QUARANTINE BLOG # 413

May 17, 2021

Today’s sermon from the Crawfordville UMC Pulpit is “The Woman Who Made a Decision for Eternity.”

👉  Last week we did some Limericks, and I shared the one Amy wrote.  

The Bro sent me one that is most unique:

12 + 144 +20 + (3 X √4) ÷ 7 + (5 X 11) =  92  and not a bit more.

That translates to: 

        A dozen, a gross, and a score 

        Plus three times the square root of four 

        Divided by seven 

        Plus five times eleven 

        Is nine squared and not a bit more.

The explanation isn’t as elegant as the Limerick, but here is the solution: 12 + 144 + 20 + 6 ÷ 7 + 55 = 81.

👉  And in answer to Amy’s, I wrote one:

        There was an old hermit named Dave,

        Who set up his home in a cave.

        He had no hot water,

        Which bothered his daughter,

        But think of the money he saved.

Anyone else?

👉  Writing last week about South Pacific, I mentioned Oscar Hammerstein introducing “You've Got to be Taught” during The National Conference of Christians and Jews Brotherhood Week.  And I commented, “What a message this song has for 2021!”

Well, I remembered a song by my favorite satirist, Tom Lehrer, whose verse comes closer to today than Hammerstein’s.  He wrote it in 1965 during a week-long program sponsored by the National Conference for Community and Justice.  The song criticizes liberal hypocrisy. (Lehrer: “It’s fun to eulogize the people you despise, as long as you don’t let ‘em in your school.”)  Here is Lehrer’s “National Brotherhood Week.”

👉  Last week’s six-day closure of Colonial Pipeline’s 5,500-mile system was the most disruptive cyberattack on record.  Refiners and fuel distributors are racing to recover before the Memorial Day holiday weekend at the end of May, the traditional start of the peak-demand summer driving season.

In Washington, D.C. yesterday, about 80% of stations were still empty, according to tracking firm GasBuddy.  Elsewhere, more than half of the stations were still out in North Carolina, while less than half of stations were without fuel in South Carolina, Maryland, Virginia and Georgia.

👉  Bloomberg News reported that Colonial Pipeline paid nearly $5 million to the hackers on Friday.  A report yesterday from Reuters News Agency said yesterday that Colonial Pipeline plans not to pay the ransom demanded by the hackers who encrypted their data.  Instead, the company is working closely with law enforcement and U.S. cybersecurity firm FireEye to mitigate the damage and restore operations.

👉  Average nationwide gasoline prices are at their highest since 2014, with a gallon of regular unleaded at $3.044 on Sunday, up from $3.042 the previous day and $2.96 a week ago, according to the American Automobile Association.

After QB 408 and 410 a reader asked about the history of gasoline prices.  The price of gasoline is typically broken down into four different categories: taxes (15%), distribution and marketing (12%), refining (6%0, and crude oil (67%).  The national average price of gasoline in 1929 was 21 cents per gallon.  At first glace, many would suggest that the price of gasoline has risen drastically.  Is this truly the case?  In the comparison of the history of gas prices, it is necessary to take inflation into account.  So to that end QB reports:

👉  Some deep thoughts from the comic strips:

That one is for "She Who Must Be Obeyed."

👉  And some wisdom and smiles from signs of the times:

👉  On November 4, 1740, a baby in Farnham, England, was given the formidable name of Augustus Montague Toplady (As one blog reader might ask, “Did his mamma not like him?”).  His father died in a war, his mother spoiled him, his friends thought him “sick and neurotic,” and his relatives disliked him.

But Augustus was interested in the Lord.  “I am now arrived at the age of eleven years,” he wrote on his birthday.  “I praise God I can remember no dreadful crime; to the Lord be the glory.”  By age twelve he was preaching sermons to whoever would listen.  At fourteen he began writing hymns.  At sixteen he was soundly converted to Christ while attending a service in a barn.  And at twenty-two he was ordained an Anglican priest.

As a staunch Calvinist, he despised John Wesley’s Arminian theology and bitterly attacked the great Methodist leader.  “I believe him to be the most rancorous hater of the gospel-system that ever appeared on this island,” Augustus wrote.

In 1776, Augustus wrote an article about God’s forgiveness, intending it as a slap at Wesley. He ended his article with an original poem:

        Rock of Ages, cleft for me,

        Let me hide myself in Thee;

        Let the water and the blood,

        From Thy wounded side which flowed,

        Be of sin the double cure,

        Save from wrath and make me pure.

Augustus Toplady died at age thirty-eight, but his poem outlived him.  Oddly, it is remarkably similar to something Wesley had written thirty years before in the preface of a book of hymns for the Lord’s Supper: “O Rock of Salvation, Rock struck and cleft for me, let those two Streams of Blood and Water which gushed from thy side, bring down Pardon and Holiness into my soul.”  Perhaps the two men were not as incompatible as they thought.

Here is Norton Hall Band with “Rock of Ages.”

-30-