I had intended to write a review of this review about a book the reviewer hasn’t read, but I haven’t read the review.
The American Spectator
I had intended to write a review of Pierre Bayard’s new book, How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read; but with work, the holidays and the quotidian demands of family life, I haven’t been able to read it.
Alas.
The unread books are stacked deep in my house, it is a shame really.
The girls and I are listening to Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days, as read by Jim Dale, by way of Audible.com.
It’s great fun. Lizzie’s concerned that Fogg might actually be the bank robber while T is more confident of the gentleman’s scruples. They agree that Mrs. Aouda is beautiful and Passepartout is funny.
I thought that following the trip along on a map would add to the sense of adventure, sort of a AAA TripTik for literature. Someone must’ve mapped the fictional voyage onto a poster or a downloadable image, right? No dice. As far as I can tell, no one sells a map of Phileas Fogg’s trip around the world. With that, the idea of a map was left behind like Mr. Fogg in Hong Kong when his ship sails for Yokohama without him.
The map, possibly because it is a map, knew about cutting the steamer off at Shanghai and met up with us in Japan, by way of Google’s Booksearch blog and my RSS reader.
Google has Google Earth and Google Maps. Google also has Booksearch which will return results from scanned texts. It only follows that Google could, and eventually would, link the two services and map the locations mentioned in the texts of books.
Google’s Booksearch Blog:
So why not visualize places mentioned in books on a map? Now you can. Our team has begun to animate the static information found in books by organizing a sample of locations from them on an interactive Google Map, with snippets of text from the book, and links to the actual pages where the locations are mentioned.
The Google Booksearch entry for Around the World in Eighty Days:
The booksearch service is already valuable and is enhanced by the addition of maps. The mapping data does not appear to be widely available yet. I checked a few other books, the “Places Mentioned in this Book” section did not appear.
Jim Dale’s rich performance of the Jules Verne adventure classic is a joy and with the single exception of the train conductor in San Francisco, whom Dale voices exactly like Dobby, the house-elf introduced in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, there are no undue flashbacks to Dale’s performances of the magical J.K. Rowling books.
Two word review: Watch this.
Extended review: Watch this as soon as you possibly can. Not “See this”, but “Watch this”, go be an active observer and take this in.
Watch Mary come to believe the angel’s unbelievable annunciation.
Watch Elizabeth confirm the miraculous words of the angel to Mary.
Watch Joseph the righteous man handle his impossible situation.
In an odd way, the film does better at reading between the lines of the Gospels than reading the actual lines of the Gospels. The unwed mother is scorned. Her father is deeply troubled, burdened, and suspects Herod’s soldiers of the worst. Joseph is torn between mercy and decency. Travel is dangerous and difficult. The people are poor. None of that is directly in the New Testament text, yet I think the filmmakers get them essentially right.
On the other hand, scenes such as Mary’s visitation of Elizabeth, are taken straight from scripture, and have been edited ’til they sound more like Hollywood dialogue than divinely inspired words. The words are already written, they should’ve used them all.
In short, neither Saint Matthew nor Saint Luke gets screenplay writing credit.
The virgin Mary’s part in the story doesn’t suit film nearly as well as Joseph’s. Joseph has a deal of filmable work to do to get the couple to Bethlehem keeping them fed, safe and warm along the way. He comes off as the hero. Justly so.
In addition to providing important prophetic context to the Nativity the three Magi are welcomed comic relief. The film would go from terror to burden and from burden back to terror again without coming up for air were it not for these moments of relative levity. It is not Stooge-style slapstick silliness, just relative levity.
Please, Watch this movie. Make it a Christmas tradition.
Bible Films Blog has a thoughtful review plus some other related content on this page.
Here’s another of the two-word reviews that made Inedible Ink as famous as it is, this one for the 2004 film Napoleon Dynamite.
Flippin’ sweet!
Truth be told, I didn’t write a review when I saw Napoleon Dynamite the first time, or the second, or the third. I knew I liked it, but I couldn’t explain why. In Touchstone Magazine Michael E. Bailey tells me why, and he uses Thomas Hobbes’ philosophy, the Apostle Paul and Blanche DuBois to do it.
Touchstone Archives: Napoleon Blown Apart
Michael E. Bailey on the Pauline Aliens of Preston, Idaho
Book review of Speed Reading by Tony Buzan: I dunno, it’s all a blur.
Just kidding, it’s not really a blur, it’s really one of the two or three best books on speed reading I’ve ever read.
The sweet spot: If you’re interested in learning to read faster and comprehend more of what you read. If you’re not going to be put off by the guy on the back cover gesturing to his head with the “this is my brain” fingers. Being a mind-mapping geek would really help too. Go get this book, but don’t pay more than 50 cents plus postage.
Normally, the “this is my brain” gesture is one that marks books to avoid. Similarly, cover art that strives to be, but falls short of, “Salvador Dali-esque” usually marks books worthy of skipping.
