Archive for 2020

More Tree Climbers Guild

A while back I posted some information about Tree Climbers Guild, although they might not appreciate that I capitalized their band name here.

I’m taking this opportunity to point out that their songs are now on YouTube. Feel free to enjoy some of the sounds of my college days.

Tree Climbers Guild album

Who improvise to the sound of the harp, And like David have composed songs for themselves,

Amos 6:5

Mother Gothel and Gretchen Whitmer

I know people have already done all the coronavirus comparisons to Disney’s Tangled, but I think our governor is filling her role too well. She compares quite easily to Mother Gothel.

And for those of you who aren’t familiar with Tangled, how about Stockholm syndrome? Think about it – a captor (Whitmer) keeps innocent people captive (Michiganders who aren’t sick) and tells them it’s for their own good and they believe her.

We are supposed to help this COVID-19 die down so we don’t get a second wave? That’s vague enough that it is always true. A second wave inevitable no matter how long you postpone, so give us information about how we’ll know it’s safe enough. Something more concrete than “trust me”.

Similarly, how flat a curve is flat enough? The growth rate has tapered off, the daily new cases have been on the decline for some time now. We were supposed to stay home to flatten the curve. Without a clear definition of when the curve is flat enough, I say it is. If you disagree, please let me know why Michigan hospitals are closing and laying off their workers.

Finally, why not let people work, who can work by themselves? Like lawn services, surveyors, some contractors, etc. “But science says social distancing works…” Sure, and if the point is to prevent person-to-person interaction, why did the governor ban surveyors from working? They walk in fields and forests alone, taking measurements. The same could be said about the guy who mows our neighbor’s lawn by himself, or at least he would if he could.

Anyway, here are some images that illustrate our dear leader’s decisions.

image of Rapunzel and Mother Gothel fighting, captioned as Gretchen Whitmer and Michiganders

image of Rapunzel and Mother Gothel about why they stay in the tower, followed by Gretchen Whitmer saying it is to keep us safe

image of Mother Gothel and Gretchen Whitmer, saying she is the bad guy

image of Gretchen Whitmer saying she is not loosening any restrictions

image of Mother Gothel, captioned that Whitmer knows best

So he said to them, “What counsel do you give that we may answer this people, who have spoken to me, saying, ‘Lighten the yoke which your father put on us’?”

2 Chronicles 10:9

Subject and Verb

Some of our kids’ teachers sent out a link to a site that we could use to keep up on grammar lessons while schools are prohibited from meeting. It is called No Red Ink. It appears they are thorough in that their website promos display good grammar.

image of no red ink, the web page for noredink.com

I half expected the marketing copy to have the common error of matching the verb with the nearest text rather than the actual subject – but it didn’t so I’m impressed. In case you’re wondering, the subject is one school district so the correct verb is uses to match the singular subject. The common mistake is to take the closest noun (2 school districts) and match the verb to that.

I also noticed they use the Oxford comma, so that makes me happy. I haven’t seen one of their actual lessons, so I can’t vouch for the completely, but their first impression was a good one.

But we know that the Law is good, if one uses it lawfully,

1 Timothy 1:8

More Accents

One upside to being sheltered in place is that there are now some new accents on the Accenterator.com site. You can now train yourself how to sound like Elmer Fudd, Scooby Doo, or Mark Wahlberg. Oh, and there’s Beaker.

And it seems the German accent code went missing. I’ll have to re-write that one, as the only other place a backup might be is on a laptop that’s in a building that is closed due to fear, uncertainty, and doubt. Officially it’s closed because it has been deemed a non-essential business, but I’m thinking liability is a factor too.

Anyway, Elmer Fudd was the easiest to write. It took longer to find a decent picture of him than to code his accent. And the Boston accent (“smaht pahk”) took much longer to write than I expected. It was supposed to be just replace the Rs with Hs but it turns out to be more complicated than that.

As for their children, half spoke in the language of Ashdod, and none of them was able to speak the language of Judah, but the language of his own people.

Nehemiah 13:24

Carbonite

image of how covid-19 is like carbonite

I suppose I could have gone on with America in July and America in August, but the image was getting a little too long, plus I don’t want to predict exactly when we’ll be out of trouble. I thought that sequence from The Empire Strikes Back was a good fit for how things will go, but if you remember that part of the movie, Han Solo just moved into another bit of trouble and it wasn’t good for him just yet.

I thought about trying to caption who Jabba and cronies are in the world of 2020 – something like “countries who didn’t cripple their own economies” but it’s a little early for that. But I’m guessing there will be some countries in decent shape by the time America gets up and starts stumbling around – maybe they handled things better or maybe they were hit earlier so they recovered earlier.

For brevity’s sake, I should have stopped after the second image. Use that as the TL;DR version.

So teach us to number our days, That we may present to You a heart of wisdom.

Psalm 90:12

New and Improved Petri Dishes

image of new and improved petri dishes in the shape of cruise ships

In case you can’t tell, those are glass cruise ships.

Because there’s no better incubator of diseases than cruise ships.

then the Lord will bring extraordinary plagues on you and your descendants, even severe and lasting plagues, and miserable and chronic sicknesses.

Deuteronomy 28:59

Governorball

image of governorball - Calvinball but replaced with governor directives to shut things down for COVID-19 coronavirus

Another day, another announcement from the governor about what else is being shut down. The problem is that we disagree on what is “good behavior”. Not a big disagreement yet, but a number of small divergences add up eventually. New rule! New rule!

For rulers are not a cause of fear for good behavior, but for evil. Do you want to have no fear of authority? Do what is good and you will have praise from the same;

Romans 13:3