I wonder who picked it

It wasn't yet 8 this morning. I needed a few small items and Walmart was close, with an almost-empty parking lot.

The speakers were not playing Christmas music. Yet. Possibly they have some choice what to play on the night shift, and in honor of Black Friday somebody wanted Ballroom Blitz. Or maybe it was coincidence.

Spikes

Spicomellus had quite the dinosaur armor suit, but it never had to face spears or even swords; just teeth and claws and horns. Which admittedly are bad enough.

A youtuber asked if spiked armor (as in the fantasy pictures) was really ever used. Real examples are scarce (pickelhaube spikes were decorative and as of 1915 they were removed in combat to reduce visibility), and usually not obviously useful. Spiked shields could be handy, to snag your opponent's weapon briefly and safely away from you. Snagging your enemy's sword against your arm transfers a lot of momentum to your arm--much nicer to have it skid off smooth armor than catch, and maybe dent your armor and bruise your arm or worse. And fantasy armor spikes get in the way of moving smoothly too. And your friends might have objections.

Remembering with gratitude

Habits of a lifetime are hard to change. I've taken health mostly for granted. As with us all, I've had some bad episodes over the years, including a few that might have turned lethal. But if I wake up and nothing hurts, I tend to forget. Even touching numb areas, or realizing that something doesn't taste right, tends to be filed automatically under "It is what it is," and without taking time to remember what might have been.

And sometimes, with so many resources, one takes time for granted too -- surely there'll be time to add this to the pile of things to read or do. After all, the resources are there. But the clock...

Count your blessings. It'll keep me busy for a while.

Black Friday

so soon after Thanksgiving, demonstrates that we are thankful but not content.

Hiding the key to knowledge

Following up on the thoughts about "explaining away" God's rules, it struck me that sometimes there isn't a really good alternative.

Take, for example, charging interest. Exodus and Deuteronomy forbid charging interest to one of your people, especially the poor.

On the other hand, in purely civil terms it makes good economic sense to allow the charging of rent for the use of your property -- you are deprived of the use of it for a while and ought to be compensated. And experience shows that if you forbid charging any interest, either the supply of loans dries up or people develop workarounds.

What kind of workarounds? Well, you can redefine usury to mean "extortionate charges." After all, Jesus' parable of the talents doesn't condemn earning interest, so maybe only excessive interest is meant, despite the Torah text.

Or you can get picky and say it only applies to insiders, but of outsiders you may exact what you choose. This doesn't seem just.

You can buy a nominal item from the lender for cash and arrange to sell it back later for more money. Legal fiction

You can pay a commission proportional to the amount borrowed that varies with the length of time you need the money. Legal fiction

Distinguish between loans for investment and loans for consumption: the former being activity which should bring a return that the borrower can easily pay the lender from--and therefore not predatory. Splitting hairs, but maybe supportable

And so on. Some of these are Muslim inventions, and some more universal. The point is that an activity which is apparently forbidden sometimes has to happen in some way whether forbidden or not--and not in order to break any other commandments, just to manage ordinary buying and selling. (If you are among those who believe ordinary buying and selling is evil, please remember that attempts to forbid this have been some of the most calamitous experiments in history. Whatever evil you hope to stop that way, starving people is worse.)

Killing people is bad, and murder is forbidden, but sometimes there's war, or self-defense, or just having to kill a fellow villager who has proved dangerous to the community and who won't stay away. I've known some thoroughgoing pacifists, and been very grateful that they were not in charge of anything. But what shall the church say? That war is good? (a lie) Or that because war is bad you must never kill? (not obviously true, and has very bad effects; scripture seems to show an implicit duty to defend) Or that war is bad but the church would exceed its mandate if it told you what to do? (you really don't want the state to be supreme). Or that it is only permissible when God's prophets endorse it? (which are which?)

Or perhaps that killing is bad and you'd better never get comfortable with it, even when it is necessary? And pray that God will understand. (My own view is that although Cortez will have a lot to answer for at the Judgment, he'll at least be able to say that he helped destroy the Aztec empire. However, I'm not God; weight my view accordingly.)

Consider the giving of alms. I know from observation that if I give cash to X, he'll use it to give grief later as a "drunk and disorderly." Do I follow the plain command and give when he asks, or assume some kindness to my neighbors, or perhaps even responsibility for X, and decline or perhaps just give on my terms (e.g. food)? The Didache (first century church document) says "Let your alms sweat in your hands, until you know to whom you should give." That seems to suggest a bit of discernment is advisable, though in context there's no other hint of it--though in any event it expects a generous spirit. (and warns of judgment on beggars who don't need the alms!)

Do I owe more to the immediate request of X for money, or to his wife and the likely (though never entirely certain) result of X's use of the money?

How much of this is muddying the waters? Is it a council of despair to say that sometimes there are no good choices and we will have to answer for whichever of them we choose? That's a dangerous claim, since there almost always are good choices, and we tend to jump at loopholes and excuses. Which makes "sometimes no good choices" an easy way to muddy the waters and hide the key to knowledge.

Music hath charms

When I saw the BBC article on music calming dogs (classical was better), I immediately thought of this: of course. That wouldn't count, though--"Slow tempo (50-60 beats per minute or less), simple compositions with low or no percussive elements are best."

Audiobooks might sound like they'd calm pets, especially with a soothing-voiced narrator, but the theory doesn't hold up in practice. A study Wells co-authored in 2022, which observed the reactions of 60 dogs to either classical music or audiobooks while their owners were briefly absent, found that audiobooks had little to no calming effect. Rather than sit or lie down as they did while listening to the music, most would just stare at the speaker emitting the audiobook recording.

