Lift Up Your Hearts!

... He was born on Pi Day!

The Skin Map by Stephen Lawhead (Thomas Nelson, 2009) (audiobook, read by Simon Bubb)

I review books for the publisher, Thomas Nelson.  I've never before reviewed their fiction, because, frankly, it usually doesn't sound all that interesting.  However, this offer made me sit up and take notice, because I've enjoyed Stephen Lawhead's work before.  Add the fact that what was offered was the audiobook version, and I was hooked:  I figured it would be just the thing for my upcoming long flight across the Atlantic.

I was wrong about that part.  Over and over I repeated the pattern:  Listen, doze off, awaken in a different part of the story, doze off, etc.  Not because the story wasn't interesting, but because I needed sleep more than I needed entertainment.

Home again, I started the story anew, and found it a wonderfully inspiring accompaniment to my daily exercise walk.  The prospect of hearing a few more chapters of the book was just the incentive I needed to get out and get going.  Plus, it's really hard to fall asleep while walking.

Lawhead takes the concept of ley lines as his jumping off point (literally) in this tangled adventure of multiple realities.  Or perhaps one reality that is infinitely more complex than we have supposed.  Ley lines were new to me—I was as ignorant as his long-dead great-grandfather found protagonist Kit Livingstone to be.  In The Skin Map, the power of ley lines is discovered to be, not legend, but cold, scientific fact, and a wrong turn one day in London takes Kit from his directionless, boring existence into adventure, danger, and more directions than he fears his mental health—and his stomach—can handle.

Without doubt, it was easy to be caught up in the adventure, and the mystery.  But my favorite parts of the book were its well-researched intersections with everyday life: in modern England, 17th century England, 17th century Prague, Macao during China's Qing dynasty, 18th dynasty Egypt, and more.  My least favorite were the drawn-out descriptions of the physical appearance of every female character encountered, and the even more interminable battle scenes, both of which were obviously included for the more testosterone-laden among us.

Therein lies the weakness, and the strength, of the audio version.  Were I reading, instead of listening, I'd have quickly skimmed over those parts I found dull; instead, I was forced to wait, impatient, through them.  On the other hand, I would probably also have given short shrift to the many highly descriptive scene-setting passages, and this format forced me to listen, to enjoy, and to appreciate a much more vivid picture of each setting than I would have envisioned on my own.  Narrator Simon Bubb also does a fantastic job of bringing the characters to life through their voices, making this audio version an enhancement, rather than merely a slower and more laborious—albeit hands-free—way of reading the book.

On my own personal scale, The Skin Map is not nearly as good as The Lord of the Rings (one of my favorite stories of all time), and a whole lot better than Harry Potter (which I enjoyed, though less and less, I'll admit, after the third book).  It's an interesting concept, a riveting story, and well-written to boot.  True, there were times when I sighed, "Oh, come on, that's not plausible"—but  that tends to happen to me even with nonfiction books.  Astonishingly, for this age, Lawhead manages to craft a complex and engaging tale without ever being offensive, edgy, or over-the-top.  I can't say for certain that there are no "grandchild warnings"—I'm pretty sure "bloody" occurs a few times, not related to battle scenes—but any potentially offensive language is rare, minor, and appropriate to the context.

The book is not short—448 pages in printed form—but the end came long before I was ready.  Really, it seemed the story had just gotten started!  That was when I discovered the sad, and happy, truth:  the book was over, but the story had only begun.  The Skin Map turns out to be the first of what is intended to be a five-book series.  Fortunately, the second is available at the library, and this morning I reserved it.  The third, however, has yet to be published....

The Skin Map is not a movie—though I think it would make a good one—but it has a "trailer" anyway.  Who knew?

I saw this on John Stackhouse's blog, and find it both sad, and amusing, and open to many more applications than Christian denominationalism.  Enjoy!  (Click on the image to enlarge it.)

Osmo Vänskä, music director
Midori, violin

Brahms: Variations on a Theme of Joseph Haydn, op. 56a
Sibelius: Concerto for Violin in D minor, op. 47
Beethoven: Symphony No. 5 in C minor, op. 67

Our Orlando Philharmonic Orchestra season tickets brought us a bonus:  last night's concert by the Minnesota Orchestra, featuring violinist Midori, now forty years old but with a 29-year professional career behind her.  Definitely worth going out on a Friday night for.  What's more, on a weekend when we must lose an hour, we gained a day, a psychological advantage at least as real as whatever people think we gain by fiddling with the clocks.  Since most of our concerts are on Saturday nights, today felt like Sunday—until we realized Sunday was still a day away!

Thanks to my sister, I have three Trader Joe's reusable grocery bags that would just love to be used at an actual Trader Joe's.  And now, at last, Florida has a Trader Joe's store!

