By DANNY MINTON One of my favorite TV shows is NCIS. One of the reasons I like it is that the characters come across as real people with real-life problems and struggles. In one episode, Agent Torres is obsessed throughout the show on trying to fix a pair of sunglasses that he accidentally broke. Throughout the show, no one understands
Read moreBy DANNY MINTON My day had been going great when I drove into the bank drive-in. There were six lanes open with two cars in each. As I drove up, one car went on through, so I pulled behind the single car. Fifteen minutes later I was still sitting in the same spot. All the other lanes had fulfilled the
Read moreBy JIM NICHOLS One of the things humans just seem to do naturally is to compare our behavior to that of animals. We are good at this anthropomorphic trick—saying, “Look how that animal is acting just like a human.” Kevin McGowan, an ornithologist at Cornell University, suggests this is backward reasoning. “Thinking of animals like people is misleading and unhelpful
Read moreBy DANNY MINTON You stare at the line with pen in hand. To sign it means freedom, yet at the same time, it brings thoughts of memories that once were a part of a happier life. Thoughts of flowers, fancy clothes, smiles, and looking toward a bright future seem like faded pictures of a life that once was so alive
Read moreBy JIM NICHOLS During Jesus’ ministry there were several instances of healing; scripture deals with some of them briefly, but others are described with some detail. One in particular has spoken to me over the years. In Mark 9 there is a crowd around Jesus and a father approaches him and asks for aid for his son. He describes his
Read moreBy JIM NICHOLS Some of scripture is, frankly, difficult to understand. We have to wrestle with writers who composed in a vastly different time of the world and in different cultures. Clearly, in many cases, they are addressing issues that we do not know about and therefore we do not have much context for the words. We want to take
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By DANNY MINTON There is a passage in Tom Clancy’s book “Red Storm Rising” where two Russians are discussing war. One of the men, who was not really for going to war, makes the following statement: “There are always doubts, Comrade Minister. Fighting a war is not an exercise in mathematics. We deal with people, not numbers. Numbers have their
Read moreBy WALT PFEIFER Children in the village would taunt her yelling, “There goes monkey lady- monkey lady- monkey lady!” as she hobbled along the streets of Corozol Town. I never did know her name, so for story purposes I’ll call her by the most popular female name in Belize, which is Meera. Corozol Town is the northernmost city in Belize
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By DANNY MINTON Growing up, the kids in our neighborhood and probably most neighborhoods in the fifties played “Cowboys and Indians.” The Indians were always the bad guys. This picture is what we saw when we went to the movies or read most of the western comic books. That was the mindset most boys grew up around. Then, as an
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Spirit Of Abilene 