AKMA’s Random Thoughts

I’ve been trying to concentrate on my sermon for tomorrow’s “Beyond Dichotomous Theology” seminar across the street at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary. The featured speaker, Gary Dorrien, is a professor of my foster-daughter’s at Union — so if the pressure to preach a true word before God’s people and all the saints and angels assembled weren’t high enough, I’ll be trying to make a good impression for Jennifer’s sake.

Since I have that sermon to finish, and a Bible study group at St. Luke’s tonight, I’ll conclude for now by pointing to A Light Blazes in the Darkness, the Advent devotional book by the RevGalBlogPals, featuring contributions by Jane and Susie (among other people I know — I’m not sure who-all else is in on this). All the proceeds go to Katrina Relief — so by ordering a copy, you’ll be doing good both for your soul and for the survivors of the Louisiana-Mississippi hurricane.

(Unfortunately, it looks as though we’ll need to write a whole lot more devotionals if we’re going to shelter and feed the survivors of the Pakistan-India earthquake. . . .)

Today is All Saints Day, and tomorrow All Souls Day — a doubleheader of my favorite holy days. I appreciate All Saints Day not only because it was the day Pippa was baptized, but also because it’s a feast that whose honor extends even to me. While I rejoice in remembering the feasts of my favorite hero-saints, there is no risk whatever that I would attain to that degree of the eminence. On the other hand, these days embrace even the least of the saints — people like me — and allot them a feast day. Those of us who miss the cut for “saints,” even loosely construed, are commemorated on All Souls.

So I think of the All Saints tapestries at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, but I also remember one of the very favorite things I’ve read online: Halley Suitt’s column called, “When My Dad Wakes Up Today.” If you haven’t read it before, go read it now and then come back. I can wait.

The punchline — “I’ve died and gone to heaven” — hit home to me especially this All Saints/Souls Day. I’ve had a fair helping of pastoral-care work to do on- and offline over the past few weeks, and have been touched by the sad circumstances of several other people who didn’t call on me as a pastor. As I reflected today on the beautiful souls who have entwined their lives with mine, as I think about Elway, and Halley’s dad, and Pem’s dad, and all the saints, I realize that even now, at every moment, I’m surrounded on every side by Pippa, Si, Nate, Margaret, and Juliet and Jennifer, and our family back east; by a tight and tremendous community of bloggers and readers, some with whom I email and message day by day, and others whom I will never know.

It’s not just Halley’s dad, but me, too: surrounded by so marvelous a cloud of witnesses, I can wake up with Jacob and say, “This is none other than the house of God, and this is the very gate of heaven!”

I recognize that it wouldn’t measure any real quantity, but just out of curiosity: does anyone have a record of the number of “category-hours” of hurricanes this year, and how that compares to other years? Everyone seems to agree this year has been dramatically more active; it would be interesting to see that we had X hours of category five hurricane, Y hours of category four, Z of category three, and so on, compared to past hurricane seasons.

Today’s mail brought me a DVD of the June 23 telecast of Envoyé Spécial, the French TV program that devoted a half hour to covering the emergence of blogs as a social phenomenon. The producers sent me a copy because the segment concludes with a brief series of shots of St. Luke’s church and me, talking about blogs and particularly about my casual suggestion that someone look into archiving the sites and posts of deceased bloggers — what Joi and David called “AKMA’s Cyber Crypt.” In other words, I provide the mild comic relief after others demonstrate the salacious, political, and journalistic aspects of blogging (as one viewer commented, “perfect for making the blogosphere look ridiculous”).

I suppose I’d have liked the French viewing public to hear about some of my, um, deeper ideas about theology, technology, postmodernism, or biblical hermeneutics — but it’s not surprising that only the goofy idea got edited into the final cut. I’ll remember that the photography around St. Luke’s was lovely, and seeing the segment reminded me of what a good time I had talking with the crew.

Sermon for tomorrow, sermon for Thursday’s conference, overdue paper for SBL conference.

I have a request of the LazyWeb, or the Expert-Readers Web, or something. It involves Macs, pages, PDF, and printing.

The problem is this: I produce a lot of documents for students. Custom and the material circumstances of production typically require that I print them on 8.5 × 11 paper, with roughly a 1-inch margin all ’round.

That’s not the most suitable format for reading or printing, though — otherwise, our bookshelves would be crammed with folio and quarto-sized volumes, instead of the much more common duodecimo size. No big problem; almost all word processors (and all page-layout programs, of course) permit me to write two columns on a landscape-oriented page, making a presentation functionally equivalent to a duodecimo page layout. (I’m waiting impatiently for Mellel to introduce columns — the major impediment to my making my annual word-processor application switch, in this case returning to Mellel from a year using Pages).

But: I’m not aware of a way conveniently to paginate such a volume by column (that is, “by simulated page”).

