Best. Magazine. Ever.

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

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

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

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!).

Sci-fi Implausibilities

I thought the list below was about Star Trek when I first heard it. It comes from a recent episode of The Dollhouse. The scene begins with a character rattling off the list, but you don't hear the category until the list is complete. I believe the way they phrased it in the episode was "common sci-fi errors."

Of course, if they wanted to pick on Star Trek specifically, they could have added

time travel whenever the plot requires it
transferring matter to energy and back in defiance of Heisenberg
American English as a permanent lingua franca

But you protest "What about the Universal Translator? They aren't all speaking English, the translator just makes it seem that way." In which case, we can add to the list:

instantaneous, flawless machine translation

And for that matter

conducting any meaningful communication with aliens.

Understand, I'm not hating on Star Trek. I've been delightedly rewatching TNG episodes. I will be seeing the movie. But I think I would most enjoy seeing it with two of the great nitpicking fans, Phil Farrand and Joss Whedon.

Timor mortis conturbat me

It was time to renew my driver's license. Luckily, I didn't have to retake the written test; just had to look into the black box and read line 5. So with a faded portrait of Jesse White looking on (there's something extra-imperial about the fact that it was faded), the woman behind the counter rattled through her questions, checking off my answers with looping flicks of her pen.

"Has your license been suspended or canceled in this state or any other state."

"No."

"Do you have a condition that could cause you to lose consciousness."

"No."

"Do you want to be an organ donor."

I felt a rush of fear. This question.

* * * * *

I remember the first time it caught me off guard. I was getting my license for the first time; since these things are scheduled by your birthday, it would have been almost exactly twelve years ago. I didn't know that this person, this interchangeable processor in the basement of the county courthouse, would want to know what should be done with my body after I died. "Do you want to be an organ donor." My dad was with me, and I looked over at him. He shook his head and quietly said "No." I was relieved and unsettled. But the interchangeable processor didn't judge; she had moved on to the next question. It was over except for the lingering sense that I had somehow been weak; somehow faithless.

The question has been asked at least twice since then, and I've always been caught off guard. I've always said no and felt like a jerk. A cowardly, relieved jerk.

* * * * *

"Yes."

I felt like an idiot. A thoughtless, careless idiot.

The woman behind the counter looked me in the eye for the first time. "By saying yes, you acknowledge your agreement to donate your organs. Your next of kin has no authority to alter this decision. Do you agree?"

"Yes." I wanted to turn around, but I was too ashamed to make the train stop. My wife isn't comfortable with me changing our phone service to a different provider. And I just gave her rights regarding the disposition of my body over to the state of Illinois.

Idiot.

* * * * *

I don't like my new picture as well as I liked the old one. I wasn't ready when they snapped the photo. My mouth is smiling, but my eyes haven't caught on yet. (Those weak, misshapen eyes. Who's gonna want 'em?) I guess I was ready enough. I'm just going to have to go with it.

What is this a list of?

Earth-identical gravity and atmosphere on other planets
one ecosystem for a whole planet
human-alien cross-breeding without scientific intervention
flaming explosions and sound in a vacuum
light-speed travel
space storms
sexy sexy aliens

In this Moment, I’m the Anti-Jacobs

When you want to open a new document in Word 2007, you have to tell it whether you want a new document or a new blog post. I wanted to find out how to circumvent that time-wasting step (I never want to create a new blog post in Word). Googling did not give me a solution. The only posts I found were about how cool it is that you can post to your blog from Word. Er . . . okay. I guess you can use an iron to make grilled cheese, too, but isn't it kind of messy? I couldn't resist trying it out, so this is my first post published

<Word crash>

<Error reporting/>

<Document recovery/>

</Word crash>

from Word. Funny, Firefox tends not to crash in the middle of posts like that.

Alan Jacobs would ask why you want to use a program with all the overhead and complications of MS Word to write a blog post, which is essentially pure text. I mean, you can throw in some italics or bold, but it's just as easy to do that in Blogger if you really need to. Word can do things like small caps, but do those make it through all right to the web? I guess we'll see. Update: Nope.

By the way, Ctrl+N takes you directly to a new document, without asking if you want to blog. Save those precious seconds. Spend them blogging on trivialities.

Why O Why Did I Ever Leave My Home?

I spent a good chunk of my free time over the last couple weeks re-re-re-learning some basic chords on the guitar so that I could perform at my church's variety show night. Mrs. Chaka and I sang Green Pastures. I did a solo performance of One (inspired by the Johnny Cash version, but my octave of choice was more like Bono's).

