Month: January 2010

A few weeks ago I was stopping in at the Bay Tree, my Sunday morning oasis of coffee on my way to church, and business was slow. A couple of gents had come in to order coffee to take away, and I was waiting behind them to pay for the nutritious start to my morning, when the more gregarious of the two turned and addressed me. “Have you ever seen weather like this?” gesturing at the snowy sidewalk. I allowed that I hadn’t seen the like in Glasgow, although my sample size was relatively small. I had in fact seen wondrous blizzards when feet of snow fell, on top of a foot or more already on the ground — back in the States. “Oh, when’d you come here?” he asked. “Just September.” “From the States?” “Yes, indeed.”
 
“Did you understand what we were saying?” To this I had to admit that I would only have been able to puzzle out about half of the conversation (not that I’d been listening in). Their colloquy had fallen into the part of my consciousness to which I assign pleasant-sounding auditory static that I can’t figure out, apart from a word here or there.
 
“Well listen, the first thing to learn is to say, ‘Och aye, the noo.’” I know that nobody here says that; plenty of people say “Och, aye,” and occasionally people use “the noo” to refer to the present moment, but somehow “och aye, the noo” has become a stereotyped representation of Glaswegian patter. Rather than quibble with him, I made a few feeble efforts, and when he was satisfied he demanded to know why I was out early on a Sunday morning. I pointed out that I was on my way to church.
 
“Say a prayer for us, then,” he said, and introduced himself as Alan. I agreed to, and was about to leave, when he pressed his card into my hand. “Alan Marsh, pleased to meet you.”
 
Apparently Alan is something of a media person. His card shows a picture of him evidently from a production about Greyfriars Bobby (one imagines he played Bobby’s master, not the terrier himself); his IMDB entry indicates that he’s made walk-on appearances in a number of shows, of which I recognized the Glasgow detective program Taggart; he has made a YouTube video from stills of himself with some of the celebrities he has met (if I’m not mistaken, he’s kissing SuBo toward the middle of the sequence); but most of all, I like the portrait of him from the photographer’s Flickr site.

According to the Panopticlick, my browser profile is unique among the quarter million they’ve tested so far — so it would, presumably, be easy to track my browser if someone wanted to spy on my trail of fountain pen sites, Facebook, and Google Reader.
 
If I were worried about this, I’d complicate the enterprise by activating and deactivating various fonts in my system; that seems to be a strong element in the fingerprint process. That way I’d look different every time I browsed. But on the whole, I’m not yet concerned that I might be the target of a browser-based spy ring.

I remembered today that my blogiversary comes round this week. Came around, actually, on the 23rd. On 23 January, 2002, I entered a few settings into Blogger.com, pushed the “Post” button, and darned if it didn’t start up a website for me with my daily random thoughts.
 
Eight years of blogging have brought wonderful benefits, but I’m beginning to think I can see the end of it. Not immediately, but eventually I can envision putting more time into focused, larger-scale online writing, and leaving the dailyness to microblog vehicles. I dislike microblogging for a number of reasons, but the community into which I started out blogging has largely faded to inactivity (blogwise — I’m not accusing anyone of laziness). With less tightly-woven sense of writing to people and hearing from them, I feel less sense of obligation to put anything here at all. And I’m certainly busy enough, even busy relaxing, that I can imagine a time when I’m not inclined to bother at all anymore.
 
But that’s not today, and heaven knows I’m wrong often enough, so maybe I’ll just keep chugging away at it. The important thing, though, is that they’ve been eight really good years, with very wonderful friends and readers, and I can’t ever adequately say to the old gang who lured me into this uncanny world how grateful I am for their interest and encouragement. Seeing Euan the other day reminded me what a special experience that initiation was, and how magical the transition from one side of the looking-glass to the other. The neighbours who have moved into Blogaria after it became “normal,” after everyone rolled their eyes at the sound of the word “blog,” missed out on the frontier days — but I will remember them, and cherish them, for they helped keep me sane and showed me some of the cool tricks reality plays when you develop digital extremities.
 
Eight years — and who knows how much longer! Thanks, y’all, a million times. And see you tomorrow.

See also Kevin Marks and Michael Pusateri. By the way, Michael, thanks again for that breakfast in California five or so years ago.
 
And now Steven Frank’s. I know Kevin and Michael are certifiably smart, and Steven sounds as though he knows what he’s talking about. I’m beginning to think I was right, and that this iPad really is a big deal in the making, despite the antihype.

OK, first make the predictable two or three jokes, some cleverer than others. Get it out of your system, I can wait.
 
