allmyways

How Long?

2012-01-04T20:11:00.000-08:00

O Lord, how long shall I cry for help,

and you will not hear?

Or cry to you “Violence!”

and you will not save?

Habakkuk 1:2

Definition of Enormity (from the Free Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary)

Definition of ENORMITY
1: an outrageous, improper, vicious, or immoral act

2: the quality or state of being immoderate, monstrous, or outrageous; especially : great wickedness

3: the quality or state of being huge : immensity

4: a quality of momentous importance or impact

Loster Killers

2012-01-01T13:37:00.000-08:00

I had a fun New Year's Eve with our good friends the Andas cooking Julia Child's Lobster Thermidor recipe. Aimee made the Reine De Saba (Chocolate and Almond Cake). It was awesome, even if it did turn out a bit flat.

"Lobsta Killers"! Yes I did feel bad putting the live lobsters in the boiling wine/water. Cooking with Julia Child is always an adventure. The lobster thermidor was delicious.

Julie Powell's recipe for success - LA Daily News

2011-12-30T08:31:00.000-08:00

Julie Powell's recipe for success - LA Daily News

Grandpa Tell Me Bout The Good Old Days

2011-12-30T07:40:00.000-08:00

Did lovers really fall in love to stay
And stand beside each other come what may?
Was a promise really something people kept
Not just something they would say?
Did families really bow their heads to pray?
Did daddies really never go away?
Oh, Grandpa, tell me 'bout the good old days

The Way of Love

2011-10-08T10:15:00.000-07:00

1 Corinthians 13 (From The Message Bible)

1 If I speak with human eloquence and angelic ecstasy but don't love, I'm nothing but the creaking of a rusty gate. 2If I speak God's Word with power, revealing all his mysteries and making everything plain as day, and if I have faith that says to a mountain, "Jump," and it jumps, but I don't love, I'm nothing. 3-7If I give everything I own to the poor and even go to the stake to be burned as a martyr, but I don't love, I've gotten nowhere. So, no matter what I say, what I believe, and what I do, I'm bankrupt without love.

Love never gives up.
Love cares more for others than for self.
Love doesn't want what it doesn't have.
Love doesn't strut,
Doesn't have a swelled head,
Doesn't force itself on others,
Isn't always "me first,"
Doesn't fly off the handle,
Doesn't keep score of the sins of others,
Doesn't revel when others grovel,
Takes pleasure in the flowering of truth,
Puts up with anything,
Trusts God always,
Always looks for the best,
Never looks back,
But keeps going to the end.
8-10Love never dies. Inspired speech will be over some day; praying in tongues will end; understanding will reach its limit. We know only a portion of the truth, and what we say about God is always incomplete. But when the Complete arrives, our incompletes will be canceled.

11When I was an infant at my mother's breast, I gurgled and cooed like any infant. When I grew up, I left those infant ways for good.

12We don't yet see things clearly. We're squinting in a fog, peering through a mist. But it won't be long before the weather clears and the sun shines bright! We'll see it all then, see it all as clearly as God sees us, knowing him directly just as he knows us!

13But for right now, until that completeness, we have three things to do to lead us toward that consummation: Trust steadily in God, hope unswervingly, love extravagantly. And the best of the three is love.

Sonnet cxvi

2011-09-16T09:57:00.000-07:00

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments. Love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove:

O no! it is an ever-fixed mark

That looks on tempests and is never shaken;

--- Shakespeare

Christmas Memories from 1834

2010-12-10T11:14:00.000-08:00

From Leigh Hunt's London Journal 1834

A THIRD PORTRAIT OF DECEMBER.
(From the Literary Pocket Book.) IT is now complete winter. The vapourish and cloudy atmosphere wraps us about with dimness and chilliness; the reptiles, and other creatures that sleep or hide during the cold weather, have all retired to their winter quarters; the farmer does little or nothing, out of doors; the fields are too damp and miry to pass, except in sudden frosts, which begin to occur at the end of the month; and the trees look like skeletons of what they were—

"are ruined choirs in which the sweet birds sing."

The evergreen trees, with their beautiful cones, such as firs and pines, are now particularly observed and valued. In the warmer countries, where shade is more particularly desirable, their worth and beauty: are more regularly appreciated. Virgil talks of the pine as being handsomest in gardens, and it is a great favourite with Theocritus, especially for the fine sound of the air under its kind of vaulted roof.

…

But December has one exercise in it which turns it into the merriest month of the year—Christmas. This is the holiday, which, for obvious reasons, may be said to have survived all others; but still it is not kept with anything like the vigour, perseverance, and elegance of our ancestors. They not only ran Christmas-day, New-year's-day, and Twelfth-night all into one, but kept the wassail-bowl floating the whole time, and earned their right to enjoy it by alt sorts of active pastimes.

The wassail-bowl, (as some of our readers may know by experience, for it has been a little revived of late) is a composition of spiced wine or ale, with roasted apples put into it, and sometimes eggs. They also adorned their houses with green boughs, which, it appears from Herrick, was a practice with many throughout the year,—box succeeding at Candlemas to the holly, bay, rosemary, and misletoe of Christmas,—yew at Easter to box,—birch "and flowers at Whitsuntide to yew,—and then bents "and oaken boughs.

The whole nation were in as happy a ferment at Christmas, with the warmth of exercise and their firesides, as they were in May with the new sunshine. The peasants nestled and sported on the town-green, and told tales of an evening; the gentry feasted them, or bad music and other elegant pastimes; the court had the poetical and princely entertainment of masques, and all sung, danced, revelled, and enjoyed themselves, and so welcomed the new year like happy and grateful subjects of nature.

This is the way to turn winter to summer, and make the world what Heaven has enabled it to be; but, as people in general manage 'it, they might as well turn summer itself into winter.

Nor is it only on holidays that nature tells us to enjoy ourselves. If we were wise we should earn a reasonable portion of pleasure and enjoyment day by day, instead of resolving to do it some day or other, and seldom doing it at all.

A warm carpet and curtains, a sparkling fire, a book, a little music, a happy sympathy of talk, or a kind discussion, may then call to mind with unenvying placidity the very rarest luxuries of the summer time; and instead of being eternally and foolishly told that pleasures produce pains, by those who really make them so, with their profligacy or bigotry, we shall learn the finer and manlier knowledge how to turn pain to the production of pleasure.

A Little Sunlight

2010-10-17T16:17:00.000-07:00

The Word
by Tony Hoagland

Down near the bottom
of the crossed-out list
of things you have to do today,

between “green thread”
and “broccoli” you find
that you have penciled “Sunlight”!

Resting on the page, the word
is as beautiful, it touches you
as if you had a friend

and sunlight were a present
he had sent you from some place distant
as this morning – to cheer you up,

and to remind you that
among your duties, pleasure
is a thing,

that also needs accomplishing.
Do you remember?
that time and light are kinds

of love, and love
is no less practical
than a coffee grinder

or a safe spare tire?
Tomorrow you may be utterly
without a clue

but today you get a telegram,
from the heart in exile
proclaiming that the kingdom

still exists,
the king alive
still speaking to his children

to any one among them
who can find the time,
to sit out in the sun and listen.

H’aitches, H’ays and Red Herrings

2010-09-06T11:07:00.001-07:00

The Five Red Herrings by Dorothy Sayers is my least favorite of her Peter Wimsey detective stories. The story turns on detailed train schedules which, to my mind, get a little tedious. Since it is set in Scotland there is a fair amount of Scottish dialect to wade through.

But I found this passage which relates the Scottish police Inspector Macpherson's interview of the English butler of one of the six suspects in the murder of an artist to be hilarious. It was worth reading the book for this one exchange. The butler's name is Alcock:

The Inspector opened his notebook.

"Your name is Halcock, is't no?" he began.

The butler corrected him

"H'alcock," he said, reprovingly.

"H, a, double-l?" suggested the Inspector.

"There is no h'aitch in the name, young man. H'ay is the first letter, and there is h'only one h'ell."

"I beg your pardon," said the Inspector.

"Granted," said Mr. Alcock.

"Weel, noo, Mr. Alcock, juist a pure formality, ye understand, whit time did Mr. Gowan leave Kirkcudbright on Monday nicht?"

"It would be shortly after h'eight."

"Whae drove him?"

"Hammond, the chauffeur."

"Ammond?" said the Inspector.

"Hammond," said the butler, with dignity. "H'albert Hammond is his name – with a h'aitch."

"I beg your pardon," said the Inspector.

National Dog Day: “A Famous Dog”

2010-08-27T13:03:00.001-07:00

In honor of National Dog day which took place on August 26, I thought I'd post about Thomas Hardy's dog, Wessex. Wessex was a very spoiled but much- loved fox terrier who kept Hardy company in his old age.

Wessex was notorious for his bad behavior towards visitors to the Hardy home, as one dinner guest recorded in a letter:

Wessex was especially uninhibited at dinner time, most of which he spent not under, but on, the table, walking about unchecked, and contesting every single forkful of food on its way from my plate to my mouth.

Thomas Hardy's notebook recorded the dog's passing in 1926 thusly:

"Wx buried" and "Wx sleeps outside the house for the first time for 13 years".

Wessex's Headstone reads:

THE
FAMOUS DOG
WESSEX
August 1913 – 27 Dec 1926

Faithful. Unflinching

Hardy's wife Florence also recorded her affection for Wessex in a letter to a friend:

Of course he was merely a dog, and not a good dog always, but thousands (actually thousands) of afternoons and evenings I would have been alone but for him, and had always him to speak to. But I mustn't write about him and I hope no one will ask me about him or mention his name.

Hardy wrote this poem about Wessex in 1924:

A Popular Personage at Home

"I LIVE here : 'Wessex' is my name:

I am a dog known rather well:

I guard the house but how that came

To be my whim I cannot tell.

"With a leap and a heart elate I go

At the end of an hour's expectancy

To take a walk of a mile or so

With the folk I let live here with me.

" Along the path, amid the grass

I sniff, and find out rarest smells

For rolling over as I pass

The open fields toward the dells.

" No doubt I shall always cross this sill,

And turn the corner, and stand steady,

Gazing back for my Mistress till

She reaches where I have run already,

" And that this meadow with its brook,

And bulrush, even as it appears

As I plunge by with hasty look,

Will stay the same a thousand years."

Thus "Wessex." But a dubious ray

At times informs his steadfast eye,

Just for a trice, as though to say,

" Yet, will this pass, and pass shall I?"

You can read more about Thomas Hardy and his famous dog Wessex at:

Forever Foxed
and
The London Dog Forum

It Pleases! (Placet)

2010-08-23T10:44:00.001-07:00

This summer I am steadily making my way through all of the Lord Peter Wimsey detective novels written by Dorothy Sayers. (Thanks to the great L.A. county library which seems to have none of them available at the local branch but easily, freely and quickly orders them from other branch libraries in the system. But that's a subject for another blog post.)

My favorite of the Dorothy Sayer's novels so far is Gaudy Night which takes place on the campus of Oxford University. It is here that Lord Peter's proposes to his true love Harriet Vane for the last time. I wrote about this romantic proposal in a previous post.

Lord Peter says:

". . . But I will ask you now, and if you say No, I promise you that this time I will accept your answer. Harriet; you know that I love you: will you marry me?"

. . .

They passed beneath the arch of the bridge and out into the pale light once more.

"Peter!"

She stood still; and he stopped perforce and turned towards her. She laid both hands upon the fronts of his gown, looking into his face while she searched for the word that should carry her over the last difficult breach.

It was he who found it for her. With a gesture of submission he bared his head and stood gravely, the square cap dangling in his hand.

"Placetne, magistra"

"Placet."

Note: (Placetne – Does it please?/Is it agreed?)

(Placet – It pleases./ It is agreed)

I am also reading a collection of Dorothy Sayer's letters, The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers 1899 to 1936 edited by Barbara Reynolds.

The letters are fun and interesting to read alongside of the novels because the source of so many incidents and details in the novels are recognizable in Sayer's real life experiences related in the letters. She also discusses her thought processes with her friends and family members as she works out the plots of her books.

I was especially thrilled to come across her 1913 letter to Catherine Godfrey when she was a student at Oxford. She recounts to her friend Catherine her experience at a graduation ceremony at the University. The events of the ceremony illuminate the details and language of the proposal.

From Dorothy Sayer's Letter to Catherine Godfrey of 29 July 1913

About the Encaenia (The name of the degree ceremony at Oxford, from the Latin, meaning consecration, dedication.)

…

…Then Dr. Heberden, with his proctors one on each side of him, started off in Latin, to open Convocation and propose the conferring of degrees. When he had finished, the Public Orator – namely Godley, the man who writes such screaming poetry you know, -- started off to 'present' the Honorary doctors, which meant a terrific long Latin eulogy on each. I could follow a good deal of it, but not all. Godley is a rather dried-up looking individual with grey hair – not suggestive of verses, but people never do look suitable to their talents. When he'd finished the Vigger-Chagger addressed all the assembled doctors in a sing-song little speech, beginning something about 'Does it please you doctors of the University that so-and-so should be admitted to such and such a degree – "Placet ne?" and then he took off his cap; then said 'Placet' without leaving time for anyone to make an objection if he wanted to, and put it on again. And when he took his cap off the proctors took theirs off too, and when he put on his, they put on theirs, only generally they weren't paying attention and were a little late both times.

More details about the Latin phrases of the proposal are found in Dorothy Sayers Her Life and Soul by Barbara Reynolds Pg. 260:

The words "placetne?' and "placet" ("does it please?" – "it pleases") are uttered at a degree ceremony when a candidate is presented for graduation. The young Dorothy had described just such a ceremony in her letter to Catherine Godfrey many years ago—the occasion when she first set eyes on Maurice Toy Ridley, who was to become, though she had forgotten, a model for Lord Peter. When the degrees are conferred, the Proctors walk round so that anyone objecting may "pluck" the proctorial robes and protest. This did not occur in the case of Harriet and Peter:

Reynolds then quotes the paragraph from Gaudy Night which follows the proposal.

The Proctor, stumping grimly past with averted eyes, reflected that Oxford was losing all sense of dignity. But what could he do? If Senior Members of the University chose to stand –in their gowns, too! – closely and passionately embracing in New College Lane right under the Warden's windows, he was powerless to prevent it. He primly settled his white bands and went upon his walk unheeded; and no hand plucked his velvet sleeve.

LOVE IT!

SAVE OUR LIBRARIES!

2010-08-07T16:53:00.001-07:00

The city of Santa Clarita is considering taking over the operation of the three library branches located in the City of Santa Clarita from the county of Los Angeles.

Why Privatizing the SCV libraries is a bad idea:

The libraries in Santa Clarita are one of the best things about living in the area. They are well run, kid-friendly, adult friendly and staffed with knowledgeable and helpful people. Why mess with a successful operation? There aren't that many of them (successful operations) around.
All of those nice, friendly, helpful people who currently staff the library will lose their jobs and benefits. During this time of high unemployment and economic troubles why would we want to do that to the locally based employees who are currently doing such a fine job.
Those people, like me, who live outside of the city of Santa Clarita limits in unincorporated parts of the county of Los Angeles such as Stevenson Ranch and Castaic will likely lose their library privileges. (This even though we pay the same taxes as the city residents for library support.) The FAQs on the Santa Clarita website disingenuously state that those who live outside of the city proper will still be able to "go to" the library. It does not say that we will still be able to check out books.
The county library system currently consists of 89 branch libraries. The entire collection of each of these libraries is fully and easily accessible to every county library user. This is to me the real beauty of the library system and the reason the local library is so useful. Nine times out of ten the specific book I'm looking for is not housed in the local library. It actually never ceases to amaze me how few of the books I look for are available, even in the relatively well-stocked Valencia branch library. But, I have been ever so grateful for the easy to use web-based L.A. County catalog that allows me to click a button and order a book or DVD from another county library. In a few days it conveniently shows up on a shelf at the Valencia library with my name on it. All this at no charge, no need to have a librarian search a database for me or fill out a form.
This Web-based intralibrary request system is not at all like an inter-library loan. If the city takes over the local libraries interlibrary loan would be the only access SCV users would have to the county books. I recently had need for a book which was not available in any of the county libraries. I stood in line and waited for the assistance of one of the reference librarians to ask about an interlibrary loan. He searched his database of libraries for me. I was warned that although the book was available in several Southern California libraries that it was completely at the discretion of those libraries whether or not I would ever see the book. I had to fill out a form and pay $3.00 for the privilege. About a month and a half later I received a notice in the mail that my interlibrary loan request had been filled. I now have the book but will not be allowed to renew it. The Intralibrary request items are renewable up to 3 times just as if I had gotten it from the shelves of the local library.
Please Don't Take The Library Services Away!

I could go on about the wonderful kid's summer reading programs that both of my children have participated in, the helpful librarians who helped me find resources for my Middle School Social Studies classes etc., etc. This is a terrible idea!

A Romantic Proposal

2010-07-10T14:40:00.001-07:00

I just finished reading Gaudy Night by Dorothy Sayers:

In the book Lord Peter Wimsey continues proposing to the love of his life, Harriet Vane, on an average of once every three months over a period of five years. As they are both classically educated Oxford graduates Peter takes the opportunity to practice his Latin with her as he proposes.

