Abraham, Lot, Sarah, Hagar, Abraham, Ishmael, Isaac, and Peterson

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More than a few of you are almost certainly familiar with the regular weekly followHIM Podcast that is hosted by Hank Smith and John Bytheway.  (It’s very popular.)  Unfortunately, their long run of excellent episodes hit something of a rough patch with the last two installments:

Genesis 18-23 — Part 1 : Dr. Daniel C. Peterson (51 minutes)

How do the ancient Near Eastern traditions regarding hospitality affect the story of Lot and Sodom and Gomorrah? Dr. Daniel Peterson explains how Abraham, Lot, and Sarah learn to trust the Lord and wrangle some of the more difficult passages regarding Sodom and Gomorrah.

Genesis 18-23 — Part 2 : Dr. Daniel C. Peterson (one hour and nine minutes)

Dr. Peterson continues to discuss Genesis 18-23 and the impossible choices Sarah, Hagar, Abraham, Ishmael, and Isaac make as they heed the Lord’s commands,  wrestle with identifiable human emotions, and reap considerable blessings

But there’s every reason to be confident that Brothers Smith and Bytheway will soon return to their successful, winning ways.

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With friends, we drove down on Friday to St. George.  Soon after arriving, the four of us met with another couple of friends who now live in Washington, just outside of St. George, for dinner at Benja’s Thai Garden.  I’m pleased to be able to report that excellent Thai food is available in the St. George area.  (I’m not sure that this would be a requirement for me to consider moving to an area, but it would certainly be a plus.  It may well be that other good Thai places exist in and around St. George — there is apparently also a local Benja Thai and Sushi, for one thing — but Benja’s Thai Garden is definitely worth a return.  (Can I get a commission on such endorsements as this?). For dinner tonight, by the way, we ate at Don Pedro’s here in St. George.  I had an excellent shredded beef chimichanga.

Why do I mention these experiences with food?  Partially because I hope they’ll be helpful to one or two of my readers:  It really irritates these obsessive critics, driving them to post silly things and to send me anonymous insults.  And, clearly, such enterprises give them enormous satisfaction.  But I don’t do it merely to help these poor unfortunates.  I also hope that others among my readers might occasionally find my restaurant endorsements of value.  Of course, tastes vary and, as the standard stock prospectus boilerplate likes to say, past performance does not predict future results.  Moreover, candidly, it’s occasionally seemed that my recommendation immediately triggers the firing of the restaurant’s chef and his replacement by a dishonorably discharged Marine Corps food service specialist.

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Back in September of 2019, I posted this little item:

My wife and I are both serious Anglophiles.  In fact, we occasionally talk about trying to spend some relatively substantial post-retirement time — when I finally do retire — in England or somewhere else in the United Kingdom.  I’ve always been partial to academic centers (or centres) such as Oxford and Cambridge, or perhaps up in Scotland at St. Andrews.  (I’ve had week-long stays in each of the latter two.)

But I’ll admit that I’m having second thoughts.

We also like to relax late at night, to distract ourselves from the day’s frenetic activity, with the occasional good British mystery video.  However, you can learn a lot from such shows that you might rather not have known.

There are, it’s now clear, some very, very dangerous places in Great Britain.  We’ve already been acutely aware, for example, from reading and seeing stories about Agatha Christie’s Miss Jane Marple that Miss Marple’s home village of St. Mary Mead — located in Downshire, which is later known as Radfordshire, which, according to the BBC, is now called Middleshire — is an extraordinarily risky place to live.  So we’ve checked St. Mary Mead off the list of possible places to stay.

And then there’s the county of Midsomer, which straddles part of Berkshire and the northern portion of Hampshire.  We’ve watched many episodes of the ITV series Midsomer Murders, and we’ve become quite familiar with the bizarre crimes that frequently occur in the Midsomer county town of Causton and in the picturesque villages that surround it.  Pretty, yes.  But pretty deadly, too.  No thanks.

Finally, though, what about Oxford itself?

We’ve long been fans of the Inspector Morse detective series, and so, accordingly, we’ve also watched many episodes of its spin-offs, Lewis and Endeavour.  Thus, we’ve been appalled to learn how violent and dangerous Oxford and Oxfordshire are.  In particular, it’s now clear that the faculty of the University of Oxford are an especially adulterous, fraudulent, and homicidal lot.

So that’s not to say that we won’t someday go and spend two or three months in Britain.  But we care about survival and self-preservation, too.  So, right now, I’m considering safer, more serene places.  Like Baghdad or Kabul.  Or somewhere in the neighborhood of the University of Chicago, say, or near the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.  Places where we stand at least some chance of not being poisoned or ending up at the bottom of a medieval well.

Well, we went to watch the new Kenneth Branagh film Death on the Nile today.  And it has led me to stipulate and to announce that our next tour to Egypt will definitely not be using the Karnak as our Nile cruise boat this next November.  Even with Hercule Poirot on board, far too high a proportion of its passengers end up being murdered.  So I’m adding it to my list — including Midsomer, St. Mary Mead, and Oxford — of things and places  to avoid.

Posted from St. George, Utah