The same item

Two different children independently decided to order a replacement for something their grandmother had had when they were young--a modern version of a German face mug.

Can you spot the differences? No, one is not tilted; that's just to keep the illumination roughly comparable.

Should auld acquaintance be forgot?

Short answer: sometimes yes.

About 48 years ago an Illinoisian wrote a science fiction novel and spent a fair bit of effort publicizing it; even wangling an interview on a local radio station. In order to keep his science fiction un-prejudiced by current trends, he hadn't read any science fiction--mostly romances. I did my part for the university sci-fi club and spent the money and read the book, and wrote a review. I kept the copy around for a few years until I decided that emptiness was nicer to have. (A beta-reader told him the book was too long, so he cut out the only chapter with action/exposition. No, I'm not making this up; he said in the interview that's why he cut out a chapter. A reader could figure out where and what was missing.)

I don't know what brought that to mind yesterday, but I checked to see if the book had made any more of a splash. According to google (which is less than stellar for pre-internet things), the answer is no; it was listed among new books, but nobody's review (not even mine) was findable. No loss.

However, his self-publishing firm had put out two more books in 2017, with the same pen name. I read the blurb for one of them, and it is odd enough that I wonder if he read any more sci-fi in the intervening forty years. I'm guessing not.

The press published a bunch of books by somebody else, with titles like "Atomic Spirituality" and "Alien Threat from the Moon." I'll pass on all four of the writers.

Once burnt, twice shy.

Influential people

The local paper had an article today of the "influential people" who died this past year. It was pre-Carter's death, so I added that one in for my count. Of 69 entries, about 3/4 were entertainers (including sports figures here).

I wonder who wrote the headline. "Famous" might fit better than "influential"-- at least I hope it does.

Traditional sightings

At solstice the news had photos of the usual suspects circling the standing stones at Stonehenge and clambering around barrows--dreaming of a wight Christmas?

Letters to Malcom

Chiefly on Prayer, by C.S. Lewis

I've no good excuse for not having read this before. Something about the title seemed off-putting, perhaps--I'm not greatly intrigued by somebody else's correspondance, and reading about prayer can seem as much of an awkward duty as doing it can sometimes be (and Lewis wrote about that in one of the letters).

At any rate, I have corrected that deficiency, and if you haven't, you should. His letters show as much vivid imagery as his work written for publication, and some things he has thought about much more deeply than I.

A still worse thing may happen. Novelty may fix our attention not even on the service but on the celebrant. You know what I mean. Try as one may to exclude it, the question, "What on earth is he up to now?" will intrude. It lays one's devotion waste. There is really some excuse for the man who said, "I wish they'd remember that the charge to Peter was Feed my sheep; not Try experiments on my rats, or even, Teach my performing dogs new tricks."

It isn't hard to find the book.

Carols

A joyful Christmas to all! And if joy isn't the first thing in your thoughts (a friend died yesterday--the doctors were pretty accurate as to how long he had), Jesus has been there too.

Thinking about carols: we all know that Joy to the World isn't a Christmas song, but we sing it then anyway. Some of the old favorites have grammar that confuses children (I was one) thanks in part to fashions for making English poetry work like Latin. But they are fun; they help us celebrate; they help us remember.

I got to thinking--is there a lack in the Christmas carol collection?

In the Christmas story we have John the Baptist, Elizabeth, Mary, Zechariah, Simeon, and Anna, inspired directly by the Holy Spirit.

We have Joseph and the magi, indirectly informed by the Holy Spirit in dreams.

We have Mary and the shepherds, informed by angels sent from God.

I can't think of any Christmas hymns devoted to the Holy Spirit. They all point to Jesus, and perhaps reference the Father. Perhaps that's appropriate, but it seems a little odd.

Fasts and Feasts

A post of AVI's brought to mind this Patheos post about an Orthodox Archbishop:

Visitations by Archbishop Dmitri Royster of the Orthodox Church in America were different, since the faithful in the 14-state Diocese of the South knew that one memorable event would take care of itself. All they had to do was take their leader to a children’s Sunday school class and let him answer questions.

During a 1999 visit to Knoxville, Tenn., the lanky Texan folded down onto a kid-sized chair and faced a circle of pre-school and elementary children. With his long white hair and flowing white beard, he resembled an icon of St. Nicholas — as in St. Nicholas, the monk and 4th century bishop of Myra.

