Month: January 2012

I ordinarily scorn the gesture of declaring inbox bankruptcy — simply writing off any pending email obligations and starting with a fresh, new, empty inbox — but I anticipate humbling myself and admitting that I don’t have time or energy to comb through both my home (gmail) inbox and my work (glasgow.ac.uk) inbox, pull out the lonely important messages from the oceans of notifications, semi-spam, and so on, and square away my debts in the most responsible way possible.
 
If I owe you an email, I suggest sending me a reminder early next week, by which time I will no longer be curled up in the foetal position at the sight of my overflowing mail client window. If I don’t owe you an email, you may contact me in the future, more confident that I’ll actually be able to pay due attention to your words.
 

Today has been pretty uneventful, but I’m not going to take that as an excuse to not-blog, since I’m still working up the habit of blogging as often as possible. To the end of reporting something rather than nothing, then, I will note that we got Margaret new lenses for her glasses this morning (her eyes have been changing, and she experienced a vitreal event this winter that aggravated her sense that her vision was blurred). When we stopped at our regular café, S’mug, we were greeted by Stewart at the table next to ours — someone we hadn’t met before, but who recognised me from my Foursquare avatar (the pixelated Diesel Sweeties-style image of me) and from our email communication relative to his doing some web design work for Trinity College.
 
More important than any of that, though, today was actually clear and sunny in Glasgow! Just when one might have been beginning to doubt that it was possible, we had a few hours of lovely, crisp daylight — then sunset around 3:00. But it was a start.
 

Edward Tufte started a thread in his columns about warning signs, their semiotics, and the explicit messages they bear. He teases and provokes as usual, and draws on some well-known phrases to illustrate his points. Sometimes he incorporates the originators of the phrases in the titles of his prints — hence, Stevie Smith, Not Waving But Drowning — but other times not; presumably, the titles without authors’ names suggest that the attribution may be apocryphal, or public-domain proverbial, or perhapps that Tufte isn’t quite certain he has the attribution correct.
 
Friends with long memories, or battle-scarred former students of mine, will recognise with appreciation one of the ‘philosophical warning signs’ he prepared:
 

 
Tufte assigns this image neither title nor source. While it’s virtually certain that someone said it before me, I’d just like to put down a flag here to say that I was applauding Doc Searls’s use of a more verbose version back in 2002, on the basis of long-standing use of my more lapidary ‘It’s more complicated than that’ in lectures from the beginning of my teaching work in 1990. So let the record show that the short form of the ‘complicated’ axiom goes back at least to me, if not further.
 

OK, I missed yesterday, but I have remembered — at the last minute — to put something in my blog today. Since I’m still getting the back into the swing of it, I’ll keep to the superficial observation that, Yes, it has been extraordinarily windy today (gusts reached over 100 mph in Edinburgh, and Glasgow lost chimney pits, roof tiles, stone railings, trees, and more). The BBC slideshow gives a good idea of the weather.

On the local news cut-ins to BBC Breakfast, the camera showing the view of the Clydefor background green-screen shots was shaking while the presenter read the stories. That lent credence to her warnings about high winds! The Clyde was driven over its banks at high tide, and all in all we withstood a sore bluster.

It’s not a New Year’s resolution that I will blog more often in 2012, but — let’s face it — I couldn’t blog much less than I did last year. As a first-fruits of the new year, and as an easy way into blogging for the coming year, I’m attaching this morning’s sermon below.
 
It’s not composed de novo; it’s based on a sermon I preached back in the States a few cycles ago. The content and context are different, though, and I’ve tidied up some unsatisfactory formulations that resulted from the editing process. (I’ve argued before, in the heyday of non-commercial blogging, that it’s perfectly kosher even to repeat sermons verbatim; the task of composing an admirable, entirely fresh essay week on week poses too great a challenge for almost every preacher. Moreover, the notion of ‘originality’, and especially the expectation of homiletical originality, derive from some very dubious source, and certainly not from a gospel imperative. In any case, this morning’s sermon wasn’t a repeat, but a new version of an old theme. And here it is.)
 
Continue reading “Sermon on the New Year, Holy Name, Solemnity of Mary, et cetera“