Ask Chaka

One-sentence book reviews

2011-07-25T19:19:00.003-05:00

For some of my recent reading:

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: I know this wasn't your intention, but now I really feel like a loser for how little my garden is producing.

The Aeneid (trans. Sarah Ruden): This translation is clear, memorable, and moving; it made me wish that Vergil had finished the poem, just so I could read more.

The Phantom Tollbooth (in progress): Why did it take me so long to discover this book?

The Trumpeter of Krakow: I'm not actually reading this one--my wife is. But this book smells like a happy childhood.

Prime Obsession: Bernhard Riemann and the Greatest Unsolved Problem in Mathematics (in progress): I feel the ceiling of what is possible for me to learn about math rushing precipitously toward my head.

The Potter Challenge

2011-07-15T18:51:00.002-05:00

So, you're put off by the Harry Potter hype. You had to live through "the end of HP" back when the seventh book came out, and now the media is filled with the same recycled stories. The breathless devotion of the fans is annoying. You just don't get what all the fuss is about, and you're not planning on reading the books yourself any time soon.

Well, I was once just as put off as you. And I'm now one of those breathless fans. I have a hard time formulating how much I love these books. I turn into a cliche factory: they're about good and evil, about love conquering all, about growing up, about learning how to die.

Yeah, I wouldn't want to read them on that description.

But I really think you should read these books. Not so you can wring some enjoyment out of the mediocre movies or catch esoteric references. It will improve your life to have this narrative walking around with you.

So as an incentive for you to read the series, I'm going to put my own reading time on the line. There are plenty of supposedly "great" books that I don't see what the fuss is about. I've written these authors off; I'll never read them. Unless you read Harry Potter.

Here's what I propose. If you pledge to read a certain number of pages in the HP series, I'll match those pages with something that you love from my Never Gonna Read It list.

Feel free to choose works by any of these authors:
Ayn Rand
David Foster Wallace
James Joyce
Kurt Vonnegut
Karl Barth (or pick your favorite systematic theologian)
Sylvia Plath (I don't even know what she wrote. Just her name annoys me.)
Virginia Woolf (I'm not sure I know the difference between her and Sylvia Plath. Also, her name has too many o's.)
Kate Chopin (let's just make a category called "Depressing Lady Books")
Stieg Larsson
Leo Tolstoy
Stephanie Meyer
William Faulkner
Thomas Hardy
Marshall McLuhan
Any French Novelist (Proust, Balzac, Hugo, Flaubert, Zola)
Any of the Brontes
Suggest something you know I'll hate!

Suggested page pledges:

Sorcerer's Stone: 309
Chamber of Secrets: 341 (650 cumulative)
Prisoner of Azkaban: 435 (1085 cumulative--you should go at least this far)
Goblet of Fire: 734 (1819 cumulative--you really should go at least this far)
Order of the Phoenix: 870 (2689 cumulative)
Half-Blood Prince: 672 (3361 cumulative)
Deathly Hallows: 759 (4120 cumulative)

This is a genuine offer. I honestly loathe the thought of reading any books by these authors. But I'm willing to make the sacrifice. Let's make a deal.

Paul among the People

2011-06-13T18:31:00.000-05:00

Paul among the People is a good book. You should read it.

The author, Sarah Ruden, is a classical scholar and translator of the Aeneid. Based on the snippets of her translation scattered throughout the book, I'd say she's a very good translator. (Maybe she'll be able to get me past Book I of the Aeneid.) Her renderings are striking, immediate. The danger in translating classic texts is that the unnatural English of the translation will lay like a haze over the terrain of the original's ideas. The haze masks the landscape, the places where it rises to meet us and where it falls away abruptly. Ruden is clear, and the disorientation you feel when reading her translations is the result of seeing the extremes of the landscape: These ancient people were just like us, except when they were exactly unlike us.

In Paul among the People, Ruden lets us hear Paul in the context of "his own time." This is what New Testament scholarship is supposed to do, but Ruden does it more vividly than any commentary I've read. What kind of behavior were the early Christians and their polytheistic neighbors engaged in? What was Paul warning them to avoid? (The short answer: A lot of sexual violence and exploitation.)

Ruden's approach is driven by the way Paul is viewed in modern society (outside the evangelical sphere, it should be added): as a hater of fun, women, and homosexuals, a supporter of oppression and slavery. Ruden's project is to debunk this view, topic by topic.

Reading this book from within evangelicaldom is an interesting experience. Ruden shows that Paul was on the right side of history, but she doesn't have the highest opinion of his personality. I don't think evangelicals perceive Paul as having a personality, at least, not personality flaws. (Is this a consequence of inerrancy? Was Paul's crankiness covered in verbal plenary inspiration?) Some of the hardest passages are punted away by saying, "Paul didn't write that letter." This was a let-down for me, but fair enough: Ruden's project isn't to tell the church what its Scriptures teach; she wants to present what Paul, the ancient thinker, actually taught. As an outsider to New Testament scholarship, it makes sense for Ruden to defer to the highest-credentialed scholars in the field (i.e., her colleagues at Harvard and Yale) on the limits of the Pauline corpus.

This is a unique, helpful, and riveting book. (I read it in only a couple of sittings.) The designers and typesetters also deserve credit for an excellent finished product.

Lord and Master

2011-05-05T14:15:00.003-05:00

Pets aren't supposed to be called pets anymore, apparently. It makes sense when you think about it. There's already something odd about referring to a dog and his "master," isn't there? Something 1950s, patriarchal, racist. The concept of master recedes further and further from our minds and everyday experience, until it relates solely to two opposite images: the Christian God (Lord = Master) and a fat Southern slave owner. A mental continent is sinking under the waves, with these two promontories the last pieces of ground above water. Is there anything valuable in seeing that they are connected under the surface?

Unfaithfulness

2011-05-05T13:37:00.002-05:00

A certain stock scene has cropped up in a couple of recent books I've read. I feel like I should reflect on the meaning of the scene in it's various incarnations, but the closest I'll get is probably making a note of them here:

Work	Faithful spouse	Unfaithful spouse	Result
2666	Amalfitano	Lola	AIDS
The Moon and Sixpence	Dirk	Blanche	suicide
Todo sobre mi madre	Manuela	Lola[!]	AIDS
Hosea	Gomer	Hosea	reconciliation

Who Owns the Slave?

2011-02-23T12:00:00.001-06:00

*This is a satire. Don't take it too seriously, mkay?*

Just a quick note about "slave labor." The real question for those who would understand the nature of slavery is the question of ownership. Say there is a particular slave working in the fields, or at the factory, or in the house on Main Street. Who owns that slave's labor?

The assumption behind the free labor movement is that the worker owns his labor. The biblical understanding is that the one who owns the worker owns the labor (1 Tim. 6:2). This is not the same as saying that the slave owner is a great guy. No, the slave owners are frequently evil, and they abuse their position of ownership (Exod. 1:11).

Owner/slave disputes often fall into a false good guy/bad guy dichotomy, and it betrays a false understanding of the antithesis. In the Bible the owners are often the bad guys. But that does not mean they are not the owners of their slaves. Bad guys can own things. And the commandment does not say, "Thou shalt not steal, except from bad guys."

So there is absolutely nothing wrong with slaves deciding that conditions on the job are horrendous, and asking the owner to remedy the situation. And there is no problem with the slaves using whatever persuasive ability they have to make his case. Say they are asking for an increase in rations, or for safer working conditions. That is fully legitimate as well. What is not legitimate is for them to refuse to provide the owner with their labor as though they are the owners of it. To refuse to work until your demands are met is a claim of ownership, which in this case is a false claim.

This sin (and it is a sin) is in evidence when slaves abandon their duties entirely by running away. This deprives owners of both the slave's labor and the slave himself, and also negatively affects all the remaining slaves, who must shoulder the extra burden left by the runaway.

In other words, the proposal to emancipate slaves and pay them for their labor is nothing but extortion, and Christians should do everything in their power to have nothing to do with it.

Homemade Naan

2011-02-16T21:02:00.002-06:00

Indian food is the best food on the planet. I've tried my hand at several different Indian dishes over the years (some of my favorites are Aloo Gobi, Baingan Bharta, and for special occasions, Rogan Josh). But I've never tried to make the naan before. I've always been content to serve the dishes with basmati rice. But you only live once, right? Go big or go home.

There are several naan recipes out there. I wanted to start simple, so I ignored the ones that called for yeast. This recipe seemed a good base. I diverted from it a bit, so I'll spell out my own work below.

Ingredients:

1.5 cups flour (plus more flour for dusting)
1/2 tsp salt
2 tsp sugar
1/2 cup soymilk (this is just an accommodation to my wife's lactose intolerance--cow's milk is what's typically called for)
2 tbs vegetable oil
olive oil (or butter for those who can handle lactose)

Directions:

Combine dry ingredients in a bowl or food processor. Mix in wet ingredients. Dump dough onto floured surface and knead (with floured hands) until dough is smooth, about 8-10 minutes.

Dump dough into a greased bowl and turn the ball so that the whole ball is coated with oil. Cover with a towel and put in a warm spot for an hour.

(I'm not sure why you have to let the dough sit for an hour, since there's no yeast involved, but I decided not to skip this step. Since we keep the heat on low in my house, there aren't many warm spots. I turned the oven on low for a couple minutes, turned it off, and stuck in the bowl.)

Divide dough into quarters. On a floured surface, roll out each ball into a very flat tear-shaped loaf with a floured rolling pin. In the meantime, position your cooking surface (a baking stone, upside-down cast iron skillet, upside-down baking sheet) a few inches away from your oven's broiler and turn the oven on to the broil setting.

Pop the loaves onto the hot cooking surface. They will cook very quickly. Turn the loaves over when the top side has browned and blistered. When the other side is finished, pull them out and brush them with oil or butter.

I honestly didn't think these would turn out very well, but I was pleasantly surprised. We quickly devoured the four loaves, so I'm tripling the recipe next time. Wish me luck.

Sunflower Satay

2011-02-13T20:07:00.002-06:00

In my last post, I talked about making "tahini" from sunflower seeds (instead of sesame seeds). I suppose it was really more of a sunflower butter--just roasted sunflowers and oil ground into a paste.

I had some leftovers from the recipe, and used it up by adding a little salt and sugar, then spreading it on celery like one would peanut butter. This was a great snack, and there was something about the taste that reminded me of Asian food (East Asia, that is).

I thought that this sunflower paste might be a workable substitute for an Asian peanut sauce. (We've been avoiding peanuts in our household to prevent our son's getting allergies.) I found a base recipe for a peanut satay recipe at ThaiKitchen.com and started modifying. We like the results; here's the recipe:

Ingredients:

1 inch ginger, minced
4 cloves garlic, smashed and minced
1 onion, sliced
1 can coconut milk
1 cup sunflower sauce (recipe follows)
4 cups broccoli, cut into florets
1 red bell pepper, cut into strips
2 limes, quartered
1 bunch cilantro, chopped

Directions:

Heat a couple tablespoons of oil in a wok or deep pot over high heat. Stir fry the ginger and garlic for about a minute, then add the sliced onion. After frying the onion for a few minutes, add the sunflower sauce and coconut milk. Run some water into the coconut milk can and swirl it around to avoid wasting any of that coconut goodness and add it to the pot. Stir to combine.

When the pot begins to boil, add the broccoli and red pepper, reduce heat, and cover. Cook for about 10 minutes or until the broccoli is tender. Remove from heat and add chopped cilantro. Squeeze the juice of the limes over the sauce and mix in. Serve over jasmine rice.

Sunflower sauce:

1/2 cup of roasted sunflower seeds
1/4 cup of vegetable oil
1/4 cup of fish sauce and/or soy sauce
2 tsp chili paste (I used some homemade paste that I made by just roasting some peppers and processing with garlic and cilantro)
2 tbs brown sugar
Curry spices to taste (cumin, coriander, tumeric)
1/2 cup hot water

Directions:

Combine all ingredients except the hot water in a food processor. With the motor running add some hot water to thin out the sauce (you probably won't need the full 1/2 cup). Process until smooth.

Falafel Meal from Scratch

2011-02-02T19:45:00.007-06:00

Thank God for Sultan's Market. Without them, I would not have known how awesome falafel is. I've been on a quest for the last several years to make as great a meal at home as you can get at Sultan's Market. I'm still a long ways away from that goal, but I've made progress.

If there's one key to that progress, it's this: from scratch is better.

I started by buying packaged hummus, tahini paste, and falafel mix. I thought I was showing mad skillz by making my own tahini sauce from the paste (following the recipe on the side of the bottle).

I took the next step toward "from scratch" by making my own falafel, following this recipe. I used our food processor to make the falafel, without which it would have been much more of a pain. Shallow frying in olive oil doesn't produce quite the same deep-fried deliciousness that Sultan's falafel has. This recipe is quite tasty, though.

The results were good enough to make me want to try again soon. However, I had used up the last of my canned chick peas and the last of my tahini paste. We ran out of hummus long before we ran out of pita. The price tag for these three products (chick peas, tahini paste, and hummus) is higher than I would like: about $1.00 for a can of chick peas, $5.00 for tahini paste, $2.00 for a tiny tub of hummus. I figured I could get better flavor and better value by cutting out a few middle men and moving closer to "scratch."

A 2-lb bag of dried chick peas was only $2.00. For the price of two cans of chick peas (28 oz), I ended up with about 80 oz of cooked chick peas--plenty of raw material for falafel and hummus, with plenty left over. I followed these helpful directions for preparing the dried chick peas.

For some reason, I conflated sesame seeds (the raw material from which tahini is made) with sunflower seeds. So I bought bulk unroasted sunflower seeds for $2.00 a pound. I intended to follow this recipe, but at the roasting stage, I suddenly realized I'd bought the wrong kind of seeds. Fortunately, someone has made this substitution before. My $2.00 investment in sunflower seeds produced the equivalent of $8.00 worth of tahini paste. The food processor did all the work.

The cooked chick peas and tahini paste go together into the homemade hummus recipe. (I followed the second, faster method.) This makes about 2 lbs of hummus for about $2.00 in raw materials. That beats out even the famous Costco hummus, and blows out of the water the teeny 10 oz containers you usually see in the grocery store.

The tahini paste goes into the tahini sauce that I mixed with the Jerusalem salad.

All in all, this is a pretty cheap way to eat. I figure I can easily get 8 meals out of the following ingredients:

$1.00 for chick peas (1 lb dried)
$1.00 for pita (8 loaves)
$1.00 for tahini paste (1/2 lb sunflower seeds + some vegetable oil)
$3.00 for fresh produce(cucumber, tomato, onion, garlic, parsley, lemons)
$1.00 for all the other incidental ingredients (a bit of oil, spices, etc)

That's less than $1.00 per meal.

John and June, George and Tammy

2011-01-04T15:43:00.003-06:00

One of my Christmas gifts:

I'm enjoying it. I'm also ready for the George Jones biopic starring Jim Carrey (Mrs. Chaka's idea).

