A rubber band pistol was confiscated from algebra class. It was deemed a weapon of math disruption.

Note the moose on top of his trailer.

I let the guy at the plumbing supply store talk me out of shut off valves. I'll be using Shark Bite couplings. I used them on a project I did about 18 months ago and they're pretty slick. Just push the copper pipe, PVC or PEX line into the fitting and it's done. No sweat fitting, thus less chance of a leak. I'll be using PEX (a flexible tubing) for this job to make it easier to get the new valve to fit with the old lines.
This doesn't mean I'm not anxious about this project. I'll be there well before 10:00 when they're scheduled to turn off the water, and if this goes as easily as it's supposed to I'll be done long before they turn the water back on at noon. In between I'll be sweating (pun intended).

Ricardo Montalban died today. He'll be buried in a casket lined with fine Corinthian leather, and he'll look mahvelous!

No one should be expected to live anywhere that the temperature can be stated using only one syllable.

Pam's dad had a very rare form of cancer that produced tumors in his blood vessels, especially those under his scalp. He participated in what was then a cutting edge treatment that involved shooting laser beams at his head to blast those tumors. He was thrilled to do this because as a nuclear chemist it appealed to the scientist in him.
He reported to the doctors during one of the sessions that as the laser beam was turned on he saw things. He saw bright, vivid colors. They explained to him that the laser was hitting and stimulating the portion of his brain responsible for sight.
Question: Was Earl seeing those colors? His eyes weren't looking at anything; the room was dark. His optical nerves weren't transmitting any data to his brain. But his brain was responding to electrical impulses exactly as though he was seeing in the normal sense of that word.
What does the word "see" mean? Can one see, in the real sense of that word, the physiological sense, without any participation by the eye or the optical nerve?

What does it mean to hear? Can someone hear without their ear drum, the bones of their inner ear and the audio nerves responding to any stimulus? Does it take sound waves to hear? I'm not talking "hear" like we can still hear our mother telling us to hang up our clothes. I mean it in the physiological sense, just as Earl physiologically saw those colors.
The answer is, of course, yes. Brain scans (maybe it's MRI's, or it could be PET's) have shown that schizophrenics who hear voices do, in fact, show the same kind of brain activity in the hearing portion of their brain as people who are hearing through their ears. That's why the "voices" are so real. I heard an NPR story on schizophrenics and they interviewed a man who kept a dog in his apartment. That way he could tell if the voices were real or just inside his head. If the dog barked,answer the door. If the dog didn't bark the voices weren't coming from people. But those voices were just as real if we define that term from the brain's perspective.

OK, here's the punch line:
When God spoke to men in the Bible - Moses, Samuel, Saul - was he talking to them with a voice that entered their ears as sound waves? Or did they hear him in their brain? That would be just as real, just as physiological.
They did genuinely hear God, not just get a sense that he was leading them in one direction or another. Samuel got up twice in the middle of the night, mistakenly thinking Eli was calling him. He heard a voice. But if his cousin Jacob had been awake next to Samuel would he have heard the voice?
On the road to Damascus the Lord spoke to Paul. The text (Acts 9:7) tells us that the men with him heard the sound (the Greek word for sound, not voice) but did not see anyone. That suggests that at least in this case there probably were sound waves.

Of course none of this makes any difference. God could speak to them with sound waves entering through their ears or with electrical impulses directly to their brain. But I got to thinking about it today and found it fun to mull over. I tried to come up with examples in the Bible of God speaking to people.
Interesting, don't you think?
No, really.