Ruminations about hermeneutics, theology, theory, politics, ecclesiastical life… and exercise.
The newest version of Quicksilver has changed the user interface, such that when I launch it and begin typing, I hesitate for a second — not recognizing what I see on the screen. Of course, Quicksilver interprets that pause as my changing my mind about what I want the application to do, so it redirects its target to a different file. Sigh.
The much-[unfairly]-maligned Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams interrogates Richard Dawkins’ version of the “Atheists Rule!” meme in an address transcribed here. And at the risk of self-promotion, I ought to remind readers that David Weinberger expressed his qualms about Dawkins a year ago.
I was going to comment retrospectively on Tom’s post about the Bible and “proper” understanding, but Paul and Tom and Phil far outdid anything I’d be able to cobble together.
So instead, I’ll summarize the article about technology and religion that I sent in to my editor.
In the opening paragraphs, I try to sketch the extent to which technology permeates contemporary culture. While one can imagine a hermit who eschews all fabricated advantages, or a bleeding-edge early adopter who embraces all technologies without hesitation, the vast preponderance of religious adherents fall into a middle area that accepts some technologies and rejects others, very often without careful analysis.
I then begin by proposing a very rough characterization of religious faith that repudiates the material world in favor of the spirit, and religious faith that endorses the material world as an expression of the human spirit. Such a convenient taxonomy might shed some light on religious attitudes toward technology, but it occludes mediating positions or religious perspectives that construe technology in itself as indifferent, but concentrate on its effects on believers.
I call attention to technology’s propensity to foreground its advantages and to suppress its costs. The capacity to drive across town to obtain a take-out pizza constitutes a delicious benefit of automotive transportation, but that benefit occludes the chain of dependency, pollution, and exploitation that produce and sustain the car. While advocates of technology can concentrate on the vast advantages that technological devices bestow, religious thinkers will want to keep a steadfast eye on all the labor, spoliation, waste, and pollution on which technologies depend.
Moreover, technologies insinuate themselves into their users’ lives so as to constitute aspects of their own identity. A musician senses the familiar instrument to be an extension of her or his own self; a driver does not simply operate a car, but feels with it (and responds to its traumas and triumphs as though they involved the driver’s own self. Indeed, sometimes technological devices become appendages of their users (glasses, for an external example, or a pacemaker for a life-sustaining internal device).
As technology shades into personal identity, though, we encounter the perplexing zone where organic identity and technological identity become difficult to parse. A copious literature explores the zone where “robots” and humans interact in ways that call into question the artificiality of the android and the humanity of the biological person.
(Here I note in passing a point I owe to Chris Locke — that especially in the field of “artificial intelligence,” technology comes with the hereditary influence of its progenitors in the military-industrial complex, and the apple rarely falls far from the tree.)
The conundrum of technological humanity, the cyborg, often evokes the suspicion that the technological aspect of something (or someone) is not real. I’ve been asked more than once if certain of my friends are “real friends” or “online friends.” But no matter how you slice it, online interactions involve reality in some way or another; they are actual interactions, not hallucinations or fantasies.
We need to take seriously the religious significance of technology (and the technological dimensions of religious life) in part because the two have always been intertwined — from Stonehenge to temples. St Paul relied on the virtual presence made possible by letters to communicate with far-flung congregations; the buildings and appliances that serve religious purposes may involve digital technology as well as mechanical technology.
If machines can approximate humanness, and digital reality remains nonetheless real, though, what shall we say about technological spirituality? I take several paragraphs to explore the meaning of “religious behavior” in a digital online environment. Can toons pray? Can toons participate effectually in religious ritual? What criteria apply to the legitimacy of spiritual interactions online? Can one really be married in an online ceremony? (Are the toons involved married, but not their users?)
In a section that sends long roots back to my earliest arguments with David Weinberger, I insist that the internet doesn’t constitute a place — but (showing, I hope, a respectful appreciation of what he’s taught me since then) I underscore that the two-dimensional non-spatial nexus is not like any other two-dimensional entity with which we’re acquainted. Our near-instant access to the limitless extent of the expanding Web, and the fact that the Web interacts with time very differently from the ways that conventional spaces do, enrich the online environment with (non-literal) depth that three-dimensional spaces lack. The difference of the digital world approaches constituting the “sufficiently advanced” condition that Arthur C Clarke equates with “magic”; and since comparativists have long submitted that magic and religion are formally indistinguishable, we may fairly suggest that the Web offers users a magical, religious environment.
