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20
Jul
2021
Sunday July 18, 2021
COVID-19 cases have started surging again, in places like Brazil, India, Indonesia, and the U.S.. Reports blame the rise on anti-vaccine movements, distrust of authorities, misinformation, and government incompetence.
If I were a coronavirus, I’d be celebrating all of those.
As a virus, I have only one goal – to get inside the cells of as many humans as possible, so that I can take over their cell mechanisms to make more copies of me, so that I can get inside more cells of more humans.
We viruses run the ultimate assembly line. All we need is victims.
Categories: Sharp Edges
Tags: COVID-19, coronavirus, allies
Thursday July 15, 2021
Some sources will tell you that the “rule of threes” derives from trench warfare in World War I. Two soldiers could safely light their cigarettes off a single match. But if you kept the match alight long enough for a third soldier to light up, enemy snipers had time to aim. One dead soldier.
But the rule of threes surely goes back far before that.
Threes are endemic in Christianity. The Holy Trinity – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. In baptisms, people are dipped or sprinkled three times. Everyone knows that there were three Wise Men – although the Bible itself never cites that number. Resurrection came on the morning of the third day. Peter denied Jesus three times; Jesus countered by asking Peter three time, “Do you love me?” Jesus rejected three temptations in the wilderness…
Categories: Soft Edges
Tags: Threes
Sunday July 11, 2021
Back in May, Lorna Beecroft posted a photo on her Facebook page of a giant log being trucked down a Vancouver Island highway. It went viral.
“I have never honestly in my life seen a tree that big on a truck ever,” Beecroft said.
The log was almost ten feet – three metres – in diameter. It filled the entire highway lane, all by itself.
Here in the Okanagan, I see lots of logging trucks go by. At a guess, they carry up to 100 trees per load, some of them so small it would be hard to cut a single 2x4 out of them.
But this was just one log. A single giant spruce.
Tags: forests, Old growth, logging, debt
Earlier this spring, a friend and I were coming down a steep trail on a local mountain. As we came around a huge boulder, we suddenly realized there was a woman on the far side of it. Sitting with her back against the boulder. Sobbing.
To one side of her there was a small green tree. A pretty little tree, but not what I would consider a native pine, spruce, or aspen. It looked more like the decorative evergreens that florists use for contrast in a pot of blossoms.
A small white sash hung around the tree: “This tree planted for our son Walter.”
Tags: grief, tree, Walter, memorial