Let’s begin with a quote.
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“If God didn’t want us messing with this stuff, we couldn’t do it,” Horner said.
Jack Horner, Curator Museum of the Rockies, author and MSU professor.
As reported in ‘Life after death’ in Bozeman Daily Chronicle.
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Jack Horner was talking about messing with the DNA of chickens (descended from dinosaurs) and reconstructing “dino-chickens”. I think this is a good answer to anytime religious objections are made to scientific inquiries.
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OK, I got that off my chest. On to more current topics.
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The other day I decided that I had had enough and went to the store to buy a pair of 27 inch laces for my new Brooks running shoes. The shortest laces I could find were 40 inch laces. Having thought about this some, I have two observations. Now I don’t know how valid these observations are but they seem related to each other and to other happenings in the world.
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First observation. I believe I started having problems with laces when they stopped being made of natural fibers. Shoelaces are a lot slicker than they used to be. Concurrently with this phenomenon, I noticed that clothing in general contain a lot less natural fibers. The manufactures (or at least the people who dream up ad campaigns for their products) point out all the advantages of manmade fibers but I believe that price is the driving force here. First in the 70s they started making stuff that used less material (example shorter shoelaces) because of cost and then when manmade materials became more prevalent (and the price dropped) they started making stuff that used more material –see, we are giving you more for your money.
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Second observation. There is a connection between the length of shoelaces and the cupidity of our society. Almost everything has grown in size. I have two Coke bottles from the Second World War. They contained 6 ounces of Coca Cola when issued to troops. Have you tried to find that size lately? First there was 12 oz and then 16 oz sizes. Individual fountain drinks went from 16 to 32 to 44. Sometimes even larger. Coke, shoelaces and fountain drinks aren’t the only things that have increased in size. It seems as if everything has become larger. Food portions, autos and houses have all increased in size from the 1970s. Not to mention the size of American rears. And when portions do get smaller they try to make them larger by oversized packaging or putting some other spin on the product.
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I have a friend who is taking classes related to fashion and design. He recently mentioned to me that even jeans have been affected by synthetic fiber and things getting bigger. To make jeans (made out of cotton) stretchy they have added manmade materials (Lycra, I think but I could be wrong). We need stretchy jeans to make our bigger bodies more comfortable in a smaller size. It would appear that vanity and cupidity are driving our use of synthetic materials.
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Need I say anything about the size of bonuses paid to CEOs, especially in financial businesses?
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From the least to the greatest, all are greedy for gain; prophets and priests alike, all practice deceit.
Jeremiah 6:12 NIV
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