Codex Sinaiticus

Ok, I think this is the last update for today....and possibly for a while, if my track record is any indication!

I thought this was one of the most FASCINATING things I'd ever seen. I'd love to see it, in person, one day. If I ever make it on that London trip I'm planning, I'll stop at the British Library, they have a portion of it there.

It's the OLDEST complete copy of the New Testament in the world. This is THE religious text that originated the contemporary translations and versions of the New Testament in use in Christianity today. VERY cool. See for yourself! I was moved just looking at it on a website, can't imagine what it would be like to see it in person!

Codex Sinaiticus Project

The Big 5-Oh.....

I thought this was funny as hell, so I'm sharing it. I'm a few short years shy of my 50th, but I think I might save this one for the hubby when that special occasion rolls around!

Turning 50 two years ago, I took a lot of good-natured ribbing from family and friends. So as my wife's 50th birthday approached, I decided to get in some needling of my own. I sat her down, looked deep into her eyes, then said I had never made love to anyone who was over 50 years old.

"Oh, well, I have," she deadpanned. "It's not that great."

Regina Brett's Life Lessons

I love old people, they have so much wisdom! I wish we could all be like that, but I guess it takes a lifetime of overcoming adversity, sorrows, joys, laughter and tears to give a person that insight. Well, here are some truisms that I hope will help you (and me!) on your journey!

1. Life isn't fair, but it's still good.

2. When in doubt, just take the next small step.

3. Life is too short to waste time hating anyone.

4. Your job won't take care of you when you are sick. Your friends and parents will. Stay in touch.

5. Pay off your credit cards every month.

6. You don't have to win every argument. Agree to disagree.

7. Cry with someone. It's more healing than crying alone.

8. It's OK to get angry.

9. Save for retirement starting with your first paycheck.

10. When it comes to chocolate, resistance is futile.

11. Make peace with your past so it won't screw up the present.

12. It's OK to let your children see you cry.

13. Don't compare your life to others. You have no idea what their journey is all about.

14. If a relationship has to be a secret, you shouldn't be in it.

15. Everything can change in the blink of an eye. But don't worry; God never blinks.

16. Take a deep breath. It calms the mind.

17. Get rid of anything that isn't useful, beautiful or joyful.

18. Whatever doesn't kill you really does make you stronger.

19. It's never too late to have a happy childhood. But the second one is up to you and no one else.

20. When it comes to going after what you love in life, don't take no for an answer.

21. Burn the candles, use the nice sheets, wear the fancy lingerie. Don't save it for a special occasion. Today is special.

22. Over prepare, then go with the flow.

23. Be eccentric now. Don't wait for old age to wear purple.

24. The most important sex organ is the brain.

25. No one is in charge of your happiness but you.

26. Frame every so-called disaster with these words 'In five years, will this matter?'

27. Always choose life.

28. Forgive everyone everything.

29. What other people think of you is none of your business.

30. Time heals almost everything. Give time time.

31. However good or bad a situation is, it will change.

32. Don't take yourself so seriously. No one else does.

33. Believe in miracles.

34. God loves you because of who God is, not because of anything you did or didn't do.

35. Don't audit life. Show up and make the most of it now.

36. Growing old beats the alternative -- dying young.

37. Your children get only one childhood.

38. All that truly matters in the end is that you loved.

39. Get outside every day. Miracles are waiting everywhere.

40. If we all threw our problems in a pile and saw everyone else's, we'd grab ours back.

41. Envy is a waste of time. You already have all you need.

42. The best is yet to come.

43. No matter how you feel, get up, dress up and show up.

44. Yield.

45. Life isn't tied with a bow, but it's still a gift."

Amazing Stop Motion Video...

This sweet stop motion video took 60,000 photos to make. VERY charming, see for yourself!

Thanks to @photojojo from Twitter!


The PEN Story.


Enjoy!

Larry the Cable Guy

Some people have NO common sense, but others make up for it by having more than their share!

Copied from an email a friend sent me because I thought they were funny. So there! Have a laugh!


1. A day without sunshine is like night.

2. On the other hand, you have different fingers.

3. 42.7 percent of all statistics are made up on the spot.

4. 99 percent of lawyers give the rest a bad name.

5. Remember, half the people you know are below average.

6. He who laughs last, thinks slowest.

7. Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm.

8. The early bird may get the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese in the trap.

9. Support bacteria. They're the only culture some people have.

10. A clear conscience is usually the sign of a bad memory.

11. Change is inevitable, except from vending machines.

12. If you think nobody cares, try missing a couple of payments.

13. OK, so what's the speed of dark?

14. When everything is coming your way, you're in the wrong lane.

15. Hard work pays off in the future. Laziness pays off now.

16. How much deeper would the ocean be without sponges?

17. Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.