As snacks were served, a child asked if Dmitri liked his donuts plain or with sprinkles. With a straight face, the scholarly archbishop explained that he had theological reasons — based on centuries of church tradition — for preferring donuts with icing and sprinkles.

A parent in the back of the room whispered: “Here we go.” Some of the children giggled, amused at the sight of the bemused bishop holding up a colorful pastry as if he was performing a ritual.

“In Orthodoxy, there are seasons in which we fast from many of the foods we love,” he said. “When we fast, we should fast. But when we feast, we should truly feast and be thankful.” Thus, he reasoned, with a smile, that donuts with sprinkles and icing were “more Orthodox” than plain donuts.

I have not been doing very well with my Advent fast this year, with remarkably little change in my diet--though I'm keeping the carbs low. I've proved somewhat better at the feasts. I think I need both, in rhythm.

Deaths in a happy season

I didn't know anybody at ALCS, but friends did, and friends had children there. One ten-year-old was in the room across the hall from the shooting, another child sat next to the shooter for a class, another had a locker close by and saw her regularly. Another friend might have, had paperwork been handled differently, been in the room that day.

Remember the Holy Innocents. It's not always a "happy" season.

Deuterocanonicals

The New Testament contains a number of references to the Jewish version of the Old Testament which many Protestants endorse: notably Isaiah, Genesis, Deuteronomy, Psalms, Micah, Malachi, and so on. Quite a few of those references are prefixed with "it is written."

Here is a list of quotes and "allusions" in the New Testament to the Old. Some of these are "it is written" references that assume the authority of the passage cited, while others are parallel—and sometimes it's a bit of a stretch.

The New Testament also contains a few obvious references to non-canonical material, for example: "Cretans are always liars", "in Him we live and move and exist", and the difficult one, referring to Enoch's prophecy. The first link is an obvious joke paradox, and the second was quoting their own writers to some pagan Greeks.

The Enoch one is hard – the book of Enoch as we have it is a mess (in my not so humble opinion). Some scholars think at least some of it dates to about 100BC, though parts may be older. The Jews think it contradicts the Torah, and though several early church fathers thought it valid scripture, today only a couple of Ethiopian churches do. I had a little trouble keeping the thread of the book sometimes. It is heavily into judgment – in fact, 1 Enoch 1:1-2 seems to say that it is meant for the last generation before judgment.

FWIW, Jude also quotes from the now-lost Assumption of Moses—so say several early Church Fathers who still had access to the work.

Whether what we have of Enoch is what Jude had (and the Qumran folks) I can't say. Jude's citation seems perfectly innocuous; the confusion comes from his attribution of the quote to "Enoch the 7th from Adam." I'm content, after having read it, to agree with everybody but the Ethiopians and read Enoch no more.

---

At any rate, the obvious question is: Are there citations of the Deuterocanonical books in the New Testament? (The next obvious question is, are those books cited by the early Church Fathers? Yes, they are, but I haven't investigated how significant the citations are. And they approvingly cite books that nobody includes in canon, so the Fathers are not the sturdiest reeds for this sort of evaluation.)

So, I looked around and found a list of alleged references at scripturecatholic.com.

At one point the list says "James 2:23 – it was reckoned to him as righteousness follows 1 Macc. 2:52 – it was reckoned to him as righteousness." I think one could argue that Genesis is older than Maccabees, and refer to Genesis 15:6 instead. There are several such dubious references.

The list also has lots of what look like reasonable parallels. It links Pauls' "sacrifice to demons and not to God" to Baruch 4:7, which is a quite reasonable parallel, though not a "it is written" class of citation.

And there are a lot of sort-of parallels that I'd not really count unless the New Testament author explicitly made the connection for me, as Matthew does.

All in all, I don't see the same sort of obvious connections to the deuterocanonicals that there are to (some of) the rest of the Old Testament. That doesn't rule out canonicity, of course—most of the Old Testament isn't cited either. The New Testament would be much longer if it did that.

If there were such a "it is written" citation to Judith, I'd bet there wouldn't have been any argument about including it.

Human sacrifice

Spencer Klavan reviews a documentary about Lily Phillips, the woman who had sex with 100 men in one day for OnlyFans. I will not be watching the documentary, much less OnlyFans – sometimes curiosity can be an ugly thing, and sometimes dangerous to the soul. I'll take Klavan's observations of the documentary as accurate, and avoid the other for obvious reasons.

No one described the situation more clearly, or more fearsomely, than the anonymous viewer who wrote, “So weird, it's like watching someone commit suicide but they are still alive.”

