A few weeks ago the famed English astro-physicist, Stephen Hawking, certainly grabbed the headlines! On his new TV show, “Into the Universe with Stephen Hawking,” this brilliant scientist issued a warning that earth inhabitants ought to avoid making contact with intelligent aliens in the universe. You may recall that there have been numerous scientific efforts—such as the SETI project (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence)—that have attempted to communicate with intelligent life forms elsewhere in our universe.

Perhaps the game was perfect after all. How can I let the hottest story in sports a week ago get by without at least a comment? If you’re not a baseball aficionado, let me set the story up first.

The USA Today headlines hanging on my hotel doorknob would catch anybody’s eye.

He lost seven teeth! I don’t know about you, but it was traumatic enough as a kid losing one tooth at a time. But seven? Though he’s really not to blame. Because when Duncan Keith saw the puck coming, there simply wasn’t enough time to turn his head. And so his mouth took the full brunt of that speeding ice hockey puck Sunday evening. Owww! And sure enough, when Keith put his hand up to his mouth, he spat out seven of his favorite teeth. Gone! Why then was Duncan Keith all smiles afterwards?

Have you read the latest survey on teenagers? Two weeks ago George Barna, the Christian demographer, released a new national survey of 602 teenagers, in which they were asked to describe what they think their lives will be like in ten years. And their responses are intriguing.

Look, I’m not an oil company executive or engineer, OK? But three weeks into the on-going BP oil well blowout fiasco (or crisis, if you prefer) in the Gulf of Mexico, does it trouble you at all that nobody seems to know for sure what we’re supposed to be doing next? With over 4 million gallons of crude oil already spewed into the Gulf since the well blowout on April 20, what if the leak (at a rate federal officials now estimate to be 210,000 gallons/day) can’t be capped?

So how much is your mother worth? Not that she was anybody’s mother, the subject in Picasso’s painting “Nu au Plateau de Sculpteur.” Turns out she was the renown painter’s mistress—which hardly makes her an appropriate theme for Mother’s Day. And yet the buzz throughout the art world this week has been all about the auction price this oil canvas of Picasso’s actually fetched on Tuesday night.

What do golden orb spiders have to do with you 600 Andrews graduates this weekend? This past fall a shining piece of yellow-gold textile (11 ft x 4 ft) went on display in the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Woven from the silk of more than a million wild female golden orb spiders, this rare cloth is a four year collaboration of seventy people searching telephone poles in Madagascar to collect the spiders (which bite), with another twelve workers gingerly extracting the silk filament from each of the arachnids (about 80 feet per spider).

It isn’t pretty when Mother Nature blows her stack! For over a week now the economy of our little planet has been held hostage by an angry volcano fuming above the frigid plains of Iceland. They call her Eyjafjallajoekull (meaning “island mountain glacier”), and the good news is she hasn’t put on a display like this since 1821. The bad news is that back then she threw her tantrums for thirteen long months!

Here’s an Earth Day idea for you. Paul Hawkens in his “green” book, Blessed Unrest, tells of an old rabbinical teaching that if we hear that the world is ending and the Messiah is coming, we must first plant a tree and then go and determine if the story is true or not. For Seventh-day Adventists, who champion God’s creation memorial and who celebrate the return of the Creator, planting a tree isn’t such a bad idea, is it?