The Brunch Table

This morning, I talked to my stepbrother on the phone; he told me that “they” found an exploded North Korean missile in the Alaskan outback. I went to my window, but I didn’t hear the screams of any fighter jets taking off from L.A. Air Force Base (I bet they stencil that name in pink cursive script). So I calmly turned to Google to settle things.

By the way, if I understand right, any missile that exceeds the specs for “short-range” becomes a “long-range missile”–there’s no “medium” class. Iraq, for example, has long-range missiles that can travel all of 20 miles farther than the short-range limit. (That’s not far enough to reach Israel, in case anybody was wondering.) Anyway, back to the North Korean menace:

“The only test of a longer range missile occurred in August 1998, when the three-stage Taepo Dong 1 (TD-1) missile was launched in an attempt to place a small satellite in orbit. This effort was not successful due to a failure of the missile’s third stage…the missile cannot be considered operational without further testing…Even if the TD-1 were successfully tested in the future, it would have limited capability and could at best deliver a small payload as far as Alaska or Hawaii…Moreover, North Korea has not flight tested a reentry heat shield for a long-range missile, and would need to do so before it could use it to deliver a warhead.”

Of course, the Alaskan press takes this a bit more seriously.

The English word Hell, referring to the Christian afterlife of eternal punishment, comes from the Old English Hel, a borrowed Norse word for the land of the dead.

The Greek originals of the Christian Testaments use Hades, the land of the dead in Greek mythology, where their Old English descendants use Hel. The very earliest Greek Christian writings, though, use the Hebrew word Gehenna instead.

In the original Hebrew of the Torah, the Christian Old Testament’s references to Gehenna are mostly replaced by a different Hebrew word, sheol. Although Jewish oral tradition has various theories on the rewards and punishments awaiting souls in the afterlife, the Torah itself doesn’t offer much of an explanation on the matter.

Sheol is not an explicitly religious term. In ancient Judea, when a city garbage dump grew too large, the authorities would have it burned down to make room for more. The resulting fiery mess was called a sheol. In ancient Judean literature, a sheol, a mountain of fire, was used as a poetic metaphor for earthly death.

Gehenna, or Ge-Hinnom, was the name of ancient Jerusalem’s municipal landfill.

Source: Wikipedia