But it's in Naples.  Granted, we really enjoyed our visit to that part of the state back in Novemeber, but I'm not one of the "Trader Joe's tourists" who are travelling hundreds of miles to the store.  There's a store opening soon in Sarasota, but that's still too far away.

Nonetheless, I have hope.  Now that the Florida border has been breached, can Orlando be far behind?

I note that the Naples store went in where a Borders bookstore went out.  We're getting a Michael's at our former Borders.  Not that Michael's is a bad idea, but there's already one nearby, and wouldn't it be fantastic to be able to walk to a Trader Joe's?  Oh well, I'll be happy enough for one within a 15-minute drive and not on the far side of town.

We are the Folk Song Army
Everyone of us cares.
We all hate poverty, war and injustice,
Unlike the rest of you squares.
(Tom Lehrer, 1965 or earlier)

With all the publicity given to the Kony 2012 social media campaign, this looks like a good time to bring back Tom Lehrer's wonderful Folk Song Army. (Brief, mild, visual grandchild warning at the very beginning.)

Seriously, there is good reason to worry that this popular campaign will do more harm than good.  As this Guardian article explains,

There is no question that the LRA has been one of the most horrifying armed forces in the past half century. But while the video urges spreading the word, signing a pledge, buying an action kit of Kony 2012 bracelets and posters, and of course donating to [advocacy group] Invisible Children, it's hard to understand how this will aid the current slow chase of Kony and his forces through some of the most intractable terrain in the world.

US military advisers have been helping the Ugandan army track the LRA since October, and Invisible Children wants to keep pressure on the US to maintain or improve that assistance. But as there has not been a whisper of possibly withdrawing this support, raising it as the reason for urgency seems slightly odd.

...

The arc of the video tells you that before, no one cared but, thanks to technology and Invisible Children, everyone can now take the necessary action to earn Kony the infamy and arrest or death he deserves.

But since Invisible Children as an organisation began with a few north Americans stumbling into a conflict they didn't know existed and then resolving to help the child victims by making a movie, the base level of great white saviourdom is already high. Implying that finally now, by getting the word out about Kony via celebrities, bracelets and social media, can the LRA be ended plays into this narrative of white rescuers coming to help poor Africans and totally ignores the efforts, good and bad, by Ugandans to fight the LRA for 25 years. I belong to a discussion group of hundreds of Ugandan journalists, and so far only one has been willing to stand up and say this campaign is a good thing (and mainly because it might help more people find Uganda on a map). Nearly everyone else finds Kony 2012 self-aggrandising, patronising and oversimplified.

Remember the war against Franco,
That's the kind where each of us belongs.
Though he may have won all the battles,
We had all the good songs!

So join in the Folk Song Army,
Guitars are the weapons we bring
To the fight against poverty, war, and injustice.
Ready, aim, sing!

Tired of waiting for Netflix to offer anything beyond the second season of the Duggar family's TV show (they're now on Season Six), I discovered the Duggar Family blog, which despite the name is a fan blog, not run by any of the Duggars themselves.  Apparently with the blessing of host channel TLC, this site has links to all episodes from the first specials through Season Five!

Now this discovery bodes ill for my overflowing inboxes, my piles of files and files of piles, and my endless backlog of past-due work and future projects.  I had to figure out a way to redeem the time, and I did.  Because the videos are hosted on YouTube, each episode is divided into three parts of five to ten minutes each.  Not only does this slice them into manageable portions that can be squeezed into odd bits of time here and there, but it also suggested my new exercise plan:  I only allow myself to watch while exercising.  The anticipation of watching a show gets me started, the distraction of the show keeps me going until the end, and the exercise requirement sets a limit on how much I'll watch in a day.  I'm a very wimpy exerciser.  Some people can watch a whole movie while exercising; I'm doing well to manage eight minutes at at time.

It's a lot more fun to watch the shows guilt free, knowing I'm doing something healthful and productive!

The following headlines were presented as the top three on my Orlando Sentinel news feed this morning:

Transgender woman denied drinks during  ladies night

Florida suspect accused of eating brain due in court

Mom accused of strangling 2-year-old with bra returns to court

The Sentinel is a mainstream, respected newspaper, with several Pulitzer prizes to its credit.  Apparently, supermarket tabloid fare has become the new normal.

I realized yesterday that—until September, anyway—all of our nephews are now teenagers.  And what a fine bunch of young men they are!

Here are the results of my trial of SurveyMonkey, which, by the way, I think is pretty cool and hope to find more uses for.  I have closed the survey, as there has been plenty of time to respond for those who wish to, and I'm starting to get spam.  (That's why one of the comments has been blacked out.)

I considered blacking out the name in the second comment from the bottom, but "Fasnachtschüechli" is as good an identifier.  :)  That's as close, I note, as anyone got to a Fasnacht/Carnival/Mardi Gras festival.  I missed Zurich's by a few days.  (But I did enjoy Fasnachtschüechli!)

Thanks to everyone who participated!