The Sci-Fi/Fantasy Franchise Ring

2010-12-15T22:18:00.004-06:00

Mrs. Chaka and I started talking tonight about science-fiction/fantasy franchise crossovers. You know, like how since Star Wars took place a long time ago in a galaxy far away, and time travel happens in every third Star Trek movie, you could have a movie where the Enterprise joins in the attack on the Death Star. (This crossover is Mrs. Chaka's idea. I had not fathomed that such a thing was possible.)

That reminded me that I had heard of a Star Trek/X-Men crossover (apparently what I was thinking of was this comic book). If they did a movie crossover, Patrick Stewart would get to negotiate between the Federation and the X-Men as both Captain Picard and Professor Xavier. That scene makes the whole project worth doing.

And from that point, we tried to connect the cardinal science-fiction and fantasy franchises to each other. Jim Broadbent connects Harry Potter and Narnia; Christopher Lee connects Star Wars to Lord of the Rings . . .

It took some brain-racking (and eventually some help from IMDb), but this is what we came up with:There are other, more marginal franchises we could tack on: Batman, X-Men, Terminator, Pirates of the Caribbean. But they would destroy the symmetry of the above.

Incidentally, several of these franchises to Kingdom of Heaven. I'll let you flesh out the connections in the comments.

Idea for competitive exercise

2010-12-14T13:29:00.002-06:00

For two teams of 2 or more players

Equipment: 2 jump ropes, room to run (a 100-meter course would work well)

Object: Be the first team to reach 1000 jumps

Rules: Each team has a jumper and a runner. The jumpers begin doing (single-under) jumps. If either jumper misses, it's a fault, and the runners start sprinting.

Let's say the two teams are called "Legends" and "Leaders". Assuming it was the Legends jumper who faulted, then if the Legends runner loses the sprint, the Legends have to do an extra 100 jumps. If, on the other hand, the Legends runner wins, his team suffers no penalty.

While the runners are sprinting, the jumpers may rest, change jumpers, or continue to jump. If they miss a jump during the sprint, it's not considered a fault, and there are no game effects.

First team to hit 1000 jumps (plus any penalties they've incurred) wins.

If someone can do 1000 single-under jumps without missing, feel free to substitute double-unders.

Computer viruses and the OT

2010-12-10T11:10:00.000-06:00

Fascinating story of the computer virus that ground Iran’s nuclear program down to a halt. An excerpt:

“Originally, all eyes turned toward Israel’s intelligence agencies. Engineers examining the worm found “clues” that hinted at Israel’s involvement. In one case they found the word “Myrtus” embedded in the code and argued that it was a reference to Esther, the biblical figure who saved the ancient Jewish state from the Persians. But computer experts say "Myrtus" is more likely a common reference to “My RTUS,” or remote terminal units.”

Myrtus is the genus of the myrtle plant, and Hadassah means “myrtle”. (Which makes me wonder why we don’t just call her Myrtle.)

If I were writing a virus to save the Jews, I’d call it CyRus. (Cyber Rescue Virus)

Phrases from Homer to Incorporate into Daily Conversation

2010-12-01T11:24:00.005-06:00

nothing loath (=quickly)
Now tell me, and tell me true . . .
. . . and his armor rang rattling around him as he fell (This one will have to go into the file with "I threw down my enemy and smote his ruin on the mountainside"--someday I will bust this out. Someday. And it will be awesome.)
vouchsafe X to Y
Tell me, O Muse . . .
and while he was thus in two minds . . .
and they put their hands on the good things before them
the blessed boon of sleep
the child of Morning, rosy-fingered Dawn

Reviewing the Iliad

2010-11-23T08:08:00.002-06:00

I’ve been listening to the Librivox recording of the Iliad during my household chores. I’m really enjoying it, despite the unevenness of the readers (Pete Darby, yay! Hugh Mac, your talents lie elsewhere).

I can’t help but compare it with that other great work of the ancient world, the one with which I am much more familiar. You know, the Hebrew Bible. There’s really very little in common between the two, except for one episode: 2 Samuel 2:12-32 feels reminiscent of the Iliad, what with the fighting, the spoiling, the speeches in the midst of battle.

But anyone who thinks of “the Old Testament God,” or of the Old Testament itself, as bloodthirsty . . . well, one wonders if they’ve examined the competition.

The Iliad, like the Bible, also uses a lot of stock phrases: So-and-so kills such-and-such, “and his armor rang rattling around him as he fell heavily to the ground.” There are maybe a half dozen of these phrases that Homer cycles through to describe somebody biting the dust (actually, “he bit the dust” is used now and then in the text—yes, there was a time when this wasn’t a cliché). I enjoy this stable of phrases, but some people apparently find them irritating. (Scroll down to the review entitled “One of the most important works of literature ever - and a damned good read too” for some unintentional humor.)

Last night the idea for a game based on the Iliad came to me in a dream. I still haven't perfected my game based on the wars of Alexander the Great's successors, but the Iliad one is simpler . . . I know what I'll be working on over Thanksgiving.

2010-11-12T17:33:00.002-06:00

For some reason, this kind of argument (X has an ungodly/pagan origin and is thus unacceptable for Christians) drives me insane. See also, Al Mohler on yoga, Frank Viola on "the institutional church." (As an aside, Viola claims that he doesn't reject ideas just because they're pagan. Well, that's the impression I got from reading Pagan Christianity. In fact, I'd call that list of "straw men" an accurate summary of the book's theses.)

Now that I've asserted but not argued anything, I'll drift on to other points, if you don't mind.

My parents and their home church rejected Halloween because of its pagan origins. I heard some great, lurid stories about the origins of jack-o-lanterns and trick or treat.

I call the stories "great" with only partial irony. Now they sound to me like folk etymologies, but I was interested in them at the time. I was in a phase when I wanted to find out the etymon, the true origin, of everything—words, names, symbols, customs.

There is a perennial attraction to the quest for the etymon, a feeling that once you find it, you’ve grasped true meaning. I’m still very interested in etymons, but more because they often make for a good story than because they’re the key to ultimate meaning. The kind of meaning I find more relevant is how the word (name, custom) fits into the larger system. In anthropological terms, I’ve moved from James George Frazer to Claude Levi-Strauss. In linguistic terms, from Jakob Grimm to Ferdinand de Saussure.

Take yoga. The Christian anti-yogaists are dismayed that Christians would put their body in a pose dedicated to a Hindu god. The woman at the health club teaching a yoga class might not be a Hindu. She might not even know anything about the pose's link to a deity. But if you go back far enough, the argument goes, the etymon lies in pagan worship. So the yoga pose *means* devotion to another god. Taking on the pose is like speaking praise of that god, which a Christian should not do.
If the etymon of the yoga pose truly lies in pagan worship, that would be an interesting story. I have my doubts whether the story is true. If I were in a real argument on the topic, I'd like to see some non-polemical scholarship on the question. But would such an etymology imply that the pose *means* pagan worship?
I was thinking that it could mean such a thing in a sacramental view of the world. Sacramentalism does emphasize that we're not disembodied minds, that what we do with our bodies has spiritual impact. But to call this position sacramental would be an insult to sacramentalism. Even in sacramentalism, the body cannot mean what the person as a whole does not mean. You could bless the public swimming pool on a hot day in July, but that doesn't mean all the swimmers become baptized.

Hence, I submit to you that to believe that yoga constitutes pagan worship isn't even sacramental. It's purely magical. It's a pagan idea if there ever was one. (Look, the argument just folded in on itself!)

At some point I stopped despising earlier Christians for the pagan customs they retained/redeemed—and started admiring them for their audacity. (This is one of the things that made Chesterton my homeboy, finding that he had this attitude.) Maybe it had something to do with learning about all the good things in my life that had “bad” backgrounds—Christmas trees, Easter eggs, eeny meeny miny moe, the European settlement of America, most of the names of God . . .

If you want to reject everything with a tainted origin, what will you be left with? Utopia, I suppose. Nowhere to stand.

Medieval Mentality

2010-10-28T08:59:00.002-05:00

From a review of Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin:

Perhaps we need a new word, one that is broader than the current definition of genocide and means, simply, “mass murder carried out for political reasons.”

My first thought on reading this sentence was, "Isn't all war 'mass murder carried out for political reasons'?" If the international community is to allow war but criminalize some mass murders, what makes the criminal ones criminal?

My second thought (and now you're going to laugh) is that the difference between war and criminal war is . . . chivalry.

Jesus and Violence

2010-09-30T11:31:00.002-05:00

Heh:

In an interview several years ago for Relevant Magazine, Mark Driscoll (well known pastor of Mars Hill in Seattle) said,

“In Revelation, Jesus is a prize-fighter with a tattoo down His leg, a sword in His hand and the commitment to make someone bleed. That is the guy I can worship. I cannot worship the hippie, diaper, halo Christ because I cannot worship a guy I can beat up.” (You can find the original interview here).
I frankly have trouble understanding how a follower of Jesus could find himself unable to worship a guy he could “beat up” when he already crucified him.

Now I'm going to have "The Hammer" in my head all day. HT: Matt Tebbe

"What a blessing it will be to attend a banquet in the Kingdom of God!"

2010-09-01T09:16:00.002-05:00

Is it sacrilegious to say that the wine at last Sunday's Eucharist was particularly excellent?

I don't think so. The Eucharist is many things simultaneously. Among those things, it is a foretaste of the Messiah's banquet. And we know that the Messiah serves the good stuff.

George Clooney's Secret

2010-08-12T12:11:00.003-05:00

He's really Peter Sagal.

Wasting Time and Money

2010-05-26T11:35:00.005-05:00

Mrs. Chaka and I have made the dangerous discovery of two hours of Star Trek (TOS and TNG) being broadcast each night. Last night's episodes (The Changeling and Emergence) were somehow archetypal; each embraced all the joys and absurdities of its respective series.

It's always amusing to see how dated the future is. The Changeling made frequent reference to data being stored on "tapes". Then again, in Emergence, Dr. Crusher had a pretty cool blue iPad.

Oh, and I had a Double Down a week ago. Definitely not worth the price of admission.

Spite Food

2010-05-18T15:28:00.003-05:00

I read (on the Wait Wait Don't Tell Me blog) that KFC introduced the Double Down because of complaints that there wasn't enough chicken in their chicken sandwich. If true, it places the Double Down in that delightful genre, Spite Food.

Potato chips are the best-known example of Spite Food. To quote the Wikipedia article:

"The original potato chip recipe was created by George Crum, the son of an African American father and Native American mother, in Saratoga Springs, New York on August 24, 1853.^{[citation needed]} Fed up with a customer who continued to send his fried potatoes back complaining that they were too thick and soggy, Crum decided to slice the potatoes so thin that they could not be eaten with a fork. As they could not be fried normally in a pan, he decided to stir-fry the potato slices. Against Crum's expectation, the guest was ecstatic about the new chips."

I'm still hoping to eat one of those Double Downs; haven't got to it yet.

Endless Rain

2010-05-13T15:36:00.003-05:00

Blogging has suffered, what with the moving house, the many calls to AT&T trying to convince them to take my money, the computer dying, etc. But I just discovered this and had to blog it:

YouTube Repeat!

Insert the word "repeat" into a YouTube URL before the ".com" and the video will loop endlessly. I'm using it to listen to this over and over. Helps me focus on the giant pile of work.

Wading through Stacks

2010-04-21T11:59:00.004-05:00

Adam Graber directed me to this New York Times article about the consequences of digital (and hence, mashable) texts. The whole thing is interesting in its entirety, but what drew my attention was this quote:

“Online research enables scholars to power-search for nuggets of information that might support their theses, saving them the time of wading through stacks of material that might prove marginal but that might have also prompted them to reconsider or refine their original thinking.”

This strikes me as a very real problem. It’s really easy to be a bad scholar. The task of refining your thinking and mastering your subject requires time, focus, and discipline—three things we have in short supply. For all their benefits, digital texts make it easier to veil poor thinking and inadequate mastery of the subject. The power of machine searching delivers a trade-off: a vastly greater pool of data with a vastly more superficial grasp of it. The efficiency of search obsoletes that horribly inefficient part of research, “wading through stacks of material.”

(Perhaps I should qualify my pronouncements: I obviously speak for myself, not for all of academia. My academic credentials amount to a master’s degree and a single journal article*. The temptations and follies I describe are my own.)

A few weeks later, Adam noted that Oxford University Press is trying to address these concerns. In brief, they’re producing “a straightforward, hyperlinked collection of professionally-produced, peer-reviewed bibliographies in different subject areas—sort of a giant, interactive syllabus put together by OUP and teams of scholars in different disciplines.”

The Oxford Bibliographies will no doubt have efficient search capabilities, quick retrieval of the desired documents, and a large pool of data in one place. But by foregrounding the texts that scholars have judged most important, they encourage you to wade through material that should be known, even (especially?) if it’s irrelevant or destructive to your thesis.

As you can tell, I like this image of “wading through stacks.” It sounds like a mixed metaphor, but it makes me think of walking the key shelves in the library stacks. The mass of (potentially) relevant titles thicken the air in that spot, slowing your pace to a shuffle. You look up and down the shelf, pulling out a volume, browsing, letting your mind quicken as your feet slow.

Interestingly, the library in which I picture myself wading like this is the University of Edinburgh library, where I spent a mere six months (as opposed to the four years at the University of Minnesota and three years at Trinity University). I suppose it’s related to the fact that British syllabi encourage more wading. Instead of telling you about the five required books and when you’re supposed to read each chapter, British syllabi give you a list of forty books and tell you to have fun. Read around, master the subject, and at the end of term, write a big old essay about the subject (which will be 100% of your grade for the course).

In my experience, this system results in lower grades but better habits.

---------------------------------------------

*Forthcoming :-)

"It made me feel significant and connected to ancient traditions"

2010-04-19T13:28:00.003-05:00

A little satire on Philippe the Postmodern Evangelist:

"Read it again, more slowly this time. I want to hear the poetic forms and imagine myself in the context of the ancient tradition."

That cuts close, that does.

HT: Lingamish

KFC's Double Down

2010-04-13T20:05:00.002-05:00

This makes me feel so conflicted about being an American. Disgusted? To a point. Proud of my country? Absolutely.

RefTagger

2010-04-13T15:13:00.005-05:00

A while back I posted a massive regular expression that finds Bible cross references. Something like that must be behind Logos's RefTagger, which I'm trying to get working on this blog. This is a test:

Gen 1:14
Gen 3:14
Matt 1:1
Phlm 3
Philemon 3
Rev 45:2

David Lloyd

2010-04-07T22:06:00.002-05:00

Christopher Lloyd, comedy writer, writes about his dad, David Lloyd, comedy writer.

I had no idea that the man responsible for the immortal "Chuckles the Clown" worked on Frasier. No wonder that show was so funny.

