Missa solemnis

Last Saturday I went to a free performance of Beethoven's Missa solemnis at the Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park. This was maybe a rare opportunity: according to the wiki article this piece is infrequently performed (never mind for free).

The Pritzker Pavilion is open to the air; folks who pay (or who are otherwise lucky) get seats, and the rest sit on the lawn. I'm now pretty sure I prefer my Beethoven listening experiences to involve sitting on a lawn under the sky to sitting in a dark and enclosed auditorium. Picking at the grass is a great outlet for those of us with large amounts of nervous energy. And it's a considerably less hoity-toity atmosphere than the average classical music concert (which also has its drawbacks, like occasionally providing distractions from the music).

It was an especially nice effect when the sun broke through the cloud cover during the Gloria movement. (No God rays came through, though.)

Stuff Christians Like

A blog by a sarcastic Christian.

From the recent post on prosperity:

What Jesus said was true, "the Son of Man has no place to lay his head." That's because, when you're super rich, you can buy this sleep pod where you kind of sleep standing up in a cushion of tangerine-flavored air. So technically speaking, spot on Jesus.

I like.

FYI

Dawn's mom is visiting for three days. We are doing touristy things.

I can't drive 55

Well, I can, but just barely. Our car stalls if you push it much faster.

Anyway, I got my driver's license today. Another step on the path to adulthood!

Scavenging

Exam week just ended, and all the seniors are moving out. A lot of them aren't too good at figuring out how to get rid of all of their stuff, which means that you can collect an awful lot of useful junk just walking up and down alleyways.

For example:

• a small vase
• a stress ball
• a scarf
• a skirt
• a pair of Asics runners in Dawn's size
• hydrogen peroxide
• several spools of thread
• a book from the university library (?)
• like-new hardcover copy of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
• two volumes by Frantz Fanon
• a gift bag
• binder clips
• a pair of gloves
• countless sheets of paper (some ruled, some blank, some used on one side)
• also notebooks (partly used, but not nearly full)
• one of those holders for soap and whatnot you hang off of a shower head
• push pins
• three hole punch
• ruler
• white board marker
• small white board
• package of Razzles labeled "HAPPY BIRTHDAY SHMOO!"
• luggage
• volleyball
• 2 throw cushions
• plastic knives, forks, cups
• 2 pieces of tupperware
• bowl
• 2 full bottles of laundry detergent and other cleaning supplies
• stand-up fan
• box of chicken-flavoured ramen packages
• pizza pan
• oatmeal
• stacking file crate with hanging files
• fancy folder
• sea salt
• bottles: olive oil, white wine vinegar, red wine vinegar, rice vinegar, balsamic vinegar, white vinegar, peppermint schnapps
• cans: chicken with rice soup (3), clear chicken soup, beef barley soup, chicken pot pie soup, chicken tortilla soup, coconut milk, bamboo shoots, chop suey vegetables, chickpeas, hot chili beans, pinto beans, tuna (4), kosher tuna (1), beef tamales (some of these will give me my first exposure to meat in a while--I wonder how that'll go)
• lap top battery (for safe disposal)

That, at least, is what Dawn and I have retrieved thus far. (We plan to have another go at it in the near future.) We're not talking dumpster diving here, since all the dumpsters are overflowing; rather there are piles and piles of garbage-which-should-not-be-garbage external to the dumpsters.

If we'd needed furniture, we would've come back with a lot more stuff (potentially, absolutely everything you need to furnish an apartment). And if some of the piles and piles of clothes we found had been in a different size....

There really ought to be a convenient system in place whereby lazy departing seniors can get rid of all of their useful goods in a useful manner. (There's already a handy dandy website for advertising cheap or free second hand stuff to the university community, but that's apparently not enough.) Dawn and I figure something could be worked out with the Salvation Army or local thrift stores: sending some vans or trucks around at the end of every school year or some such. At any rate, the current system is crazy wasteful.

Plus I'm sure it's a big headache for the garbage collectors and / or the caretakers of some of these buildings. One of the piles of junk covered something like a 10 foot by 10 foot area, and was decorated with a fair bit of broken glass (nearby was an Apple monitor, which I'm sure was in perfect working order).

Sacred Harp

A few weeks ago Dawn and I investigated the sounds of a great many people singing very loudly. It turns out there were dozens of people arranged in this big ole square singing hymns in 4 part harmony. It was the annual Midwest meet-up of this Sacred Harp thingy. We thought it was neat, I looked it up, and it turns out there are weekly "singings" in the area, some just a few blocks away. And today we tried it out.