(Pg. 65)

One first of April, the question had arrived from Paris in a single Latin sentence, starting off dispiritedly. "Num . . . ?"—a particle which notoriously "expects the answer No." Harriet, rummaging the Grammar book for "polite negatives," replied, still more briefly, "Benigne."

Note: (Benigne – no thank you.)

(Pg 500)

". . . But I will ask you now, and if you say No, I promise you that this time I will accept your answer. Harriet; you know that I love you: will you marry me?"

. . .

They passed beneath the arch of the bridge and out into the pale light once more.

"Peter!"

It was he who found it for her. With a gesture of submission he bared his head and stood gravely, the square cap dangling in his hand.

"Placetne, magistra"

"Placet."

Note: (Placetne – Does it seem good?/Is it agreed?)

(Placet – It seems good./ It is agreed)

Maybe it's just me and my love for languages. But this is the most romantic proposal I've ever read.

Homecoming Words

2010-07-06T14:00:00.001-07:00

When I step off the plane in New Orleans next week I may feel inspired to say these words from Samuel Taylor Coleridge's play Remorse: A Tragedy:

If aught on earth demand an unmix'd feeling,
'Tis surely this—after long years of exile,
To step forth on firm land, and gazing round us,
To hail at once our country, and our birth-place.

Nah, I'll probably just say, "Oh man, is it ever hot!"

In other words, I'm really excited about going back to my birth-place. Seven years is a long time to be away.

WE WON!

2010-05-31T13:36:00.001-07:00

WE WON THE CANADIAN LOTTERY!

Yep, without even purchasing a lottery ticket, we have been informed that we are one of 24 winners of the $3 Million US dollars Shoppers Sweepstakes Lottery. Our portion of the winnings is a whopping $125,000! Yippee!

Enclosed with the letter informing us of our windfall was a check for $3,875 for the payment of applicable Government Taxes. The check was drawn on Sovereign Bank.

Of course I shouldn't be publicizing our unexpected good fortune because we were urged to keep the winning confidential until the claim is processed. This is to discourage "unscrupulous acts by non participants taking advantage of this program." I know I wouldn't want to be besieged by low-life acquaintances looking for handouts, but then I don't know anyone who would do that so I'm not worried about it.

We are going to use the proceeds to invest in some bargain priced bridge property in New York City (Brooklyn to be exact.)

Sucker Punch

2010-05-21T22:13:00.001-07:00

A sucker punch is a blow made without warning, allowing no time for preparation or defense on the part of the recipient. It is usually delivered from close range or from behind.

Lessons Learned

2010-05-15T16:27:00.001-07:00

In honor of my daughter's (almost) completion of her first year of Latin studies is this poem. I'm so proud that she was able to jump into the fourth year of Latin class with her classmates. She has kept up and actually done quite well.

The key to understanding this poem is that the Latin word Amo means "to love", while the Latin word Amarus means bitter. Both words can take the form Amare. Amare is the present active infinitive of amo (love), and the vocative masculine singular of the adjective amarus (bitter).

I thought the poem was particularly apropos the current season.

A Lesson in Latin

Lewis Carroll, A Lesson in Latin:

Our Latin books, in motley row,
  Invite us to our task—
Gay Horace, stately Cicero:
Yet there's one verb, when once we know,
  No higher skill we ask:
This ranks all other lore above—
We've learned "'Amare' means 'to love'!"

So, hour by hour, from flower to flower,
  We sip the sweets of Life:
Till, all too soon, the clouds arise,
And flaming cheeks and flashing eyes
  Proclaim the dawn of strife:
With half a smile and half a sigh,
"Amare! Bitter One!" we cry.

Last night we owned, with looks forlorn,
  "Too well the scholar knows
There is no rose without a thorn"—
But peace is made! We sing, this morn,
  "No thorn without a rose!"
Our Latin lesson is complete:
We've learned that Love is Bitter-Sweet!

The Transfiguration

2010-04-02T15:26:00.001-07:00

by Edwin Muir

So from the ground we felt that virtue branch

Through all our veins till we were whole, our wrists

As fresh and pure as water from a well,

Our hands made new to handle holy things,

The source of all our seeing rinsed and cleansed

Till earth and light and water entering there

Gave back to us the clear unfallen world.

We would have thrown our clothes away for lightness,

But that even they, though sour and travel stained,

Seemed, like our flesh, made of immortal substance,

And the soiled flax and wool lay light upon us

Like friendly wonders, flower and flock entwined

As in a morning field. Was it a vision?

Or did we see that day the unseeable

One glory of the everlasting world

Perpetually at work, though never seen

Since Eden locked the gate that's everywhere

And nowhere? Was the change in us alone,

And the enormous earth still left forlorn,

An exile or a prisoner? Yet the world

We saw that day made this unreal, for all

Was in its place. The painted animals

Assembled there in gentle congregations,

Or sought apart their leafy oratories,

Or walked in peace, the wild and tame together,

As if, also for them, the day had come.

The shepherds' hovels shone, for underneath

The soot we saw the stone clean at the heart

As on the starting-day. The refuse heaps

Were grained with that fine dust that made the world;

For he had said, 'To the pure all things are pure.'

And when we went into the town, he with us,

The lurkers under doorways, murderers,

With rags tied round their feet for silence, came

Out of themselves to us and were with us,

And those who hide within the labyrinth

Of their own loneliness and greatness came,

And those entangled in their own devices,

The silent and the garrulous liars, all

Stepped out of their dungeons and were free.

Reality or vision, this we have seen.

If it had lasted but another moment

It might have held for ever! But the world

Rolled back into its place, and we are here,

And all that radiant kingdom lies forlorn,

As if it had never stirred; no human voice

Is heard among its meadows, but it speaks

To itself alone, alone it flowers and shines

And blossoms for itself while time runs on.

But he will come again, it's said, though not

Unwanted and unsummoned; for all things,

Beasts of the field, and woods, and rocks, and seas,

And all mankind from end to end of the earth

Will call him with one voice. In our own time,

Some say, or at a time when time is ripe.

Then he will come, Christ the uncrucified,

Christ the discrucified, his death undone,

His agony unmade, his cross dismantled—

Glad to be so—and the tormented wood

Will cure its hurt and grow into a tree

In a green springing corner of young Eden,

And Judas damned take his long journey backward

From darkness into light and be a child

Beside his mother's knee, and the betrayal

Be quite undone and never more be done.

Edwin Muir, "The Transfiguration" from The Labyrinth. Copyright 1949 by Edwin Muir.
Source: Collected Poems 1921-1958 (1960)

Happy Easter! He is Risen!

Here and Back Again

2010-02-13T11:16:00.001-08:00

FOR COMMUNION WITH GOD

    By Rev. Thomas Shepherd

  Alas, my God, that we should be

    Such strangers to each other!

  O that as friends we might agree,

    And walk and talk together!

  Thou know'st my soul does dearly love

    The place of thine abode;

  No music drops so sweet a sound

    As these two words My God.

  May I taste that communion, Lord,

    Thy people have with thee?

  Thy spirit daily talks with them,

    O let it talk with me!

  Like Enoch, let me walk with God,

    And thus walk out my day,

  Attended with the heavenly guards,

    Upon the king's highway.

  When wilt thou come unto me, Lord?

    O come, my Lord most dear!

  Come near, come nearer, nearer still:

    I'm well when thou art near.

  When wilt thou come unto me, Lord?

    For, till thou dost appear,

  I count each moment for a day,

    Each minute for a year.

  There's no such thing as pleasure here;

    My Jesus is my all:

  As thou dost shine or disappear,

    My pleasures rise and fall.

  Come, spread thy savour on my frame--

    No sweetness is so sweet;

  Till I get up to sing thy name

    Where all thy singers meet.

Rev. Thomas Shepherd, 1665-1739.

Son of William Shepherd, sometime Vicar of Tilbrook, Bedfordshire, Thomas was ordained an Anglican priest,

serving first at St. Neots, then in Buckinghamshire. He later left the Church of England, and joining the

Nonconformists in 1694 became pastor of the Independent Castle Hill Baptist Meeting, Northampton (Philip

Doddridge later served there, as well). In 1700 he moved to Bocking, Essex, preaching in a barn for several years

before a chapel could be built. He served there the remainder of his life.

A Literary Game

2009-09-28T13:28:00.001-07:00

Using only books you have read this year (2009), answer these questions. Try not to repeat a book title.

From: D.G. Meyers: A Commonplace Blog

Describe yourself: The Poincare Conjecture: In Search of the Shape of the Universe (Donal O'Shea)

How do you feel: The Old Curiosity Shop (Charles Dickens)

Describe where you currently live: The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald

If you could go anywhere, where would you go: There and Again (George MacDonald)

Your favorite form of transportation: Aladdin's Lamp: How Greek Science came to Europe through the Islamic world ( Deckle Edge) or The Time-Traveler's Wife (Audrey Niffeneger)

Your best friend is: The Tie that Binds (PG Wodehouse)

You and your friends are: Tycho and Kepler: The Unlikely Partnership that Forever Changed Our Understanding of the Heavens (Kitty Ferguson)

What's the weather like: Gates of Fire (Steven Pressfield)

You fear: The Tides of War (Steven Pressfield)

What is the best advice you have to give: The Poetry of the Universe (Robert Osserman)

Thought for the day: Quantum Philosophy (Roland Omnes)

How I would like to die: Mr. Dixon Disappears: A Mobile Library Mystery (Ian Sansome)

My soul's present condition: The Blue Flower (Penelope Fitzgerald)

Running for Haiti's Kids

2009-09-28T08:29:00.000-07:00

I've been so inspired by the example of the Livesay family, a family of "former Minnesotans in our 4th year serving in Haiti." Their blog can be found at http://livesayhaiti.blogspot.com

I'd like to invite anyone and everyone to contribute to the Medika Mamba project which is helping so many children recover from malnutrition. This is a way to directly impact the lives of little children for good. Tara Livesay writes on her blog:

ALL money donated will go directly to purchase Medika Mamba that will be used to help kids in Haiti recover. Please consider sponsoring me as I train to run to benefit malnourished children in Haiti.

I don't see how anyone can watch this and not be moved:

Go to the Livesay blog and make a "chip-in" contribution before October 4, 2009.

I remember

2009-09-25T12:11:00.001-07:00

A Facebook Group entitled "I grew up in New Orleans in the Seventies", (well actually it was Metairie, a suburb of New Orleans), which I recently joined, prompted me to sit down and "stream of consciousness"-like write down memories from my childhood in New Orleans.

I remember…

Royal Castle, Krystals, Time Saver, Frost-Top, Monkey Hill, The Levee, Drive-In on Veterans, Midnight Mass on Christmas, Oyster Po-Boys from Schwegmanns, Gaylords, The Zephyr and the Wild Maus (overcoming the fear that I would fall off the edge) at Ponchartrain Beach, The wading pool at the Ponchartrain Beach pool before it closed. Boiled crabs on newspaper spread out on the picnic tables at the Lakefront, Fitzgerald's Seafood restaurant on the pier at West-End, The colorful fountain at West-End, the swings at West-End park, Sno-balls with cream on top, Riding the street cars up St. Charles Avenue to the dentist office on Canal Street. The SS President on the Mississippi River. The rotating restaurant/bar at the top of the World Trade Building. Horseback riding at City Park: (MonkeySee Monkey Do, Country Boy were a couple of the horses' names I remember), Horseback riding at Audubon Park, The boat pulling inner tubes (fall off and the boat stops and waits for you to swim back to your tube) at the Ponchatoula River. Inner tubing down the river (almost drowned once), Manuel's Hot Tamales from the street vendor cart, "Get your Tamales, Get your Red Hot Tamales" wrapped in newspaper. Rock concerts at the Warehouse, Cotton Club swimming pool. Beignets and Café Au Lait in the French Quarter. The French Market (so many smells, so many varieties of vegetables and kind of scary at night) in the French quarter. Driving across the Ponchartrain Bridge (paying the toll) to picnic in Mandeville. Riding bikes from home in Metairie to the Lake Front. Watching scary movies with Morgus the Magnificent, Lakeside Shopping Center when it was an open air shopping center, Disco at Fat City, D.H. Holmes, Maison Blanche, Crawfishing in the swamps- so much fun wearing wader boots and filling up burlap sacks full, the best part, having a big crawfish boil after.

Abundant Harvest!

2009-09-23T10:22:00.001-07:00

I recently signed our family up for a weekly delivery of fresh, locally grown, in-season, organic vegetables. The picture above is of the first week's box. Every Saturday morning we bring back the crate that held last week's produce and pick-up a new box overflowing with fresh vegetables, fruit and herbs. Now I just need more recipes for eggplant and kale… Oh yeah , and more time to cook. Well at least I have an incentive. It's so much fun to see what's in the box each week.

From the Abundant Harvest Website:

"Abundant Harvest Organics is an alliance of small family farmers in Central California dedicated to growing superior organic produce and getting it to you in the simplest manner possible; that is, without the use of chemicals or packaging materials. We grow locally and supply locally, cutting the need for expensive and wasteful fuel and packing resources."

I feel so much more "in-touch" with the agricultural process because the produce is all locally grown and in-season. If you live in the Los Angeles area and are interested in finding out if there is a delivery location near you, this is the website:

www.abundandantharvestorganics.com

Still Searching for Treasures in the Heap

2009-09-21T10:33:00.001-07:00

The Bookworm: By Robert Buchanan (1841-1901)

With spectacles upon his nose,
    He shuffles up and down;
Of antique fashion are his clothes,
    His napless hat is brown.
A mighty watch, of silver wrought,
    Keeps time in sun or rain
To the dull ticking of the thought
    Within his dusty brain.

To see him at the bookstall stand
    And bargain for the prize,
With the odd sixpence in his hand
    And greed in his gray eyes!
Then, conquering, grasp the book half blind,
    And take the homeward track,
For fear the man should change his mind,
    And want the bargain back!

The waves of life about him beat,
    He scarcely lifts his gaze,
He hears within the crowded street
    The wash of ancient days.
If ever his short-sighted eyes
    Look forward, he can see
Vistas of dusty Libraries
    Prolonged eternally.

But think not as he walks along
    His brain is dead and cold;
His soul is thinking in the tongue
    Which Plato spake of old;
And while some grinning cabman sees
    His quaint shape with a jeer,
He smiles, — for Aristophanes
    Is joking in his ear.

Around him stretch Athenian walks,
    And strange shapes under trees;
He pauses in a dream and talks
    Great speech, with Socrates.
Then, as the fancy fails — still mesh'd
    In thoughts that go and come —
Feels in his pouch, and is refresh'd
    At touch of some old tome.

The mighty world of humankind
    Is as a shadow dim,
He walks through life like one half blind,
    And all looks dark to him;
But put his nose to leaves antique,
    And hold before his sight
Some press'd and withered flowers of Greek,
    And all is life and light.

A blessing on his hair so gray,
    And coat of dingy brown!
May bargains bless him every day,
    As he goes up and down;
Long may the bookstall-keeper's face,
    In dull times, smile again,
To see him round with shuffling pace
    The corner of the lane!

A good old Ragpicker is he,
    Who, following morn and eve
The quick feet of Humanity,
    Searches the dust they leave.
He pokes the dust, he sifts with care,
    He searches close and deep;
Proud to discover, here and there,
    A treasure in the heap!

ht:Laudator Temporis Acti

There and Back, Again

2009-07-01T12:22:00.001-07:00

Here are some more quotes from George MacDonald's There and Back. I especially enjoyed all the references to books and reading in the story. The book is full of them because of the author's love of literature and story, and also because the main character of the story is a book-binder by trade and a book-lover too.

"I would rather learn to read, though—the right way, I mean—the way that makes one book talk to another."

What is feeling but poetry in a gaseous condition? What is fine thought but poetry in a fluid condition? What is thought solidified, but fine prose; thought crystallized, but verse?

She had yet to learn that books themselves are but weak ministers, that the spirit dwelling in them must lead back to him who gave it or die; that they are but windows, which, if they look not out on the eternal spaces, will themselves be blotted out by the darkness.

Only those who haunt the slopes of literature, know that marvels lie in the grass for the hand that will gather them. Multitudes who count themselves readers know no more of the books they read than the crowds that visit the Academy exhibitions know of the pictures they gaze upon. Yet are the realms of literature free as air, freer even than those of music.

For what are books, I venture to say, but an army-corps of the lord of hosts, at whose command are troops of all natures, after the various regions of his indwelling! Even the letter is something, for the dry bones of books are every hour coming alive to the reader in whose spirit is blowing the better spirit.

The good in a true book, he would say, is the best protection against what may not be so good in it; its wrong as well as its right may wake the conscience: the thoughts of a book accuse and excuse one another. In saying so, he took the true reader for granted; to an untrue reader the truth itself is untrue.

"Look here: I am very fond of a well-bound book; I should like all my new books bound in levant morocco; but I don't care about it; I could do well enough without any binding at all."

"Of course you could, sir! and so could I, or any man that cared for the books themselves."

"Very well! I don't care about religion much, but I could not live without my Father in heaven. I don't believe anybody can live without him."

