You knew it was cold when the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago kept its polar bear inside! And when every state in the union dipped below 32 degrees on Tuesday (including Hawaii). Suddenly Americans have added two meteorological words to their vocabulary, “polar vortex.” Like a spinning top atop our planet is a band of high altitude winds that circle the Artic.

Scientists think they’ve found the secret to our good and bad habits. It has to do with the pleasure-sensing chemical dopamine, coursing up and down our body’s internal highways. Dopamine “conditions the brain to want that reward again and again—reinforcing the connection each time—especially when it gets the right cue from your environment” (South Bend Tribune 1-4-11). For example, you enjoy munching on chips (no doubt a healthful kind). You usually do it before supper, while you’re watching the evening news.

(Spoiler alert: I’m against it.) It was practically a feeding frenzy this week, as Americans lined up across the nation to purchase their $2 Mega Millions lottery tickets before the Tuesday night drawing. One news report from the Nevada-California state line indicated that Nevadans were streaming across the border to purchase the lottery tickets in California (a Mega Millions participating state), with a waiting line so long that it stretched from the California store back across the border into Nevada.

Twin holiday tragedies this past weekend have preoccupied both the news media and the nation. We’ve all seen the pictures. The Metro-North Railroad train, its locomotive and seven cars upended, splayed and flung beyond the tracks and nearly into the Harlem River. Four dead, 60 injured.  Just as tragic was the fiery crash of  actor Paul Walker, star of the “Fast and Furious” movie franchise. A security camera captured the Porsche Carrera GT’s explosion after slamming into a tree and concrete pole, killing both the actor and his friend and driver Roger Rodas.

Nathaniel Philbrick, in Mayflower, his acclaimed history of the Pilgrims, recounts how William Bradford, the intrepid leader of that courageous band of Puritans, years later described “that first morning in America.” Recalling with wonder their landing on the salty, windswept shores of Cape Cod Bay on November 15, 1620, Bradford wrote: “But here I cannot stay and make a pause and stand half amazed at this poor people’s present condition. . . .

Can you believe it? Earth may boast (according to wiki.answers.com) 23,259,475,120 dialects, but researchers have discovered in a new study that when it comes to confusion, we all speak the same language! No kidding. It turns out that our English word, “Huh?”, is about as universal as it gets. The so-called “Huh-hunters” (linguistic anthropologists) headed to remote villages on five continents and examined ten very different languages.

The scenes have been all too familiar—and tragically so. The photographs could have come out of the monster earthquake tsunami that leveled swaths of the east coast of Japan in 2011. Or the pictures could have been taken in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy that obliterated entire communities on our own eastern seaboard in 2012. But now for the third year in a row another eastern coastline has been reduced to broken match sticks in the furious wake of Typhoon Haiyan.

You could certainly draw that conclusion, given the findings released this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. Astronomers with data from NASA have for the first time calculated that our Milky Way galaxy “is teeming with billions of planets that are about the size of Earth, [that] orbit stars just like our sun, and exist in the Goldilocks zone—not too hot and not too cold for life” (South Bend Tribune 11-5-13).

For ninety days this summer this campus and congregation claimed God’s promise, “I will do a new thing. . . .

I’ve been amazed at the quality and depth of the questions that have been texted in each evening for Q & A with David Asscherick this week. True, there were the frivolous and trite  ones—“How fast does David run a 5K?” “Can you have a class for your sound effects?” “What is your tattoo of?” etc.