The 4Star-9Rattan Blog

Saturday Reading-An Extraordinary Human Being!                                                                                                       Robbin Island, South Africa: A freedom fighter's prison                                                           – Orange County Register -Prisoner No.46664                                           Nelson Mandela was a South African anti-apartheid revolutionary who became the nation's first black president, serving from 1994 to 1999. Born...

Sunday Special-   An Imperturbable & Masterful Hero! June 24, 1982. Over the Indian Ocean.British Airways Flight 009 a Boeing 747 carrying  263 people was cruising peacefully at 37,000 feet when the night sky began behaving strangely.First came St. Elmo's fire an eerie blue glow crackling across the cockpit  windows like electricity dancing on glass.Then shimmering streaks appeared along the wings, as if the aircraft were trailing sparks through darkness. Captain Eric Moody and his crew had never seen anything like it. Beautiful. Unsettling. Wrong.Then came the engine failure alarm.Engine four had failed CGI illustration of  British Airways’ SPEED BIRD 9  descending without power, surrounded by St. Elmo’s Fire illustration of British Airways’ SPEED BIRD 9  descending without power, surrounded by St. Elmo’s Fire.  Before they could process that, engine two quit.Then engine one.Then engine three. In less than 90 seconds, all four engines on Brit...

Sunday Special-Marry had a Lamb   Mary Sawyer Tyler : 1806-1889 "Mary had a little lamb" wasn't just a nursery rhyme it was a real 9-year-old girl who saved a dying lamb, and that lamb's wool eventually helped save a piece of American history. You sang it as a child. Maybe you've sung it to your own children: "Mary had a little lamb, little lamb, little lamb..." But did you know Mary was real? Her name was Mary Sawyer, and this is the true story behind one of the  most famous poems in the English language. March 1815. Sterling, Massachusetts. A cold morning with frost still clinging  to the barn walls.Mary was born New York Public Library“Birth-place of Mary Sawyer and the little lamb. Sterling, Mass.” Nine-year-old Mary Sawyer was helping her father with the morning chores when they discovered one  of their ewes had given birth to twin lambs overnight.One lamb was healthy, nursing contentedly. The  other lay motionless in the straw rejected by its mothe...

  Saturday Reading! Norway, a country in Europe... If you ever visit, you’ll often see this scene: There’s a restaurant. A woman comes to the cash counter and says, “5 coffees, 1 suspended.” (“Suspended” means for someone in need.) She pays for five coffees but takes only four cups. Some time later... Another man comes and says, “4 lunches, 2 suspended!” He pays for four lunches but takes only two lunch packets. Then another person arrives, ordering, “10 coffees, 6 suspended!!” He pays for ten but takes only four coffees. Some time later... An old man in tattered clothes comes to the counter and asks, “Any suspended coffee?” The girl at the counter says, “Yes!!” and hands him a cup of hot coffee. A little later, a bearded man enters and asks, “Any suspended lunch?” The person at the counter gives him a parcel of hot food and a bottle of water. And this cycle continues... One group pays extra, and another group takes food without paying, all day long. This means helpi...