Now, what do I think of it? Well, I doubt I can afford one, and I’m not uneasy about that; by the time our finances stabilize, a great many other things will have settled down, too, including prices and apps and specs. If someone wants to donate one, I’ll gladly accept it and put it to work, but I’m not making puppy-dog faces at Margaret over iChat.
 
That being said, I can envision immediately what an iPad would mean for my daily routine. I look at the iPad and I see the main reason I haven’t been drawn into the Kindle world. An iPad will do more, better, in color — and it will do a very fine job of presenting books. And that’s the pulsing heart of such desire as I feel for one: as a recent immigrant to this thistl’d isle, I have had to leave a great proportion of my library behind (as I’ve said before). and I see in the iPad the device that could help me make the transition to digital reading. Most of what I read, I read in unattractive formats. Academic and technical books are generally published with minimal effort toward the selection of paper, ink, page design, illustration (if any), and so on. I would ecstatically trade all my bound copies of academic/technical works for digital copies. Please, make me the the offer. Please.
 
That doesn’t make me post-bibliophiliac. It does mean that I would select the bound books that I buy for their specific physical manifestations. I don’t want (only) digital versions of Edward Tufte’s books. I will continue buying various editions of the Greek New Testament, Bibles, and liturgical books (although digital editions of Ritual Notes, Fortescue, and A Priest’s Handbook would come in awfully handy). It does mean that book publishers will have to earn their bound-book sales, though at the same time they will be able to mass-market digital pulps. It means that bound-books will retain their value for the things that tangible books do best (archival copies, a centuries-old open format) and digital books will be able to flourish for the things they do best (convenience, portability, multimedia hybrid formats, perhaps some interactivity, low backlist storage costs, somewhat adjustable formatting (no separate large-type editions necessary, and machine-audio once the publishing industry recuperates from its cranio-rectal displacement disorder). All of this should be a very good thing for authors. Different, but very good.
 
And the super-good news, if Apple doesn’t ruin everything (and I don’t trust them not to), is that the iBook app rests on the open EPUB book format. I repeat my assertion/plea that this is the moment for some university press to lay claim to a huge untapped market share.
 
Plus the iPad will do much else beside present books — those other uses for which gadgeteers are slagging the current iteration of the iPad as “not good enough.” Word: if people play games, watch video, read and send email, and browse the web contentedly on smart phones (and they do — have you noticed?), they will do so all the more happily with an iPad. If the iPad is as blazingly fast as the people who handled it have suggested, all of these functions will work so smoothly that smartphones will again look as awkwardly clunky as did the monochrome dot-matrixed versions of those apps on early “web-ready” mobile phones. And come on, the bezel about which so many are griping serves the essential purpose of giving a margin for holding the unit. These aren’t flaws, they’re features.
 
Apple hasn’t played all its tablet cards yet. There’s an upgrade to the iPhone OS due in a short while that may well introduce limited multitasking. There’s plenty of opportunity for Apple design engineers to figure out what to do with a camera such that it fits functionally with the uses to which one might put a tablet (did people seriously imagine that someone might hold a legal-pad-sized item up in the air to take photos? Or that a webcam-like unit would work well with the positions and circumstances in which users will deploy iPads? There’s progress to be made on this front, but I think Apple is smart to wait and see how cameras fit into the emergent usage patterns for this new device). It’s going to get better.
 
So I’ve almost talked myself into lusting after one — I see a very strong case for the iPad as a note-taking, book-reading, video-watching, web- and mail-browsing mobile computing platform. That sounds like a huge winner to me. So I’m with Dave (except that he’ll own one before I will).

I’m greatly enjoying watching our friend Prof. Dale Martin’s lectures on the New Testament, available in video an audio forms through iTunes University. Dale’s a great scholar and a gifted lecturer, but it’s especially fun to see a good friend doing his stuff; we lecturers don’t often watch one another in action. (Mark, get Duke to set this up for you to go with your audio podcast!)

The University of Glasgow is undergoing a comprehensive academic reorganization; all the departments will be dissolved, and the various [now-called] Subject Areas will regroup into larger Schools. The ostensible rationale for this process mostly involves economies of scale, although some colleagues intimate that more sinister administrative priorities lurk behind that innocuous corporate façade. I regret the process; a few years ago, my appointment would have resided in a School of Divinity, then a Faculty of Divinity, then the Department of Theology and Religious Studies that I now inhabit. After those more glorious designations, a “Subject Area” sounds pretty shabby.
 
