The Ark and The Dove

Whoa, whoa, whoa...

I just saw the following ad at Toysrus.com (don't ask why I was there, just know it was surely for some very important scholarly research...).

So...any thoughts on this one? Doesn't it seem especially...oh...religious? I don't seem to recall any images of Geoffrey kneeling at a manger for their Christmas ads ("Why lies he in such mean estate, where ox and g'raffe are fe-e-eding").

Where do people think these three king's are going?

Are we supposed to think that Melchior is bringing baby Jesus a Wii?

Also, this might be the first time I've seen a Three Kings Day ad like this at all. Does this represent a larger cultural shift in TRU's target demographic?

After Snow Crash

I just finished reading Neal Stephenson's cyberpunk, dystopian novel Snow Crash.
It treads a precarious line between literary and popular fiction, although it generally ends up more on the literary side (it's hard not to when some of your characters actually speak using in-text citation from Mesopotamian scholars). I'm not really sure how to distill the plot and do it justice, but it's essentially the story of a cyberpunk Renaissance man (computer genius, expert swordsman, and Mafia-employed pizza dude) trying to prevent a computer virus named Snow Crash from destroying what's left of an already nightmarish, post-American world
The story takes some very clever and provocative turns, and I don't feel comfortable pointing them out lest I spoil the book for you (although considering that it's almost 20 years old, I shouldn't feel bad about it). Suffice to say that it makes some very interesting observations regarding how computer programming and linguistic semiotics intersect. It also has some fascinating conspiracy theories about ancient civilization.
This is also where the book set up some red flags that led me to post about it on this blog. For a cyberpunk novel, the text is intriguingly friendly towards theism. One of the main characters, Juanita, is a self-proclaimed Catholic who stands out in contrast to a vastly atheist or at least agnostic (or perhaps just apathetic) hacker culture. This made her a more sympathetic character for me, even though she is a divorcee who hardly seems to put too much stock into the moral aspects of her faith. Unfortunately, we later learn that her Catholicism is really just cafeteria Catholicism. Her research into ancient cultures has led her to see the obvious lies of the Church -- Christ clearly had no physical resurrection and the pope is a man-made institution that was forced upon Christ's earliest followers.
I'm not exactly sure what's left of Catholicism to make her Catholic--I don't recall her voicing any opinions on the Eucharist. It almost starts sounding like a cooler, better written version of a Dan Brown novel. Don't think that Protestantism fairs any better though. In Stephenson's fictional universe, Protestants (Pentecostals in particular) take the wrap for reducing post-American religion to a pre-rational (or post-rational) numbness and zombie-like state.

While I'm not going to complain too much about how he depicts some of the more radical versions of Protestantism, I was a little disappointed that his book had to go after the pope. It seemed like an unnecessary move that didn't really advance the story and really only served to reinforce the kinds of technocrat stereotypes that the novel seemed to be breaking.

It also seemed like a missed opportunity. Here's a spoiler...the novel suggests that it might be possible for the human brain to be infected with a data virus, the same way a computer can. The novel even goes so far as to suggest the possibility that the data could be delivered through as vary means as pictures, sounds, or even radio waves. He calls this a "metavirus" that "infects" a brain and causes the infected person to then reproduce means by which others can be infected. In other words, there might be invisible or hidden means by which signals in the cosmos could trigger thoughts in a human brain. It's a bit like some mutant hybrid between a theory of the Ideological State Apparatus and astrology. While Stephenson's characters argue that that papacy and resurrection were fabrications that were imposed on the Gospels during revision (a very Marxist approach), his characters could have used the allegedly imposed text as evidence of metavirus. After all, one of the strongest biblical defenses of the papacy is when Peter identifies Christ as the Messiah. Christ tells Peter that he did not learn this from any man -- rather, he's been inspired by God. Sounds like a Divinely-generated metavirus to me.

Conspicuous Consumption or Foretaste of Heaven

It's easy to get cynical about the material aspects of Christmas.
How often do you hear people say things like, "It's not about the presents, it's about Jesus."

That's true. I'm not about to debunk that.

But sometimes, I think, people can get goofy about the dangers which presents pose. Some people became nigh afraid of presents, that they will spoil children, that the shiny paper and bows will crowd out the Nativity scene. (Or, in even worse scenarios, there is the ungotten present becomes a distraction through its conspicuous absence among all the things one didn't really want that much.)

This year, though, I was a bit stunned by the sheer generosity that went around at Christmas. Maybe it stemmed from celebrating the first Christmas morning ever with my wife. From finding rare action figures in a bogo two-pack to framing my old Transformers the Movie poster without me even realizing it, from checking off my Amazon reading wishlist to collaborating with my brother-in-law to get an old Gamecube and retro-Zelda collection so I could finish off a twelve-years of unfinished business with Ganondorf in Ocarina in Time--she really outdid herself this year.

