AKMA’s Random Thoughts

Or at least, “twelve years of a government act intended to bring about accessibility.” The Americans with Disabilities Act was passed twelve years ago today, despite the efforts of iron-hearted “compassionate conservatives” and the mockery of commentators content to cash in on a cheap laugh at the expense of blind or deaf or wheelchair-bound jobseekers.…

Makes me feel pretty cosmopolitan to notice the number of referrers who point to this page from foreign-language sites (the same sort of feeling as having heard that I’m a bigger deal scholar in Finland than I am in the USA). At least, it feels cosmopolitan until I realize how few of the pages I…

Has anyone else noticed an uptick in the quantity of spam recently? Or did I just get lucky with some spammer’s harvesting bot? I won’t mention what I’ve been offered, lest I get some misdirected Google hits, but let’s just say that they’ve got absolutely the wrong audience. DRMA: “All My Little Words,” Magnetic Fields.

I know I’ll feel dopey for asking, but is there something I should be remembering to avoid giving my external USB hard drive a migraine every week or so, when I forget to dismount it nicely before my PowerBook goes to sleep? It seems so massively counterintuitive that Apple should have written the system software…

Juliet’s archive problem seems to have cleared up (blogger blogger) and that puts me back on the spot to respond to her (just as I was telling David in email that maybe we should wind this thread down). I’ll try to strike a happy medium between boring the non-hermeneutics fans out there (on one hand)…

What more fitting conclusion could our thread reach than this breaking story, from America’s Finest News Source?

I’m going to keep this short, not out of disrespect for my wonderful conversation partners (whose patience and persistence I greatly admire and appreciate) but first, because I don’t want to go on indefinitely about the topic, ’cause I have the distinct feeling that very few people care, and second, because I don’t want to…

Two more quick excerpts on hermeneutics, in both cases especially Scriptural hermeneutics: [Scripture] cannot as it were be mapped, or its contents catalogued; but after all our diligence, to the end of our lives and to the end of the Church, it must be an unexplored and unsubdued land, with heights and valleys, forests and…

David Weinberger and Tom Matrullo (via email) have both gotten back to me about hermeneutics. I’ll answer David first, because I think it’ll be easier. David tosses me a softball to start, asking whether his representation of my proposed distinction between “integral” and “differential” hermeneutics rings true. Yes, though I think that in the definition…

David Weinberger offers thoughtful criticism of my developing essay on integral and differential hermeneutics. If all writers had readers like David, writing would be none the less difficult—David doesn’t let me off any hooks—but it would be vastly more rewarding. Shelley has answered us, firmly, that blogging is no longer for her, and she gives…

Jennifer, our wonderful adjunct daughter, is here for a while, and Margaret leaves New England with Pippa and Si tomorrow early in the morning. We figure to be all together by Wednesday at the latest. It is, as Martha says, all good.

Picking up near where I left off, oneof the aspects of the whole discussion that flummoxes me involves the extent to which the argument tends to presuppose a Protestant-vs.-Catholic worldview, with no room left for anyone else. I would have a hard time imagining the same vigorous arguments against plurivalence in the context of Judaism…