The reorg involved smaller departments such as ours finding larger departments that were willing to take us under their wing. Such negotiations involve politics, finances, personalities, rivalries, and every other sort of complexity, so it was a relief to learn that TRS would end up with the relatively congenial departments of English Literature, English Language and Scottish Literature. Give the strong literary interests of many TRS staff, this seems like a terrific match.
 
That much was decided a month or two ago; since then, though, we’ve been in a smouldering struggle to select an appropriate name for our newly-unified staff. One might think that “Humanities” would make a fitting label, but the History-based cluster grabbed that one first. “Letters” was mooted as one possibility, “Letters, Language, and Religion” as another, but nothing suited a preponderance of the decision-makers. Today, a final decision was announced: we will be a constituent of the School of Critical Studies, which suits me just fine.
 
I was talking to my across-the-hall office neighbour, and we decided the whole ludicrous drama should be written up in a David Lodge novel. That would make it easier to just laugh at the Sturm und Drang, rather than feeling vaguely apprehensive about what it all portends.

This one’s for my Mom:
 
The web has been kicking around an insufficiently documented photo of an owl in flight (“acidcow” is a photo sharing site, to which “sandhouse” pointed on his reddit account; I’ll happily link to the originating source if someone points it out to me):
 

 
That’s just beautiful, and all the more so when one considers the owl’s stunning adaptation to its hunting life. Owls are a totemic creature for my mother’s side of the family; I wish my Grandfather Emerson had had a chance to see this image.
 

A long time ago, I was a Baltimore Colts fan, and I was deflated by their Super Bowl loss to the New York Jets. All of which means I wouldn’t mind if the astroturf swallowed up both teams in the AFC championship.
 
And I see that Jay Leno put on a great show last night — as reported by an NBC affiliate. Hmmm.

The news outlets are picking up on a report from the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry that bemoans, yet again, the extent to which people use the internet for transmitting data — in particular, for transmitting digital versions of music recordings without the permission of the record companies. We’ve been ’round this bush a million times before, so let’s note by title (as it were) several features of this tendentious reproduction of the industry’s perspective.
 
The article cites industry sources repeatedly and verbatim, and summarizes their perspective, while only alluding vaguely to a contrary outlook. The article reproduces the biased vocabulary of the industry (“piracy”) rather than steering toward more even-handed vocabulary; the only time the article uses “file-sharing,” it quotes the phrase from an industry spokesperson who appends the modifier “illegal” to it. (“Piracy” and “file-sharing” are different phenomena, as the British couple whose lives hang in the balance can testify.) The statistics to which the article refers should be questioned, as in virtually every other case when the recording industry has generated estimates of their losses to file-sharing, the figures have rested on very tenuous assumptions about human behaviour. And the article insulates the industry from the pertinent criticism: that it has repeatedly failed to embrace a changing technological environment for what it makes possible, and adapt their business models to accommodate reality. Instead, they try to institute the legal perpetuation of the ephemeral state of affairs that began about a hundred years ago, and will end pretty much as soon as governing cultures allow it to.
 
I’m in favor of musicians making money, and I’m in favor of the internet doing what it does best (i.e., transmit data). If that means that the specific ways that musicians earn money has to change, that should be a no-brainer — not a basis for legislation that forestalls adaptation to changing circumstances.

The other day, my mind flashed the thought “Steve Jobs is John Galt,” and the possibility unnerved me. I see that many others got there way before me, so at least I’m not utterly off my chump. Still, I wish Steve would do something (uncharacteristically) clearly anti-Randian to dispel the connection.

NC State whipped Duke’s butt last night, and although I’d rather my team had won, I’m awfully proud that the flagship Duke hoops website takes the high road in reporting on the loss (as it consistently has done over the years). NC State does deserve congratulations, and it’s very good for the ACC when State thrives.
 
DBR regularly shows that unwavering support and home-team boosterism can go hand in hand with honest respect (and candid criticism) for other programs — and for Duke, when that’s called for. Well done, guys, and I’ll look forward to reading about Duke basketball on your site till the last game of the NCAA playoffs.

From the SF Chronicle:

members of Congress are pushing to revive a bill banning U.S. tech companies from working with governments that digitally spy on their citizens.

— thus, apparently, foreclosing the possibility that U.S. tech companies could collaborate with. . . the U. S. government! Good plan, guys. (Hat tip, Bruce Schneier and Rebecca Mackinnon.)

