tom.bl*g

Baby's First Shoutout

I just got a public What's Up from DJ KAOS on The Vinyl Destination broadcasting on 100.5. He made me sound like a dork, but there's no such thing as bad publicity. It's true, anyhow.

Truth: 1, Fiction: 0

Decomposing whale explodes on Taiwan street

(via Dappled Things)

Nobody expects...

Break-Dancers Perform For The Pope, Get His Blessing

Check out the video clip. (Link via And Then?)

PvP on LotR

They struck an OK balance between epic and cheesiness IMHO. Most of the time.

For those of you who don't read PvP and who have played D&D: PvP on LotR at the Oscars.

If it was a period piece about the ivory trade you know it would be a shoe-in.

Thanks to slashdot commentors for the link, and the first quote.

Church for gay people

So, I was going to record my brilliant insight that the gym is homoerotic, bordering on gay, and sometimes just gay. Then I said to myself, "well, Tom, duh." All those boy band slash diva dance mix videos don't help.

As long as you can't get married, I guess there's pressure to keep your inner beer belly repressed.

UPDATE: Now I remember why I didn't want to post this. Oh well.

Wore out

I need a break: something low-key and uncontroversial, like Linux advocacy.

*time passes*

Sigh. While this post was sitting in draft status, I went back to the baptist bulletin board and started slogging through discussions over "KJV-onlyism" and free-will vs. predestination. I should probably just accept that I am a religion geek, and get on with it.

Duh Factor X

I was poking around baptistboard.com when I came across an interesting debate on how to interpret parts of 2 Peter with respect to some doctrinal point or another. A Calvinist wrote the following:

To teach otherwise is to reject the plain teaching of Scripture and you will be damned for it yourselves.

Now, paraphrasing a free-will Arminian who disagreed in the strongest terms:

To teach otherwise is to reject the plain teaching of Scripture and you will be damned for it yourselves.

Finally, a non-denomination Christian chimed in and said, as far as I can recall,

To teach otherwise is to reject the plain teaching of Scripture and you will be damned for it yourselves.

Clearly.

It's enough to drive a man agnostic, or worse: Catholic (by man, I mean myself).

Gong xi fa cai!

The Scientific Degradation of Women

I misread the title of a paper in a coursepack for one of Mel's Linguistics classes. It was really "The Semantic Derogation of Women"--what am I supposed to think about myself now, hmm?

Pondering the trinity

So on my 15 minute walk home in the chilly, glowing sunset, I got to thinking (hint: not a good sign). So I've organized Christianity into three branches--loosely: Catholic, protestant, and Orthodox*. At first I saw them respectively as a forward-slash, a backslash, and an underscore. Ten minutes of exploratory thinking later, and I write the following.

(*leaving out, for now, Islam, Jehova's Witness, and a few other offshoots)

The Catholic kingdom of God is like the mustard seed; it started small--with the completed revelation of Christ--and has grown and matured according to and consistent with its nature and mission.

Protestants see Catholics start with a simple faith--a small church--and tack on needless--harmful, even--additions. They have been trying to tear down that building which has barred men from a proper religion. Wycliff pulled out a brick; Luther pounded on the door, Calvin kicked it in; others have since thrown rocks through the stained glass, torn down sections of the wall in order to let the trapped Gospel out.

Eastern Orthodox christianity, on the third hand, remains constant. For nearly two millenia it has kept the same faith, the same scripture, the same doctrine, avoiding the Catholic tendency to construct and the later anti-Catholic revolt.

The Wisdom of Spongebob

In case you didn't realise how awesome Spongebob Squarepants can be: Squidward on job satisfaction.

Spam Freeverse

neptune, returning from visiting his favourite aethiopians, from the this out of mere fatal vanity. cross to france, however, he would will rejoice in my misfortunes, they will accuse me of folly and than to be obliged to do a quantity of disagreeable things they did not

Condemnation

George Macdonald, in The Hope of the Gospel--which just arrived in the mail today--writes the following.

Not for any or all of his sins that are past shall a man be condemned ; not for the worst of them needs he dread remaining unforgiven. The sin he dwells in, the sin he will not come out of, is the sole ruin of a man. His present, his live sins--those pervading his thoughts and ruling his conduct ; the sins he keeps doing, and will not give up ; the sins he is called to abandon, and clings to ; the same sins which are the cause of his misery ; though he may not know it--these are they for which he is even now condemned. It is true the memory of wrongs we have done is, or will become very bitter ; but not for those is condemnation ; and if in that our character which made them possible were abolished, remorse would lose its worst bitterness in the hope of future amends. 'This is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil.'

