May your Christmas Eve and Christmas be blessed!
We got news yesterday that my basketball teammate from high school, Mark (“Fritz”) Fritzenmeier, has passed away. He was as long and lanky as he was kind and tov. May be rest in peace and rise in glory!
Photo by Sixteen Miles Out on Unsplash
One person who comes to the fore at Christmas, though most of the year ignored, is Mary, mother of Jesus. Thanks to Susy Flory for her kind words and this wonderful Substack:
One of the most ear-catching songs of the last year was We Don’t Talk About Bruno, a fun song written by wunderkind Lin-Manuel Miranda for Disney’s animated film, Encanto. For a while the song was everywhere, depicting an odd, reclusive relative that everyone knew but no one talked about. Don’t you feel like that about Mary sometimes? She’s everywhere at Christmas time, and also nowhere—a caricature more than a real live person—and when we do hear about her in a sermon or a pageant, she is usually depicted as passive: listening to the angel, agreeing to serve, carrying her baby for 9 months, then traveling to Bethlehem and holding Jesus after he’s born as she welcomes shepherds and later wise men from the East.
But the bottom line is this: Mary says yes to a very unusual request (maybe the most unusual request of any woman, ever) and then births and raises the son of God. In the last few years I’ve felt a strong desire to get to know the women of the New Testament, and started seminary in 2018 to pursue my quest. I quickly realized—maybe even the first day of school—that Mary was the most prominent woman in the New Testament! But I didn’t feel like I knew her much at all; I only knew the symbol. Who is the real Mary?
St Pete’s got a Christmas Uber driver:
ST. PETERSBURG — Each customer that slides into the backseat of Frantz Laroche’s vehicle is asked the same question.
“Are you ready for the best Uber ride of your life?”
As the journey begins, Laroche blasts holiday music punctuated with his own hearty “ho ho ho”s.
Here our Santa is a rideshare driver who looks like Stanley Tucci, with a shaved head and black-framed glasses. He wears a festive headband and a glowing string of Christmas lights around his neck. His sleigh is a black Honda Odyssey complete with glossy leather seats. Each person who enters it during the holiday season will be quizzed on classic Christmas music as they zip through the streets of St. Pete.
Welcome to the Holiday Rideshare Express. Think Cash Cab, but the prize is Christmas cheer.
Naturally, a group of Tampa Bay Times Christmas fans hopped at the chance to take a ride with him before he clocked into work last week.
“Because of politics, because people hurt each other for no reason, somebody’s got to drive his butt all over Florida to spread the positivity to others,” said Laroche, who also drives for Lyft. “You are among 30,000 passengers I’ve entertained just to put a smile on their face. And I intend to entertain 30,000 more.”
It’s cold beyond cold in Chicagoland, so what about warming up your car?
(NEXSTAR) – Many of us can deny it no longer – cold weather is here, with much of the country facing an arctic blast just in time for Christmas. That means some of our cold-weather habits are back, like weathering extra layers when we head outside, or staying inside as long as possible.
It might be time to leave one of those winter habits in the past, though.
We’ve likely all done it – traversing knee-high snow to our cars, starting them, and letting them idle to warm up for a few minutes before hitting the road. But do you really need to let your car warm up?
First, it’s important to note that idling your car doesn’t damage it. Idling does still consume gas, according to J.D Power, but it likely won’t lead to any other problems unless your car has mechanical malfunctions.
The idea that you have to idle your car when it’s cold out, though, is really just a misconception.
It wasn’t always an old wives’ tale. As The Washington Post explains in a 2014 article, cars used to rely on carburetors, which needed to warm up to work well. If they weren’t warm enough, they could cause your car to stall.
In the 1980s and 1990s, car makers turned away from carburetors and began using electronic fuel injection, which depends on sensors to supply fuel to the engine. Those sensors, according to industry experts, don’t need to warm up.
Sherwood Ford, an Alabama Ford dealership, explains modern vehicles do “not need more than a few seconds to start up,” adding that “modern technology requires modern approaches.”
Even the U.S. Department of Energy notes that guidance from most car manufacturers says your vehicle is ready to drive after just 30 seconds of warming up.
Malcolm Foley on race, racism, and greed with help from the Cappadocians:
Merry Christmas and Christmas season! As I have been preparing to write my first book (more news on that to come), I have begun to put together some of the thoughts that I have been ruminating on for the last year. The most significant of those is this: that the history of race and racism is fundamentally a history of greed. In many evangelical (and non-Christian) circles, the narrative tends to be that race and racism are best battled by resisting pride. This can especially be seen in various industries, whether for or non-for-profit. The language of “cultural humility” bears this out: the issue, it would appear, is hate and ignorance, which is remedied by getting to know people and being aware of your own context and cultural biases. Such a consideration, however, remains at the surface level. We must go deeper.
Race and racism are not fundamentally concepts of feeling. They are concepts of material exploitation and domination. If this is true, then our resistance of them must not merely be ideological but material. This means that the issue is not so much hatred as it is pleonexia, translated variously as greed or covetousness. Race and racism were created because some people wanted more resources, wanted them cheaply, and were willing to do whatever was necessary to accumulate those resources.
That’s a teaser for the year to come but for this Christmas season, a season where we consume at alarming rates yet also succumb to seasonal depression, I want to offer some reflections from a fourth-century source on greed that we would all do well to consider.
Top Ten words of slang this year:
In the social media age, slang terms often come and go, weaving in and out of popularity over the course of weeks and months, making it hard for many who aren't plugged in to keep up.
Recent geotagged data from Twitter that was compiled by authority.org over the course of 2022 shows the slang term that was most popular in each US state, along with revealing which states used slang terms the most.
When it comes to Illinois, "vibe", referring to a positive feeling, ranked as the most used slang term on Twitter, a title it also held nationwide.
Twitter users in Illinois also use slang terms the 4th-most of any state in the country, only behind Maryland, Louisiana and Georgia.
Overall, here were the top 10 slang terms used nationwide:
1. Vibe (refers to a positive feeling)
2. Drip (refers to clothing and style)
3. Flex (refers to bragging about something or showing off something)
4. Slay (refers to looking good, showing confidence)
5. Banger (refers to a good song)
6. Slaps (refers to something being good, usually a song or food)
7. Shook (refers to something bothering someone or shocking someone)
8. Bet (refers to a confirmation, an understanding or affirmation of directions or plans)
9. No cap/cap (refers to not lying, or "cap" which means not true, lying)
10. Fire (something is really good, pleasing)
An Arizona man driving in the high-occupancy vehicle lane was ticketed after a police officer realized his passenger wasn’t a person at all. It was an inflatable Grinch.
The man was spotted by an Arizona state trooper last week, according to a Tuesday tweet from the Arizona Department of Public Safety.
The driver and his “Seusspicious-looking ‘passenger’” were driving on Interstate 10 at 8 a.m.
“The trooper stopped the driver & determined the grumpy green guy was, in fact, an inflatable Grinch,” wrote the department.
Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to All, and to ALL some good sleep!!!