Lift Up Your Hearts!

We don't see robins much at all here, but when we do, they are almost always in flocks.  Having grown up with the excitement of one or two robins heralding the arrival of spring, to see a couple of dozen robins suddenly descend on our yard is always a thrill.  If these robins are working their way north, I think they're a bit premature.  But they sure had fun eating the berries off our trees.

The pictures don't do the sight justice (a video would have been better), but you can see them a little better by clicking on the images.

  

This is SO typical of our wonderfully nerdy family that I had to share Jon's birthday cake here.

The Selfless Gene:  Living with God and Darwin, by Charles Foster (Thomas Nelson, Nashville, 2009)

Charles Foster got one thing right:  "The biologists will think that I have oversimplified the biology....Theologians will justifiably moan that I have summarized too brutally some very big and complex ideas."  That's inevitable in a book that purports to bring sense to the evolution/creation debate, and might be forgivable for the extensive footnotes and bibliography, were the book not condescending as well.

Foster cries, "A plague on both your houses!" to young-earth creationists (a category which he unfortunately stretches to include nearly everyone with doubts about some parts of the evolutionary paradigm) and Richard Dawkins-style hyper-Darwinists, then sets forth his own solution to the problem. Unfortunately, his conclusions aren't as obvious or as logical as he would like to believe.  After several chapters that needlessly insult creationists he shifts his aim to the hyper-Darwinists, following that with chapters that must have theologians scratching their heads.  I can't decide if he's brilliant or merely heretical.

Nonetheless, The Selfless Gene is still a book worth reading.  Foster is unafraid to tackle the important and perplexing questions that most people, especially those on the extremes of this debate, would rather ignore.  And he's right that the extremes actually support and reinforce each other, increasing book sales while decreasing understanding.  Whether or not Foster's ideas are right, they are at least thought-provoking, and might break a few mental log jams.

Having made my first New Year's resolution on January 8, it is fitting that I add my second today.

At first glance, resolving to rediscover feasting sounds about as painful as resolving to read more books, but bear with me a moment.

There's a lot of wisdom in the church liturgical year, with its fasts (e.g. Advent and Lent), its feasts (the grandest of which are, of course, Christmas and Easter), and its large swaths of so-called Ordinary Time.  For most of our modern, American society, however, it is Christmas Every Day.  To paraphrase one of my favorite lines from The Incredibles, If every day is special, no day is.  (More)

The Omnivore's Dilemma:  A Natural History of Four Meals, by Michael Pollan (Penguin, New York, 2006)

My limited knowledge of Michael Pollan prior to devouring this book was primarily his mantra for healthy eating:  Eat food.  Not too much.  Mostly plants.  There's a lot of wisdom there — not that I'm very good at following it — but that phrase itself is not found in The Omnivore's Dilemma.  It is the beginning, however, of an excellent Pollan article in the New York Times, Unhappy Meals.

I'll admit I was expecting a diatribe, a full-force blast against agri-business and the factory farm, more along the lines of what we hear from the more strident vegans and animal rights activists.  Pollan, however, is much too skilled as a journalist and writer for that.  If his journeys lead him to both Food Hell and Food Heaven, they also show him that there is no clear, simple, and easy path to salvation when it comes to eating. (More)

A night launch of the space shuttle is always worth waking up for, even if you have to do it two days in a row and put on a coat against the cold.

As usual, we watched the liftoff on television, then walked outside to catch the view as it rose above the horizon in the east.  We were able to see separation of the booster rockets clearly, with a little low-tech optical enhancement.  I gazed in wonder—and with no little sorrow to think that this is the last night launch, and nearly the last launch, period—until Endeavour slipped beneath the northeastern horizon, then returned inside to watch the shuttle's liberation from the external tank.  Here's the view from our front yard.  (Click to enlarge.)

It may not look like much with my little camera, but it's a thrill that never gets old. You can see much more at the NASA main site, and NASA television.

You'd think that being freed from the 9 - 5 routine, Mondays wouldn't bother me.  (What's with 9 - 5 anyway?  When I was employed I never worked that few hours in a day!)  And normally that's true.  This week was another story.

It began when the alarm went off at 4:30...a.m.  That's when I took Porter to the airport for a week out of town on business.  Still, that was only bad in hindsight; normally getting an early start imbues the day with productivity, and I was looking forward to digging right into my many awaiting projects.  I returned home, drove into the garage, walked through the door, entered my office, and turned on my computer.  Which promptly turned itself off.  Further attempts disclosed the unsettling warning, "Fan error." (More)

Sometimes the difference between a useless tool and a helpful one, or a good tool and a great one, is merely a matter of imagination.

