Thanks International Readers

The number of people taking a look at the blog has gone down in recent weeks, a trend that corresponds with the Coronavirus. With more people at home under "shelter in place" orders, I guess that people are watching more movies or binge-watching TV shows.

That's happened here at our home too.

I'm trying to watch as many episodes of Father Brown before it leaves Netflix, presumably to migrate to BritBox, on March 31. I watch about one of those forty-six-minute episodes at night before I sanitize our kitchen, bathrooms, door handles, drawers, faucets, and other frequently handled items, then get ready for bed.

On a slower pace, I watch episodes of Cadfael starring Derek Jacobi and Walking Through History with Sir Anthony Robinson (Tony Robinson).

When not running to get groceries or other errands or tending to her ninety-year-old mother, my wife is currently bingeing on Call the Midwife.

Clearly, we're Anglophiles.

Our daughter isn't when it comes to movies or TV shows, but is in the realm of music. Her bingeing show of choice is Golden Girls.

But for all the likely sheltering-in-place happening around the world, the blog still sees readers log on from different parts (and some unknown parts) of the world. I love that!

This is where Google tells me the most recent 1000 visitors are from, as of 12:56 AM, Thursday morning, March 26.

So, hello, everyone!

Welcome to the blog and please come back often.

I'm from the United States and have been to Germany and Canada. I would love to visit the other countries listed here someday and perhaps, when Coronavirus is conquered, as it will be, probably sometime in 2021, meet some who come here often. (By the way, I've also been to England but not the rest of the United Kingdom, Denmark, and France. But people from those countries aren't known to be among the most recent one-thousand visitors.)

Wherever you live, God bless you and protect you and your families from this pandemic.

May you experience His love and support in these times.

And may all who have already suffered the loss of loved ones the world over take refuge in the compassionate, forgiving, life-giving God revealed in the crucified and risen Jesus Christ.

Thanks for coming here, readers!

Hello, Italy!

This report from Blogger shows me where in the world readers of the blog are reading it.

Over the years, there's been a relatively solid readership from Russia. But as you can see from this report, captured a few moments, readers from there haven't even dented the top ten today.

Italy has been well-represented here lately. Why? I have no idea.

Czechia (the Czech Republic) has also been well-represented in the past day or so.

Besides the United States, where I live, I've only been to three of the other countries in the top ten: Germany, Canada, and France. (My visits to the latter two were brief. I stopped for a short time on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls and I've had a couple of layovers at Orly in Paris, neither visit affording a very good sample of the countries in question.) They're places I hope to revisit one day. There are lots of places I hope to visit.

Anyway, thanks to all visit and read the blog.

Hello, Russia...and the rest of the world

It's a funny thing. Millions don't read this blog.

But whenever I check to see where people live who do read it--and, by the way, I can only check on readers' countries, nothing about specific readers or the towns in which they live--the overwhelming majority are from the United States.

Russian readership is usually in a distant second place. Why that is, I have no idea.

But this week presents an even bigger mystery. Look at this screen shot of the most recent report on the countries from which people are reading this blog.

Hello, Russia...and hello too, to the USA, as well as to the Netherlands, Germany, Latvia, the Falklands (or the Malvinas, if you're an Argentinian), Luxembourg, China, the United Kingdom, and Ireland! It mystifies me how the biggest chunk of readers this week is from Russia. But you're welcome to read away!

To all who read the blog, next time you stop by, leave a comment. Tell me how you found the blog and what drew you here. I would be interested in knowing those tidbits.

Я буду видеть Вас здесь в ближайшее время .

[Blogger Mark Daniels is pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]

Johann Gambolputty...and Long German Words

A pastoral colleague of mine posted this on Facebook today.

It made me laugh and reminded me of this old Monty Python bit.



Both send-ups are funny because they ring true. How would you like to be an elementary student in Germany studying for next week's spelling test?

Message in a bottle, yeah

A German woman, Marianne Winkler, on holiday at the German North Sea island of Amrum, has found a message in a bottle.

It came from a marine biologist in Plymouth, England who set that bottle and over a thousand more of them into the North Sea sometime between 1904 and 1906. The researcher, George Parker Bidder, was trying to learn more about "deep sea currents."

Bidder's reward for those who broke the bottles, retrieved the messages they contained, and notified him at the Marine Biological Association of the retrievals, was a shilling. The shilling basically went away in the UK in 1968, then definitively in 1971. But the association was true to Bidder's promise. According to the smithsonianmag.com, "the association found an old one for sale online" and forwarded it to Winkler.

Read the whole thing.