So to sum up, it is with good reason that people say both “God is in the details” and “the Devil is in the details.” Either way, it’s the details of technology that pertain to religious evaluation (and the details of religious particularity that will determine the status of technologies). As religions have struggled with whether to permit musical instruments, electrical lights, or other technological affordances, they will gradually come to terms with digital technology, in ways that vary according to the technology and the religion involved.
(Here’s a full PDF of the essay draft as submitted.)
I suppose there are theologians I respect more than Nicholas Lash, but there aren’t very many. So when I noticed that he had responded to The God Delusion in New Blackfriars, and that his response was among the free offerings in that otherwise walled-off journal, I turned to it with delight and great satisfaction. “A deplorable book,” indeed.
I was offline all day yesterday at the Advisory Board meeting for Affirming Anglican Catholicism. We’ve had some setbacks recently, so the meeting was itself sobering and tiring; I got up early to get to Manhattan, and the meeting took place in the sausage factory (which I find a spiritually wearying place). I don’t have much to say about that, beyond my grateful astonishment at the sumptuous hospitality I was shown. Margaret picked me up in Princeton Junction at 11:30, and I still feel worn out.
Tom asks some apposite questions over at his place, but I don’t have the concentration to answer right now.
Bob pointed to Sarah Milstein’s “Make Life More Like Games” (and Mary interjected a very helpful note too), which mentions Serios, whose economic model for email struck a chord for me. If an organization’s internal communications — requests for action, fulfillments, and so on — were marked in a way that indicated how much was being asked, and how much was being offered, one might learn an awful lot about workflow. Who asks a disproportionate amount from coworkers? Who asks little but provides much? How does a worker’s input/output vary depending on the kind of task? All very provocative and interesting. Next time someone asks me to prepare a memo or an evaluation, I want them to say “Please devote fifteen minutes to. . . .”
There’s an argument over at Kendall’s place occasioned by an essay from Scott Carson concerning the [alleged] plain meaning of texts. I intervened once, but I think I’ll keep out hereafter; William Witt, who’s promoting the “plain meaning,” says that texts are inherently intelligible, that “inherent intelligibility is in the text” to be ignored or revealed. I’m on record as vociferously opposing the notion of subsistent meaning that he seems heavily invested in. If “intelligibility” is a property inherent in texts, I am curious to know (a) where it’s located, (b) who gets to determine which texts are intelligible and which aren’t, and (c) who determines which “revelations” of inherent intelligibility are sound and which are actually just “ignoring” the inherent meaning. I’ll leave it at that for now.
My extremely capable daughter has been making a name for herself in a field that I didn’t even know was a field, namely, “poultry portraiture.” Her most recent foray into this enterprise came after we invited longtime friends John and Hilary over for dinner when we first got to Princeton, and they watched delightedly as we showed off some of Pippa’s work. When they saw her depictions of other chickens, they — recidivist poultry keepers — both realized instantly that Pippa had to come meet Lucky, their new rooster.
They commissioned Pippa to paint a portrait of Lucky (whose life story merits a whole separate post), and Pippa began a series of studies for the commission. First she got acquainted with the rooster, then took a series of photos of him. She looked over the alternative images, and chose several candidates. She printed them out, cropped, edited, and re-selected, finally arriving at one particular image. Then she cut out the “Lucky” part of the image with an Xacto knife and traced the image onto a legal pad. After that, she executed a freehand version of the image on plain paper and — having satisfied herself that she was ready — got out the canvas and paints, and set to work.
Margaret and I were instantly captivated; we spent the last week regretting that this was a commission and would have to leave us. Yesterday we brought the painting, veiled, to Hilary and John’s house to introduce them to it.
They loved the painting as much as we did, and Hilary rushed to compare the painting to the subject. Lucky himself showed no interest whatever in the glorious representation of his handsome profile (he’s a very self-effacing rooster).
It was a wonderful afternoon, a splendid luncheon with delicious dessert of apple crisp made of fresh apples from Terhune Orchards, all presided over by Hilary and John’s latest acquisition.
Bob Carlton names a serious problem — though I’d argue that the problem isn’t “postmodern preaching” so much as “mediocre preaching.” Modernity itself conceived and gave birth to the meaning-impaired mode of preaching that Bob has had enough of; if someone preaches in the unconvicted manner that Bob finds appalling, it’s not Derrida’s or Foucault’s or Lyotard’s fault.