Since I was getting my callouses back, I played around with a song that regularly gets stuck in my head: I Sang Dixie, by Dwight Yoakam. It belongs to a subgenre of country songs that I like to call "Why O Why Did I Ever Leave the South?" See also, Detroit City, Smoky Mountain Memories, perhaps even I Am a Man of Constant Sorrow belongs in this category ("I left my home . . . I'm bound to ride that northern railroad").

Laments about having left the North are, on the other hand, conspicuously nonexistent. Is no one sad to have left the North? Can Northerners not sing? Did they just not leave the North? Do they thing about things like Purple Rain instead?

Well, when I sing Man of Constant Sorrow, I sub in "Minnesota" as "the place where I was borned and raised." (It bugs me that Dylan didn't. Colorado? What does that have to do with anything?)

You could say that the real source of the Southerner-in-exile laments is the economically driven migration of workers from the rural South to industrial Northern cities (that theme is pretty blatant in Detroit City). But if that's the case, we should find similar genres of music for other migrations: Are there African American blues songs about longing for the South? Mexican songs about the harsh life in los EE. UU.? Traditional Native American chants about the joys of homey Siberia?

Well, are there? You tell me.

The Four Spiritual Laws in the Ancient Church

HT: Kouya Chronicle. I do not demean the first law. It is true. God does love you and has a wonderful plan for your life. His definition of wonderful may differ from yours.

Me and Hats

An accurate description of my predicament, from a Lileks screed:

"I love the era of fine hats, but I know I would have looked like someone in a Munchkin production of The Maltese Falcon.”

AT&T Technical Support: We Support You, Technically

Call center guidelines:

Assume the caller is an idiot
Assume that the caller's problem isn't AT&T's problem
Look for the quickest way to tell the caller that it isn't AT&T's problem
Empathy implies liability--try to get the caller to empathize with you
The magic words "I do apologize for the inconvenience" make everything okay

Taking a Guess at Nyungwe

David Ker posted the first five verses of John in Nyungwe and asked if his readers could figure out any of the words. Here are the verses and my notes:

1 Pakutoma akhali fala ndipo falalo likhali pabodzi na Mulungu. Ndipo iye akhali Mulungu. 2 Iye pakutoma akhali na Mulungu. 3 Bzinthu bzentse bzidalengedwa na iye, tsono palibe ciri-centse cidalengedwa mwakusaya iye. 4 Mwa iye mukhana moyo. Ndipo moyoyo ukhali ceza ca wanthu. 5 Ceza cikhabvunika mumdima. Mdima ulibe kucikunda.

Some nouns are easy: Mulungu is “God,” ndipo translates logos (whether it specifically means word, message, reality, etc., I don’t know for certain). Mdima seems to be “darkness,” ceza is “light,” wanthu would be “people,” and moyo “life.” None of these appear to have case endings. I guess the reduplication of –yo in verse 4 is something other than case.

I would guess that pa- is a prefix/preposition corresponding to “in.” Kutoma would then equal “the beginning.” I guess that bodzi is also a morpheme (“in bodzi with God”). The prefix/preposition mu- also overlaps with English “in.” Na seems to correspond to “with.” Ca also looks like a preposition, relating “light” to “people.” Perhaps “for”?

I don’t see an article.

Iye and –khali are doing a good bit of work, which suggests that they mainly convey grammar rather than semantics. I’m going to guess that iye is a pronoun (“he”) and the –khali words are forms of “to be.” Akhali goes with words of the class containing ndipo (masculine?) and ukhali with words of the class containing ceza and mdima (feminine?).

I notice possible morphemes bzi-nthu, bz(i)-entse, c(i)-entse, and wa-nthu. Could –nthu (or a chunk of it) mark the plural?

Bzi- appears with both nouns and verbs. Bzinthu bzentse should correspond to “all things” and bzidalengedwa to “were created/came to be.” Bzi- alternates with ci- on the verb for coming to be (dalengedwa). Do bzi- and ci- mark semantic classes?

While I’m on verbs, cikhabvunika must be “shines/has shined” and kucikunda “overcomes/has overcome.” Both have the ci-. If the translation preserves the distinction in tense between these two words, the reduplicated ku- in kucikunda looks like a tense marker. But there ought to be a pronoun in that clause with the antecedent ceza, so maybe ku- is a pronominal prefix.

Ulibe ought to be the negation in the last clause. There’s a palibe in verse 3 that could negate things coming to be apart from him.

That’s probably as close as I can get. I’m particularly intrigued by the bzi-/ci- alternation. And the fala words stumped me. Here’s my gloss:

In-beginning was fala word falalo was in-bodzi with God. Word he was God. 2 He in-beginning was with God. 3 Bzi-things bzi-all bzi-came-to-be with him, but not ciri-ci-all ci-came-to-be apart-from him. 4 Mwa him in-himself life. Word life was light for people. 5 Light ci-shines in-darkness. Darkness does-not it-overcome.