It was neat. It was also hard. I sang bass, Dawn sang treble, and these are both harmony parts, which can be tricky to pick up. It was easier for me, since I think the bass tends to be easier, and I have some experience reading music, but I still struggled. If this were Sacred Harp Hero, I don't think I would've scored very high.

But we both think we'll stick with it. This Sacred Harp stuff is some good quality Christian music (which can be remarkably hard to find nowadays--but I'll leave those complaints for some other post).

Canada apologizes for residential schools

Today.

Wait, seriously? This wasn't done before? Boo.

(Not that I cared enough to pay attention to that sort of thing, apparently.)

For I was hungry and you gave a shitload of money to these people who talk about supporting this guy who talks about how good it would be if I got fed

So there's this new PAC doing this thing.

A fund-raiser is being held tonight in Washington for a nascent political action committee that is hoping to reach out to Christian communities on behalf of Senator Barack Obama.

Reaching out to Christian communities ain't cheap: "the suggested contribution is $1,000", and I guess that's per person.

The PAC is called "The Matthew 25 Network". As in:

The new group’s name takes its inspiration from the 25th chapter of the gospel of Matthew in which Jesus talks about how he will select people like a shepherd separating sheep from goats, saying, “For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.”

Really? When I look at the list of acts which Jesus demands in that there parable, it seems to me that voting and campaigning are conspicuously absent, never mind holding fundraisers "in which the suggested contribution is $1,000". Now, I grant that I could see someone (assuming they are sufficiently untouched by cynicism) coming to the conclusion that they can best answer the parable of the sheep and the goats by supporting the Obama campaign. After all, the American president has the capacity to affect the well-being of people throughout America, and the rest of the world as well; and one might well hope that Obama as president would use that capacity to especially good effect, perhaps even altering the sorts of economic structures (etc.) which underlie problems of poverty (etc.), in a way that the normal individual cannot hope to do, and whatnot.

On the other hand, someone who is in the habit of participating in $1000 Washington fundraisers isn't someone I'd expect to take the parable of the sheep and the goats seriously. (Classmate Mark has this idea for a great new heresy: anyone who makes and keeps over something like $150K / year is ipso facto on the way to hell.)

This isn't the only biblically branded project to come out in connection with the Obama campaign (e.g.), and I gotta say that this whole thing where you slap religious brands onto political campaigns isn't making me any happier now that it's the Democrats doing it.

Saint Matthew's "Churches"

In the Concluding Unscientific Postscript, pseudonymous author Climacus complains:

Usually people abhor denying that [an eternal happiness] exists; so they include it but, just by including it, show that they do not include it. I do not know whether one should laugh or weep on hearing the enumeration: a good job, a beautiful wife, health, the rank of a councilor of justice - and in addition an eternal happiness, which is the same as assuming that the kingdom of heaven is a kingdom along with all the other kingdoms on earth and that one would look for information about it in a geography book. How strange that simply by talking about a thing a person can show that he is not talking about that thing, because one would think that this could be shown only by not talking about it. (p.391)

Dawn and I recently received some Junkmail from Jesus which provided a perfect illustration of the object of that complaint from some scam called Saint Matthew's "Churches". Click to embiggen the following image, and pay special attention to that blue box.


I especially like how salvation is sandwiched between two different ways of asking God for money.

You may also have noticed reference to a "Church Prayer Rug" and a "Prosperity Cross". I don't have images of those scanned, but I assure you they're just as ludicrous as you might be imagining.

So, that's all pretty funny (in response to Climacus, I guess I'm more inclined to laughing than weeping). Then I found this report, courtesy of the good folks at the Trinity Foundation. According to the graph at the bottom of the page, in 1999 Saint Matthew's "Churches" brought in nearly $30 million, and their income increases every year. Who knows how much they're making nowadays.

Every once in a while, I really feel like kicking someone in the head.

Superman hair

Today Dawn stepped out of the shower and got stabbed in her heel by one of my hairs.

My hairs have jabbed me underneath my fingernails (this is more or less a regular occurrence when I take the clippers to my head), but that's not nearly as impressive as penetrating heel skin.

My hair is a weapon. I've got like Superman hair.

Headline fun

Ahem.

Buffy Ste-Marie and classic Sesame Street

...kick ass.

He's better when he's talking about stuff no one can see

When Plato is good, he's very good. But when he's bad, he's hilarious.

There are a number of moments of the latter sort in the Timaeus. I ran across one of these some time ago, and it remains one of the funniest things I've ever read in philosophy. But there is so much more.