People sometimes jeer at exemplary postmodern theorists, suggesting that since they cared about prison reform or the exploitation of labor or the persistent inequities associated with religious or racial or gender difference, then somehow their commitment falsifies an alleged postmodern tenet that “everything’s OK, nothing makes a difference.” (Not accusing Bob, here, by the way.) That sort of pseudo-refutation belies a tendentious reading of postmodernism that you can’t answer because it’s already decided that its postmodern object isn’t worth studying thoughtfully.) Most of the postmodern theorists I can think of adopt passionately hortatory rhetoric when you hew close to the topics about which they care most. Those simply aren’t the topics that other people have decided in advance that they should care about, or the ways that other people have decided they should care.
A long time ago, when I taught a senior honors seminar that involved postmodern theory, one of my students interrupted me toward the end of the semester and asked, “So are you telling us that postmodernism means that you’re accountable for everything you say and do, all the time?” That seemed pretty apposite for the course, for the time — and it seems apposite for Bob’s homiletical desiderata, especially when you consider that the preacher dares to stand up in the assembly of God and angels, saints triumphant and saints militant, to speak a Word of the gospel.
“Oooh, and my ears are still ringing. . . .”
I don’t think I’ve ever been to a concert where the crowd was so loud. I’ve never been to so smoke-free a concert. I hadn’t been to Madison Square Garden before — I imagined it to be much bigger, much more spacious. I think my ears may have turned a corner somewhere; the fine high-frequency sounds (violin, piano) lacked definition in a way that I doubt the sound people would have tolerated. A crowd full of people cheering “Bru-u-u-uce” sounds more like a herd of lowing cattle than like an exhilarated throng of fans. Has anyone else noticed that Bruce Springsteen doesn’t cuss?
OK, I got all that out of the way. The Springsteen set was spectacular. From the moment the band hit the stage, they rocked harder than anything I’ve seen before (except maybe the previous Springsteen concert, but we were all twenty-five years younger then). I was astounded at the job Springsteen did; his performance catalyzed a constellation of ideas I’ve had about “performing” for a while, ideas I’ll allow to gestate a few days longer, but as Margaret appositely observed on the way home, the set was unrelenting. The E Street Band plays compelling ensemble rock’n’roll, without sacrificing intensity to the expansivenes of the band (which was a big band, a big sound, when we saw them back in ’81; now they’ve added Nils Lofgren and Patti Sciafa on guitar and Soozie Tyrell on violin, and sometimes Tyrell picks up a guitar herself, making a total of five guitars plus Garry Tallent on bass). Multiple guitars sometimes makes for a ponderous sound kludge, but the band’s experience with one another and the sound team’s production work channeled the aural density into oceanic force.
I love the E STreet Band, but I especially appreciate the background players. I keep an eye on Danny Federici and Garry Tallent while the projection screens emphasize Bruce (of course), the guitarists, Clarence, Max and Prof. Roy Bittan. They display a professionalism that belies the sterility the term is frequently deployed to convey; contrariwise, they give everything, just right, and support the ensemble sound with grace and reticence.
Springsteen was in terrific form. I had only two cavils: One, very short, involved a verse (perhaps from “Reason to Believe”?) when he sang into an overdriven microphone, giving the impression that he was using a dispatcher’s mike — it sounded incongruous for the song, though it might have been effective in a different setting. Two, I thought he rushed the delivery of some key lines (in “Candy’s Room,” “Jungleland,” “Born to Run”). I wonder whether he’s not trying to wrest control of the lines away from a crowd that wants to shout them along with him — but whatever the reason, I’d argue that Springsteen’s artistry relies heavily on timing, such that letting the lyric run ahead of the beat undercuts the whole. I felt the hurried delivery attenuated the conviction that carries so much of his compositions. (Margaret didn’t notice that, so take my criticism with a grain of salt.)
