ArtieShaw

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sources_for_the_historicity_of_Jesus

A google of “historicity of Jesus” will turn up some results. The wiki link is one of at least three very similar wiki articles on the topic.

tl/dr - it’s generally accepted that Jesus was a historical person but all that can be confirmed from written accounts is 1) he was baptized and 2) he was crucified.

Of course people can and do question the independent contemporary Jewish (Josephus) or Roman (Tacitus and Pliny) sources, but they seem to be in the minority. Even the less shady version of Josephus’s passage suggests that he was talking about a person who existed.

I don’t have anything to add since I’m not Christian - merely surrounded by Christians. I’ve done a fair bit of reading trying to figure out what’s going on with all that.

Egg and rice is the easy comfort food my husband learned from his grandmother. It’s our too lazy to cook or shop dinner.

My understanding is that this only applies if there’s no other way for the neighbor to access their own property. If the property owners can access their property from any other way (for example, from the city streets), there’s no obligation for a landowner who owns the back of the property to allow them to have a second access point.

Does my backyard neighbor owe me the right to cut across his back yard to access mine? No. I have a driveway that connects to a city street.

On the chaos angle, I’d imagine that some of those homes have built backyard gates that allow them direct private access to that park. If someone were to buy up that strip they could cut that off and basically extort each homeowner for access. It’s possible that the homeowners could claim some sort of “I’ve used this land for 20 years for access to the park argument,” but that would involve individual claims, expense, and a general PITA legal mess. And depending on the locality, it may require you to prove that you’ve done improvements to the property and a whole host of other PITA things.

Best case for those homeowners is to pay a couple of thousand each to buy the lot and come to an agreement among themselves on subdivision and/or collective maintenance and access rights.

Yes! Let your imagination run riot.

The Netherlands is in an interestingly unique position when it comes to rising sea levels. They’ve been fighting the sea (and winning) for centuries. I’m sure they’ll be at the forefront for engineering future sea incursions.

Having guys make me mix tapes.

Anyway, this one really cute guy at college had an epic cassette collection and he was also artistically talented so he made custom covers/inserts for each one. The original tape is long gone, but somewhere I still have my favorite cassette cover that also includes the hand-printed play list.

He had other excellent skills, so I eventually married him.

Once, and only once, the dream ended with me deciding to enter the mystic portal and me subsequently finding myself standing alone in the hallway of a Hampton Inn in Salt Lake City at 3:00am.

I was in my jammies. No socks, no room key, no phone. I contemplated many options to get myself out of the situation, but they were all objectively bad. The only high point of the experience is that the breakfast bar hadn’t opened in the lobby, so this remains something shared between only me and the night clerk. Neither of us were happy, but she was wearing more clothing.

My main takeaways for hotel stays and dreams:
-jammies must have pockets
-jammies must have full coverage
-spare key cards are in the pockets
-never enter the mystic portal that you summoned

Mystic portals: never again

Unless I’m also having an off day, the article is just really confusing. It makes sense to me that Italy would want the base back because it would be like selling a framed painting to Hitler and getting only the canvas back when it was returned. (Hitler, amirite?)

It’s probably a pretty nice base. Probably custom made for the statue shortly after it was unearthed, and probably the sort of thing that art historians would care about keeping together with the sculpture for art historian reasons.

It was a not so subtle way of saying “we love you but you’re not saved so you’re going to suffer during the tribulation.” Or, “are you sure you don’t want to accept Jesus and avoid all that?”

The rapture is not an instakill scenario for them, but the details make my head hurt.

Baptized Lutheran shortly after birth, but never attended church. It’s a long and vaguely racist family story. Don’t consider myself Christian.

My in-laws are fundamentalist end times folk, and it took years to try to make sense all of that. I love my husband, but it’s a lot to take in. And my brain naturally tends to try to make sense or analyze things, or figure out what’s motivating people.

Their older generation are very interested in controlling the people around them and they’re very good at it. I think it’s control and authority at the heart of it, with a helping of genuine trauma that makes death and reward look appealing.

Actual quote that I’ve heard a few times: “Life is hard, short, and cruel - and then you die!” \ Let me just say that Christmas visits can get really weird.

On a lighter note, they mailed us a Tribulation Survival Care Package for the 1999 x-mas, ahead of the Y2K impending millennial crisis. That was actually sort of fun, and the shiny space blanket came in handy a few times.

Lentil soup. The only fresh ingredient is the greens (and you can freeze them to use later). The finished soup can be frozen.

2 cups black beluga lentils (or green French lentils), picked over and rinsed
1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil
1 large onion, chopped
1 teaspoon fine-grain sea salt
1 28- ounce can crushed tomatoes
2 cups water
3 cups of a big leafy green (chard, kale, etc), rinsed well, deveined, finely chopped

1. Boil the lentils for 20 minutes, drain and set aside.
2. Saute the onion until soft
3. Add everything else except for the greens; bring to a simmer
4. Stir in the greens and cook for another couple of minutes
5. Adjust seasoning

Not so much an etymology, but how it was used in pop culture:

Our local paper used to publish a cartoon and poem every fall. The piece was called Injun Summer, and it was printed every October from 1907-1992.

It’s very much a relic of its era, which is to say “it was weird; really fucking weird.” The image is lovely. The text is an old man telling a young boy a totally made up story. It’s folksy, wistful and nostalgic. It talks about the past and how native spirits (literally ghosts) return to the land each fall. It’s also written in the vernacular of what an old man in 1907 might sound like.

Personally, I don’t think the complaints about racism were what caused them to stop printing it. I think it was the weirdness that just didn’t appeal to anyone under the age of 50 (in 1992!).

The fist link shows the image with text. The second shows how it would have looked in print.

http://www.sewwug.org/images/injun_summer_2.pdf

https://drloihjournal.blogspot.com/2017/10/the-history-of-john-t-mccutcheons-1907.html

There’s an older form that goes back to at least the 1970s when fuel efficient Japanese cars started to become popular in the US: “Rice burners.”

There was some made-in-America angst at the time because of the oil crisis, coupled with some quality issues that made these cars more appealing. The phrase was definitely used pejoratively. I can remember my dad muttering about it well into the '80s.

My family always pronounced it “chewing them down,” so I was surprised to see it written the first time. I was probably in college.

There’s an interesting podcast called Stuff the British Stole.

They did an episode on the Elgin Marbles, but they cover a wide range of stolen goods.

And not to lay all the blame on Britain, Germany stole an entire temple from Pergamum. It’s currently in a museum in Berlin. (I tried to see it while in Berlin, but the exhibit was closed. I’m still a little salty about that. Can’t see it in the original location. Couldn’t see it in the museum.)

The thing about Canada geese for me is the weird little poos. I don’t mind the aggression, the flocking behavior, or any of the other antisocial nonsense that they’ve adopted from their namesake country.

It’s the poos. They linger around for weeks.

I could do without those hammerhead fuckers. They’re invasive in our area, eat the regular earthworms, and really hard to kill.

I also immediately thought of hedgehogs.

That’s awful! I’ve heard that tinnitus is an absolute misery.

Soundcore Q30.