Month: October 2009

This afternoon, after a week of exchanging emails with HP Support, my printer has accepted the UK ink cartridges that I bought for it last Saturday. The cartridges said nothing about being suitable only for machines bought in the UK; they said they would work in an HP C4480, the exact model printer that I shipped over here; and when I installed them, they reported that they were “incompatible” with my US-purchased printer. Needless to say, I was irked.
 
I just counted; HP Support sent me twelve messages since I registered my frustration last Saturday (and of course, I sent fourteen, since I started the chain and ended it). Bruce, Ashley, Ronnie, and Nick gave me instructions that differed at least slightly each time, and sometimes their instructions didn’t fit the model of printer I’m working with. All told, I know I spent more than two hours fiddling with the printer and fulfilling their instructions. On their end, they must have spent at least a half hour or so. It’s hard for me to believe that companies actually come out ahead by devising, installing, and maintaining region-restrictions on their products. But hey, I’m a lecturer in biblical studies; what do I know?

I’ve blogged before about my recipe for supplemented ramen (and since then, Brooke has suggested adding egg to the list of potential supplementing ingredients, and that makes a delightful difference — thanks Brooke!), but for a couple of reasons I’m beginning to explore beyond merely supplementing ramen packages.
 
Reason One, I’m determined to start improving my cooking habits in general. Ramen is cheap and easy, even supplemented, and that helps provide simple, inexpensive, rapid food at the end of a tiring day. But I ought to be able to put together a simple noodle meal without a package, so I want to figure out how to do it myself. Reason Two, I’m concerned to achieve more complete ingredient control. Margaret will be here for a couple of weeks this winter, and I’d like to be able to prepare gluten-free comestibles for my wonderful wife. And Mark reminded me that some ramen is not vegetarian-friendly, and Margaret noted that I should watch out for MSG and salt. OK already; if I make it myself, these will not be problems.
 
So what will I do? Rice noodles shouldn’t be too hard to come by, so I’ll track some of those down in preference to the wheat noodles in most ramen packages. Plain rice would do, too, if I can’t put my hands on mei fun (I have a rice cooker here, thank heaven). I’ll throw in some of the supplementary ingredients that I cataloged before. That leaves the “flavor sacs,” the little packets of chemicals that induce you to think that you’re eating something tastier than just boiled noodles.
 
After some googling around, I have a line on some DIY seasoning combinations. I’d like to be able to make one or two different curry versions, a version that tilts more toward teriyaki flavor, and perhaps one other direction. Vegetable bouillon will be one ingredient; garlic, curry, ginger, chili (for me, not Margaret), perhaps powdered milk, soy sauce. I’m not sure what to try for proportions (and I don’t mean to use all the ingredients I just listed in every dish!), and I’m open to nominations for other ingredients, but when I arrive at substitute seasoning recipes for my DIY “ramen” noodle dishes, I’ll definitely post them here.

I have a colleague at Glasgow named Yvonne (Sherwood), and each time I send her an email I remember the pioneering African-American newscaster on Pittsburgh’s KDKA news station, Yvonne Forston,* whom the irascible Bill Currie persistently used to call “ ‘Y’-vonne” (pronounced “Wye – von”). I remembered it, but hadn’t known of other details of Yvonne Forston’s career, and I definitely hadn’t remembered that Bill Currie used to broadcast for the woe-begotten ACC athletic teams down the road from Duke. Now all that stuff has come back to life for me.
 
* She seems to have made relatively little impression on the Web; that’s a wrong thing, and if I still lived in the greater Philadelphia area I would track her down and try to get more details and reminiscences to record for digital archives.
 

One of the things that strikes me as odd about my current school is the perfect ease with which it tolerates being identified as either the University of Glasgow or Glasgow University. There are both sorts of signs around the campus. Campus acronyms frequently have recourse to GU; the official functions and statements typically go out as the University of Glasgow. But both names function, and I’ve heard no concern that one of them should predominate over the other.

Judy’s comment struck home to me. Something in the whole interaction was deeply off-kilter, but I couldn’t figure it out. Then, while I was at Iceland again, I had a moment of clarity.
 
The problem, I think, lay in the fact that, yes, people were saying “Sorry” to me (as one would expect in the US) — but they had a funny tone in their voices because they would ordinarily have expected me to say “Sorry” first, where I was saying “Excuse me.” So I said something that (as Mark suggested) sounded stroppy to my interlocutors, and they answered “Sorry” — and I was hearing “Sorry” as part of the conversation — and I couldn’t figure out what was awry with the interaction because I was hearing what I expected. OK, lesson learned, I won’t say “Excuse me” but “Sorry.” I almost look forward to standing in a crowded aisle.