There and Back

2009-06-30T20:35:00.001-07:00

I just finished reading There and Back, George MacDonald's novel about a book-binder who comes into his rightful inheritance and finds true love. George MacDonald (1824-1905) was a Scottish author, poet and Christian minister. His fantasy works influenced both C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkein. You may recognize the title of MacDonald's novel in the sub-title to Tolkein's, The Hobbit, or There and Back Again.

There and Back begins with this note from the author:

Some of the readers of this tale will be glad to know that
the passage with which it ends is a real dream; and that,
with but three or four changes almost too slight to require
acknowledging, I have given it word for word as the friend
to whom it came set it down for me.

The dream, recounted in the last chapter of the book as Barbara's dream, brought tears to my eyes and stirred a deep longing within me. May it bless you as well:

Barbara's Dream

"One morning, after what seemed a long night's dreamless sleep, I awoke; but it was much too early to rise; so I lay thinking--or more truly, I hope, being thought into, as Mr. Wingfold says. Many of the most beautiful things I had read, scenes of our Lord's life on earth, and thoughts of the Father, came and went. I had no desire to sleep again, or any feeling of drowsiness; but in the midst of fully conscious thought, found myself in some other place, of which I only knew that there was firm ground under my feet, and a soft white radiance of light about me. The remembrance came to me afterwards, of branches of trees spreading high overhead, through which I saw the sky: but at the time I seemed not to take notice of what was around me. I was leaning against a form tall and grand, clothed from the shoulders to the ground in a black robe, full, and soft, and fine. It lay in thickly gathered folds, touched to whiteness in the radiant light, all along the arms encircling, without at first touching me.

"With sweet content my eyes went in and out of those manifold radiant lines, feeling, though they were but parts of his dress, yet they were of himself; for I knew the form to be that of the heavenly Father, but felt no trembling fear, no sense of painful awe--only a deep, deep worshipping, an unutterable love and confidence. 'Oh Father!' I said, not aloud, but low into the folds of his garment. Scarcely had I breathed the words, when 'My child!' came whispered, and I knew his head was bent toward me, and I felt his arms close round my shoulders, and the folds of his garment enwrap me, and with a soft sweep, fall behind me to the ground. Delight held me still for a while, and then I looked up to seek his face; but I could not see past his breast. His shoulders rose far above my upreaching hands. I clasped them together, and face and hands rested near his heart, for my head came not much above his waist.

"And now came the most wonderful part of my dream. As I thus rested against his heart, I seemed to see into it; and mine was filled with loving wonder, and an utterly blessed feeling of home, to the very core. I was at home--with my Father! I looked, as it seemed, into a space illimitable and fathomless, and yet a warm light as from a hearth-fire shone and played in ruddy glow, as upon confining walls. And I saw, there gathered, all human hearts. I saw them--yet I saw no forms; they were there--and yet they would be there. To my waking reason, the words sound like nonsense, and perplex me; but the thing did not perplex me at all. With light beyond that of faith, for it was of absolute certainty, clear as bodily vision, but of a different nature, I saw them. But this part of my dream, the most lovely of all, I can find no words to describe; nor can I even recall to my own mind the half of what I felt. I only know that something was given me then, some spiritual apprehension, to be again withdrawn, but to be given to us all, I believe, some day, out of his infinite love, and withdrawn no more. Every heart that had ever ached, or longed, or wandered, I knew was there, folded warm and soft, safe and glad. And it seemed in my dream that to know this was the crown of all my bliss--yes, even more than to be myself in my Father's arms. Awake, the thought of multitude had always oppressed my mind; it did not then. From the comfort and joy it gave me to see them there, I seemed then first to know how my own heart had ached for them.

"Then tears began to run from my eyes--but easily, with no pain of the world in them. They flowed like a gentle stream--into the heart of God, whose depths were open to my gaze. The blessedness of those tears was beyond words. It was all true then! That heart was our home!

"Then I felt that I was being gently, oh, so gently, put away. The folds of his robe which I held in my hands, were being slowly drawn from them; and the gladness of my weeping changed to longing entreaty. 'Oh Father! Father!' I cried; but I saw only his grand gracious form, all blurred and indistinct through the veil of my blinding tears, slowly receding, slowly fading--and I awoke.

"My tears were flowing now with the old earth-pain in them, with keenest disappointment and longing. To have been there and to have come back, was the misery. But it did not last long. The glad thought awoke that I had the dream--a precious thing never to be lost while memory lasted; a thing which nothing but its realization could ever equal in preciousness. I rose glad and strong, to serve with newer love, with quicker hand and readier foot, the hearts around me."

THE END

Akdamut – A Pentecost Poem

2009-05-31T15:20:00.001-07:00

Translated from the Aramaic and Source of the hymn: "O Love of God"
Source: http://www.edhaor.org/

Akdamut-First Day Of Shavuot ("Sabbath and Festival Prayer Book" edited by Morris Silverman with Robert Gordis, 1946. USCJ and RA, 185-88.)

Were the sky of parchment made,
A quill each reed, each twig and blade,
Could we with ink the oceans fill,
Were every man a scribe of skill,

The marvelous story
Of God's great glory
Would still remain untold;
For He, Most High,
The earth and sky
Created alone of old.

Without fatigue or weary hand,
He spoke the word, He breathed command;
The world and all that therein dwell,
Field and meadow, fen and fell,

Mount and sea,
In six days He
With life did then inspire;
The work when ended,
His glory ascended
Upon His throne of fire.

Before Him myriads angels flash,
To do His Will they run and dash;
Each day new hosts gleam forth to praise
The Mighty One, Ancient of Days;

Six-winged hosts
Stand at their posts -
The flaming Seraphim -
In hushed awe
Together draw
To chant their morning hymn.

The angels, together, without delay,
Call one to another in rapturous lay:

"Thrice holy He
Whose majesty
Fills earth from end to end."
The Cherubim soar,
Like the Oceans's roar,
On celestial spheres ascend,

To gaze upon the Light on high,
Which, like the bow in cloudy sky,
Is iris-colored, silver-lined;
While hasting on their task assigned,

In every tongue
They utter song
And bless and praise the Lord,
Whose secret and source,
Whose light and force
Can ne'er he fully explored.

The heavenly hosts in awe reply:
"His Kingdom be blessed for e'er and aye."
Their song being hushed, they vanish away:
They may ne'er again offer rapturous lay.

But Israel,
Therein excel -
Fixed times they set aside,
With praise and prayer,
Him One declare,
At morn and eventide.

His portion them He made, that they
His praise declare by night and day:
A Torah, precious more than gold,
He bade them study, fast to hold;

That He may be near,
Their prayer to hear,
For always wear will He
As diadem fair
His people's prayer
In His phylactery,

Wherein is told of Israel's fame
Who oft God's unity proclaim.
'Tis also meet God's praise to sing
In presence of both prince and king.

Memorial Day 2009

2009-05-25T11:24:00.001-07:00

How Sleep The Brave

HOW sleep the brave, who sink to rest
By all their country's wishes blest!
When Spring, with dewy fingers cold,
Returns to deck their hallow'd mould,
She there shall dress a sweeter sod
Than Fancy's feet have ever trod.

By fairy hands their knell is rung;
By forms unseen their dirge is sung;
There Honour comes, a pilgrim grey,
To bless the turf that wraps their clay;
And Freedom shall awhile repair
To dwell, a weeping hermit, there!

William Taylor Collins

From Greek Class to the Gallows

2009-05-25T10:39:00.001-07:00

I collect quotes about (among other things) classical education in literature. Here's a classic from William Makepeace Thackeray, The History of Pendennis, chapter 2:

Miserable trifler! A boy who construes δε and instead of δε but, at sixteen years of age is guilty not merely of folly, and ignorance, and dulness inconceivable, but of crime, of deadly crime, of filial ingratitude, which I tremble to contemplate.

It reminds me a bit of my Greek Prose Composition class in college. Read the entire scene, it's hilarious. Notice the progression from mistakes in construing Greek to the gallows… (Thanks to laudatortemporisacti for the reference.)

It was at the close of the forenoon school, and Pen had been unnoticed all the previous part of the morning till now, when the Doctor put him on to construe in a Greek play. He did not know a word of it, though little Timmins, his form-fellow, was prompting him with all his might. Pen had made a sad blunder or two when the awful Chief broke out upon him.

'Pendennis, sir,' he said, 'your idleness is incorrigible and your stupidity beyond example. You are a disgrace to your school, and to your family, and I have no doubt will prove so in after-life to your country. If that vice, sir, which is described to us as the root of all evil, be really what moralists have represented (and I have no doubt of the correctness of their opinion), for what a prodigious quantity of future crime and wickedness are you, unhappy boy, laying the seed! Miserable trifler! A boy who construes δε and instead of δε but, at sixteen years of age is guilty not merely of folly, and ignorance, and dulness inconceivable, but of crime, of deadly crime, of filial ingratitude, which I tremble to contemplate. A boy, sir, who does not learn his Greek play cheats the parent who spends money for his education. A boy who cheats his parent is not very far from robbing or forging upon his neighbour. A man who forges on his neighbour pays the penalty of his crime at the gallows. And it is not such a one that I pity (for he will be deservedly cut off), but his maddened and heart-broken parents, who are driven to a premature grave by his crimes, or, if they live, drag on a wretched and dishonoured old age. Go on, sir, and I warn you that the very next mistake that you make shall subject you to the punishment of the rod. Who's that laughing? What ill-conditioned boy is there that dares to laugh?' shouted the Doctor.

No wonder classical education has a bad rep!

15 Books: A Meme

2009-05-24T19:26:00.001-07:00

I received this on Facebook. It was hard to narrow the list to fifteen but here they are:

Instructions: Don't take too long to think about it. Fifteen books you've read that will always stick with you. First fifteen you can recall in no more than 15 minutes. Tag 15 friends, including me.

The Bible (I became a different person after I started reading the Bible when I was sixteen yrs. old)
How Reading Changed My Life by Anna Quindlen (Reading this book a few years ago made me realize that I had lost a part of my identity by losing my childhood insatiable appetite for reading and changing it to thinking of reading as something to be done only for a specific purpose. Reading is part of who I am as a person, and I had lost part of myself by denying it. )
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (IMHO quite possibly the best book ever written. As many times as I read it I always come away a better person for having read it again.)
A Room of One's Own by Virginia Wolfe (Helped me realize the importance of setting aside a space (and time) for writing.) Still working on that one.
Appointment in Jerusalem by Derek Prince (Amazing (true) story of a woman's journey of faith.
Jane Eyre Charlotte Bronte (Another one that I never get tired of rereading.)
Grammatical Man: Information, Entropy, Language, Life by Jeremy Campbell (Great book on information theory and language, the main topic of my Ph.D. dissertation.)
John Adams by David Mccullough (My favorite biography)
The God Who is There by Francis Schaeffer (Schaeffer was a prophetic voice to his generation.)
Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco (The best conspiracy theory novel I've read. I love The Name of the Rose too, but had to narrow the list to 15.)
The Way of Holiness by Andrew Murray (My favorite devotional book by my favorite devotional author.)
Thank You Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse (Really any Jeeves book. Jeeves and Bertie Wooster are my two favorite fictional characters. I can't read Wodehouse without cracking up. He makes me smile.)
The Lord of the Rings Trilogy by J.R.R. Tolkein ( I can get lost in his prose.)
Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C.S. Lewis by Michael Ward (Ward discovers a hidden structure in the Lewis' Narnia novels based on the 7 planets of medieval cosmology. Incredibly well written and convincing.)
Kite Runner by Khaled
Hosseini (This book put a human face on the struggle in Afghanistan for me.)

May 15, 1618

2009-05-15T21:59:00.000-07:00

I just finished reading a book about Johannes Kepler and Tycho Brahe, Tycho and Kepler by Kitty Ferguson. According to the book it was on this date, May 15, in 1618that Kepler discovered the 3rd law of planetary motion.

The 3rd law is the harmonic law which states that “there is an exact relationship between the squares of the planets’ periodic times and the cubes of the radii of their orbits.” Kepler was so excited by the discovery that he wanted to give way to a “sacred frenzy”, as he put it:

I feel carried away and possessed by an unutterable rapture over the divine spectacle of heavenly harmony... I write a book for the present time, or for posterity. It is all the same to me. It may wait a hundred years for its readers, as God has also waited six thousand years for an onlooker.

The dedication prayer of his book, Harmony of the Worlds reads:

I should pray, devout and supplicating, to the Father of lights: O Thou Who dost by the light of nature promote in us the desire for the light of grace, that by its means Thou mayest transport us into the light of glory, I give thanks to Thee, O Lord Creator, Who hast delighted me with Thy makings and in the works of Thy hands have I exulted. Behold! now, I have completed the work of my profession, having employed as much power of mind as Thou didst give to me; to the men who are going to read those demonstrations I have made manifest the glory of Thy works, as much of its infinity as the narrows of my intellect could apprehend. My mind has been given over to philosophizing most correctly: if there is anything unworthy of Thy designs brought forth by me—a worm born and nourished in a wallowing place of sins—breathe into me also that which Thou dost wish men to know, that I may make the correction: If I have been allured into rashness by the wonderful beauty of Thy works, or if I have loved my own glory among men, while I am advancing in the work destined for Thy glory, be gentle and merciful and pardon me; and finally deign graciously to effect that these demonstrations give way to Thy glory and the salvation of souls and nowhere be an obstacle to that.

Interviewing With the Stars

2009-05-14T18:27:00.001-07:00

Aimee and I had the privilege of participating in a "meet and greet" with Shawn Johnson, the Olympic gold medalist. Shawn took a day off from her rehearsing for the Dancing with the Stars finals to promote the Lunchables Lunch Your Tummy Right Tour. As part of the promotion, Lunchables is awarding 50 kids with a VIP ticket to Camp Wodward. Lucky winners will find a ticket inside a "specially marked" Lunchable.

My friend and blogging mentor Donna, aka Socalmom, told me that she had given my name as a "blogger" who has an interest in gymnastics (our daughters are on the same gymnastics team). Well I didn't receive the email but she told me Aimee and I were invited anyway. It was being held at a local gym in Burbank. We've been to this gym before and I remember it was really small.

I had no idea what to expect. Actually, I was expecting a huge crowd jammed into this small gym, kind of like the meet we had attended there several years ago. I didn't think we'd actually get close enough to talk to her, let alone sit down and ask her questions one-on-one, well actually four-on-one.

I felt kind of like I should say I was representing Horse and Hound magazine.(Like Hugh Grant in Notting Hill.) There were reporters from the LA Times and other media. Donna and I both were handed a gift bag from Lunchables. I opened it up and my mouth dropped when I saw it contained a Flip VideoCamera. I could get used to this kind of thing.

Another blogging mom, Sweatpantsmom, was there with her two daughters. Her two girls, aged 10 and 13, had their questions for Shawn prepared and neatly written out. They went in first. I said to Aimee, "Think of some questions for Shawn!" Then they ushered us into the gym and introduced us to Shawn. The four of us (Aimee, Donna, her daughter Megan and me) had about ten minutes to interview her.

Shawn was extremely sweet and poised. She seemed genuinely interested in the girls and gave some really great advice on dealing with fears and what it takes to stick with the sport. I was very proud of Aimee and Megan coming up with some great questions. You can watch the entire interview on YouTube here. (Thanks to Donna for posting it.)

After our time with Shawn she spent time with the girls on the team at the Burbank gym. We sat on the side and watched as the girls were allowed into the room. They didn't know that Shawn was going to be there. The reaction on the girls faces as the realized it was Shawn Johnson was priceless. Donna posted it on YouTube here.

Gotta run, I'm on my way to the store to buy some Lunchables.

Writing advice from Nora Roberts

2009-05-02T10:06:00.001-07:00

I have to confess that I have never read a book by Nora Roberts. She just doesn't write the kind of books I like to read. But, I admire her because she is a successful author. I read this recent interview with her this morning and appreciated her perspective on reading and her advice on writing. So here are some excerpts from:

There Ain't No Muse: A Conversation with Nora Roberts

Conducted by Clarissa Sansone

What is your writing and revision process like?

Nora Roberts: Well, first: There ain't no muse. If you sit around and wait to channel the muse, you can sit around and wait a long time. It's not effortless. If only. Well, if it was, then everyone would do it, and where would we be then? So I work really hard to make it as fluid as possible, as readable and entertaining as possible.

I'll vomit out the first draft: bare-bones, get-the-story-down. I don't edit and fiddle as I go, because I don't know what's going to happen next. Once I get the discovery draft down, then I'll go back to page one, chapter one, and then I start worrying about how it sounds, where I've made mistakes, where I've gone right, what else I have to add, where's the texture, where's the emotion. I start fixing. And then, after I've done that all the way through again, I'll go back one more time, and that's when I'm really going to worry about the language. And the rhythm, and making sure that I haven't made a mistake, that I've tied up all the loose ends reasonably.

Do you have the time to actually sit down and read books very often?

NR: I think if you don't read, you'd never have the chops to write, and why would you, if you didn't love stories and want to lose yourself in what someone else has sweated over? I love to read, and I really think books are the most important tool in a writer's toolbox.

Are you an omnivorous reader?

