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Before Google Maps or navigation systems, there were shepherds and there were stars.

In the Old World, shepherds knew the sky and the terrain like a well-worn map.   They were quite different from farmers of the time, who had the means to at least own land or to buy livestock.  Shepherds survived on meager wages earned by watching the flocks of others.  Even so, they were well-travelled and moved from pasture to pasture, hillside to hillside.  If there ever was a change in the sky, or a happening on the horizon, shepherds often would have been the first to see it, and likely the first to tell of it.

There has always been great poetry in the way Heavenly Father sent word of the Savior’s birth, dispatching a beautiful chorus of angels to proclaim it to lowly shepherds.  There was also a message in this method.  By breaking the news on the hillsides above Bethlehem where only shepherds dwelt, those shepherds would be the ones to have the privilege of announcing to many that the greatest shepherd of all had been born into the world.

Chemotherpay at Duke Cancer Clinic

This article in today’s Salt Lake City Deseret News is so vital and informational to those who have or who are or who will confront Cancer in their families, that True North takes the opportunity to excerpt it here and thanks writer Lois M. Collins for her great piece and for spreading the news of the work of Massachusetts firm,  Merrimack Pharmaceuticals, for their innovatoins in Cancer research.

FIRM TAKES ENGINEERING APPROACH TO TREATING CANCER

A Massachusetts company with strong Utah ties is approaching the finding and fixing of cancerous tumors as an engineering challenge. It believes most solid tumors are triggered by one or more of six distinct systemic signaling-mechanism breakdowns and it’s developing treatments to repair them.

Merrimack Pharmaceuticals of Cambridge, Mass., on Thursday announced a $530 million exclusive worldwide licensing agreement with French pharmaceutical giant sanofi-aventis for the development and co-commercialization of a drug targeting the first of those

signaling breakdowns.

It used to be so simple.

If you wanted to know what happened in the world today, NBC, CBS or ABC could sum it all up once a day,  in less than 30 minutes.

Tuning in to the Evening News was a national past time.

My parents even timed our T.V. dinners around it.   Today, Americans seldom watch the network news.

It’s practically irrelevant.  Sad to say,  because I know Brian William spends a fortune on his ties…

When I raced my bicycle around the neighborhood in the 70’s porching newspapers  in Utah, it never occurred to me, not even for a moment, that anything inside of the paper might be just one man’s opinion instead of the absolute truth.