I dislike decorative trinkets, and most especially if they must be dusted.  My mother-in-law, however, loved them, and we received many gifts that were more in line with her preferences than mine.  Thus I wasn't entirely pleased when she proudly presented me with a Charleston, South Carolina sweetgrass basket, beautiful as it was.  But inspiration hit, and instead of hanging it as a wall decoration, I put the basket on a desk in our entranceway.  Not only does it look lovely, but in an instant I solved my perennial "where are my keys?" problem!  Because the basket gets continual use, it never needs dusting, and its presence must have saved me, over the years, hours of searching time.  The right tool in the right place. (More)

Is there a word, in any language, for "my daughter's husband's cousin's husband"?  That's what Kevin Michael Johnson is, and I'm proud to claim the family relationship, however distant and awkwardly-phrased.  Kevin is an actor, living in New York City with his lovely singer-songwriter wife, Steph Shaw.  One of his recent triumphs was in the show Wild Black Yonder, which a number of members of our family (but, alas, not I) were privileged to see at "The Kate" in Old Saybrook, Connecticut.

Kevin's latest venture is The Raid, a documentary about the tremendously popular online game, World of Warcraft.  Everything I know about WOW I learned form the Foxtrot comic strip...at least until I watched Kevin's promotional video.  The embedded video below is from YouTube, but the link will take you to a video on the official, more informative site, where you can also get involved in the project if it excites you.  You can also check them out on Facebook.

Mayflower:  A Story of Courage, Community, and War, by Nathaniel Philbrick (Penguin, New York, 2006)

 Whatever your preconceptions are of the Mayflower, its passengers, and the Native Americans whose lives were irrevocably altered by its arrival on their shores, Nathaniel Philbrick will change them.  From the much-sanitized stories many of us older folks learned in elementary school, to the "politically correct" versions that sneer at the Pilgrims and idealize the Indians—forget them all.  They're all partly true, but mostly false, and completely over-simplified.  Both the Pilgrims and the Natives were better, and worse; more innocent, and more Machiavellian; wiser, and more foolish; more skillful, and more inept; than our visions of them.  In short, they were all thoroughly human, and Mayflower's greatest strength lies in its ability to make these humans, European and Native American, as real to us as our next-door neighbors. (More)

Theatre Shoes, by Noel Streatfeild (Dell, New York, 1983)

This wasn't on my reading list at this time, but the combination of (1) hearing a Teaching Company lecture about The Tempest and remembering the part it plays in this book, and (2) a dreary, chilly, rainy day in which the computer, the dryer, and the telephone all suddenly stopped working, led me to feel that what I needed was a bit of curling up by the heater with a blanket, a cup of tea, and an easy-to-read, uplifting book. (More)

Ah, a glass of red wine, bruschetta (made with homemade bread), and a Porter-made salad with spring greens, scallions, artichoke hearts, kalamata olives, and rosemary and sea salt focaccia sticks with sun-dried tomato spread, dressed with a dressing concocted from balsamic vinegar and a marvellous lemon-olive oil from Italy that was a gift from Stephan's parents.

A perfect accompaniment to Shakespeare.

Shakespeare:  The Word and the Action, by Peter Saccio; a Teaching Company lecture

For accessible, serious, high-quality, adult-level educational materials (DVD, tape, mp3 downloads) it's hard to beat The Teaching Company.  Tonight we finished the last lecture of Shakespeare:  The Word and the Action, a course which easily ranks as one of my favorites.

Here are the titles of the 16 lectures:

1. Shakespeare's Wavelengths
2. The Multiple Actions of A Midsummer Night's Dream
3. The Form of Shakespeare's Sonnets
4. Love in Shakespeare's Sonnets
5. Love and Artifice in Love's Labor's Lost and Much Ado About Nothing
6. As You Like It
7. The Battles of Henry VI
8. Richard III and the Renaissance
9. History and Family in Henry IV
10. Action in Hamlet
11. Coriolanus—The Hero Alone
12. Change in Antony and Cleopatra
13. The Plot of Cymbeline
14. Nature and Art in The Winter's Tale
15. Three Kinds of Tempest
16. History and Henry VIII

I find it easy to be intimidated by Shakespeare; despite the efforts of my high school teachers, the glories of the Bard didn't begin to open to me until a few months after my 50^th birthday, when I saw Kenneth Branagh's version of Henry V.

Saccio's lectures aren't this inspiring, I will admit.  But most of the plays he teaches I have never seen nor read, and every single lecture left both of us eager to experience the play, which is no small accomplishment.  I highly recommend this course.

Check out this TED lecture:  Pranav Mistry: The thrilling potential of SixthSense technology, not only for what might be ahead in the world of computing (hint: the line between computing and interacting with the real world is about to get quite blurry) but also for what a brilliant mind can think of when pondering the workings of an ordinary computer mouse.  You are in a taxi on your way to the airport and want to check the status of your flight.  Who needs an iPhone?  Simply look at your boarding pass, and a tiny device attached to your body reads the information and projects back onto the card that your flight is 20 minutes delayed.  Thanks, Janet, for sharing this.

Forget whatever witty and informative post I was going to provide tonight.  Go over to The Occasional CEO and read about the latest and greatest economic forecasting tool:  Just Follow the Bones.