NR: Oh yeah. There may be times when, after a really long day at the keyboard, my brain is too tired to read. And that's when I get my stories on TV. Once I start a book I'm a gobbler, so it's very rare that I'll read a couple chapters and put it down.

Read the entire interview at borders.com

Tax Dog Cometh?

2009-04-16T19:27:00.000-07:00

I wonder if I can hire her to do my taxes? I am so late this year. I had to mail an extension request at the last minute.

100 Books Meme: How Many have you read?

2009-04-06T18:31:00.001-07:00

This has been around for a while, but I ran across it at the Jane Austen World and thought it was time to tally up. I think I counted 65. A couple seem to be repeats.

If you would like to participate, just copy and paste this list of books into your own blog or Facebook notes, and follow the instructions below, or add up the books you've read.

This list was compiled in the U.K. by the BBC. The average adult has read only 6 of the books on the list. (Really?)

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you love.
4) Strike out the books you have no intention of ever reading, or were forced to read at school and hated.
5) Reprint this list in your own blog.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 The Harry Potter Series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25
The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26
Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The
Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39
Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60
Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

A Budget Speech

2009-03-21T12:30:00.000-07:00

The (AP) news headlines from yesterday read:
Obama budget could bring $9.3 trillion in deficits
WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama's budget would produce $9.3 trillion in deficits over the next decade, more than four times the deficits of Republican George W. Bush's presidency, congressional auditors said Friday.

Wow! Well I am just about speechless about this, but I came acros a historic speech which I feel could be applied to this occasion.

Excerpts from Gladstone's attack on Disraeli's Budget (1852)
('A Budget which may imperil our safety')
"I vote against the Budget…, not only because I disapprove upon general grounds of the principles of that Budget but emphatically and peculiarly because in my conscience is my firm conviction that the Budget is …the most subversive in its tendencies and ultimate effects which I have ever known submitted to this House.

It is the most regardless of those general rules of prudence which it is absolutely necessary we should preserve…Sir, the… is a noble assembly, worthy of its historical and traditional associations; but it is too much to expect that we should teach the executive its duty in elementary matters of administration and finance…

You are now asked to vote for a Budget which consecrates, as it were, the principle of a deficiency, and which endangers the public credit of the country, and which may peril our safety—if, indeed, the circumstances of the present day are circumstances of uneasiness;…

I say, then, that I vote against this Budget, feeling that in giving that vote I do the work, so far as depends upon me, which you ought to join with me in doing.

I do not express that sentiment in an offensive, manner, but I say it because I feel deeply attached to the institutions of the country,…and I feel it my duty to use that freedom of speech which I am sure, … you will tolerate, when I tell you that if you give your assent and your high authority to this most unsound and destructive principle on which the financial scheme of the Government is based…,

My belief is that the day will come when you will look back upon this vote—as its consequences sooner or later unfold themselves—you will look back upon this vote with bitter, but with late and ineffectual regret."

Ode to Spring

2009-03-20T09:55:00.000-07:00

O spring, O spring,
You wonderful thing!
O spring, O spring, O spring!
O spring, O spring,
When the birdies sing
I feel like a king,
O spring!

by Walter R. Brooks

HAPPY FIRST DAY OF SPRING!

In case the first poem was a little too juvenile for you, here's another one by Robert Frost:

A Prayer in Spring

Oh, give us pleasure in the flowers to-day;
And give us not to think so far away
As the uncertain harvest; keep us here
All simply in the springing of the year.

Oh, give us pleasure in the orchard white,
Like nothing else by day, like ghosts by night;
And make us happy in the happy bees,
The swarm dilating round the perfect trees.

And make us happy in the darting bird
That suddenly above the bees is heard,
The meteor that thrusts in with needle bill,
And off a blossom in mid air stands still.

For this is love and nothing else is love,
The which it is reserved for God above
To sanctify to what far ends He will,
But which it only needs that we fulfil.

The Lorica of St. Patrick

2009-03-17T19:48:00.000-07:00

(St. Patrick's Breastplate Prayer)
I arise today
Through a mighty strength, the invocation of the Trinity,
Through a belief in the Threeness,
Through confession of the Oneness
Of the Creator of creation.

I arise today
Through the strength of Christ's birth and His baptism,
Through the strength of His crucifixion and His burial,
Through the strength of His resurrection and His ascension,
Through the strength of His descent for the judgment of doom.

I arise today
Through the strength of the love of cherubim,
In obedience of angels,
In service of archangels,
In the hope of resurrection to meet with reward,
In the prayers of patriarchs,
In preachings of the apostles,
In faiths of confessors,
In innocence of virgins,
In deeds of righteous men.

I arise today
Through the strength of heaven;
Light of the sun,
Splendor of fire,
Speed of lightning,
Swiftness of the wind,
Depth of the sea,
Stability of the earth,
Firmness of the rock.

I arise today
Through God's strength to pilot me;
God's might to uphold me,
God's wisdom to guide me,
God's eye to look before me,
God's ear to hear me,
God's word to speak for me,
God's hand to guard me,
God's way to lie before me,
God's shield to protect me,
God's hosts to save me
From snares of the devil,
From temptations of vices,
From every one who desires me ill,
Afar and anear,
Alone or in a mulitude.

I summon today all these powers between me and evil,
Against every cruel merciless power that opposes my body and soul,
Against incantations of false prophets,
Against black laws of pagandom,
Against false laws of heretics,
Against craft of idolatry,
Against spells of women and smiths and wizards,
Against every knowledge that corrupts man's body and soul.
Christ shield me today
Against poison, against burning,
Against drowning, against wounding,
So that reward may come to me in abundance.

Christ with me, Christ before me, Christ behind me,
Christ in me, Christ beneath me, Christ above me,
Christ on my right, Christ on my left,
Christ when I lie down, Christ when I sit down,
Christ in the heart of every man who thinks of me,
Christ in the mouth of every man who speaks of me,
Christ in the eye that sees me,
Christ in the ear that hears me.

I arise today
Through a mighty strength, the invocation of the Trinity,
Through a belief in the Threeness,
Through a confession of the Oneness
Of the Creator of creation

St. Patrick (ca. 377)

Gymnastics Tie-Breakers

2009-03-11T11:22:00.000-07:00

Tie-Breakers

Some of my myriad readers (LOL) may know that my 10 year old daughter is a competitive gymnast. She’s been doing gymnastics since she was three. She moved up this Spring to the Optional level 7. US competitive gymnastics starts with 3 compulsory levels where every gymnast does the exact same routines to the exact same music. It makes for some very looong meets when you hear the same dinky music over and over again about 300 times or so. In the optional levels every gymnast picks (in conjunction with her coach of course) her own music and has her routines choreographed especially for her. It’s so much more fun that way.

I know that every sport has its ups and downs, pros and cons, but I am becoming intimately familiar with the ins and outs of this wonderful sport called women’s artistic gymnastics. You may think I’m about to write about the latest crisis at the gym, and it’s a doosey. I’ll just say that there was about a week or so where things were really shaping up at my daughter’s gym, after the knee thing and then the ankle thing.

Well, I would write about it, except that I’m still processing it, and the thing is still unfolding, so we’ll just keep a positive attitude and press ahead. Once things settle down I’ll give an update on that.

But I learned something yesterday from my friend, who also happens to be the meet director for some of the largest and best gymnastic meets in Southern California. She explained to me how ties at gymnastics meets are handled differently by different states.

In California, if two or more gymnasts get the same score on an event or in the all around, then the place medal or ribbon is awarded to all of the girls with the same score as a tie. This is what we’re used to since all but two of Aimee’s meets have been in California.

I thought there was something wrong when we recently went to a meet in Las Vegas, Nevada. I don’t remember exactly, but I think it was a four-way tie on one of Aimee’s events. The ribbons and medals were awarded to the girls 2nd place, 3rd place, 4th place, 5th place (and Aimee got the 5th place ribbon.) I didn’t think it was fair since they all had the same score.

Now I understand, they use tie-breakers in Arizona. The places are awarded according to the highest all-around score. In the meet in Arizona, since Aimee only competed in 3 out of the 4 events, her all-around score was naturally low, hence the 5th place.

Tie-breakers in the all-around are awarded according to who got the highest score on any event.

I think I like the California system better. But I was glad to have that question answered. Thanks Stephanie!

Spring Forward Tonight!

2009-03-07T20:10:00.000-08:00

Daylight Savings Time

In Spring when maple buds are red,
We turn the Clock an hour ahead;
Which means, each April that arrives,
We lose an hour
Out of our lives.

Who cares? When Autumn birds in flocks
Fly southward, back we turn the Clocks,
And so regain a lovely thing—
That missing hour
We lost last Spring.

By Phyllis McGimley

Galileo's Daughter

2009-03-01T20:24:00.000-08:00

I wrote a while back about accepting the Astronomy Reading Challenge. I just finished one of the books I picked to read about an astronomer, Galileo's Daughter, by Dava Sobel. I've been wanting to read this book for a while now, but for some reason I was under the impression it was a novel, not a biography. That was probably because I've read both of the Rashi's Daughters novels (and waiting patiently for the third one to be written). This also explains why I never found it when I looked for it several times in the fiction section of the library.

Anyway, it is a biography, and it's more of a biography of Galileo than his daughter, which is just as well, because Galileo was the famous astronomer, not his daughter. The book is uses the correspondence between Galileo and his daughter, who was a nun, to frame the story of Galileo's life. There are 124 surviving letters, all of them from Suor Marie Celeste to her father Galileo; none of Galileo's letters to his daughter have survived.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book; it is well-written, interesting and informative. I was especially interested in Galileo's thoughts on the intersection of science and religion. Even though he was convicted of heresy by the Inquisition for expounding the view that the earth moves around the sun, Galileo remained a faithful believer in the Scriptures and in the God-given ability of man to discover by means of his senses and intellect the way the universe works.

“I believe that the intention of Holy Writ was to persuade men of the truths necessary for salvation, such as neither science nor any other means could render credible, but only the voice of the Holy Spirit. But I do not think it necessary to believe that the same God who gave us our senses, our speech, our intellect, would have put aside the use of these, to teach us instead such things as with their help we could find out for ourselves, particularly in the case of those sciences of which there is not the smallest mention in the Scriptures; and, above all, in astronomy, of which so little notice is taken that the names of none of the planets are mentioned. Surely if the intention of the sacred scribes had been to teach the people astronomy, they would not have passed over the subject so completely.”

Do You Speak Yat?

2009-02-28T11:03:00.001-08:00

Do You Speak Yat?

I do. First, let me explain what Yat is. Yat is a dialect of English spoken by native-born New Orleanians. The word comes from the greeting, “Where y’at?” which is the New Orleans way of saying. “Where are you at?”, meaning. “How are you?”

After more than 30 years of living away from New Orleans, most of my distinctive New Orleans accent has vanished, however it is still faintly discernable when I try to pronounce words like “iron”. It comes out something like “irn”. I still remember my grandmother’s (the one we called Mia, another New Orleaniism.) burl, and url (for boil and oil), and zink (for sink).

So, I’m reading Dava Sobel’s “Galileo’s Daughter”. Yesterday I read that while Galileo was in Rome being tried for heresy (He had the nerve to suggest that the earth moves around the sun instead of being stationary at the center of the universe), his hometown in Tuscany was being decimated by the bubonic plague. This is where the connection to the New Orleans dialect comes in: those stricken by the plague would develop festering sores called bubos.

When I was growing up we called any little cut, scratch or bruise a “bobo”, not a “booboo”, but a “bobo”. So when I was reading about bubos in Sobel’s book it got me wondering if bubos were related to my childhood bobos. After looking up the origin of bubo, I doubt it, bubos are strictly related to infectious sores from diseases like the bubonic plague. Bobos were simple little childhood booboos that your mom could kiss and make all better.

Some other “yat” expressions I remember from my childhood:

Dodo: sleep

Make big dodo (go to sleep)

Cap: An expression my dad used to call other men, usually a stranger, I’ve found out it’s a shortened form of Captain.

Cher: dear, my grandmother (the one we called Granmere), used this a lot, it means dear.

Minoux: a word for cat, we had a cat we called minoux, but shortened it to mimi

Alligator pear: These used to grow on a vine in our backyard, also known as mirliton. I’ve seen them in grocery stores in California called chayote squash.

More to come…

Lincoln's 200th Birthday

2009-02-12T22:31:00.001-08:00

Lincoln The Railsplitter by Norman Rockwell

Of this work Norman Rockwell wrote, “I hope this painting might inspire the youth of this land to appreciate this man who believed so much in the value of education.”

“Lincoln the Railsplitter” depicts Abe as a young man during the time he pursued the occupation of surveyor in Sangamon County in central Illinois - a time documented in “The Prairie Years” by Carl Sandburg. (The book served as an inspiration to Rockwell as he created this work.) Lincoln prepared to be a surveyor as he would later prepare for his law career, by immersing himself in various text books. The painting depicts just such study, portraying the future president with an axe in one hand, and holding a text book with the other. A railsplitter’s tool is draped over Abe’s shoulder, and the painting also includes an image of a log cabin and a newly build split rail fence, with remnants of felled trees in close proximity.

Quote from The Butler Institute of American Art, who purchased Rockwell's original painting in 2006.

Rainy and Cold

2009-02-11T13:54:00.000-08:00

trip to Disneyland on Monday:

Den of Vipers and Thieves

2009-02-04T11:34:00.000-08:00

The quote below from our seventh president, Andrew Jackson, came to mind when I read in the news how corporate bankers, after begging billions of dollars of taxpayer money from the federal government to avert going under, proceeded to hastily give themselves billions of dollars worth of executive bonuses:

“Hey buddy, can you spare a few billion in chump change for a poor banker?”

Here’s what Andrew Jackson had to say to a delegation of bankers in 1832:

“Gentlemen, I have had men watching you for a long time, and I am convinced that you have used the funds of the bank to speculate in the breadstuffs of the country. When you won, you divided the profits amongst you, and when you lost, you charged it to the bank. You tell me that if I take the deposits from the bank and annul its charter, I shall ruin ten thousand families. That may be true, gentlemen, but that is your sin! Should I let you go on, you will ruin fifty thousand families, and that would be my sin! You are a den of vipers and thieves. I intend to rout you out, and by the eternal God, I will rout you out.”

Inauguration Day!

2009-01-20T21:01:00.001-08:00

Here's a scene from the very first inauguration day.

Wodehouse on The Art of Fiction

2009-01-18T21:58:00.000-08:00

I enjoyed this interview with P.G. Wodehouse so much that I thought you might enjoy it too. He sounds like such a character, in fact like a character in one of his stories. In spite of being rather unfocused on the practical details of life, he managed to write 96 books, and countless short stories over a career that spanned 73 years (1902-1974).
Gerald Clark wrote this about Wodehouse in 1975, shortly before his death at 93.

Read the entire article here at the Paris Review.

When I first went to see him, I telephoned P.G. Wodehouse and asked for directions from New York to his house on Long Island. He merely chuckled, as if I had asked him to compare Euclid with Einstein or attempt some other laughably impossible task. “Oh, I can’t tell you that,” he said. “I don’t have a clue.” I learned the route anyway, and my arrival for lunch, only ten minutes late, seemed to astonish him. “You had no trouble” Oh, that is good. That’s wonderful!” His face beaming at having in his house such a certified problem-solver, a junior Jeeves almost, he led me without further to-do to a telephone, which he had been dialing all morning in a futile effort to reach a number in New York. He had, of course, done everything right but dial the area code, an addition to the Bell system that had somehow escaped his attention since he had last attempted long distance. He was intensely pleased when New York answered, and I sunned myself in the warm glow of his gratitude for the rest of the day. All of which is by way of saying that Wodehouse, who lived four months past his ninety-third birthday, had discovered his own secret of long life: He simply ignored what was worrisome, bothersome or confusing in the world around him.

BiblioMysteries

2009-01-10T11:53:00.000-08:00

Me at Seven

I found myself relating at some level to this description of Israel Armstrong, the unlikely librarian-hero of Ian Sansom's The Case of the Missing Books. The book, set in the small Northern Ireland village of Tumdrun, is full of quirky and amusing characters. Here's a sample:

Books had spoilt him; they had curdled his brain, like cream left out on a summer’s afternoon, or eggs overbeaten with butter. He’ d been a rather bookish child. Right from the off, the youngest of four, the kind of child who seemed to start reading without anyone realizing or noticing, who raced thru non-fiction at an early age and an extraordinary rate, who read Jack Kerouac before he was in his teens, and who by the age of sixteen had covered most of the great French and Russian authors, and who as a result had matured into an intelligent, shy, passionate, sensitive soul, full of dreams and ideas, a wide ranging vocabulary, and just about no earthly good to anyone. His expectations were sky-high and his grasp of reality was minimal.
Israel had grown up in and around libraries. Libraries were where he belonged.

Libraries to Israel had always been a constant. In libraries, he’d always seemed to be able to breathe a little easier. When he walked thru the doors of a library it was like entering a sacred space, like the Holy of Holies! The beautiful hush and the shunting of the brass-handled wooden drawers holding the card catalogues, the reassurance of the reference books and the eminent OEDs, the amusing little troughs of children’s books, all human life was there. And you could borrow it and take it home for two weeks at a time, 9 books at a time.