Busy transcribing my remarks given at the Duke Archaeology and Politics conference. I was certain I had done so already. Evidently, I was wrong.

I’ll try to get all of them out in one post, so it’ll be easier to ignore them (and I’ll put them in an “extended`” entry, too). A number of persistent annoyances have been ganging up and trying to force themselves from my ill-tempered moments onto the internet, and perhaps by offering them their own little corner, I’ll get them off my back. Nothing wrong with Glasgow, neither the University nor the dear green place itself — just some odds and ends that don’t fit right with smooth sailing through my daily life. Continue reading “Complaints”

I was going to post a video of albino moose here today, in honor of my father-in-law (whom the kids know as “Pa Moose”), to mark the fiftieth anniversary of Pa Moose and Grandma Pat. Unfortunately, being of an incurably investigative frame of mind, I poked around for a while and noticed that some of the same images were being reported as originating in very different locations. That led me to the invaluable Snopes.com where — now pause for a moment, who would have thought that “albino moose” would require a Snopes search? I rely on Snopes frequently, and when I started this post, it would never have occurred to me it would end this way — it turns out that although someone somewhere took some photos of unusual white-haired moose, the moose involved are probably not albino, and they did not magically transport themselves, in the same poses, to several different states and provinces. It’s all a bit of a let-down.
 
But the point is — Happy Anniversary, Pa Moose and Pat! Congratulations on fifty wondrous years!

To everyone who has invited me to join their networks on Linkedin: I’m trying to accept, but for some reason Linkedin doesn’t want to add anyone.
 
And if you asked to Facebook friend me and I didn’t accept it’s probably because I haven’t the faintest recollection who you are. If you don’t jog my memory, I’ll continue to ignore your invitation (so I suppose that yes, I am ignoring you). And if I really don’t know you at all (you’re a friend of a remote friend, or you think we have common interests), please excuse me if I don’t add you to my already overinflated network. Or you could make a real connection with me, leaving comments now and then at the blog, please don’t email me — I’m drowning in email (that’s directed to people I don’t already know, not friends and relatives), that sort of thing.

People have asked me what I think about Pope Benedict’s Apostolic Constitution permitting Anglicans lay and ordained to join themselves to the Roman Catholic Church while maintaining at least some of the liturgical and theological inheritance of the Anglican Tradition. Since I’m a pretty resolutely catholic-minded theologian, and an extremely resolutely Anglican-Episcopalian, there’s a lot to say about this move.
 
First, though, let’s get over the “winning”/“losing” game of numbers and political maneuvering. Christians should have learned at the foot of the cross that “winning” and “losing” in temporal terms don’t have anything to do with the truth of the gospel. Benedict, I am very confident, is not trying to “poach” Anglicans, and Rowan Williams isn’t in an ecclesiological arm-wrestling match to constrain Tiber-leaning clergy and congregations. If I understand Williams aright, he consistently aims at articulating the most precise and truthful ecclesiology he can, regardless of who likes it or doesn’t. (I’m willing to grant that he may not always succeed, or that he may sometimes succumb to tailoring his arguments to fit one audience or another, but even when he lapses he’s a sharper theologian than all but a newborn’s handful of his detractors. Few things trouble me more than self-congratulatory theological hooligans who paint their faces with the colours of their favoured partisan, then hoot and jeer if they don’t “win” in any given church showdown.)
 
Continue reading “Rome-ing In The Gloaming”

Let’s say I’m trying to navigate a crowded aisle at Iceland. A somewhat oblivious young person is staring blankly at the varieties of butter, margarine, and related spreads. In the US, I’d say “Excuse me” in a gentle, regretful way — and I’ve been doing that over here, too. Over here, though, people say “Sorry” when they make room for me to get by, with a tone that sounds unfamiliar to me.
 
Should I be saying something different? Is “Sorry” a very conventional response to “excuse me” over here?

Chris pointed out to me that our lovable madcap Saviour has been at it again, this time manifesting himself in the wood grain of the door to a “male toilet” at the local branch of Ikea, just outside Glasgow in Braehead. What makes this story unusual among the “face of Jesus seen on freezer/grilled cheese sandwich/burrito/fingerprint” stories is that I was there yesterday afternoon as the news was breaking. I observed no commotion, no rowdy pilgrims, no healings or feedings (and I could’ve used a few loaves — it was dinnertime). In fact, I didn’t see Jesus at all. I probably walked right past him without even noticing. Someone could write a maudlin country song about that, and I’d only ask for a small cut of the royalties.
 