I gather from what Klavan wrote that Lily's words in the interview were of empowerment—the ideology of antinomian liberation—while her manner spoke of torment. The ideology/religion of limitless emancipation demands some examples: prove you mean what you say about limitless pleasure. Even when your nature rebels against the lies your mind affirms.

In 2024 we are all extremely comfortable talking about “systems” of injustice and oppression, disembodied mechanisms and algorithms with the power to influence and entrap us. What distinguishes these forces from those that older authors called “powers of the air?” Less and less, it would seem. The medievals probably attributed consciousness and intention to these powers in a way we do not. Are we more justified than they were?

His description sounds like a human sacrifice.

Noise

When the defrost fan is running on high and your ears are muffled under a tight wool cap, you might not hear the engine stall as you try to back the still-cold minivan down the driveway. It will seem very strange that you have no acceleration, and that the steering now requires a gorilla to turn. A mild disadvantage of a smooth-running engine...

Rituals

BBC has an article about how rituals help us connect; little things that we do together. The interview doesn't go into how to create them, or if robust ones only arrise spontaneously, and I'm not buying the book right now to find out.

It struck me that there might be a dark side--rituals that disconnect and repel us from each other. Are there rituals in unhappy marriages, or rituals that reinforce solitude?

Some tribal recitations are ritualistic, even though they're not actions, for example the conversational challenge/response that assures your comrades that you're still one of them."

Decades ago we got a year-long subscription to Chocolatier (I think that was the name) magazine. Out of the 12 issues we recall nothing but the recipe for cranberry nut bars, which everybody liked and we've made every year as a Christmas bar since: a spontaneous tradition. In the other direction, early in our marriage we didn't do anything in particular for Advent, but some time ago we decided to make the Advent candle time a tradition, and barring the sometimes illness it has been so ever since: deliberately creating a tradition, with our particular flavor.

Fire in Liberia

"fire engulfed the Capitol Building, the seat of Liberia’s Legislature." Also: "The Liberia National Fire Service and the Liberia National Police responded promptly to the emergency, but their efforts were hampered by limited and outdated firefighting equipment."

Second fire in about a week--first was attributed to an electrical fault, with no major damage. I'm not expert enough to know if a smolder can last a week and flare up again. If you don't have equipment to look for hot spots...

There's blame. Two factions in the House of Representatives claim to be in charge--one group removed Speaker Koffa from his position. Rep Foko is being arrested for questioning, accused of making "incendiary remarks" ("If they want us to burn the session, we will burn it.") Protestors had been out in front the day before, and were dispersed aggressively. You may believe Johnson or not as you please: ""rights as enshrined in our constitution can’t be trampled upon by neither Mr. Boakai, nor his irresponsible homophile police Director Gregory Coleman. The firing of live bullets at unarmed citizens speaks to the undemocratic and tyrannical nature of the Unity Party government and this reminds us of the numerous bloodshed orchestrated and executed by Unity Party over the years,” he said. "

I don't think I'd care to pay them a visit until the dust settles a bit.

Is volume the important part?

I checked several stores for metal tins we could use to pack homemade cookies in. They're pretty scarce, and for a few cents more I could buy tins of cookies, eat the cookies, and reuse the tins.

Work at Home

A discussion at AVI's turned towards Work At Home and its effects.

I don't have statistics or analysis, but I do have some anecdotes and a few thoughts.

Obviously a lot of things just can't be done from home. A computer systems manager may have everything monitored and automated, such that he can keep track of things while traveling, and fix 98% of all problems remotely, but when a disk goes sour somebody has to walk into the server room to replace it. And that's a white-collar job.

I was able to do almost every bit of my job from home. The plus side included saving 90 minutes of my day that would have been commuting, and being available for emergencies. I got more sleep and ate better, and I think I was more focussed as a result. The down side was that I was also available for non-emergencies, which militates against staying "in the zone." I'll get the the "growth" downside in a bit.

I knew another manager, working for a company instead of the University. He could easily do all his work from home, and did. However, others in the same group also could, and didn't--or at least not as well. Since the job involved monitoring a lot of equipment, if somebody slacked off problems didn't get noticed as fast. Not earth-shattering, but it degraded performance.

I heard tales of K-12 students nominally doing "remote learning", who found ways of hacking the system (still images instead of videos, etc) to hide the fact that they weren't paying attention, or indeed sometimes even present at all. You might wonder if they'd have learned much more if they'd been physically present; that's a fair point. Some, though, I'd guess.