Others blogged and Facebooked this last week, but I stalled — partly because I had other things to blog, and partly because it seemed a waste of a blogpost to mention this at the same time everyone else did. So, as others said earlier, the SBL will eventually develop a web resource to be called “The World of the Bible: exploring people, places, and passages.” Before so doing, they hope to learn from you, the general audience, just what you’d expect and desire to see in such a site, so they’ve constructed a survey for you to fill out. If you wouldn’t mind, why don’t you stop over there and fill it out. I’m not sure there’s a place to put “AKMA for Monarch of Biblical Studies!” but I won’t stop you from trying.

Margaret has been following with the avid interest of a crime-novel aficionado the latest developments in Glasgow’s underworld gang war. Last week, assassins gunned down Kevin “The Gerbil” Carroll while he sat and waited outside a local ASDA supermarket. That scene itself was enough to pique interest, since the rate of gun violence is so very much lower here than in the States. But Margaret had to follow up the question of how the ruthless enforcer for the Daniel mob — got nicknamed after a cute furry rodent.
 
So — avid reader of Glasgow news that she is — Margaret tracked down an article that cites and explains several of the Glasgow gang members’ nicknames. (I admire the tag for Tam “The Licensee” McGraw. I keep envisioning a surreptitious encounter in a dimly-lit warehouse, where one mug warns another, “Watch ye — The Licensee is after ye.”) Evidently the enforcer was named after “Kevin the Gerbil” on a kids TV puppet show — so imagine a member of the New York Mafia known as Tony “Mr Snuffleupagus” Valenti, for instance.
 
Today’s update notes that the killers — the alleged killers, of course — sped out of the parking lot in a VW Golf.
 
But the entire scenario reminds me of a plot line from a brilliant television series set in Baltimore (the other city Margaret and I call home, for now). That set me to thinking: Port city. Rivalry among crime families. Challenging dialect. Wouldn’t there be a market for a series that takes up the issues of inner-city racketeering set in Glasgow?
 
(Parenthetical disclaimer in case any Glaswegian mobsters read this blog: I mean no disrespect, and certainly no hostility, apart from the general antipathy a law-abiding pacifist citizen holds toward violent law-breaking. In other words, “Nothing personal, sirs.”)

Quoted for Truth: An IHE Quick Take entitled “Accents Matter in Ancient Greek.” I haven’t seen the t-shirts in question, but I can easily understand how such a problem might arise. It goes along with the frequent problem of non-Greek-literate sign painters trying to reproduce letterforms on painted institutional crests and mottoes (Glasgow cleverly avoids this by having adopted our biblical motto in its Latin form: “Via, Veritas, Vita.”) Once I ordered Greek-inscribed t-shirts for a class, and had to make a last-minute change (at a certain out-of-pocket expense) because my memory slipped a cog on the proper form for a third-declension genitive, and somewhere in a box I have a t-shirt that students made for me with an imprecise Greek slogan on it.

Yesterday, my friend (and former student at PTS) Katie Pate called my attention to Laura Veirs’s appearance last night at my neighbourhood night spot, the Òran Mór. I’d have gone to check it out, but I was still babying my convalescing cold. I did download a bunch of her songs, though (it’s still early in my eMusic cycle, so I have — errr, “had” — downloads to spare). I’m sure I missed a great (and affordable) show, but it isn’t the first time nor will it be the last. She was appearing as part of Celtic Connections, an annual January music festival in Glasgow, of which the inhabitants are evidently quite proud. The participants aren’t necessarily from Scotland or Ireland, not by far; I suppose the idea is to celebrate indigenous musics of the world, including Celtic culture in the foreground, but that’s just a guess. Maybe it’s just a matter of “book who we can, and call it ‘Celtic’ to draw the tourists.” Is there a “Rangers Round-up” music festival in the summer?
 
I have to say, though, that Scotland is a rocking place — especially considering the (small) population of the country. Signs all over Glasgow proclaim gigs by numerous bands of whom I’d never heard before; I assume they’re local groups, and I wish them all the best.
 
But then there are a myriad of bands of whom I had indeed heard before, some quite famous and others more neglected, but all from the land of Burns: Big Country, Franz Ferdinand, Belle and Sebastian, My Latest Novel, Camera Obscura, the Proclaimers (of course!), Simple Minds, Travis, Glasvegas, Trash Can Sinatras, Idlewild, Frightened Rabbit, Teenage Fanclub, the Eurythmics, the Fratellis, the Beta Band, the Scottish Enlightenment (but not, paradoxically, Sunny Day in Glasgow), and many more. (I’m putting my fingers in my ears and pretending that the Bay City Rollers didn’t exist, and only letting the Average White Band sneak in when I’m not looking.)
 
