AKMA’s Random Thoughts

On the day that someone decides there’s a benefit (whether temporal or eternal) to gathering up, encouraging, and promoting reasoned theological reflection online, they’ll need to name Fred “Slacktivist” Clark as their first columnist. (I’m not saying I’d turn down an invitation if they hadn’t tapped Fred first, but I’d nag them at every staff meeting.)

I’ve linked to his page-by-page reviews of the dire literary and theological cataclysm that constitutes the Left Behind franchise (now regularized, we hope, as a weekly Friday feature), but really, I’ve never known him to post a trivial or ill-considered idea.

The morning was frantic, as usual; I was behind on some academic obligations, and am always behind in personal communication, and the sermon wasn’t quite set. I was supposed to bring over incense from our personal stock to use at Seabury’s Annunciation mass, but I forgot so I had to go home and pick it up, etc. etc., etc.

But the time came, I squared away my very most pressing administrative debts, checked in with my sweetheart, burnished the sermon (appended below) with some coherence and precision, and the service went well. Seabury doesn’t usually practice quite elaborate liturgy, so we negotiated some unplanned dialogues and maneuvers. God was praised, the congregation fed, and now I’m only just ordinarily behind, which feels almost like a vacation this afternoon.
Continue reading “How Can This Be?”

I’ve been wrestling with tomorrow morning’s sermon for the Feast of the Annunciation (well, they’re supposed to be no more than five minutes, so “homily” would be a more precise term). (I know that Annunciation comes on March 25, but it had to be transferred out of Holy Week, so this year it’s observed tomorrow.) I had a very vivid idea of what to do yesterday, at the installation of our new priest-in-charge at St. Luke’s, but on reflection it seems a bit too vivid in the mode I originally imagined for it. I need to rework the beginning bit so as to evoke the premise less explicitly; the conclusion can be pretty direct, but the opening needs to unfold more gently.

So while I try to work that out, I’ll tell you what Pippa and I thought of at the supermarket yesterday. We walked down the aisle with office supplies, to see whether I needed any of the goodies for my new digs, and as we surveyed the offerings, we noticed the clock array. “In this era of consumerism,” we thought, “are there any superficialities that haven’t been taken advantage of? Maybe just one. . . .”

“What if you sold special clocks pre-adjusted for Daylight Savings Time?” (You can sell the “Standard Time” models in the fall, and can quickly branch out into special clocks pre-adjusted for each time zone, too.) Now, don’t tell us that American consumers are too sophisticated for an idea such as that — Pip and I just take our cues from the advertising industry.

I was chatting with Joi this morning to thank him for his [qualified] endorsement, and he wished there was an RSS feed just for posts that involve Pippa (I’m setting aside what that (and the “usually”) imply about the rest of my posts).

At first, I thought that I should break down and begin using the MT Categories, but I’ve never liked those much. I pointed out that I tag Pippa’s pictures on flickr with her name, so he can subscribe to that feed anyway.

Then it occurred to me: I checked to see whether anything but her pictures showed up when I treated her name as a Technorati tag; no, no other “Pippa”-tagged posts or pictures. So I went back, tagged the last few posts that involved her, and now the world of Pippa fans can subscribe to the RSS feed of the Technorati tag page for Pippa. And you other Pippas of the world, sorry, you’ll have to devise modifiers for your own tags.

[Update: I’m going through the archives and adding tags now for Josiah and Nate — will work one up for Margaret sooner or later.]

Since the Freedom to Connect conference concerned itself (among other things) with the FCC’s recent Reign of Prudery, many speakers went out of their way to emphasize their points with emphatic profanity. More than once, the speaker accompanied that with an explicit (or muttered) apology to me, as though I were unaccustomed to hear such language. (They don’t spend enough time around seminarians and teenagers — though Pippa tsk-tsks Si when his language turns colorful). Word: I’m not that fragile. Profanity provides vivid prose with some of its most vivid moments, especially when the profanity is well-rendered (though I’m not convinced that Matt really needed to adopt a metaphor that implies that men uniquely possess the physiology for technological innovation. . . ).

What of boasting? It is committed.

Josiah has heard from schools number two through four among his five applications, and Two College and Three College both wait-listed him, and Four College admitted him with a generous offer. That leaves Five College, a sort of wild-card; but not only is he a wanted undergraduate, but he’s wanted by more every institution to which he applied, and two of them want him enough to admit and fund him. You go, boy!

Margaret’s getting positive feedback from all around her; she’s doing great work in her classes, thinking hard with her profs and a wonderfully positive presence for her colleagues. She and Nate are studying hard and doing well, though since they’re both in remote locations, and since academic work involves fewer obvious occasions for laud, but they’re both spectacular.

