SNORTING & STEAMING

In my local newspaper earlier this week there was a huge article with a picture showing a British vicar blessing Blackberries, computers and other such electronic gadgets. He did this at what was called a "Back-to-Work Ceremony." This vicar at a prestigious church in London said that just as in the old days we blessed scythes and other farming implements dragged to the church door, now it was appropriate to give that blessing to the tools of the modern workplace - Blackberries, cellphone and computers. His thinking was that the ceremony made worship "lively and relevant" to the people who worked in the nearby financial district.

My, my, my.



And then I read (and hear) that old Pat Robertson right here in the US says that Haiti's trouble is caused by a pact they made with the devil hundreds of years ago.

If you had looked carefully you would have seen me snorting when I read of the British ceremony and you would have seen smoke coming out my ears at reading of Robertson's mean spirited, ignorant and ill-advised words.

Things like this are what make me have less than warm fuzzy feelings about Christians and their interpretions of religion. I probably overall am not as negative of Christianity as I sometimes seem, but it is sure things like this that really rub me the wrong way. And give a poke in the eye to the truth.

A GOOD WORD FOR US ALL

Oh, it is another new word today. How I love new, delicious words.

How is this one: BOMBINATE: To buzz, to hum; to drone. It comes from a Latin word meaning “a boom.” And the second “b” is pronounced - bom-bin-ate.

Examples of its use are as follows:

“He is often drunk. His head hurts. Snatches of conversation, remembered precepts, prefigured cries of terror bombinate about his skull.”

“Sometimes the computer bombinates way into the night, stops for a bit of rest, then resumes its hum at the early hours of the morning.”
Oh my gosh! I like this word almost as much as I liked “peculate.”

Perhaps the reason I like it is that I personally have experienced both uses. For the first example although I was not often drunk I did have one spectacular episode when I was in that lost time after my divorce and didn’t know how to drink. As many of you know, I married Joe when I was not yet 21 and we were not drinkers, though we did on occasion have a beer. After we’d been married for a few years we tossed our lot in with an evangelical church and at that point we didn’t drink at all. So after my divorce when I would have one of the rare dates (not many man wanted to date a woman with 4 young children), we often went to dinner and then dancing afterwards. It only took one time of drinking and then experiencing a bout of bombination for me to get hold of myself and vow that it would never happen again. And it didn’t. (Brendan, are you listening?)

But also while I was sitting here at my daughter’s computer this morning (I'm in Los Angeles house-sitting)readying to log on, I once again realized how much noise her computer setup makes. It sounds like someone in the neighborhood is mowing their lawn... and mowing...and mowing. It has a faint hum with a pitch that waivers up and down. They have way too much hooked up to it for me to figure out just what or why it is doing this. (Well, I learned early on anyway not to ask “why” a computer does anything, because even if someone knows, you’ll never understand their answer.) Anyway, that little foray of thought reminded me that when I first got on the internet back in 1997 I had a dial up modem. Not knowing much about the internet, or my computer either for that matter, I set it so that AOL would send out all my e-mails at 2 a.m. I don’t know why I did that. I guess I thought one was supposed to do it that way. But in the middle of the night I was awakened by my computer automatically using my dial-up modem by itself and then sending all my e-mail before shutting itself down again.

Now that isn’t quite what the second example above is talking about, but I think anything the computer does while a body is not sitting at the controls can be considered some form of bombinating.

So there is my word for the day – and a special thanks to the people who wrote those very interesting sentences that caused me to reflect on things past. Be assured that I will be adding bombinate to my vocabulary and will be eagerly waiting for just the right opportunity to use it!