The Daily Bluster

From the New York Times:  Student Faces Town’s Wrath in Protest Against a Prayer CRANSTON, R.I. — She is 16, the daughter of a firefighter and a nurse, a self-proclaimed nerd who loves Harry Potter and Facebook. But Jessica Ahlquist is also an outspoken atheist who has incensed this heavily Roman Catholic city with a successful lawsuit to get a prayer removed from the wall of her high school auditorium, where it has hung for 49 years. Read more here . And here . It says in the nytimes article that at ten years old, she became an atheist. Clearly, the girl is made of sterner stuff, and not just of sugar and spice. Yep, that's Jessica As local florists refused to deliver flowers to her, I asked a friend to deliver one to her: You rock, Jessica.

It is difficult to imagine the world today without money, or the concept of money. But surely, the first civilizations did not start out using money, right?             Long ago, people did not use money to buy things. They also did not use money to pay the person who repaired their roof, or built their tables, chairs and other furniture. What they did was to exchange the things they had for the things that they needed. If they had a lot of rice, they might want to exchange some of it for fish, so they would find somebody who has a lot of fish, and see if that person wants to trade some of it for rice. Or maybe a person who was very good at repairing roofs or making chairs and tables would get paid with bananas, or whatever fruit was in season. This type of doing business is called barter .              As you can imagine, barter trade has some serious flaws. For example, what if the person who had just repaired your roof wanted, say, flip flops? And you only had bananas? Mor

So, 2012. The year the world is supposed to end. As the world (much of it, anyway) celebrated the coming of the new year, I couldn’t help but notice the different ways cultures of the world welcome the new year.  For us here in the Philippines, we like to usher in the year with a bang—literally. With firecrackers that can set off car alarms, and can reduce your precious doggies to whimpering, whining, shitting, piteous creatures; with firecrackers that shatter eardrums, and mangle hands and, in some cases, cause fires and kill people.  The firecracker on the left is aptly called "Goodbye Philippines" Also by firing loaded guns indiscriminately into the sky. This one’s fun—gravity tells us that what comes up must come down, right? So when the bullet does return to earth, it sometimes hit people, including children.  And kills them. Loud noises are supposed to drive away “evil spirits,” according to Chinese traditions. That people use this superstition to