Fade to Quiet

(image from steed griffin, cryptotypographer: http://steedgriffin.tumblr.com/page/2) Every now and then, a piece pops up in the news that helps me connect a few dots. Today's piece is the article about Gunnar Samuelsson, a quiet minister from Sweden who has spent the last several years trying to figure out where we got the idea that Jesus Christ was crucified. His conclusion: the word "stauros" that has been translated for more than 2000 years to mean "cross" denotes any variety of long wooden objects. This resonates with an exhibit I saw a few years ago of various artifacts from Biblical times. Among the remarkable objects was a part of a human foot with a metal spike driven through it attaching it to a piece of petrified wood. The tour guide pointed out that this is the only found evidence that human bodies were nailed to wood as a form of torture and execution. I remember wondering how that can be possible if crucifixion was the number one favorite form of ex...

This is my beach. Siesta Beach. On Siesta Key, on the Gulf Coast. This is my beach. It has white sand I walked on every day when I was a teenager. This is the beach that saved my life, kept me off drugs, the beach that was my boyfriend for all those years I didn't have one. This is the beach my grandmother and I walked along in winter, imagining the white sand into snow. It's the beach I kicked soccer balls on while walking its miles with my best friend. It's the beach where I lost the key to my father's Audi while my parents went to England on vacation, before I had a license to drive. It's the beach that mysteriously coughed up the key so I could drive home, astonished. For how many years have we been using the phrase "of mythical proportions?" The oil in the Gulf of Mexico has reached "mythical proportions." They are now saying that since the underwater robot (what planet are we on?) bumped into the cap (the one we actually watched that 24 hou...