The “Is that contestant on American Idol a Christian Scorecard”

2010-04-06T06:50:00.001-05:00

It's a privilege to bring you a guest post from Jon Acuff, Christian satirist extraordinaire, author of Stuff Christians Like. Like a lot of Christians, I'm sure you're interested in supporting that worship pastor or soloist who's trying to make it big in the secular music world. Well, you're in luck. Mr. Acuff has written up a scorecard to help you add up the clues and hints to pinpoint the secret Christian:

26. After they make the final 12 they thank Jesus = + 2 points (Now we're talking. Everyone thanks God in big moments, but few people will drop the "J" word.)

To add up your score with over a 130 other ideas on this scorecard, visit stuffchristianslike.net.

Holy Saturday

2010-04-03T09:54:00.004-05:00

Descended

Jesus played the man
He stared into the abyss
And for my sake, fell.

Amelia's Prenup

2010-04-01T09:48:00.002-05:00

There's something telling in the horrible mangling of "medieval."

I'd be a better me if I hated the iPad

2010-03-31T22:25:00.003-05:00

David Pogue's twofold review of the iPad assumes the Eloi/Morlock distinction (explained here). Pogue doesn't use those words, but he writes two separate, widely diverging reviews, one for "techies" (=Morlocks) and one for everybody else (=Eloi).

What I find hilarious about this is how much I want the first review to be relevant to me . . . but I'm seduced by the second. I don't actually fit Pogue's description of a techie, and the Eloi review awakened within me deep longing for the device.

The key to understanding this paradox (hypocrisy?) is in Pogue's summary: "It’s not nearly as good for creating stuff. On the other hand, it’s infinitely more convenient for consuming it — books, music, video, photos, Web, e-mail and so on."

There you have it, folks. I want to believe that I'm creative, but I'm just a consumer. I will now take a deep breath and remind myself: Buying things can't make you creative.

I mentioned a while back Stevenf's prediction that New World computing belongs to the Eloi. The iPad is just the beginning. In some ways, this makes sense. Computational machines were always somewhat of a strange device for mass consumption. They can do so much more than home users need them to do. Winnowing things down to what people really use seems inevitable.

Small Town Opinions

2010-03-30T17:07:00.003-05:00

For no particular reason, I find myself vigorously disagreeing with what people say about small towns.

It began when Adam Graber sent me a link to this review. I objected to several of the reviewer's notions: that small town culture is in decline (like any living culture, it's changing, not dying), that "when you want to write an epic, you set it in a city" (not sure what we're talking about--what's an example of a contemporary epic?), and that people in the Chicago suburbs call their metropolis "downtown," not "Chicago" or "the city" (here in Carol Stream, I mostly hear "the city").

None of these notions are at the heart of Crispin's review, but I'm always one to latch on to the incidental. If I come out with my small-town epic in 15 years, I'll have her to thank for getting me going. Here are some of the elements that an epic in a contemporary small town would have:

The rivalry with the small town down the road
One major employer that dominates the economy
Everyone goes to the (single) high school's sporting events
People go off to the military
The community college
Walmart
The town you go to with the stores you don't have
The yearly town festival (parade, flea market, some wacky theme)
The radio station
Chautauqua/band shell
Layers of immigrant communities--anglo-saxons, scandinavians/germans, a few greek/jewish/asian merchants, latino laborers, african/asian refugees
Methamphetamine
You always know someone in the paper's obits, wedding announcements, and/or police blotter

What would you add to my list?

Marginal Member Blends

2010-03-23T17:40:00.003-05:00

I knew what a portmanteau was in the Lewis Carroll sense long before I ever saw a non-Carrollian portmanteau. Actually, I've never seen a non-Carrollian portmanteau in the flesh, and I'm not sure exactly what it is, other than a sort of suitcase. Here's a picture of one, anyway:

(HT: I stole the picture from a blog about portmanteaux. If that's how you pluralize it.)

My Intro to Linguistics textbook chose to use the more dignified term blend to describe a word that combines two independent words (e.g., smoke + fog = smog). I've been wondering recently about what motivates people to coin blends. Obviously, pure inspiration and the delight of wordplay are a big part of it. You say the words and suddenly feel the joint where they can be collapsed into each other.

Some blends are halfway between their two constituents (brunch), or both constituents at the same time, even paradoxically so (frenemy).

The class of blends I refer to in the title of this post are those that describe an unusual, unexpected, or marginal member of a category. These take a head noun for the category and combine it with a modifier that shows the marginality.

For example, "Nick used to be a manny" (man + nanny). "This year we're going away for real: no more staycations" (stay + vacation). Webinar, etc.

How to Use This Book (Or Else)

2010-03-09T21:39:00.003-06:00

More authors ought to do this. Instead of writing a boring old dedication, write a curse. In a 1518 manuscript of the Gospels, Psalms, and a work called Thekaras, a scribe named Theophilos Iviritis wrote:

I beseech all who come across this book not to dare cut it up shamelessly, in order to take it apart and remove either the Gospels or the Psalter or Thekaras or any other office or part, or even a single leaf, but let it remain intact, just as it was written and bound by me. Should the binding become worn, may it be rebound just as it is now. If anyone should act against what I say, the curse of my sinful unworthy self be upon him. And may whoever owns this take care not to leave it lying idle on the shelf but always make full use of it; for this is why the book was written, so that he might not suffer the same condemnation as he who hid the talent. And if he should neglect his own salvation, let him give the book to another who cares greatly about being saved so that he might use it to gain the riches of heaven and to pray for my wretched self, who is responsible for a thousand wicked deeds and is unworthy of either heaven or earth. May the Lord have mercy upon me and deliver me from eternal damnation; therefore, I beseech you, all the holy fathers, to pray for me.

The Apocalypse famously contains a blessing on the one who reads it (probably referring specifically to the lector, the person reading it out loud in the church meeting) and a curse on anyone who tampers with it. Probably too heavy-handed a tactic for some, but it does promote that whole author-reader interaction thing.

(HT: Evangelical Textual Criticism)

KJV and me

2010-03-08T21:33:00.003-06:00

The King James Version has had an immense impact on literature in English. Take, for example, this exchange (from Right Ho, Jeeves, also used as the opening riff of a Mark Steyn piece):

“Is he still upset about that income-tax money?”
“Upset is right. He says that Civilisation is in the melting-pot and that all thinking men can read the writing on the wall.”

“What wall?”

“Old Testament, ass. Belshazzar’s feast.”

“Oh, that, yes. I’ve often wondered how that gag was worked. With mirrors, I expect.”

There are a few phrases that I hold in my heart, waiting for my chance to drop them into conversation. One of these phrases is, of course, "I threw down my enemy and smote his ruin on the mountainside," which sounds like the Bible but isn't. Another of these phrases is "Old Testament, ass."

Anyway, Robert Alter has written a book about the KJV's impact on American lit in particular (HT: JT). Sounds entertaining. I'm doing that whole "read the Bible in a year" thing for the first time, and I decided to read the KJV because I'm largely unfamiliar with its "cadences and diction". I know a verse here and there, mostly from hearing them quoted by people from an earlier generation. It's striking how difficult it is to understand Paul's letters. The company I work for was born out of a man's desire to make Paul's letters understandable for his children. Take a slog through Romans in the KJV and you'll understand why The Living Bible was a hit.

There are some awesome phrases in the KJV, though. My current favorite is:

All that openeth the matrix is mine.

(Actually, I should admit that I'm mostly listening to the KJV while doing the cooking and the washing up. You can go to BibleGateway to listen to Screwtape read it.)

Brisket and Banks

2010-03-03T17:54:00.002-06:00

When I married my wife, I got a lot in the bargain. Like what, you ask? Well, for example, my father-in-law can smoke a superb corned beef brisket. I don't even want to think about how sad it would be if I'd never experienced that corned beef, sliced paper thin, piled high on homemade rye bread, with white wine sauerkraut . . .

Another example: because my father-in-law served in the Navy, his daughter is eligible for membership in USAA. And because I lucked out and married her, I'm included as well. We have a credit card with USAA, as well as our car insurance, renter's insurance, and life insurance. The last time an eager beaver insurance agent foisted a car insurance quote on me, I pitied the poor soul. He couldn't come anywhere close to USAA's rate. And I doubt that his company would turn it's profits into a credit on my account, like USAA does.

What prompts this paean is the fact that I just opened a letter explaining changes to our credit card account because of new federal regulations. The letter and the card agreement were lucid, straightforward, and to the point.

Contrast this with my bank (TCF), which silently began charging a $2.50 monthly fee this February. When I called to complain, they were willing to stop charging it. But--they warned--my online banking statements would now only go back 60 days instead of 18 months. What was once free was now a premium.

Though in fairness to TCF, I was always pleased that their name wasn't in the news over the last year and a half. So I guess they're doing something right.

What digital books should look like

2010-03-01T07:19:00.002-06:00

From A Working Library (but I'm just copying and pasting from Text Patterns)

On the page, the rhythm of the text emerges from both the macro design—the pleasing shape of the page, the proper amount of thumb space—and the micro—the right amount of leading, the evenness of the word spacing, the correct break of a line. On the screen, the rhythm of a text encompasses all of these things and more—the placement of a link, the shift from text to video and back again, the movement from one text to another. The rhythm becomes more complex as the orchestra gets larger, but the desire for rhythm does not subside.

In order to create this rhythm, the book must be designed and composed for the screen. A beautiful digital text can no more be arrived at by “converting” from a print design than a beautiful print book can be created by converting a Word file. The digital book will never come into its own so long as it is treated as a byproduct, unworthy of attention.

Furthermore, digital books should no more adhere to identical designs than their print counterparts; different types of writing, different voices and tempos, require unique approaches to design. The current crop of ebook formats were designed for the novel, and on that they do a fine job; but countless other texts—cookbooks, technical books, graphic novels, books on art, plays, verse—are rendered unreadable by that conformity. If the form of the book is changing, it ought to lead to more variety, not less.

Center. Margin. Villain. Hero.

2010-02-27T10:34:00.003-06:00

I thought this article was fascinating: "Shylock, My Students, and Me". What's most interesting to me is how the students' mass reaction to The Merchant of Venice has changed over the years, from sympathy with the dominant, majority culture within the play to sympathy with the oppressed, minority culture. Now everyone identifies with Shylock--everyone has been oppressed in some way, they've been made to feel different, like an outsider to the dominant culture.

Cohen (the author of the article) points out that the new generation of students are the ones who have been sensitized to diversity and oppression in school. I don't remember getting much of that training in high school, but it was a huge part of my college orientation. If I remember right, the closing session of orientation was a cringe-inducing small group discussion where each person was asked to share some way in which they had been marginalized. At least, it was cringe-inducing at the time; having passed through the system now, I could probably handle it. Even find it meaningful. But oh, how I wanted to jump out the window at the time.

Like Cohen, I don't want to say that this impulse to identify with the oppressed is a bad development, but it feels incomplete. The move from hiding your victimization and dehumanizing the outsiders to cherishing your victimization and dehumanizing "the insiders" (whoever they are nowadays) represents less progress than could be desired.

Simply put, we haven't learned that your position in the center or on the margin does not determine whether you're a hero or a villain.

Or does it? You tell me.

Easter's a ways off, isn't it?

2010-02-24T19:14:00.002-06:00

Reading in Dreams

2010-02-20T09:07:00.006-06:00

I remember a post by Chaka a while back about dreaming a word game he didn't know the rules to, and this made me think of that on some level or another. Your guess is as good as mine.

Last night I had a dream that I was taking a test, and the second question on the test was asking something along the lines of "A man named Nathaniel Bohr used an atom with 5 ... to describe ... blah blah blah ... What is the name of this atom?" (that is all I remember of the question from waking up).

When I first read the question, I had no idea what it was talking about. My first thought was that BORON is the 5th element in the periodic table. Then I looked through the test to see if it contained a periodic table I could reference. When I did not find one I decided to read the question again. The name "Nathaniel Bohr" instantly clued me in on the answer of Bohr's Atom.

Obviously, the facts in the question are all wrong, I have no idea what his first name was, almost definitely not Nathaniel. Secondly, it was not a specific atom but a model for describing atoms. Thirdly, it did not have 5 specifically of anything, it could be used to describe any number of atoms with any number of proton/neutron/electron combinations. etc, etc. But that is NOT the point.

After I realized the answer I started writing it in my answer booklet. I had finished writing the letters "BOHR" (which I specifically remember seeing in big block letters) when I realized I had written on the line for the NEXT question's answer. So I crossed it out and wrote it again "Bohr's Atom" on the correct line. Then I decided to quit taking the test and the dream took a turn for the weird, but that's a different story.

The reasons I posted this dream are
1) I remember specifically reading the question and having NO idea what the answer was at first. I find this interesting, because some part of my own brain had to create this question from scratch, yet another part of my own brain was not able to answer it right away.
2) Second, I remember specifically READING the name "Nathaniel Bohr" along with READING the rest of the question a second time. Do you ever remember READING in a dream? For some reason I thought READING was impossible in a dream. Usually what happens to me is I see some scribble of jumbled text-like drawings and just KNOW what it's trying to say. In this case, I actually remember READING the english words, not a jumble of text.
3) I very distinctly remember the big block letters spelling "BOHR" which, like part 2, is something I've never remembered in a dream before. Maybe I'm just not thinking back enough or remembering enough other dreams, but there were actual letters representing an actual word which actually stood for something in the real world. And not only did I READ it, but I was also WROTE that word "BOHR" letter-by-letter on the wrong line in the answer booklet. And then I crossed it out and wrote again: "Bohr's Atom" on the correct line.

I don't know about you folks, but I found it all interesting enough to post here.

Alafraganza and Alfraganus

2010-02-18T20:07:00.005-06:00

I've been listening to episodes of the Gunsmoke radio show here. It's funny how you get used to the same two or three actors voicing all the bit parts. For principals, you've got Matt, Chester, Kitty, and Doc (who is Floyd the Barber from the Andy Griffith Show, btw). But this week's down-and-out sodbuster sounds suspiciously like last week's shifty gambler.

Given the fact that sets are no object on a radio show, it's surprising how the same places figure in almost every episode: Matt's office, Doc's office upstairs, Front Street, the Texas Trail, where the first thing you hear is always Kitty's "Hello, Matt!" . . .

Sometimes they venture into one of the other saloons in town: the Long Branch (which happened to be the name of the bar in my hometown) or the Alafraganza.

That last one is a bit of a mystery to me. It's a fitting name for a saloon--a bit of exoticism to set the brand apart--but where does the name come from? How do you even spell it?

The only google hits for the word relate to the Gunsmoke show. There are no suggestions for alternative spellings.

It's possible the show's creators made the name up out of thin air, but today I read in a commentary to the Inferno that Dante's knowledge of Ptolemaic cosmology probably came via a work by the Persian astronomer Alfraganus. There's a pretty strong correspondence between those names, but can a connection between them be established?

On the other hand, that -ganza ending looks like the ending of extravaganza--also a good theme for a saloon. Is this a blend of some kind? If your bookstore was offering 70% off ancient Persian astronomy texts, would it be an alafraganza?

Update: Is there an expert on Italian out there who has an opinion on this word? Google Translate offers "going between wings" for "ala fra ganza."

