Musings of a Snickerdoodle

I have never reviewed a game before, but this one caught my attention as some of my brothers and sisters love to pun and I wanted to see if it would make a good Christmas present for one or all of them.  I wasn't disappointed. The object of the game is to collect 10 pairs of pun prompt cards.  You win prompt cards by coming up with the best (or sometimes the lamest) puns.  The Prompter draws two prompt cards reading the prompts and the players have 90 seconds to write own a single pun that combines the prompt word topics and then they give the paper on which their punning creation is written to the prompter who chooses which he likes best.  The winner of the round becomes the new prompter and the game continues until someone has ten pairs of prompt cards.  There are a few other aspects of the game (like a pre-pun-prompt round and also prizes one can set up for the end of the game) that I have not described but the main fun was trying to come up with puns to...

I often sense a tendency in myself to take having an English translation of the Old and New Testaments for granted.  But, as Harry Freedman demonstrates in his book, The Murderous History of Bible Translations: Power, Conflict, and the Quest for Meaning, I shouldn't take it for granted and should appreciate all the more the effort and sacrifice that went in to getting the written Word of God into a book that ordinary people could read.  In this book Freedman does an excellent job at writing, he grasps and keeps one's attention, and it flows nicely.  He takes you through history, beginning with the translation of the Old Testament and then including the New in the focus as well.   Translating God's Word into the common vernacular of any people was often very tumultuous and controversial, and we see this down the passage of time that the author examines, and through many different translators who often took many risks to make the translation.  Thou...