20. What happens if you get scared half to death, twice?

21 Why do psychics have to ask you your name?

22. Inside every older person is a younger person wondering, 'What the heck happened?'

23. Just remember -- if the world didn't suck, we would all fall off.

24. Light travels faster than sound. That's why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.

25. Life isn't like a box of chocolates. It's more like a jar of jalapenos. What you do today, might burn your butt tomorrow.

George W's "How Do You Like Me Now?"

What? A sympathetic article about George W? Say it ain't so! I'm sure the writer will be drummed out of the press corp any second now.

From Newsweek: "Bush's Afterlife in Texas"

Patrick Bibb, a 19-year-old from Dallas, glanced at his cell phone. He was in the middle of his economics class at Texas Christian University on a February morning. His caller ID read withheld. He decided not to answer. When class ended, he checked his messages and found that George W. Bush had been trying to reach him.

The sophomore listened to the voice mail. He heard the former president of the United States thank him at least four times. Bush was happy that the teenager had been selling welcome home george & laura signs for $20 to people all over Bush's neighborhood in Texas. "I hope this message is sufficient" to show appreciation, Bibb heard Bush say. Bibb dutifully listened, hung up and went to his other classes.

Bibb, a budding entrepreneur, had decided to make and sell the signs after he learned that the former president would be moving close to his parents' house. The placards went up all around the exclusive Preston Hollow neighborhood in North Dallas, which is studded with homes worth $5 million to $20 million. Bibb used some of the profits to pay his tuition and decided to donate the rest to a nearby elementary school.

He settled into accounting class. His phone rang again. Bibb decided to pick up. "Excuse me, I need to go to talk to the president," Bibb wisecracked to a pal as he left the room. It was Bush again.

He began thanking Bibb, repeatedly, for making the signs. Bibb listened patiently. He didn't mean to be rude, but he finally said: "I'm really sorry, Mr. President. I'm in the middle of class." He needed to get off the phone. Bush replied: "No problem, that's where you're supposed to be."

Weeks later, the undergraduate was still wondering about his chat with the man who, only a short time ago, was arguably the most powerful man on the planet. "I had just wanted him to know that people still cared about him, despite the public-opinion polls," says Bibb.

Bibb's not the only one. Molly Vilbig, who lives nearby, believes Bush had gotten word that her grandson had once tried, at the tender age of 6, to donate $1 to the first Bush for President campaign. That's why, Vilbig suspects, the ex-president called and invited the 14-year-old to come over. Under the watchful eye of Secret Service agents, the boy walked to Bush's home. The two settled into chairs in the backyard. "Ask me anything you want," Bush said to the boy, according to the grandmother.

They spent 90 minutes together. And when the teenager went home, he told his grandmother all about it. She was Republican, as were many of the folks in the neighborhood. In the following days, she saw her grandson getting chummy with the Secret Service agents on the street. One day she called Jake to dinner. He came in, a little upset. "I was just about to learn Laura Bush's Secret Service code name," she heard her grandson say.

Bush has always been friendly. And maybe, after years of being cordoned off by security, his face time with others carefully choreographed and his days scheduled to the hilt, it's refreshing to him just to have the chance for a spontaneous chat with a neighbor. But Bush's choice of conversational companions may speak to something deeper. He lived in a bubble during much of his time in Washington; having left office with a disapproval rating of 73 percent, he might be forgiven for being a bit hesitant about what awaits him on the outside. He's declined to give a major interview since leaving office (he and his aides declined to cooperate with this story). So Bush seems to be easing into life back home in Texas, reaching out quietly to reconnect with old friends, stalwart supporters—and the occasional teenage fanboy, who may or may not yet be fully aware of the harsh public judgments, even in Republican circles, of the guy who just moved in next door.

"He is in home territory for sure, no question about it. And that's where he wants to be," says Bruce Buchanan, a presidential scholar at the University of Texas at Austin. "He doesn't enjoy naysayers and critics and opposition. Never has. And right now, he needs that nurturing cocoon that he is in. He is not calling people who didn't support him. He is calling people who supported him, those 14-year-olds."

"But we will see how serious he wants to get in being a participant in the debate over his legacy, beyond writing his side of the story," Buchanan continues. "He may decide, forget it. Or he may decide to become his own version of the Jimmy Carter model. Or he might just stay on the lecture circuit and make money. He has all those options."

