Meanderings 30 September 2023

Good morning! May your cup of coffee bless your day.

Photo by Tim Foster on Unsplash

With chickens, well, everyone loves chicken! Including a quoll…

A farmer in southern Australia captured an animal considered locally extinct for over a century while trying to protect his chickens. Photos show the spotted creature.

Frank Pao-Ling Tsai, a trout farmer in Beachport, South Australia, heard a “panic” from his chickens and rushed outside early in the morning on Tuesday, Sept. 26, he told McClatchy News in an email.

Inside the coup, Tsai found a spotted creature and a dead chicken, he said.

“I had no idea what it was at first,” Tsai told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. “I expected to find a cat, but I found this little animal instead.”

Photos show the captured animal. It has a furry brown body, long tail and smattering of white spots. It appears angry and bared its teeth at the camera, photos show.

Tsai captured the creature in a plastic chicken cage, he told McClatchy News. He took photos and shared them in hopes of identifying the animal.

Wildlife officials identified the animal as a spotted-tailed quoll, the National Parks and Wildlife Service of South Australia told McClatchy News.

Quolls are “about cat-sized” marsupials with a “cat-like shape but a lot stronger jaws and a lot longer canine teeth,” Limestone Coast district wildlife ranger Ross Anderson told McClatchy News.

The spotted-tailed quoll, also known as the tiger quoll, is an endangered quoll species and the “largest native carnivore left on the (Australia) mainland,” according to the Australian Conservation Foundation. An estimated 14,000 spotted-tailed quolls are left in the wild, the organization said.

The last officially documented sighting of a spotted-tailed quoll in South Australia was in the 1880s, Anderson said. The species has been considered locally extinct for over 130 years.

Of course!

People give a better first impression on Zoom calls if they have books or plants behind them, rather than a living room or a novelty background – such as a walrus in front of an iceberg.

“With videoconferencing, most of what everyone else sees – the majority of your screen – is taken up with your background,” says Paddy Ross at Durham University in the UK. “So you no longer have to just worry about how you look and how you’re presenting yourself to other people, but also what you have all around you.”

Ross and his colleagues collected 72 photos of 36 white adults, made up of 18 men and 18 women who were either smiling or had a neutral expression, taken from a human faces photo database for researchers.

They superimposed these faces onto six different backgrounds: a living room, a blurred living room, a bookcase, plants lined up across a cupboard, a blank wall and a walrus in front of an iceberg. They then framed these images to look like screenshots during a Zoom call.

The most favourable first impressions were given to the people in front of the bookcase or plants, while the worst were in front of the living room or walrus. The blank wall and blurred living room fell in between.

The team also found that among the photos with the unblurred living room background, the women were more likely to be judged as being just as competent as they were with the plant and bookcase backgrounds, compared with when the men had these backgrounds. More research is needed to understand why men give poorer first impressions in some settings, says Ross.

But regardless of whether the caller was a man or a woman, smiling evoked more competence and trustworthiness than having a neutral expression. This is probably because smiling suggests self-confidence, says Ross.

So, how many manuscripts are there of the NT?

In this post we'll tackle the question of how many Greek New Testament manuscripts there are using the latest information in the NTVMR. We'll explain how Greek New Testament witnesses are currently registered in the Liste and some of the complexities of counting manuscripts.

The work of cataloguing all known Greek New Testament manuscripts worldwide is a massive endeavor that has been going on for many years. The Kurzgefasste Liste (for more on the history of the Liste, see here) was designed to offer a systematic list of all known Greek New Testament manuscripts and to make them available as potential witnesses for use in critical editions and more widely for scholarly research. Greek New Testament manuscripts are designated with a Gregory-Aland (GA) number and their codicological and paleographical features like date, contents, writing material, script, lines, columns, and dimensions are catalogued.

[… somewhere between 2-5K!]

On moving boxes and boxes and boxes of books, by Bob-on-Books:

We are in the middle of a long anticipated home project of replacing the old carpet in the upper level of our raised ranch with wood flooring. All but one room has flooring in it as I write and if everything goes as we hope it will done the day you are reading this.

We have lived in our house over 33 years. While we cleared the kitchen a few years ago for a remodel, this is the first time for all the other rooms upstairs. It meant emptying all that was in cupboards and especially on bookshelves.

I ended up hauling 75 boxes of books downstairs. My Library of America collection and some of my mother’s old books. Gardening books, art books, and decorating books, and other miscellaneous fiction including my wife’s Murder She Wrote collection of books. Did I mention that it came to 75 box loads that we more or less stacked under an eight foot long table in our family room.

