Month: January 2021

So for the first day of my new running streak, which I’ll hope to break before it gets too ambitious, the weather went to frigid again (-1°) (but dry), I saw a very healthy-looking fox at the corner of James and St Mary’s, I passed an auto on its side in the middle of the Iffley Road (cordoned off by Thames Valley’s finest), and almost ran over a tabby cat on Magdalen Road when it didn’t budge as I came toward it.

The rain has been falling heavily since 5:30 (or earlier), so today I finally do end the streak. I’ll start again tomorrow, assuming it doesn’t rain.

Apparently the hour from five to six o’clock in the morning is a rain-free zone according to some meteorological rule governing Oxford. I keep planning to skip my run for a day when the Met Office predicts rain in the morning, and my preferred running time keeps clearing up long enough for me to go ahead and run it. I believe this makes thirty-three days.

Another zero-degree morning, another run, thirty-one days in a row.

The psychology of the streak-running phenomenon, now that I’ve been made aware of streaks as a popular phenomenon, is brilliant and insidious. I’m at 31 now; that means that if I were to take tomorrow off, it would be more than a month till I regained the ground I’ve built up. The higher the streak gets, the more intense the pressure not to break it, in a cycle of heightened stakes. I feel the temptation to break my own streak this week just to dispel that haunting duress.

I didn’t expect to run this morning; the snow is still lying in the garden and on the garden path. But I looked out the front window and the pavement was clear, so I decided to give it a go. Everything was fine and dry to The Plain, but the Iffley Road’s pavements were occasionally a bit slippery, and as I headed southeast on Iffley the pavements were getting worse, so I opted to cut the run short. On the side streets that lead home, the pavements and even the streets were covered with that sort of almost-ice that’s really not slippery at all unless you hit it at a particular angle. Anyway, thirty days in a row.

Yesterday made twenty-eight, today (before it snowed) twenty-nine days of running in a row; around 0° and slippery on the pavement yesterday, dry and subzero this morning, though about three cm of snow had fallen before it was time for church. I spend these days alternating between trying to concentrate (almost typed ‘consecrate’) and get work done, and allowing myself to drift. Lockdown life.

No desktop photoi this Friday; I’m working on one of our twin dining room tables, and don’t have the rest of my study to conceal paperwork.

Twenty-seven days in a row.

Weather was rubbish this morning, and it’s been alternating handsome blue skies and grey downpours every 90 minutes or so ever since. I started my morning run in chilly weather with a firm wind, and within a few blocks was running in light rain, which had turned to more-than-light rain by the time I got back to James Street. So, a short run, but nonetheless the twenty-sixth day in a row on which I ran.

I’m looking forward to the US having a president whom I can comfortably ignore for days, if not weeks, at a time. Thank you, America!

I have been ravenously hungry in the mornings recently. In a sense, this is no surprise since breakfast is my favourite meal of the day — but I think I’ve noticed an uptick in hunger, even on my (blessed) hot breakfast mornings. I just finished a good plate of brreakfast, with a bit of apple left over from M’s breakfast, and I feel as though I could tear through another few eggs, rashers of faux bacon, and hash browns. But I won’t, cos I want to stay in fighting trim, to ward off that malevolent virus.

It was raining the proverbial domestic animals this morning at 4:30 when I woke up, so I drifted back to sleep thinking that I’d let my running streak lapse — but when I awoke an hour later, the skies were… well, not ‘clear’, but at least not chucking it down. So chalk up another day, streak stands at twenty-five.

So, that happened. Today was my first full-on, for-credit, enrolled-students, part-of-a-formal-module online class. I won’t try to imagine what it was like for the students, but bits of it were easy for me (the parts where I was lecturing/monologising) and parts were more complicated (the parts where I would ordinarily have been pointing to places on a map, or writing on the board). I also had less sense of the passage of time than I do in a lecture room — I shouold probably set up a clock, or timer, to manage the bits of the class better. But no catastrophic results, unless my refusal to be drawn on the question of whether the historical Paul studied with the historical Gamaliel was more consequential than I would anticipate.

Four more of that class, four sessions of Intro Bible, eight Greek classes, eight meetings with finalists to discuss the Set Texts, and innumerable tutorials to go.

Plus, twenty-four day running streak. The weather was much warmer today, about 10°, but very blustery. No matter — I did my part and ran my the race.

Yesterday morning, Radio Four covered the progress of the government’s vaccination scheme in a feature on the ‘Broadcasting House’ programme. Toward the end of the segment, they interviewed beloved actor and big personality Brian Blessed, who apparently has been vaccinated now. I recognised Blessed from his role as King Richard IV in the first series of Blackadder, and from sundry miscellaneous appearances on panel shows and chat shows. After the usual and well-deserved praise of the NHS, the BBC interviewer prompted Blessed to send a message to all listeners named ‘Gordon’, at which point Blessed roared ‘Gordon’s alive!’ (at the 20:00 marker).