He took on a very tough job, trying to keep a wildly enthusiastic crowd on board for the somber political message of the songs from Magic. How do you cheer wildly at the end of “Devil’s Arcade,” even if Springsteen delivered it with heart-wrenching intensity? And some in the crowd had no patience for Springsteen’s explicit politicking, shouting, “Just sing the songs.” Though I’m on Bruce’s side here, I wonder whether he might not do better taking the heckler’s advice — “Magic” and “Last to Die” sound more convincing to me than most of Bruce’s (heartfelt) excoriations of the last six years. But Bruce just wins; the songs from Magic work better, Margaret and I agreed, on stage than on the record (and I notice that the AMG review tends to concur (“[the] careful construction. . . tends to keep the music from reaching full flight”).
Highlights? Goodness! Well, hearing “Night” right after “Radio Nowhere” caught up whatever hadn’t already been captivated. “Reason to Believe” worked admirably as a with the blues-rock setting the band gave it — the lead-in sounded uncannily like “Spirit In The Sky,” a song I’d love to hear Springsteen and the band cover). Asking “Are there any lovers out there tongiht?” (he obviously knew Maragret and I had come to the show), he sang “Tougher Than the Rest” with Patti. He dedicated his performance of “Meeting Across the River” to Peter Boyle, whose birthday it would have been, noting that Boyle always loved the tension of hope and failure in the song. Springsteen sang it accompanied only by Tallent on upright bass and Bittan on piano, and it soared, and (in accordance with cosmic laws of necessity) segued into a tremendous performance of “Jungleland.” The band had buckets of fun with “You Can Look (But You Better Not Touch),” including winning byplay among Bruce and Steve and Clarence.
And yes, he brought out “Thundercrack” in the encores. Bruce explained, “This was our show-stopper, back when. . . there was no one at the show. We used to play this at Max’s Kansas City. We played there with Bob Marley and the Wailers — it seated 150, and there were some empty seats!” The song gave Federici a chance to step out at the beginning, gave everyone a chance to rock out in one of Springsteen’s classic episodic compositions, and thrilled me from toes to scalp. The band segued into the inevitable “Born to Run,” then, and “Dancing In the Dark” (on cue, Steve did The Monkey with the audience seated behind the stage). Then Bruce brought the Sessions Band out to play “American Land,” with supertitled sing-along lyrics on the projection screens.
What a night! Thanks so much, Jennifer, for the tickets. And thanks, Bruce, for the hard work and brilliance that you put into everything.
John sent me a message asking what I thought about Hal Crowther’s elegy to print journalism, presumably in light of my advocacy of digital media. Without taking the full time that Crowther’s bittersweet column deserves, I’d make a couple of points in response. First, Crowther correctly identifies the problem as to a great extent a financial problem; under cultural conditions when newspapers were expected to serve the public interest mare than to serve as profit centers, they produced more excellent work. When bloodless speculators see a newspaper as capital waiting to be disagglomerated for profit over the cost of the whole enterprise, you’re going to depress the quality of the news that the papers produce. That’s not the Web’s fault; if the citizenry demanded high-quality news reporting, they could demand legislation that protected newspapers.
Crowther shows some attentiveness to media transitions as an ordinary aspect of culture, but still falls back on “internet as cesspools of [bad] amateurs” rhetoric of, for instance, Andrew Keen. If we grant that things are as bad as he says — and that’s not at all clear; print media are not as uniformly excellent as his nostalgia makes them, nor are online media as uniformly unreliable — but even if things are bad, may we allow that digital media have only had a few years to coalesce the business models that will support excellence in news reporting. And established media haven’t exactly been helping shape the financial future of news reporting by their resolute resistance to inhabiting online communication on the terms of the medium. Combine their square-peg-round-hole approach to digital media with the vultures’ chainsaw profiteering, and Crowther has ample reason to regret times past.
All of that, however, doesn’t mean that online media somehow prevent good news reporting. If no one model has come to the fore as a basis for a future reliable, unbiased [!], disinterested venue for online reporting, it’s not because no one is trying, or the medium makes good reporting impossible.
Thanks to David, I just encountered yet another brilliant Michael Wesch visualization (someone’s going to string these together one of these days and make a captivating illustration of the techno-cultural moment) — this one illustrating David’s point that everything is miscellaneous.