And, then, of course, there were presents from parents, and grandparents, and siblings. Gifts, upon gifts, upon gifts seemed as though they just kept pouring in, day after day. I received far more than I needed to this Christmas, and certainly far more than I deserved.

While it would obviously be wrong to become preoccupied with such material concerns, I think even this speaks to the glory of God.

Have you ever had the experience of finding the present that Santa must have forgot to wrap or put under the tree? Sometimes it shows up days after Christmas. My encounter with this was when I was five or so years old and Santa accidentally left a coffee table book on military vehicles in the family hamper. (That might not sound like much of a present for a kid, but you have to remember I grew up in the age of G.I.Joe, when they sold toy M-16s that didn't even have orange caps on the end.) It was a little extra bit of Christmas that came as a delight and a surprise.

Isn't Heaven pretty much going to be the experience of God's overflowing generosity? A superabundant Christmas morning followed by an eternity of finding presents that Santa forgot to leave under the tree?

The Whole Shibang (Sp?)

The American Museum of Natural History has posted a YouTube video of the whole (known) Universe (h/t BBspot.com). The video impressively takes the camera from the tip of the Himalayas, out into space, and, eventually, gives a extra-universal view of the universe itself. What I found particularly striking about the video is how it initially succeeds in making our planet look terribly vast. There's something about the horizon-shot in the opening that gives you a sense of just how puny an individual is to the largeness of the globe...but that grandness is short-lived as the Earth eventually drops out of sight when it is reduced to less than a pixel can represent. As you might expect, the video repeats this experience for the sun, Milky Way galaxy, and whatever it is that is bigger than our galaxy.

What might be even more mind-blowing than the imagery, however, is that the AMNH claims that the 3D graphics are derived from an astronomical databases that houses all the known positions of every known astronomical body in perceivable space. Even when you can't see the objects on the screen, the computer, in theory,"knows" that they are there.

So this gets me thinking, why should a skeptic have a problem with an omniscient God? For that matter, think of all the data that is streaming around the Internet at any one given moment in time. If you take the Internet as a whole and include Wi-Fi technology to boot, then, in a way, man has already taken steps to creating an omniscient and virtually omnipresent entity. The Internet, almost like the Force in Star Wars, is moving all around us, passing through us, binding us together, and binding us with our cars, our iPhones, the rock, the ship...
And the Internet knows a nigh inexhaustive amount of data about the things that it passes through.
It just doesn't have a conscious...so far as we can tell.

If we, meat-computer monkey men, can make something so godlike out of our primitive understanding of physics and math, just imagine how more godlike our creations will be when we (or our creations) know even more.

As we are, one might say that the supercomputer that knows everything about astronomical bodies doesn't quite know it all at once. It isn't necessarily aware of all of these things simultaneously. It assumably has to read code in a linear fashion, bit by bit. It can't even really project the data on the screen all at once. It just looks like all of the images appear simultaneously because it does it so darned fast that our eyes can't see the progression. But computers are getting faster...and I suppose it's just a matter of time before a computer can know and express multiple pieces of data simultaneously (unless they already can, and I'm just behind).

Anyway, my meat computer brain is straying off course, like they tend to do.

My point is that if we can make things that approach godness, then why should godness independent of human creation be so unbelievable?

Why should we doubt God's ability to be a more perfect version of what we are trying to do with our tools? In a way, don't these tools point us back towards God? Aren't we ultimately trying to build God?

We build vehicles in reflection of God's speed (C.S. Lewis has some commentary on this, I believe); we fabricate medicines in reflection of God's healing; we build computers in reflection of God's knowledge; we build governments in reflection of God's wisdom; we build weapons in reflection of God's justice.

It's a fool's task (although certainly a profitable and useful foolery) to try to make God out of base matter (and energy). All of the human constructs above always fall far from the thing they reflect, but perhaps because we can make things that do (in a currently very limited way) what we would expect God to be able to do, we somehow think we have surpassed God or a need for His existence. We take our reflections for the things themselves (Oh, boy, I think I just reinvented Plato...).

But it might also be that even our technological drive is more like our narrative drives than we imagine. Our sciences and humanities might converge in a Hegellian synthesis in this regard.

In "On Fairy Stories," Tolkien suggests that all human myth, narrative, and story taps into our natural desire and even awareness of God. He says that the Gospel is the most perfect, satisfying expression of that desire and awareness...which he claims is a testament to its truth if not historical accuracy. But what if the things we build and the tools we construct derive from that same yearning and awareness? What if they are intertwined?