I had spent £10 on a cab ride to get to Ikea because I needed a work chair for my flat, and I thought I’d pick up a laptop-height table so I could surf comfortably while sitting on the couch. Lacking a car, I had tried to order the items in question online, but o-o-o-o-o-oh no, Scots may not buy from Ikea online. So I telephoned the store, but no-o-o-o-o-o, they may not accept phone orders (you can order by phone from Edinburgh, but there’s a £60 delivery charge). I looked around for alternatives, but I didn’t see the same combination of suitable style and value, so I clenched my teeth and rode out to Braehead. (By the way, I’ve only been inside a motor vehicle twice in the last six weeks: once when I caught a ride from the man who brought the boxes of my personal effects from my office to my flat, and yesterday riding to and from Braehead. It’s weird to go from “driving somewhere pretty much every day” to “hardly ever stepping in a car.”) The cab fares to and from my flat still came in less than the fee for delivering the goods, so I came out ahead — if somewhat frustrated.
 
To abbreviate an already overlong story, I found Dave and Moses (the table and chair for which I was looking), and made one impulse buy:
 

 
There are still a few battle-scarred veterans of the days when the world of blogs could be set ablaze by controversies over the relative merits of soap-dispensing dish scrubbers. But sentimental guy that I am, a tear bedewed my eye as I spotted Ikea’s answer to the iconic Dishmatique, and I had to pick one up. Tonight, when I do the dishes, I will raise it high and laud the soapy name of Delacour!

I’m plucking out readings for a course on interpretive method, and since it’s my job to introduce plain old historical criticism I turned to obvious prominent reference works as possible sources for readings, or for guidance in my endeavor to find other such sources.
  
Neither Abingdon’s Dictionary of Biblical Interpretation nor the Anchor[-Yale] Bible Dictionary has an entry under “Historical Criticism,” nor “History” (in the critical-interpretive sense), nor “Historiography” (again in the contemporary sense; the A[Y]BD has articles on Mesopotamian, Judaic, and Greco-Roman historiography).
  
I suppose that historical-critical interpretation is so transparently obvious that it needs no discussion?

While I was preoccupied with unpacking and conferring last week, the other (of the two topics I alluded to before) involved developments in the Google Book Empire. So, for instance, the NYTimes acknowledged the groundswell of resistance to the proposed settlement between Google and the Authors Guild, and also posed the question “Will [Digital] Books Be Napsterized?.”
 
For the time being, we’re all still stumbling around in the twilight of print-oriented copyright regimes. Change will come; the pressure of “napsterized” versions will contribute to that, as will consumer demand and competition, once real competition gets started. Eventually, we ought to develop a marketplace in which
  
  Books are published in digital-native form, without restrictive DRM;
  These digital editions are metadata-rich;
  Publishers acknowledge that in all but a very few cases, digital versions (even and especially when free) drive print sales up;
  Editions are not device-specific;
  We can concentrate on making better publications, rather than fighting over which redundant regulatory process controls them.
  
Someone will get there first, and benefit immensely from the market recognition. Since most of the world’s most treasured works are in the public domain, the first-comer can develop a powerhouse line of well-produced digital-print complementary editions (think Everyman’s Library or Modern Library) to support contemporary works. They’ll learn the ins and outs of production and marketplace first-hand, benefiting from their fundamental appreciation of the fact that digital publishing alters the conditions of print publishing at the same time it launches a new artery for distribution. And people will forget that this awkward intermediate phase ever afflicted us — I hope.

So far as I have been able to observe, one says “Cheers!” over here:
  (a) as an alternative to “Thanks!”
  (b) as an alternative to “Goodbye”
  (c) some other times for which I can’t account
  
Does it work as a response to someone else’s thank-you “cheers!” as well — that is, as an alternative to “You’re welcome”? Are there other pertinent usages of which I should be aware?

Last week provided two distinct sets of convergent story and commentary for me to blog, both of which I missed due to general busyness. In the first, Tom called my attention to Ajay Kapur’s memos advocating Plutonomy. At the same time, Calvin Trillin’s op-ed in the NYTimes ascribed the financial collapse to “smart guys working on Wall Street.”
 
Somehow, I don’t think these are commensurable explanations.

Mark and Nathan both pointed me to (different versions of) this helpful story from the BBC yesterday. Swamped with unpacking and conference-going, I would have missed it entirely. I’m doing pretty well, though; the main impediments to my understanding derive from the speed with which my local interlocutors speak and the extent to which they articulate their phonemes. If I can hear the sounds distinctly, I can usually puzzle out the vowel shifts and colloquialisms. If, on the other hand, they’re talking like Brad Pitt in Snatch (link — NSFW language alert), then I’m at sea.

Classes and a small conference on Religion and Technology, with fascinating people such as Siegfried Zielinski.