Holy Crap

"On foot, or by the help of transportation..."

So I finally figured out what Royksopp's song "Remind Me" is all about. But hold up. Y'know that Geico commercial? The one with the caveman in the airport, standing on the moving walkway, carrying a tennis bag? Well, there's a song playing in that commercial, and that song is "Remind Me" by Royksopp. The song is a happy sounding one, but it's really a sort of strange, slightly sad song, and I thought it was interesting, so I'm going to talk about it. So the song is about this dude who was in England for a long time. He comes back home, pokes around a bit, and can't really remember why he wanted to come back so much. So, he travels across the city to where his friends live, only to discover that they don't actually live there anymore, a fact which he had forgotten while he was away. It's an interesting sort of lyric, even if it ends up being a bit glum.

This brings me to another point. There's a website called SongMeanings.net, and on this website, song lyrics are published, and users post comments about what they think the song means. Almost all of these comments are complete bull honkery. They start out in this fashion: "This song obviously contains deep meaning about relationships... blahblahblah, reading in metaphors, blahblahblah." They tried to turn "A-Punk" by Vampire Weekend into some sort of complicated love-saga! WTF, mate? Stop this nonsense! But, people on the internet will do what they will. Personally, I like to take songs at face value, as seen above.

You Fail at Latin

The other day, my mother, who works in our church's office, emailed me for some help with a Latin translation. There's a song in Latin being sung on Sunday, and she needed a translation to print in the worship folder. The text was Panis Angelicus:

Panis angelicus
Fit panis hominum;
Dat panis coelicus
Figures terminum;
O res mirabilis!
Manducat Dominum
Pauper, pauper
Servus et humilis.

I found a lot of sloppy translations. As a general rule, I hate English translations of Latin hymns. Oftentimes, liberties will be taken with word mean. For example, a number of translations take "panis angelicus" as "the bread of heaven," when the word for heaven is nowhere to be found in the text. Also, "coelicus" is translated as "heaven," when in reality it means "inhabitants of heaven." Clearly, this text is referring to heavenly beings, not merely heaven as a place. Furthermore, the phrase "dat figures terminum" is translated as "puts an end to symbols," which, for one thing, sounds really awkward. But I think there's some context that is missing. Number one thing I remember from Dr. Heckel's Latin I class: Context is king. "Figures" can also be translated as "forms." Ah, forms! Plato! The allegory of the cave! This is a foundational term in classical philosophy. In this context, Christ is the fulfillment of the prophets, the covenant, and, indeed, all creation. Earthly forms. The one redeeming factor in all of the translations I found is their treatment of "O res mirabilis." Well, thank God for that, I'd have been really worried, otherwise. O wonderful thing! Not too complicated. But now we run into some basic adjective/noun agreement issues. The next three lines are one sentence: "Pauper servus et humilis Dominum manducat." Pauper is the subject, servus and humilis are its modifying adjectives, Dominum is an accusative direct object, manducat is a verb, third person singular. For some ridiculous reason, somebody thought it would be proper to connect the adjectives with Dominum, like so: "The Lord becomes our food, poor, a servant, and humble." Now, although all of those adjectives can be used to describe our lord and saviour, and it might sound good in English, it is very, very bad Latin, given that both the adjectives are nominative, and Dominum is quite obviously accusative. Grrr. The intent of this text is to show that everyone, even the poor and humble, are able to partake of the Lord's body, the bread of angels, at the table. THAT is the wonderful thing mention earlier in the passage! So, after all that, here's my treatment of the passage.

The bread of angels
Becomes the bread of men;
The bread of the children of heaven
Gives an end to [earthly] forms.
O wonderful thing!
The poor man, the poor man,
Humble and servile,
Partakes of the Lord.

Latin nerd, away! *whoosh*

Fallen from the Means of Grace

It's stuff like this that is killing the Church in England and in Europe. Give an inch, and Europe's liberal atheist tendencies will take a mile. The level of importance that the modern Church places upon the sacraments is abysmal. The Lord's table is pushed to the margins of church life, covenant children are barred from partaking, baptism is viewed as a right of passage, rather than the sign and seal of God's grace, and Christian attitudes towards marriage are, on a broad scale, lazy at best. These are not rituals, these are not symbols. These sacraments are physical manifestations of God's power and grace in the lives of believers! Why would we skimp on that? It's ridiculous. The Church MUST strive to cultivate a deep respect the means of grace and take hold of them as her own.

Muir: It's like a swamp, only for English majors.

Blog blog bloggity blog.

The lightbulb in my room burned out last night. Rather than go through the effort of replacing it, I simply ran downstairs and got a candle. I can't decide if that's lazy or not.

For any Mac users reading, there's a really awesome launcher that I downloaded: Quicksilver. If you like being able to search your files, launch apps, or do pretty much anything on your Mac without a single mouse click, then check this out. It takes some getting used to, but it's pretty nifty.

I've bought another album by Say Hi To Your Mom, and I'm enjoying it. I've got three of their albums, and each one has some really great songs. I'll work my way through the entire catalogue, I'm sure. Another sort of interesting band is the Dead Weather. I'm a bit apprehensive about this one, since it's another of Jack White's non-White Stripes bands. There's a female singer this time, which is something new. I sort of wish Jack would step back and let someone else take control, since the Raconteurs has sort of become "Jack White's Other Band." I mean, there are definitely contributions being made from the other members, but it can't be denied that Jack's musical vision takes center stage. Hopefully this new project will shake things up a bit. OR... Radical idea here... the White Stripes could finish that tour they cancelled! GASP.

Time for some R.L. Burnside.

"You know my methods, Watson."

At ease, you worthless sons of mothers.

