Category: Uncategorized

Wendy tapped me to respond to the “Four Things” quiz. I usually sit these out — as a professor and a priest, there are serious TMI risks to my giving vent to unbridled self-expression (students and alums shake their heads and say, “You mean, this guy is holding anything back?” But really, appropriate relationships with teachers and clergy are difficult enough without thinking about their favorite body part or which film star they most desire).

Four Jobs I’ve Had

Senior Flyboy, the Brunswick-Bath Times Record Summer 1977
Waterbed Installer, Waterbeds East 1979-1980 (Hey, Fred!)
Production Manager, Slidemaker Computer Graphics 1980-1983
Announcer, “Son Shine,” Religious News show on the Radio Information Service 1981 (I think)

Four Movies I Can Watch Over and Over

The General
The Philadelphia Story
Lord of the Rings
Much Ado About Nothing

Four Places I have Lived

Brunswick, Maine
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
St. Petersburg, Florida
Princeton, New Jersey

Four Television Shows I Love to Watch

(I haven’t watched television for years, but from days of old):
Mystery! , especially Albert Campion
Twin Peaks
Rocky and Bullwinkle
Max Headroom and Sledge Hammer

Four Places I Have Been on Vacation

Don’t vacate much:
Nantucket, Massachusetts
Ayreshire, Scotland
The Best Western, Downtown Evanston
Toronto, Canada

Four of My Favourite Dishes

Margaret’s Penne Pesto
Rama Tofu at Cozy Noodles
Theresa’s Special pizza at Pizza Coloré, Princeton
Mexican Night at home with my daughter

Four Websites I Visit Daily

David Weinberger’s
Jeneane Sessum’s
Dooce’s
Si’s, not that he blogs that often
This really isn’t fair, since I read so many daily. And Happy Birthday to Tom

Four Places I Would Rather Be Right Now

With Margaret, in Durham
London, England
Stencilton (My house was in Lunkhead Commons, I think)
A location yet to be revealed, yet to be determined

Four People I am Now Tagging to Prepare the Same Lists

I don’t want to put anyone on the spot, but if no one’s asked you yet, and you want to have been tagged, by all means count this as a tagging. Not in the folksonomic sense.

Our friend Amy Morrison (“I take cat pictures and blog, so make something of it!”) will be coming to sleep over Saturday night. Amy survived at least one class with me back at Eckerd College (Hey, congratulations, Julie!) in olden times, when I used to lecture in a room lit by candles, and Chris and Shannon would throw papyrus airplanes back and forth.

To make Amy feel at home in the South Bedroom, we set up (and successfully booted and ran) the old Classic II computer that used to sit on my desk on the second floor of Seibert Hall. And I’ll be sure to wear my Eckerd “Fightin’ Fire Ants” t-shirt. And Laura emailed me to say we mustn’t stay up too late, giggling.

Pippa’s grandpapapapapapapa gave the family a collection of DVDs of the PBS series, Jeeves and Wooster for Christmas, and last weekend Pip set about watching. She watched the first, chuckled, laughed, and smiled — then crept over to my seat on the couch, batted her eyelashes, and asked, “What will we do next?” (The correct answer, of course, was “watch another episode.”)

There can hardly be a more precious sound to a parent’s ears in all the world than the sound of their child’s unguarded laughter. If watching Jeeves and Wooster makes Pippa’s laughter peal out, then we will watch another episode. Case closed.

The drawback of this viewing marathon, however, is that it’s engendering something of an identity crisis for me. For a long time, I’ve introduced myself as a postmodern Victorian — but now I’m wondering whether I might not be closer to a postmodern Edwardian. [The best solution, probably, is to say that I’m the kind of person who would devote significant deliberation over the question of whether he is more precisely a postmodern Victorian or a postmodern Edwardian. . . .]

Tim Bray cites a post by jwz about the criteria one might use in rating one’s iTunes selections. As you can imagine, this highly tangential critical question just fascinated me. Before I read about anybody else deliberating about the question, I conducted lengthy, intricate, silent private debates with myself about how one ought to rate tunes.