I’ve lived here for nigh on to twelve years now, and this still mystified me. Though I had always kept an eye on goings-on in British film, television, popular music, and so on, I don’t have the background of a lifetime fully immersed in British popular culture, and this one hit not just one, but areas of my ignorance.

For US readers: it turns out that this all hinges on the campy Flash Gordon film (the one for which Queen performed the soundtrack), in which Blessed plays Prince Vultan. I had no interest in Flash Gordon when the film was released in 1980, so I missed it the first time around, and I never returned to a film that I thought cartoon-y (in a bad way), dated, and probably tone-deaf about cultures and gender. In this respect I differ, apparently, from Her Majesty who allegedly watches the film every Christmas. At a certain point in the film, Prince Vultan learns that the eponymous hero has not, in fact, nbeen killed by Ming the Merciless I still have not watched Flash, but I’m fascinated by catch-phrases and the way they develop, so I sought out a clip from the film that includes Blessed expostulating ‘Gordon’s… alive?!’

Two things struck me as I watched the clip in question. First, I strongly doubt that anyone would have guessed at the time that Blessed’s query would develop into a catchphrase. Nothing in the dialogue, the blocking, or the cinematography suggests emphasis on these words. It is a certain sort of emergent phenomenon, catching particular viewers’ attention, in a particular way, in connection with a particular actor, at a particular cultural moment.

Second, if you listened to the radio clip and then watched the film, you might be surprised (as I was) that although Blessed bellows his line on the radio (and everywhere else he appears — Blessed has been given a unique vocal instrument and he makes the most of it), in the film he expresses it in a fairly ordinary tone. Ever since then, though — and in keeping with the magnitude of Blessed’s persona in everything he has done since then — the phrase has necessarily been roared at full volume.

So learning, and deliberating about quirky details in life and culture, never stops.

Oh, by the way: running streak = twenty-three days.

I hope you didn’t tear up your betting slips on my running streak, because it’s up to twenty-one, bay-bee! The weather turned lovely yesterday afternoon, and I decided to run in the afternoon after having skipped in the morning.This was illuminating, since I don’t usually go outside apart from my early morning run (sometime between 5:00 and 6:15 AM, usually) or going to the college through our back garden (thus not seeing any of the roads that ring our block). The pavements were every bit as busy yesterday afternoon as I’d have expected on any other Saturday afternoon, despite the government exhorting us to stay at home during Lockdown Three. I’m not surprised that our COVID rate is high, if the sample I saw yesterday is in any way representative.

After I got home, and Margaret got home from her longer, more leisurely walk, we had a chance to see Thomas, the Certified* Best Grandson in the World. He’s growing and learning and talking and exploring in amazingly expansive ways. Quite apart from the changing-nappies and temper-tantrum differences, being a grandparent and seeing our grandprogeny at intervals rather than day-by-day, we can see the changes from incremental visit to visit, and it’s a great thrill. Tom is, and will be, a terrific kid.

And once again, my running streak stands intact, at twenty-two days.

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* I’ve started a side hustle in certifying things. If you have a claim to certify, give me a call, we can work something out.

I’ve spent much of the last couple of days populating a database of PDFs of and links to public domain theological sources. St Stephen’s House is looking to modulate toward more thoroughly distance-based teaching, and we can’t assume that our students will have ready access to research materials at their homes; by compiling a library of sources that we’ve vetted and to which we want to guide our students’ attention, we hope to alleviate some of the loss of access that distance (and COVID) necessitate. So far, the interface (on our closed Moodle site) is ugly, and that will tkae some work, but this brings closer to realisation one of the features of the original Disseminary vision (and presentation). That’s satisfying (even if that satisfaction arrives about twenty-plus years after I originally suggested it).

Streak ends at twenty days, unless I go for a run this afternoon. This morning, it was raining heavily in cold weather.

I am certain that there are many users of online marking systems who interact with those systems contentedly and effectively. Thqt certainty, though, is an inference from the size of the sample (millions of users) and general probability (lots of people like user experiences that I detest, so presumably some of them are working with online marking systems). I am even more certain, though, if we admit of degrees of certainty, that a great many users of online marking abominate them as intensely as do I.

Sadly, many of us detest online marking in ways different from one another, so it can be difficult to resist the phenomenon with a united front. Moreover, in our noble if futile efforts to resist, to evaluate and comment on student work within the kludgey framework online marking provides, we respond to elegances and errors, typos and terrible misapprehensions in ways that differ from one another as well — with the result that if one has to look over a section of marking (here in the UK we double-mark most student work) part of the job involves figuring out how another person has marked the exercise, and sometimes even where to find the comments and mark. I’m sympathetic to my peers in this; I have a way of doing things that I’ve arrived at after protracted frustration and discomfort with the online system, and I object to doing things in a way that’s much slower and more counterintuitive to me so as to accommodate someone else. I’m someone else’s someone else, so I understand how frustrating the whole experience is.

Some clever developer should devise an efficient, appealing alternative that works from the assessor’s point of view, not necessarily from a programmer’s point of view and certainly not from an administrator’s point of view. It would be rapturous if the experience of online marking were oriented toward helping me, as opposed to shoehorning me into a conveyor belt processing line designed to satisfy… I don’t know, probably someone who doesn’t spend much time marking.

