QUARANTINE BLOG # 43

May 12, 2020

Sunday I asked you to pray for Ronnie Johnson who was scheduled for back surgery.  He had the surgery yesterday.  The doctor said he had a large piece of disc laying right on top of the nerve.  Ronnie went home after the surgery with good meds on board and doctor’s orders to stay in bed for 2 days and to do no lifting, pushing, or pulling for 2 weeks.  Everything is looking good.  Thanks be to God!

👉  Major League Baseball owners yesterday approved a proposal that commissioner Rob Manfred plans to present to players today for a return-to-play scenario that aims to have the baseball season begin in home stadiums on July 4th. Two issues – money, and ensuring a safe working environment – will be the most discussed issues.

👉  From a position firmly established behind my keyboard and my computer, let me ask you a question: does it matter whether you place a comma (or a period, or a question mark) inside or outside of quotation marks?

There are some things that just bug me.  Lots of things, actually, but this one is becoming increasingly irritating because of increasing number of people who do it wrong.  Check your grammar book.  Check Kate L. Turabian’s A Manual for Writers, or the MLA Handbook, or Strunk and White The Elements of Style.  The aforementioned punctuation marks go inside the quotation marks.

If those are too old fashioned for you, check out Mignon Fogarty.  Her website,  Grammar Girl, has been named one of Writer’s Digest’s 101 best websites for writers multiple times.  She agrees with Turabian and the others and with me.  Inside the quotation marks.  Unless you are British.

Here’s why.  Compositors – people who layout printed material with hand-set type – made the original rule that placed periods and commas inside quotation marks to protect the small metal pieces of type from breaking off the end of the sentence. The quotation marks protected the commas and periods. In the early 1900s, a famous British style guide called The King’s English began lobbying to make the rules more about logic and less about the mechanics of typesetting.

Authors Henry Watson Fowler and Francis George Fowler won the British battle, but Americans didn’t adopt the change. Maybe it is just the stubbornness of the colonials which dates back to the time of Charles Cornwallis, 1st Marquess Cornwallis, KC, PC.

Next complaint: when typing, do you double space after a period, or single space?

👉 Yesterday we visited “Ding Dong School”  the first children’s television program.  Today, let’s go to “Romper Room.”

Romper Room (1953-1994) was the second children’s television series that targeted preschoolers.  It was franchised internationally at various times in Canada, the United Kingdom, Japan, Finland, New Zealand and Australia, and had localized versions in more than three dozen places in the United States.

Romper Room’s first production was in Baltimore, and after the first few shows aired, the next 10 years were hosted by “Miss Nancy” Claster, the wife of the producer, Bert Claster.  Atlanta’s version started on local stations, but went nationwide in 1976 as part of Ted Turner’s WTBS Superstation.  There were three local versions in Pennsylvania – Johnstown, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh.

Each program (in America) opened with a greeting from the hostess and the Pledge of Allegiance. The hostess, always addressed as “Miss,” and her group of children then embarked on games, exercises, songs, story-telling and moral lessons. The young cast, which ranged from four to five years old, was rotated every two months.

At the end of each broadcast, the hostess would look through a “magic mirror” and recite the rhyme, “Romper, bomper, stomper boo. Tell me, tell me, tell me, do. Magic Mirror, tell me today, did all my friends have fun at play?” Youngsters were invited to send a postcard with their names on, and she would then name the children she saw in “television land.” Here is that clip from a 1984 show (nothing to identify it other than the date) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=td1KAgrYUGA

Tune in tomorrow for “Captain Kangaroo.”

👉  How about an amusing sign, or two?

👉 The number of new coronavirus cases reported per day in Georgia is staying roughly the same since April 20 when there were 910.  Sunday there were 886.  The high in that 3 week period was May 1 with 1,232 new cases reported (the lowest number was 339 on May 3; 526 yesterday).  So far, the feared increase that many of us – including this blogger – warned about has not happened.  Some, however, are pointing out that with an incubation period of 14 days and a delay in testing, upward numbers may yet be seen.  To which I fervently say, “Please Lord, let it not be so!”

👉 On this day in 1949, the first battle of the Cold War, fought with food, not with bullets, ended when the Soviet Union lifted its 11-month blockade against West Berlin.  The Berlin blockade began when Britain, France, and the United States began a slow move towards restoring the divided Germany to a democratic nation.  The USSR, wanting communism to be the ruling government, blockaded West Berlin, believing the other powers would not go to war over half of a city.

Britain and the United States responded by initiating the largest airlift in history, flying 278,288 relief missions to the city during the next 14 months, resulting in the delivery of 2,326,406 tons of food and supplies.

Flights were made around the clock, and at the height of the Berlin airlift, in April 1949, planes were landing in the city every minute. On Easter Sunday, April 17, 1949, ground crews and pilots delivered 12,940 tons of food and supplies. Cold War tensions over Berlin remained high, culminating in the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961.

👉 Ben Haden, one of the greatest preachers of my lifetime, began a sermon on prayer with this introduction, “If you stopped praying, would it radically change your life?  You say, ‘No, not really.’  Then why do you pray at all?”

I haven’t been able to identify the source, but a minister recounted asking a 16-year-old boy if he had prayed about a problem the boy was having. He answered, “I haven’t prayed in three years.” When asked why not, the boy replied, “Because God is going to do what He’s going to do whether I pray or not.”

The boy was no theologian, but God says in Isaiah 46:10, “I make known the end from the beginning, from ancient times, what is still to come. I say: ‘My purpose will stand, and I will do all that I please.’”

So why bother to pray? Because God promises that our prayers make a difference. James 5:16 says, “The prayer of a righteous man is powerful and effective.” The Bible tells us about times when prayer had a direct impact on things. For example, God told a man named Hezekiah that it was time for him to die. Hezekiah prayed for God to spare his life and God healed him and gave him 15 more years to live (2 Kings 20).

But how can the God who plans and controls the future tell us that our prayers affect what He does and what happens? I have no clue. But that’s ok. All I need to know is that I can trust God. And if He tells me that my prayers make a difference, then I know they make a difference.

So, pray boldly, even if you can’t fully understand how your prayers synch with God’s sovereign will. Pray boldly, not because you fully understand how prayer works, but because you are fully convinced in Jesus Christ that God loves you.

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