More Thoughts on Libraries

2010-02-17T17:23:00.003-06:00

If you liked my last post on my personal library, you'll like this much better one by Ben Myers even more. (HT: Addenda & Errata, Evangelical Textual Criticism)

(Come to think of it, I suppose that if you hated my last post, you'd also like Myers's post more. So it's a sure bet.)

Myers gives twelve theses about libraries and librarians. Some of them are downright Chestertonian: drawing the poetry out of the most commonplace things, among other delightful inversions.

My favorite thesis is number 8, which contains a great quote from one Giorgio Agamben: “Like a true maze, the library [leads] the reader to his goal by leading him astray.”

One idle afternoon I was wandering the stacks at the University of Edinburgh's library when I found yards of books bearing the name G. K. Chesterton. I've heard of him, I thought. He's got something to do with C. S. Lewis, doesn't he? And I picked up All Is Grist.

There are echoes of Umberto among Myers's theses as well. The twelfth thesis reminds us that the librarian is a mistress of hidden knowledge. It plays on the fantasy that animates The Name of the Rose, The Thirteenth Tale, and countless other novels: finding the lost book. It may be forbidden or forgotten, rumored or restricted; what's actually in the book varies from novel to novel and is ultimately irrelevant. What matters is getting your hands on that book that no one else has held.

This story arc is the book lover's erogenous zone. Work it into your next novel, and librarians and book reviewers will melt into a puddle for you.

Other novels with a lost book theme include: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell; the Harry Potter series; others?

Burning through my books

2010-02-16T18:26:00.002-06:00

Moving house is to libraries as fires are to forests. Burn out the dead wood and make room for new growth. It's part of the natural life cycle.

The first part of packing is easy--you box up the "absolutely yes" books and set aside the "absolutely no" ones. These two categories make up perhaps 40% of my collection.

Then it starts getting hard. That set of thirteen volumes about twentieth-century theologians? It does pad out the theology section nicely, but will I ever read them? My little section of Mormonalia? Those copies of Faust and Crime and Punishment from the Nobles County Public Library book sale?

The danger at this point is that weighing a certain book's fate (holding it in your hand, checking out the publisher, reading the back cover copy) can lead to sitting down on a pile of boxes and reading the text itself. Sometimes this can be instructive: after finally giving Velvet Elvis a go, I couldn't make it past the first page. So that's a no, then.

At other times, though, you sit down with Dante's Inferno and end up having to read the whole thing. And then, because you understood so little of it, you need to consult the separate commentary volume. Hours can be lost this way.

Leadership Lessons from a Shirtless Dancer

2010-02-14T21:55:00.001-06:00

Do either of these guys (the shirtless dancer or the narrator) have a book deal yet?

HT: Kouya Chronicle

Sad Songs

2010-02-11T17:23:00.002-06:00

I've been playing Bob Dylan's "North Country Blues" for the last week or so. It's relentlessly melancholy. Two chords and despair.

It got me thinking about the saddest songs I know. Here's my very short list.

(Okay, I was going to link to songza here, but it looks like they grew discontent with their niche in the Internet and are trying to be Pandora and/or Grooveshark. Grooveshark's embedded songs take too long to load. So . . . the links go to YouTube.)

"North Country Blues" by Bob Dylan
"The Snowy Downs" by The Roe Family Singers (sorry, I couldn't find this one online)
"Last Kiss" by Pearl Jam et al.
"Top of the World" by the Dixie Chicks

These are different kinds of sad song. Some are sentimental, some are horrific, some are just bleak.

What's the saddest song you know?

A Regular Expression for Bible Cross References

2010-02-10T09:33:00.004-06:00

I've been working on this bit-by-bit for weeks. It's a regular expression (see here for a tutorial) that recognizes Bible cross references (e.g., 1 Sam 1:1; Matt 2:1) in a variety of formats. The hardest thing about it was dealing with book names that contain numbers (1 Kings, 2 Corinthians, etc). Even now I'm not thrilled with the way it handles those, but I'm satisfied.

The "flavor" of reg-ex that this was developed in is VBScript. Other flavors might be able to handle things more elegantly. For example, I wish that I could just use \w for whitespace (including non-breaking spaces), but that shorthand character class doesn't seem to work. The only thing I've found that works for the space between a number and a word in a book name is ([^A-Za-z0-9]| | ), where the final character is a non-breaking space.

Anyway, here it is:

"\b((G(e(nesis)|e?n)|Ex(o(d(us)?)?)?|L(eviticus|e?v)|N(u(mbers)?|u?m)|D(euteronomy|(eu)?t)|J(os(hua)?|o?sh)|J(udg(es)?|gs|d)|Ru(th?)?|Ezra?|Ne(h(emiah)?)?|Est(h(er)?)?|Jo?b|Ps(alm)?s?|Pr(ov(erbs)?)?|Ec(c(les(iastes)?)?)?|S(o(ng( of (Songs|Solomon))?)?|g)|Is(a(iah)?)?|J(e(remiah)?|e?r)|L(a(mentations)?|a?m)|Ez(e(kiel)?|e?k)|D(a(niel)?|a?n)|Ho(s(ea)?)?|J(oe)?l|Am(os)?|Ob(a(d(iah)?)?)?|Jon(ah)?|M(i(c(ah)?)?|c)|N(a(h(um)?)?|h)|Hab(akkuk)?|Z(ep(h(aniah)?)?|p)|H(ag(g(ai)?)?|g)|Z(ec(h(ariah)?)?|c)|M(al(a(chi)?)?|l)|M(at(thew)?|(at)?t)|M(ar)?k|L(uke|[uk])|J(oh)?n|Ac(ts)?|R(o(mans)?|o?m)|G(al(atians)?|l)|Ep(h(esians)?)?|Ph(il(ippians)?|p)|C(o(l(ossians)?)?|l)|Ti(t(us)?)?|Ph(ile(m(on)?)?|l?m)|H(e(b(rews)?)?|b)|Ja((me)?s|m)|J(ude?|d)|R(e(velation)?|e?v)|Bar(uch)?|Add([^A-Za-z0-9]| | )?Dan|Pr(ayer)?[^A-Za-z0-9]?(of )?Azar(iah)?|Bel( and the Dragon)?|S(on)?g( of the |([^A-Za-z0-9]| | )?)Three( Children)?|Sus(anna)?|Add(itions to |([^A-Za-z0-9]| | )?)Esth(er)?|Ep(istle of |([^A-Za-z0-9]| | )?)Jer(emiah)?|J(udith|dt)|Pr(ayer of([^A-Za-z0-9]| | )?)Man(asseh)?|Sir(ach)?|Tob(it)?|Wis(dom of Solomon)?)|(([1-4]|First|Second|Third|Fourth|I{1,3}|IV)([^A-Za-z0-9]| | )?(S(amuel|a?m)|K((in)?gs)?|Ch(r(on(icles)?)?)?|Co(r(inthians)?)?|Th(ess?(alonians)?)?|T(i(mothy)?|i?m)|P(eter|e?t)?|J((oh)?n)?|Esdr(as)?|Macc(abees)?)|(SAM|KGS|CHR|COR|THE|TIM|PET|JOH)[1-3]))(\.?)([^A-Za-z0-9]| | )?([0-9]{1,3})(([:\.,]([0-9]{1,3})(f{1,2}|[a-z])?[-–]([0-9]{1,3})[:\.,]([0-9]{1,3})(f{1,2}|[a-z])?|[:\.,]([0-9]{1,3})(f{1,2}|[a-z])?[-–]([0-9]{1,3})(f{1,2}|[a-z])?|[:\.,]([0-9]{1,3})(f{1,2}|[a-z])?|[-–]([0-9]{1,3}))?)([,;]([^A-Za-z0-9]| | )?(((([1-4]|First|Second|Third|Fourth|I{1,3}|IV)([^A-Za-z0-9]| | )?(S(amuel|a?m)|K((in)?gs)?|Ch(r(on(icles)?)?)?|Co(r(inthians)?)?|Th(ess?(alonians)?)?|T(i(mothy)?|i?m)|P(eter|e?t)?|J((oh)?n)?|Esdr(as)?|Macc(abees)?)|(SAM|KGS|CHR|COR|THE|TIM|PET|JOH)[1-3])(\.?)([^A-Za-z0-9]| | )?([0-9]{1,3})([:\.,]([0-9]{1,3})(f{1,2}|[a-z])?[-–]([0-9]{1,3})[:\.,]([0-9]{1,3})(f{1,2}|[a-z])?|[:\.,]([0-9]{1,3})(f{1,2}|[a-z])?[-–]([0-9]{1,3})(f{1,2}|[a-z])?|[:\.,]([0-9]{1,3})(f{1,2}|[a-z])?|[-–]([0-9]{1,3}))?)|([0-9]{1,3})([:\.,]([0-9]{1,3})(f{1,2}|[a-z])?[-–]([0-9]{1,3})[:\.,]([0-9]{1,3})(f{1,2}|[a-z])?|[:\.,]([0-9]{1,3})(f{1,2}|[a-z])?[-–]([0-9]{1,3})(f{1,2}|[a-z])?|[:\.,]([0-9]{1,3})(f{1,2}|[a-z])?|[-–]([0-9]{1,3}))?))*\b"

Budget Planning with Excel: The Expense Form

2010-02-09T16:59:00.004-06:00

The biggest time-saver in my hack of Excel is the expense form I created:

You can design forms like these in the Visual Basic Editor. (Here's a tutorial.)

When I enter a receipt into the budget (yes, we save all our receipts; I know it sounds like a pain, but it's helpful), I select the column of the account that I paid with and the row that shows the date. Then I launch the expense form (I assigned it to Ctrl + E).

The picture above reflects a Target receipt from February 1. We bought items in three budget categories: A supplement that falls under health expenses ("Out-of-pocket"), conditioner ("Toiletries") and soy milk ("Groceries"). I enter the total bill in the first box, assign the expense to at least one budget category in the "Budget" frame, and add a comment (usually the name of the store where the purchase was made).

The form is particularly helpful for split checks like this one. When I add second and third budget categories, the form calculates how much of the bill remains in the first category. This means I can just enter the retail prices for the soy milk ($2.59) and conditioner ($3.14), and the form will deduct the remainder of the bill from Out-of-pocket. (This ends up sticking one category with all the tax, but I'm content with that level of imprecision.)

When I hit OK, my Visual Basic code takes the information from the form and writes it to the proper spots on the spreadsheet: the expense is taken out of the account, the proper budget categories are docked, and the comment is created. Before 2010, I was doing each of these actions separately. Splitting a receipt like this one into multiple budget categories required redundant comments on each cell involved.

So, what does this code look like? Something like this:

Dim expense, c2, c3, c4, c5 As Currency

Private Sub cbOK_Click()
'Write the textbox contents to their correct cell.
   Dim r, i As Long
   Dim cExpense, cCat1, cCat2, cCat3, cCat4, cCat5 As Long
   Dim s As Worksheet
   Dim txtArr(3)
   Dim cbArr(3)
   Dim colArr(3)

   Set s = ActiveSheet
   r = ActiveCell.Row
   cExpense = ActiveCell.Column

'Choose column based on combobox contents.
'If there's an amount for the category, write the amount to the correct column.
   If Me.cbCategory1.Value = vbNullString Then
      MsgBox "Specify a budget category"
      Me.cbCategory1.SetFocus
      Exit Sub
   Else
      cCat1 = ReturnColumnNumber(Me.cbCategory1.Text)
      If s.Cells(r, CInt(cCat1)).Value <> vbNullString Then
         MsgBox "Please create a new line for this transaction."
         Exit Sub
      End If
      s.Cells(r, CInt(cCat1)).Value = CCur(-1 * Me.txtCategory1.Value)
   End If
'Try using arrays of controls to cut down on code for categories 2-5
   Set txtArr(0) = Me.txtCategory2
   Set txtArr(1) = Me.txtCategory3
   Set txtArr(2) = Me.txtCategory4
   Set txtArr(3) = Me.txtCategory5

   Set cbArr(0) = Me.cbCategory2
   Set cbArr(1) = Me.cbCategory3
   Set cbArr(2) = Me.cbCategory4
   Set cbArr(3) = Me.cbCategory5

   For i = 0 To UBound(txtArr)
      If txtArr(i).Value <> vbNullString Then
         If cbArr(i).Value = vbNullString Then
            MsgBox "Specify a budget category."
            cbArr(i).SetFocus
            Exit Sub
         Else
            colArr(i) = ReturnColumnNumber(cbArr(i).Text)
            If s.Cells(r, CInt(colArr(i))).Value <> vbNullString Then
               MsgBox "Please create a new line for this transaction."
               Exit Sub
            End If
            s.Cells(r, CInt(colArr(i))).Value = CCur(-1 * txtArr(i).Value)
         End If
      End If
   Next i

'Write the expense
   s.Cells(r, cExpense).Value = CCur(-1 * Me.txtExpense.Value)

'Comments
   If Me.cbComment.Value <> vbNullString Then
      ActiveCell.AddComment (Me.cbComment.Value)
   End If

   Unload Me
End Sub

Private Sub cbCancel_Click()
   Unload Me
End Sub

Private Sub txtExpense_Change()
   ConvertToCurrency
   Me.txtCategory1.Value = expense - c2 - c3 - c4 - c5
End Sub

Private Sub txtCategory2_Change()
   ConvertToCurrency
   Me.txtCategory1.Value = expense - c2 - c3 - c4 - c5
End Sub
'There's an identical subroutine for the text boxes for categories 3, 4, and 5. Not shown in this post.

