Linda G. Hill’s One Liner Wednesday.


Although less than ten years old the boys were old enough to read a children’s weekly their parents purchased for them. One of the stories reported that chickens evolved from dinosaurs (or perhaps it was the other way around).
Regardless, the boys decided they would find a dinosaur and become famous like the guy who wrote that story. One of the boys thought that a slight rise in the normally flat Indiana farm land was enough of a warrant to proclaim that ground as the perfect burial ground for a dinosaur, but their father told them they could not dig there while the corn was growing.
So they shifted their plans and began a dig behind the chicken house going about a foot down before reaching the water table and finding – ! ! ! – BONES! – though admittedly only chicken bones, but bones nonetheless worth showing to their mother. After giving her the bones they went back outside imagining now that they were Flash Gordons saving Dale Ardens from Ming the Merciless and their mother put the bones in the garbage.
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Denise offers the prompt word “warrant” to be used in this week’s Six Sentence Stories.
This is a true story. I was the boy who wanted to dig up the corn field. My brother liked digging up stuff as well. Only many, many decades later did I realize that this chicken-dinosaur nonsense was indeed nonsense.
If you haven’t yet realized that it’s nonsense, but are still going on snipe hunts or are wondering how reindeer could possibly fly, have a look at Michael Earl Riemer’s Reindeer Don’t Fly: Exploring the Evidence-Lacking Realm of Evolutionary Philosophy.
If you don’t know who Flash, Dale, Ming, Princess Aura and Dr. Zarkov are, you are either missing out or you are very fortunate.
Matthew 18:2-6 KJV – 2 And Jesus called a little child unto him, and set him in the midst of them,
3 And said, Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.
4 Whosoever therefore shall humble himself as this little child, the same is greatest in the kingdom of heaven.
5 And whoso shall receive one such little child in my name receiveth me.
6 But whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.

Dale offers the prompt “community” for this week’s Cosmic Photo Challenge.
There is a park across the street from us which serves many housing communities in the area. Some of the trees there are beautiful even when they are not blooming.
The area used to be part of Heritage USA a Christian theme park which fell apart some decades ago. Although we knew nothing about that park when we moved here many of the people we now know were associated with it in some way.
The blossoms on a particular kind of tree in the park symbolize the area for me. I think the tree is a kind of magnolia, but I don’t know. I just walk through the park.




One of the nice things about limericks is that they’re short. By the time you realize that the one you’re reading was not worth reading, it’s too late.
Below are four more limericks with two interspersed photos.
I am grateful to Esther Chilton for her weekly prompts, Laughing Along With A Limerick.
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There once was a witch and a snitch.
We weren’t sure though which one was the witch.
Perhaps neither. Who knows?
Although either one shows:
got a snitch, want a witch, then just switch.
Prompt Word “snitch”, May 5, 2025

There’s a beep in my brain going peep.
It’s annoying. I’d better count sheep.
With that beep in my head
there’s now sheep in my bed.
It’s no wonder I can’t get to sleep.
Prompt Word “beep”, April 28, 2025
There once was a knave in a cave,
in a cave since it rhymes well with knave.
The word ‘knave’ I must use,
not the word I would choose,
but like Dave in the cave I’ll be brave.
Prompt Word “knave”, April 21, 2026

How I grouse and I grumble! It’s grim.
As the cat’s getting fatter, I’m slim.
When I’m small, I’d be tall.
Should I rise, then I’d fall.
When it’s bright, the light’s suddenly dim.
Prompt Word “grim”, April 7, 2025
A pretty door! It’s just a wall
that’s painted pretty. That is all.
But should you climb the steps and fall,
recall: I told you so.
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Also linked to Dan Antion’s Thursday Doors Writing Challenge. I selected Resa’s door which is really a pretty painted wall.


