Can you name every country in the world in 12 minutes?
My brother sent this game to me a few days ago, and I was surprised by how addictive it is.
The first time I was only able to think of 40 of the 196 countries on earth. It was an embarrassingly low score, but I am slowly improving as I play the game over and over again.
What is your score?
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My parents moved several times while I was growing up. We were the only grandchildren on mom’s side of the family for many years, and I can only imagine how much our grandparents, aunts, and uncles missed us every time we moved away.
Photo by KevMAC.
One of the best things they did to keep in touch with us was to send little boxes full of stuff. Candy. Clippings from the Sunday comics. Books. Letters. Once they even included a tape of my grandfather telling stories about his childhood. Half of our excitement was rooted in getting mail addressed to us specifically. It made me feel very grown up and important!
They stopped doing it once we moved back to Ohio when I was 11, but I dreamed about those deliveries for years to come.
I’ve been working on my own care package of Canadian sweets recently. There are a lot of candy brands up here that I’ve never seen in the U.S., and I thought it was about time to share a few of them with my grandparents and extended family. The best part of it is finding something special that I know they’d never pick out for themselves but that I suspect they might like. Some people are easier to figure out than others. Solving that riddle is surprisingly fun though!
What do you add to the care packages you send out? What the best care package you’ve ever received?
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Here is this week’s list of blog posts and other tidbits from my favourite corners of the web.
You Can Learn A Lot About America From Each State’s Internet Search History. Ok, this is hilarious. I’d love to know what the most common search terms are for each province in Canada.
Not All Pastor’s Kids Are Christian. Sorry. via JamietheVWM. There is a very short list of Christian blogs I still really enjoy reading. Jamie’s blog is one of them for many reasons, and I was reminded of nearly all of them with this post.
Love Is a Terrible Reason to Get Married via LarryCheetos. The title stays it all.
Adult Children. A brilliant answer to a repetitive question.
From I Can Show You 99 Kinds of Crazy. None Are Due to Mental Illness via TruthisHers:
One of the reasons the word crazy is tops on my offensive mental health terms is because when its definition is researched we find it closely linked with the word insane, which is commonly defined as marked by foolishness and folly. Foolishness! Witless, stupid, brainless, mindless, unintelligent, harebrained—all words that imply a faulty character and flawed intellect.
From So I Married an Astrophysicist: Dispelling Myths About Scientists:
I don’t see “scientists” as guys in white coats with taped glasses and pocket protectors. I don’t think of them as “Dr. Jekyll” types trying to attain immortality by creating something never before achieved. I don’t see them as pawns of any particular political agenda or as money-hungry individuals who will make wild claims in order to get the next grant. I definitely don’t see them as people who are willing to engage in and promote a vast conspiracy for the purpose of controlling the public.
I Can Hear You Whisper chronicles the journey of a family whose third child is born with serious hearing loss. What makes it even more fascinating, though, is everything Lydia Denworth has discovered about the science and sociology of deafness.
The handful of people living with disabilities that I knew growing up were either paraplegic or amputees. Our community was small and most of its members were able-bodied and (fairly) young. Things are quite different here in Toronto, but I still loving stumbling across books that describe what other people’s lives are like. There are a lot of questions that are impolite to ask unless you know someone very, very well. (Even then, I wouldn’t bring up certain topics. It’s much better to quietly wonder about something than to accidentally hit a sore spot!)
This book is so well-written that it feels like a conversation between old friends. I really enjoyed learning about what this author’s life has been like, and I suspect my readers might as well.
What have you been reading?
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Photo by Adria Richards.
For anyone who hasn’t heard the news yet, Maya Angelou died yesterday.
No, I’m not sad today. It’s a little odd to grieve over someone you don’t know, but hearing about her death did make me think of my first encounter with her writing. It’s funny how reading someone’s books can make it feel like you know them in certain ways.
I was pretty young when I first read I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Some of the things she talks about in that book flew over my head the first time I read it, but each time I returned to it I understood a little more.
The rest of her autobiographies didn’t capture my attention the way the first one did. I suspect that I was too young to grasp everything she had to say.
She was an incredible writer, though. Many stories can be read silently, but hers work better if they’re read aloud. You have to feel every syllable to understand what she’s saying and why she chose certain words.
I’m looking forward to returning to her books as an adult reader. There is a tentative plan bubbling in the back of my mind to blog my way through them, but I’ll have to see what I pick up this time around.
Is anyone interested in following along? Where should I begin?
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I’ve really gotten into a musical rut. Most of the artists I listen to are from the 90s and 00s, and I tend to go back to them over and over again.
I’m purposefully not mentioning which artists or styles of music I like so I don’t sway your recommendations. Some people only like one genre of music, but I’m not one of them.
What have you been listening to?