… his pocket bulging neurotically with emergency paperbacks and newpapers. Just in case he was ever caught short without something to read…

I noticed with interest that Sansom has a new addition to the Mobile Librarian Series: The Book Stops Here: A Mobile Library Mystery. I'm adding it to my to-read list for 2009.

Happy Birthday Bud

2009-01-09T21:28:00.000-08:00

Seventeen Years Ago today!

Where did this little guy with his Teddy go?

2009 International Year of Astronomy

2009-01-08T17:12:00.000-08:00

These are 2 photos taken New Years evening about 7pm, looking SW, with my little Samsung Digimax digital camera. The picture on the left shows the crescent moon, and the picture on the right shows the moon (not sure what happened to the crescent, probably fuzziness because I changed the setting on the camera between the two shots.)But changing the setting also allowed Venus to show up in the picture. Anyway, one of my New Year's goals is to learn more about Astronomy.

So I noted with interest a couple of things: 1. That 2009 has been named the International Year of Astronomy. and 2. The International Year of Astronomy Reading Challenge 2009.

From: The Classical Bookworm Blog

Your mission:

Read one book from each of the categories of: History;Astronomers, Cosmology; Astrophysics, and Sci-Fi, and complete the two "extra-vehicular activities" described below.

EVA 1: Do some stargazing with a field guide and blog about it.

EVA 2: Visit your local planetarium or observatory and blog about it also.

I accept the challenge. I've been wanting to read Dava Sobel's Galileos' Daughter so that will be my selection from History and Astronomers. I bought Dava Sobel's The Planets last year but didn't finish it, so that will be my selection from Cosmology/Astrophysics. I'll have to investigate the Sci-Fi options but I'm thinking one of C.S. Lewis's Space Trilogy novels.

I'm looking forward to EVA 2. I haven't been to the Griffith Park Observatory since it reopened after renovations several years ago. I've been planning to take a trip there for a while so I'll report back when the assignment is completed.

Happy New Year!

2009-01-01T14:55:00.000-08:00

2009!

You crown the year with Your goodness,

And Your paths drip with abundance!

Wishing you and yours a year crowned with His goodness and dripping with abundance!

Happy Hanukkah and Merry Christmas

2008-12-23T22:43:00.000-08:00

Today is the day before Christmas eve and the space underneath our Christmas tree is filling up with wrapped presents waiting to be opened on Christmas morning.

Tonight is also the 3rd night of Hanukkah, the Feast of Dedication. We lit the 3rd candle of the Hanukah Menorah tonight.

Christmas and Hanukkah go together. Jesus celebrated Hanukkah, why shouldn't Christians acknowledge the great miracle that happended when the Temple was rededicated in Jerusalem?

Want to read about a real "Raider of Lost Arks"? I came across this story of a rabbi who spends his time and money finding, rescuing and restoring Torah scrolls (Hand copied Biblical manuscripts) that were buried to hide them from the Nazis during World War II.

He couldn’t look less like Indiana Jones. His black yarmulke glistens after
our four-block walk in the rain from the bookstore—that’s his day job. His
slender body and high, sweet voice make him seem more like a boy than a
43-year-old father of seven. But as he takes off his glasses to wipe away the
droplets, his blue-green eyes sparkle with energy—a hint that looks don’t begin
to tell the story.

“I rescue Torahs—that’s what I have been doing since 1985,” he says.

“It is not just a book,” he says. “A congregation without a Torah is a
congregation without a bond between them and God.”

A Torah is also, in many of the Eastern European towns he visits, the only
tangible remains of communities that were wiped out in World War II. So he is
doing more than commemorating those whose lives were lost—he is bringing
survivors back to life.
Read the entire story: Raider of the Lost Ark by Susan Seliger

A Blogger's Christmas Card

2008-12-17T17:04:00.000-08:00

In case you can't read the caption, it reads: "Oh, I am so blogging about this."
Available at: http://wondermark.com/store/card_blog.jpg

Bunny Trails: Bar Mitzvahs and Bibliophiles

2008-12-14T17:44:00.000-08:00

(Note: I have officially run out of time and I need to go cook dinner and grade papers. I'll have to come back to this and add links and quotes.)

I love having a block of time to just sit and surf the internet. This afternoon provided me with just such an opportunity. I started off thinking I’d do a quick search to try to determine the origin of the Jewish Bar Mitzvah ceremony. I know that Jesus’ parents took him to the temple when he was twelve. I was wondering if there was any evidence of a coming of age ceremony while the Jerusalem temple was still standing.

I found some interesting information in the online Jewish Encyclopedia (1906) entry for Bar Mitzwah:

Nevertheless there are many indications…, that its origin must be sought in remote antiquity.

Masseket Soferim xviii. 5 is even more explicit: "In Jerusalem they are accustomed to initiate their children to fast on the Atonement Day, a year or two before their maturity; and then, when the age has arrived, to bring the Bar Mitzwah before the priest or elder for blessing, encouragement, and prayer, that he may be granted a portion in the Law and in the doing of good works. Whosoever is of superiority in the town is expected to pray for him as he bows down to him to receive his blessing."

But I became intrigued and distracted from my original quest by this statement at the end of the Jewish Encyclopedia article.

Regarding a strange custom of cutting a boy's hair when he became Bar Mitzwah, see Abrahams' "Jewish Life in the Middle Ages," p. 144, note 2.

So I googled Abrahams' "Jewish Life in the Middle Ages”, and as “luck” would have it I found a good-sized preview of the book at Google Books.

The description of the preview of the book reads as follows:
Jewish Life in the Middle Ages By Israel Abrahams 1911. A study of the life and lives of Jews during the Middle Ages.
Contents:
The Centre of Social Life; Life in the Synagogue; Communal Organization; Institution of the Ghetto; Social Morality; The Slave Trade; Monogamy and the Home; Home Life; Love and Courtship; Marriage Customs; Trades and Occupations; The Jews and the Theater; The Purim-Play and the Drama in Hebrew; Costume in Law and Fashion; The Jewish Badge; Private and Communal Charities. The Relief of the Poor; Private and Communal Charities. The Sick and the Captive; The Medieval Schools; The Scope of Education; Medieval Pastimes and Indoor Amusements; Medieval Pastimes. Chess and Cards; Personal Relations between Jews and Christians; and Personal Relations. Literary Friendships.

I spent a good portion of an hour reading the chapters of the book that were online. Then I got to the section on schools and education. There I found some kindred spirits as to book lovers and care of books, and some great book quotes to add to my collection. Since the online version of the book on Google books was only a preview, I couldn’t copy the text as text so I ended up retyping the quotes I liked so I could save them in my book quotes collection:

On Page 253, from the section on “The Care of Books”

But unlike most modern bibliophiles, they were very willing lenders.

‘If A has two sons, one of whom is averse to lending his books, and the other does so willingly, the father should have no doubt in leaving all his library to the second son, even if he be the younger.’

This twelfth-century piece of advice comes from Germany; another, emanating at about the same period from Provence, contains the following directions from Judah Ibn Tibbon to his son:

‘Take particular care of your books; cover your shelves with a fine
covering, guard them against damp and mice. Write a complete catalogue of your books, and examine the Hebrew books once a month, the Arabic every tow months, and the bound volumes once a quarter. When you lend a book to any one, make a memorandum of it before it leaves your house, and when it is returned cancel the entry. Every Passover and Tabernacles call in all your books that are out on
loan.’

There is a note of intense love of external as well as internal
beauty in books in another noble remark of Judah Ibn Tibbon:

‘Avoid bad society,’ he says, ‘but make your books your companions. Let your book-cases and shelves be your gardens and your pleasure-grounds. Pluck the fruit that grows therein, gather the roses, the spices, and the myrrh. If your soul be satiate and weary, change from garden to garden, from furrow to furrow, from sight to sight. Then will your desire renew itself, and you soul be satisfied with delight.’

A scheme of study prefixed by the Spanish Jew, Profiat Duran, to the Hebrew Grammar which he wrote before 1403 admonishes:

(vi) Use only books which are beautifully written, on good paper, and well and handsomely bound. Read in a pretty well-furnished room, let your eye rest on beautiful objects so that you may love your work. Beauty must be everywhere, in your books and in your house. ‘The wealthy must honour the Law,’ says the Talmud; let them do this by paying for beautiful copies of the Scripture.

A footnote to the text sent me on another quest to find the source. Footnote (3) on page 352 reads:

Some of the quaint remarks on this subject by the author of the Book of the Pious were translated into English by the Rev. M. Adler in the Bookworm, 1891, pp 251 seq.

It wasn’t as easy to find the Bookworm from 1891 referenced above, but persistence paid off and several pages into my google search I found a NYT Times article from 1891 in which the translation of Rev. Adler was given. Again I had to retype it:

The Bookworm, An Illustrated Treasury of Old-Time Literature. Third series. New-York: A.C. Armstrong and Son.

Of all blessed old book worshippers, but in the broader, higher sense, must have been Rabbi Judah be Samuel Sir Leon, who in 1190 preserved precious manuscripts so as to keep them intact for coming generation. In his “Sefer Chasidim; or, Book for the Pious,” a work popular among orthodox Jews today, he devotes several paragraphs to the treatment of books.

“Do not,” he says, “bind two treatises together, for if you do you will be compelled to lend both, when a man only wants to read one, and somebody else will have to wait.”

“If you sit in the sun with a book, get sunstruck, but do not shield
yourself from the heat with the book. You want to dry a book of which the parchment is damp, and the fire smokes. You must not hold the book before your eyes; rather shed tears than blacken you book. Beware of bending the book on your knee, so as to make the clasps meet. You must never use books for a support for your head when you sleep. If a book and piece of money fall on the ground take the book up first. If there is a fire in the house first rescue the books.”

Happy Thanksgiving!

2008-11-27T19:30:00.000-08:00

Here's a Thanksgiving Proclamation issued by Congress in 1782:

Following the Revolutionary War, the Continental Congress recognized the need to give thanks for delivering the country from war and into independence. Congress issued a proclamation on October 11, 1782:

By the United States in Congress assembled.
PROCLAMATION.

IT being the indispensable duty of all Nations, not only to offer up their supplications to ALMIGHTY GOD, the giver of all good, for his gracious assistance in a time of distress, but also in a solemn and public manner to give him praise for his goodness in general, and especially for great and signal interpositions of his providence in their behalf:

Therefore the United States in Congress assembled, taking into their consideration the many instances of divine goodness to these States, in the course of the important conflict in which they have been so long engaged;

the present happy and promising state of public affairs; and the events of the war, in the course of the year now drawing to a close;

particularly the harmony of the public Councils, which is so necessary to the success of the public cause;

the perfect union and good understanding which has hitherto subsisted between them and their Allies, notwithstanding the artful and unwearied attempts of the common enemy to divide them;

the success of the arms of the United States, and those of their Allies, and the acknowledgment of their independence by another European power, whose friendship and commerce must be of great and lasting advantage to these States:

----- Do hereby recommend to the inhabitants of these States in general, to observe, and request the several States to interpose their authority in appointing and commanding the observation of THURSDAY the twenty-eight day of NOVEMBER next, as a day of solemn THANKSGIVING to GOD for all his mercies:

and they do further recommend to all ranks, to testify to their gratitude to GOD for his goodness, by a cheerful obedience of his laws, and by promoting, each in his station, and by his influence, the practice of true and undefiled religion, which is the great foundation of public prosperity and national happiness.

Done in Congress, at Philadelphia, the eleventh day of October, in the year of our LORD one thousand seven hundred and eighty-two, and of our Sovereignty and Independence, the seventh.

JOHN HANSON, President.

Charles Thomson, Secretary.

Preoccupied Parents Trying to Write

2008-11-19T12:06:00.000-08:00

Why Does This Remind Me of Blogging???

(ht: Amanda Shaw, First Things )

A Tribute to Preoccupied Parents, Elder Siblings, and Longsuffering Relations
(In all due Respect to their Little Angels)

Playing with children is a glorious thing; but the journalist in question has never understood why it is considered a soothing or idyllic one. It reminds him, not of watering little budding flowers, but of wrestling for hours with gigantic angels and devils.

Moral problems of the most monstrous complexity besiege him incessantly. He has to decide before the awful eyes of innocence, whether, when a sister has knocked down a brother’s brick, in revenge for the brother having taken two sweets out of his turn, it is endurable that the brother should retaliate by scribbling on the sister’s picture book, and whether such conduct does not justify the sister in blowing out the brother’s unlawfully lighted match. Just as he is solving this problem upon the principles of the highest morality, it occurs to him suddenly that he has not written his Saturday article; and that there is only about an hour to do it in. . . .

He sits down desperately; the messenger rings at the bell; the children drum on the door; the servants run up from time to time to say the messenger is getting bored; and the pencil staggers along, making the world a present of fifteen hundred unimportant words. Then the journalist sends off his copy and turns his attention to the enigma of whether a brother should commandeer a sister’s necklace because the sister pinched him at Littlehampton. That is how an article is written.

—G.K. Chesterton

Room with a View (of the fires burning across the Valley)

2008-11-16T17:18:00.000-08:00

This was the view from my balcony this afternoon. My prayers are with all those who lost their homes over the last few days in this round of wildfires.

I came across these quotes on the dry Santa Ana winds which bring on the fire conditions in Southern California. The first is from Raymond Chandler:

There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge.
"Red Wind"

Actually the dry conditions make my hair straighter, but the dryness and howling winds do make my nerves jumpy and skin itchy. I wouldn't know about booze parties or full glasses of beer at cocktail lounges, but I think I'll stay away from carving knives.

The next quote is excerpted from a 1968 book of essays by Joan Didion (Slouching Towards Bethlehem):

There is something uneasy in the Los Angeles air this afternoon, some unnatural stillness, some tension. What it means is that tonight a Santa Ana will begin to blow, a hot wind from the northeast whining down through the Cajon and San Gorgonio Passes, blowing up sand storms out along Route 66, drying the hills and the nerves to flash point. For a few days now we will see smoke back in the canyons, and hear sirens in the night.

...

Easterners commonly complain that there is no "weather" at all in Southern California, that the days and the seasons slip by relentlessly, numbingly bland. That is quite misleading. In fact the climate is characterized by infrequent but violent extremes: two periods of torrential subtropical rains which continue for weeks and wash out the hills and send subdivisions sliding toward the sea; about twenty scattered days a year of the Santa Ana, which, with its incendiary dryness, invariably means fire. At the first prediction of a Santa Ana, the Forest Service flies men and equipment from northern California into the southern forests, and the Los Angeles Fire Department cancels its ordinary non-firefighting routines.

Just to watch the front-page news out of Los Angeles during a Santa Ana is to get very close to what it is about the place. The longest single Santa Ana period in recent years was in 1957, and it lasted not the usual three or four days but fourteen days, from November 21 until December 4. On the first day 25,000 acres of the San Gabriel Mountains were burning, with gusts reaching 100 miles an hour.

It is hard for people who have not lived in Los Angeles to realize how radically the Santa Ana figures in the local imagination. The city burning is Los Angeles's deepest image of itself.

Los Angeles weather is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse, and, just as the reliably long and bitter winters of New England determine the way life is lived there, so the violence and the unpredictability of the Santa Ana affect the entire quality of life in Los Angeles, accentuate its impermanence, its unreliability. The winds shows us how close to the edge we are.

Prayer for Leadership in our Country

2008-10-26T19:38:00.000-07:00

“Lord, give us leaders such that it will be for Your glory to give us victory through them.”

This is a prayer which the late Derek Prince prayed during World War II when he was a British soldier in North Africa. At that point in time things looked bleak for the allied forces in Africa. The British army was forced on a 700 mile retreat, the longest retreat in the history of the British army. The stakes were high. Defeat at the British army's final stand near Cairo would open the way for the Nazis to move unhindered through Egypt into Palestine and to gain control of the Holy Land. It would mean certain annihilation of the Jewish community there.

Derek Prince describes the circumstances which led to the retreat, the result of lack of confidence in the leadership causing low morale among the troops in Shaping History Through Prayer and Fasting.

If there was ever a time when our nation was in need of prayer for righteous leadership, it is now. I was encouraged by Derek Prince's accounts of three different times when prayer turned circumstances around, resulting in earth-changing victories. The first of the accounts took place at the North African front in World War II. Here it is:

From 1941 to 1943, I served as a hospital attendant with the British forces in North Africa. I was part of a small medical unit that worked with two British armored divisions—the First Armored Division and the Seventh Armored Division. It was this latter division that became celebrated as the “desert rats” with the emblem of the white jerboa.

At that time the morale of the British forces in the desert was very low. The basic problem was that the men did not have confidence in their officers. I myself am the son of an army officer, and many of the friends with whom I grew up were from the same background. I thus had some valid standards of judgment. As a group, the officers in the desert at that time were selfish, irresponsible, and undisciplined. Their main concern was not the well-being of the men, or even the effective prosecution of the war, but their own physical comfort.

I recall one officer who became sick with malaria and was evacuated to a vase hospital in Cairo. For his transportation to Cairo, he required on four-berth ambulance for himself, and a one-and-a-half-ton truck to carry his equipment and personal belongings. At the time, we were continually being reminded that trucks and gasoline were in very short supply, and that every effort must be made to economize in the use of both. From Cairo, this officer was than evacuated to Britain (a procedure that certainly was not necessitated by a mere bout of malaria). Some months later, we heard him on a radio broadcast relayed form Britain. He as giving a very vivid account of the hardships of campaigning in the desert!