Private Sub UserForm_Initialize()
   Dim i As Integer
   Dim catList As String
   Dim catArr As Variant
'Fill in date
   Me.txtDate.Text = ActiveSheet.Range("A" & ActiveCell.Row & ":A" & ActiveCell.Row).Text
'Populate budget category comboboxes
   catList = ListBudgetCategories
   catArr = Split(catList, "|")
   For i = 0 To UBound(catArr)
      Me.cbCategory1.AddItem (catArr(i))
      Me.cbCategory2.AddItem (catArr(i))
      Me.cbCategory3.AddItem (catArr(i))
      Me.cbCategory4.AddItem (catArr(i))
      Me.cbCategory5.AddItem (catArr(i))
   Next i
'Populate comment combobox
   catList = ListComments
   catArr = Split(catList, "|")
   For i = 0 To UBound(catArr)
      Me.cbComment.AddItem (catArr(i))
   Next i
End Sub

Private Function ConvertToCurrency()
   Dim txtArr(4)
   Dim valArr(4)
   Dim i As Long
'Validate numeric entry and set variables equal to box contents.
   If TypeName(Me.ActiveControl) = "TextBox" Then
      With Me.ActiveControl
         If Not IsNumeric(.Value) And .Value <> vbNullString Then
            .Value = vbNullString
         End If
      End With
   End If
'For things in Budget frame, need to refer to the control within the frame control.
   If TypeName(Me.ActiveControl) = "Frame" Then
      With Me.ActiveControl.ActiveControl
         If Not IsNumeric(.Value) And .Value <> vbNullString Then
            .Value = vbNullString
         End If
      End With
   End If

'Cycle through array of textboxes
   Set txtArr(0) = Me.txtExpense
   Set txtArr(1) = Me.txtCategory2
   Set txtArr(2) = Me.txtCategory3
   Set txtArr(3) = Me.txtCategory4
   Set txtArr(4) = Me.txtCategory5

   For i = 0 To UBound(txtArr)
      If txtArr(i).Value = vbNullString Then
         valArr(i) = 0
         Else: valArr(i) = txtArr(i).Value
      End If
   Next i
   expense = CCur(txtArr(0))
   c2 = valArr(1)
   c3 = valArr(2)
   c4 = valArr(3)
   c5 = valArr(4)
End Function

Function ListBudgetCategories() As String
   Dim i As Long
   Dim catList As String
'If a column is green in row 4, that means it's a budget category, so add it to the combobox.
   For i = 1 To 55
      If ActiveSheet.Cells(4, i).Interior.Color = 14545386 Then
         catList = catList & "|" & ActiveSheet.Cells(2, i).Value
      End If
   Next i
   catList = Replace(catList, "|", "", , 1)
   ListBudgetCategories = catList
End Function

Function ListComments() As String
'Populate the Comment combobox with the comments that already exist on the page.
   Dim comList As String
   Dim com As Comment

   For Each com In ActiveSheet.Comments
      comList = comList & "|" & com.Text
   Next
   comList = Replace(comList, "|", "", , 1)
   comList = Replace(comList, Chr(10), "")
   ListComments = comList
End Function

Justifying My Media Consumption

2010-02-07T13:58:00.002-06:00

While laid up with a hurting back this weekend, I watched a great deal of media.

I also read a great book, How Fiction Works by James Wood. Great writing, beautiful typesetting. I just read a quip about Wood that he seems "to want to be his own grandfather." The throwback design of the book supports that notion, with it's wide margins, section numbers, and running heads that summarize the contents of the spread. I love that stuff, and yes, I've been trying to be my own grandfather for some time now.

But if I go on about literary criticism, I'll be misrepresenting the weekend. What I really did this weekend was consume TV and movies. Specifically:

Several episodes of Parks and Recreation: Great concept and characters. I particularly like the setting and the character of Ron Swanson, who may have the most earnest (= least ironic) mustache on television in the last twenty years.

Several episodes of Family Guy: So, is Peter raped in every other episode now? I think I'm finally writing this show off for good. Then again, they made a joke about Picard's flute from the episode "The Inner Light." So it kind of evens out.

Benny and Joon: This continues our series of watching VHS tapes we got for free at rummage sales. Can't say I was impressed. Johnny Depp's physical comedy was about 10% of the movie. If it had been 90% . . .

Sixteen Candles: The VHS series again. I don't care if you think this is a classic; it just plain stinks. Unintelligible, unfunny dreck.

Moral of the story: recommended books are better than recommended movies.

What's Wrong with Muscular Christianity?

2010-02-03T10:44:00.003-06:00

The New York Times reports "More Churches Promote Martial Arts to Reach Young Men."

As the article points out, this isn't the first time that America has seen a movement to inject more masculinity into a church (and a Jesus) perceived as feminine. The most famous legacy of this earlier iteration of "muscular Christianity" is the YMCA (Young Men's Christian Association).

I suppose I could resent the movement for that. Some of the most hateful hours of my adolescence were spent in my hometown Y, compelled by my dad to work out when I'd rather have been a few blocks down at the library. For years afterward, the smell of that place, the smell of rubber mats and disinfectant, made me queasy and anxious.

For the most part, I've gotten over my hatred of weights and workouts. I attempt a CrossFit workout two to four times a week (and brag endlessly about my accomplishments). I've come to appreciate the joy that the pursuit of fitness can give (sore muscles and creaking joints included). I've come to see the struggle for fitness (the αγων, if you will) as virtuous.

I use that word virtuous intentionally, with an etymological implication. Virtue (the word, not the concept) originates in Latin virtus, "strength, manliness." A man who tests his strength against an opponent, in a footrace or in a fight, does what is fitting for a man.

I hasten to add that none of this should be taken as disparaging women athletes or men who are not athletes. My wife, now 21 weeks pregnant, is still a better athlete than I. It is possible to revel in a quality of manliness without saying that that quality is all there is to manliness; or that men alone own that quality.

In short, it is possible to thank God for being a man without adding "And thank God I'm not a woman."

(Along the same lines, it's possible to say, "I'm proud to be an American" without implying "I'd be ashamed to be one of those poor slobs who's not." But that's another post.)

Which brings us, belatedly, to my problem with muscular Christianity. Its always accompanied by unmanly whining about feminization, ungentlemanly scorn of women and "feminine" men, and unvirtuous assertions of a man's right to lead. For example:

“The man should be the overall leader of the household,” said Ryan Dobson, 39, a pastor and fan of mixed martial arts who is the son of James C. Dobson, the founder of Focus on the Family, a prominent evangelical group. “We’ve raised a generation of little boys.”

Even if you believe that every man has a God-given right to lead his household, surely it's unmanly to go on about it so. It makes it sound as though the problem is these darn women who refuse to follow. Is there anything less manly than blaming a woman for your failures?

Let men not be taught to shift blame; let them not be given excuses to demand their own way; let them not learn to despise those considered weak.

Brave New World Computers

2010-02-01T17:37:00.003-06:00

An interesting post about what the future of computers might look like, once the desktop goes the way of the floppy disk (HT: Lileks). Particularly, how will hackers (in the non-pejorative sense) cope with losing the flexibility and openness of current file systems.

Personally, I hate the idea of hacking going away so soon after discovering it. The stuff about Excel I've been posting is all about getting under the hood of a program to make it more efficient for you. I'm not very good at it, and what I'm doing is rudimentary, but I was hoping to keep at it for awhile. I was hoping that learning this stuff meant I was catching up, but now stevenf tells me it's just turning me into an Old World computer user. Sad.

Dead Rapping Economists

2010-01-28T19:39:00.004-06:00

I don't know why this hasn't already taken over the Internet .

Fear the Boom and Bust: Keynes vs. Hayek in a rap video

HT: Caleb Sjogren

From what I've read, the portrayal of Keynes as a playboy is historically accurate.

Budget Planning with Excel: Macros

2010-01-26T07:05:00.006-06:00

If you've never created a macro in Microsoft Office, you're missing out. You probably have some repetitive task that you wish you could automate. Well, it probably is possible to automate it (though it might take writing some computer code).

There is a way to create macros without dealing with code: you can tell Excel (or Word, or other Office programs) to record a macro. I won't explain this; if you haven't done it, just search for "record macro Excel" and you'll find the info you need.

To deal with the code that underlies macros, you use the Visual Basic Editor. Open this program by pressing Alt + F11 from Excel. It should look something like this:

Though you won't have the module Budget2010 and its code. That's what I'm going to give you.

I can't take time to explain everything about this editor or the language (Visual Basic) that it uses. There are millions of web pages out there that explain these, as well as a decent help file in the Visual Basic Editor itself.

For now, just try adding a module (Insert > Module) and giving it a meaningful name (instead of the default Module1). Then copy the code below and paste it into the module's code window:

Sub AddAnotherLinetoDate()
'Shortcut=Ctrl+D
'Adds another row below the current one, so you can record another transaction for that day.
Dim s As Worksheet
Dim r, c As Long
Dim d As String

Set s = ActiveSheet
r = ActiveCell.Row
c = ActiveCell.Column
d = s.Cells(r, 1).Text
Rows(r + 1).Insert Shift:=xlDown, CopyOrigin:=xlFormatFromLeftOrAbove
'Give the new row the same date as the original row.
s.Cells(r + 1, 1).Value = d
'Gray out the date in the new row
s.Range("A" & r + 1 & ":A" & r + 1).Font.Color = RGB(169, 169, 169)
s.Cells(r + 1, c).Select
End Sub

The comments (the lines that start with ') explain what this subroutine does: it adds a new row to the selected date. To try the macro out, select a cell in Excel, then go back to the Visual Basic Editor, put your cursor anywhere inside the code, and press F5.

Of course, you don't want to have to open the Visual Basic Editor every time you run a macro, so you can give macros keyboard and button shortcuts. I'll explain how to do that in my next post.

In the meantime, you'll want to save your Excel spreadsheet, which now has this code stored in it as well. In Office 2007, you have to save the spreadsheet with the .xslm extension to enable macros.

Dear Stonybrook Center,

2010-01-21T17:07:00.004-06:00

How did I get on your mailing list for people dealing with opiate addiction? I figure a good chunk of my junk mail comes from the Evangelical Theological Society selling their mailing list, but I don't think I should blame them. Unless that imminent Evangelical collapse I've been hearing about has finally happened . . .

For the record, I support counseling and believe that it shouldn't bear a stigma. Helping people recover from addiction is a difficult and important task that I respect. I'm sure the folks at Stonybrook Center do a fine job.

Unless they're some sort of scam, which may be why they don't come up on Google and their phone number seems to belong to a moving company.

Mesmerizing Texts

2010-01-19T21:13:00.002-06:00

Gorgeous ASCII animation.

I love this stuff.

HT: Alan Jacobs

Budget Planning with Excel: The Columns

2010-01-19T13:01:00.002-06:00

What columns do you need in your Excel spreadsheet to track your finances? Well, the way we do it, you need one column for each

1. Source of income
2. Account that holds money (assets)
3. Account that you owe money (debts or liabilities)
4. Category of regular expenses

The first three should be easy to identify. I have one job, my wife has one job, so there are two income columns. We have a checking account, a savings account, and each of us carries cash, so there are four asset columns. We have a few credit cards and some student loans (our debt columns).

Deciding how many of the fourth kind of column (budget categories) you need takes some trial and error. We currently have about 20 budgeted columns. Just to give you some ideas, here they are:

Groceries
Toiletries
Household supplies/Laundry
Clothes
Missions
Life insurance
Health care
Car insurance
Gasoline
Car maintenance
Rent
Renters' insurance
Electricity
Water/Gas/Garbage [all three of these appear on one bill]
Landline
My cell
My wife's cell
Dates
Social events
Travel

And the big catch-all:

Other

We've set a certain amount of money that goes into each of these columns at the beginning of the month. Any leftover money should carry over to the next month, but the reality is that sometimes you have to steal from one column to make up unforeseen shortfall in another. This is where trial and error comes in. If one column is always short and another is always over, maybe you can change the allocations. Or maybe (if the Groceries column is always short, for example) you need to rein in your spending.

Finally, I should mention one other kind of column that is largely optional. I have columns for the deductions that come out of our paychecks before they're deposited: taxes, retirement, flexible spending accounts. I included them this year for the sake of completeness, but they're out of the picture for the basic monthly budget. They mostly don't interact with other accounts and budget categories, and my pay stub already shows me what the running total is.

In the next post, we'll start talking about the macros and forms I use to save time in entering income and expenses.

Works of Genius

2010-01-16T14:12:00.002-06:00

Last night I finished The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan. (Whom I loved at first read.) This book was a delight from beginning to end. I was so often looking up from it to tell Mrs. Chaka what I had just read that I might as well have read the whole thing aloud to her.

After finishing it, I realized that I've read quite a few spectacular books recently. The following are my recent reads that I do not hesitate to call Works of Genius (the star means it was a re-read):

The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan
Planet Narnia by Michael Ward
*Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke
Jesus of Nazareth by Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI)
*The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
*The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Recently read books that I'd place just shy of genius include:

The Great Divorce by C. S. Lewis
Word Myths by David Wilton
The Natural History of Unicorns by Chris Lavers
Becket by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Budget Planning with Excel: Cell Format

2010-01-13T17:53:00.004-06:00

Tip Number 2: Make ordinary numbers appear as dates and currency.

I use a worksheet for each month of the year. The lefthand column of the sheet gives the date. You don't have to type 1-Jan, 2-Jan, 3-Jan, etc for the whole month. Excel can interpret a positive integer as a date. Here's how it works.

1 = January 1, 1900
2 = January 2, 1900
. . .
40,179 = January 1, 2010

So try this: Put "40179" in cell A5. Right-click A5 and choose "Format cells." Select "Date" from the Category box and choose the Type on the right. You'll see a preview in the Sample window.

Now your 40179 is transformed into a date.

To populate the rest of the dates for the month, create a formula in A6: "=A5+1". After you hit Enter, A6 should show 1/2/2010. You can copy A6, select the next 30 rows or so, and select Paste. You now have a month of dates.

You can redo this for every month (February 1, 2010 = 40,210), or I suppose you could do the whole year in one sheet.

The format for most cells in the sheet (everything east of column A and south of row 4) will be Currency. I prefer the format that shows negative numbers in red with parentheses. When the cells are set up like this, Excel will automatically interpret an entry like "4.1" as $4.10 and -38.5 as ($38.50). High visual contrast and a minimum number of keystrokes. That's what I like.

Budget Planning with Excel: Freezing Panes

2010-01-13T17:37:00.005-06:00

Here's Tip Number 1: Learn how to freeze panes properly. This is a feature of Excel that never works the way I think it should, but it is possible to freeze the leftmost column(s) and topmost row(s) so that they're always visible when you scroll elsewhere in the document.

In Excel 2007, the Freeze Panes command is on the View tab. Pre-2007, it's under Window.

The trick is to select the cell that will be in the upper left-hand corner of the lower right-hand quadrant before choosing "Freeze Panes." Got that?

If you select the cell highlighted as "This one!" in the picture above, you'll freeze the top two rows and the leftmost column so they're always visible.

At the risk of belaboring the point, it may help to think of this command as cutting the sheet into four quadrants (the "panes"). Excel will make a cut along the top of the selected cell and along its left side.

If you mess up, there doesn't seem to be a way to adjust where the "cuts" lie. You just have to unfreeze the panes and try again.

(HT: Tech Xpress)

Budget Planning with Excel

2010-01-13T17:05:00.004-06:00

I spent New Year's Day gearing up to track the family finances. Since the beginning of our marriage, Mrs. Chaka and I have used an Excel spreadsheet for this purpose. I was planning to migrate to something more fully featured, such as GNUCash, but after playing around with that program for a bit, I felt that a couple modifications to Excel would serve us better. This is because I'm lazy and didn't want to learn a new system.

Now, credit where credit is due: Mrs. Chaka started our budget, using a system she learned from her mentor Jason Falck. Any blunders I've introduced should be laid at my door, of course, not theirs.

You may have heard of Dave Ramsey's envelope system: You put the budgeted cash in an envelope and when the money for that category is gone, it's gone. Our system is like that, except we use Excel columns instead of envelopes. There's a Gas column, a Groceries column, a Rent column, etc. When we make a payment from our credit card or bank account, we deduct the money from two columns--the account and the budget category. E.g.,

On the 5th of January there, the $24.86 we spent at Valli Produce (The Platonic Ideal of a Grocery Store) was deducted from our credit card (USAA) and from the Groceries column.

