QUARANTINE BLOG # 603

November 23, 2021

We begin today with some “Ponderables:”

When people see a cat’s litter box they always say, “Oh, have you got a cat?” I just say, “No, it’s for company!”

Employment application blanks always ask who is to be called in case of an emergency. I think you should write, “An ambulance.”

The sole purpose of a child’s middle name is so he knows when he’s really in trouble.

Did you ever notice that when you put the 2 words “The” and “IRS” together it spells “Theirs”?

👉  Calvin and Hobbes address some scary science fiction:

👉  Writing in The Body: A Guide For Occupants, Bill Bryson talks about increasing life expectancy:

“Any number of reasons have been proposed for the improvement ... [a] huge boost can be attributed to vaccines. In 1921, America had about 200,000 cases of diphtheria; by the early 1980s, with vaccination, that had fallen to just 3. In roughly the same period, whooping cough and measles infections fell from about 1.1 million cases a year to just 1,500. Before vaccines, 20,000 Americans a year got polio. By the 1980s, that had dropped to 7 a year. According to the British Nobel laureate Max Perutz, vaccinations might have saved more lives in the twentieth century even than antibiotics.”

The Body was published in 2019, before the pandemic started by the Chinese virus changed the way we live, killing 5.1 million of us, and the anti-vaxxers scream for their right to die or to infect the rest of us.

👉  One from “Ooh You’re Gold”:

👉  Two from Non Sequitor:

👉  Armando Markaj, 27, is a waiter at Patsy’s Pizzeria in Harlem, New York.  One of the tables, on what would turn out to be a very interesting day, was assigned to was an ill-tempered woman and her daughter.  They ordered two slices of New York-style pizza, but, as Armando was just about to walk away back to the counter to send the orders to the kitchen, the older woman stopped him.  “Why are there so few pictures of women on the wall?” the lady asked.  She asked it with malice and with what seemed like an intent to spark outrage and debate.  Armando didn’t have an answer, but he tried a joke, “Maybe women don’t eat a lot of pizza.”  The joke fell flat.

When the women had finished their pizza, he handed them their check, and moved promptly to another table to take their order.  However, upon finishing up on getting the orders, he noticed that the two women had already left.  He was thinking the worst, that the women left without paying their bill.  Another waiter had handled the check-out, and on the slip was written, “Maybe women don’t tip either.”

As he cleared the table, Armando noticed that there was a white envelope under one of the napkins.  When he saw the “Citibank” logo, he run out the door to chase the women down to give the envelope back, but they were gone.  Back inside, he opened the envelope and discovered a cashier’s check – which could be cashed by anyone – for $423,987.55.  As the story developed, Armando gave the check to the Pizzeria’s owner for safe keeping, who then called a newspaper to get help locating Karen Vincor, to whom the check was made out.  She had sold her apartment and put the proceeds and all of her savings into the check to have as a down payment on a new apartment.

The newspaper located Karen and she returned to Patsy’s.  Ashamed for her earlier behavior, she offered Armando a finder’s fee with a heartfelt apology for how she treated him.   Armando accepted the woman’s apology but said no to the money.  “I’m really for her, really,” he told interviewers.  “Saturdays are pretty busy and I was very close to taking everything left on the table and throwing it out when I saw the envelope.”  The two of them settled their differences over a freshly made pizza.

👉  Yesterday I was reading 1 Peter 1, where the apostle speaks of the Lord Jesus, “whom having not seen, you love; in whom, though now you see Him not, yet believing, ye rejoice with joy unspeakable and full of glory.”  And I started singing an old hymn by Frances Ridley Havergal, “Joy Unspeakable and Full of Glory.”  Miss Havergal authored such well known hymns as “I Gave My Life For Thee” and “Take My Life And Let It Be.”  The tune was composed by Ralph Erskine Hudson.  The song was first published in Hudson’s 1893 Glad Tidings.  Hudson is perhaps best known for the melody and chorus “At the Cross” to which we sing Isaac Watts’s hymn beginning “Alas, and did my Savior bleed.”

This video starts out in an almost stately manner, like the way it might be sung in a stately uptown church, but at marker 2:19 they sing it like we did at the Williamsport, Maryland Church of God.  Enjoy.

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