The Breadbox Letters: September 2016

Wednesday, September 21, 2016

Therefore, There is No Earth

"The final argument for modern broad-mindedness is that truth is novelty, and hence 'truth' changes with the passing fancies of the moment. Like the chameleon that changes his color to suit the vesture on which he is placed, so truth is supposed to change to fit the foibles and obliquities of the age. The nature of certain things is fixed, and none more so than the nature of truth. Truth may be contradicted a thousand times, but that only proves that it is strong enough to survive a thousand assaults.

"But for anyone to say: 'Some say this, some say that, therefore there is no truth' is about as logical as it would have been for Columbus, who heard some say 'the earth is round,' and others say 'the earth is flat' to conclude: 'therefore, there is no earth.'

"Like a carpenter who might throw away his rule and use each beam as a measuring rod, so too, those who have thrown away the standard of objective truth have nothing left with which to measure but the mental fashion of the moment.'

Fulton J. Sheen

Tuesday, September 20, 2016

Beware of the Blog!

Happy birthday to you!
Happy birthday to me!
This blog's five years old now...
Oh, how can that be?!

It can be, I guess, because on September 20, 2011, I sat down and started clacking away at a keyboard, and a teensy little spot in the blogworld was carved into place.

No one who happened upon that first ramble had a clue of the secret I'm about to tell you now, here on this very screen. Which is that I wrote while shaking in my blogboots. I didn't even do e-mail at the time. I knew nothing about the big wild world of the Internet. I'd felt "nudged" for months to blog, but I barely knew what a blog was. I had never even read one, so how could I have gotten such an idea?

Considering the fact that anything involving the Internet was a mystery to me (and I really wanted to keep it that way), I had begun to think this wild notion THAT WOULD NOT LEAVE ME ALONE might, in fact, be an inspiration from God.

I could at least give it a try. Except that I didn't. I had gone through the spring and summer of that year trying to convince myself that I must be mistaken, it was just a silly idea. And all the while the thought kept following me around like a puppy. It lodged in my mind like a melody, like one of those tunes you just can't get out of your head - and in fact an old song popped in to keep "reminding me" that I was being chased by a strange notion. The song's lyrics, which I found amusingly appropriate for what I was feeling, sneaked into my brain and (when others were not within earshot) out of my mouth. Because my husband and I once had a "retro" jukebox loaded with old 45s and this record had been one of them, I knew the words to this theme from a campy 1950s movie. So for months, as I drove or cooked or sorted laundry, I found myself constantly singing this - but with one changed word.

All you have to do is change the last letter of the title and you'll know just what I was fearing five years ago. It's a fun tune, not spooky, from surely one of the campiest films ever made.

Shall we check out what I was humming as I wrote that first blog post five years ago?

It's a splotch! A blotch!

BE CAREFUL OF THE BLOG...

(to our e-mail subscribers: this post features a video, which can be viewed by coming to the blog itself)

(disclaimer: any other videos that may come up after the song entitled "The Blob" are not chosen nor endorsed by me)