One of the reasons Mrs. Chaka and I both dreaded working on the budget in the past was the time it took to enter every expenditure twice--sometimes more than twice, since we often needed to use comments to make notes about the transaction.

My goal on New Year's Day was to hack Excel to reduce the number of times I have to enter the same information. In the next few posts, I'll share my results.

My Goodbye Song for 2009

2009-12-31T19:24:00.001-06:00

Sing us out, Bob.

Ommwriter

2009-12-15T21:08:00.003-06:00

Ommwriter claims to recapture for you the ability to write without distractions. Yet it's not featureless: it has variable fonts, sizes, backgrounds, even different sound effects for your typing.

I think I know what Alan Jacobs would say: Those are the distractions. And Neal Stephenson would wonder, will your words still be there in five years?

Long quote from Stephenson's book, In the Beginning Was the Command Line, available for free here:

I began using Microsoft Word as soon as the first version was released around 1985. After some initial hassles I found it to be a better tool than MacWrite, which was its only competition at the time. I wrote a lot of stuff in early versions of Word, storing it all on floppies, and transferred the contents of all my floppies to my first hard drive, which I acquired around 1987. As new versions of Word came out I faithfully upgraded, reasoning that as a writer it made sense for me to spend a certain amount of money on tools.

Sometime in the mid-1980's I attempted to open one of my old, circa-1985 Word documents using the version of Word then current: 6.0 It didn't work. Word 6.0 did not recognize a document created by an earlier version of itself. By opening it as a text file, I was able to recover the sequences of letters that made up the text of the document. My words were still there. But the formatting had been run through a log chipper--the words I'd written were interrupted by spates of empty rectangular boxes and gibberish.

Now, in the context of a business (the chief market for Word) this sort of thing is only an annoyance--one of the routine hassles that go along with using computers. It's easy to buy little file converter programs that will take care of this problem. But if you are a writer whose career is words, whose professional identity is a corpus of written documents, this kind of thing is extremely disquieting. There are very few fixed assumptions in my line of work, but one of them is that once you have written a word, it is written, and cannot be unwritten. The ink stains the paper, the chisel cuts the stone, the stylus marks the clay, and something has irrevocably happened (my brother-in-law is a theologian who reads 3250-year-old cuneiform tablets--he can recognize the handwriting of particular scribes, and identify them by name). But word-processing software--particularly the sort that employs special, complex file formats--has the eldritch power to unwrite things. A small change in file formats, or a few twiddled bits, and months' or years' literary output can cease to exist.

Now this was technically a fault in the application (Word 6.0 for the Macintosh) not the operating system (MacOS 7 point something) and so the initial target of my annoyance was the people who were responsible for Word. But. On the other hand, I could have chosen the "save as text" option in Word and saved all of my documents as simple telegrams, and this problem would not have arisen. Instead I had allowed myself to be seduced by all of those flashy formatting options that hadn't even existed until GUIs had come along to make them practicable. I had gotten into the habit of using them to make my documents look pretty (perhaps prettier than they deserved to look; all of the old documents on those floppies turned out to be more or less crap). Now I was paying the price for that self-indulgence. Technology had moved on and found ways to make my documents look even prettier, and the consequence of it was that all old ugly documents had ceased to exist.

It was--if you'll pardon me for a moment's strange little fantasy--as if I'd gone to stay at some resort, some exquisitely designed and art-directed hotel, placing myself in the hands of past masters of the Sensorial Interface, and had sat down in my room and written a story in ballpoint pen on a yellow legal pad, and when I returned from dinner, discovered that the maid had taken my work away and left behind in its place a quill pen and a stack of fine parchment--explaining that the room looked ever so much finer this way, and it was all part of a routine upgrade. But written on these sheets of paper, in flawless penmanship, were long sequences of words chosen at random from the dictionary. Appalling, sure, but I couldn't really lodge a complaint with the management, because by staying at this resort I had given my consent to it. I had surrendered my Morlock credentials and become an Eloi.

The Peanut Butter Video from Sesame Street

2009-12-15T20:15:00.002-06:00

Anytime I'm cooking, and the recipe calls for both salt and sugar, this song gets in my head. Every single time, people. This is what Sesame Street does to you.

Update on No Problem

2009-12-07T20:48:00.002-06:00

I was talking to technical support the other day. After I explained the device's malfunction, the gracious and polite technician's first words were "No problem." And it grated. I had a flash of irritation. If it wasn't a problem, I wouldn't be talking to you. Then I realized that our conversation had simply skipped a groove.

We were following a script, the technician and I. My script didn't have the line, "Can you help me solve this malfunction?" but it might as well have. That is why people call technical support, after all--to request help. It's such an integral proposition of the call that it didn't occur to me to verbalize it.

Of course, if I had happened to verbalize the request, the exchange would have made perfect sense. In the technician's "[It is] No problem," the referent of the "it" was my (implied) request, not the malfunction. If the conversation did skip a groove, it was probably my fault for missing my line of the politeness script.

Die Prinzen!

2009-12-04T17:03:00.004-06:00

I listened to two bands today that illustrate my utter lack of taste in music. I think you should go listen to both of these bands. I think that they will put a bounce in your step and a smile on your face.

But I know you'll probably hate them.

Die Prinzen (HT: Paige Skakal) and Brave Combo (HT: Carol Stream Public Library)

Just type them into Grooveshark (one at a time, for best results) and hit play all.

Feel free to tell me what you think.

Incidentally, Brave Combo came to mind today because I heard Bob Dylan's "Must Be Santa" and thought, That sounds like it could be a Brave Combo performance. Well, according to Brave Combo's website, it's a cover of their arrangement.

2009-12-04T08:15:00.001-06:00

I found this article from MSNBC to be interesting.
Authors of a new online project that aims to create a Bible suitable for conservatives argue that contemporary scholars have inserted liberal views into the Bible.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34270487/ns/us_news-faith//from/ET

I Had No Idea I Was So Annoying

2009-11-23T21:38:00.003-06:00

Apparently the general public despises my default casual reply to "Thanks." I'm sure that I say "No problem" all the time. I never meant anything by it--it's just one of those pieces of the politeness script that one has to deploy in the conversation ritual.

But it turns out that what people hear when I say "No problem" is "a problem caused by you will be graciously ignored." That's according to the readers of Stanley Fish's blog at nytimes.com. Check it out for a list of niceties that they don't find so nice.

I can't agree with most of the list. I do find the corporation-speak offensive: "Your call is important to us"; "For your convenience"; "In order to serve you better." These are expressions that no normal human being would come up with--they spring from spin sessions. They are nakedly disingenuous, each one a malevolent "This is not a pipe."

But most of the things people complain about on Fish's blog aren't in this class. "Is everything all right?"; "Take care"; "Have a nice day." People seriously have a problem with these?

John M. Ellis wants you to know that the Brothers Grimm are frauds

2009-11-15T21:32:00.003-06:00

In One Fairy Story too Many: The Brothers Grimm and Their Tales, Ellis documents the evidence for Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm's deceptions and takes folklore scholars to task for stubbornly ignoring this evidence. The Grimms come off looking like a pair of undergraduates faking their research paper; Grimm scholars wind up looking like willfully blind burghers who can't bring themselves to admit that the emperor has no clothes.

Incidentally, "The Emperor's New Clothes" is not one of the stories collected in Grimms' Fairy Tales (auf Deutsch, Kinder- und Hausmarchen); that fairy tale was composed by Hans Christian Andersen. Andersen and the Grimms are traditionally juxtaposed: Andersen was an artist, writing his own fairy tales; the Grimms were scientists, merely collecting and reporting the indigenous tales of Germany. Ellis's book shows that

(1) The Grimms claimed to be just that, scientific collectors and preservers of indigenous German tales;

BUT

(2) Their sources were almost entirely drawn from their immediate social sphere: young, local, middle-class, educated, and in many cases, French-speaking;
(3) Far from preserving the wording and content of their sources, the Grimms constantly reworked the material;
(4) This reworking involved substantive changes, including taking out sexually suggestive elements, making the "good guys" better and the "bad guys" worse, and generally making the stories less wild and more rational.

I found Ellis convincing, and I'm surprised that I've never heard his polemic, even though the book was published in 1983. The most disappointing part for me is losing the image of the Grimms as ethnographers: tramping through the German countryside, listening to toothless old women and furiously scribbling down notes. They cultivated that image by, for example, listing the source of one story as "the River Main region" and another as "Cassel"--when in fact, both stories had come from members of the same family (the Hassenpflugs), who had lived in both places but were originally of French Hugenot extraction. This is what we call "fudging the data."

Sigh. I guess the movie got it half right--unfortunately, it was the con artist half, not the traveling-across-Germany half.

Stuff Christians Like: Samaritan's Purse

2009-11-10T19:31:00.002-06:00

Mrs. Chaka and I just contributed to Samaritan's Purse at the urging of Stuff Christians Like. After raising $30,000 to build a kindergarten in Vietnam in one day, they're now raising funds for two more.

I'm not much for giving to a cause just because a celebrity says I should, but I figured it's the least we could do for a blog that has the funniest (and most edifying) comments on the entire internet.

Linus has probably blown his entire paycheck on this.

I love how for xkcd, Ender's Game is a shared text

2009-11-08T09:52:00.003-06:00

Learn to Stay Away from Those Who Carry 'Round a Fire Hose

2009-11-04T21:08:00.005-06:00

You could call me a Bob Dylan fan; my music collection has more albums by him than by any other artist. I acknowledge that he's an acquired taste, though. The first time I heard him on the radio ("Like a Rolling Stone" on 98.7 FM KISD), I thought it was a joke. What was this doing on Oldies radio? Organ music and a guy who can't sing? When it went on and on for minute after minute, I thought it was a joke on an immense scale. Then the song ended, and the next song began, without a single word from the DJ to explain what had just happened. Apparently, everyone else was in on the joke.

I think I heard other Dylan songs eventually--"Rainy Day Women #12 & 35" at least--but it wasn't until I found out that he was a Minnesotan and had spent time around the University of Minnesota that I picked up one of his albums (Bob Dylan). I knew he was supposed to be cool, so I listened to it over and over again until I liked it. Honestly, that's pretty much what I did. When I found another album in the used bin at Cheapo, I'd buy it and repeat the process.

"Like a Rolling Stone" has grown on me somewhat, but it's still not my favorite. "Subterranean Homesick Blues" probably tops my list. I like the personal connection to "Positively Fourth Street" (I lived for three years in Dinkytown, on the titular Fourth Street). I drive Mrs. Chaka crazy by playing "You Ain't Going Nowhere" over and over again on our cheap acoustic guitar.

I say all that to say this: like Andrew Ferguson (HT: JT), I have no idea why people continue to revere Dylan and buy his albums, when he is in no way the artist he used to be. He never really sang the notes, but his inimitable style did have some charm and emotional resonance. Now his voice is shot so badly that he has only two notes, and only one emotional register: deep mortal anguish.

If Ferguson is right about what's going on inside Dylan's head, then maybe I wasn't so wrong when I heard his music for the first time. Maybe it is a joke on a massive scale.

M. Levi-Strauss

2009-11-03T19:48:00.003-06:00

I had no idea that Levi-Strauss was still alive. And now he's not.

Pretty shameful ignorance for someone who considers himself a casual Levi-Straussian.

Etymological Fables

2009-10-30T16:51:00.002-05:00

Today I came across a word history of sincere that seems impossible. According to the story, Latin potters would sometimes use wax to conceal cracks in their products. Vendors in the marketplace, knowing that the buyers were wary of this ruse, would praise their wares as sin cera--without wax.

(Are there any valid etymologies that end with ". . . so people used to say ________"?)

The author of this word history intended to illustrate that sincerity requires allowing the cracks to show. A good point to make, especially in a church context, where there is great pressure to conceal our weaknesses. Somehow this etymological fable is less offensive to my sensibilities because the point isn't really the etymology. One can think of it as an elaborate pun, a just-so story, rather than a statement about the origin of sincere.

But what is the true etymon of sincere? Merriam-Webster's tentatively traces it to "sem- one + -cerus (akin to Latin crescere to grow)." The New Century Dictionary follows a similar line, associating the initial syllable with the sim- in Latin simplex. The OED concurs and explicitly puts down those Latin pottery merchants: "There is no probability in the old explanation from sine cera ‘without wax’."

It's disappointing that only Merriam-Webster's ventures a guess at the second half of the word. If the "without wax" story is well-known enough for the OED to knock it down, there must be some vigorous discussion somewhere of what that second element is. I submit the question to Professor Liberman and his legendary database.

And while he's pondering wax, perhaps he'd care to comment on the relationship between the English noun wax and the verb wax. According to the OED, "it seems not impossible" that the two share a common etymon (wax being "that which grows (in the honeycomb)"), but "the view now most in favour refers the word to the Indogermanic root *weg- to weave." Merriam-Webster's etymology of sincere seems to imply that the Latin words for wax (the noun) and grow share a common origin.

Books Half Read

2009-10-28T07:34:00.003-05:00

I just re-read Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose. Highly recommended. Don't let your eyes glaze over during the dialogs and arguments: them's the best parts. Now I want to read more about several important figures in the book: Roger Bacon, William of Ockham, Aristotle, Dante. But first, I have to finish the following (half-read) books:

Lush Life by Richard Price
Public Enemies by Bryan Burroughs
The Lighthouse by P. D. James
The Next Christendom by Philip Jenkins

Then there are the two books Jon loaned to me:

And Another Thing by Eoin Colfer
Jesus of Nazareth by Pope Benedict XVI

That last one was lent well over a year ago, and I don't think I'm halfway through it yet. I'm such a loser. What would Teddy Roosevelt think?

A Sad State of Literary Affairs

2009-10-12T18:05:00.004-05:00

A coworker recently spent a few days biking in Iowa and Minnesota. He passed through the town of Luverne, MN, where I was born. There's not much in Luverne to awe the world-weary traveler, so I didn't know if it would leave an impression on him.

Unfortunately, it did.

He had stopped in Luverne hoping to pick up a book. He told me that he always travels with a paperback, but had forgotten one on this trip. He claims to have gone to ten different places trying to buy a book, but couldn't get one anywhere. People reportedly returned his request with puzzled stares: "You mean, like a storybook?"

Now, some exaggeration is surely involved here: I doubt whether Luverne has ten businesses that would seem even remotely likely to carry novels. Nonetheless, I'm embarrassed that the town of my birth could not provide for my friend's literary needs. This has shamed not only Luverne, but all of southwest Minnesota--even the great state of Minnesota itself.

Loopy's, I'm ashamed of you. Pamida, I used to hold you in such esteem.