And he's exploring them, to be sure. Bush made his first foray into the lucrative post presidency speaking circuit last month, cracking up an audience of Calgary oilmen for a reported $400 a ticket. He's got more talks ahead, including one with former president Bill Clinton in late May. He's busy writing a book and aggressively raising money for a $300 million library, museum and think tank on the campus of Southern Methodist University. And he's trying to find his place in Texas, a land where he once was king.

When Bush flew home from Washington Jan. 20, he made a very safe bet. He landed in Midland. His friends are among the most prominent figures in the small, affluent west Texas town. It's where he was raised, where the family name carried serious weight. It's where Laura Bush, whose approval ratings were nearly twice her husband's when they left Washington, comes from. "They turned out 30,000 people here," says his longtime Texas accountant, Bob McCleskey. "And that's without giving out food and beer. Most people in Texas, by and large, hold him in high regard because he made a decision and stuck with it."

Those Texas friends say Bush seems remarkably unchanged by his eight years in Washington. "Every time I talk to him or have been around him, he has been very upbeat," says his buddy Nolan Ryan, the baseball legend Bush has described as his "hero."

Ryan helped orchestrate one of the rare public appearances Bush has made since leaving office. In April, Ryan, now the president of the Texas Rangers, invited Bush, once a limited partner in the team, to throw out the first pitch of the season. "He was well received," says Ryan. "It was a very positive day."

Ryan knows a little about stepping off the mound. Leave office, Ryan says, and "you're just another citizen of the United States."

When Bush last lived here full time, he was a media darling with sky-high approval ratings. Karl Rove had conducted a "front-porch campaign," inspired by the candidacy of William McKinley. Governor Bush waited for national GOP leaders to come to him at the stately white-columned governor's mansion in Austin. Republican rainmakers trooped up the steps and threw their support to Bush's presidential campaign.

Today, the mansion is in ruins—almost torched to the ground last June by an arsonist who still hasn't been caught. And the Bush brand, once spoken of in the halls of the legislature with awe, is now a little like Lord Voldemort's. "It is the name that shall not be spoken," says Texas political consultant Bill Miller, who has worked with both Democrats and Republicans. "The emotional response from people is almost always negative, never positive. It's a different time and a different deal."

Earlier this year a state lawmaker from Waco, which is close to Bush's ranch, proposed a bill praising the ex-president as a man who "lived each day with the safety and prosperity of his fellow citizens foremost in his mind; he took a principled stand on a wide range of issues of great importance to every American, and his tireless efforts will not soon be forgotten." Further, the measure held that Bush should be lauded for his "new antiterrorism tools."

It was similar to the thousands of salutes handed out every year without a whisper of opposition. But this one met with intense resistance by one Ft. Worth state representative, who said it seemed like Bush was being congratulated for "his waterboarding and other torture techniques." The original proposal was withdrawn, rewritten and resubmitted. At the last hearing on the bill in late April, no witnesses showed up to defend it or attack it. It now sits in limbo—a little like the person it was written for.

Only a little more than a month after leaving Washington, Bush dropped in to see students at Pershing Elementary near his new house in Dallas, according to a local blogger. He asked the grade-schoolers if they knew who he was. One student shouted: "George Washington!" He quickly answered: "George Washington Bush."

Texas today is different from the heady place it was when Bush left. Unemployment is rising, and deepening recessions are predicted for some urban areas. And though it is still firmly a Republican state, the GOP holds just a two-seat lead in the Texas House. Obama secured 44 percent of the vote in Texas, improving on the 38 percent Kerry won when he ran against Bush in 2004. Navigating the changed terrain is tricky business for Bush and his handlers—one that involves carefully picking his spots.

There has been resistance to the policy institute, or think tank, he's seeking to establish at Southern Methodist University. Critics see it as a place designed to burnish the Bush legacy, glossing over problems—and wounding the school's academic independence in the process. Defenders say it will be a forward-looking organization devoted to examining 21st-century global concerns.

A state district judge ordered Bush to give up to a six-hour deposition in a civil lawsuit claiming that SMU officials broke the law when they acquired and tore down a condominium complex to make room for his center. Bush's lawyers say they will appeal, and legal observers say it is highly unusual for sitting or former presidents to be compelled to testify in litigation.

Meanwhile, Bush has talked to a political-science class at SMU, worked out at the school's training facilities and met with old hands to plot strategy for his presidential center. "It seems that former president Bush is always on campus," says student-body president-elect Patrick Kobler. "Though I may not agree with every policy he put forth, I believe that he led from the heart, meaning he looked beyond what was considered popular and instead did what he thought was right."

He has set up an office in North Dallas, where, friends say, he is deeply enmeshed in his memoirs. The book will revolve around key decisions of his presidency—and of his life before Washington, such as when, at 40, he stopped drinking. "I know he is working on his book," says billionaire Tom Hicks, his longtime friend. "I get the sense that he has the confidence that history will judge him a lot better than The New York Times or the current media does."

