Here’s what I learned during too much of a Saturday afternoon spent on social media

It’s now late Saturday afternoon. The temperature with the wind chill factored in here in Thompson is -33°C. A little colder than normal for the time of the year, but not particularly remarkable as winter goes in Northern Manitoba. Still, cold enough to stay indoors after being out for a biweekly breakfast at 9 a.m. with nine guys this morning talking situational leadership and various real-case scenarios of how Manitoba Public Insurance (MPI) determines accident fault, while sampling Keith Derksen’s latest  habanero-laced breakfast dish. Keith has more ways of using haberneros for breakfast than anyone else I know.

That was the morning.

Here’s what I learned this afternoon on Facebook, Google News, Twitter and LinkedIn:

• CNN reported French law enforcement officers have been told to erase their social media presence and to carry their weapons at all times after “terror sleeper cells activated over the last 24 hours in France.” Read more about it here at: http://edition.cnn.com/2015/01/10/europe/charlie-hebdo-paris-shooting/.
• BBC News science reporter Jonathan Webb says “a pulsar, one of deep space’s spinning ‘lighthouses,’ has faded from view because a warp in space-time tilted its beams away from Earth. The tiny, heavy pulsar is locked in a fiercely tight orbit with another star. The gravity between them is so extreme that it is thought to emit waves and to bend space – making the pulsar wobble … The pulsar’s axis drifts by two degrees every year, and according to Dr. [Joeri] van Leeuwen’s calculations it should swing back around to shine on Earth again by about 2170.” Read more about it here at: http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-30752288;
• Michael Voris, host of ChurchMilitantTV’s The Vortex, reported Jan, 6 they learned recently that Father Robert Barron, asked at a dinner about his “personal opinion” that we can “have a reasonable hope that all are men are saved,” when pressed by his host for more precise math, estimated that about 98 per cent of people fall into that saved category and will make it into heaven when they die. Voris, needless to say, is not a fan of Father Barron, thinking him too much an expositor of what he regularly and derisively calls the “Church of Nice.” You can watch it on YouTube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ok95AWTuMfs&feature=youtu.be&list=UUX17igkZ9JhU64JoTBVSWeQ;
• I also came across a Dec. 18, 2014 tweet by So Bad So Good from Sydney, Australia, which describes itself as hunting the “best & worst pop culture on the web, so you don’t have to,” of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard measuring “Thetans (alien spirits) in a tomato plant.” This delightful black and white photo pops up on various Twitter accounts and elsewhere on the Internet from time to time. You can view it here on the So Good So Bad tweet at: https://twitter.com/sbadsgood/status/545601980820123648/photo/1.

It was an article by Alan Larcombe about Hubbard using radiation to grow giant tomato plants 16 feet high, with an average of 15 trusses and 45 tomatoes on each truss in the greenhouse of his English estate, Saint Hill Manor at Saint Hill Green, near East Grinstead in West Sussex, that was published in an August 1959 edition of the East Grinstead Courier that soon prompted a feature in the Dec. 18, 1959 issue of Garden News, with the headline, “PLANTS DO WORRY AND FEEL PAIN.”  Hubbard was memorably photographed looking compassionately at a tomato jabbed by probes attached to an E-meter – a picture that eventually found its way into Newsweek.

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