Tastes Better Than it Looks

I never ate SOS until I got into the army. I understand that some outfits served it so often that everybody grew to dislike it, but our guys only served it occasionally and, as far as I know, we all liked it. The official name for it was "creamed chipped beef on toast" but I've always had it made from hamburger. Maybe they used to chip the beef before hamburger was invented. I don't know how you'd go about chipping beef anyway. I've never seen a machine that does it, so they probably did it manually with knives. Soon after I met my hypothetical wife, we found a recipe for the stuff. She used to make it often, but lately, not so much. She says it's not difficult to make, so I don't know why we seldom have it anymore. The secret is that you have to drain the hamburger on paper towels after you fry it, unless it's pretty lean to start with.

I believe the first time I heard of John Hus was when my daughter wrote a paper about Czechoslovakia for school. I did some further research years later and ultimately wrote a song about him. Now that I think about it, there was some mention of Hus in that Martin Luther movie, but I didn't know the full story until decades later.

I was baptized at the age of nine, not because Methodists don't do infant baptism, but because I never went to any kind of church until I was nine. My parents sent me to Elsdon because I had been asking them questions that they couldn't answer, and Elsdon was the only church in the neighborhood that wasn't Catholic. They must have been impressed with the answers I brought home because, shortly thereafter, they and my little sister started going to church with me, and we were all baptized together. In those days, Methodists baptized by sprinkling, not immersion and, as far as I know, they still do.

I read about that Roman Trinity dispute in "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" by Edward Gibbon. I never thought about it much before that, it was just something that everybody said, even  if they didn't quite understand it. It's hard to believe that people used to kill each other over stuff like that, but they certainly did. I think that Gibbon said it best: "Man, who imperfectly understands his own nature, presumes to exactly define the nature of the deity that created him."