We are back in South Carolina. As I was putting mulch around some bushes I noticed the fossils in a bit of mudrock we brought back from a property we once owned on Green Bay in Wisconsin. That rock (along with the mulch) are shown in the photo above.
Ten years ago when I found the stone I tried to identify the fossils1 in it using a field guide. The field guide said that they were between 300 to 400 million years old (assuming I remember what it said correctly and matched what was in the book with what was in my hand).
I was impressed, but I was also disappointed that they weren’t 600 million years old, or older. I kept looking for more of those stones.
Over the past ten years I smartened up. I realized that given erosion rates all of the stuff I had in my hand would have eroded away2 long before it reached anywhere near 300 million years.
Today, I can tell you how old that stone is to within about 10 years, but you need to understand something about fossils first.
Fossils don’t form from dead stuff falling to the ground and being slowly buried over millennia. Dead stuff falling to the ground quickly decays. They have to die rapidly with a heavy weight pressing them down so they do not decompose. That occurs when heavy sediment carried by flooding waters provides the weight to press the plants and animals to the ground.
You would apply the same process to a leaf you wanted to preserve. You would pick it fresh and place it between paper with many books piled on top of it. When it dried out, you would have a nice, flat leaf, not a curled up piece of decaying leaf mold.
So, when in the history of humanity did such a flooding occur so that you could expect to find fossils all over the world? Think. The only time such flooding occurred on a global scale was the flood recorded in Genesis 6-9 and echoed through many legends.
That allows me to date the stone that I now have in my garden.
Given the biblical chronology that Henry B. Smith, Jr from Associates for Biblical Research provided3, the flood could be dated to 3298 BC. Now there is some wiggle-room here due to when in the year births occurred in the Genesis 5 and 11 chronologies, but I suspect that wiggle-room could be reduced to plus or minus 10 years.
You might object that what we read in Genesis are just stories. They are stories, but the important question is this: Are they TRUE stories? If you do not want to believe they are true, to the extent that archeologists can align those stories with historical events to that extent you might want to seriously reconsider any disbelief. This is why Christian archeologists try to align those dates with historical evidence so that the only ignorance that remains is willful ignorance.
So, how old is that stone?
It is, given today’s year of 2025 and subtracting one year since there is no 0 year in the Gregorian calendar, 3298 + 2025 – 1 = 5322 years old plus or minus those 10 years.
That is far less than the 300,000,000 years which the field guide wanted me to believe, but a far more reasonable number given erosion rates. That stone had already suffered much erosion damage when I found it.
And it is continuing to be eroded away every year I leave it unprotected in my garden, but it is not rare. Fossils like the one I have are all over the world because sedimentation layers are all over the world as one would expect given a catastrophic, global flooding less than 5,400 years ago.

You want to flee? Where will you go?
The wedding feast will happen though.
You have been chosen. Don’t say no.
Just answer. You’ve been called.
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Ronovan Hester offers the inspiration “flight” for this week’s Ovi Poetry Challenge. Also posted on Poet’s Corner.
Matthew 22:14 KJV – For many are called, but few are chosen.

The devil tempted George to curse the idiots around him, to just lay into them with full force. However, George couldn’t see what good that would do, so – since the devil reminded him of them – he blessed them instead.
Annoyed by George’s disobedience – not that George owed the devil any obedience whatsoever – the devil then reminded him that his silly blessings amounted to a hill of beans on the commodity market of prayers, because everyone knew those idiots weren’t going to change no matter how nice he was to them.
Don’t forget, George, that it is up to them to decide if they want to change, not you which was the only observation the devil made that George could agree with.
Regardless, those blessings were a win-win-win for George.
If nothing happened, as the devil predicted, those George blessed would remain good examples to point out of bad behavior, but if something unexpected happened – something admittedly miraculous in their cases – they would become an awesome fount of blessings for everyone around them and yet no matter what they did by blessing them George at least did what he was told to do: bless, and curse not.
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Denise offers the prompt “market” for this week’s Six Sentence Story.

Dale offers the prompt “in the evening light” for this week’s Cosmic Photo Challenge.
A couple weeks ago I went to the ocean to watch the full moon rise. The first photo shows one of the pictures I took.
The second photo was taken some years ago in Tiberias watching the moon over the Sea of Galilee. The third was back at the Atlantic Ocean.
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