Meanderings, 12 November 2022
Good morning! Some amazingly warm Fall days suddenly met their match in the northern winds, and the northern winds won. Our 70s weather has dipped into the 30s! Here comes Winter. Bundle up, Chicagoland!
Photo by Roxane Clediere on Unsplash
For Wordlers — 2022’s hardest words:
So what were the hardest words? According to the numbers they are...
PARER
FOYER
CATCH
WATCH
MUMMY
CATER
COYLY
TRITE
FOUND
TACIT
NICKERSON, Kan. -- Just over four months after she was severely injured and her father was killed after being struck by a car, Ava Jones signed a national letter of intent for the Iowa women's basketball team Wednesday.
Jones, 17, suffered a traumatic brain injury, torn ligaments in both knees and a shoulder injury when an impaired driver hit her and her family on a Louisville sidewalk July 5, while there for an AAU tournament. Her father, Trey Jones, died a few days later and her mother, Amy Jones, suffered a brain injury and 21 broken bones. Her younger brother, Creek, escaped serious injury.
The driver, Michael Hurley, was indicted by a grand jury in August and charged with one count of murder, two counts of first-degree assault, one count of assault in the fourth degree and one count of operating a motor vehicle under the influence. According to the police report, Hurley said he had taken the opioid Hydrocodone before driving.
Jones, a 6-foot-2 forward who was ranked 83rd by ESPN HoopGurlz for the Class of 2023, originally committed to Arizona State but then decommitted in March after coach Charli Turner Thorne retired. Jones reopened her recruiting and announced her commitment to Iowa on July 3, two days before the crash.
It’s over. Facebook is in decline, Twitter in chaos. Mark Zuckerberg’s empire has lost hundreds of billions of dollars in value and laid off 11,000 people, with its ad business in peril and its metaverse fantasy in irons. Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter has caused advertisers to pull spending and power users to shun the platform (or at least to tweet a lot about doing so). It’s never felt more plausible that the age of social media might end—and soon.
Now that we’ve washed up on this unexpected shore, we can look back at the shipwreck that left us here with fresh eyes. Perhaps we can find some relief: Social media was never a natural way to work, play, and socialize, though it did become second nature. The practice evolved via a weird mutation, one so subtle that it was difficult to spot happening in the moment.
Diverse church life is intentional:
KEARNS — Pastor Corey J. Hodges has been working to cultivate a multicultural atmosphere at the Point Church during the last 15 years, and he has been succeeding.
The Point Church currently has at least 33 different nationalities represented in its congregation, counting first generation Americans and people who were born in other countries.
"I don't think there's another church in the valley that's as diverse as us, in fact, I know there isn't," Pastor Hodges said.
There are majority white churches with a few Black people and churches where the makeup of the congregation is the opposite who claim they are multicultural, he said, but at the Point Church, no matter what ethnicity a person is, they will be able to see 15-20 people who look like them.
Pastor Hodges said he helped the church become a multicultural community by mixing together different styles of music, dress and preaching and making sure church leadership includes people from multiple cultures and women. About five years into the effort, he said they began to see success.
"Multiculturalism has to be intentional, it doesn't happen by mistake," he said. "If you're not intentional about it, it's not going to happen."
Reaching the level of diversity the church has is not easy, he said, since people naturally go to places where people are like them; which he said isn't bigoted or racist — people are just looking for places where they are comfortable.
AURORA, Colo. (KDVR) – A long, scratched-up coffin will likely catch the eyes of customers who walk into Pasternack’s Pawnshop in Aurora, Colorado. The owner of the shop, Scott Pasternack, said it was traded in for a cash loan within the last year.
The eerie-looking box is just one of many personal belongings people are pawning at a record pace. Pasternack said the onslaught started when the economy began to take hits.
“Our loans have gone through the roof with the economy being much lower and people needing more money,” Pasternack said.
One man who didn’t want to be identified told Nexstar’s KDVR he is pawning his things a lot more often.
“As times have gotten tougher, and inflation rates, have caused me to come in once a month now selling things,” the man from Aurora said.
People are also buying plenty of things at this shop as well. Roxi Kessler was excited about being able to afford a used vacuum cleaner.
“You can’t afford anything ’cause gas prices are so damn high it raises the prices of everything. Food, insurance, everything. The price is just skyrocketing. You can’t afford to buy anything new,” Kessler said.
She’s not alone — at least 30 million unbanked or underbanked American households use pawnshops each year, according to the National Pawnbrokers Association.
Where do you get the best Reubens?
The Reuben sandwich is an undeniable deli classic. And for good reason: There's some inexplicable magic that happens when tender slices of corned beef are layered over melted swiss cheese, a bundle of pungent sauerkraut, and a healthy drizzle of tangy Thousand Island dressing, all of which are usually served on buttered and toasted rye bread. The Reuben is a textbook example of a sandwich that's greater than the sum of its parts, and each ingredient complements the others in a way that creates a complex and wildly delicious flavor profile.
The exact place of origin of this sandwich, however, seems to be up for debate. While some say the Reuben hails from Omaha, Nebraska, others insist a famished actor in New York City wandered into an iconic deli and inspired the sandwich (via GrubAmericana). Regardless of how the Reuben came into existence, most sandwich-loving deli-dwellers will agree that it's one of the tastiest handheld offerings around.
That said, there can be slight variations in its execution and overall quality. Is the corned beef made in-house? Is the rye bread baked on-site? There can be vast, discernible differences between Reuben sandwiches from deli to deli, from how thick the meat is sliced to the style of dressing used. There are various versions of the sandwich that are served all over the U.S., and among these, some are truly incredible.
Read More: https://www.mashed.com/1088192/the-absolute-best-reuben-sandwiches-in-the-us/?utm_campaign=clip
When the wildfires crashed down the mountains above Marmaris, the beekeeper İbrahim Şahin was returning from a funeral to his home in the village of Osmaniye. At first, he was unconcerned—fires happen frequently in this part of southwestern Turkey, and rarely become cataclysmic. Then Şahin received a phone call from the head of his village. The fires were already upon Osmaniye. Everyone needed to evacuate.
The fires continued to spread. Pine cones exploded as if the trees were lobbing hand grenades. Small birds caught fire and flew off in a panic, spreading flames with their burning wings before they immolated. Firefighters and helicopters were tied up in Manavgat, nearly 250 miles away, where fires had broken out shortly before. The hills above Marmaris crackled.
By the time the fires finally died out, more than 14,000 acres of pine forest in Muğla province were a blackened wound. The catastrophe had come.
Pine honey is unusual. It tastes resinous and zingy, and unlike honey produced by bees feeding on flowers, pine honey relies on three distinct species: the red pine tree, the honeybee, and the marchalina bug (Marchalina hellenica). The bugs feed on mature red pine trees, secreting a sticky, saplike substance, sometimes called “honeydew,” and a cottony white residue; the bees feed on the honeydew and use it to make their honey. Without the red pine, without the marchalina, there is no pine honey.
Almost all of the world’s pine honey comes from Turkey, and almost all of Turkey’s pine honey comes from Muğla province, in the country’s southwest. There are hundreds of villages in Muğla, and according to Şahin, the majority of them make honey and even depend on it as a main source of income. Here, rows of blocky hives line the roads, and honey-selling kiosks stand beside tiny tea gardens.
[HT: AW]