Hicks, who made Bush a wealthy man by buying the Rangers from his ownership group, helped the Bushes get settled in their spot on Daria Place—right next door to his estate. Another Texas billionaire, Harold Simmons, a major player in the world's titanium supply, is nearby; Simmons helped bankroll the Swift Boat campaign against John Kerry. The men who helped give Bush the platform, the money and the political muscle to win his various campaigns are within easy walking distance of his new front porch.

Fred Meyer, former chairman of the Texas GOP, was on hand at Ellington Airport in Houston when Bush's father came home. "And there were not a lot of us there," Meyer says, contrasting the reception with the "gang" present for 43's return. An ailing economy had dampened enthusiasm for the father. But 41's approval ratings had rebounded to 56 percent by the time he jetted to Houston, and he was buoyed by the many friends he'd made over the course of a long career. Larry Temple, formerly special counsel to Lyndon Johnson, says the vibe surrounding 43's return is different. "I see people reliving [George W.] Bush's presidency. There is a lingering dissatisfaction. It may be the war, it may be the residual effects of the economy," he says.

"Presidents don't get a full and fair hearing until everyone who was alive when they were alive is dead and so are they," says UT's Buchanan. It will take time.

The waiting must be hard on Bush, a man still bristling with a jangly, kinetic energy at 62. One day in Dallas, according to a local blog, he visited Pershing Elementary and a parent asked him to consider coming to work at the school's haunted-house carnival. "I'd make a good ghost," Bush replied.

With Anne Belli Perez

Minutaglio, the author of First Son: George W. Bush and the Bush Family Dynasty, teaches journalism at the University of Texas at Austin.

I've been meaning to read this author's book for some time, I think I've had it on my Amazon Wish List for a couple of years now! Not just based on the sympathetic tenor of this article, I think someone once told me that the book tells some hard truths....I like the writer's style. Anyway, think what you want of his Administration, I think he did the best he could under the circumstances. It can't have been easy, that must be a TOUGH, TOUGH job....I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy.

Food for thought....

90 people get the swine flu and everyone wants to wear surgical masks. Over 1 million people have AIDS and no one wants to use a condom.


("Borrowed" from an email group I belong to.....VERY true, don't you think?)

Money Lady

I thought I'd post this here, instead of doing the usual email forwarding thing, in the hopes that WAY MORE than 12 people will see it, LOL!

This is a Money Lady. Pass it to 6 of your good friends or family and be rich in 4 Days. Pass it to 12 of your good friends or family and be rich in 2 Days. I am not joking. You will find an unexpected windfall. If you delete it, you will never know! Good luck!

A Reminder.....

I think quite a few of us have forgotten what made this country the greatest nation on Earth. Why our forefathers fought and died. Why so many impoverished people from all over the world endured such hardships to make their way to our shores, and from whom you and I are descended. Here's a reminder:

America the Beautiful
Words by Katharine Lee Bates,Melody by Samuel Ward

O beautiful for spacious skies,
For amber waves of grain,
For purple mountain majesties
Above the fruited plain!
America! America!
God shed his grace on thee
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea!

O beautiful for pilgrim feet
Whose stern impassioned stress
A thoroughfare of freedom beat
Across the wilderness! America! America!
God mend thine every flaw,
Confirm thy soul in self-control,
Thy liberty in law!

O beautiful for heroes proved
In liberating strife.
Who more than self their country loved
And mercy more than life!
America! America!
May God thy gold refine
Till all success be nobleness
And every gain divine!

O beautiful for patriot dream
That sees beyond the years
Thine alabaster cities gleam
Undimmed by human tears!
America! America!
God shed his grace on thee
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea!

O beautiful for halcyon skies,
For amber waves of grain,
For purple mountain majesties
Above the enameled plain!
America! America!
God shed his grace on thee
Till souls wax fair as earth and air
And music-hearted sea!

O beautiful for pilgrims feet,
Whose stem impassioned stress
A thoroughfare for freedom beat
Across the wilderness!
America! America!
God shed his grace on thee
Till paths be wrought through wilds of thought
By pilgrim foot and knee!

O beautiful for glory-tale
Of liberating strife
When once and twice, for man's avail
Men lavished precious life!
America! America!
God shed his grace on thee
Till selfish gain no longer stain
The banner of the free!

O beautiful for patriot dream
That sees beyond the years
Thine alabaster cities gleam
Undimmed by human tears!
America! America!
God shed his grace on thee
Till nobler men keep once again
Thy whiter jubilee!