He does so love the run-on. Here's a money quote, from several pages later, which I pull out of its context for you.

Obedience is the soul of knowledge.

I've learned that's true in real-world application such as Dance Dance Revolution and racquetball, so I'm unsurprised to think that it may be true in spiritual matters.

Email I

Good quote about Iran:

"And her scarf was pushed back to reveal fully half her hair -- something officially prohibited shortly after then-President Abol-Hassan Bani-Sadr in 1981 explained that women's hair emits rays that drive men insane."

Maybe the original arabic reads more reasonably.

I discover the Bleep

Warp records has made their back catalog available for purchase with Bleep [via slashdot]. Single tracks go for $1.49; an album will set you back $9.99. I did what any sane man in my position would do, picking up Speedy J's G-Spot. Next month, I will let myself buy Ginger. These two albums are mid 90's IDM on par with Autechre's Incunabula or Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works 85-92 (both of which are also availabe on bleep, although I've linked to Amazon).

Darkness

"Despair and die, for God is not with thee. All is in vain. Death, not Life, is thy refuge. Make haste to Hades, where thy torture will be over. Thou hast deceived thyself. He never was with thee. He was the God of Abraham. Abraham is dead. Whom makest thou thyself?"

I have been wandering through the archives of A Catechumen's Walk. The author is "a Protestant who has fallen in love with sacraments and liturgy." She writes about her father,

One of my greatest fears is that I will end up where he is; everyone says I am exactly like him. He is older now, but sometimes I can see his youthful religious zeal when I talk about it. He is still searching as desperately as I am, but has given up; he goes to church to hear a man speak, and to drink grape-juice and eat bread. He knows he is not home, but I don't know if he can still change. I fear I may become like that; settle down into something I know to be heterodoxical because I am too worn and sore from the search. [link]

Mark Twain quips, "A conclusion is simply the place where you got tired of thinking," and I think I grok his idea. Conviction--be it religious, agnostic, or atheist--is something that other people get to enjoy. The repeated alienation and unsatisfaction I find everywhere really, um, gets me down.

The Internet Monk is an evangelical Christian who suffers similar doubt, and George Macdonald has written some relevant words:

Then, if ever the time should come, as perhaps it must come to each of us, when all consciousness of well-being shall have vanished, when the earth shall be but a sterile promontory, and the heavens a dull and pestilent congregation of vapours, when man nor woman shall delight us more, nay, when God himself shall be but a name, and Jesus an old story, then, even then, when a Death far worse than "that phantom of grisly bone" is griping at our hearts, and having slain love, hope, faith, forces existence upon us only in agony, then, even then, we shall be able to cry out with our Lord, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" Nor shall we die then, I think, without being able to take up his last words as well, and say, "Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit."

That is the conclusion of his sermon on The Eloi ("My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?"), which is part of his Unspoken Sermons, First Series. Earlier in that sermon, he spoke more directly about Jesus on the cross.

... Never had it been so with him before. Never before had he been unable to see God beside him. Yet never was God nearer him than now. For never was Jesus more divine. He could not see, could not feel him near; and yet it is "My God" that he cries.

Thus the Will of Jesus, in the very moment when his faith seems about to yield, is finally triumphant. It has no feeling now to support it, no beatific vision to absorb it. It stands naked in his soul and tortured, as he stood naked and scourged before Pilate. Pure and simple and surrounded by fire, it declares for God. ...

The first quote, by the way, is also from Macdonald's sermon.

The horror

I woke up this morning, after a distrubing dream about airports and the end of the world, to realize that I knew what it meant to "immanentize the eschaton". For other of you who wish to join me in this knowledge, read this short bit.

Just to be clear, it wasn't the dream that gave me this knowledge.

I got into PEL 1441

Not five minutes ago I was able to get a seat in the elusive PEL 1441, aka Racquetball 1, aka how-i'm-going-to-get-into-cardio-shape-for-the-Appalachian-Trail. Of course, it meets Tuesday and Thursday 2nd and 3rd period, which means I will get much less sleep than I should tonight. Also, tuesdays will be painful, as Josh, Yin, and I will be destroying our legs at the gym every monday evening. I'm glad we won't be playing tomorrow.

I am Jacque Lacan

You are Jacques Lacan! Arguably the most important psychoanalyst since Freud, you never wrote anything down, and the only works of yours are transcriptions of your lectures. You are notoriously difficult to understand, but at least you didn't talk about the penis as much as other psychoanalysts. You died in 1981.

What 20th Century Theorist are you?
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I found this quiz linked from And Then? Did you know Jacque has been featured on a trading card?