From one perspective, Daedalus's waxen wings are a tool to escape worldly confinement. From another perspective they transform his son into a virtual angel.

Problems arise, of course, when Icarus forgets that tools themselves can never really surpass nature.

Return of the Ornament

I thought I'd share another scary Christmas ornament that Isabel has.

Part of the horror of this ornament is that it isn't entirely clear what it is supposed to be. Clearly, it has some kind of martial function--it's dressed as a toy soldier. But is it a bear? A mouse? A sloth? Some kind of mutant anomaly forged in the infernal mind of some rogue elf set on overthrowing Santa and his minions?
One of the more disturbing (and sloth-like) features of this creature is that his eyes are set below his nose, leaving . It gives it a kind of creepy, unsettling notion of being just slightly off what you would expect...as if some kind of shape-shifting monster were trying to approximate a friendly, recognizable animal, but just didn't quite take into account the natural proportions of mammals.

It also doesn't help that the thing's body has a tendency to become semi-detached from its head. Occasionally, you'll walk by it and the shoulders will be dangling by a spinal-cord like shaft, half an inch below it's snout.

How I Spent My Snow Day

The following is only a narrative in the loosest sense. There is no story arc, no recurring themes. It is pretty much just loosely connected plot that I've strung together to avoid growing mad from 48 hours trapped in my house. In that regard, it reads a lot like the script to any of the Star Wars prequels. If only I had some computer graphic skills...I could make millions...

To start, Isabel and I stared out the window for about a half hour debating whether or not our immortal souls would be in jeopardy if we did not attend Mass today. The snow out here was pretty bad, and our parking lot was still covered in about an inch of the white stuff despite the best efforts of the plows.
We then considered that even if we could make it out of the parking lot without damaging anyone else's property, we had no idea what the roads would be like between our community and the nearest Church, which is a fifteen-twenty minute drive away.
Ultimately, I think we decided that it must not be reasonably prudent or safe to drive to Church if we could debate the safety and prudence of driving to Church for over a half hour.
This meant that the next hour or so was spent digging our cars out.

I'm discovering that winter in the country is not what Norman Rockwell promised it would be.

From then, it was on to grading exams. Would you believe that my school did not cancel yesterday's exams despite over a foot of snowfall? Madness. If I were tenured, I would wave an angry finger about campus and give steely glares to administrators. As I am not tenured, though, I will merely gripe pseudonymously on the Internet.

At some point, I suppose I ate lunch...but since lunch probably just consisted of several swipes at the Christmas cookies, I'm not positive when that actually occurred.

Then Isabel decided that we could get some really scenic photographs from the top of a nearby hill. What we hadn't anticipated was that our fingers would be too cold to actually manipulate the camera or that we would be too frozen to bother determining any kind of composition. So we hustled back home.
I was a bit envious, though, of the small children who were romping about in the wide open snow-blanketed fields. Growing up in the city, we had just enough lawn for about an hour's worth of snow play before all the stuff was trodden down and slushed-up. Sledding down a five-foot slope to a concrete sidewalk didn't really have makings of Norman Rockwell painting either. Actually, maybe it did.

As the day progressed, I ultimately settled on watching the 1 Henry IV episodes of the BBC series The Age of Kings. The performance was slightly disrupted since I played the episodes in the wrong order (I found it very odd to start the play with Act 3, scene 1, but I at first assumed it was a provocative directorial choice). This is a very old, black and white broadcast of two-hour long versions of the history plays, but the play very well and you barely notice any cuts. Of particular note is the casting of Sean Connery as Hotspur--he does a great job. And it's one of the best versions of the tavern role-play scene between Falstaff and Harry that I've every scene. There was also an uncanny incident when my father called me at precisely the moment that King Henry IV finally confronts his absentee son Prince Harry. You could almost hear that "Cat's in the Cradle" song playing in the background.

A little after this point, Isabel announced that I was no longer allowed out of the man-cave due to present-wrapping...so when Shakespeare concluded, I was reduced to watching "The Revenge of Cobra" G.I.Joe miniseries that was included in a recent purchase I had made.

It's been a while since I've watched the old G.I.Joe cartoon, but I was left with a distinct impression that the writers didn't have much concept of military protocol or procedure. For instance, I had completely forgotten that Shipwreck was literally picked up by the Joe team in a bar. I mean, the guy is wearing a Navy uniform...but he claims to be a mercenary. Did he go a.w.o.l. or something?
And the Cobra villains laugh an awful lot...pretty much at the end of every complete sentence, ha, ha, ha! What's with that? ha, ha, ha! They have a completely overactive sense of irony, ha, ha, ha!
And I had forgotten how gratingly annoying the battlecries are in this show. The Joes and Cobra shout out their respective team names before and after engaging in virtually any physical activity whatsoever. It begins to sound as compulsive and neurotic as the Smurfs using their racial epithet as an adjective, or Snarf using his name as a nervous tic (or are we to assume he was named Snarf because of the tic, like Gollum being named for his gutteral coughs?).

