I have quit watching the national and local news shows. And I don’t take the local newspapers. They are just not that informative any more. They assume I have a 2-minute attention span, the IQ of a 5th grader, and are hooked on celebrity news. Sometimes it difficult to tell the difference between the national nightly news and Entertainment Tonight (ET).
Mormons believe that all human beings are the literal children of God, and thus have the divine potential to become like Him. Some have noted that the doctrine is not broached as frequently today as it used to be. But it is still discussed.
Last Friday in Delft, the Netherlands, while attending a conference of the International Water History Association, I attended a session discussing water and culture. One of the presenters discussed the geographical distribution and evolution of one technical word (the arabic expression for water tank) as it spread throughout the Arab/Berber world. Since the word for the tank was similar across many cultures, he assumed this meant a common origin for the technology. While his presentation was interesting, it was the discussion afterward that was more informative for me.
I love to play Scrabble, but I’m not very good. My friends and work colleagues routinely outplay me. But I play on.
In Scrabble, there are only a few “q” words that don’t require the vowel “u”. One of those is “qat”. Until recently, I had only a faint idea about its meaning or significance.
That all changed when I read a short article in a recent NG. As it turns out, qat is a drug (stimulant) that is routinely used in Yemen and Africa’s Horn, but is illegal in the US and Canada. In other parts of the western world (including the UK), however, it is very much legal.