Before I present my approach, this is what jwz said:

0 stars: I have not yet rated this song
un-checked: I hate this song and never want to hear it again
1 star: I think I don’t like this song, but I’m not yet sure enough to kill it outright
2 stars: It’s ok. Don’t love it, don’t hate it
3 stars: This song is pretty good (but not great)
4 stars: I love this song!
5 stars: An ass-kicking, incredible, all-time favorite.

Tim doesn’t offer a full criteriology, but describes his five-star selections as “a tune that in some way gives me as much pleasure as music can.”

I can’t imagine that I’m as musically literate as Tim; I come in fourth in my family (I may be able to parlay my advantage in years into a slight lead over Si, but since both Nate and Margaret have serious formal music training, Pippa is the only immediate-family member who isn’t threatening to leave me in the dust, which is OK because her taste is so impeccable that we get along great). But I do know of a lot of music, and have probably spent more hours listening to tunes than some voters have been alive. So my assessment of star ratings reflects a more than nominal degree of rumination and evaluation.

Of course, a five-star system is awfully coarse-grained; it’s hard to grade anyone or anything on a five-point scale, with all the variables involved. Here’s the way I assign stars to my iTunes:

0 stars: There’s a reason for keeping this around, but I don’t want to hear it
un-checked: This is either spoken word or temporarily off my listening list
1 star: This song is pretty unfortunate
2 stars: Baseline: good enough to enjoy, but not outstanding
3 stars: Noteworthy in some way; better than most of my baseline choices
4 stars: A favorite of mine, but my taste may be idiosyncratic here
5 stars: Everyone should like, and if you don’t, I’m comfortable thinking that it’s a peculiarity of your taste more than of mine

Then I introduce some modifiers. For instance, if I listened only on the basis of unmodified stars, I would end up hearing an overwhelming preponderance of performances by men (if for no other reason than that I’m more familiar with more music performed by men, and have spent more time appreciating music performed by men) — so I tend to introduce a correction to ratings of performances by women (a star to a half-star, so that my baseline for women’s performances comes in at three stars, and my standard for “my favorites” stretches somewhat, and the “everyone should like it” category includes a didactic element).

At this point, my iTunes are only partially categorized; I’ll post the breakdown when I make more progress. Of course, I may need to change my ratings if someone convinces me that my criteria need refactoring.

I frequently dream about preaching; last night, for the first time I remember, I woke up from the midst of a dream in which I was saying mass, and it was hard for me to focus enough to realize that I didn’t have to continue saying the Great Thanksgiving.

This morning has already started well: as I was walking the dog, my iPod played for me the Chi-Lites’ (For God’s Sake, You Got to Give More) Power to the People,” U2’s “Vertigo,” Beck singing “Loser,” Edith Piaf’s “La Vie En Rose,” Blind Willie Johnson’s “John the Revelator,” and the Carter Family’s “No Telephones in Heaven.”

A couple years ago I suggested that the Democratic Party adopt the Indigo Girls’ “Let It Be Me” as a musical theme for their Presidential campaign, and we all see what happened when they disregarded that advice. For next time, I nominate the Chi-Lites’ “Power to the People” (I think the line with the question mark is “never knew but only heard of”). Timely lyrics, funky beat, and you can dance to it. Of course, then they might have to think about taking a stand and devolving more power to the people, so it’s probably a non-starter.

Then it turns out that ArtRage has released a new version of their natural-media paint program — actually, two new versions, one free (with slight improvements to the feature set of version 1) and one more powerful version for a scant $20.

That reminded me that Gary Turner reminisced, last week, about his exploits as a Photoshopper. It turns out his favorite, pardon me favourite, was a picture of me teaching theology on Fox News (I’d forgotten about that one); I love the Infohighwayman illo, though, and my all time favorite is still the Enquirer cover.

I just realized that tomorrow is my fourth blogiversary. Looking up the date involved remembering the tagline trio from my first blog (“All times are local” • “Local times may vary” • “Minutes do not expire”) and the subhead of the blog layout before this one, “the sensation of fullness for the whole day.” This reminds me that although I talk a lot in my vocations as preacher and teacher, I’ve been talking all the more online through this blog. You might think that, at a certain point, one just loses any sense of caution about so doing, but I find that I still experience great hesitancy about pushing the “post” button, or (as was the case this afternoon) pushing “send” to submit my lectionary reflections to Dylan.