Some managers can trust the people they manage, and I'd guess that WorkFromHome works pretty well for them. But if their management philosophy tries to measure everything--not so much.

If what the kids see you doing teaches them about how work works (and how to do it well), then being at home where your kids can see what you do might help them. (Assumes, of course, that they are at home when you are, and that they don't interfere too much.)

WorkFromHome can interfere with growth, though. In person you get a wider understanding of someone's abilities and personality. For the jobs you have right now, the people you have right now may be just fine, but when the job broadens, or somebody retires, or you need a new manager: Zoom/Teams/whatever meetings may not tell you enough to predict who the best person to promote will be.

Meetings for lunch could be revelatory: "I hadn't heard about that; tell me more." Sometimes the topic might be options for problem solving, and another the Packers game.

In a tech field this matters a lot. We've solved problem X, what do we do next? You have quick talks in the hall, or around the table in the CERN cafeteria, to start the seeds long before you know to organize a workshop or symposium. The research projects of the future start with "Did you see this?" in the hall, or "What if?" at the table. That doesn't happen from home.

Our group tried using a Discord feature: turning on the camera so we were as visible at home as we were in our offices at work. Why? At work I could look in the window beside the door and tell if a colleague was concentrating hard, and couldn't be bothered with a question. At home, who knows? Well, in practice that didn't work. Probably the camera and mike were too close and intimate.

Fearful

At prayer meeting this morning, several men worried that some of their adult children were afraid--afraid to drive, afraid of change, afraid to leave home, or other manifestations. (OK, a worry that you'll hurt somebody when you are still objectively bad at driving isn't crazy.)

We agreed that "The world is ending" trope for grabbing clickbait eyeballs didn't help, and likely the "Mankind is a cancer on the globe" trope didn't tend to enspire confidence.

AVI had thoughts a while back about how people who grew up "in" a partly virtual world valued the virtual relationships far more than those of us who mostly didn't.

An obvious extention to that is "virtual adventuring." Do kids get out less than they used to? My sampling is somewhat biased--we live in a lower middle-class area--but some of the younger kids do get out on their bikes a lot, especially when there are more kids at home.

It's hard to know what you're capable of if you don't experiment with doing a few hard things now and then. "Hard" is relative, of course--I was a rather shy kid and "hard" included striking up conversations with new people. Virtual interactions allow some buffering.

I didn't have smart phones (for half my childhood we didn't have any phone) or computers, but I did have books, and spent a substantial amount of time with those, and not as much time socializing/playing with others as other kids did. I suspect that was partly because I was shy, and partly it reinforced the shyness -- not so confident because not so experienced.

Does "virtual life" sap time and experience from "physical life?" It does seem likelier to restrict your circle of acquaintances. I overhear things in buses and bookstores that I don't run into in my "virtual circle"--such as people who honestly believe they will live long enough for their mind to be downloaded into a computer, or people who believe that Trump staged getting shot at (I gather that the woman had never actually tried to hit anything--gun, bow, or just throwing a rock). And then when you do run into people you don't understand, perhaps you fear?

Old writings

C.S. Lewis strongly recommended On the Incarnation of the Word by St. Athanasius. I finally got around to reading it. Yes, read it. It's short and the language is clean--it doesn't need lots of explanatory footnotes. He explains why the Incarnation is fitting and offers proofs for the divinity of Jesus.

I notice that he brings forward among the proofs of his case both the lives of Christians and miracles. I wonder what he'd refer to if he wrote today.

Lewis also recommended Boethius. Cheers for CCEL!

Burnout Prevention and Recovery

A few decades ago I read rec.humor.funny (rec.humor was mostly trash). Some of that is archived at a non-https site (www.netfunny.com/rhf/jokes/93q3/msview.html), so I can't insert a link without blogger throwing a fit, but one post reminded me a bit of grad school.

10. TAKE CARE OF YOUR BODY. Don't skip meals, abuse yourself with rigid diets, disregard your need for sleep, or break the doctor appointments. Take care of yourself nutritionally.

    MICROSOFT VIEW: Your body serves your mind, your mind serves the company. Push the mind and the body will follow. Drink Mountain Dew. (it's free.)

11. DIMINISH WORRY AND ANXIETY. Try to keep superstitious worrying to a minimum--it changes nothing. You'll have a better grip on your situation if you spend less time worrying and more time taking care of your real needs.

    MICROSOFT VIEW: If you're not worrying about work, you must not be very committed to it. We'll find someone who is.