Our Ford

2009-10-10T14:29:00.003-05:00

Elliot at All Is Grist (named after the first work by Chesterton that I read!) talks about defining evangelicalism, a topic touched upon in this blog. I would agree that evangelicalism is not quite the right word to describe Henry Ford's adventures in Brazil. In Chesterton's taxonomy, Ford might qualify as a Puritan because of his anti-alcohol stance, but an Episcopalian who believes in reincarnation (per Wikipedia) scarcely qualifies as an evangelical.

I know you're not supposed to cite Wikipedia, yeah yeah, blah blah blah, but some articles make for great reading. I had no idea that Europeans (particularly Germans) had such a fixation with him. It makes the premise of Brave New World more understandable.

What's the opposite of uber?

2009-10-05T17:25:00.003-05:00

I'm wearing my mustaches long these days, but I am not a fan of Nietzsche. I am in his debt today, however, for a new line of self-interrogation. (That is what philosophers are good for, right?) I read this description of Nietzsche's critique of Christian morality (from Joseph Ratzinger's Jesus of Nazareth):

"Nietzsche sees the vision of the Sermon on the Mount as a religion of resentment, as the envy of the cowardly and incompetent, who are unequal to life's demands and try to avenge themselves by blessing their failure and cursing the strong, the successful, and the happy."

I suddenly asked myself, "Am I a Christian because I'm weak?"

The argument could be made. I'm certainly much better off in a Christian-influenced environment than in a world of supermen. As a short, nearsighted man with rather slow reflexes and not much skill at making money, I wouldn't fare so well among the strong and successful, especially if they were cut loose from law and conscience.

I remember a moment in elementary school when I informed a persecutor that, in the way he was treating me, he "wasn't being very Christian." But he was a superman--the tallest kid in fifth grade--and he responded simply, "I'm not a Christian." Didn't know what to say to that.

So I am capable of using Christian morality in the service of power, attempting to control others who are stronger than me. Even if it doesn't work very often (I actually can only think of times when it failed), I should pay attention to this capability. When are my appeals to God's favor for the weak mere power plays for my own advantage? Thank you, Nietzsche, for this.

At the same time, I wholeheartedly embrace Christian morality and God's favor for the weak. What's right is right, even if my motives for supporting it will never be purely right.

My current leather possessions are limited to a wallet and some belts

2009-10-01T22:03:00.005-05:00

"Logos Bible Software is celebrating the launch of their new online Bible by giving away 72 ultra-premium print Bibles at a rate of 12 per month for six months. The Bible giveaway is being held at Bible.Logos.com and you can get up to five different entries each month! After you enter, be sure to check out Logos and see how it can revolutionize your Bible study."

Well, it's a new month, and that means it's time to enter again in Logos Bible Software's luxury Bible giveaway. I've entered every month so far, but I haven't wanted to enter by writing a blog post; I figured I would look pretty shallow writing about a contest just to be entered into the contest. Thankfully, because of Lingamish's recent rant about the giveaway, I have a pretext to write a post.

Lingamish hasn't shamed me into not trying to win a luxury Bible, but he has reminded me anew that English-language Bible resources are wasted on speakers of the English language. There is a great hunger abroad for good tools for interpreting the Bible, but many obstacles stand in the way. A lack of workers, copyright issues, poverty, lack of technology. Meanwhile, Bible publishers, one of which is my esteemed employer (I speak entirely in earnest), continue to crank out new repackages of the English Bible. People keep buying them, even though (according to this website, which was the first hit on Google), 92% of American homes have a Bible--and among those 92%, the average number of Bibles is three.*

By contrast, 200 million people don't have the Bible in their own language.

Lingamish has 6 things you can do about this. I'm not saying you shouldn't try to win one of Logos's Bibles, but maybe you can do one of these, too. I'll add a seventh option:

7. Give to one of Wycliffe Bible Translators' current projects.

*I have over twenty Bibles on my shelves (not counting electronic versions), but what can I say? I would really enjoy getting one of the leather-bound copies Logos is giving away. I'm hoping for the TNIV (currently a lacuna in my library).

You know what I miss?

2009-09-30T07:40:00.002-05:00

The Secret Diary of D. A. Carson.

Speech Is Magic

2009-09-22T20:57:00.002-05:00

Some favorite topics of mine:

Cuss words
Back to the Future
Tintin
The Bible

All linked together by Lingamish. Read his post, then read the article Eddie links to: Toward an Evangelical Theology of Cussing.

One could add another section to Svigel's excellent paper covering the relevance of speech-act theory to cussing. More noticeably than most other words, curse or swear words do things. Taken at face value, they invoke a curse or register an oath. Of course, many people no longer believe that God, or the spirits, or the universe itself responds to their oaths and curses. But even when used by someone who believes that speech is potent only in the human realm, the words still act. They intimidate, shock, or impress. They grab the hearer by the collar and demand attention. That's why it's called strong language.

To forestall an inevitable response: the words do this to the extent that they remain strong language. If, in a given social context, the words become so common that they become accepted, inoffensive, even expected, then their status as "cuss words" is thereby diminished. Doing things with words is essentially magic, and you can't deploy the most powerful magic indefinitely without diminishing returns.

Conversing with Chesterton's Portrait

2009-09-16T19:49:00.003-05:00

An interview with Chesterton about Dan Brown (HT: American Chesterton Society). The editor who pieced that together did an excellent job. More than anything, though, the piece reminds me of how great Chesterton himself was. How many authors have a body of work that is unified, vibrant, and vast enough to make this kind of reconstruction plausible?

As the title of the post indicates, the article makes me think of conversing with Chesterton in a portrait from the Potterverse. You're talking with an echo of the person; nothing truly new can emerge from the conversation. At least, nothing new from your interlocutor--you are free to experience new thoughts and insights.

I've imagined doing a sort of stitched-together exchange like this in which Chesterton and Oscar Wilde volley wit and witticisms at each other. Of course, Wilde joined Chesterton's church before the end, so it's not inconceivable that they've had a raucous ongoing conversation in the afterlife.

Sterile Irony

2009-09-15T07:06:00.001-05:00

Lileks, writing about MadMen's depiction of the 60s, drop kicks the greatest metaphor ever:

"It may seem impossible to some, but people played the accordion without making sure everyone knew it was being done ironically, or was intended to be understood with a certain amount of irony. God knows I love irony, but it’s the condom the culture puts on when it doesn’t want to enjoy something completely for reasons it will regret in the morning."

I want to bank here

2009-09-14T21:27:00.003-05:00

You know that scene at the end of The Shawshank Redemption when Andy hands a bank teller some envelopes and says, "Could you put this in your outgoing mail?" I have always wanted to do that: hand off my mail at the bank with an air of confident sophistication. It's like dropping off your laundry at the gas station. Banking + Mail = Awesome. Seriously, I think about that scene every time I slide a letter into a mailbox or drop it into the bin in the mailroom at work. I would so much rather hand this to a gracious, smiling teller, knowing she would dispatch the task with efficiency and discretion.

But I bank at the grocery store. Banking + Food = Not so cool. Can you imagine handing a letter to a twenty-something, stubbled, mumbly teller in an ill-fitting suit from Target, a half-inch gap between the top of his tie-knot and the top of his collar? Inconceivable. It's off the script. He couldn't ask me if I want my balance with that, or if I want to open a savings account. The steely glares of the five people queued up behind me (heretofore directed at the two tellers busily doing something other than assisting customers) would cut through me like samurai blades.

Yes, I'm waxing wistful and snarky about a two-second scene from a movie. But you got to admit, it is a good movie.

Evasion

2009-09-10T16:59:00.003-05:00

Last night I saw part of a game show while visiting a friend's apartment. The show ("Lingo") was clearly a word game, but I couldn't follow how it worked. The TV was muted and I was making some effort at conversation.

In the wee hours of the night, I dreamed I was on the show. There was a lot of set-up in the dream: people arriving, explaining who they were, finding their seats. When the time came to actually play the game, various delays popped up--more spectators arrived, the host left the stage, contestants disappeared and we couldn't proceed till they returned.

I got impatient and tried to gather the wayward characters. I started grilling my competitors on the rules of the game, since I hadn't played before. They became evasive, started talking nonsense. I got angry, thinking they were trying to make sure I lost.

Suddenly I realized this fact: The characters in your dreams, being contained entirely within your head, have no knowledge that you do not already have. They couldn't give me a straight answer because I didn't know the rules. I awoke laughing.

My question for you is, have you ever heard this point made before? I feel like I've read it somewhere or seen it in a TV show (sounds like something that would show up in a Star Trek episode). Any ideas?

Fancying Footnotes

2009-08-31T18:20:00.005-05:00

I love footnotes. I know they drive some people crazy; some people want them banished to the end of the book, or at least to the end of the chapter. Some people even want to scrub them out of books all together.

Me, I like footnotes in my fiction. Eaters of the Dead was good for that, though not as good as Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. I never finished Infinite Jest, but if I remember correctly, it had endnotes. An unfortunate decision, I fear. It's hard enough to read a thousand-page novel without having to flip back and forth between parts of the book. Actually, with that many pages, you're not flipping back and forth. I think flipping has a three-hundred-page maximum. At a thousand pages, you're flopping. Or maybe floupping.

Another of my favorite footnoted figures of fiction is The Annotated Alice. I was rereading it today, enjoying the lengthy notes on "Jabberwocky," when I stumbled on this tidbit:

"A magnificent German translation [of "Jabberwocky"] was made by Robert Scott, an eminent Greek scholar who had collaborated with Dean Liddell (Alice's father) on a Greek lexicon."

Both the book and my jaw dropped into my lap. Alice Liddell's father was that Liddell? Liddell & Scott Liddell?* I guess I should have expected the Dean of an Oxford college to have accomplished something other than making friends with fairytale writers, but I didn't expect Alice's dad to have edited one of the Greek lexica. Talk about being overshadowed.

*Incidently, I don't know why the Wikipedia page about Liddell & Scott claims that Liddell accented the second syllable of his name. Carroll repeatedly puns on Liddell as "little." Gardiner claims the name "rhymes with fiddle" (p. xviii in my edition) and argues, "We know how "Liddell" was pronounced because in Carroll's day the students at Oxford composed the following couplet: I am the Dean and this is Mrs. Liddell. / She plays the first, and I the second fiddle" (p. 75).

Delhi 2 Dublin

2009-08-27T22:34:00.004-05:00

Heard about these guys on NPR's The World last night. Good stuff. Some people might think that Celtic fiddle and Indian music are a strange combination, but linguists know that it's just a reunion of distant cousins: the westernmost and the easternmost branches of those prolific proto-Indo-Europeans (see chart). I wonder if they could record a song that consisted of a call and response of Sanskrit and Gaelic cognates (I stole the following from Metro Gael; more of the same to be found in published books as well):

Raja - Ri
Arya - Aire
Badhira - Bodar
Pibati - Ibid
Minda - Mend

You could do a song about a deaf king who gets drunk with a freeman and ends up disabled or stammering.

Smells Like Money

2009-08-19T08:29:00.003-05:00

I first ran across the proverb Pecunia non olet (Money doesn't stink) in a book about Aldi.
What I didn't realize until today was that the proverb is also a pun. Pecunia means both "money" and "cattle," and of course, cattle do in fact stink (HT: Liberman).

If you've ever been on a farm with livestock, you may have seen this scene played out:

City Slicker: This farm smells.
Farmer: {Inhale}: Smells like money.

It's nice to know that my Uncle Mike has the same sense of humor as the ancient Romans.

"While shooting yourself in the leg is by no means the most glamorous thing a man can do . . ."

2009-08-12T07:34:00.002-05:00

". . . if you must do it, it seems best to do it while shark hunting."

From AoM's recap of Hemingway's life. I've always assumed that Dos Equis's "Most Interesting Man in the World" is a rip-off of Ernest.

Up My Alley

2009-08-02T16:26:00.002-05:00

Read this news with interest: Lewis on Language (Unpublished).

I'm about a quarter of the way through Planet Narnia, incidentally. (I decided that having accepted its thesis on the basis of an article each in Touchstone and Books & Culture, and having enthusiastically passed it on to others, I ought to read the bookitself.) It's living up to my expectations.

It's also reminding me of works that I need to read (or read again): The Divine Comedy, Shakespeare's works, Canterbury Tales . . .

What's Twitter good for?

2009-07-29T17:02:00.002-05:00

Like many innovations, Twitter is a good angle to use to talk about something that's been talked about a thousand times before. To keep you updated on the "they"-as-a-gender-neutral-pronoun debate, I give you this article from the New York Times Magazine. (HT: Adam from ElShaddai Edwards from Mike Aubrey)

It makes all the claims that have driven the good Professor Liberman to distraction: "Writers as far back as Chaucer used ['they'] for singular and plural, masculine and feminine." "Many great writers — Byron, Austen, Thackeray, Eliot, Dickens, Trollope and more — continued to use they and company as singulars." Merriam-Webster accepts it. No examples are cited, though, disappointing my hopes of seeing a true clash of the titans as the Times rose to accept Liberman's challenge.

The article's authors (Patricia T. O'Conner and Stewart Kellerman) make an argument I've not heard before, which is that the idea that "he" can refer to both genders stems from "Anne Fisher, an 18th-century British schoolmistress and the first woman to write an English grammar book." They cite the delightfully named Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade for this fact (I assume to chase it down and find examples, one would have to read her book. Ooo, it's only $137 at Amazon!)

It seems that it ought to be incredibly easy to decide between O'Conner/Kellerman and Liberman on this point: one side claims that "he" was never used as a gender-neutral pronoun before Anne Fisher; the other claims that "they" was never so used before the mid-20th century. This calls for some collating. This calls for a dissertation.

On second thought, before I send in my application for Ph.D. programs, I can think of one data point off the top of my head that seems to blow O'Conner/Kellerman out of the water: the earliest English Bible translators used "he" as a gender-neutral pronoun. Now, maybe one could argue that that usage was a carry-over from Greek and Hebrew, and that the English Bibles reshaped the language and paved the way for Fisher's declaration . . .

I've been compulsively listening to Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me for the last few months (funniest show on radio), and I notice that Peter Sagal always says to the Not My Job guest, "Answer two of the questions correctly and you'll win our prize for one of our listeners: Carl Kassel's voice on their home answering machine." That sheds no light on the subject, I guess, since I think Liberman would accept using "their" with "one."

Husserl and the Hyrax: Part I

2009-07-25T11:39:00.002-05:00

First, let me pay my debts. Adam directed me to the Economist article, and my descriptions of Husserl's categories come from James K. A. Smith, "Tongues as 'Resistance Discourse,'" in Speaking in Tongues: Multi-Disciplinary Perspectives, edited by Mark J. Cartledge.

So what are hyraxes singing about? According to the article, they sing about their vital stats: weight, size, hormones, and status. Not as interesting a topic as the pangs of unrequited love, but musical tastes do differ.

Of course, the article tries to draw inferences about human singing from animal mating calls, eventually suggesting that when you sing about unrequited love, what you're really singing about is yourself--your size, anatomy, and hormones.

