Visual Aids

https://books.google.com/books?id=Q05GAAAAYAAJ

Dispensationalist pastor Clarence Larkin illustrated his books with intricate charts interpreting prophecy and explaining God’s action in history.

“[T]he charts had to be thought out and developed under the direction and guidance of the Holy Spirit,” he wrote in Dispensational Truth (1920). “In this the Holy Spirit did not confuse the Author by suggesting all the charts at one time. When one was completed another was suggested. And upon more than one occasion when a problem arose the answer was given in the night or at awakening in the morning.”

| Literature · Religion

Boom!

The town of Glacier View, Alaska, doesn’t get dark enough for fireworks on the Fourth of July. So they drive cars off a cliff.

| Oddities

The Dilemma of Timeless Knowledge

  1. God timelessly believes K and is infallible.
  2. Nobody now can do anything about the fact that God timelessly believes K and is infallible.
  3. Nobody can do anything about the fact that if God timelessly believes K and is infallible, then A will kill B on Saturday (what is next Saturday to us).
  4. So nobody now can do anything about the fact that A will kill B on Saturday (what is next Saturday to us).
  5. So A will not kill B freely.

From Linda Zagzebski, Philosophy of Religion, quoted in W. Jay Wood, God, 2011.

| Religion

Better People

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Liezen_R%C3%A1k%C3%B3czi_Rodost%C3%B3ban.jpg

Horace Walpole on the preferability of animals’ companionship to that of humans:

“Sense and fidelity are wonderful recommendations; and when one meets with them, and can be confident that one is not imposed upon, I cannot think that the two additional legs are any drawback. At least I know that I have had friends who would never have vexed or betrayed me, if they had walked on all fours.”

(From a letter to the Earl of Strafford, Oct. 11, 1783.)

| Society

In a Word

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mes_chers_agneaux.jpg

philargyry
n. love of money

pismirism
n. hoarding of money; miserliness

ingordigious
adj. greedy, avaricious

pleonectic
adj. excessively covetous, avaricious, or greedy

| Language

Podcast Episode 255: Death on the Ice

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:SS_Newfoundland_survivors.png

In 1914, 132 sealers found themselves stranded on a North Atlantic icefield as a bitter blizzard approached. Thinly dressed and with little food, they faced a harrowing night on the ice. In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll tell the story of the Newfoundland sealing disaster, one of the most dramatic chapters in Canadian maritime history.

We’ll also meet another battlefield dog and puzzle over a rejected necklace.

See full show notes …

| History · Podcast

The Cute Response

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Animal_human_growth_skull_neoteny_cuteness_maturation.png
Image: Wikimedia Commons

“Humans feel affection for animals with juvenile features,” noted Konrad Lorenz. “Large eyes, bulging craniums, retreating chins. Small-eyed, long-snouted animals do not elicit the same response.”

This induces people to care for small, cuddly animals. “And this has led some experts to argue that the entire phenomenon of pet-keeping is nothing more nor less than an elaborate case of social parasitism,” writes zoologist James Serpell. “Needless to say, this idea has done little to promote a positive view of pets or their owners. Rather, it creates the impression that pet-owners are the victims of some kind of bizarre affliction, and that dogs, cats and budgerigars are little different from body lice, fleas or tapeworms or, indeed, any other sort of parasitic organism.”

(From James Serpell, In the Company of Animals, 1986.)

| Science & Math

When in Rome

https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/205024931
Image: IWM

In German East Africa during World War I, soldiers painted this pony to resemble one of the local zebras so it could be tethered in the open.

The Imperial War Museum adds, “Two white ponies behind anxiously await their makeovers.”

| History