Ecuador 1, Argentina 1

In Guayaquil, Argentina had us under control; and then, at the 89th minute, the VAR awarded us a penalty kick. It was blocked, but the taker, Enner Valencia, put in the rebound. I think we are not very good, compared to Argentina.

I looked at Qatar on Google Maps. No two World Cup stadia are separated by more than an hour’s drive, or a thirteen-hour walk.

Example 1.

Example 2.

Here is a stadium built of shipping containers.

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I am so behind on my reading, I’ll have to finish nine books next month to meet my quota. (I begin counting titles each May and conclude the following April.)

I’ve again taken up the Commedia. The end of Purgatory is near. Some passages – e.g., the one with the Siren – are stunningly good; others are tedious; some are kinda weird; and some, like these lines from canto XXI, are shocking:

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

In the days when good Titus, with the aid

of the Almighty King, avenged the wounds

that poured the blood Iscariot betrayed …

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

(Translator: John Ciardi)

Um, which “good” Titus is this? Surely not …

Roman Emperor, A.D. 79–81. In A.D. 70 in the reign of his father Vespasian, Titus besieged and took Jerusalem. Thus, with God’s help, Rome avenged the death (the wounds) of Christ. So Dante, within his inevitable parochialism, chose to take that passage of history. The Jews, one may be sure, found less cause for rejoicing in the goodness of Titus.
[Translator’s note]

Within my own “inevitable parochialism,” I am a little horrified.

Dante is a master, and I’m just a guy. But … my goodness. On the one hand, he’s very careful about the position of the sun over Mt. Purgatory. On the other, he seems very casual with his name-dropping. Sometimes, he saddles a penitent soul with the sins of two historical people with the same name.

My favorite character is the first-century poet Statius, who has a celebrity-crush on Virgil. As Dante tells it, Statius clandestinely converted to Christianity. There is no evidence that he really did so; his role in the poem is to personify Christianity’s appropriation of the best aspects of pagan Rome. Dante is so proud of Rome, he reminds me of a “God and Founding Fathers” evangelical.

I’m woefully ignorant of the history of sola scriptura. I wonder, were the Reformers (non-Italians) driven to it because they were fed up with this sort of thing?

Same old, same old

I don’t care about college basketball anymore, but I do still enjoy the collision of mascots, cultures, and uniform colors in the NCAA Tournament. And so I liked this Yahoo! article from March 22:

“The 16 Most Interesting Potential Final Four Combinations.”

Ah, yes, I thought, reading through the list.

The “brainiac” Final Four.

The “party school” Final Four.

The “all-Catholic” Final Four.

The “‘when’s spring football practice?’” Final Four.

Any of the sixteen combinations would have been good, except the “blue blood” Final Four (Duke, North Carolina, Villanova, Kansas).

Guess which Final Four we’re getting.

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My two cents on the SCOTUS confirmation hearings of Ketanji Brown Jackson.

Senators Blackburn, Cruz, and Graham were in fine form – by which I mean, despicable form.

My right-leaning Facebook friends loved it, though.

Whine, whine, whine.

One wonders: if they don’t want a judge whose position is, Womanhood, as understood in the law, is not something for judges to define outside of the specific context of a court case informed by expert testimony of biologists – which is the long way of saying what I take Jackson’s quick and concise response to mean – what sort of judge could they want? Don’t they realize that Jackson’s response is friendly to conservative views of womanhood, and of the judiciary? Are they too busy scoffing to notice this – or to care?

(Notice, Jackson’s crucial qualifier, in this context, is omitted above.)

I am reading Proverbs, which says harsh things about scoffers and how to talk (or not talk) to them. And on Sunday, I heard a sermon about Luke 20:

One day, as he was teaching the people in the temple and telling the good news, the chief priests and the scribes came with the elders and said to him, “Tell us, by what authority are you doing these things? Who is it who gave you this authority?” He answered them, “I will also ask you a question, and you tell me: Did the baptism of John come from heaven, or was it of human origin?” They discussed it with one another, saying, “If we say, ‘From heaven,’ he will say, ‘Why did you not believe him?’ But if we say, ‘Of human origin,’ all the people will stone us; for they are convinced that John was a prophet.” So they answered that they did not know where it came from. Then Jesus said to them, “Neither will I tell you by what authority I am doing these things.”
[NRSV]

A few points (not exactly the ones from the sermon, but not too different, either):

Jesus tells good news. Still, the religious leaders are determined to challenge him.