Oh, and running streak now at twenty.

Glad to hear that the UK’s vaccination drive is proceeding satisfactorily, heartsick that the rate of deaths from COVID is still at higher levels than last April. As Margaret and I keep our heads down, wear masks, stay at home, we’re very eager to get our vaccine. If you know an injectionist with a dose or two going begging. you know where to find us.

Streak to nineteen, though a short run (’cause it was raining).

Strek to eighteen.

I woke up this morning to discover that David Weinberger has been blogging about ethics and technology. It was almost as though I’d been projected backward in time nineteen years!

David sketches two main approaches to ethical deliberation, consequentialism and deontology, and invokes the contemporary ‘ethics of care’ in passing. He doesn’t say anything about virtue ethics, the sort that Margaret and I ingested at one of the sources of virtue ethics’ resurgence in the 1980s and ’90s, when we studied at Duke. We’re still strongly inclined in the virtue-ethics direction; at least, I am (I didn’t ask Margaret before I wrote this).

He then observes that neither deontology nor consequentialism seems to clarify the ethical status of the recent shutdown of Parler, the online hate-speech haven. Now, I would disagreee with David on a number of points in the preceding parts of his exposition — but here I think he takes a very wrong step indeed, treating the value of ‘moral frameworks’ as though they were defined by their capacity to provide a satisfying answer to the question ‘Should a society that places paramount value on free speech permit corporate interests to encourage or stifle particular sorts of expression (i. e. hate speech)?’

I don’t think it’s a moral framework’s job to decide ethical questions for you; there’s always, inescapably, going to be moral discernment going on at some stage of the deliberation. Deontological ethics tend to treat actions as if they belonged to natural kinds, easily sorted into ‘murder’, ‘armed robbery’, ‘littering’, and so on. (I know there are more sophisticated analyses of this, but I’m writing a blog post, not an ethical treatise.) Consequentialism begins from the premise that ‘happiness’ or ‘well-being’ can be identified and agreed upon easily enough that its founding premise (‘maximising happiness/well-being’) can occupy a pivotal role in the discourse (but ask a comfortably bourgeois person and an impoverished person how to define general well-being and the problems with that premise emerge fairly rapidly). These frameworks function poorly at articulating ‘what everybody should think’, but do better at providing a system for locating various ethical concerns relative to one another, for somebody who adheres to this or that schema.

So rather than asking ‘which moral framework can define the right thing to do about a medium overflowing with bilious conspiracists?’, I would pose the question ‘granted what you believe about the world and the Good, how does Parler fit in to the moral cosmos that defines your actions?’ In answering that question as a Christian theologian, I reply that although it is indeed a very good thing to permit people to speak as their conscience dictates, that good cannot outweigh the harm caused when people whose leading characteristic is self-interested deceitfulness have means to propagate disinformation and to plan violence against the public. Not everyone is a Christian theologian (and not all Christian theologians see the world as I do)(more’s the pity), so other people will reach other conclusions, but that was always going to be the case anyway.

If we want to argue the matter out in public debate, I wouldn’t lead with ‘Be a Christian and it’ll solve all your moral conundrums’, a claim that is as false as it is unconvincing to… people who are’t already Christians. I’d talk about the ways that making room for Parler advances the cause of people who are in the aggregate already more privileged, and endangers people who are (in the aggregate) already imperilled in the course of daily life. Black Lives Matter. But I would have arrived at my convictions about the importance of standing up for people at the short end of the oppression stick from theology, not from Kant or Mill.

That doesn’t solve David’s frustration, I don’t think, but it may give him something to push back against productively.

It doesn’t feel like it, in part because of the lockdown and the concomitant absence of students, but today is the first working day of Hilary Term. I shifted fairly smoothly into administrative productivity despite working in a heat-deprived environment today and yesterday. The heater person came in to replace the fan in our heater today, so we should be back to our usual toastiness tomorrow.

Streak up to sixteen.

No, it had to be the coldest day (so far) of the winter that the exhaust fan on our heater went out. That means the pilot light won’t go on, because there’s no exhaust fan to blow the fumes to the outdoors. No pilot light means no heat. No heat means very cold house. We are very thankful that Maciej came out, twice, to help us (once to ascertain that Yes, our heater was well and truly out, and the second time to bring some portable heaters so that we can make islands of warmth in our dining room and bedroom.

The gas heater company will source a replacement fan, probably Monday.

Streak running at fifteen.

Day Four of the US Fascist Crisis dawns (in the UK) on the note that various social media providers have cut off the Presidunce and his enablers. This is probably a good thing, but there is plenty of time for DJT and company, and the various Proud Children and Q-cumbers, to strike again — four full days in my Seven Days In… conceit, and another week until Joe Biden is (presumably) inaugurated. I have no prediction of coups or terrorist actions, but neither will I be surprised if the something materialises.

Extended my running streak to fourteen days. Are you sure that ‘streak running’ is a thing?