At that period our greatest hardship was the shortage of water. Supplies were very strictly rationed. Our military water bottles were filled every other day. This was all the water that we were allowed for every purpose – washing, shaving, drinking, cooking, etc. Yet the officers in their mess each evening regularly consumed more water with their whisky than was allotted to the other ranks for all purposes combined.

The result of all this was the longest retreat in the history of the British army – about seven hundred miles in all – from a place in Tripoli called El Agheila to El Alamein, about fifty miles west of Cairo. Here the British forces dug in for one final stand. If El Alamein should fall, the way would be open for the Axis powers to gain control of Egypt, to cut the Suez Canal, and to move over into Palestine. The Jewish community there would then be subjected to the same treatment that was already being meted out to the Jews in every area of Europe that had come under Nazi control.

About eighteen months previously, in a military barrack room in Britain. I had received a very dramatic and powerful revelation of Christ. I thus knew in my own experience the reality of God’s power. In the desert, I had no church or minister to offer me fellowship or counsel. I was obliged to depend upon the two great basic provisions of God for every Christian: the Bible and the Holy Spirit. I early came to see that, by New Testament standards, fasting was a normal part of Christian discipline. During the whole period that I was in the desert, I regularly set aside Wednesday of each week as a special day for fasting and prayer.

During the long and demoralizing retreat to the gates of Cairo, God laid on my heart a burden of prayer, both for the British forces in the desert and for the whole situation in the Middle East. Yet I could not see how God could bless leadership that was so unworthy and inefficient. I searched in my heart for some form of prayer that I could pray with genuine faith and that would cover the needs of the situation. After a while, it seemed that the Holy Spirit gave me this prayer:

“Lord, give us leaders such that it will be for Your glory to give us victory through them.”

I continued praying this prayer every day. In due course, the British government decided to relieve the commander of their forces in the desert and to replace him with another man. The man whom they chose was a general named W.H.E. “Strafer”:Gott. He was flown to Cairo to take over command, but he was killed when his plane was shot down. At this critical juncture the British forces in this major theater of the war were left without a commander. Winston Churchill, then Prime Minister of Britain, proceeded to act largely on his own initiative. He appointed a more-or-less unknown officer, named B. L. Montgomery, who was hastily flown out from Britain.

Montgomery was the son of an evangelical Anglican bishop. He was a man who very definitely fulfilled god’s two requirements in a leader of men. He was just and god-fearing. He was also a man of tremendous discipline. Within two months, he had instilled a totally new sense of discipline into his officers and had thus restored the confidence of the men in their leaders.

Then the main battle of El Alamein was fought. It was the first major allied victory in the entire war up to that time. The threat to Egypt, the Suez Canal and Palestine was finally thrown back, and the course of the war changed in favor of the Allies. Without a doubt, the battle of El Alamein was the turning point of the war in North Africa.

Two or three days after the battle, I found myself in the desert a few miles behind the advancing Allied forces. A small portable radio beside me on the tailboard of a military truck was relaying a news commentator’s description of the scene at Montgomery’s headquarters as he had witnessed it on the eve of the battle. He recalled how Montgomery publicly called his officers and men to prayer, saying , “Let us ask the Lord, mighty in battle, to give us the victory.” As these words came through that portable radio, God spoke very clearly to my spirit, “That is the answer to your prayer.”

I believe that the prayer which God gave me at that time could well be applied to other situations, both military and political:

“Lord, give us leaders such that it will be for Your glory to give us victory through them.”

Aramaic Professor meets Hollywood

2008-10-06T17:04:00.000-07:00

I wrote before about one of my Professors at UCLA named Yona Sabar. Prof. Sabar's son, Ariel, just happens to be a journalist and an author. He has written a book about his father, My Father's Paradise: A Son's Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq.

He relates some interesting encounters between Aramaic and Hollyood in this article: When a Professor of Aramaic Meets Hollywood: You get asked some pretty strange things when you speak the language of Jesus.

Chinese 2008 Gold Medal Gymnasts

2008-10-01T20:48:00.000-07:00

all met the minimum age requirement of 16 says the FIG...

Case Closed!

HT:Live.Breathe.Love Gymnastics

How Do You Spell Relief?

2008-09-01T20:52:00.000-07:00

G-U-S-T-A-V!

Thank God that Gustav was no Katrina and that New Orleans was spared from major destruction!

God is good!

More Fun

2008-08-21T12:08:00.000-07:00

Here's a picture of my daughter having fun at the beach this summer. The summer wasn't a total loss. Now that her knee is better things are looking up!

Olympic Proportions

2008-08-13T20:52:00.000-07:00

How about those Olympic gymnasts? I managed to stay up until after midnight last night to watch our "Golden Girls" clinch their Olympic silver medal. I really felt for Alicia Sacramone who struggled on both beam and floor. But hey, the Olympic silver medal is a great accomplishment, and even if Alicia would've been perfect, the Chinese would probably still have taken the gold.

Have you heard about all the injuries plaguing the US Olympic team? Well we've been dealing with a gymnastics injury of our own all summer. I'm thanking God that our little gymnast got the okay from her physical therapist to start easing back into tumbling again. Whew! Do you have any idea how hard it is for a kid who is consumed by gymnastics fever to be off of tumbling for three months?

Ask Jeeves

2008-07-27T14:17:00.000-07:00

“Jeeves, who was the fellow who on looking at something felt like somebody looking at something? I learned the passage at school. But it has escaped me.”

“Jeeves, what was it Shakespeare said the man who hadn’t music in himself was fit for?”

I just finished reading P. G. Wodehouse’s Thank you Jeeves. These are two of the questions Bertie Wooster asks his valet, Jeeves, in the first chapter of the book. It reminded me of one of the old internet search engines, Ask Jeeves. I decided to try these two questions on the internet version, but I soon discovered that Ask Jeeves has been renamed simply ask.com.

This is a personal favorite use of the internet for me, to find quotes that I vaguely remember, but can’t put my finger on the exact wording, or even who said it. So I decided to try these two questions on ask.com. I found that the first question was too much for both ask.com and Google. None of the results returned the correct answer or even matched the quote to P.G. Wodehouse’s Thank You Jeeves.

The second question did turn up a reference to Wodehouse and thus to the answer to the question, which for number 2 is “treasons, stratagems and spoils”.

Wodehouse’s Jeeves' answer to question number 1 is:

“I fancy the individual you have in mind, sir, is the poet Keats, who compared his emotions on first reading Chapman’s Homer to those of stout Cortez when with eagle eyes he stared at the Pacific.”

Maybe I should ditch the internet and hire a smart British valet. Nah!

Fathers and Sons

2008-07-21T21:01:00.000-07:00

I happened to run across this soon-to-be published book at Amazon, My Father's Paradise: A Son's Search for his Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq, by Ariel Sabar. The reason I am anticipating the publication of this book is because I know the father in the book. Yona Sabar was one of my Hebrew professors at UCLA. He was a member of my Ph.D. committee. He is one of the kindest and most godly men I have ever met.

He is also one of a very few native speakers of Aramaic that I have met. I knew that he had fled from Kurdistan in Iraq as a young person and settled in Israel before coming to the US. I’m looking forward to reading the book.

My Secret History Part II

2008-07-20T20:01:00.001-07:00

I think I’m ready to jump back in to blogging on a regular basis. I sort of drew back from it as a response to an attack on my personal privacy through the internet with which I’ve been dealing for a while, and which has thankfully come to a resolution. (Thank you God!) Even so, the memory of it will stay with me as a caution to the dangers of this online society in which we live.

I love the fact that virtually anything I want to know about is at the tip of my fingertips on the internet. What a few short years ago would have taken many trips to libraries around the world, is there for the Googling. And yet, I have learned a hard lesson, that an unintended consequence of this wealth of information is a grave lack of privacy, which can be exploited by the unprincipled, and used against me in ways I never dreamed possible. I am sadly the wiser and more cautious for the experience. As I recently asked a lawyer,“Don’t I have a right to privacy in this country?” (You know, the much touted defense for the legality of killing of innocent babies in the womb.) His answer, “That went out with the internet.” Well, okay, I’m better now.'

So, enough about that. I’ve been searching for a C.S. Lewis quote that I wanted to use to go with the quote from the Secret History on Greek Prose Composition in my previous post. If memory serves me (which it often doesn’t), the quote is something about him being so at home in Greek and Latin that he had basically a native speaker’s fluency in them; that he was a product of a bygone system of education, a dying breed of classically educated scholars. Anyway, I couldn’t lay my hands on it, but I did find a quote where he said losing his Greek and Latin would be like losing a limb.

Eureka! I have found it!: It’s from C.S. Lewis’ inaugural address at Cambridge in 1954, De Descriptione Temporum. See for yourself if my memory of the quote matches up at all with what he said:

One thing I know: I would give a great deal to hear any ancient Athenian, even a stupid one, talking about Greek tragedy. He would know in his bones so much that we seek in vain. At any moment some chance phrase might, unknown to him, show us where modem scholarship had been on the wrong track for years. Ladies and gentlemen, I stand before you some what as that Athenian might stand. I read as a native texts that you must read as foreigners. You see why I said that the claim was not really arrogant; who can be proud of speaking fluently his mother tongue or knowing his way about his father's house? It is my settled conviction that in order to read Old Western literature aright you must suspend most of the responses and unlearn most of the habits you have acquired in reading modem literature. And because this is the judgement of a native, I claim that, even if the defence of my conviction is weak, the fact of my conviction is a historical datum to which you should give full weight. That way, where I fail as a critic, I may yet be useful as a specimen. I would even dare to go further. Speaking not only for myself but for all other Old Western men whom you may meet, I would say, use your specimens while you can. There are not going to be many more dinosaurs.

My Secret History

2008-07-19T14:56:00.000-07:00

I recently finished reading the book, The Secret History by Donna Tart. I was attracted to the book when I heard it centered around a cohort of students of Ancient Greek at a small private college. Having been a student of Greek in college and a lover of dead languages to this day, I decided it was a book I should read. Of course I enjoyed the book. I found it a suspenseful page-turner; I couldn’t put it down.

I enjoyed the book even though the plot to me was rather creepy, sort of a cross between Tom Wolfe’s I am Charlotte Simmons and Golding’s Lord of the Flies. From what I had read about the book I was expecting a kind of murder mystery, whodunnit. Actually, there was never any doubt about, “who done it”, not just once but twice. The mystery and suspense was in whether they would be caught or not. Whether or not the perpetrators were brought to justice in a court of law, they for the most part, seemed to have received a sort of divine retribution for their crimes.

The most fascinating parts of the book to me though, were the parts about the actual language classes and learning. The author’s observations on Greek prose composition, which I quote below, were worth the time spent reading the book. You see, I too took Greek Prose Composition in college. It was probably the hardest class I ever took, more difficult to me than Old Akkadian or Engineering Physics. Of course, I was at a disadvantage, being the only person enrolled in the class who wasn’t a Classics major (My major was Near Eastern Languages).

I’ll never forget the look the Professor gave me after I read aloud one of my compositions to the class. He looked my squarely in the eyes and asked if I had meant to say such-and-such. “Yes”, I answered meekly. “Well that is not at all what you said.” I wish I could convey the sarcasm in his voice and the embarrassment I felt, but you get the idea. So I haven’t yet mastered the art of thinking in Ancient Greek. But I can’t say I didn’t try.

Here's an excerpt from The Secret History:

Back in my room, dizzy and exhausted, I wanted more than anything to pull the shades and lie down on my bed -- Which suddenly seemed the most enticing bed in the world, musty pillow, dirty sheets and all. But, that was impossible. Greek prose composition was in two hours and I hadn't done my homework.

The assignment was a two page essay, in Greek, on any epigram on Callimachus that we chose. I had done only a page and started to hurry through the rest in an impatient and slightly dishonest fashion, writing out the English and translating word-for-word. It was something Julian asked us not to do. The value of Greek prose composition, he said, was not that it gave one any particular facility in the language that could not be gained as easily by other methods, but that if done properly, off the top of one's head, it taught one to think in Greek. One's thought patterns became different, he said, when forced into the confines of a rigid and unfamiliar tongue. Certain common ideas become inexpressible; other, previously undreamt of ones spring to life, finding miraculous new articulation. By necessity, I suppose, it is difficult for me to explain in English exactly what I mean. I can only say that an incendium is in its nature entirely different from the feu with which a Frenchman lights his cigarette, and both are very different from the stark, inhuman pur that the Greeks knew, that pur that roared from the towers of Illion or leapt and screamed on that desolate, windy beach, from the funeral pyre of Patroklos.

Pur: that one word contains for me the secret, the bright, terrible clarity of Ancient Greek. How can I make you see it, this strange, harsh light that pervades Homer's landscapes and illumines the dialogues of Plato, an alien light, inarticulable in our common tongue? Our shared language is a language of the intricate, the peculiar, the home of pumpkins and ragamuffins and bodkins and beer, the tongue of Ahab and Falstaff and Mrs. Gamp; and while I find it entirely suitable for reflections such as these, it fails me utterly when I attempt to describe in it what I love about Greek, that language innocent of all quirks and cranks; a language obsessed with action, and with the joy of seeing action multiply from action, action marching relentlessly ahead and with yet more actions filing in from either side to fall into neat step at the rear, in a long straight rank of cause and effect toward what will be inevitable, the only possible end.

In a certain sense, this was why I felt so close to the others in the Greek class they, too, knew this beautiful and harrowing landscape, centuries dead; they'd had the same experience of looking up from their books with fifth-century eyes and finding the world disconcertingly sluggish and alien, as if it were not their home. It was why I admired Julian, and Henry in particular. Their reason, their very eyes and ears were fixed irrevocably in the confines of those stern and ancient rhythms -- the world, in fact, was not their home, at least not the world as I knew it -- and far from being occasional visitors to this land which I myself knew only as an admiring tourist, they were pretty much its permanent residents, as permanent I suppose it was possible for them to be. Ancient Greek is a difficult language, a very difficult language indeed, as it is eminently possible to study it all ones life and never be able to speak a word; but it makes me smile, even today, to think of Henry's calculated, formal English, the English of a well-educated foreigner, as compared with the marvellous fluency and self-assurance of his Greek -- quick, eloquent, remarkably witty. It was always a wonder to me when I happened to hear him and Julian conversing in Greek, arguing and joking, as I never once heard either of them do in English; many times I've seen Henry pick up the telephone with an irritable, cautious, 'Hello?', and may never forget the harsh and irresistible delight of his 'Khairei!' when Julian happened to be at the other end.

Happy Fourth of July!

2008-07-04T09:29:00.000-07:00

Here's a quote from a letter John Adams wrote to his wife. He expected July 2 to become the national holiday because the Continental Congress declared the "United Colonies free and Independent States" on July 2. The document justifying the act of Congress was dated July 4th.

"The Second Day of July 1776, will be the most memorable Epocha, in the History of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival. . . . It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfire and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more."

Enjoy your Pomp and Parades, Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations!

(For more info see: Three Cheers for July 2! )

Reading

2008-07-03T21:16:00.000-07:00

... We get no good
by being ungenerous, even to a book,
and calculating profits... so much help
by so much reading. It is rather when
we gloriously forget ourselves and plunge
soul-forward, headlong, into a book's profound;
Impassioned for its beauty and salt of truth --
Tis then we get the right good from a book.
by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
(from Aurora Leigh)

God's Grandeur

2008-06-20T09:57:00.000-07:00

THE WORLD is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–89)

Angels in the Locker Room

2008-06-09T11:14:00.000-07:00

I'm not normally a big sports fan, but this report really intrigued me. Paul Pierce of the Boston Celtics suffered a knee injury in Game 1 of the NBA finals. He had to be hoisted in his teamates' arms and carted off the floor in a wheelchair. He returned to the game a short time later and led the Celtics to a 98-88 win over the LA Lakers. He had this to say about his speedy recovery:

"I think just God sent this angel down, and the angel said, 'Hey, you're going to be alright. You need to get back out there and show them what you've got'"

Pentecost

2008-06-08T22:57:00.000-07:00

Could we with ink the ocean fill,
Were every blade of grass a quill,
Were the world of parchment made,
And every man a scribe by trade,
To write the love
Of God above
Would drain the ocean dry;
Nor would the scroll
Contain the whole
Though stretched from sky to sky.

(Opening lines of the piyut of Akdamus, traditionally read on the 1st night of Pentecost or Shavuot, which btw, is tonight.)

Happy Birthday

2008-05-31T22:37:00.000-07:00

to the Flowergirl!
(my Mom)

Headline News!

2008-05-26T09:34:00.000-07:00

Bald Eagles

2008-05-07T15:00:00.000-07:00

Oh My, it's been almost a month since I posted last. I've been taking a little blogging sabbatical.

I found this live webcam of a Bald Eagle's nest on Santa Cruz Island. The chicks were born in early April and will be full grown in about 4 weeks. In the meantime, we're all welcome to check in on them anytime day or night.