About speed reading: reading quickly is easier than reading slowly. If you read slower than 500 words per minute, look into going faster.
How to read faster: Your eyes take in detailed information while they are fixed and focused, not while they are moving. It takes time to move your eyes and refocus. Move your focus point less often and take in more words each time you do. You can do this with a little practice.
Once, I watched the eyes of a friend read two pages of a novel. I counted the number of timed her eyes jerked and resettled. It was a painful thing to watch for around six minutes. Then I borrowed her book and counted the words on those two pages, she had moved her eyes more than once per word.
About speed reading books: They’re all about the same. Their contents contain multiple central similarities. They’re all about like learning to golf from a magazine, it will probably help but you have to go and practice. Also, a good deal of the content of a speed reading book is bound to be sample reading material and comprehension tests. The actual how-to that I didn’t already give you for free should fit into a magazine article.
I’m still giving The Evelyn Wood Seven-Day Speed Reading and Learning Program by Stanley Frank as a gift for folks undertaking new courses of study, not the Buzan book.
This ebook on speed reading is free.
Author Douglas Adams died on May 11th, 2001. Among the losses to literature associated with his untimely death is this: We may never know how many books actually fit into a trilogy. Douglas was up to five, and reports have it that a book making it either six or eight was in the works at the time of his death.
Bits of work on that sixth book to the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Trilogy are said to be included in the posthumously published A Salmon of Doubt.
Book Review of A Salmon of Doubt: If you are a fan of Adams’, by all means buy this. Do not complain to me, though, when despite its having a; front cover, back cover, blurbs, ISBN number, introductions, pages with type set all over them and glued all together along the one edge, the Amazon.com listing and even this supposed book review you discover that it is not a book at all. No, if form were being honest about following function, this would arrive not in a uniformly bound book but in one of those fat accordion files. Stuffed full of newspaper clippings with Douglas’ obituary and multiple remembrances, Douglas’ recent magazine articles clipped out and with ads for a cruise line on the reverse, and a manilla folder entitled “unpublished stuff found on an expedition deep into his Mac” it would be tied closed with brown string.
If you are not yet a Douglas Adams fan, you are missing out on some hilarious science fiction. I’d suggest that you start either with The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy or Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency.
Douglas was devoutly atheist.
Douglas Adams, on religion:
imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, ‘This is an interesting world I find myself in, an interesting hole I find myself in, fits me rather neatly, doesn’t it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!’ This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, it’s still frantically hanging on to the notion that everything’s going to be alright, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on the watch out for.
- Douglas Adams
technorati tags: DouglasAdams, mementomori, salmonofdoubt, hitchhikersguide
A Christian book review, but first, a dirty joke:
A man goes to a psychologist, and they decide to start with a Rorschach test. He’s shown the first picture and sees a man and a woman making love at the beach. In the second, a man and a woman making love in a hottub. The third has a man and a woman making love in a park. In all of the pictures, the man sees a couple making love. After the test, the psychologist looks over her notes and says, “You seem to have a preoccupation with sex.” The man replies, “You’re the one with all the dirty pictures.”
And so it is with the Shroud of Turin. Whether you look at the Shroud of Turin and see the face of the tortured, crucified and risen Lord, or if you see a cunning and deceitful forgery from an oppressive culture of liars, I’d think that either of these says more about you than it does about the length of old linen in question, since what we know with absolute certainty about the Shroud is easily eclipsed by what we presume, what we think, what we feel, what we want to know, and what we want to be true.
To some, the Shroud is the holiest of relics, the burial cloth of Jesus Christ, the cloth container for the Resurrection. To them The Shroud is proof positive of the Incarnation and Resurrection where no proof is necessary.
Here is the text of a 1998 address Pope John Paul II gave at Turin. I get the impression that his personal feelings were that the relic is authentic.
Others are quite ready to put more faith into things like C-14 radiocarbon dating. Some people are more comfortable believing that a 17 year old Leonardo DaVinci invented photography three hundred years before anyone else, made a single historically accurate fourteen foot long front and back photograph of a naked crucified man, and then never made another photograph in his life.
face detail image of the Shroud in negative
Are cynics like the psychiatrist’s patient who sees sex in every inkblot, seeing reasons to doubt because they do doubt? Maybe the good Doctor would tell believers “You seem to have a preoccupation with the Resurrection.” To which I would hope to reply “You’re the one with all the pictures of the crucified Christ!”
image from Identifont, preview of the font called Rorschach
Author Ian Wilson has made a careful study of the Shroud and presents an authenticist’s case in The Blood and The Shroud. Or, rather, he does not present a case for the Shroud being the actual burial cloth which held a particular Jesus Christ during a particular resurrection event. He simply refutes the various assertions which call that an impossibility and leaves the ultimate conclusion in the realm of faith.
