QUARANTINE BLOG # 361

March 26, 2021

From Pearls Before Swine, a reminder about the coronavirus vaccine.  And as of yesterday in Georgia, everyone over 16 can be vaccinated.  If you haven’t already, make an appointment and roll up your sleeve.

👉  Yesterday QB showed you an ad for the most expensive Volvo station wagon known.  Well, maybe you are not in the market for a used car, but you may be looking for a new wrist watch.  If so, check out the Omega Seamaster 300 made with Bronze Gold.  To produce this new patent-pending alloy Omega combined gold, palladium and silver.  Its movement features the Omega Co-Axial Master Chronometer Calibre 8912 – whatever that is – that is self-winding in both directions (up and down? back and forth?) and offers a power reserve of 60 hours.  The new Omega Seamaster 300 Bronze Gold will be available starting in June with a price of $11,600.

👉  Old TV shows and movies are constantly being resurrected and remade, their stories told from different points of view.  What would it look like if producers combined Star Trek and Batman?  Perhaps like this.

👉  John Herbert Dillinger was a gangster and bank robber during the Great Depression. He led a group known as the “Dillinger Gang,” which was accused of robbing 24 banks and four police stations. Dillinger was imprisoned several times but escaped twice, one time carving a bar of soap to look like a gun. 

Dillinger began his life of crime in 1924 when, unable to find a job, he planned a robbery with his friend Ed Singleton, who was an ex-convict and umpire for a semi-professional baseball team, the AC Athletics, for which Dillinger played shortstop.  The two robbed a grocery store, stealing $50, and were arrested the next day. 

After robbing 12 banks in one year, and feeling pressure from the Bureau of Investigation (the precursor to the FBI) Dillinger dropped completely out of sight, and the federal agents had no solid leads to follow.  He had, in fact, drifted into Chicago where he lived under an alias.  J. Edgar Hoover created a special task force to locate Dillinger.  On July 21, 1934, Ana Cumpanas, a madam from a brothel in Gary, Indiana, contacted the Hoover’s agents.  She was a Romanian immigrant threatened with deportation for “low moral character” and offered agents information on Dillinger in exchange for their help in preventing her deportation.  The FBI agreed to her terms, but she was later deported nonetheless.

On July 22, 1934, local and federal law enforcement closed in on the Biograph Theater, where Dillinger and Cumpanas had gone to see the crime drama Manhattan Melodrama, which starred Clark Gable.  

Agents moved to arrest Dillinger as he exited the theater, but he ran, and died in a shootout after he was identified by Cumpanas, who wore a red dress and became known as the “Woman in Red.”  There were reports of people dipping their handkerchiefs and skirts into the pool of blood that had formed, as Dillinger lay in the alley, as keepsakes.  

Dillinger’s body was available for public display at the Cook County morgue.  An estimated 15,000 people viewed the corpse over a day and a half.

👉  Finding out where your ancestors came from is big business.  The DNA market has doubled every year for the last 4 years, to say nothing of ancestry research sites.  I’m content to know that my ancestors came from Adam and Eve (like everyone else’s did).  But for one man, a genealogical project at Ancestry.com, resulted in a prison sentence for identity theft and an order to pay $2 million in back child support.

In 1993, Richard Hoagland called his wife and said he was not feeling well and needed to go to the hospital.  The married father of two boys disappeared that evening.  Hoagland was officially declared dead 10 years later, but he was not really deceased.  He had abandoned his family, assumed the identity of a dead fisherman, remarried, and even had a child.  He might have gotten away with it if not for genealogy.  The fisherman’s real nephew was working on a genealogy project on Ancestry.com and was puzzled to see his dead uncle was married a few years after he supposedly had died.  Police followed up, and Hoagland eventually confessed.

👉  Holding Nothing Back

Let’s return again to Bethany and the home of Mary, Martha, and Lazarus.

Martha prepared a meal.  Lazarus talked to their honored guest.  What could Mary do to show her love for Jesus?  I’ve imagined Mary’s face as she tries to think of a way to honor Jesus.  Her eyebrows pulled down.  Her eyes looking around.  If not a frown, then she had a serious, meditating look on her face.  But then you can see the moment when she thinks about that container of spikenard oil, the one Judas calculated was worth a year’s wages for the average working man.  She has decided that this oil which came only from India and the Himalayas is the perfect gift.

“Then Mary took a pound of very costly oil of spikenard, anointed the feet of Jesus, and wiped his feet with her hair.  And the house was filled with the fragrance of the oil” (John 12:3 NKJV).

It was very costly, but it did not cost a penny too much now that it could be used on him.  There was a pound of it, but it was not too much for him.  It was sweet, but not too sweet for him.  Instead of keeping it for herself, she will use it on Jesus.

She brings the pound of oil and pours it on his feet as he reclines at the table, and then begins to wipe his feet with the hairs of her head so that her personal beauty as well as her valuable treasure is given to the one she loves.

What Mary did was the result of a soul on fire.  She gave all that she had, holding nothing back.  May she challenge us to be total in our devotion to Jesus!

-30-