Entries in Life

My friend Jeff takes some good videos of his two month old. The latest, “Sucker“, shows his daughter hungrily slurping at her fingers while he tapes her. Alexis only comment (besides “That’s cute”) was “They need to feed that baby!” To be fair, the child looked well-fed and rather tolerant — why else would she babble like that when she was hungry and her father had a camera in her face?

Anyway, I decided to post some movies of my own kids using the movie mode of my digital camera. Quality isn’t that bad, but I discovered too late that it doesn’t have sound. To bad, no talkies for you. You’ll have to make up your own words.

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What I want is Christian artists who create art that is imbued with their faith.

What I see in “Christian” music is what I see in the church’s confusion when it comes to culture in general. “Oooo… Pop music is popular. Let’s make Christian pop music and we’ll make the gospel popular.”

Ok, so its probably different then that, and like Tara said, the people making those songs are probably sincere.

What I want is something more along the lines of Johnny Cash’s Man in Black or U2′s Grace. These are clearly popular songs, enjoyable by non-Christians.

This universality applies, of course, to other art. Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy were distinctly Christian novelists and wrote novels that were distictly Christian, but their works are loved by atheists and Christians alike. Not only were they universal, they were timeless.

More recently, C.S. Lewis’s friend (and fellow Christian) Tolkein wrote Lord of the Rings and the story, with distinctly Christian themes, was voted Book of the Century and made into a popular movie with those themes faithfully carried over by a director without a “Christian” agenda. How many purveyors of “Christian Music” can say they’ve influenced the world?

So, what makes these artists and their art different from the trash we get today carrying the label “Christian Music”?

The key word is: “imbue”. These artists created great works because they didn’t set out to prosletize, or to write create only for Christians. Nor did they see the need to censor themselves. They did what they loved and, as the result of who they were, their Chistianity penetrated the whole result.

Some people are trying to make art like this. A friend of mine, Ephrem, has a site whose aim is “to explore a theory of literature informed by the Incarnation”, by creating art. If nothing else, it gives Christians artists a place to express themselves. Perhaps, like Lewis-Tolkein-Williams, they’ll turn out something that stands the tests of universality and timelessness.

Christian pop music, by contrast, is too self-concious, too self-censoring. I won’t say it can never be great, but it continues to stumble over itself.

Slate has the best article ever on not voting.

  Even for the most passionate partisan, it's hard to  argue that voting is a good use of your time.  Instead of waiting in line to vote, you could wait  in line to buy a lottery ticket, hoping to win $100  million and use it to advance your causes—and all  with an almost indescribably greater chance of  success than you'd have in the voting booth.  

(They give equal time to the counter-argument, of course.)

For those who aren’t as hep as me (all two of you) when it comes to tracking what is going on regarding the upcoming election, I offer you Electoral-Vote.com which projects the winner based upon the latest state-by-state polls and the number of electoral votes in each state. The current score there is Kerry 291 to Bush 247. A candidate needs 270 votes to win.

For a different (pro-Bush) bias, see ElectionProjection.com. The score there is Bush 274 to Kerry 264.

Those numbers look eerily similar to the numbers that 2.004k.com posted today (Kerry 264 to Bush 247, 27 Tied). Looks like ElectionProjection is giving all the tied votes to Bush, something that goes against the information we have about elections that involve an incumbent.

And if you aren’t tired yet, check out Electoral College Predictions which runs simulations on the data from 2.004k.com. Based on the simulations, they predict (with 95% confidence) that Kerry squeak out a win.

In a way, it almost makes you glad that the 2000 election was the debacle that it was. Otherwise, who would’ve been motivated to come up with all this data?

Since Dan asked about this, I thought I’d post an update about how I’ve changed my mail-reading habits.

Previously, I was using Gnus for all my mail-reading. Mostly, this worked well. However, some poor implementation decisions (which is the only way I can understand what was happening) in Gnus’ IMAP support meant that moving emails between folders or deleting emails from folders was an extremely slow, tiresome process. Additionally, Gnus doesn’t background the process, so moving an email to the spam folder (so the server-side spamassassin would pick it up) or deleting an email made Emacs unusable for several seconds.

It turns out that, for me, this is only a problem with my INBOX. Mailing lists are sorted server-side (using Mail::ListDetector) and the only time I really need to move something is when spam hits my inbox. That or deleting some automated messages from my server.

The solution was easy: start using Mozilla’s Thunderbird for the INBOX and continue using Gnus for everything else. This way I can quickly deal with the spam and server messages and continue reading the other email and newsgroups in the environment that I’m most comfortable.

A few months ago, I signed up for Powell Books Review-A-Day. I suppose their purpose is to get you to buy more books and, in that, it succeeds. Many of the books have seemed pretty blah, but some reviews have really piqued my interest. Here are the ones I’m interested in so far:

• Holes by Louis Sachar

• The Work of Wolves by Kent Meyers

• Monster of God: The Man-Eating Predator in the Jungles of History and the Mind by David Quammen

• To Err Is Divine by Agota Bozai

• Spice: The History of a Temptation by Jack Turner

• Daily Life in the United States, 1920-1940: How Americans Lived During the Roaring Twenties and the Great Depression by David E Kyvig

• The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki

The two books I’ve already purchased (I’m reading Inside the Victorian Home now) are pretty good, so I feel comfortable trusting the reviews.

Of course, for anything books not recently published, I have to rely on a friend from New Orleans for recommendations. He’s been spot-on in the past. (As an example, he pointed me to Nikolai Berdyaev.)

Instant Messaging provides the right amount of reintermediation for discussing politics with close kin. I first discovered this when I watched the second presidential debate while IMing my half-brother in Indiana. A former paratrooper, he is no fan of Kerry.

Of course, since I have a distinct set of wacky ideas not necessarily common amongst any particular political movement, I have tha ability to provoke exasperated responses from almost anyone no matter what their political leanings. This exasperation is exactly why it is traditionally considered impolite to discuss politics and religion in casual conversation. But its also what makes it fun!

But, as I said, Instant Messaging provides just the right amount of intermediation. When you feel like shouting, you have to type out your thoughts. Shouting doesn’t do much good and ALL CAPS just looks silly. Now, when I exasperate someone, I can ask them to explain what they’re thinking — and then we can figure out why they’re wrong.