David's Daily Diversions

Babel-on

We have been experiencing a significant increase in vocabulary in the Holford house. Our favourite words are still “Papa” and “Honey” (or “Nunyee” as it comes out), but since we always tell him they are in Texas (so he will get down off the window sill), he can now say “Texas” (or more like a variation thereof that defies transliteration).

We seem to be doing well with the “T” words. Quite out of the blue, he’s picked up the word “tasty”. This is no doubt due to my overuse of my David Letterman dumb guy voice when I’m encouraging him to continue eating a food that he had tested and found acceptable for an additional bite. I invariably say, “Them’s a tasty treat!” and “Them’s good eatin’!” I suppose I should avoid overuse of the third person objective possessive pronoun, as it doesn’t actually exist in proper English.

Stuck in the Future Past

Do you ever get old songs stuck in your head for absolutely no good reason? I think we all do. Lately mine has been the "Cossack Song" by Tommy Coomes and released originally on Love Song’s Final Touch album in 1974. It is Hal Lindsey – or more specifically Chuck Smith -- eschatology from the same era. In part:

I wouldn't want to be a Cossack headed for that Palestine Road
Thinking about what's written in the Word of God
About the things that he's foretold
No, I wouldn't want to be there, down Jerusalem way
No, I wouldn't want to be there, headed for my grave
I wouldn't want to march with the comrades when they enter Israel
Headed straight into the fiery wrath of God
And finding no escape from, well,
I wouldn't want to be there, down Jerusalem way
No, I wouldn't want to be there, headed for my grave

Yep, the Russians are the baddies and they are going to attack Israel and BAM! God’s gonna get them. The thought pattern goes something like this: The Russians must be the baddies because them’s godless Communists. If there’s anything we knowd, it’s that Amairca is God’s country – next to Isrul, u’course – God loves us more spaisle than them. Heck, they don’t even speak Anglish, so how would they read the King James Version and get saved anyhow?

I suppose the fall of Communism has taken the gum erasers to some Bible prophecy charts and graphs, but Russia (or Gog as they like to call it) is still an indicator used in the Rapture Index. The Rapture Index is sort of Dow Jones of “Prophetic Activity”. The higher the number, the more likely the Rapture is to occur. There apparently hasn’t been a lot of activity in Gog lately, so it’s rating has been downgraded by one point.

However, there is a lot of activity related to the EU – or the “Beast Government” as it is called (a name I might prefer in a different context), so it is still rated at the maximum five points. In case you haven’t kept up with all this, the EU is the 10-horned restoration of the Roman Empire, because there are 10 countries in the EU. Well, there are a lot more than that, but that doesn’t matter, apparently.