That’s a very impressive showing for a wee little state such as ours. I’d have a fantastic time at a (chronology-defying) festival featuring a line-up like that.

Well, let’s see. Friday morning I gave my Bibs 1B lecture, but as I wandered back to the office I realized that I felt pretty run-down, and my nose was sending me ominous signals. I accomplished as much as could only be done from campus, and then headed home to finish up my afternoon’s work from the flat.
 
Once I got home, I realised that I wasn’t just weary and achey. I had come down with a genuine cold, and I’ve spent much of the intervening two days huddled on the couch, watching movies on my computer, napping, and staring blankly out at the world. As colds go, this is nothing special — but it’s a real cold, and I’m a poor convalescent.
 
What might I have discussed more effusively if I had the energy? Well, of course, there’s the abysmal situation in Haiti. I stopped at one of the Oxfam stores on Byres Road to make a donation, but there are abundant ways of contributing digitally. I particularly commend to your attention the Haiti Partners program, of which Kent Annan, a former student of mine at PTS, is co-director. (Will C, if you can direct some airplay his direction, I expect that would be illuminating for listeners/viewers and helpful to HP’s mission.) Haiti Partners is not just responding to this week’s catastrophe, but has been working there for years.
 
I might have blogged about the tremendously delightful conversation I had with Euan at the Brunswick Hotel (the Brunswick is so classy that you can only find it if you are searching intently for it; I’m glad I allowed extra time for exploring the Merchant City neighborhood, because if I thought I’d just walk up to a brightly-lit marquee with a spacious lobby and liveried staff to-ing and fro-ing, I’d have missed the whole evening). Several salient points: first, if you haven’t met Euan, you probably underestimate how tall he is. I was expecting (no offense, friends) someone more the height of most of my other hyperlinked circle, but Euan is a seriously tall man. Second, if you attend only to Euan’s and my banter about my allegiance to the church and his deplorable pagan-ness, you may miss the point that on many aspects of our disagreement we diverge in quite harmonious ways. There’s a difference, but it’s a chord, not a dissonance. Third, we talked a great deal about how much we miss the good old days (about five or six years ago), when Blogaria felt more like a network of friends than like Times Square (or George Square) on New Years Eve (or Hogmanay). I won’t try to run through the list of names of people we cited — you know who you are — but we miss the days when our writing back and forth to one another in blogs and comments made for a lively, daily, neighbourly discourse among The Regulars at a local cafe. Nowadays, we catch the eye of someone we know at the hot-drinks franchise, maybe wave back and forth, but something has been lost. Anyway, we raised a glass in your honour, comrades, and we gave thanks for your friendship. And Euan, come back again, maybe to the West End, and we’ll renew the conversation.
 
Yesterday, I’d have congratulated our diocesan Dean (not the Big Priest of the cathedral as in the US/England, but the senior priest of the diocese wherever he or she is located) Gregor Duncan, on being elected Bishop of Glasgow and Galloway. We might have elected Alison Peden as the first woman to be a bishop in the UK, but Gregor is well-known and well-respected in the diocese, and I expect that the electors gravitated easily to a familiar, popular, admirable local leader. I’d have been very happy to serve either Gregor or Alison (didn’t know much about the third candidate), but the election of Gregor makes much good sense to me and I’m pleased for him and the diocese.
 
When I went to town to meet up with Euan, I left the West End early, partly because I wanted to be sure to find the Brunswick, but also because I thought I might be able to find a replacement for my black felt hat. On my trip to the States, I left my black hat in the KLM gate area of the Glasgow Airport, and by the time I realized it, there was nothing to be done. I’ve gone bare-headed for many of the intervening days, but Thursday’s chilly rain motivated me to look into the men’s millinery departments of several Glasgow merchants. A word to the wise: slim pickings. I did track down a suitable replacement, though, and am comfortably re-hatted on black-wearing days. On yesterday’s fresh-air foray to Byres Road, I looked in at a shop that sells grey top hats (such as one might wear to a wedding or the Queen’s Tea), and one of them fit me perfectly — but even so idiosyncratic a dresser as I could not think of a single situation in which it would be appropriate for me to wear a top hat. More’s the pity. If, however, it had been a bowler, well that’s another story.
 
To return to my health: I still feel listless and congested, but I got outdoors for an hour or so yesterday, and will probably venture forth for a while today. I am skipping church (with the Provost’s permission — I did have my Lemsip, Kelvin) this morning, and will take things at a very relaxed pace. There’s much I need to do, but banishing this cold comes first.

You will never dismantle the master’s house if you want to occupy it, too.