Strange and Curious Legal Oddities

Twenty-one years ago ...


2 Peter 3                                           March 2
to be honest and clear                      9603.02


The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. He is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance. 9


I'm writing this in a movie theatre [and the ticket stub I've got from that day says I saw Mr. Holland's Opus] , and my spirits -- along with my health -- are picking up. We all need someone in the right circumstances (or even the wrong ones) to remind us that we re important. I have come from H&R Block [where I was working as a tax preparer that year] ; so many people I've had said they got the wrong type of refund that the other preparers have worked overtime on mine. [Why didn't they just ask ME to do it, I ask more than two decades later?] Thank you, Lord, for guiding me to people who remind me that it's all worth it. Let the encouragers not be forgotten, O my God.


Sometimes these journal entries and what I remember through them are humbling.


Coming off Ash Wednesday the beginning of Lent last night -- in my household, I seem to be the only one the ashes were imposed (formally called the Imposition of Ashes, when the pastor traces the cross on your forehead and says "you are dust, and unto dust you shall return" going back to Genesis 3) on whom they did not stick on. It's not uncommon to see the afterimage of them on your forehead for a day or two. But I digress. This morning before I got to work's been an adventure too. Indeed, from shortly after midnight to just after two this morning I couldn't get back to sleep. I got my Bible reading done along with most of the dishes because the kids said I complain when THEY do them -- and Sarah and Jeffrey only do them when Martha or I call on them to, they don't offer though they say they do. Some of my done dishes got put back to do again, and that's rather hair-pulling.

I felt the dig. And as far as I know there's no law requiring that dishes be washed, rinsed, dried, and put away by just one person almost all the time, though I'm sure if New York attorney Nathan Belofsky wanted to he could find some. Instead, in his The Book of Strange and Curious Legal Oddities (ISBN 9780399535956) we're treated to the likes of spherical goldfish bowls being illegal in Rome, Italy since 2004, an Illinois law that requires written warning to the purchaser of a pet reptile not to nuzzle or kiss it, a West Virginia law that makes displaying or possessing a red or black flag criminal, and there are historical examples as well from the Code of Hammurabi and the Lex Frisionum of Charlemagne that cover much of the same things laws do now ... but some are so silly that you know someone somewhere did something that required a law passed against it.


Last month at Longfellow (actually, throughout Minot Public Schools) we had for our family Reading At Home the Beverly Cleary book The Mouse and the Motorcycle (ISBN 978059068731), the 1965 story of Keith staying with his family at a California inn and meeting Ralph, the adventurous young mouse living in the floorboards. It's a ... unique coming of age story for both of them, and Martha remarked she read this growing up so it was easy for her and I to get through. Sarah and Jeffrey, not so much. It's proof that age-appropriate reading doesn't work for everyone of that age, but you have to filter through a lot of dross and dreck the more you read before something clicks. I tried to like Karen Hancock's debut novel Arena (ISBN 0764226312) but I didn't like it as much as I thought I would.


To wit, twenty-something Callie Hayes and her best friend find themselves transported to an alien world as a result of what they're told was a psychology experiment. They and whoever else finds themselves trapped there are given instructions to find the Exit; the story's meant to be a Christian allegory (what one reviewer calls Pilgrim's Progress meeting The Matrix) but the elements get dropped on you the reader -- and several of the character travelers, I think -- so quickly that you're expected to take it for granted. Callie's journey and her trust in Elhanu (the God-figure of the story) to evade the fire curtain that gradually turns people into Trogs serving Cephalus (the Satan-figure); it got me to thinking of Mormonism, Scientology, and a trifle of the Charismatic Church and hitting frappe. I made it through, but parts of it really do drag with too much sufferance.


I'd just like my own books to drag a little less.

David