When they discuss how to answer Jesus’s question, they don’t consider which answer is true. Instead, they worry about saving face.

So, they don’t really care about finding out the truth.

So, Jesus doesn’t owe them an answer.

Even so, in the following verses, Jesus gives an answer (though he addresses it to the people). He tells the parable of the wicked tenants. This parable implies that his authority is from his Father (God); and that the leaders have no regard for this authority, though they’ve just made a show of asking about it.

Paraguay 3, Ecuador 1

Not our best outing.

Fortunately, the Chileans failed to defeat Brazil (they came up five goals short), and Uruguay defeated Peru (somewhat controversially). These results guaranteed our qualification for this year’s World Cup, with a game to spare.

Uruguay qualified, too.

The really shocking result was in Europe: North Macedonia eliminated Italy, the continental champions.

As of this writing, we are the qualified nation with the second-least World Cup experience. This will be our fourth World Cup. For Qatar, the host nation, it will be the first.

Thirteen of thirty-two places remain unclaimed.

1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 49: Rumble in the Bronx

Don’t be misled by the brevity of this review: Rumble in the Bronx is as impressive as any movie from 1996. And it’s a big ball of cheese.

The dubbing is horrible.

The dialog and story are phoned-in.

The action is set in New York City … with mountains in the background. I thought the movie might have been shot in Hong Kong, but, actually, it was shot in Vancouver.

Even so …

It’s pretty good. Watching Jackie Chan is like watching Lionel Messi in his prime. Apparently, Chan broke a foot or ankle doing one of his stunts, and then he kept on making the movie with a cast on his leg.

Roger Ebert gives the movie three stars out of four, which is about right if one is comparing it with other movies by Jackie Chan. Comparing it with action movies in general, I’d give it five or six stars out of four.

Opening credits: Chan’s jetplane descends upon NYC. Dramatic sunrise (or is it a sunset?); dramatic music.

Chan has come to visit his uncle, a grocer. As they drive through Manhattan, Chan is awed. Is this where your store is, he asks. No, says his uncle. My store is in the Bronx. Cut to the Bronx, which is almost as wild as the city in Escape from L.A. It doesn’t take long before a biker gang threatens Chan.

Here is Love Interest No. 1 (Anita Mui).

Here is Love Interest No. 2 (Françoise Yip).

I must say, the movie’s attitude toward women isn’t radically forward-thinking.

There are lots of scenes with fighting and chasing, of course. In the final chasing scene, a hovercraft destroys about half of Vancouver/the Bronx (how this movie got made for just $7.5 million is beyond me). Chan uses an ancient Chinese technique to defeat the hovercraft. Chan isn’t just a great martial artist and stuntman. His character is an immensely likable human being: kind, polite, forgiving. Most harms, in the end, are healed – the main exception being the guy who gets fed into a woodchipper. (It turns out, Fargo didn’t produce the only dismemberment-by-woodchipper scene of 1996.)

Though it’s a very noisy movie, Daniel and Samuel slept through all of it.

Fantastic beasts

Here is an interesting note about the Ukrainian artist Maria Prymachenko. It says that her themes and artistic style, as well as her country’s circumstances, were similar to those of Pablo Picasso. (Picasso, it turns out, admired Prymachenko.)

Not an outlandish connection; but right now, I’m primed to associate Prymachenko’s art with Blake’s paintings of fantastic beasts.

(As I’ve mentioned here and here, the Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk has explicitly connected her own work with Blake’s.)

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

An update on our infestation:

Jasper has caught and killed three mud-room mice.

Ziva also has been hunting. She caught a mud-room mouse and brought it into the house. It ran away before she got around to killing it, though.

Since then, we haven’t seen any trace of that mouse. It probably didn’t survive long.

Karin found the hole in the mud-room through which the mice have been entering from the yard. We’ll put copper wool over the hole. That should keep them out.

Some reading combining culture and science

One of the funnier book descriptions I’ve come across:

From Cambridge University Press. I like the gratuitious bit about the “long period of stagnation through the Middle Ages.”