Let's consider this understanding of meaning or "aboutness." You see a teenage boy playing guitar and singing "Hey There Delilah" in front of a teenage girl. You could say that his song means "I am a suitable mate," that the song is about his sexual maturity and dexterity. There seems to be something to that understanding, but by itself, it's a very narrow and monochromatic definition of meaning. A richer understanding of meaning would be able to say (at least) that the song is about a woman named Delilah, beloved by the narrator, who is in school in New York City, far from her lover. One should also be able to say that the song means, "Isn't love a beautiful anguish?" or "Remain faithful to me as I remain faithful to you," or any number of other statements.

The first level of meaning, in which the song is about the singer's vital stats, seems much farther removed from the second and third levels (in which the song is about the people named in the song and about other people by extension, respectively).

In future posts we'll explore these different levels of meaning, bringing in some vocabulary drawn from Husserl in particular.

In the meantime, ponder the following ways of referring to meaning or "aboutness," all taken from the article (my italics throughout). Do they all mean the same thing? Do some correspond better to the first level? Others to the second and third?

"Zoologists have worked out the meaning of some [animal] calls . . . the rattle made by a male barn swallow indicates his testosterone levels."

"what hyraxes were singing about."

"correlations between the pattern of a hyrax's song and other details of its anatomy and behaviour."

"Wailing . . . indicates weight."

"A mid-song sound . . . communicates size."

"snorts . . . are connected to . . . hormones."

"peaks in snort-frequency provided information on . . . dominance."

"these are all honest signals."

Husserl and the Hyrax: Introduction

2009-07-01T17:21:00.003-05:00

The title of this post alludes to a book by Umberto Eco: Kant and the Platypus, which I picked up one day in the King's Cross bookstore. I knew Eco only from The Name of the Rose (loved it) and Foucault's Pendulum (also great; should be regulated as a mind-altering substance). Oh, and I knew that in his professional life, Eco had something remotely to do with linguistics.

I have no idea what Kant would have to say about the platypus, since I couldn't make it past the introduction of Eco's book. Nor do I understand what it is, exactly, that Eco does and how it relates to linguistics. But I'm a sucker for a catchy title.

The Husserl I refer to is Edmund Husserl, a German philospher. The hyrax (or coney, or rock badger) is, as we all know, this.

In my posts on this topic, I'll try to be easier to read than Eco. Since this is the first post in the series, it's sort of like the first day of a class. You know, the day where the teacher blathers on a bit, asks a provocative question, and hands out the reading. Hence:

Blather #2: A friend of mine used to say that one of the most important questions in a debate was "What's the meaning of meaning?" Ironically, I had no idea what he meant by the question.

Question: "What's the meaning of "meaning"?

Reading: "The song of songs," The Economist, January 15, 2009.

Is this an orthodox restatement of the Golden Rule?

2009-06-22T21:10:00.001-05:00

"Before it's all over, everything you've done to other people gets done to you."

Please respond in comments.

What's the Deal with the Apocrypha?

2009-06-15T20:41:00.003-05:00

My dad asked me to explain the Apocrypha the other day, and I couldn't do it. I remembered some details: the Jews rejecting the books in the first century; Jerome putting them aside in the fifth century; the King James translators including them in the seventeenth century. But I had to do some reading to remember the whole story. Here's my spiel:

What's the deal with the Apocrypha?

The Apocrypha is a collection of books written by Jews in the time between the testaments, that is, between Malachi (around 400 B.C.) and Christ (first century A.D.). The Jews at the time of Christ read these books in private, but they were not read aloud in the synagogues like the Old Testament was. Early Christians, like the Jews around them, read these books as well. Like the Jews, they also seem to have read them in private rather than in the church service.

It's important to know that Christians mostly used the Greek translation of the Old Testament (called the Septuagint) rather than the original Hebrew. The Apocryphal books and the New Testament were also written in Greek. So the Jews in the first century, who were arguing with Christians over religious doctrines, probably became very suspicious of any scriptures that weren't written in Hebrew. They stopped using the Apocryphal books not long after Christianity emerged.

Christians continued to read the Apocryphal books, however, and when they starting putting all the scriptures together in bound books (instead of collecting them on scrolls), they included the Apocryphal writings mixed in with the Old Testament. When the Bible was translated from Greek to Latin, the Apocryphal books were translated too. But when Jerome (an Italian monk who lived in Bethlehem and learned Hebrew) was asked to revise the Latin translation (in the 400s), he made a distinction between the Old Testament books and the Apocryphal books, which were "not in the canon." The Protestant Reformers felt the same way, but none of them seem to have felt it was appropriate to remove the books from printed Bibles. Luther did pull them out of their places interspersed throughout the Old Testament and set them between the Old and New Testaments. This was what the King James translators did as well. The stance of the reformers could be summarized with these words (from the Thirty-nine Articles of the Anglican church):

"And the other Books (as Hierome [Jerome] saith) the Church doth read for example of life and instruction of manners; but yet doth it not apply them to establish any doctrine; such are these following:" . . . and it goes on to list the Apocryphal books.

Catholics responded to this by rising up to defend the Apocryphal books, declaring at the Council of Trent that they were canonical, with the same authority as the Old Testament.

So when did the books drop out of Protestant Bibles? Well, the short answer is that it was easier and cheaper to print Bibles without the Apocrypha. The major driving force in putting Bibles in the hands of people from the 1800s on were the Bible societies. These organizations (think of them as the Gideons of that time) were made up of people from different denominations (Anglicans, Methodists, Presbyterians, Baptists, even Unitarians in the early days) who all wanted to make the Bible available. They all contributed money to the cause, but to keep everyone happy, they agreed that the money would only go to printing and distributing the straight Bible text—no notes or commentary. The Apocryphal books weren't considered part of the straight Bible text—they might be helpful reading, but they weren't important enough to print in these low-cost evangelistic Bibles.

Eventually, most Protestants lost familiarity with the books. They came to think of them as a Catholic thing, something to be resisted and argued against. But I don't think that's the right attitude to have. These books were, after all, written by Jewish believers, not by heretics or anything. It's probable that Jesus and the apostles had read them; the early church certainly read them; the Reformers read them. I'd argue that it won't damage a Christian's faith to read them. On the contrary, they can help us understand the world in which Jesus and the early church lived. They can probably teach us something about God and his dealings with his people, even if they aren't inspired and authoritative like the Old and New Testaments. There are a lot of books out there written by faithful believers, and we can benefit from them even if they aren't inspired. That's where I'd place the Apocrypha.

Works consulted:

The NIV Study Bible, "The Time between the Testaments" (Zondervan, 1985)
The Book of Common Prayer
Introduction to the History of Christianity (ed. Timothy Dowley, Fortress Press, 2002)

A Film Called Awful

2009-06-14T20:22:00.002-05:00

Yesterday we bought A Fish Called Wanda on VHS for a quarter. We watched it today and promptly threw the cassette into the garbage so that no one ever has to watch it again. At no point was the film even mildly funny. After the first third of the movie, we wondered if we'd stumbled on another Brassed Off. Not even a brief cameo by Stephen Fry could save it. I can only assume that the entire Motion Picture Academy was high on cocaine while watching the movie and deciding to give Kevin Kline an Oscar.

Father Brown in the Excluded Middle

2009-06-01T20:35:00.004-05:00

Happy belated birthday to Gilbert Keith. In his honor, I'll finally write this post I've been meaning to get to for months. It's inspired by an odd coincidence.

My biweekly reading group assignment was "The Blue Cross," the first Father Brown mystery. (Reading that is probably a better use of your time than reading the rest of this post, so if you leave now, I'll understand. Unless you're Anatoly Liberman, in which case, read on.) I had just read the assignment when Anatoly Liberman's Monthly Gleanings popped into my RSS reader. At the bottom of his post, Liberman returned to a well-worn topic, the use of they as a gender-neutral substitute for he.

A little background for those who don't read Monthly Gleanings: Liberman has made what I would call an aesthetic objection to they as a singular pronoun. The particularly ugly sentence he highlighted (from the Minnesota Daily, I assume) was "If a tenant has an eviction on their record, it does not mean they were a bad tenant."

Liberman regards such grammar as "a horror." He also objects that it is inaccurate to defend it as a longstanding feature of good English. In the last two decades, some respected dictionaries (Random House, Heritage, American Oxford) introduced notes that claim a long and respectable pedigree (e.g., Austen, Thackery, Shaw) for singular they. Liberman might accept the example sentences ("To do a person in means to kill them") as good English, but makes a distinction between they with antecedents like person, someone, and anyone and its standing in for tenant, borrower, and fisherman. He challenged his readers to find examples of the "bad tenant" variety that predate the 1960s and 70s.

Still with me? Okay, here's the passage from "The Blue Cross" (1910) that a reader submitted in response to the challenge:

"There was one thing which Flambeau, with all his dexterity of disguise, could not cover, and that was his singular height. If Valentin's quick eye had caught a tall apple-woman, a tall grenadier, or even a tolerably tall duchess, he might have arrested them on the spot."

This is not precisely parallel to the "bad tenant" sentence. Chesterton did not write "If Valentin's quick eye had caught a tall pedestrian, he might have arrested them on the spot." But it doesn't fall into Liberman's other category. Chesterton did not write "If Valentin's quick eye had caught anyone particularly tall, he might have arrested them on the spot." What we have here is a tertium quid, an unjustly excluded middle: them stands in for regular old nouns like apple-woman, grenadier, and (or?) duchess, though not as blatantly as it did for the bad tenant.

Inexplicably, Liberman demonstrated no interest in this fascinating specimen. He dismissed it with a single sentence: "Surely, them does not refer to the apple woman, duchess, or grenadier separately." I was shocked. "On the contrary," I thought, "surely them must refer to these three separately! It cannot refer to them collectively, can it? It is precisely the indeterminacy of the gender (whether because of the mixed group or the possibility of masquerade) that prompted Chesterton to use them in place of him."

A few hours later, as I joined my colleagues—all of them veteran copy editors—to discuss "The Blue Cross," I pointed out the sentence and asked them about it.

"If the nouns were changed, would the sentence still make sense?" I asked. "Let's say it read:

'If Valentin's quick eye had caught a tall apple seller, a tall grenadier, or even a tolerably tall duke, he might have arrested them on the spot.'"

The copy editors wrinkled their noses and shook their heads. "It would have to be 'arrested him,'" one responded. The others agreed.

Notice that this verdict both confirms Liberman's initial disdain for the "bad tenant" sentence (if the copy editors had liked "bad tenant" sentences, they would have accepted my emended "Blue Cross" sentence) and challenges his dismissal of the original "Blue Cross" sentence. There is room for the case against the frivolous extension of singular they, especially when the referent's gender is known. But I believe the "Blue Cross" sentence shows that when gender indeterminacy is forefronted in the speaker's mind, using they is a handy and longstanding tactic, even for ordinary nouns. As Chesterton shows, it can even lend itself to rather elegant writing.

Best. Magazine. Ever.

2009-05-28T23:12:00.002-05:00

Books & Culture is the best magazine I have ever read. It's published by Christianity Today International, which is headquartered a couple blocks away from my apartment. CTI (as everyone around here calls it) has had to trim some of their publications recently. Thankfully, Books & Culture was spared. But I decided that, cheap as I am, it's time I actually subscribed. You should too. Go here to get your trial issue.

Special K, I specially direct this recommendation to you. A good chunk of the books reviewed are non-fiction, which I know you are partial to. I think you would really enjoy this magazine.

I love a good sonnet

2009-05-27T17:56:00.003-05:00

In high school, I heard a translation of a sonnet attributed to Michelangelo. It was in a video about the Renaissance artists. I went up to the teacher after class and asked if I could play it back. I rewound and played the laserdisc over and over till I had the whole thing written down.

Ten years later, I think that piece of paper is in my apartment somewhere. But I can't find it, so here's what I remember:

In a frail boat through stormy seas, my life
In its course has now reached the harbor
The bar of which all men must cross
To render an account of good and evil done.

I now know how laden with error
Was that fantasy which made Art for me
An idol and a king, and how mistaken
Is that earthly love which all men seek.

What of those thoughts of love, once light and gay,
As now I approach a twofold death?
One is certain; the other menaces.
No brush, no chisel quiets the soul
Once turned to the divine love of him
Who stretches out his arms on the cross.

New Context, New Meaning

2009-05-19T22:05:00.003-05:00

Lileks once wrote of attending a performance of the musical Annie: "That 'Hard-Knock Life' tune is very odd. (Wonder how many people in the audience wondered why they were playing a Jay-Z song.)"

Indeed. I remember the first time hearing a recording of Sinatra singing "Love and Marriage." It didn't compute. Why would Sinatra sing the theme song from "Married With Children"? There's no way he was a fan of that show . . .

Of course, I eventually realized that the Sinatra performance came first, but I still can't stand to hear him sing the song. Everything Sinatra touched he infused with class, but Al Bundy and Fox managed to wring all the class out of that one.

So our topic is clearly songs which once had an independent existence, but have been completely absorbed into and associated with some new context. Could be a movie that used the song ("Time Is on My Side" in Fallen?), a certain artist's signature performance (Whitney Houston's cover of "I Will Always Love You"), a parody ("Just Eat It"?).

What comes to your mind?

Guitar picking

2009-05-13T21:50:00.002-05:00

I've been whiling away many a free hour playing around with the guitar. I come home from work, do a few household chores, and play for a bit before the boss comes home and I have to get back to business. That time has traditionally been blogging time, so things have been sparse around here of late.

Here are some of the songs I've enjoyed playing. Understand that I play all of them badly.

#1: You Ain't Going Nowhere by Bob Dylan. Super super easy to play, and it sounds really cool. There are multiple sets of lyrics out there. I prefer the ones with "Gonna see a movie called Gunga Din." It's also not clear to me what the lyric after Oooweee is. I've been singing "You ride me high," but it could be something "behind"? Who knows?

#2: I Am an Orphan Girl by Gillian Welch. Chaka is sentimental. Not Thomas Kinkade sentimental, but singing this song subjects me to excessive lacrimosity.

#3: The Story by Brandi Carlile. I like the instructions that go along with the tab on this one. "Begin strumming softly . . . Start rocking out like your hair is on fire . . . Back to fingerpicking . . . Hair is on fire again." Cough loudly when I get to the F# minor, you really don't want to hear that.

#4: Don't Let Your Deal Go Down by Charlie Poole. Because there are things I need to know, like who's gonna shoe your pretty little feet?

#5: The Scarlet Tide by Allison Kraus. This one is actually a cheater transposition, and I still can't play it well. Cool song, though.

#6: Clavelitos. (Traditional Tuna song. That's right, Tuna. Nothing to do with fish.) You know this song, you just don't know that you know it. Picture an Andalucian scene, a Spanish lad with a guitar serenading a young lady on the balcony above. Okay, got that pictured? That song he's playing? That's the one.

My favorite part is the "No! te! creas que ya no quiero--es que no te los pude traer." So many preposed pronouns! It sounds so dramatic, but it's actually a pretty lame line (see the translation here; the whole song actually loses some power in translation. I'll give you a bell! Woohoo!).