So I was mowing the lawn in high school when I noticed a frog in my path. I stopped dead in my tracks and let the handle go to stop the mower when the frog jumped right under the mower.

After a deep breath, and a few choice words, I pulled the mower back to observe the carnage. The frog was still alive.

But he was injured. Very injured. The mower blade had removed the top layer of skin from his back, with only a narrow strip still holding it on. If he had jumped again, he would have literally come right out of his skin. He wasn’t going to heal. This frog was a goner.

I felt horrible. I had tried to save the little guy, but I guess he hadn’t been taking his Zoloft and wanted to end it all. I couldn’t shake the gnawing guilt, so I found a shoebox and gave him a proper burial beside the creek from whence he came.

And so I was mowing the lawn last week when I noticed something wiggling in the grass in my path. I stopped dead in my tracks and let the handle go to stop the mower.

I looked. It was brown and furry, and it wasn’t making a suicidal leap under the mower. Click to continue reading “Narrowly missed redemption”

But Rodenberry always meant for the tribbles to be in 3D CGI.

Post I’ve enjoyed this week from folks at The Daily Scribe. (Sorry I missed last week.)

• A Chutney fave, Pop Occulture, just joined this week. Here’s one from him: “Driving: Rite of Passage.”
• And here’s another: “The Biology of Guilt“
• Religion Blog gets onto a Mennonite doctor for refusing to fill a birth control order but not withholding taxes to protest the war. (Mennonites are pacifists.)
• Cleave resurrects the search for the Worst. Church. Website. Ever. (His leading candidate.)
• And finally, from The Journey, the worst analogies ever written in high school essays.

In a recent comment to the “But April 19” re-post, CP links us to this Ze Frank vidcast. A view asked Brooklyn-based Ze where he was on 9/11, and Ze tells it all.

I was just a few miles away from the Murrah building the morning of April 19, and that next year I moved to Boston to go to seminary. It seems that everyone, when the subject of my being from OKC came up, asked me, “where you there?” or, worse, “what was it like?”

I went to the church across the street from the Murrah building. A good friend who worked in an office across the street lived because he was running late to work that day. In the days that followed, my girlfriend (now my wife) worked with visiting New York Times reporters and picked up PTSD from being downtown so much.

I didn’t really feel like answering. Click to continue reading “9/11 survivors: Something to look forward to now (from an OKC native)”

Though more than nine in ten Americans tell pollsters they believe in god, a recent survey shows that there are four different gods Americans believe in. (Graphic.) Also of note: less than half of projected evangelicals identified themselves as such, only half as “born again,” and less than two thirds as “bible believing.” (Hat tip to Kinsi.)

One the fifth anniversay of the 9/11 attacks, I thought I should repost this article on the Oklahoma City bombing. (Chutney is an OKC native and was there.)