Yesterday I remembered something my cousin’s husband said twenty-five years ago. He was an Air Force mechanic and would make a twenty-year career of it. He was assigned to the F-117 stealth fighter some number of months before its existence was publicly disclosed in 1988. Immediately before that he was working on F-4 Phantoms, the Vietnam workhorse that the Air Force had been flying since ’63. Sometimes he would marvel at the improvement in some state-of-the-art system, like the brakes, and then learn that it was the same system as used in the F-15 and not so new after all. From the perspective of the Phantom, a lot was new that wasn’t so new.

I changed spark plugs yesterday on a 2002 Chevy Prizm. (more…)

“Flowers has consistently been the one dragging along his band mates. While they want time off after their typically lengthy world tours, he’s always keen to go higher, further, longer. So he fills the hiatuses with solo projects. This despite the fact that he’s the one with most family — Flowers has three young sons, and talks of ‘maybe one more. But it’s totally up to my wife. I would have ten kids,’ he beams, and that is a precept of his religious faith.” (link)

Tell it, Brother B.

Yesterday Washington Post ran a piece, “Conservatives say marriage has always been between a man and a woman. They’re wrong.” It was what you would expect, the standard boilerplate about husbands and wives dealing with one another differently in some ways than they did 700 years ago so why should they have to men and women, but I scanned through it for one reason: curiosity how far it I would go before finding the phrase “some Indian tribes.” (more…)

“A lot of them have nice things to say about it, but none of them practice it anymore. I went a different route.”

The Daily Beast

[Following are the final two paragraphs from James Thurber’s “Sex Ex Machina” which first appeared in The New Yorker, March 13, 1937.]

I should like to end with the case history of a friend of mine in Ohio named Harvey Lake. When he was only nineteen, the steering bar of an old electric runabout broke of in his hand, causing the machine to carry him through a fence and into the grounds of the Columbus School for Girls. He developed a fear of automobiles, trains, and every other kind of vehicle that was not pulled by a horse. (more…)

The Independent reports on a detailed genetic study of the British population. Many historic and prehistoric demographic events show up, but some don’t:

“Other major events in history, such as the Roman invasion and occupation between 43AD and 410AD, the large-scale invasion by the Viking Danes in 865AD and the subsequent establishment of Danelaw, as well as the Norman invasion of 1066, cannot be seen in the genetic profiles of Britons today.

“This probably reflects the fact that often major cultural shifts are carried out by relatively few people within an elite who do not leave their genetic mark on the conquered masses, said Sir Walter Bodmer, the veteran population geneticist who first had the idea of the study.”

Something worth remembering the next time DNA and the Book of Mormon comes up.

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“European demographers even have an elegant name for the phenomenon: They call it the Second Demographic Transition (the First being the shift from high birth rates and death rates to low ones that began in Europe in the early industrial era and by now encompasses almost every society). In the schema of the Second Demographic Transition, long, stable marriages are out, and divorce or separation are in, along with serial cohabitation and increasingly contingent liaisons. Not surprisingly, this new environment of perennially conditional, no-fault unions was also seen as ushering in an era of more or less permanent sub-replacement fertility.

“According to Eurostat, the European Union’s statistical agency, the probability of marriage before age 50 has been plummeting for European women and men, while the chance of divorce for those who do marry has been soaring. In Belgium—the birth-land of the scholars who initially detected this Second Transition—the likelihood of a first marriage for a woman of reproductive age is now down to 40%, and the likelihood of divorce is over 50%. This means that in Belgium the odds of getting married and staying married are under one in five. A number of other European countries have similar or even lower odds.”

(From “The global flight from the family” by Nicholas Eberstadt, found at AEI and mentioned at Marginal Revolution)

“A driver exited his vehicle with a knife and charged another man, who was critical of his driving, police said. The man who didn’t like the driving pulled a gun and shot the man who had the knife.” (link)

A former stake president explained once that in his calling he was supposed to recommend potential mission presidents to his leaders. Mission presidents needed to be under 60, or up to 65 in cases of exceptionally robust health and vigor.

When the ages for young missionaries were lowered, and thousands more made themselves available for service, and dozens of new missions opened, that required finding more mission presidents than before. One of those tasked was Stephen Hansen, 71 at the time of his call to preside the Utah Salt Lake City Mission. Wednesday, Sister Carol Hansen, his 69-year-old wife died quite unexpectedly, though naturally. It seems likely that President Hansen will be released early.

“An Alabama middle school principal wants to stockpile cans of corn and peas in classrooms for students to hurl at possible intruders as a last resort defense.”

“‘The canned food item will give the students a sense of empowerment to protect themselves and will make them feel secure in case an intruder enters their classroom.'” (link) I hope the kids get to practice chucking the cans during PE.

“Now Jason’s getting married in the blink of an eye. / I got an invitation but I didn’t reply. / Tell your little brother that we put down the gloves. / And give him all of my love.”

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As a youth there were two things that turned my mind toward attending Brigham Young University. The first was a personal story my 9th-grade seminary teacher recounted that involved him as a BYU student teaching missionaries at the Missionary Training Center. The part that stuck with me, the incidental setting for his story, was that BYU is a place that serves the missionaries. That is a holy thing that wouldn’t be found at other colleges.

The second thing was learning that there were weekly devotionals where General Authorities spoke to the entire student body. If there was one school that included teaching from the mouths of prophets and apostles, in addition to the physics and literature classes that all schools have, then I wanted in. (more…)

Decades from now, when only old men and women can dimly recall when somebody told a friend of mine about a dancing human spaceman that can read my mind when we got the radio on, there may be 9-year-olds that sing together “Joel, the Lump of Coal.”

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Nine years ago, Edmonton writer Colby Cosh was considering in the National Post the potential H5N1 flu epidemic: “One daily warned us on Wednesday that a flu pandemic could ‘thrust the planet into unprecedented social and economic chaos.’ But what, I ask you, was the Spanish flu if not a precedent?” He continued with the lessons he had acquired from an acquaintance with microfilm rolls of early 20th Century Canadian prairie newspapers he had poured through for other research. (link)

This week in Maclean’s, Cosh turns similar attention to recent bouts of freelance terrorism: “It has become a pastime of mine to pick major royal or ministerial figures from 19th-century continental Europe and look up the little-known assassination attempts against them.” (link)