Well, hullo there, blog-reading public. Tonight, I am smoking my favourite pipe. In it, I have packed some tobacco which I purchased today. It's a Peterson blend called "Sherlock Holmes." I'm actually rather unimpressed. Holmes is probably the most well-known pipe-smoking fictional character, and I'm really not sure why they decided to name this tobacco after him. It smells absolutely wonderful, a really great liquorice sort of smell. But, sadly, the taste does not quite match its olfactory presence. I can tell that there's a lot of Burley in this blend. For one thing, it says so on the tin. But it's also rather bland in the taste department, which usually indicates Burley. Burley is a sort of filler tobacco, it doesn't have much flavour, and is pretty light. That's all well and good, but this blend just isn't doing it for me. It's not bad, I mean, it burns pretty well, and the volume of smoke is nicely consistent, and I'd be lying if I said it didn't smell good, but the taste just isn't anything special. Plus, it's got some bite to it right off the bat, which is a turn-off. Not that I mind a little pinch on the tongue, but I'd prefer to be smoking some punchy Latakia if I'm going to go down that road. If it's going to bite my tongue, I'd rather it have something pretty strong in the taste department to back it up. I won't try to quantify the actual taste, since that's pretty subjective territory. I'll give it a few more smokes and see if it grows on me. At least I've got it packed it my Bulldog, which never fails to produce a good smoke. A good English pipe, the way it should be.

As I mentioned before, I've been writing lesson plans for that church history study. I've gotten the first one finished. It covers the inter-testamental period, the rise of the Roman Empire, and sets the stage for the ministry of Christ. No small undertaking. Darius III, Philip II, Alexander the Great, Pompey, Julius Caesar, Augustus... lots of dates and dead people in this round. Next up is the aftermath following the Ascension and the struggles of the early church, namely the introduction of the Pauline gospel, and the conflict between Peter and Paul over the role of Jewish tradition in the life of the church. Heavy stuff. The early days were rough going. It makes one appreciate aspects of orthodox Christianity that we sometimes take for granted. If Peter and some of the more pharisaic factions within the church had won out, we'd all be eating Kosher hot dogs and celebrating Passover instead of eating ham for our Christmas dinner. Kind of makes you think a little harder about how things got to be the way they are. Everything wasn't spelled out at first, and our fathers had to exercise a great deal of discernment to figure out exactly how the followers of Christ should live, worship, and carry out the Micah Mandate. I'm really looking forward to researching this period in-depth. Wait, I get to do this sort of stuff as a career? Whoa, awesome!

What I Have Been Doing

So, the Summer of Dre drags on. And on. And on. In fact, if there's much more dragging, I'm going to have a very serious rug burn. But no matter. I shall continue in the next paragraph.

Ah, here we are. I'll now discuss some things that I have been up to this summer.

I. Being In Britain. I actually still need to post the transcript of my travel journal. I'll get that up tomorrow.

II. Not Being In Britain. As I expected, upon my return from the Isles, things went back to normal, and the good times ceased to roll, as it were. AND IT GOT REALLY, REALLY HOT. But, it's cool, I began the summer with a bang, and one cannot expect to have such excitement(or 60° weather) on a day-to-day basis. Woooooo.

III. Photography. I've been playing around with my F5 a lot. I really love that camera. Sad thing is, I can't find a photolab that does a really good job. Walgreens and CVS do all right, but their negative scans are at low resolution and cost way too much. Regardless, I'm improving my skills, and I've found a C-41 film that I really like, so it's all good.

IV. Watching Fresh Prince Late At Night With The Lad.

V. Writing. I've been working on some material for a church history study I'll be doing next semester. It's been good so far. I've still got a lot left to do, but I'm off to a good start. I'll probably talk about this more as things progress.

VI. Doing pushups. 100 per day. Wooo.

VI. Sleeping.

VII. Listening To Morrissey. I do this a lot. Whenever I get into my car, I usually pick either Morrissey or Say Hi, so it's a good bet that in the course of a typical day, I've listened to Morrissey at least once. Anyways, I really like Morrissey. Yep. It's good.

VIII. Making Espresso. Apparently, my cappuccinos aren't as terrible as I thought. Meh, who knew?

IX. Cooking Breakfast. I've gotten rather good at eggs. They're tasty, and they've got loads of protein. Yessssss.

X. Not Smoking My Pipe. It's too freaking hot. Unless I want to go outside to smoke at 2 AM. Which I have done. BUT STILL. TOO HOT.

So that's pretty much what I've been doing. The Summer of Dre drags on.

The British need to get out more.

So, apparently the number of British soldiers killed in Afghanistan since 2001 has gotten up to 184. According to the BBC, this makes Afghanistan the bloodiest conflict since the Falklands. 184? In almost nine years? That's a miracle, really. Of course, I understand that no one wants to see their countrymen die in war, but nonetheless, those numbers are on the modest side.

This is unreal.

The last 20 seconds are very sad indeed.

A Well-Respected Man About Town

I've found a most excellent website, The Chap Magazine, one which promote most excellent things, such as quality tailoring, pipe-smoking, and moustache-growing. The protest recounted here has got to be the best thing ever. I'm only sorry that I wasn't there to witness it.

Fallout from the Age of the 10,000 Commandments

Apparently saltires are racist. This is one of those completely ridiculous instances of political correctness. The saltire is the Scottish flag. It's a rather simple symbol, actually, just the cross of St. Andrew backed by a field of blue. But apparently it might be offensive to non-Scots? What? At the National Library of Scotland, no less. Now, I don't think that this is anything to get worked up over, but it is one of those dumb little situations that arises because of the faux egalitarian world that we live in.

"Spring-heeled Jim winks an eye..."