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Most Sentences in the Bible Begin with And
2–3 minutesStephen Hawking touches on a surprising topic in his autobiography My Brief History: Biblical Hebrew’s waw-consecutive. The blog Parchment and Pen sets up, tells and reflects on the excerpted episode: Hawking only mentions his “run in” with Christianity a few times. A prominent memory of the Bible was having a tutor use the Bible in English class. He writes: To keep us occupied, he therefore set us to read a chapter of the Bible each day and write a piece on it. The idea was to teach us the beauty of the English language. We got through all of Genesis and…
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The Bitter Way of the Kola Nut
2–4 minutesIt’s impossible to predict what you’ll learn on any given day. Today, for the third day of the course I’m teaching this week I wanted to add in a little something extra for my students. Since I’m teaching in the afternoon after everyone’s just eaten but hasn’t had a nap, I often notice my students fighting off the fatigue that presses down in a classroom beset by 100 degree heat. I try to keep things lively and interactive but sometimes the subject matter at hand requires a bit of endurance on the part of the student; there’s no getting around…
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The Masked Weaver
1–2 minutesWhen it comes to the things of nature, Sir Charles Darwin would weep while St. Francis lamented my ignorance of the created realm. Besides the cat, dog, and cow, I’m lucky to know the name of any indigenous flora or fauna. But that certainly doesn’t stop me from admiring the diversity of creation. This high-flying yellow spectacle caught my attention last week while I was outside washing the car. The picture you see above is not upside down; it’s the bird who’s upside down. And if my extensive ornithological googling has led me to the correct identification, that little guy…
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People Stop and Stare
3–4 minutes…but that don’t bother me.” That’s the position of the star-crossed lover in My Fair Lady, but is that real life? Yesterday we ventured into the central market to do some shopping for basic necessities. Remember, one-stop shopping doesn’t exist so much here. Rather you go around the market, stall to stall, boutique to boutique seeing who’s got what on that day. Our friends and colleagues, Jim & Sarah, took us around to the vendors they frequent. Experience has taught us that the best prices and least haggling is to be had by re-visiting the same sellers each week. They…