I think I’m going to step out and change from Moveable Type to Blogger. If I had the time and energy, I’d rather use WordPress and host the engine as well as the pages — but the lesson of my last few years running MT has been that if I don’t feel determined enough to maintain it, I shouldn’t install it. I’ve been sticking with MT through the comment-spam phase and the subsequent no-commentts phase, but I’d like to get back to welcoming comments. I ran Blogger for the Beautiful Theology blog, and am comfortable with it; I am not wild about captchas, but the corporate heft of Blogger/Google provides the capacity for disability-aware alternatives to the visual captchas. I wanted to investigate making a simple question-and-answer challenge for my MT comments page — my page is low-profile enough that there’s no percentage in devoting brainpower or computer cycles to defeating something as simple as “What is AKMA’s last name?” or “What kind of thoughts is this blog named after?” But I never got around to it, and the prospect of upgrading MT has been daunting me for months now.
Using Blogger will solve about twelve problems at once. I think that’s enough to overcome my residual personal loyalty to Ben and Mena. I’m still very fond of them, but I’m no longer in MT’s core constituency.
Whoa! You might think I had said I was about to buy a PC!
Am entertaining second thoughts, impelled by urgent feedback from trusted friends.
From Cat and Girl: “The second-rate Valhalla of mediocrity in quantity.”
Zack Exley, on religious women in rural Missouri:
Just imagine if you heard one day about an international community of women that’s been operating continuously and supporting itself for more than 170 years. Imagine that you heard that these women vow to serve others as their primary vocation for the rest of their lives, and that they choose to live together in spiritual as well as practical community for the whole span of their lives. Wouldn’t that be an amazing thing to hear about? Well, that’s what this community is.
. . . As I was going to sleep, thinking about that, I felt terrified of a world without these beautiful and powerful international communities.
From Bob Carlton, this follow-up video by Michael (“The Machine Is Us/ing Us”) Wesch; and from Stephen Downes, a slide presentation of “Web 2.0” using Web 2.0 tools. Change is happening, and it will overtake our institutions willy-nilly. I’m inclined to argue that by paying attention and getting involved, they’re more likely to experience that change as productive and invigorating, whereas by ignoring and resisting change , they’ll experience it as threatening and destructive.
I’m getting cautious about Google’s monolithic standing in tech innovation/leverage, but Patrick MacDonald has the right idea (hat tip to Jenny, who pulls out the dead-on quotation from Anil Dash: “If YouTube has created something fantastic, and it required copyright violation to do so, then copyright law should be changed to make it legal. Laws are ours, people — they’re not carved on stone tablets“). I would so love to be in on that.
Seems as though everyone is pointing to the Chronicle’s [pseudonymous] dyspeptic denunciation of graduate students, about which I feel a wave of indignation amplified by the twinge of sympathy I feel for Prof. Gradgrind. Let me explain.
First, Gradgrind’s stunning narcissism disgusts me. If her students discover that their fascination with [subject area] doesn’t warrant devoting themselves to teaching careers, Gradgrind should be relieved for them. They’ve attained a state of self-awareness and self-differentiation that surpasses Gradgrind’s. Gradgrind, in turn, needs seriously to re-evaluate her proclivity to vest her identity in her students’ replication of her choices and her career path.
Academia isn’t the only field that benefits from the fruit of advanced study. If her students are flourishing in non-academic vocations, Gradgrind should commend them with pride — not denounce them as deceivers. People who know me well can imagine my “barely contained fury” expression and tone as I type this.
Second, academia displays and perpetuates numerous deeply-embedded pathologies, such that sensible, intelligent, critical thinkers have plenty of reason to hesitate before committing themselves to teaching in higher education. Among the drawbacks are having to work with people such as Gradgrind and the careerist clones of whom she’s presumably proud.
I appreciate New Kid’s candor (and follow-up here) about the ways she (or he) was a difficult grad student for her advisor. I don’t hear her hitting the same points that Gradgrind did, though, and New Kid sounds a great deal more sympathetic to me.
Higher education involves coaching students through stages of erudition and critical thinking with which they’re less well acquainted than are their teachers. Under the circumstances, they’ll make mistakes and miss points as they try out new ideas and practices. That’s not a sign that they’re deceivers or incompetents, it’s a sign that they’re learners. Some among these students will perceive their misstep and self-correct; some will listen attentively (and critically, I hope) and adjust their efforts accordingly; some will refuse to acknowledge that their work could possibly have been improved; some will recognize their work‘s weakness, but will decline to extend themselves to improve it. My own work with students has been hindered by their encounters with Gradgrinds who imperiously imposed arbitrary standards (frequently reflective of Gg’s own specialization and inadequacies) and by Prof. Feelgoods who gushed about how marvelous their students are (without providing critical perspective on their “growing edges”). Gradgrinds and Feelgoods drive me batty, because I devote vast energies toward providing students with feedback that gives specific explanations of where their work could be improved, how improved, and why that’s an improvement — but how are students to distinguish my feedback from the capricious narcissism or the inflated encomiums?