They emphasized that there was a lot of variation, and your mileage with your pet might vary.

A rascal in the house

BBC ran a story suggesting that raccoons were, in trying to use human territory and human trash, at least partly domesticating themselves. I assume that this "self-domestication" wouldn't work quite the same way for prey animals like rats, but they report that urban raccoons have shorter snouts than wild ones, similar to changes in domesticated cats and dogs -- and foxes.

I read Rascal too (no, I haven't been to the museum), and I can imagine some of the issues that might arise with a housepet with curiosity and hands, but trying to breed a tame raccoon sounds like an interesting project. For somebody younger than me.

I wonder what besides tameness you might want to try to breed for.

For that matter, imagine breeding monkeys for tameness. And rather importantly, ability to be housebroken. How long before your indoor pet figured out how to feel his way to opening those cheap combination locks. I assume childproof latches would be a peice of cake.

You may say that I'm a dreamer... but maybe just bats.

Build their tombs

The sermon was on Luke 11's woes this morning. The preacher missed a bet and didn't explain what the lawyers were--expert theologians. I made a mental note to remind him of that for his second sermon.

I'd always found Jesus' comment to be a bit of a non-sequitur: "So you are witnesses and approve the deeds of your fathers; because it was they who killed them and you build their tombs."

Burying the dead was a mitzvah, an act of true kindness (unrepayable), that even the high priest was obligated to do if nobody else was around.

But thinking of the lawyers as professional theologians made it click. Their ancestors didn't care for the prophets' messages, so they killed them. The lawyers made sure to carefully reinterpret the messages to make them harmless--bottle them up. Burying the dead is not the same as building a big tomb to hide them behind. We've seen tombs and mausoleums impressive enough to make us forget who it was supposed to remind us of.

The last woe ties in with this interpretation: "you have taken away the key of knowledge." Obscuring the spirit of the law with details, or an "explanation" of why it doesn't mean what it says seems like a good way to do that. And Jesus called out an example of that elsewhere: something dedicated to God (corban), even if the actual gift was delayed and you still enjoyed beneficial use of it, could not be used to take care of your parents, despite the explicit command.

Of course a more usual take also works to explain the last woe: "the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom" = key of knowledge, and piling up a heap of human rules can obscure the "fear of the Lord."

Applications... It's no trouble at all to find theologians adept at justifying the unjustifiable. Are there hard passages I gloss over? Or at least don't think too much about? Um, yes. I'm guessing that those need more listening, even if my applications don't change.

A little lack of planning

A fire at Liberia pavilion at the COP30 meeting in Brazil may be due to a bit of confusion. Liberia uses both 110 and 220 systems, sometimes in the same building.(*)

The Liberian Pavilion had reportedly been dealing with electrical challenges since the opening of the conference due to a mismatch between the 220 volt wiring used in the pavilion and the 110 volt wiring standard across the broader facility, according to the source.

According to the source, several devices brought in by the Liberian delegation had burned out earlier in the week after being plugged in, prompting them to purchase step-down equipment to manage the voltage difference.

---

(*) Upstairs was 110, downstairs 220, and the exact same style of outlet (American 2-prong) was used in both. When the manager's son innocently loaned the downstairs tenants a replacement microwave, the magic smoke came out and they had to come borrow the use of ours (upstairs).

Early thoughts

from Romans 2

"Judgment" is a bit ambiguous. What's its purpose? Condemnation, or "Houston, we've had a problem"? It's a lot easier to notice a problem and take warning than to evaluate all the details. I have to apply some judgment, enough for my needs and responsibilities (Is that guy likely to prove a threat? Would she be a good teacher?), but more than that may be encroaching on God's turf.

Romans 2:7 and 2:8 both describe people who persevere--clear cut "trying to be good" and "trying to be bad". Judging the lazy is a bit messier. Though there's always Laodicea.

We don't go in a lot for gnostic "special knowledge needed for true salvation" explicitly, but we seem to emphasize classes more than practice. Of course it's easier to get people to show up for most sessions of a class than to scrape together a snow-shoveling crew of the able-bodied (who have to get to work or school too). But "render to each person according to his deeds" suggests that maybe taking class notes isn't quite all that's required.

Judgment for all, for the Jew first and then the Greek. The order seems to reflect who got the explicit revelations from God, and from whom more is expected. If so, Christians, following the revelation of the living Word, seem likely to be first in line now.

Orientation and surgery

Typically if someone touches me I can touch the same spot in the same way without looking.

But when the OT was showing me how to manipulate neck skin to try to mobilize scar tissue and get lymph moving, I found that I had to touch her fingers to find the spot. Something about some nerves gone, and some nerves not running in precisely the same locations, left me a bit offset.

Not serious or life-changing, just an oddity nobody mentioned.

UBC

I wonder what they teach reporters to do

University Baptist Church closed last month, and the Good Samaritan House declined the building. The Daily Egyptian's report, despite the headline, is mostly about the future use of the building, and includes several textual curiousities: "The sanctuary was filled with several emotional congregants", and the pastor is called "John Annabelle" while the sign outside says "John Annable."

I wonder where the plaque with the names of the founding members will end up.

When I was there, by and large professors went to UBC and students (or at least the cool kids) went to a different church. I don't know if that was to avoid the appearance of evil, or if mutual forgiveness might be an issue--or if it was just the fashion of the moment.

Potluck time

A business by any other name

"Killer Mane Salon"

No, Medusa is not on their web page.