The positive take on this phenomenon ascribes my reluctance to an acute sense of my fallibility. The negative take, of course, suggests that I’m slow to draw the appropriate conclusion from the fact that my writing seems , on the whole, not to compare unfavorably to Vogon poetry, and even seems to please a number of readers, at least one of whom is not a relative of mine.

Speaking of readers, Gustav of Uppsala just left a comment noting that he’s working on a paper about Linnaeus, and would like to know of any places in the USA (streets, towns, I don’t know, multi-lane bowling alleys) named after Linnaeus. I couldn’t think of any at all; do you know of one?

I owe Dylan an essay of “lectionary reflections” by tomorrow afternoon, and I’ve been trying to reflect for her all morning and afternoon, but what keeps coming to my mind are more angles on the “justice as fetish” topos, for which these are not the readings nor this exactly the right publisher.

I frequently find that when I have a deadline, my brain overflows with intriguing ideas for other projects. That would excite me more if they came along with opportunities actually to develop any of them.

I was just using Technorati a few minutes ago, and noticed that my Technorati Rank is 5,740. That’s not the kind of number that gets you swell-headed; you have to go through the alphabet a few times to get to the “list” that ranking earns me. Doc may resist being labelled an A-list-er, but I’m roughly on the WW-list.

On the other hand, granted that Technorati tracks 25 million blogs — I’m in the 99th percentile. That sounds better. I’m not the head of the blog foodchain, nor the “long tail”; I’m more like part of the “pointy elbow.”

Pippa has been permitting her gifts for painting and drawing a lengthy fallow period — and as we try not to strong-arm our children’s learning, we haven’t pushed her back to her easel. She was given several art-oriented presents for her birthday at the end of November, though, and in early December she set about executing a Christmas present for aunts Jeanne and Gail (whom she’ll make a three-week visit later in the winter).

We took the pastel in for matting and framing (a customer at the table next to us ooh-ed and aah-ed about the image, which discomfited Pippa), but it took longer to frame than could be squeezed in before Christmas. We picked it up during the week after Christmas, and after the holiday’s assembled family multitudes shuffled back to their various academic institutions, I packed and shipped the framed pastel to Maine.

Today, it arrived in Maine, and Jeanne and Gail have had the chance to admire it, and now I have permission to post it to my Flickr page — so those of you who’ve been missing the steady flow of Pippa art can take some solace in this shipment.

Two pictures here, and one at Google video.

First, for Chris, a possible connection for him to get a guest-lecturer gig:

Then, a photo of the sign that has long tickled our family — we frequently park near here and walk past on our way to church.

And finally, a Google video that seems spontaneous, but too good to be spontaneous — and it delights me even if was set up and rehearsed.

A few years ago I lamented about my students’ disinclination to look for any resources online; more recently, I’ve had to cajole students to bestir themselves to find research material in the physical library. I don’t deprecate the value of research material just because it’s found online, but I wish for my students the opportunity to learn not only from people so forward-thinking as to publish their work online, but also from some of the scholarship that has not yet appeared in digital form.

So I spent a fair amount of time this past weekend with the wonderful application Comic Life* writing/illustrating a guide for finding the relevant reference sources in Seabury’s United Library. I tried to include establishing shots so that people could orient themselves, images of specific books and periodicals (along with catalogue numbers) so that people could recognize them when they saw them on the shelf, and some miscellaneous observations about where to find pointers to pertinent books and articles. (The guide should also help fend off the tendency to rely on some sources that I don’t illustrate.)

I printed a couple of copies for the class and the librarian, and posted the pages to the Disseminary Flickr site in a set (and linked to it from the course website). But if you didn’’t see me this weekend, that’s what I was doing — and now you can find the New Testament reference material in the United Library, too.

---

* Comic Life could be improved in a variety of ways, but on most fronts it’s an exemplary program; it demonstrates the power of computers to make complicated special tasks into simple drag-and-drop errands. They advertise “zero learning curve,” and although that’s a marketing overstatement, it’amazingly close to being true. I recommend it strongly. Still, they should include or permit one to import some vector objects (such as arrows and explosion shapes), and manipulating styles of “POW!” text involves some frustrating idiosyncrasies.