I Call Waist Gun!

Family

One of our favourite manly traditions is the calling of the front seat.  Men and boys all over the English-speaking world can be found racing out of doors shouting, “Shotgun!”  At our house, though, the mom and dad always take up the left seat and shotgun positions, leaving only the middle and back row positions open, but alas! those seats have no awesome nickname or protocol for calling them.

So we have adapted the shotgun protocol to the exigencies of our mini-van.  In honour of World War II bomber crews, we have christened our two middle row positions “waist gun” and our three rear positions, “tail gun.”  Our boys and girl may daily be found sprinting out the front door shouting, “waist gun!” “tail gun!” and that’s just the way we like it.

Twitter and Me, Me, Me

Observations

We have been given the gift of clarity — clarity about the problem with “Social Media” — and of all the things that could have given us this gift, it was a church sign. The church sign read, “Thankful for all those who gave their lives serving God and Country,” and while we wholeheartedly agree with the sentiment, it occurs to us that the sentence reads just like a tweet and thus, we worry that the sign-writer is overly influenced by Twitter.  O.k., fine…

Maybe we are annoyed because this is an incomplete sentence.  Maybe we extend some grace because we note that the guy is limited by the number of those pesky letters that will fit on the sign (and worried about the ones that will fall out).

Then, with a modicum of thought, we notice that we can shorten the sentence.  Our sign would read, “Thank you to all those who gave their lives serving God and Country.” And here is where we see our problem.  We have realized that the greater issue here is that the first version of the sentence (“Thankful for…”) has the wrong subject!  The focus in that sentence is the author and his feelings, instead of where it should be, on those who gave their lives.