nation alone.  Even distracted walking with resultant injuries is becoming a threat, with people bumping into each other on busy sidewalks or stepping out into traffic.

   A recent Baylor University study of college students, published in the Journal of Behavioral Addictions, found that women spend an average of ten hours daily on their cellphones, while men spend an average of eight hours.  Subtract sleep time and that doesn’t leave many hours for reality.  Sixty percent of all students queried admitted they may have Screen Addiction. 

   Nobody seems to know what to do about it. 

  There are increasing pressures that deepen the addiction through thousands upon thousands of apps.  A Hilton app lets you use your phone as a room key.  Restaurants and supermarkets and stores are encouraging you to use your phone as an ordering and checkout tool, allowing them to operate with fewer employees.  Theme parks have navigational and ride-wait-time apps that speed customer flow.  There are gadgets that tether your phone to you so you seldom even have to put it down or into a pocket or purse. 

   And all the while robotic web crawlers, lurking invisibly and silently behind our billions of screens, are at work for vast data centers like Facebook and Google and Amazon, tirelessly watching and listening and gathering and storing away data on every addict, from our educational and employment and medical and political and social histories to our dining and entertainment preferences to our brands of underwear.

   Is this an early sign of artificial intelligence (AI) creeping into our lives, eventually to seek more control over us than it obviously already has?  Robots are not only building our vehicles but are also taking over driving them.  Computers are piloting and landing planes and controlling our habitats and talking cordially with us and even generating news reports. 

   We lost one of our great minds recently.  Before he left us, Stephen Hawking warned humankind about the insidious encroachment of AI.  So far, there’s no evidence I can see that anyone has listened to him.

   We’re all too mesmerized by—and intimately occupied with—our wonderful cellphones.

Phil

Downside Up

     All my life, I’ve thought of northward on a map as ‘Up,’ southward as ‘Down,’ and eastward or westward as ‘Over.’  Living in New England, we would drive ‘up’ to Canada for a summer vacation or ‘down’ to Florida for a mid-winter warmup, or ‘over’ to New York State to visit my uncle and his family.  I would look ‘down’ at my feet to see if my sneakers were tied or ‘up’ into the night sky to marvel at the familiar constellation Orion.  Everybody else I knew seemed to observe the same orientations.

     Then a few years ago I went way ‘down’ to Chile in the Southern Hemisphere to view the night sky from a barren mountaintop high in the Atacama Desert, where it has not rained in decades and the atmosphere is not only free of moisture but also free of both air and light pollution.  Severe clear.

     The night sky was spellbinding in its majesty.  Impossible to adequately describe.  Venus was casting my shadow onto the ground, I could see the Andromeda galaxy with my naked eyes, and the legendary Pleiades, those ancient beautiful seven sisters, were dazzling and nested in a bed of diamond-like lesser stars I’d never even known were there.

     But the constellation Orion was upside-down.  A few other constellations that I’d been able to see from the Northern Hemisphere and that I could still see from the Southern Hemisphere were also upside-down.  What?  I had to make a sketch on a pocket pad to figure out why.  For the first time I realized there really is no ‘up’ or ‘down’ or ‘over.’  Those are all merely arbitrary concepts.  Weightless astronauts learn this lesson quickly on arrival at the International Space Station.  At any distance from our home planet, there is no longer any ‘up’ or ‘down.’  Even on the surface of our planet, if I look ‘down’ at my sneakers and then wait twelve hours, or half an earth revolution, I’m actually positioned on my head from where I was twelve hours earlier, looking ‘up’ at my sneakers.

     It was a disconcerting lesson in orientational prejudice.  The good people in Chile have every right to say they’ll go ‘up’ to Antarctica for penguin-watching or ‘down’ to Maine for photographing moose if they wish, and I have no right to fault them for it.

Phil

Lexophiles: people who enjoy punny word puzzles such as:

When fish are in schools, they sometimes take debate.

A thief who stole a calendar got twelve months.

When the smog lifts in Los Angeles U.C.L.A.

The batteries were given out free of charge.

A dentist and a manicurist married. They fought tooth and nail.

A will is a dead giveaway.

With her marriage, she got a new name and a dress.

A boiled egg is hard to beat.

When you've seen one shopping center you've seen a mall.

Police were summoned to a daycare center where a three-year-old was resisting a rest.

Did you hear about the fellow whose entire left side was cut off?  He's all right now.

A bicycle can't stand alone; it's just two tired.

When a clock is still hungry it goes back four seconds.

The guy who fell onto an upholstery machine is now fully recovered.

He had a photographic memory which was never developed.

When she saw her first strand of grey hair she thought she'd dye.

Acupuncture is a jab well done. That's the point of it.

Those who get too big for their britches will be totally exposed in the end.

Phil

Our modest star

Our Sun is only a smallish average star in a Universe where there are stars hundreds and thousands of times larger and grander.  Yet we owe all we are to it.  Our planet with its rich resources and wondrous vistas.  All flora and fauna on it.  Our very existence.  If it were to vary its energy output by a few percent, Earth and every living thing on it would perish.  One day, as the sun begins to grow old (it is already middle-aged) and expands to become a red giant, Earth will, indeed, perish, but long before then we can only hope we will have found another planet in a younger star system and, over several voyaging generations, have made it our new home.  This is the best argument for continuing a vigorous global pursuit of space programs.  If we do not do so, then the Universe will never know humankind, with all our scientific and sociological achievements, ever even existed.

This mesmerizing video (scroll down) displays the ultimate in abstract art, because absolutely nothing is or can ever be more important than what it depicts:

http://earthsky.org/space/red-giant-pi1-gruis-convection-granulation-bubbles

Phil