Pictures from the Fall Concert

I'm hoping these will lift some spirits--Here's a lot of pictures from the fall concert. It is called a Blast from the Past. Most of the students are dressed in fifties style...but I did see a few in sixties and seventies. It's great fun. Notice: the girls like to pose better than the guys. I did manage to sneak in a couple of them.

Overwhelming Statistics.

Having recently been disturbed by the trend to extend the "pro-life" label to all aspects of human life (capital punishment, war, poverty, environmentalism, you-name-it) so that "pro-choice" candidates could claim the moral high ground, I did a little research in the field. One of the most troubling of the articles I read came from a minister, who said we shouldn't "let one issue trump all the others" when we voted, meaning, of course, that we should not let our stand on abortion affect our vote. I feel that the issue itself trumps all the others. :

Americans killed in wars since 1973: 6,830.
At an X for every 100 it would look like this:

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Americans killed by capital punishment from 1973-2004: 983
At an X for every 100 it would look like this:

XXXXXXXXXX

Total Americans killed in all wars from the Revolutionary War on: 1,315, 00.At an X for every 100 it fills six pages of X's.
That's pretty impressive.

Abortions in the U.S. from 1973-2004 : 42,470,000.

At an X for every 100 it fills 188 pages full of X's
How can it NOT trump everything else?

Anyway, I actually printed out all the pages and put them on the wall. It looks like this:

The Green Page is capital punishment, the gray is wars since 1973, the yellow pages represent all Americans ever killed in war, and the white pages are those full of abortions--over 200,000 per page (as each typed X represents 100)

My seniors are making a video of the display for You-Tube. I think it will be called simply X=100.

Just For Fun

Here's a few really short videos from the Pumpkin Festival. For the Children, it was a magical day. What a great age, when little things make them so happy! An interesting conversation taking place while the third video is playing really contrasts the reaction of teen-agers, who would rather die than admit that a small town celebration like this can be entertaining.

Whoops.

As a member of the Lions' Club, my husband is called upon, from time to time, to sell fund-raising tickets for a benevolence project: this time it was for building a skate park for our community children (who will probably still skateboard on the sidewalks and use the elderly for bowling pins, but that's irrelevant). Turtle, however, has a dilemma. It hardly seems appropriate for a minister to ask his congregation to buy raffle tickets.

He had to sell ten. They cost twenty dollars each. So, reluctantly, after a church dinner, he asked for twenty dollar donations for the Lion's club project. The ticket with your name on it, he would just present as an afterthought for those who donated. And then, as is usually the case, he bought the unsold ones himself...gotta support those Lions.

Yesterday, at the the Pumpkin Festival, in front of the entire town and half the population of the county, he won the grand prize for the raffle--a big screen TV--42 inches.

I have no idea where to put it. Right now we don't even have cable. There is a TV in the basement for watching DVD's, and a smaller one in the guest room for the WII. I just don't know...he wants to trade it for a Bass boat or a pontoon boat, but that would entail more money. I suggested we use it in the guest room for the Nintendo game, but he thinks that would be a waste. Our children say they will take it off our hands, but he isn't really open to that suggestion; after all, he has never won anything before. Ah Turtle.

P.S. Turtle reminded me that he did win something before, a tiny little black and white TV. But that was from putting his name in a jar at the hardware store when we lived in Matador, Texas. . . what is it with TV's? A laptop now, that would have been great. sigh.