Here's the link at The Nature Conservancy.

All My Ways

2008-04-09T11:48:00.000-07:00

I'm so glad that He's acquainted with ALL MY WAYS!

You comprehend my path and my lying down,
And are acquainted with ALL MY WAYS!

Psalm 139:3

The Subjunctive in the News

2008-04-05T21:55:00.000-07:00

I came across this blog post on Geraldine Ferraro's (in)?famous quote about Barack Obama, "If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position.", which focuses, more interestingly (to me), on the grammar of the sentence.

You can read the entire post at The Language Log: The Subective Tense:

Subjective tense

William Safire's most recent "On Language" column (NYT Magazine 3/30/08, p. 18) looks at the now-famous quote from Geraldine Ferraro, "If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position." Then comes a parenthetical digression on grammar:

"Get this," Sam Pakenham-Walsh, member of the Nitpickers League, said in an e-mail message, "we no longer use the subjective tense! Has all our education been for naught?" Because Ferraro's statement posed a condition contrary to fact, her "if Obama was a white man" should have been were.

Yes, "subjective tense", in a grammar peeve. Has all our education been for naught?

Seems this particular language nitpicker was outraged because Ms. Ferraro neglected to use the subjunctive form which should have been: "If Obama were a white man,...". Of course the irony of the nitpicking is that he wrongly identifies the subjunctive mood as the subjective tense and then laments, "Has all our education been for naught?" Apparently his education was. I guess if you're going to nit-pick, it's a good idea to get your terms right.

The Robots are Coming!

2008-03-28T20:17:00.000-07:00

Have you seen the latest? Well maybe it's not the latest, but I just saw this on amazon.com today. It's Pleo, the dinosaur pet that learns and changes. It actually looks pretty cute. If I had an extra $300.00 to spend on a pet dinosaur I'd probably buy one.
Play Pleo Video

The Earliest Easter in our Lifetime

2008-03-23T14:07:00.001-07:00

Today is Resurrection Sunday, more commonly known as Easter. It's the day set aside to celebrate Jesus' resurrection from the dead.

HE IS RISEN!

We know from the New Testament that Jesus was crucified on Passover and rose from the dead on the 3rd day, so why are Easter and Passover almost a month apart this year? Here's an excerpt from Chuck Missler's K-house newsletter that explains the discrepancy:

A QUESTION OF DATES
This year we celebrate Easter on March 23rd, almost a month before Passover. Yet Christ was crucified on Passover, so why are they an entire month apart?

Passover is observed on the 14th day of the month of Nisan, the first month of the religious year. Jesus was crucified on Passover and rose on the 3rd day, appropriately on the Feast of Firstfruits (the morning after the Sabbath after Passover). This was always on a Sunday, irrespective of the day of the week of Passover. Thus, Christians have traditionally celebrated His resurrection on Sunday.

In the West, most of our major holidays occur conveniently on fixed dates. However unless you are an astronomer, the date of Easter can be much more difficult to determine. That's because its date is set by the lunar calendar. The rules for determining the date of Easter were imposed by Constantine and the Council of Nicaea in AD 325, long before the advent of the Gregorian calendar that is most widely used in the world today. Easter is celebrated on the first Sunday, after the first full moon, after the spring equinox. Therefore, it is held on a Sunday on varying dates between March 22 and April 25.

This year Passover begins at sunset on April 19th, almost a month after Easter, in part because it is a Jewish leap year. During leap years, an entire month is added to the Hebrew calendar. Furthermore, this year Easter comes early, very early. In fact, the next time Easter will fall this early will be in the year 2228 – not for another 220 years. The last time it fell on March 23rd was the year 1913. Easter sometimes falls on March 22nd, a day earlier, however that hasn't happened since 1818 and won't happen again until the year 2285 – in another 277 years. What does that mean? No one alive today has or will ever celebrate it any earlier.

Raising Successful Kids

2008-03-22T21:13:00.000-07:00

The Secret to Raising Smart Kids
Hint: Don't tell your kids that they are. More than three decades of research shows that a focus on effort—not on intelligence or ability—is key to success in school and in life

The head-coach/owner of the gym where Aimee lives, uh, I mean, spends inordinate amounts of her time training with her competitive gymnastics team, scheduled an all-team parent meeting last Friday night. One of the main agenda items was a discussion of the above article from Scientific American. The article relates not only to academic success, but also to success in any kind of endeavor that requires effort.
While talent certainly is important to success in gymnastics, it isn't necessarily the most talented kids that are the most successful. This article gives a great explanation of why that is.

St. Patty's Day, or Is it?

2008-03-17T16:19:00.000-07:00

Top O’ the Mornin to You!
Happy St. Paddy’s Day!

Oh but wait, is today really St. Patrick’s Day? Well it’s March 17th, isn’t it? Isn’t March 17th St. Patrick’s day? Well, yes and no. Because of the extremely early occurrence of Easter this year, St. Patrick’s Day occurs during the week preceding Easter, known as Holy Week. This overlap is causing some conflict for St. Patrick’s Day celebrations. According to the BBC News, Why is it 'not' St Patrick's Day today?:

The Catholic Church in England and Wales says St Patrick's Day is simply not on the calendar of feast days this year. This week is known as Holy Week in the church and takes precedence over all saint's days.
Any saint's feast day that clashes with it is omitted from the calendar.
But the position is different in the Republic of Ireland, where St Patrick's Day was observed on Saturday 15 March, instead of Monday 17 March.

The situation in the U.S seems even more complicated. Different cities have responded in different ways to the dilemma:

Savannah, Georgia, Milwaukee, and Philadelphia moved their St. Patrick’s Day parades and celebrations to accommodate the wishes of Catholic leaders.

New York and Columbus, Ohio are having their parades as scheduled, on Monday.

From CNN, St. Patrick's Day causing Catholic dilemma:

For the first time since 1940, St. Patrick's Day will fall during Holy Week, the sacred seven days preceding Easter.
Because of the overlap, liturgical rules dictate that no Mass in honor of the saint can be celebrated on Monday, March 17, according to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.
But a few Roman Catholic leaders are asking for even more moderation in their dioceses: They want parades and other festivities kept out of Holy Week as well.

Well, I don’t know about you, but I’m wearing green TODAY!

A Week for Holidays

2008-03-16T21:06:00.000-07:00

This is a busy week, crammed chock full of holidays. Let’s see:

Today is Sunday, March 16 : Palm Sunday, Beginning of Holy Week

Monday, March 17: St. Patrick’s Day

Thursday, March 20: First Day of Spring

Thursday, March 20: Purim begins at Sunset in Israel

Friday, March 21: Good Friday, Purim Celebrated in Israel

Saturday, March 22: Purim celebrated outside of Israel

Ides of March

2008-03-15T21:03:00.001-07:00

Today, March 15, is the anniversary of Julius' Caesar's assasination. Here is an excerpt from an interesting blog post about Caesar:

Read the entire post here.

Caesar was a man of talent made great by the exceptional times he lived in. As Machiavelli said, “prowess” must also have “opportunity” or it cannot make itself felt. And so felt and remembered Caesar would be. As Christian Meier put it, "The way in which Caesar played this game--risking his very existence and then raising the stakes, seeking out immense opportunities, finding them and savoring them--affords an absorbing spectacle." I highly recommend on some rainy day you pickup a copy of Caesar's commentaries and absorb the spectacle.

Remembering Caesar on the Ides of March.

Hail Caesar!

I'll put it my to-read list!

How Do You Spell Relief?

2008-03-10T10:35:00.000-07:00

I received this in an email this morning...

Congratulations! The IRS has accepted your federal tax return. There's nothing else you need to do.

Whoopee!

(When there's no "Complete Jane Austen" on Sunday night, there's nothing else to do but e-file taxes.)

For the fun of it...

2008-03-07T21:15:00.000-08:00

Here's a fun link to a Nostalgic Candy store. It brought back memories of riding bikes to the corner store and coming home with a sack of loot uh, I mean candy. Just looking at those pictures makes my teeth ache.

Enjoy!

Nostalgic Candy.com

Pwnage?

2008-03-04T21:36:00.000-08:00

I learned something new today about Internetspeak or "Leet" from Mags at the Jane Austen blog. She was so kind as to mention my blog post about Jane Austen's use of the subjunctive on the Jane Austen blog. The title of the post is: "How does one say
“pwn3d” in the subjunctive?"

From Wikipedia:
Owned and Pwned
Main articles: Owned and Pwned
Owned and pwned both refer to the domination of a player in a video game or argument (rather than just a win), or the successful hacking of a website or computer.[1][17][23] For example, in a multiplayer first-person shooter game, a player with a default starting gun defeats an opponent carrying a vastly superior weapon. This would indicate dominant skill in the player with the inferior weapon, who outplayed (owned or pwned) the player with superior firepower. As in a common characteristic of Leet, the terms have also been adapted into noun and adjective forms,[17] ownage and pwnage, which can refer to the situation of pwning or to the superiority of its subject (e.g., "He is a very good player. He is pwnage.").

A 3 is commonly used to replace the letter e as in pwn3d.

Thanks Mags, for mentioning me so kindly on your blog and for the introduction to "Leet".

Don't [sic] Jane Austen

2008-02-29T09:01:00.000-08:00

"A woman, especially,if she have [sic] the misfortune of knowing anything,should conceal it as well as she can."
Jane Austen,
Northanger Abbey

Back to Jane Austen and subjunctives from my previous post...
The picture above is from page 11 of Masterpiece's The Complete Guide to Teaching Jane Austen, a beautiful, full-color, teaching guide aimed at educators who want to use the film adaptations of Jane Austen's works in the classroom. I was looking through the guide and came across the above-referenced quote with the bracketed [sic].

Inserting a [sic] in a quoted text draws attention to the fact that an apparent error in spelling or grammar is part of the original and not an editorial blunder:
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English defines sic as follows:
sic: Latin used after a word that you have copied in order to show that you know it was not spelled or used correctly.

and the The American Heritage® New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy:

sic: A Latin word for “thus,” used to indicate that an apparent error is part of quoted material and not an editorial mistake.

So, what's wrong with the quote? Obviously, a present-day speaker would most likely say, "A woman, especially,if she has the misfortune of knowing anything...", well actually a modern speaker probably wouldn't give this kind of advice to a young woman, but that's a cultural difference and we're talking about grammar here. And then there's the author's intent, Jane Austen was a master of verbal irony and satire, so even though she seems to be telling women to hide their "smarts", she is really exposing such a view to criticism, but again, I digress from the grammatical point I was making.

Back to the point, is "if she have the misfortune of knowing anything..." grammatically incorrect? Should it be, "if she has the misfortune of knowing anything..." The answer lies in the grammatical mood (also called mode) of the verb (have/has), and progressive dwindling of the use of the subjunctive in English. The word if, lets us know that this is a conditional statement.

The mood or mode of a verb is "the manner in which the action, being, or state is expressed. There are five modes: the indicative, subjunctive, potentioal, imperative, and infinitive. The indicative mode asserts a thing as a fact, ... as, "The man walks,"

"The subjunctive mode asserts a thing as doubtful, as a wish, a supposition, or a future contingency; as, "If this be true, all will end well,..."(Harvey's Revised English Grammar)

So what form should the subjunctive of the verb "to have" take in the quoted sentence, "A woman, especially, if she have the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can."? To find the answer to this, (I know my readers are burning up with desire for the answer to this question, as I was.) I had to look at 18th century English grammar:
from : The Treatment of the Subjunctive in Eighteenth-century Grammars of English by Anita Auer:

White (White, James. The English Verb (London, 1761))describes the formal aspect of the subjunctive by explaining the way it differs from the indicative mood:
All the difference, then between the Present of the Subjunctive Mood, and the Present of the Indicative, is; that the word expressive of the Verb undergoes changes of termination in several of the persons of the Present Tense of the Indicative, but none in the persons of the Subjunctive. Thus, in the Present of the Indicative, have changes into hast or have, has or hath, in the Person of the Singular Number, before in the Plural it return again to have; whereas, in the Subjunctive Mood, it continues have without variation, in every Person of each Number.

There it is! Eureka! The subjunctive form of the verb "to have" stays the same, "have", even in the singular, "I have", "You have", "He, she it have".

I rest my case! Don't go [siccing] Jane Austen! She was a master of polite English grammar, and knew her subjunctives from her indicatives; we should all be so nice!

(To see Henry Tilney's lamentation over the degradation of the word nice in Northanger Abbey, click on the bold word nice, and read the page, or after clicking, search on the page for nice.)

Cherry Blossoms and Subjunctives

2008-02-28T15:35:00.000-08:00

I was going to post a picture I took of my neighbor's cherry tree covered with pretty blossoms. I just took the picture this afternoon, (it looks so pretty in the front of their house), but I can't find the cable to connect my camera to the computer, and I only have a minute to post this so I googled this picture instead. I'm sure it's better than the one I took anyway. (thanks to http://www.alexisleon.com/figs/cherry.jpg for the picture)

Oh yeah, and I do have something to say about subjunctives (and Jane Austen of course) but it will have to wair because I just got a call to pick up my son and I need to be back by 4 to take my daughter to gymnastics... gotta run!

All Jane Austen, All the Time

2008-02-25T11:47:00.000-08:00

So it seems...

To make the most of the Masterpiece's presentation of The Complete Jane Austen on PBS Sunday nights, I've been re-reading all of Jane Austen's novels and watching as many film adaptations as I can. I picked up Sense and Sensibility from the library and, I rented the DVD of the Jane Austen Book Club and watched it this weekend. So, it's not surprising that I have Jane Austin "on the brain". There are worse things to be stuck on I guess.

It was Grigg from the Jane Austen Book Club who said, "All Jane Austen All the Time." Last night we watched the final episode of Pride and Prejudice (1995) with the dreamy Colin Firth as Mr. Darcy.

One of the things that makes Pride and Prejudice such a classic work of literature is the sterling cast of supporting, perfectly pitched, comic characters. The genre of Pride and Prejudice is a comedy of manners and the manners of the minor characters are truly comical. One of the most unforgettable comic characters of all times is the smarmy Rev. Mr. Collins. Tonight as we sat down for our Sunday family fellowship time, Chuck threatened to read Fordyce’s sermons to us for an hour or two, for our moral edification. (See, even my macho husband is being sucked into the Austen frenzy.)

And who can forget the annoyingly loud and nervous Mrs. Bennet, along with her permanently bemused husband, Mr. Bennet. To my mind the most perfect Mr. Bennet is Donald Sutherland in PandP 2005, in fact the most perfectly cast and perfectly acted character in any of the Jane Austin adaptations I’ve seen is Sutherland’s Mr. Bennet.

Another supporting character is Lizzy’s pedantic sister Mary Bennet. Mary spends all her time with her nose in a book and thinks that books alone make her wise and someone worth listening to. In honor of the comic supporting cast of Pride and Prejudice here are some choice Mary Bennet quotes:

Mary had neither genius nor taste; and though vanity had given her application, it had given her likewise a pedantic air and conceited manner, which would have injured a higher degree of excellence than she had reached.

…she was eagerly succeeded at the instrument by her sister Mary, who having, in consequence of being the only plain one in the family, worked hard for knowledge and accomplishments, was always impatient for display.

“…What say you, Mary? for you are a young lady of deep reflection I know, and read great books, and make extracts."
Mary wished to say something very sensible, but knew not how.

They found Mary, as usual, deep in the study of thorough bass and human nature; and had some new extracts to admire, and some new observations of thread-bare morality to listen to.

And even Mary could assure her family that she had no disinclination for it.
"While I can have my mornings to myself," said she, "it is enough. -- I think it no sacrifice to join occasionally in evening engagements. Society has claims on us all; and I profess myself one of those who consider intervals of recreation and amusement as desirable for every body."

"Pride," observed Mary, who piqued herself upon the solidity of her reflections, "is a very common failing I believe. By all that I have ever read, I am convinced that it is very common indeed, that human nature is particularly prone to it, and that there are very few of us who do not cherish a feeling of self-complacency on the score of some quality or other, real or imaginary. Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonomously. A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves, vanity to what we would have others think of us."

"I admire the activity of your benevolence," observed Mary, "but every impulse of feeling should be guided by reason; and, in my opinion, exertion should always be in proportion to what is required."

Gone Too Soon

2008-02-20T15:22:00.000-08:00

My sixteen year old son Eric walked in the door on Monday evening with a disturbed look on his face. "One of my good friends from school died this weekend", he said. "Look Mom, here he is on Myspace." A good-looking blonde kid's picture stared me in the face.

"He died in a dirt-biking accident. A friend texted me this morning about it, but I thought it was a bad joke. I can't believe he's gone. I just talked to him Thursday after school. He's the last person I would think wouldn't make it."

Fifteen year old Taylor LaKamp was killed this President's day weekend when his dirt bike collided with another biker while making a jump. The funeral is this Friday at 11am at Santa Clarita's Eternal Valley. I didn't know the kid but he looks like he was a great kid, good-looking, with his whole life ahead of him.

My son says he's okay, but after school yesterday he came home and went to his room. I heard him playing his guitar and when he came out of his room his eyes were red like he'd been crying. I know he wouldn't cry in front of me, but I know he's grieving and it's very important to him to be at the funeral on Friday, even though it's in the middle of a school day.