Dinner with Isabel consisted of stir fry and spring rolls. She did most of the cooking tonight. I supplied witty banter. It is, after all, the best of seasonings.

From thence, I banished my wife from the man cave so I could commence with the wrapping of her presents (shhhh...don't tell her). This never goes well. It is unfortunate, because she is very adept at gift arrangement and packaging (one might say she puts the "present" in presentation). I, however, am the opposite. Presents from me come encased in varying thicknesses of creases and tape. This year, I experimented with the bow. Really, it's more like I experimented on the bow...because none of the mutant creatures generated by my efforts resemble anything like the attractive loops and curls one might expect in a Norman Rockwell painting...but, then again, maybe they do.

Crunch Time

With the Nativity less than a week away, John Lennon's obnoxious, self-righteous "So this is Christmas" takes on a profundity that it doesn't deserve.

Indeed, I feel as though I've squandered yet another Advent. My Advent devotions have been rendered fairly ineffective ever since I moved up here. I didn't quite realize how much my faith life was dependent on living a five minute walk away from a daily Mass...

Not that the last few week's have been completely uneventful, though.

There have been plenty of exams and papers to keep me busy in between jaunts to the mall looking for presents (although I was far more successful filling my own stocking than anyone else's).

We've calloused our hands on Christmas cards (you should be getting yours soon), and gorged ourselves on Christmas cookies (Isabel went into a baking frenzy last Sunday).

I've also gorged myself on Netflix--why I didn't subscribe to this last year when I was living alone is beyond me. I've watched more DVDs in the last month than I think I've watched in the whole year prior.

And after 19 years, Isabel finally managed to beat Super Mario Bros., albeit with a little assistance from emulation save state features. We figured out how to hook my old laptop up to our new TV and have been reliving 1987 for the last week or so--let me add that Tengen's Tetris by far outstripped the NES version for playability, fun, and charm.

So, like I said, it has been an eventful Advent...just not a very meaningful one.

Just When You Thought Christmas Was Safe...

It's the return of SCARY UFO ALIEN SANTA!!!!!!!

This is, by far, one of the most terrifying Christmas tree decorations I have ever seen...and my wife has just brought it into my house.

I'm not sure precisely what makes it so creepy. It might be the eyes looking knowingly askance...perhaps its the beard sans mustache...or maybe it's that he is traveling through space and time in his strange Christmas orb.

In any event, it's giving me a major case of sugar plum heebie-jeebies.

My How the Tables Have Turned...

I just read that Natalie Portman is slated to star in Pride & Prejudice & Zombies.

Not only is this geeky news, but I wonder what it says about her career.

Consider that Keira Knightley once played Natalie Portman's double in Phantom Menace. In other words, Knightley was something of a poor man's Natalie Portman. But then Knightley was cast as Elizabeth Bennet in the last major adaptation of P&P while doing pirate movies that were far more sophisticated (and at time entertaining) than any Star Wars movie Portman was in.

Knightley plays Elizabeth in the sophisticated, real version of Austen...Portman plays Bennet in the mostly brainless, fake version of Austen. Portman is now the poor man's Keira Knightley. Who'd a thunk it?

Has the Education Degree Outlived its Usefulness?

Foxnews.com reports on a University of Minnesota program that

may require all education students at the school to understand and accept that they are either privileged or oppressed and that they be well-versed in issues like "white privilege," "institutional racism” and the "myth of meritocracy in the United States."

Hey, you know what might be an even better idea? Train future teachers in how to teach basic writing and math skills.

This sounds like the classic case of some rogue faculty members in education trying desperately to secure their jobs by hijacking the curriculum and refashioning it in their own bigoted image. Any time there is an "office of" or "director of" anything in higher education, the people who occupy that space are going to feel more compelled to make a splash in order to keep the attention of the higher-ups (and therefore stay a priority in terms of funding). In the end, though, all of these outlandish, pet-project pipedreams by minimus administrators obfuscate the actual goals of higher education.

Disadvantaged students are not going to become advantaged by feeling victimized, and they aren't going to be better served by their "privileged" teachers by making the teachers feel guilty. They will be best served by learning to use a precise and wide vocabulary, to form syntactically clear sentences, and to perform at levels that surpass their lazier counterparts. Anything short of that merely dooms these students to remain in a subculture that rewards them for professional incompetence.