Beware of exotic silverware

Greetings.

Jewish date:  18 Tammuz 5769.

Today’s holiday:  Friday of the Fourteenth Week of Ordinary Time.

Today’s quasi-holiday:  Don’t Step on a Bee Day.

Worthy cause of the day:  “Guarantee Every Child Has Access to the Services They Need” and “Urge the chief of the Forest Service to end the policy of hazing and killing buffalo.”

Relevant to Divine Misconceptions:

1. “now would be a good time to call :”
   
   and “Apparently, Basement cat felt that 4”
   
   I really have no idea how black cats ended up as symbols of evil.  If anyone knows, please tell me.
2. “Plan to ban Uluru climb sparks debate”:  Uluru is a mountain sacred to Australian aborigines.  It is understandable that some would prefer that people did not treat it as a mere tourist attraction and challenge in mountain climbing.
   
3. More religious oppression:  “UZBEKISTAN: Banned from meeting fellow-believers”, “Malaysia Sikhs lose fight against man's conversion”, “Hamas tries to detain woman on beach in feared imposing of strict Islamic law”.
   
4. “Syria Increases Penalty for Honour Killings”:  This article is remarkable for two reasons.  The first is that the title is misleading, given that the increase in penalty is to a mere two years in jail.  (Bernie Madoff got 150 years, and he did even kill anyone.)  The second is that the article completely fails to mention anything about the, shall we say, provenance of honor killings.  Syrians are predominantly Muslim, and Muslims are the group most associated with honor killings.  They do occur occasionally among other groups, but Syria is not record as having appreciable numbers of Sikhs or Hindus.  Nowhere in the text is there any mention of Islam, Muslims, or Arabs at all.  I smell whitewashing.
   
5. “Pope orders reform after Holocaust denial flap”:  Took him long enough.
   
6. “Hindus demand removal of 'offensive ad' by Burger King”:  People do not usually approve of their deity being used to sell food.  Not to mention the idea is tackier than climbing a sacred mountain.
   

Today’s news and commentary:

• “Blog based on Time Magazine’s cover story on Divorce”
  
• “Michael Jackson”
  
• “Orchestra plays live soundtrack to horse race”
  
• “Bottled up: Data on contaminants in bottled water still lacking, government says”
  
• “Frenemy, locavore among new words in Webster's”
  
• “Presidential Commandments (1989)”
  
• “Debunking the Domino Theory”
  
• “Anonymous Sources on Resettling Refugees”
  
• “Turtles crawl on runway, delay flights at JFK”
  
• “Did China's Nuclear Tests Kill Thousands and Doom Future Generations?”
  

Today’s weird things have been prompted by “Silverware in Conjunction”:

Given enough humans and enough time, they will invent practically anything.  I was aware before this of sporks, but now I have discovered that people have gone to the trouble of inventing and even selling spifes, knorks, and what this quasi-Venn diagram calls “knipoonorks”:  Splayds.  Enjoy (or wonder why such things were invented in the first place), share the weirdness, and Shabbath shalom.

Aaron