QUARANTINE BLOG # 205

October 21, 2020

I’m not sure which department of the Quarantine Blog is responsible for this first piece: “The Did His Mamma Drop Him Department,” or “The You’ve Got To Be Kidding Me Department.”  Well, without more information, all of the blame goes to Mark Bryan, an American robotics engineer living in Germany, who wears towering high heels and skirts every day to prove “clothes have no gender.”  

“I am just a straight, happily married guy,” he wrote to his 62,000 Instagram followers, “that loves Porsche’s, beautiful women and incorporating high heels and skirts into my daily wardrobe.”  He is going for masculine look above the waist and a non-gendered look below the waist.  And he completes the look with strappy stilettos.  His wife of 11 years helps him pick out clothes, and his daughter often wishes she could borrow his shoes.  I’m thinking about creating a “Fruity As A Nut Cake Department.”  You be the judge.

👉  Travis Gienger, a Minnesota horticulture teacher used his quarantine time to constantly water and feed a massive pumpkin that won this year’s Half Moon Bay (California) pumpkin contest.  His winner came in at 2,350 pounds.  The first-time pumpkin champ won $16,450, or $7 per pound, for the lumpy, orange pumpkin that was showcased during a parade through Half Moon Bay.  The U.S. record was set in 2018 when a grower in New Hampshire produced a pumpkin weighing more than 2,500 pounds.  The record for the heaviest pumpkin in the world – 2,600 pounds – was set in 2016 at the Giant Pumpkin European Championship in Ludwigsburg, Germany.  Any of those winners would have made a lot of pumpkin pies, or really, really big Jack-O-Lanterns.

👉  It is election season – you knew that because of the constant bombardment of campaign ads (He’s a crook.  No, I’m not, he’s the crook).  In Deveselu, Romania they’ve already voted and Ion Aliman was reelected in a landslide for an unprecedented third term as mayor of the village despite having died from COVID-19 complications 10 days before the elections.  His death came too late to remove his name from the ballot, but villagers went to the polling stations Sunday and voted for Aliman anyway.  He will probably make as a good a mayor dead as some of the living candidates we are asked to vote for.

👉  I forgot to tell you yesterday that the World Series was starting, and if it hadn’t been for a piece in USAToday, I might have missed the whole thing.  But this pandemic shortened season does have a couple of things baseball fans may want to tune in for.  First, it’s the first time since 2013, the teams with the best records in their respective leagues will meet in the World Series: the Tampa Bay Rays and Los Angeles Dodgers.  Second, rooting for the Rays is the closest Pirates fan will get to the World Series this year.  Last night’s starting, and losing,  pitcher was Tyler Glasnow who signed with the Pirates in 2011 for a $600,000 signing bonus, and was traded to the Rays in 2018 for a dud to be named later and a dud to be named now.  Game 3 starter for the Rays will be Charlie Morton, another former Pirate.  Let’s go Bucs!  I mean Rays!

👉  There is little need to go into a lot of specifics about today’s board game, because whether you play it or not, you know Scrabble is played by placing tiles, each bearing a single letter, onto a board divided into a 15×15 grid of squares.  The tiles must form words that are included in a standard dictionary or lexicon.  

Alfred Mosher Butts favorite letter game was Anagrams.  He decided Anagrams would be more fun if the most common letters in English were more common in the game.  Butts named his project Lexiko.  The game he designed in 1931 was rejected by several game publishers, but in 1938, Butts began work on a board game based on a new version of Lexiko, which he called Criss-Cross Words.

In 1948, James Brunot, bought the rights to manufacture the game in exchange for granting Butts a royalty on every unit sold.  Brunot slightly rearranged the “premium” squares of the board and simplified the rules.  He also renamed the game Scrabble, a real word which means “to scratch frantically”  In 1949, Brunot and his family produced 2,400 sets but lost money.  In 1952, Brunot sold manufacturing rights to Long Island-based Selchow and Righter, one of the manufacturers who had previously rejected the game.  In their second year of production S&R sold more than 2 million copies.

The world’s top-scoring single Scrabble move ever was managed by Karl Khoshnaw in 1982.  He earned 392 points with “caziques” (which is the plural of a type of oriole).  And though no one’s managed to use it yet, the theoretical highest-scoring Scrabble word out there is “oxyphenbutazone” (a nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug) which is worth 1,458 points. 

In 1984  Reg Grundy Productions premiered Scrabble on NBC-TV, hosted by Chuck Woolery.  Here is the first win from July 2, 1984 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WiVSi0SYbyg.

👉  Today’s close is from Chuck Swindol.

“Father, forgive them for they don’t know what they’re doing” (Luke 23:34 CEB).   Jesus managed to utter those penetrating words through bleeding, cracked lips, swollen from the noonday sun.  Impaled on that cruel, Roman cross, He interceded on behalf of His enemies.  What a magnificent model of forgiveness!  As a result of His sacrificial death, reconciliation was made between man and God.  He’s our model for correctly resolving disputes.  Ultimately, it’s a matter of forgiveness.

“Father, forgive them . . . “ What a way to live!

Before going on, you may have some honest reflecting to do.  I invite you to revisit your own unhealed wounded past.  It may date back many years, it may bring to mind the face of a parent, child, friend, former mate, fellow employee, boss, coach, pastor, or sibling.  They’ve wounded you.  The pain has lingered all these years. 

My friend, it’s time to move on.  Get on with it.  Whatever it takes to be free, do that.

Right now, I invite you to stand all alone at the foot of the cross, look up to Him, and deliberately release it all.  See Him hanging there, bleeding and dying, and embrace His forgiveness, for you and for your enemy.  By forgiving, you’re not condoning their sin.  You’re simply leaving that to God.  That’s His turf, not yours.  That’s grace.  And you can offer it to others because you don’t deserve it either.

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