On the order in which a soul gets incarnated in different bodies on earth:

And if a person lived a good life throughout the due course of his time, he would at the end return to his dwelling place in his companion star, to live a life of happiness that agreed with his character. But if he failed in this, he would be born a second time, now as a woman. (42b-c)

On creating the human body:

Copying the revolving shape of the universe, the gods bound the two divine orbits into a ball-shaped body, the part that we now call our head. [...] They intended it to share in all the motions there were to be. To keep the head from rolling around on the ground without any way of getting up over its various high spots and out of the low, they gave it the body as a vehicle to make its way easy. (44d-e)

On why women want to have babies:

A woman's womb or uterus, as it is called, is a living thing within her with a desire for childbearing. Now when this remains unfruitful for an unseasonably long period of time, it is extremely frustrated and travels everywhere up and down her body. It blocks up her respiratory passages, and by not allowing her to breathe it throws her into extreme emergencies, and visits all sorts of other illnesses upon her until finally the woman's desire and the man's love bring them together....(91c-d)

Yay music

We went to a Brit pop concert yesterday. It consisted of a fellow grad student on an electronic drum kit, and one of his friends from back home (that being Britain) on acoustic guitar, playing mostly self-written songs. There were also surprise cameos by the drummer's roommate, who did karaoke-ish vocals for a cover of Springsteen's "Dancing in the dark", and then blew the hell out of a harmonica during the instrumental breaks of the next song.

The venue was an apartment dining room, specially decorated for the occasion with the Union Jack and St. George's Cross, and while it wasn't standing room only, there were way more people than there were chairs. There was only one short set, and the audio equipment left something to be desired (the drums were hooked up to tiny computer speakers), but it was as fun as any concert I've ever been to. This would probably lead me to reflect on the true meaning of music if I were into that sort of thing.

Beezus and the bee

We let our rat Beezus run around the living room for a longish time unsupervised, without knowing it. When Dawn went to stick her back in the cage, she discovered a partially dismembered, barely alive bumblebee on the floor in the middle of the room. It seemed pretty likely that Beezus had tried gnawing on the thing. The bee was missing, among other things, one of its legs, and a good chunk of its butt--where all the hurty bits are. We checked Beezus as best we could, but we couldn't see any indication of a sting, and she seemed to be breathing OK. If anything, she seemed quite pleased with herself. She rarely gets to play the role of the mighty huntress.

Fafblog returns!

Woohoo!

Maybe I will, too.

Card-playing in philosophy

I'm catching up on A Philosophy Job Market Blog posts, and ran across some fun posts about sexism and racism (mainly sexism) in the philosophy biz, and concerns about possible bias in hiring practices (either as a result of, or a reaction to, problems of sexism and racism).

I say "fun", because such discussions yield an opportunity for responses such as:

You know, I am glad to see some comic relief in these threads. You folks pretending to be a bunch of narrow-minded bigots is a laugh riot. It warms my heart to know that my potential colleagues have well-honed senses of humor. Kudos to all of you.

Wow, imagine how fucking scary it would be if you weren't joking. Ha!

Well, I guess us ethnic minorities don't have to worry about having any cry-baby, racist dipshits in our departments. Why? We stole their jobs. Ha ha! See, I can be funny too.

That alone makes it all worthwhile.

The backstory to all of this is that philosophy is basically the whitest, malest part of the university (with the possible exception of physics), which leads to the question of how to fix that situation without screwing over the occasional white male.

Well, I don't have much to say about that, though I will note that wifey is a woman, while I'm a member of an ethnic minority which is well-represented in the student body of philosophy classes in most major universities but not at all represented in the faculty of the vast majority of philosophy departments -- so if you were on a hiring committee wouldn't you just love to get the right to post pictures of this academic couple on your online faculty roster?

Oh, I dearly hope so.

I got some decent time-wasting links from those comment threads. For example, these online tests of implicit bias. I tried a couple, and it turns out, first, that I automatically strongly favour Judaism to other religions. Well, that's pretty weird, seeing as how I'm actually a member of one of those other religions. It also turns out that I automatically strongly favour African Americans to European Americans. This is even weirder, seeing as how I've met precious few African Americans, and I can only think of one or two African Americans that I actually talk to on a semi-regular basis.

One possible explanation I've come up with here is that I am such a thorough misanthrope that my ample interaction with European Americans has led me to hate them a great deal, while my near-total lack of interaction with African Americans means that I haven't learned to hate them quite so much yet.

Another possible explanation is that the results are a load of crap.

But feel free to give those tests a shot. They're kind of fun, and supposedly they are capable of yielding revealing results. (To be fair, I had my 80s rock anthem Pandora station on at the time, which is not the ideal test-taking environment.)