I'm praying for Taylor's family and friends to be comforted in the midst of this tragedy. Read the Bakersfield Newspaper report here.

Getting "Crabbey" with Jane Austen

2008-02-16T15:33:00.000-08:00

On Sunday, Feb 3, I watched Masterpiece's, The Complete Jane Austen's new biopic Miss Austen Regrets. One scene shows Miss Austen's introduction to a young MP (member of parliament) named Stephen Washington. The meeting takes place in a library, and the young man begins to quote a poet named Crabbe:
"All around these silent walks I tread
These are the lasting memories of the dead."

Since I collect library and book quotes and I had never heard this one before, I had to find out more about Crabbe and the source of the quote.I found that George Crabbe was one of Jane Austen's favorite poets, and that the source of the quote is a poem he wrote called The Library. It's a very long poem, but here is the section that the quote came from:

With awe, around these silent walks I tread;
These are the lasting mansions of the dead:-
"The dead!" methinks a thousand tongues reply;
"These are the tombs of such as cannot die!"
Crown'd with eternal fame, they sit sublime,
"And laugh at all the little strife of time."

Hail, then, immortals! ye who shine above,
Each, in his sphere, the literary Jove;
And ye the common people of these skies,
A humbler crowd of nameless deities;
Whether 'tis yours to lead the willing mind
Through History's mazes, and the turnings find;
Or, whether led by Science, ye retire,
Lost and bewilder'd in the vast desire;
Whether the Muse invites you to her bowers,
And crowns your placid brows with living flowers;
Or godlike Wisdom teaches you to show
The noblest road to happiness below;
Or men and manners prompt the easy page
To mark the flying follies of the age:
Whatever good ye boast, that good impart;
Inform the head and rectify the heart.

Crabbe also seems to have been Jane Austen's source for the name of the heroine of Mansfield Park, Fanny Price.

"In The Parish Register, Part II (1807), Jane Austen’s favourite poet Crabbe had written:

Sir Edward is an amorous knight
And maidens chaste and lovely shun his sight;
His bailiff’s daughter suited much his taste,
For Fanny Price was lovely and was chaste”

(from E.E. Duncan-Jones in Jane Austen and Crabbe, The Review of English Studies, 1954) ht: oldgreypony

Crabbe also appears on a table in Fanny Price's study. The speaker in the following excerpt is Fanny's cousin, Edmund Bertram, speaking to Fanny:

Mansfield Park
Volume I
Chapter 16
You, in the meanwhile, will be taking a trip into China, I suppose. How does Lord Macartney go on?"--opening a volume on the table and then taking up some others. "And here are Crabbe's Tales, and the Idler, at hand to relieve you, if you tire of your great book. I admire your little establishment exceedingly; and as soon as I am gone, you will empty your head of all this nonsense of acting, and sit comfortably down to your table. But do not stay here to be cold."

Valentine's Day love Poem

2008-02-14T22:25:00.000-08:00

Invitation to Love
by Paul Laurence Dunbar

COME when the nights are bright with stars
Or when the moon is mellow;
Come when the sun his golden bars
Drops on the hay-field yellow.
Come in the twilight soft and gray,
Come in the night or come in the day,
Come, O love, whene'er you may,
And you are welcome, welcome.

You are sweet, O Love, dear Love,
You are soft as the nesting dove.
Come to my heart and bring it rest
As the bird flies home to its welcome nest.

Come when my heart is full of grief
Or when my heart is merry;
Come with the falling of the leaf
Or with the redd'ning cherry.
Come when the year's first blossom blows,
Come when the summer gleams and glows,
Come with the winter's drifting snows,
And you are welcome, welcome.

How to Marry a Millionaire

2008-02-09T18:21:00.000-08:00

Watch PBS' Masterpiece Pride and Prejudice tomorrow night, Sunday, Feb. 10, to find out. (You'll have to come back on the 17th and 24th to catch the whole story.)

IT is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

Lover's Vows

2008-01-30T22:04:00.000-08:00

It's been too long since my last post.

Going on with the Jane Austen theme, I've been enjoying immensely the Sunday night Masterpiece Jane Austen novels adapted for TV. Mansfield Park was the offering last Sunday. Fanny Price is the heroine of Mansfield Park and one of my favorite Jane Austen characters. Many people feel Fanny is too tame and too much of a goody-two shoes to be a favorite heroine. But I like her quiet ways and her absolute confidence to do the right thing in spite of her anxiety and fears and in the face of strong opposition.

The latest PBS version of Mansfield Park stars Billie Piper as Fanny. The character is written for the movie with a bit more spunk than comes across in the book. Her constant running here and there in the movie is definitely not in the book. But, I like the liveliness that comes across on the screen.

One of the key plot elements in the book is the preparation for a play by the residents of Mansfield Park and their friends. The play is entitled Lovers Vows. Fanny and her cousin Bertram disapprove of the endeavor and especially the choice of the play and the decision to cast the engaged Maria Bertram in the part of Agatha (the victim of a seduction and the resulting unwed pregnancy).

Reading the play helped me to understand the story of Mansfield Park better.

Fanny's Opinion of "Lovers' Vows"

From Chapter 14

The first use [Fanny] made of her solitude was to take up the volume [of "Lovers' Vows"] which had been left on the table, and begin to acquaint herself with the play of which she had heard so much. Her curiosity was all awake, and she ran through it with an eagerness which was suspended only by intervals of astonishment, that it could be chosen in the present instance—that it could be proposed and accepted in a private Theatre! Agatha and Amelia appeared to her in their different ways so totally improper for home representation—the situation of one, and the language of the other, so unfit to be expressed by any woman of modesty, that she could hardly suppose her cousins could be aware of what they were engaging in; and longed to have them roused as soon as possible by the remonstrance which Edmund would certainly make

More to come, got to run to take Aimee to gymnastics...

Soul Piercing

2008-01-17T15:06:00.000-08:00

The Masterpiece presentation of Persuasion on Sunday was not a disappointment. Watching Miss Anne Elliot brought back to life by the return of her true love, Captain Wentworth, after an eight year separation was quite enjoyable.

I am re-reading each of Jane Austen's 6 novels in preparation for watching the Masterpiece presentations. The climax of the novel Persuasion and the movie comes with the unveiling of one of the greatest love letters ever written (well certainly better than any I ever received.) Here is Captain Wentworth's impassioned epistle to Miss Anne Elliot, for your enjoyment and mine:

I can listen no longer in silence. I must speak to you by such means as are within my reach. You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. Tell me not that I am too late, that such precious feelings are gone for ever. I offer myself to you again with a heart even more your own than when you almost broke it, eight years and a half ago. Dare not say that man forgets sooner than woman, that his love has an earlier death. I have loved none but you. Unjust I may have been, weak and resentful I have been, but never inconstant. You alone have brought me to Bath. For you alone, I think and plan. Have you not seen this? Can you fail to have understood my wishes? I had not waited even these ten days, could I have read your feelings, as I think you must have penetrated mine. I can hardly write. I am every instant hearing something which overpowers me. You sink your voice, but I can distinguish the tones of that voice when they would be lost on others. Too good, too excellent creature! You do us justice, indeed. You do believe that there is true attachment and constancy among men. Believe it to be most fervent, most undeviating, in F. W.

I must go, uncertain of my fate; but I shall return hither, or follow your party, as soon as possible. A word, a look, will be enough to decide whether I enter your father's house this evening or never.

Next Sunday watch out for Gothic twists and turns in Northanger Abbey.

Milestones

2008-01-12T17:13:00.000-08:00

January 2008 has already been a month of milestones. This past week my son turned sixteen. And the week before that yours truly, turned, ahem, fifty. That’s right. FIFTY! But I don’t feel like fifty. Well, I’m not sure what fifty’s supposed to feel like, but I don’t feel any different than I did at say, forty-nine.

I guess I have some good company and lots of it. I read somewhere that since 2001 someone turns fifty every six seconds. Here are some other people turning fifty in 2008:
1958: Grandmaster Flash, Ellen DeGeneres, Ice-T, Sharon Stone, Holly Hunter, D. Boon, Alec Baldwin, Andie MacDowell, Michelle Pfeiffer, Rick Santorum, Drew Carey, Annette Bening, Prince, Keenen Ivory Wayans, Jello Biafra, Kevin Bacon, Mark Cuban, Bill Berry, Madonna, Angela Bassett, Belinda Carlisle, Steve Guttenberg, Tim Burton, Michael Jackson, Thomas Dolby, Tim Robbins, Viggo Mortensen, Jamie Lee Curtis, Charlene Tilton, George Saunders, Nikki Sixx, Bebe Neuwirth. Elsewhere: Andy Gibb, Gary Numan, Gary Oldman, Simon Le Bon.
Source : Braniac

In the Bible, fifty is a Jubilee year. It’s a year of liberty and release from debt. It's a year that to enjoy the increase of the land without sowing or reaping:

Leviticus 25:10, 12
And you shall consecrate the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty throughout all the land to all its inhabitants. It shall be a Jubilee for you; and each of you shall return to his possession, and each of you shall return to his family.

That fiftieth year shall be a Jubilee to you; in it you shall neither sow nor reap what grows..., not gather the grapes of you untended vine.

For it is the Jubilee; it shall be holy to you; you shall eat its increase from the field.

I'm ready for some JUBILATION! Let's Party!

On Turning Fifty
Today I turned fifty. I feel really good.
My body's still working quite well thanks. (Touch wood!)
My hair's not too grey, my wrinkles are few,
I can still touch my toes with my knuckles. (Can you?)
I'm quite full of vigour, just getting ripe.
(But they now print the phone book in much smaller type.)
Inside this old body I'm still young, but then
If life starts at forty, I'm really just ten.
By Sue Taylor

You'll Be a Man, Son

2008-01-12T15:52:00.000-08:00

For my son on the week he turns sixteen:

If

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or, being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise;

If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with triumph and disaster
And treat those two imposters just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with wornout tools;

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on";

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings - nor lose the common touch;
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run -
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man my son!
Rudyard Kipling

Where's My King Cake?

2008-01-06T20:12:00.000-08:00

Today, January 6, is Kings Day. Kings Day, also known as Ephiphany, is the day when according to tradition, the Magi brought their gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh to the baby Jesus. For me, growing up in New Orleans, that meant one thing, King Cake! I love King Cake. I am craving King Cake, I have been all day. Last night I did a google search asking "where to buy a King Cake in Los Angeles".

Google gave me one suggestion. The suggestion Hansen's Bakery. Oh yes, Hansen's Bakery does have King Cakes, but this is not a New Orleans King Cake, not by any stretch. This is a fake King Cake:

I could order one online from New Orleans, but I just can't bring myself to spend $40.00 to $50.00 to ship one here. I could make one, but it just wouldn't be the same, so here I sit, craving King Cake.

Jane Austen's Captain Wentworth

2008-01-04T22:56:00.000-08:00

I’m looking forward to Sunday evenings this winter. I’ll be tuning in to PBS for The Complete Jane Austen on Masterpiece 2008. (9pm/8pm CT) Here’s the schedule:

January 13 Persuasion
January 20 Northanger Abbey
January 27 Mansfield Park
February 3 Miss Austen Regrets
February 10 Pride and Prejudice
to 24
March 23 Emma
March 30 to Sense and Sensibility
April 6

In preparation for watching the film adaptations I’ve started re-rereading the Austen novels. I’m reading Persuasion now. Miss Anne Elliott is pining away for her lost love when he suddenly reappears in her life. Anne had fallen in love with a young naval officer, Frederick Wentworth, eight years earlier. She was persuaded to break it off by well-meaning friends and relatives on the grounds that he was not a suitable match for her in station or fortune. Now that he is a naval captain and has made his fortune and she a spinster the chances of them being reconciled seem slim. You’ll have to read the book and/or watch the movie for the rest of the story.

I came across something interesting pertaining to the possibility that Jane Austen had a romance with a real naval officer who perhaps became the model for Captain Wentworth. This is from Jane Austen, Her Life and Letters, by her nephews, William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh:

A story is given in the Reminiscences of Sir Francis H. Doyle, to the effect that Mr. Austen, accompanied by Cassandra and Jane, took advantage of the Peace of Amiens, in 1802, to undertake a foreign tour. Whilst in Switzerland, they fell in with a young naval officer, who speedily became attached to Jane. His love was returned, and all seemed to be going smoothly. The party were making for Chamonix; but while the Austens kept to such high road as there was, their friend was to make his way thither over the mountains. The Austens reached Chamonix safely, but their friend never arrived, and at last news came that he had over-tired himself and died of brain fever on the way. The Austens returned to England, and Jane resumed her ordinary life, never referring to her adventures abroad.

Here's an excerpt from a poem by W.H. Auden about Jane Austen:

A Letter To Lord Byron, W. H. Auden
"...
There is one other author in my pack
For some time I debated which to write to.
Which would least likely send my letter back?
But I decided I'd give a fright to
Jane Austen if I wrote when I'd no right to,
And share in her contempt the dreadful fates
Of Crawford, Musgrove, and of Mr. Yates.

Then she's a novelist. I don't know whether
You will agree, but novel writing is
A higher art than poetry altogether
In my opinion, and success implies
Both finer character and faculties
Perhaps that's why real novels are as rare
As winter thunder or a polar bear.
...
I must remember, though, that you were dead
Before the four great Russians lived, who brought
The art of novel writing to a head;
The help of Boots had not been sought.
But now the art for which Jane Austen fought,
Under the right persuasion bravely warms
And is the most prodigious of the forms.

She was not an unshockable blue-stocking;
If shades remain the characters they were,
No doubt she still considers you as shocking.
But tell Jane Austen, that is if you dare,
How much her novels are beloved down here.
She wrote them for posterity, she said;
'Twas rash, but by posterity she's read.

You could not shock her more than she shocks me;
Beside her Joyce seems innocent as grass.
It makes me most uncomfortable to see
An English spinster of the middle-class
Describe the amorous effects of 'brass',
Reveal so frankly and with such sobriety
The economic basis of society.

New Year's Reading Roundup

2008-01-01T19:53:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year!

You crown the year with your goodness and your paths drip with abundance.
Psalm 65:11

Here's a list of the books I read in 2007, at least all the ones that I finished and remembered to write down in my journal. I didn't read as many books this year as I did last year. There are probably a number of reasons for this. I think that I probably started more books and didn't finish them. Right now I'm in the middle of four or five books. I also spent more time online this year reading blogs, social networking and just chasing bunnies around the internet. I did a lot more reading when I was driving my daughter to gym 50 miles away in 2006. Not wanting to make two round trips and not really feeling comfortable with leaving her there alone, I was "stuck" there for four to six hours at a time. Needless to say that gave me quite a bit of time to read. Now she's at a local gym and I'm not "stuck".

The books are listed in the order that I read them, except that I found a few that I had missed in another list and stuck them at the end. The books marked with asteriks are those that I bought this year.

Books Read in 2007

The Princess and the Wise Woman by George McDonald

Emily Bronte and her Sisters

*The Book of Hours by Davis Bunn

Codex by Lev Grossman

The Good Nanny by Benjamin Cheever

*The Jane Austen’s Guide to Manners by Josephine Ross

Lileth by George McDonald

*The Know It All by A. J. Jacobs

Phantastes by George McDonald

Middlemarch by George Eliot

An Acceptable Time by Madeleine L'Engle

*Amazing Grace, William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to End Slavery by Eric Metaxas

*The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde

Christ in the Passover by Cecil and Moishe Rosen

Tess of D’Ubervilles by Thomas Hardy

*Lost in a Good Book by Jasper Fforde

*The Well of Lost Plots by Jasper Fforde

The Histories by Herodotus

The Bookwoman’s Last Fling by John Dunning

The Mill on the Floss George Elliot

Never Before in History by Gary Amos

Misquoting Jesus By Bart Ehrman

The Sunday Philosophy Club by Alexander McCall Smith

*Many Waters by Madeleine L’Engle

The Case of the Missing Books by Ian Sansome

*Rashi’s Daughters, Book I: Joheved by Maggie Anton

The Holiest of All by Andrew Murray

Under the Lilacs by Louisa May Alcott

*Thursday Next: The Sequel by Jasper Fforde

*The Narnian by Alan Jacobs

*Rashi’s Daughters, Book II: Miriam by Maggie Anton

*Rotten Tomatoes by Jasper Pford

*The Copper Scroll by Joel Rosenberg

*How the Irish Saved Civilization by Thomas Cahill

Our Father Abraham by Marvin R. Wilson

The Gift of the Jews by Thomas Cahill

Orthodoxy by G. K. Chesterton

The Collectors by David Balladuci

Studies in Words C.S. Lewis

The Light Princess by George Macdonald

Prometheus Bound by Aescylus

The Truth War by John MacArthur

God’s Gold: A Quest for the Lost Temple Treasures of Jerusalem

The Last Secret of the Temple by Paul Sussman

1 Dead in Attic: After Katrina by Chris Rose

The World of the Talmud by Morris Adler

Reordering Your Day by Chuck Pierce

*Water Babies by Charles Kingsley

*The Fight for Jerusalem by Dore Gold

*1453 by Roger Crowley