Light relief (you may have seen these gems before)

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Why people need to learn grammar, spelling and syntax.   Actual announcements found in Church bulletins to the congregation or announced at services:

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The Fasting & Prayer Conference includes meals.

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Scouts are saving aluminium cans, bottles and other items to be recycled. Proceeds will be used to cripple children.

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The sermon this morning: ‘Jesus Walks on the Water. ‘The sermon tonight: ‘Searching for Jesus.’

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Don’t let worry kill you off – let the Church help.

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Miss Charlene Mason sang ‘I will not pass this way again,’ giving obvious pleasure to the congregation.

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For those of you who have children and don’t know it, we have a nursery  downstairs.

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Next Thursday there will be try-outs for the choir. They need all the help they can get.

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Irving Benson and Jessie Carter were married on October 24 in the church. So ends a friendship that began in their school days.

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A bean supper will be held on Tuesday evening in the church hall. Music will follow.

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At the evening service tonight, the sermon topic will be ‘What Is Hell?’ Come early and listen to our choir practice.

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Eight new choir robes are currently needed due to the addition of several  new members and to the deterioration of some older ones.

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Please place your donation in the envelope along with the deceased person  you want remembered..

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Pot-luck supper Sunday at 5:00 PM – prayer and medication to follow.

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The ladies of the Church have cast off clothing of every kind.. They may be seen in the basement on Friday afternoon.

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The pastor would appreciate it if the ladies of the Congregation would lend him their electric girdles for the pancake breakfast next Sunday.

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Low Self Esteem Support Group will meet Thursday at 7 PM . Please use the back door.

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The eighth-graders will be presenting Shakespeare’s Hamlet in the Church basement Friday at 7 PM. The congregation is invited to attend this tragedy.

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Weight Watchers will meet at 7 PM at the First Presbyterian Church. Please use large double door at the side entrance

Here we go again- typically British

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The scientific evidence that has underpinned No 10’s response to Covid-19 will not be made public until the pandemic ends, the government chief science adviser has told MPs.

Sir Patrick Vallance said that the minutes of meetings of the Scientific Advisory Group on Emergencies (Sage) — the government’s most senior team of expert advisers — would only be released “once Sage stops convening on this emergency”.

 Sir Patrick has said that when the outbreak was under control the names of the scientists taking part in the meetings could also be released,  but only if those involved gave their permission.  The only members of Sage to have been officially acknowledged are Sir Patrick and Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer for England, who co-chair the group.

The Conservative MP Mr Clark is among those calling for all members to be made public. “In order to have some visibility into what institutions and disciplines are represented, it would be extremely useful to have the membership known,” he said. Fears have meanwhile been expressed about “limiting ourselves when we need fresh thinking.”

The excuse is that Sage is following the rules about safeguarding members’ personal security and protecting them from lobbying and other forms of unwanted influence which may hinder their ability to give impartial advice.  About  80 scientists from more than 20 institutions are regularly being consulted on coronavirus,  according to Sir Patrick, but who they are is unknown. It seems, in fact, that the documents published during the Covid-19 crisis on the Sage website so far are authored by people producing mathematical models designed to predict the course of the pandemic.

Professor Glover has commented: “If Sage was a cybersecurity committee or a defence committee I could understand security concerns, but it isn’t. It’s an advisory group that should bring the best thinking that we have from every area, not just epidemiology, to bear on a significant crisis.”

Professor Sheila Bird, a former programme leader of the biostatistics unit at the University of Cambridge, said that longstanding calls to make Sage membership transparent has been ignored. “We should know who is among the core Sage group. It would provide reassurance that the correct disciplines are represented,” she said.

My take: This is typically British. At least Americans are told the names of the people advising their government, even if they are ignored. It’s not that the virus crisis and it’s handling is some national response to deep danger and international conspiracy.  The British especially get kudos and self-importance from being on influential committees, free of public criticism. This allows them, for instance, to peddle the  idea of “herd immunity” early in the crisis.  This was a stupidly timed idea, as it turns out, but could be made without the exponents  being identified. In any event, it is better to be open and thought stupid.  That is democracy.
Meanwhile, a chaotic government is trying to open up the economy amidst a rapidly growing death toll.

The World Economic Forum

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The Observer (editorial) 

The World Economic Forum’s annual Davos shindig “became a laughing stock a long time ago”, says The Observer newspaper.  All those denunciations of global inequality by “corporate captains clinking champagne glasses” in the snow at shareholders’ expense have long seemed ridiculous.

But the penny seems finally to be drop­ping that the game really is up. The giant FTSE 100 asset manager Standard Life Aberdeen has announced that its executives won’t be attending next year, and that it plans to allocate its £3m budget “to something more useful”. The likelihood is that others will follow suit.

One of the World Economic Forum’s “thin justifications for the existence of Davos” was that a gathering of politicians and business leaders would help “create global responses to global risks”. The evidence for that was always hard to spot – “never more so than now”. Lack of international cooperation has been a defining feature of the world’s early response to the spread of the virus. Come next January, when the global economy will almost certainly still be depressed, “the fleets of corporate jets at Swiss airports” will seem even more offensive than usual. “Try teleconferencing.”  (The Observer and The Week, 2 May 2020).

My comment:  ”I own a bigger yacht and more West Indian islands than you. And have you met my “secretary”?  She travels everywhere with me”. It’s all just an opportunity to boost the (probably already overweening) ego and find overpaid jobs for the kids.  Networking on steroids, but not many ideas about global responses to global risks.  Spend the money saved on better pay for teachers and nurses, but, firstly, make serious collective waves about global warming (they could have had an impact on the virus, but that’s far too late).  The warming is an even bigger threat to everyone on the planet.

 

Filling the day with ……..what?

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“We are born once and cannot be born twice, but we must be no more for all time. Not being master of tomorrow, you nonetheless delay your happiness.  Life is consumed in procrastination, and each of us dies without providing leisure for himself.”     (From “The Essential Epicurus”, by Eugene O’Connor, Great Books in Philosophy series)

My comment:   A wise word from the ancient past, as relevant today as it was all those centuries ago.

Back in March I  thought to myself  “Best make the most of a bad job, being locked down at home – I’ll get some drawing done and take up watercolours again. It will be creative, calming, absorbing and something constructive, instead of watching the (endlessly gloomy and repetitive) news.”

Yes, you might have guessed – I have done about four hours of drawing in that time, and haven’t so much as  picked up a watercolour brush!  Bang goes my credibility!  However, I am better at hoovering the carpets and doing the laundry, if that counts?

Youth and old age

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“Not the youth, but the old man who has lived life well, is deemed to be happy.  The youth in his prime is made distraught and baffled by fortune: the old man has brought safely into harbour the goods he scarcely hoped for before, and has secured them with unfailing gratitude”.  (From “The Essential Epicurus”, by Eugene O’Connor, Great Books in Philosophy series).

My comment:  I agree almost entirely.  “Almost“ because modern technology is both baffling and challenging.  Case in point: no longer can I visit a doctor in person  but have to register on a hospital computer system.  Of course the hospitals in my area all compete, so all have different systems.  Then I have to make appointments, which is o.k except they all have their own software.  No sooner than I had downloaded Zoom than I have to sus out how to operate yet another video system.  This requires me to tell the doctor I will be there on the computer at the appointed time.  All this is conducted by cellphone.  I don’t have a cellphone, only an i- pad.

Enough!  Infection rates in Scottish care homes are currently 73%, so I’m lucky, I suppose.