Also linked to was this paper (pdf) on sexism and racism in philosophy. It seemed mostly OK to me, except for the fact that it implicitly treats blacks as the paradigm case of a racial minority, with asians being a more peripheral case. (As for the others, who knows?) For example: "like women, non-Whites are often perceived through schemas that represent them as less rational, more identified with nature and the body, than Whites." Slot in "blacks" for "non-Whites", and you do get a statement that seems to fit a standard stereotype pretty well. Slot in "asians", and you get a bunch of nonsense, at least with respect to asian men. This can easily be seen from American movie with asian dudes as major characters. The asian martial arts master might feel some rage while engaging his nemesis in an epic battle, and the mandarin-like evil asian mastermind might delight in watching the round-eyed barbarian protagonist founder in his inscrutable plans, but for the most part they're going to be pretty passionless, and indeed will be indistinguishable from eunuchs.

Asian women are completely different in this last respect: if the movie has a female asian character, she's probably going to sleep with the white male protagonist at some point in time. But you know she's probably still good at math.

Getting back to the main topic, I think it's probably important to separate issues of sexism from issues of racism. There's no doubt that women in philosophy face problems of sexism. On the other hand, I don't think I've ever suffered from racial bias on the part of any of my profs, and I really couldn't care less that I've never had a philosophy prof who was of the same race as me. I mean, OK, I'm kind of a social retard, so I wouldn't necessarily notice if I was the victim of discrimination, but complaining about it is my prerogative, and I have no complaints.

It would probably be different for me if I were, say, black -- but now it sounds like we might want to make distinctions between racism against one race versus that against another, and wouldn't that be an awkward topic to bring up in a discussion of hiring practices.

I'd caution against using "Clitophon"

Awesome story from Anna in Slacktivist comments:

I think my favorite obscure regional naming trend is one I discovered growing up in the deep South. There is a certain generation of rural farmers (most are in their eighties now) who were named after greek philosophers. When I was young, the farmer who lived down the road from us was Plato Socrates Smith (everyone in the community called him Bubba). Off the top of my head, I can also remember a Democritus Corley (nicknamed Scooter), Xenocrates Oswalt (pronounced 'zeno-krats', nicknamed Junebug), Diogenes Blackman (AKA Rhubarb), and my personal favorite: Thrasymachus Aristophenes Kneece (AKA Bo). I don't know what inspired that particular enclave of farm families to name their children so oddly, but I've always sort of wondered about the story behind those names.

If only thought bubbles showed up in photographs

It's a busy quarter for me, which has this blog near death. But this picture is worth at least 10 blog posts:


The BBC caption for that goes: "On Martin Luther King Day, a US national holiday, President George W Bush took part in a in a special lesson for young children on the importance of the day." But somehow I don't think that quite captures the moment.

The Gay is Thunderdome

Via the BBC, some excerpts from Pope B's 2008 Message for Peace:

...in a healthy family life we experience some of the fundamental elements of peace: justice and love between brothers and sisters, the role of authority expressed by parents, loving concern for the members who are weaker because of youth, sickness or old age, mutual help in the necessities of life, readiness to accept others and, if necessary, to forgive them. For this reason, the family is the first and indispensable teacher of peace.

Well, sure, that sounds marvy. So, what's the punchline?

Consequently, whoever, even unknowingly, circumvents the institution of the family undermines peace in the entire community, national and international, since he weakens what is in effect the primary agency of peace. This point merits special reflection: everything that serves to weaken the family based on the marriage of a man and a woman, everything that directly or indirectly stands in the way of its openness to the responsible acceptance of a new life, everything that obstructs its right to be primarily responsible for the education of its children, constitutes an objective obstacle on the road to peace.

Well, there's something mighty queer about those conclusions.

Perhaps relevant is the context supplied by the BBC, that this "message followed a pro-family rally by hundreds of thousands of Spanish Catholics on Sunday, which he had addressed via a video link." A rally, that is, in response to, among other things, the legalization of gay marriage in Spain.

So. Pope B is thus claiming to take a firm stance against gay marriage on the basis of his concern for peace. If you allow for gay marriage, you weaken heterosexual marriage, and thus undermine peace. Oh, and let's not forget "openness to the responsible acceptance of a new life": this has to do with contraception, of course. So if you use condoms or the pill or have an abortion, you are likewise undermining peace.

Seriously. I'm pretty sure that's the argument.

In drawing the connection between family life and peace, Pope B notes that, "violence, if perpetrated in the family, is seen as particularly intolerable," because then children will grow up learning violence rather than peace. Well, fair enough, sir. But could you maybe explain WTF that has to do with gays and condoms?