Learning involves acquiring the capacity to make pertinent distinctions; Gradgrinds and Feelgoods obscure those distinctions, making students’ job all the more difficult, so that their failures “justify” Gradgrind’s self-absorbed scapegoatery. When students who want to learn can rely on teachers who devote their efforts to helping students learn, together they can attain great things. When students and teachers withhold their efforts, or offer false affirmations (whether “This work is publlishable!” or “I see what you mean, Professor”), or concern themselves solely with what benefits themselves, the sound pursuit of shared learning suffers.
Beginning Thursday, I have a series of obligations in New York in relatively rapid succession (after having not been in New York for ages). Thursday, we’re heading in for the Springsteen concert; then a week from today I have a meeting with the board of Affirming Anglican Catholicism; then in a couple of weeks, we’re going to a party there (Margaret’s opportunity to meet Joi).
I’ll comment on Anglican stuff another time.
As far as my going to a Manhattan party for cool people, I expect we’ll have a good time, but the decision concerning what I should wear will combine considerable anticipatory stress with inevitable futility. A pouchy, homely, middle-aged guy with no fashion sense will look dowdy no matter what.
That leaves the Springsteen concert, about which I’m feeling more excited than I expected to. I’ve been following closely the reports on the setlists page, thrilled that “Thundercrack” has been a predictable element of the encore, studying the unfamiliar material so I’ll be primed to enjoy it when the time comes. Evidently he’s drawing heavily on Born to Run this tour, which makes my job easier; he’s been playing “Night,” “She’s the One,” “Born to Run,” “Incident on 57th St,” and even “Jungleland” at some stops (not “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out,” which Pippa always calls “Devil In The Freezer,” her favorite mondegreen). But wait! Last night in Ontario, Bruce invited members of the Arcade Fire onstage to play his “State Trooper” (a song Pippa likes) and their “Keep the Car Running,” both in place of “Thundercrack.” Now, I admire the Arcade Fire and I appreciate local-color spontaneity in a concert set, but I’d be pained to miss the song I’ve waited ages to hear live.
So if you can’t get hold of me in Princeton these days, try New York City.
In a moment of weakness, I agreed to talk on an Irish radio program called “Talking History.” They were looking for a Bible scholar to go with Prof. Helena Sheehan from the School of Communications, Dublin City University (I’m told she was once a religious, now an atheist) and Dr Brendan Purcell from University College Dublin; I asked whether there weren’t abundant Bible scholars right there in Ireland, but they didn’t answer the question. Maybe it’s my quaint American accent. I figure that if I do enough radio appearances, it increases the chance that I’ll get good at it someday, but in anticipation it feels as though I’m doomed to the eternal repetition of the futile.
I was disconcerted to learn that the station referred to the our talk as a “disco,” which I gather is a “discussion” (much as “convo” is “conversation”). The topics that have been proposed rest at a pretty basic level (“Bible: Who wrote it and where did it come from ie ….Was in inspired by the Holy Spirit or did it come from a range of Authors who were writing for multiple audiences?” “Status of the Bible today: Should it be viewed as mythology ie Greek or Celtic Civilization etc”). We’ll see how well I manage to address my disco partners, the presenter, the audience, and my own sense of impending predictable missing-the-point. (The show won’t be broadcast till December, I think, so for the time being you’ll just have to take my word on how it goes.)
Well, that was odd. Somewhere at the studio end, an electronic sound source was beeping continually, as though there were an open line (we know it wasn’t on my end, ’cos they called both the landline that runs to Princeton and my cell that’s directed through Chicago). They couldn’t track down the beeping today’s taping, so they’ll figure it out during the week and call me for a later interview that they’ll edit in.
Oh, and they added David Edgar to the lineup; I wish I could hear the other participants’ contributions so as to respond more precisely to the matters they raise, but I doubt that’ll be possible. More details as the story develops.
I saw this via a link from Denise; I was thinking it just mildly amusing part way in, but it pciked up toward the end. And my favorite part of all is the wildly enthusiastic standing ovation.