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It seems unlikely at first, especially for those of us who grew up with strong Anabaptist influences.
My grandparents were and are many things: resourceful, thrifty, hospitable, humble.
What they aren’t: loud, flashy, or patriotic.
There is a quiet mistrust of the government among my Mennonite ancestors. Digging into this could fill up a post ten this length, but sufficed to say that there are reasons for their wariness.
So how, then, did they celebrate holidays that promoted values they didn’t share?
Food and fireworks.
It took me a very long time to figure out that other families thought of Memorial Day as a tribute to soldiers. My family never acknowledged that part of it. Memorial Day and the Fourth of July were about spending time with family and eating all of the good stuff that summer has to offer.
Holidays are what you make of them. You don’t have to follow the same script as everyone else.
U.S. readers, how are you celebrating Memorial Day?
Everyone else, scroll down and grin.
Source: http://themetapicture.com/i-dont-understand-the-usa/.
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Here is this week’s list of blog posts, poems, and other tidbits from my favourite corners of the web.
Neil deGrasse Tyson on Children and Adults via lilylayer4. Great stuff.
I Just Ate Fruit for the First Time and It Kind of Sucked. This is one of the funniest things I’ve read so far in 2014.
When Plastic People Say We’re Dead via brudburg. Isn’t this a fantastic title? As soon as I read it, I couldn’t wait to find out what it could possibly be about. I won’t spoil it for my readers – go check it out for yourselves!
There’s No Such Thing As a Dumb Question. Or is there? This reminded me a little of all of the questions my brothers and I used to ask our parents on long road trips. Sometimes they would pay us to sit quietly and count every animal we saw alongside the road. At $0.01 per animal it was a pretty cheap way for them not to answer a million questions. 😛
From The Amish Closet – Growing Up Gay in a Closed Community via SensaNostra:
“Dad I’m gay.”
His reply?
“You had better join the church and get a wife.”
“D-a-a-a-d!”
From At the Market, Very Late:
Last night in a supermarket about 3 AM, I saw a woman have a serious breakdown. She was buying some items — not a lot, maybe $35.00 worth of cheese, meat and cereal. A basic shopping list. The checkout clerk rang her up, she swiped her credit card —
— and it was declined. No good. Not accepted.
The End of Eve is the true story of the final illness of a woman who exhibited many of the classic signs of narcissism. Her daughter Ariel documents Eve’s final months and recalls painful memories from both of their childhoods.
It’s easy to grieve for someone who was good and kind. Figuring out how to make peace with someone you have mixed feelings about is much harder. The author does a wonderful job describing how and why love is sometimes mixed with anger or resentment.
This wasn’t an easy book to read. Eve made a lot of terrible choices in her lifetime and isn’t someone I would have ever wanted to meet in person. Yet Ariel’s ability to reach out to someone who has burned so many bridges is admirable. It isn’t necessary the choice I would make if I were in her shoes, but I understand why she did it.
What have you been reading?
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If the embedded video doesn’t play, click here.
This is a 20 minute talk about how people find meaning in their own suffering without relying on supernatural or religious explanations for it. If you don’t want to watch the whole thing, try skipping through the first half. The last 5-10 minutes is where this talk gets really good.
Andrew Solomon acknowledges that you can do this while still being really angry about what happened. You don’t have to say something is at all ok in order to find meaning in it.
Here is where I disagree with Andrew. I understand why he focuses so much on the circumstances that have spurred people into doing amazing things, but the former is much less important than the latter. This is a minor quibble with an otherwise invigorating talk, though, and I suspect that he’d agree with me if we were sitting down to dinner. It’s hard to compress this kind of worldview into such a short amount of time.
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It is easy for us to criticize the prejudices of our grandfathers, from which our fathers freed themselves. It is more difficult to distance ourselves from our own views, so that we can dispassionately search for prejudices among the beliefs and values we hold.
– Peter Singer
I’ve often wondered which social attitudes that are seen as perfectly ordinary in 2014 will make people wince a hundred years from now.
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Photo by Thomas Wolf.
You followed your normal bedtime routine last night: teeth flossed and brushed; pets taken out for their evening walk; cellphone muted; 15 minutes of reading a pulpy mystery before you slipped into a dreamless sleep.
It came as a surprise to you, then, to wake up on a cold, hard, marble floor. A white wall stands behind you. There is no other direction to move other than forward.
The corridor is so quiet you can hear your heart thumping as you stand up and start walking. You glance between the columns, but none of them reveal doors or windows.
About hallway down the corridor you realize there is a room at the end of the hall. A warm, yellow light spills out of it as you draw closer.
“Hello?”
No answer.
You walk a little faster now, eager to see if you can find a phone or friendly face.
What do you discover in the room? Leave your answer in the comment section below!
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