What is science to do? It is not as though the rising from the dead of a God-man is something that can be experimentally reproduced by a physicist or medical doctor in a laboratory environment to positively identify the scorched photo-like image. Science can only observe the observable and comprehend the comprehensible. This does tend to lead people towards natural explanations. If the cloth image is in fact the result of a supernatural event like the once-in-history fission reaction that was God-made-man coming back from the dead it is to be expected that a few scientists would propose explanations that fall short.
half-length image of the Shroud in positive
If the Shroud is a hoax, by the way, it is still a marvelous thing to consider.
Wilson does not arrogantly presume authenticity and he is rather respectful towards the better developed of the various “cunning forgery” theories. Much of the text is devoted to explaining how various fakery claims are tenuous with frail supports with an image and artifact this complex.
If a forger wanted to decieve the medieval public, he would not have needed to go to such lengths, less convincing forgeries of many kinds were put over on people. If a hoaxer wanted to portray the body of the crucified Christ, wouldn’t he have put nail-holes in the hands, where the art of the time shows them instead of getting this detail “wrong” by showing them in the wrists?
Would a faker have known to put little metal dumbbells at the tips of the whipcords?
The tone is conversational, never more technical than necessary and always clear. There are 244 pages and nearly 50 pages of illustrated plates.
The Sweet Spot: If you’re curious about the Shroud, if you’re open to thinking about it’s potential history and you’re willing to work through some modestly technical discussions then this book could be a real pleasure for you. You might come away more prepared to believe the story it tells.
I read Wilson’s 1978 book (Amazon.com) back before 1988 radiocarbon dating called it a ‘fraud from the middle ages’. I remember being moved by the story the cloth tells more than I cared for the particulars of the cloth. Be it a hoax, a miracle or something in-between, it still tells the story of a horribly battered and bloodied man, crucified, with something on his head that made his scalp bleed at points.
More:
A recent BBC article on science revisiting the Shroud. There are a few stories there.
The Wikipedia article. (a difficult article for anyone to edit, and a strain on the self-regulation and impartiality of the Wiki community, but not unfairly done, at the moment.)
I’m sitting here getting ready to tell you about this radio station, this eclectic, this different, this unique and downright weird station… I’m finding it difficult to get motivated while they play the most dismally predictable of stuff:
| 2:51 pm - George Thorogood - Who Do You Love- 2:55 pm - Joe Cocker - Delta Lady 2:58 pm - Hannibal and the Head Hunters - Land Of 1000 Dances 3:00 pm - Moody Blues - Ride My See Saw 3:04 pm - Nick Lowe - Cruel To Be Kind 3:08 pm - Cutting Crew - (I Just) Died In Your Arms |
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“My Sharona”, I’m supposed to prop it up while it plays “My Sharona.” This blogging stuff can be hard work.
My blog-neighbor and fellow ari-Zonie Temple Stark noticed this article in the Los Angeles Times:
There is no discipline at KCDX, where the song choices are as chaotic as a schoolyard at recess.
That is because there is no one there to have any discipline, it’s all computers and computers don’t think twice about playing The Monkees and The Moody Blues ‘B’ sides back to back.
His blog post accurately notes that the playlist runs towards the “Whitebread” end of the musical spectrum. There is a decided lack of Jazz, Blues, Funk, Rap and Disco. The playlist has a definite character and people seem to like it that way. If you want to hear jazz, you ‘ll wait a good long time. If you like the selections being played you’ll listen a very long time indeed before you hear a repeat. Some stations advertise that they play “10 in a row” with “less talk”. How would you feel about 10,000 in a row and absolutely no talk?
Temple is a newsman and linked to his day job, the paper (here), where an interview with the Florence, AZ. Chamber of Commerce and a conversation with the station founder included this:
On two occasions, touring rock bands have taken the 25-mile detour off Interstate 10 to come here in hopes of seeing where heaven’s jukebox originates and meeting the people responsible for it. (italics mine)
KCDX is the subject of a Wikipedia article. That article gets right to the point:
The station format is late 1960s to late 1980s album rock; often including cuts that nobody played even then. It is fully automated and has no DJs and does not play any commercial announcements other than its own station identification.
including cuts that nobody played even then. Think of that.
A previous post here was called iPod in the sky. (sung to the tune of The Doors’ ‘Riders in the Sky’)
The playlist has gotten back to eclectic, check it out here: KCDX FM 103.1
Listen to the web stream
More at the Phoenix New Times and the Arizona Daily Star
OK, so it’s not an Oscar.
OK, so it’s not for Oscar.
It’s an Emmy, and it’s for the man behind, er, underneath? the voice of Oscar the Grouch. Caroll Spinney will be awarded a lifetime achievement award for his work on Sesame Street.
He does Big Bird too.
Bird brained - The Boston Globe
Caroll Spinney has played Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch on ”Sesame Street” for 37 years — enough time for Oscar to turn from orange to green, Snuffy to be revealed, and a little red monster named Elmo to achieve world domination. At the Daytime Emmys tomorrow, Spinney will accept a Lifetime Achievement Award.
For a lack of anything interesting: Something Useful:
Gas Prices - MSN Autos
