Author: AKMA

(Sorry for the gender-specific language; this is one of those words for which a suitably resonant and evocative equivalent hasn’t come to my attention.)
 
I’ve been laboring (some would say, “obsessing”) over the details of my upcoming presentations to the clergy conference. I’d rather not work from a verbatim manuscript; that’s partly because the occasion befits something a shade more relaxed, and partly because I have a hard time not pitching such compositions to a more technical readership. I keep feeling tempted to put in more footnotes and nuances, where the setting calls for more exposition and explanation. And when it comes to conference-presenting ex tempore, I have not been satisfied with my results.
 
So I’m trying to get the presentation onto 5×8 notecards, with a lead-in sentence, reminders of pertinent stuff to say, and a closing sentence. My rationale for preparing so detailed a schema rests on (a) my proclivity to divagate and lose focus, (2) the high valuation I put on transitions and continuity, and (iii) the importance of strong, clear, explicit thesis sentences for an audience to orient itself. This approach also affords me leeway conveniently to build paragraphs out-of-sequence for different topics when I’m getting stuck on one line of thought. Plus, using notecards offers an opportunity to use my pens, which by their design and functioning remind me of the value of my craft.
 
We’ll see how this all works out.

A week or so ago, Chris Lydon sent out an email advertising his interview with Slavoj Žižek; this week, he’s promoting an interview with Anna Deveare Smith. Keep an eye on Radio Open Source — you never know who will turn up on his show.

I had been withstanding considerable pain from plantar fasciitis (that could be really handy in a Scrabble game someday) through the summer and early fall. As recently as a couple of weeks ago, I gasped and winced as sharp pain engulfed my heel and arch. But last Saturday I forgot to take my daily naproxen, and then on Sunday my foot still felt OK so I pushed it for another day, and Monday I didn’t even notice. Although the last couple of days have involved some shivers of pain, my plantar fascia seems to have settled down considerably — whether because of my new insoles, or the anti-inflammatory treatment, or my stretching the foot whenever I can. I expect I’ll need to take a pill now or then, but for the time being, it sure feels good to think that the inflammation is easing.

The Subaru will take — at an estimate — $2000 to rehabilitate the engine, plus money for the electrical system. We’re trying to figure out whether we’d buy our car for $3500 (or so, counting rental and miscellaneous), or whether we should pony up to get a car made in this century, all the while needing the car to get to and from airport and art center on a near-daily basis.
 
[Update: Margaret and I decided that the circumstances required action, and the most cautious course of action seemed to us to be renting a car for a month. That gives us time to get the car fixed, if we so choose, or to take the time to pick a different car without being rushed.]

Does anyone remember the periodic spasms of moral ferment that have bestirrred Blogarians to device “Codes of Blogging Ethics” or good-behavior certification systems? Well, Micah calls my attention to Ruth Gledhill’s report that “The Evangelical Alliance will on Monday publish the new Ten Commandments of Blogging.”
 
I suppose there’s something more laudable about this than, say, submitting that the internet obviates any concern about ethics — but will these commandments actually change anyone’s behavior? I tend to doubt that there are evangelical bloggers out there who have been scraping other people’s websites, but who now will stop because it]s against the Ten Commandments of Blogging to “steal another person’s content.”
 
In my interactions with evangelical blogging, the two leading ethical questions these blogs provoked concern anonymous writers defaming their enemies, and [openly-named] bloggers misrepresenting their opponents’ claims and persons. The same applies to progressive bloggers, of course, and to presidential politics on both sides; none of these groups has, as best I recall, codes of ethics that prohibit such conduct. Returning now to the topic, do the anonymous bloggers and public polemicists imagine that they’ve been transgressing — or do they understand themselves to be using their full repertoire of rhetorical leverage in order to expose the iniquity of their adversaries, who are obscuring the truth and destroying the church? Is someone going to be conscience-stricken, or will they reiterate their self-justifications? (And who am I, who are we, to determine that we know they are wrong?)
 
I’m all for ethics and Ten Commandments (the originals, that is). I’m just hesitant about well-intentioned grand gestures such as this one. It would be great if enough people demonstrated their commitment to righteous blogging that they could point to positive results that show me to have been unduly skeptical.

 

 
I have the feeling that Henry Woolf’s character is making more sense than Sarah Palin.

On the way to Pippa’s acting class in Carrboro, the Subaru started overheating again. Any helpful, economically-feasible suggestions welcome. We’d be inclined to lease a car for the rest of our Durham year, but at the prices I’ve been able to find, we might as well just buy a junker somewhere.

It occurred to me to check at the Ars Electronica webcast site, to see whether they had edited and posted the video footage from the festival. I was delighted to see that they had, and prepared to click on the link for my presentation (to see whether I’d have convinced myself, if I’d been paying attention at the time). I was disappointed to see that they’ve published the video in Windows Media format — who thought to distribute videos of a conference about open access as wmv? — but I recalled that QuickTime can open wmv files with the Flip4Mac add-on, so I went ahead and clicked on my name.
 
Nothing happened.
 
And not because my talk was boring. For some reason, although the link successfully launches QuickTime, I don’t get the video feed. I’m trying to figure out whether it’s a PC/Mac problem, or a transmission problem, or what, but for now I don’t know how I look in the video. Follow the links at your own risk; if you can view the presentation and it makes you wish they’d invited Sarah Palin instead of me, I tried to warn you.

I didn’t sign up for any of the formal “call everyone’s attention to the Millennium Development Goals” events — not because I don’t appreciate the goals, but because I take the MDGs to be a side effect of good theology. That is, if the church is doing its job well, it’ll be reaching out and teaching and preaching in ways that advance the cause of eradicating global poverty.
 
That doesn’t mean that it escapes my notice, though, when the Congress and the world’s financial systems can within a week decide to allot more than a half a trillion dollars toward shoring up already-wealthy people and institutions. Under the circumstances, one can hardly avoid the conclusion that political leaders don’t think of malnutrition and starvation, disease, and the lack of educational resources and economic opportunity as that big a crisis.
 
Perhaps now is the time to remind our most vocally Christian political leaders (especially ones who profess to take the Bible seriously) that Jesus said, “If you lend to those from whom you hope to receive, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, to receive as much again…. [L]end, expecting nothing in return.”

We already knew that this presidential campaign would make history in one of several ways — but this keeps getting weirder and weirder. Between Biden’s blurts and McCain’s call for a time-out, I half expect to find out that Rod Serling is managing someone’s campaign (maybe both).