How Do You Spell Relief?

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

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

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

“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

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

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

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!

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

... 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

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

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

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

to the Flowergirl!
(my Mom)

Headline News!

Bald Eagles

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

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

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!

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

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

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.