I’ve tried making the normative page size a half-sheet of , then printing the resulting page two-up, but the combinations of Mac OS X and my printers and PDF add a margin around the whole page, thus doubling the margin and reducing the area available for body copy. I’ve tried imposition programs (Cheap Impostor), and none of them seems to facilitate printing two-up pages side by side. Someone would be doing me, and the Web, a big favor if they could explain an effective way to produce pages with two columns (= side-by-side pages), numbered consecutively (= by page number, if I were photocopying from a bound work), without an excessive margin around the whole.

FYI: I have Pages, Mellel, Word, Appleworks, InDesign, RagTime — and probably other word processing and page layout software.

Over and above the Guardian’s ill-advisedly denominating Leigh and Baignent “historians” (they’re historians in the same sense in which Lyndon Larouche is a politician), I’m intrigued and appalled at the news that the authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail are suing Dan “All Facts!” Brown for stealing their ideas for his jigga-zillion-selling The da Vinci Code.

Last I checked, you couldn’t copyright “ideas,” least of all if they’re factually true. Moreover, the Brown book has revived interest in a theory that had fallen into well-deserved obscurity; if anything, Brown has helped their sales. I can only imagine that this is a publicity maneuver, the ludicrousness of which is beside the point.

But if the case signifies that HB,HG really is a work of fiction, then I suppose they could sue Brown, perhaps effectively (though their having represented it as history at the outset would hamper their case).

Our household had a family tradition that I would make pancakes for brunch every Saturday. I started when Margaret and I were first married, and I distinctly remember making her tiny little pancakes for Nate, when he was still in utero (she is now off pancakes of the conventional kind) since we’ve learned that she has celiac disease and can’t digest gluten). When the boys were little, I used to astound them by producing pancakes with their initials on them. Once, Nate was in a mood and demanded the Lord’s Prayer on his pancake (I got about as far as “who art in heaven,” if I recall).

As the boys grew up and moved away, as Pippa’s wake-up time and appetite departed from regular interest in mid-morning pancakes, we fell away from the habit. I will confess that I felt a pang of regret that my paternal trademark had become redundant, but I suppose that sort of thing happens as humans get older.

This morning, Pippa stumbled downstairs and asked, “Do you think we have the ingredients for pancakes?” (What she doesn’t know is that I would have walked to D & D Finer Foods barefoot to obtain any missing ingredient if it would make it possible for me to flip pancakes for her.) We did, and I did; the decades of experience had not deserted me, as the resulting flapjacks were golden brown and delicious. Since occasionally people express surprise at the way I prepare my pancake batter, I thought I’d provide the recipe:

Dad’s Copyright-Free Pancake Recipe

First, decide how many people you plan to stuff. For two people, you ought to be able to satisfy them at the “N = 1” level; from there, you make sure you have ingredients according to the following formula: N cups of milk, N * 1.5 eggs (round up), and N cups of flour.

Mix the eggs into the milk (we use soy milk or rice milk, in order to maintain our New England hippy cred), and beat the bejeebers out of them.

Gradually add the flour to the egg-and-milk mixture.

Sprinkle some Baking Powder in the batter. I always use Clabber Girl Baking Powder, because I get a charge out of saying “Clabber Girl” with a weak Irish lilt to my voice. Sometimes I do it two or three times, which may have something to do with my family’s loss of interest in pancakes. “Some” means “enough that when you mix it in, the batter bubbles gently.”

Add a shake or two of salt. If N > 2, add three or four shakes.

Pour a splash of oil (we prefer organic canola oil) into the batter. Size of splash should be proportional, of course, to N.

Finally — and this is a vital ingredient — pour some of the maple syrup (that’s real maple syrup, ain’t no “corn syrup-with-caramel-coloring-and-artificial-flavor pseudo-maple syrup”) into the batter. Just a dite.

Heat a griddle over a medium stove. Pour six- or seven-inch disks of batter; brown on Side One until they turn easily. Serve with butter and maple syrup since, as everyone knows, pancakes are merely syrup delivery vehicles anyway.

Consume with gusto.

I will, because it will please Jane, anyway.

Someone over at Kendall Harmon’s blog pointed to a site that makes available the Bible Content exams that the Presbyterian Church administers as part of Ords (their answer to General Ordination Exams).

I won’t ask that anyone report a score — but it will reward seminarians (and clergy, and interested churchpeople, and cultural literacy types who don’t believe anything particular about Israel or Jesus) to give the test a few tries.

I’ve ranted here, repeatedly, about the potential value of “seeded search” — weighting a web search by the proximity of search results to a stipulated set of reference sites. If I search for links related to digital identity, for instance, I might want to seed the search by ordering the results relative to their proximity to Eric Norlin, Dick Hardt, and Phil Windley.

So I built a search window that seeds the results with a handful of the soundest biblical-studies research sites. Presumably this will highlight sites to which my reference sites link, and leave behind the sites that they likewise ignore. Let’s see how it works:

(I won’t know how this is going till after I post it, so if I have anything else to say, it’ll appear in the comments. Thanks for the tip, Chris and Jeneane!)