All posts in January 2008

(Yes, I know that “ecstasy” is already from the Greek.)   Selections from Migne’s Patrologia Graeca in PDF files, available for downloading. Church-historical bliss!

I have to get some upgraded preaching gigs. . . .

I’ve been observing radio silence for the past few days, mostly just from distraction and preoccupation. It felt nice; I concentrate hard on what I write in public, and telling myself to just let it rest for a while came as a pleasant break. We drove down to Baltimore in our rented car (Margaret keeps…

I am the case study of why people don’t expect shabbily-dressed professors to make important financial decisions. Same with abstracted, spiritual clergy — so I have a double case of financial naïveté. But I could have told you, and in fact I did tell some unfortunate bystanders, that subprime loans and a housing bubble were…

This morning, NPR is featuring a story about states where repeated failures and justifiable suspicions have provoked election officials to abandon electronic voting machines in favor of good ol’ fashioned paper ballots. I’m glad that they’re covering the story about the risks attendant upon black-box voting systems, but there’d have been no need to waste…

Thinking about retrospective judgment the other day piqued me to follow up my post on 1980 in music with another 25-year retrospective, this year focusing on 1983. Rather than running through all the categories and subcategories from Grammys and Oscars, I’ll exercise my authorial prerogative to award retrospective honors on an as-merited basis. That being…

Sarah Vowell contributed a glorious column on Martin Luther King to the Monday New York Times The world’s flags graded for their vexillological aesthetics. As a student of heraldry and vexillology, I appreciated the author’s critical approach, though I’m less troubled than said author by some design decisions. I don’t disapprove of including “things” on…

Someone in our household — I will not name names — has fallen under the spell of the theme music They Might Be Giants recorded for Dunkin Donuts ads, “Things I Like to Do” (this year’s 30-second version, not the 2006 60-second version). I offered to track it down online, but have been able to…

Choire Sicha posted a guest column on Jason Kottke’s blog concerning his shifting evaluation of PJ Harvey’s most recent recording, White Chalk; “Back in September, Pitchfork gave White Chalk a 6.8, and I would have given it a worse score even as recently as December,” but now he regards it as her best.   If…

Michael White’s column in yesterday’s New York Times touches on a heap of issues about which I care a lot. What counts as the true version of a Beethoven sonata? On what basis do we form such judgments? What do we make of divergent rival accounts of “the real Beethoven”? When Barry Cooper suggests that…

It was impossible to imagine that she would not return. I noticed a few days ago, in my newsreader, but it’s time to point out right on the blog that Halley’s blogging again.

Permit me to begin with an ex cathedra pronouncement: Word processing applications tend to be abominable tools for designing pages. They demonstrate a strong commitment to certain generic assumptions about text manipulation that derive from typewriting constraints. As a result, casual users (even expert users, most of the time) prepare documents whose line length extends…