O-Dark-Thirty

Please be aware that all quotes in this summary are paraphrasing as best I recall. They are not true quotes. Tass Saada was once a sniper for Yasser Arafat. He wrote a book called  Once an Arafat Man: The True Story of How a PLO Sniper Found a New Life . I bought two copies and already loaned them out – haven’t even read them yet. Here’s the official bio. Tass Saada Tass Saada is a former Muslim and the founder of Hope for Ishmael, a nonprofit organization whose mission is to reconcile Arabs and Jews. Born in 1951 in the Gaza Strip, Saada grew up in Saudi Arabia and Qatar. He worked under Yasser Arafat as a Fatah fighter and sniper. Years after immigrating to America, he became a Christian. A Palestinian Muslim, Tass hated Jews, Christians and Americans with an equal passion. He points out that the Press will try to convince the world that the conflict between Arab and Jew is political and centers on the small strip of land in Israel (I think he means Gaza). Howeve...

The horrible shooting in Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut, the senseless and tragic deaths of twenty school children and six teachers, is just the latest in the abuse of guns in this country. What doesn't get much press is the attack in the Chinese school that injured over a dozen children. That first attack used guns and left innocent victims dead. The second attack used knives and left innocent victims injured, some perhaps fatally. I admit that I am conflicted, and have been for over a decade, about the use of guns. I believe in our right to bear arms (which means to own them). I certainly don't think that means we have the right to keep automatic weapons, or weapons designed for a single purpose - killing other humans. I know that laws will not keep guns out of the hands of lawbreakers, by definition. Lawbreakers do not obey laws, except when convenient for them. I know for a fact that it took someone I know only hours to procure a handgun in the Housto...

I found this story years ago and recorded it in 2008 in one of my personal journals. It says the Author is Unknown, and perhaps he or she is. I don't even know if the story is true. You know what? I don't care. It's a great story. Merry Christmas to all! Feliz Navidad! <>   I remember my first Christmas adventure with Grandma. I was just a kid. I remember tearing across town on my bike to visit her on the day my big sister dropped the bomb. "There is no Santa Claus," she jeered. "Even dummies know that!" My Grandma was not the gushy kind. She never had been. I fled to her that day, because I knew she would be straight with me. I knew Grandma always told the truth, and I knew that the truth always went down a whole lot easier when swallowed with one of her world-famous cinnamon buns. I knew they were world-famous, because Grandma said so. It had to be true. Grandma was home, and the buns were still warm. Between bites, I told her everythi...

I usually post on days that are Prime Numbers. Sometimes I make a Bonus Post, but usually that's because I have a burning desire to post something. That doesn't happen often (hence, the "Bonus"). So tomorrow is the Thirteenth of the month, so in America it's 12/13. In two years it will be 12/13/14, which is cool. Today, however, is 12/12/12 , even in Europe, where they put the day first. Today, we are not confused (much). So today's post is in honor of TWELVE Day, which will not come again (at least not for me). So I'll post today instead of tomorrow. Famous Twelves There are Twelve Days of Christmas. There are twenty-four hours in a day, which is two sets of twelve (and who decided that, I wonder?), so a clock has twelve numbers. There are twelve months in a year. AA has a twelve step program, an archetype followed by other organizations dealing with addictions. There are twelve signs in the Zodiac. There are twelve...

After my Mom died I collected all the documents she had on her computer and some that were simply written by hand on scraps of paper. A few were stories, one of which was her version of Christmas . One of the other documents she had was Mary Stewart's prayer, one she mentioned to me years ago. At the time I didn't think much of it, but Mom thought it was important enough that she kept a copy of the prayer. When I ran across it recently I wondered what kind of prayer the Queen of Scotland would pray, and why - and who preserved it. I had the wrong Mary. Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, queen regnant of Scotland, wife of Francis II of France and potential heir to the English throne, lived from 1542 to 1587 and was executed by Elizabeth I, who found her guilty of plotting against the Crown of England.  Good book anyway!  It also was not Mary Stewart, the English author of The Merlin Trilogy , ( The Crystal Cave, The Hollow Hills and The Last Enchantment ). I really l...

Before I jump in to today's post, if you want a funny growing-up story from my younger brother, jump to his post . It's worth your time. He's pretty funny. Cult of Mac's Killian Bell posted something that immediately captured my attention - there's an Easter Egg in MAC OS X. For those of us who are gamers, the term Easter Egg has almost visceral meaning. The method to reveal the Lord of the Rings Easter Egg is simple. Open Terminal on your Mac and type the following command: cat /usr/share/calendar/calendar.lotr 01/05 Fellowship enters Moria 01/09 Fellowship reaches Lorien 01/17 Passing of Gandalf 02/07 Fellowship leaves Lorien 02/17 Death of Boromir 02/20 Meriadoc & Pippin meet Treebeard 02/22 Passing of King Ellesar 02/24 Ents destroy Isengard 02/26 Aragorn takes the Paths of the Dead 03/05 Frodo & Samwise encounter Shelob 03/08 Deaths of Denethor & Theoden 03/18 Destruction of the Ring 03/29 Flowering of the Mallorn 04/04 Gandalf visits...

Leadership needs, well - leaders. W. Edwards Deming made that abundantly clear when I heard him speak decades ago. Years ago someone told me that leadership was "an influential relationship with followers."   That seems true, but deserves some thinking. Followers must be willing to do what you want them to do. I suppose you could have negative leaders, where the followers do precisely what you don’t want them to do. A clever negative leader would then propose plans for the opposite of what he really wanted to accomplish. So if he planned to fail, and did, would he really succeed? Let's not follow that train of thought… There are a lot of leaders. These are the ones that came to my mind immediately and not in any particular order. Jesus Christ . You can argue his divinity, perhaps try to argue his even existence, but you cannot argue the impact that Jesus of Nazareth had on the world. When I look at my list of leadership characteristics Jesus has them all (wit...

(Not quite this bad, but... Read on!) One of my brothers is now adding more war stories from our respective younger years to his blog. Already he covered an analysis of my blog post on Mom's meatloaf , a funny confession of electrocuting our youngest brother , and now a post giving the enduring tale of Mom's grits . Somehow I think he still thinks Mom was a good cook. I loved my Mom and I miss her all the time. At some level I can say that Mom was a good cook. She had the fabled ability to take a quarter pound of meat and expand it to a complete meal, including vegetables, for four growing boys, my Dad and herself. Let me be clear, however. I'm the eldest, and I watched Mom cook. I can say with absolute authority that she imbued beef flavor into a steaming pot of water and beef bouillon by waving a small piece of left-over beef over the top of the kettle. This was her beef stew recipe. She tried, as evidenced by the foray into cooking Southern grits ( my short...

Women and men think differently. Most of us know that. Some people try to say it is nurture instead of nature, but I don't think so. I think we are hard-wired differently. But does it really matter at this point? My Pastor actually showed part of a YouTube video with Mark Gungor explaining these differences dramatically. The video does an excellent job of showing the differences, but I'll still try to sum up what he says, but in my own words and with some of my own thoughts included. Men compartmentalize everything. All topics and situations have their own little mental box. From personal experience I can tell you this is absolutely true. Talk to me about the car, and that's what we're talking about, not about whether we should plan a driving trip to Mexico. That's an entirely different box. I have to put the car box back into my brain - carefully, because it can't touch any other boxes - and take out the one for a trip to Mexico. If I don't have a ...