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.

How about a break from the inane kabuki theater that Washington politics has turned out to be? Besides, by the time you read this there is hope that some sort of political compromise will have been reached to deal decisively and realistically with the government shut down and debt ceiling limit. Consider instead this report from the engineering company Boston Dynamics.

They say the young Pakistani sixteen year old, Malala Yousafzai, has an inside track to the Nobel Peace Prize this year. We’ll know in a few days. If she wins this much heralded prize, she will become the youngest recipient in its illustrious history. And why not?

It’s not like we haven’t been here before. Those who can remember back to 1995 recall that the government was shut down in November that year by our perennial two-party squabble. The reason I remember is because I happened to be in Honolulu for a prayer conference, when the morning news announced that the U.S. government had entered a financial stoppage of sorts. But the world didn’t end.

Our Tokyo 13 mission completed, yesterday Karen and I were two thirds of the way up the world’s tallest tower, the Tokyo Skytree. At 634 meters (2080 feet) the Skytree is only exceeded by Mt Fuji in the hazy distance. The highest point visitors are permitted to ascend (by an elevator that travels at 10 meters/second) is 451.2 meters (1480 feet).

There is a crisis quietly unfolding far away from the headlines of Syria’s chemical attacks, North Korea’s erratic leadership, California’s raging wild fires, and this nation’s economic unraveling. The crisis concerns the land of my birth, the Land of the Rising Sun, Japan. While the international news media are focused on hot spots elsewhere, the sobering reality is that Japan has simply been unable to recover from the devastating earthquake and tsunami on March 11, 2011.