She married him thinking he'd change; he didn't. He married her thinking she'd never change; she did.

Barry Bond's Dog

Whoever invented the English language screwed it up in so many ways. Why don't we have separate words for "you" singular and "you" plural? It would make the preacher's job so much easier, especially because both Greek and Hebrew - like 99% of the world's languages - do have separate forms. And sometimes it makes a huge difference in meaning.
I guess we gotta hand it to those folks living' where grits is a breakfast staple and is a two-syllable word ("gray-its") on accounta they do have a separate plural form: y'all.
Note 1 Cor. 3:16 and 6:19.
(I worked on my sermon this morning.)

I don't think this has any particular meaning, and if it does Mrs. Malley, my 11th grade English teacher is once again proved correct in her assessment of my intellectual skills. Mostly I just think it's cool videography.
Her Morning Elegance

A long time ago I encouraged readers of this blog to close and re-open the shut-off valve on their home's toilets every six months or so. Consider this your reminder.
Those valves are famous for sticking when left untouched for years at a time. Then, when disaster is imminent and only quick action will prevent a mess nobody wants to see or clean up, that valve won't budge. You'll twist on that oval handle until you have an imprint of it on your hand, but all to no avail. Then whatcha gonna do??
Running that valve closed and then open again every few months is a simple preventative for a problem you don't want to have.
This afternoon I replaced the leaky guts on a toilet. First step: shut off the valve underneath. But it wouldn't turn, not with my hand and not with a 12" pair of channel locks. This particular valve had a plastic (!) stem which snapped under the force my the channel locks and my massive arms.
Fortunately, knowing this was a possibility I arrived at the house with a spare shut-off valve. So I turned the water off to the entire house, replaced the valve and then went on to fix the toilet's innards.
I replaced the standard valve with a 90-degree valve. Instead of turning it several rotations to close it off - like a hose faucet - you only have to turn the valve 90 degrees to get complete shut-off. Hey, it's not like you ever want just a trickle of water flowing into the toilet. (I'm not going there.) And like I told the Mrs., not only are these valves less likely to stick, when the aforementioned emergency situation does arise, speed is of the essence. That 90 degrees happens a lot faster than 6 revolutions.
Next time you're in your bathroom turn that valve off/on. And if it won't turn don't take a wrench to it unless you're prepared to deal with a broken valve. Just start praying and keep up with the fiber.

The plan was to change the oil in Gerta this afternoon. How long can that take? At this point we're at two hours and counting.
The drain plug takes a 20mm socket. The biggest I have is a 19mm, so I'm off to the auto parts store, where they are sold out of the 20mm sockets. On to store #2 where they have one. Home to remove the drain plug to discover someone who went before me also didn't have a 20mm wrench and used what they had, probably a crescent wrench. The result is two rounded corners on this drain plug.
I got it out, drained the oil, and then pulled the plate that holds the screen (instead of a filter like other vehicles). I installed a new screen sandwiched by two paper gaskets, and then re-installed the plate with nuts and new copper washers. But the learning curve means that the process which takes three sentences to describe took a lot longer than that to accomplish.
So now Gerta sits in the garage, standing up in the air on four jack stands, waiting until tomorrow morning when I can drive into town to British Auto Parts (BAP) and get a new drain plug for a '67 VW Beetle. No point putting the bad one back in and having more trouble next time.
I'd forgotten about the swing axle rear suspension. It looks really weird to see those rear wheels dangling at a 30-degree angle.

You think it's bad here? The following comes out of an article on Russia from this week's TIME:
"The stock market has dropped more than 70% in the past year, as the nation's business elite have dumped stocks to repay the huge loans they had taken out to finance acquisitions in Russia and abroad. Investors have pulled about $245 billion out of Russia since August - and the ruble is under pressure."

Tomorrow is Pam's birthday. We're going out for dinner and I told her I'd carry the tray.

Back to the current issue of TIME. They have an article in the Arts section about a device called the Auto-Tune. The inventor is Andy Hildebrand who made a ton of money because he figured out a computer program that would interpret sound waves shot into the ground so the waves' reflection would identify oil reserves deep under the earth's surface. He made so much money that he retired at 40. Now what? On a challenge from a guest at a dinner party he went to work adapting that program so it would take a singer's voice and automatically adjust it so it was perfectly on pitch.
A singer's voice is recorded digitally, it's run through Auto-Tune, and ta-da!, even someone Simon Cowell would run off the stage sounds like a diva.
But it gets better. It seems all humans slide to a note to one extent or another, even those who eventually land on it perfectly. And that slide, in the best scenario, takes 10 to 20 milliseconds. Auto-Tune can be set anywhere from zero to 400 milliseconds.
Can you remember Cher's hit, "Believe" in which she sings, "I can't break through?" The reason it sounds so weird at the beginning is because Auto-Tune is set to zero.
But that's an unusual use of the computer program. According to this article virtually every pop artist has their vocals run through Auto-Tune, so that even a sloppy voice, a very mediocre singer sounds spot-on.
TIME points out several downsides to this. First, singers get lazy. They do one take, no matter how poor, knowing that Auto-Tune will fix it. Concert goers wonder what's wrong when Brittney sounds like a Jr. High wannabe instead of the sparkling vocalist of her latest CD. And artistry disappears behind technology.
One of my favorites is "At Last" by Etta James. Those are the first two words of the song, and if you've heard it your mind's ear can hear her sli-----------de from the first note to the second in the smoothest, sexiest sound every put to vinyl. I've tried to sing along and I am completely unable to match what she does even though I know it by heart.
Methinks Auto-Tune is one in a class of technological "advances" that have robbed us of artistry and the imperfections that make up beauty. Lasers engrave instead of human hands. Computers render drawings, and computer controlled machines weave fabric.
It's nice to have perfect uniformity in some situations, like machine parts. But the beauty of "hand crafted" comes from the subtle irregularities that can be labeled flaws but which make an object unique, one of a kind.
I wish we didn't have Auto-Tune. It would spare us from Brittney and maybe give us another Etta James.
IMHO