Pippa continues making wonderful images with paint and pen and keyboard (Margaret and I cherish her email messages). At F2C, Dave isenberg brought out a t-shirt he’d been given by his print shop; it read in big letters, “God Bless America,” with an American flag imprint. He reckoned that the clergy delegate was the right conferee to get the shirt, so he threw it out to me. (This story does get back to how proud I am of Pippa.) I sat with the shirt displayed beside me through Thursday’s program, and brought it home, uncertain of what should become of it. When I explained the situation to the family, Pippa quickly pointed out some of the theo-political problems with the shirt; her first reaction was that it should be a prayer, but that instead it reads as a command. But she volunteered to take it, perhaps to wear inside-out or use for her painting shirt. Fifteen minutes later she came back. . . .

I’m so proud of them, it makes my heart pound. What, as Dick Leonard says, did I do to deserve this? [Don’t worry; you probably don’t know Dick. But he always used to say that when he lived with us, so the family always quotes him.]

Clay “They Ought Know Better Than To Mess With Me” Shirky calls in to Boing Boing with a demonstration of the corrupt incoherence of writing copyright protection into hardware and software.

Yes, those who make our lives marvelous with their creativity must be supported.
Yes, the advent of digital reproduction changes the fundamental conditions that apply to such support.

No, that does not mean perpetuating obsolete mechanisms to protect the vestiges of a [deliberately dysfunctional] legacy system of distribution and rewards.

Last night before dinner, another conference participant thanked me for a link I had made to her blog way back in olden times (when we blogged with quill pens). I didn’t remember the link at the time — it was two and a half years ago — but lo and behold, here it is (Hi, Sara)! It’s great to meet and converse with people with whom you have online history.

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As I was hunter-gathering at the continental breakfast bar this morning, one of the other participants here came up to say she had had a dream about me last night. (I took heart that she said “dream,” rather than “nightmare,” but I was still cautious as she began to tell me what she dreamt).

As it turns out, she dreamt that somebody came up to her, pointed to me and said, “That guy isn’t really a priest. He’s too cool to be a priest!” Now, for clarity’s sake I should emphasize that this doesn’t count as a conscious asseveration of my coolness (she’s obviously the sort of highly-intelligent tech observer who would never make such a mistake if she were fully responsible for her assessment of me) — but given the sorts of things that might ensue when somebody looks up and says “I had a dream about you last night,” this counts as one of the very most positive.

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Observant readers may notice that I haven’t kept up very well at tagging. I just realized a way to use MarsEdit, my present favorite blogging client (no disrespect to ecto, which I’ll happily try out some time, adriaan, but MarsEdit originally came bundled with NetNewsWire) to do better hereafter, using the “custom tags” feature, so I’ll try to reform my wayward habits.

But here’s a problem with tags: you can’t simply copy-and-paste them, the way you can with links. Copying and pasting links is very simple process; unless I’m missing something, creating a Technorati tag requires a separate step and a degree of deliberation about “how to tag.” The incorporation of categories as tags is a nice step toward this, but most category-users deploy categories that would be too broad to make good tags, and many people don’t use categories at all. At the moment, after the blush of excitement about the tag-powered, folksonomical Web has faded, that looks like an unacceptable brake on this new step. Brent, Adriaan, Firefoxians, SixApart, tool developers: please help us out on this, or tip us off that the overhead isn’t worth it.

Just before the Four Freedoms session, Jerry Michalski found me and pointed out that he had read the previous blog entry, and he had some good news: I wasn’t going to be expected to talk for twenty minutes. We weren’t going to occupy twenty-minute blocks of time at all, but would have about five minutes, followed by an open Q-and-A from the floor.

That clearly solved my awkward-duration problem, but left me a bit at sea concerning what I would say in my five minutes. I shaped my note cards for the twenty-minute slot, so I tried to summarize and skim. It seemed to go all right; no one hissed, or threw overripe fruit. Afterward, I had a couple of very provocative conversations; that’s all you can ask, I guess.

Heath “the miraculous Transcriptionist” Row seems to have blogged the session almost verbatim — bless you, Heath! And if you were listening, here or in the webcast, many thanks for your patient attention.

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[I wrote this last night — now I’m here, in Silver Spring, and we’ll find out just how wrong a twenty-minute slot can be.]

I have about twenty minutes, according to the Freedom to Connect conference schedule, which is precisely the wrong amount of time. In about five minutes, I can make a crystalline, sharp-edged case for something; in an hour or so, I can develop a careful, thorough analysis and argument. Twenty minutes is too long for scintillating, but too short for pains-taking. At least, that’s the way it feels tonight.

Luckily for me, I’ve heard David Weinberger at a number of conferences, and if I start feeling the audience slip away I’ll talk about shopping for a washing machine, or the Dewey Decimal System. That will not only occupy my fleeting minutes, but will offer me the satisfaction of watching David’s face as he realizes I’m using up some of his prime material, since he doesn’t speak at F2C until after I’ve gone! Hoohah!