Weekly Meanderings, 7 February 2021

We’ve enjoyed the Olympics we’ve been able to watch. How about you?

Photo by Bryan Turner on Unsplash

Here’s one of our favorite Olympic stories:

TOKYO (AP) — Allyson Felix finished third in the 400 meters Friday to win her 10th career medal and become the most-decorated woman in the history of Olympic track.

The 35-year-old Felix, a stalwart of American track and field, started in the outside lane and outraced Stephanie Ann McPherson of Jamaica to take third place by .15 seconds.

Shaunae Miller-Uibo blew away the field, winning in 48.36 seconds to defend her Olympic title from Rio de Janeiro.

Felix’s 10th Olympic medal broke a tie with Jamaican runner Merlene Ottey, and matches Carl Lewis, who also won 10 medals and was alone as the most decorated U.S. athlete in track.

The victory for Felix comes nearly three years after she helped spearhead a conversation about the way women are treated in track, and sports in general. She severed ties with Nike, which wrote in pay reductions to women’s contracts if they became pregnant. Felix had a daughter in 2018.

And this is another:

HOUSTON, Texas -- Simone Biles has been a huge focus of the Summer Games, but another Houston-area Olympian is also capturing the hearts of many.

Tamyra Mensah-Stock from Katy, Texas became the first Black woman to win a gold medal in wrestling for the U.S.

The gold medal Olympian got her start in 10th grade at Morton Ranch High School and quickly become one of the best in the state.

After winning gold, Mensah-Stock said she will be spending her $37,000 prize on a food truck for her mom.

"I wanted to give my mom $30,000 to get a food truck. It's her dream," she said. "I told her five years ago, 'I'll get you your food truck, but you gotta be responsible.' She's like 'Thank you, baby'...so my mom's getting her food truck! She can cook, really really well."

So what will her mom's food truck serve? BBQ!’

Take some time to ponder this by Mark Gorman:

This summer I have been practicing the recorder daily for the first time since elementary school. The recorder is different in almost every respect from the instrument on which I was professionally trained, the pipe organ. While the pipe organ, in some versions, is loud enough to be heard in concert with a full symphony orchestra, the recorder is quiet enough for me to practice in a hotel room without (hopefully!) bothering my neighbors. The recorder is by no means the quietest instrument I have ever played (that distinction belongs to the nose flute—yes, really) or heard live (I once heard a clavichord, a kind of predecessor to the piano, in a recital at a university chapel, and it was almost inaudible), but in the Middle Ages and Renaissance it belonged to a class of musical instruments called instruments bas (low, as in soft, instruments), as opposed to the instruments hauts (high, as in loud, instruments). Although louder and softer instruments still exist, that distinction matters much less than it did five hundred years ago, since even the quietest instruments can become loud through amplification or electrification. In a sense, every musical instrument today is, or can be, an instrument haut. We like loud things.

As it is in our music, so it is, I often think, in our churches. Also in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, the Christian calendar used to be filled with days for lesser feasts, the instruments bas of their devotional life, but Protestants did away with those, generally leaving us with only the “louder” feasts of Christmas, Easter, and Pentecost. Loud instruments, and loud feasts, are fun and exciting. They get our attention easily, maybe too easily. The instruments bas, on the other hand, require us to quiet ourselves, and our lives, in order even to know they are there in the first place. This does not mean that the “quiet” feasts are inherently more meaningful or deeper than the “loud” feasts, but, ironically, it does mean that it’s much easier for the louder feasts to be fitted into our ordinary lives without too much disruption. I suppose that’s why there’s always an endless supply of Christmas and Easter cards, but there’s never a Feast of the Holy Cross card around when you need one.

Sermons and politics:

Religious belief is key to many Americans’ political identities, but the public is divided on whether clergy should preach about politics from the pulpit. So, when pastors across the country addressed their flocks last fall, how did they discuss an election that many Americans viewed as historically important?

A new Pew Research Center analysis finds that among churches that posted their sermons, homilies or worship services online between Aug. 31 and Nov. 8, 2020, two-thirds posted at least one message from the pulpit mentioning the election. But these rates varied considerably among the four major Christian groups included in the analysis: 41% of Catholic congregations in the database heard at least one sermon mentioning the election, compared with 63% of both mainline Protestant and historically Black Protestant congregations and 71% of evangelical Protestant congregations.

Moreover, the content of the messages tended to differ. Roughly half of all evangelical Protestant sermons mentioning the election discussed specific issues, parties or candidates (48%), the highest share among the four major Christian groups. And, in discussing the election, evangelical pastors tended to employ language related to evil and punishment at a greater rate, using words and phrases such as “Satan” or “hell” at least twice as often as other clergy did. Evangelical pastors also were more likely to use the phrase “pray [for our] president” when discussing the election.

By contrast, historically Black Protestant pastors were by far the most likely to encourage voting and voter turnout: 43% of historically Black Protestant sermons mentioning the election either explicitly encouraged voting or discussed the election in a manner that assumed listeners would vote, roughly double the share of any other group. And when historically Black Protestant pastors discussed the election, they tended to use words or phrases related to voting or voter rights – such as “suppress[ion],” “early voting” and “register [to] vote” – more often than pastors from other groups.

Although most congregations posted at least one sermon mentioning the election at some point during the study period, relatively few pastors openly stumped for particular candidates or parties. Indeed, explicit endorsements from the pulpit were rare enough that researchers could not develop a machine learning model that would reliably identify such language across all sermons in the database. However, in a sample of 535 sermons mentioning the election that researchers examined while attempting to train such a model, 61 seemed clearly to favor either Republicans or Democrats, even if they did not mention parties or candidates by name.

Would you take a pay cut to work remotely?

NEW YORK CITY (NewsNation Now) — Would you take a pay cut to continue being able to work from home? 65% of Americans said they would in a new survey.

The poll commissioned by Breeze asked 1,000 Americans if they would take a pay cut or how many benefits they would give up if they were able to work entirely remotely.

Of all the questions and perks asked about, most people said they would take a 5% pay cut to work entirely remotely.

The percentages went down as more severe pay cuts were proposed. With only 15% willing to take a 25% pay cut to work fully remotely.

When it came to benefits, responses varied depending on the benefit asked about. A sizeable percentage of participants were willing to give up every benefit asked about in exchange for the ability to work fully remotely.

39% would give up health insurance while 50% would give up vision and 44% would give up dental.

TikTok nutters:

By Kalhan Rosenblatt

TikTokers are eating frozen Honey. Experts say it could give them Diarrhea

The latest trend to take over TikTok isn’t a new dance or a funny lip-sync — it’s honey.

More specifically, freezing a water bottle full of honey and then squeezing the contents out, so a long, somewhat solid-looking shaft of golden honey oozes out of the top before you take a massive bite.

The trend has exploded across the app, with thousands of videos having been made. The hashtag “#FrozenHoney” has been viewed nearly 600 million times, and the hashtag “#FrozenHoneyChallenge” has been viewed more than 80 million times

Some people have mixed honey with corn syrup to make the honey less dense, while others have made their own concoctions of corn syrup and candy, which, when frozen, have a similar texture to the chilled honey.

It’s unclear where exactly the trend originated. It has been a staple of YouTube channels devoted to autonomous sensory meridian response, also known as ASMR, in which content creators eat frozen honey to create sounds that some people find relaxing.

Some on TikTok claimed that after they tried the honey, they felt sick or were running for the bathroom with diarrhea.