We won’t be hauling them all back upstairs–we have a huge pile to take to Half Price Books. It has made me look at the books on the lower level of our house, mostly mine, with new eyes. One of our next projects is to re-paint and carpet the lower level of our home (after replenishing some savings from this project). We had less than a month to get ready for this project. I have a year, most likely for the next.

One way or another, it will mean moving a lot of books. To my mind, this must be the year of saying good bye to many old friends. I don’t want to move all this stuff around only for my son to have to deal with it in another decade or so, depending on how long the Lord grants us health.

Retirement is on the not-too-distant horizon and I’m realizing that many of the books on work-related topics are becoming much less relevant to my life. At this stage, I probably could write a number of those books.

We have books in a storage closet I will probably never read. They are already boxed up, so these need to go.

I also think of books squirreled away behind other books. I couldn’t even tell you what they are, It suggests that they probably won’t be missed.

There are books I thoroughly enjoyed twenty or so years ago. Some I might think of re-reading, but most probably not. It sounds like they need to go.

It’s not only a lesson in facing how challenging physically this gets when one is approaching his eighth decade. It is really about facing aging and the stages of de-accumulating ahead until that final day when it all gets left behind. It’s about mortality, and that great struggle of readers summarized in our favorite mantra: “So many books; so little time.”

Seen one?

A spotted lanternfly has been identified and detected in Illinois following a report of a sighting earlier this month, the Illinois Department of Agriculture confirmed.

According to officials, the state's agriculture department was alerted to the potential presence of the nuisance pest on Sept. 16, and coordinated a site visit near the sighting two days later.

Following the collection of specimens at the site, results that were returned Tuesday confirmed the presence of the spotted lanternfly.

The spotted lanternfly is native to eastern Asia and was first found in the U.S. in southeastern Pennsylvania in 2014.

Since then, presence of the species has continued to spread throughout the eastern and southeastern U.S., more recently making its way into the Midwest as well.

Identifications of the spotted lanternfly have been recorded in Indiana, Michigan and Ohio in recent years.

The spotted lanternfly feeds on a wide variety of plants, with a particular affinity for the invasive tree of heaven, maple trees and grapes. Officials say these plants should be monitored for any spotted lanternfly activity.

When the Calvinist went to the Methodist Church:

So, we took the advice of my pastor friend. We visited the Methodist church in town. I never thought I would go to a Methodist church. The Reformed elitism in me didn’t take them seriously. But you do these things when you are desperate. (I know how bad this sounds, I’m telling on myself.) And in our search, we are basically left with the mainline churches. On the way, I shot up one of those arrow prayers, Lord, I am looking for Christ in your church. Help me see him if he’s there.

He was.  

It’s an old church, a small congregation­­—which is mostly old as well, and all white. I appreciate the amount of mature people and am encouraged by some younger families. But the all-white part is disappointing. They were friendly. The older woman in sparkly sneakers was particularly interesting to me. I want some bling in my silver years. The music wasn’t obnoxious but could use a little more umph. There was a mixture of hymns and contemporary music. No one was cool. Hallelujah! They follow the church calendar, and it was Lent season. The liturgy was refreshing. Christ was there. The whole service was saturated in the gospel.

The pastor is a woman. She was out on maternity leave through the rest of the month. We decided to stick around, play it week-by-week. And we wanted to experience it with the pastor there. She returned the end of March.

Then the service starts. Katie calls us to worship, baby still strapped to her chest. Her voice is not put on. There’s a smile on her face, and you can tell she is a little nervous. Maybe even a little rusty after three months, in which time she pushed a baby out of her body and has been feeding him with it on demand. I’ve always liked the name Katie. During the prayer request time before the congregational prayer, Katie tells us how good it is to be back and how much she missed everyone. One of the praises from an older woman in the back was about Katie’s return, but also how smoothly everything ran in her absence. This is a mature congregation, and they don’t depend on a one-man show. I takes a mature leader to leave for three months knowing this, preparing them for this.

She moves onto the children’s talk after the singing. I’m thinking surely the baby will be separated from his mother afterwards. She sits with the children, talking with them about how Jesus wept. Wilber started to weep. Katie casually half-stands up and does the mommy-bounce that soothes little Wilber, not missing a beat in talking with the children and answering their questions. She then dismisses the little ones who want to go to the children’s time outside of the sanctuary and transitions behind the pulpit with baby Wilbur still on her chest.

I watched a woman deliver a wonderful sermon with a baby attached to her.