For six weeks in Switzerland I was the official dishwasher, and enjoyed it.  In my appliance hierarchy, a dishwasher ranks below a microwave; chiefly, I'm afraid, because without the latter it's a pain to heat up my cup of tea, which I'm forever leaving somewhere to get cold.  Nonetheless, I am inordinately thrilled by one of the first purchases we made upon my return: a Bosch dishwasher, not the top of the line but not the bottom, either.

Our old dishwasher (GE "Potscrubber 1200") didn't owe us a thing, having served us well for a quarter of a century.  The cost, spread over time and ignoring inflation, was less than $20 per year.

Does anyone expect an appliance to last 25 years anymore?  Believe it or not, the dishwasher was not our oldest appliance, either:  we've had our stove and freezer since 1977!  The freezer is as good as ever, if you don't count the cosmetic angle; the stove is limping somewhat, but all four burners, the oven, and the microwave still function well.  On the positive side, the short life of today's appliances makes one aspect of shopping easier:  if you decide you don't like what you bought, you don't have as much time to wait before getting another chance.

For the most part, I loathe shopping and the decision-making that goes with it.  Thankfully, my wonderful husband did the preliminary research while I was washing dishes overseas, so the remainder of the process was almost painless.  We went with the Bosch on our brother-in-law's recommendation—in his business, he learns a lot about such things—as well as for its German engineering.  That it was made in North Carolina is nice, too.  We bought it from Lowe's and were very pleased with the installer (who is also an amateur luthier, we discovered).  We've had the new machine for four days, and here are a few things I've noticed that are different from our previous dishwasher.

• It's much quieter.  We chose not to get the model with a delayed start option, because this is so quiet there's no need to wait to run it, even if you have company or are watching a movie.
• The cleaning process is much longer.  In this it is much like European clothes washers, which favor low water consumption over quick work.  So far it has not bothered me that it takes over two hours to wash the dishes.  There is an express (30-minute) cycle I can use if necessary.
• The default settings include an "I'm done, come unload me" set of five loud, nagging beeps, which repeat at intervals—I don't know for how long, as I've not yet been able to ignore it past two sets.  There's a way to turn the volume down, or off altogether, which I may resort to, as the beeps sound like an alarm clock, not what I want to hear at midnight when I'm deep in slumber.
• Ta-da!  I've saved the best for last:  The dishes get CLEAN!  For reasons unknown, our old dishwasher never really worked right after we returned from our two years in Boston.  We nursed it along—for years, really—trying one thing and another, with varying success, but finally threw in the towel.  Hence the new dishwasher.  Since the new models are designed to function better if you don't rinse the dishes first, I'm having to change my well-ingrained habit of getting them pretty much clean beforehand.  (To quote the Bosch rep, "It's a dishWASHER; let it do its job.")  We're still testing its limits, and marvelling at the clean dishes.

Here she is, the incredible Ashley Locheed!  On the right is some dude named Englebert Humperdinck.  (Not the composer of Hänsel und Gretel.)  The venue is in Singapore.

Everybody's Normal Till You Get to Know Them by John Ortberg (Zondervan, 2003)

This book started off with two strikes against it, but survived.

First, it was recommended as a “must read” from someone I care about, and coupled with a feeling of time pressure, which in my oddball psyche immediately sets up a cycle of resistance followed by guilt leading to more resistance, etc.  Don’t ask me why, but I’ve been like that as long as I can remember.  It was decades before I discovered that most of the books recommended to me, as a child, by my parents were really good stories.  I was out of school before conceding that some (not all) of the books I was forced by my teachers to read were actually interesting.  And I still haven’t finished Colossians Remixed, which I started in 2005….  Stupid, I know.  It's not that I don't ever take other people's reading recommendations; many of my favorite books I learned about from someone else.  But for whatever reason, obligation + time pressure = irrational barrier.

Second, I realized immediately that it is written in a style I cannot stand, which I call “modern American evangelical pop culture,” though I suspect it’s much more widespread than that.  It’s annoying enough that magazine articles use pull quotes and sidebars, which make sustained reading difficult by distracting from the main text, but I find it inexcusable in book format.  Ditto the dumbed-down writing, and the highly informal style, more appropriate for blogs than for books.

Despite these annoyances, I finished the book and am glad I read it.  The first hurdle was easy to overcome because I was reading a borrowed book with a fixed return deadline.  My breakthrough with the second was a stunning realization that I hope will aid me in appreciating more books written in this (all too common) style. (More)

Today's Stone Soup:

Less on the Scrabble side, more on the Boggle side—when you have meals to fix and children to tend, long games don't work well—but this is my family!  I don't know Words with Friends; can anyone enlighten me?

This survey has no purpose, other than to let me try out SurveyMonkey.

There's supposed to be an embedded survey below. [Update:  there isn't.]  If not, you can (supposedly) participate by clicking on this link:  Take our Lenten Practices Survey now.