Ruminations about hermeneutics, theology, theory, politics, ecclesiastical life… and exercise.
I’m still with Tom and Jeff and other critics of the NYTimes’ management and practice — but I have to give props to their new web interface (hat tip, Daring Fireball). Clean, functional, and if you’re using a standards-compliant browser, the headline typefaces correspond to the print edition’s.
The bureaucratic jargon over here can be hard to puzzle out sometimes. Either I’ve been issued a National Health number, or I’ve been drafted into MI-5 with a license to inflict paper cuts.
(I tried to post this last week, but I couldn’t effectively copy-and-paste the YouTube link.)
All the fountain pen lovers are exuberantly tweeting and linking to this video of the Japanese Prime Minister swapping out his Mont Blanc for a Pelikan. While I like both families of fountain pens, my chagrin (for the laid-by Mont Blanc 149) and glee (for the triumphant Pelikan 800) are all attenuated by the likelihood that the Prime Minister had just run out of ink, or had a momentary dry nib — and that can happen to anyone, with any pen, especially if the user isn’t as preoccupied with pen maintenance as are some of us. Frankly, I think it’s a good thing that he has more on his mind than refilling his Mont Blanc; if I were Prime Minister, people would have the right to grouse about my spending time filling, polishing, flushing, repairing, and browsing for fountain pens.
When I was preparing for the SBL, I decided that if ever there was a paper that cried out to be delivered on the Goodacre model, it was this. I therefore did not have a handy, full-formed manuscript of my talk available to post right away when I got back from the meeting — just my prompts. I’ve finally transcribed the prompts in the order in which I think they work best, fleshed them out with some of what I might have said,and now present it as the raw material for what might turn out later to be an article or a chapter. I’ll leave the placeholder text from the earliest version of this posting in the block-quote below, and the presentation itself begins after the jump. Eventually I’ll look into links and embedded video for the music to which I refer; oh, and I use curly-braces to designate something that would be a footnote, if only simple HTML were conveniently agreeable to rendering footnotes.
(This is really just a placeholder post. I have to submit copy for a Call For Papers, and I want to make a pointer to the place where I’ll have posted the paper — so I’m leaving this post here, and will come back to put the paper here when I have tim to hammer it into postable shape.
At that time, I’ll delete all this stuff and substitute an introductory explanation in the main post, with the draft of my paper in the “below the fold” part. I’m making headway on these things, honest, although people keep popping up with new meetings and tasks that need to be done right away.)