Usually, I come upon humanists who pretend to be scientists, or scientists who pretend to be journalists, or scientists who pretend to be humanists of a more grandiose sort (i.e., gurus) … not scientists who adopt this sort of workmanlike – dare I say, paint-by-number – humanistic idiom. “This strangely neglected topic,” writes the historian Lucky Jim in his sad-sack article on medieval shipbuilding; this is an exemplar of the idiom I mean. I don’t imagine that precipitation is a neglected topic, though I can guess why not all of this material was previously gathered into one book.

There are various book series by Reaktion that do the “natural-‘kind’-as-cultural-artifact” thing rather well. This is not exactly the sort of book that Precipitation is. Precipitation is more scientific.

Speaking of offbeat humanistic treatments of the sciences, today I learned that the great documentarian Errol Morris has written a book about Thomas Kuhn, who once threw an ashtray at him. According to Tim Maudlin, the book has considerable merit. (The other book that Maudlin reviews looks good, too.)

Karin is reading and getting a kick out of the first “Bridgerton” book, which is not my cup of trash, though I can respect it. I certainly do admire the titles in that series. “The Duke and I.” “The Viscount Who Loved Me.” “An Offer from a Gentleman.” Etc., etc.

March’s poem

“I yuv pacifiers,” says Samuel, who has long been weaned of them. I caught him pulling a pacifier out of Daniel’s mouth and taking a little “drag” from it.

Lately he’s been reciting: “Dickory dickory dock / The mouse ran up the clock …”; and, especially, “Dickory dickory dare / The pig flew up in the air / The man in brown / Soon brought him down / Dickory dickory dare.” (Wells’s illustration shows a wallpaper pattern of pigs flying WWI planes, as in Porco Rosso.)

Today, Samuel began composing a new poem: “Dickory dickory dickens.” Karin & I extended it: “Someone let loose the chickens / The chickens were sad / Because they were bad / Dickory dickory dickens.”

But none of them is March’s poem. That is a poem of Blake’s, the one made into the hymn “Jerusalem.” Like a pop song, it pleases each person who gives it his own interpretation. Is the poem about industrialization? The C of E? You can mean it however you like, so long as it is about England (or “England”).

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

And did those feet in ancient time,

Walk upon Englands mountains green

And was the holy Lamb of God,

On Englands pleasant pastures seen!

And did the Countenance Divine

Shine forth upon our clouded hills?

And was Jerusalem builded here,

Among these dark Satanic Mills?

Bring me my Bow of burning gold;

Bring me my Arrows of desire:

Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold!

Bring me my Chariot of fire!

I will not cease from Mental Fight,

Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand:

Till we have built Jerusalem

In Englands green & pleasant Land

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

I♥SB

Samuel: “I yuv South Bend.”

The little weirdo. This isn’t something Karin & I say to each other. And how could Samuel love South Bend when he doesn’t even go out of the house?

Maybe he’s been reading my old pastor’s web posts. (My old pastor’s current job is “city engagement pastor” at South Bend City Church.)

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Karin’s dad visits. He tells us that he attended a comic book convention, one county to the east. John Heder of Napoleon Dynamite was there.

Samuel: “I yuv Star Trek.”

Good grief, son.

Karin’s dad is delighted.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Flashback: some weeks ago, at Karin’s dad’s house, I pick up and read a humorous detective novel by Texas Jewboys frontman Kinky Friedman.

Two or three days pass.

A week passes.

All the while, I have the urge to read more Kinky Friedman.

So, I buy More Kinky Friedman, Friedman’s second omnibus. Then I buy his first omnibus. Then I buy his third omnibus (Even More Kinky Friedman).

Back to today:

Samuel gets his hands upon the first omnibus. “Kinky Friedman!” he exclaims, brightly. He sits down with the book. “Chapter 1,” he says. “Chapter 2.” He keeps on paging through the volume. “Chapter 46.” Yes, there are a lot of chapters. They’re short. That’s one reason why I like reading Kinky Friedman. I can get through a chapter or two before Samuel climbs on me and jumps up and down.

Then Samuel goes back to the beginning and counts the chapters again. Then he reaches for a crayon and draws in the book. His drawing is mildly obscene.

On leave; personal limitations; quietism; body-text fonts, pt. 1: Cochin

The weather has turned, dramatically. Temperatures approach the sixties (F).

Karin has been on leave for two weeks:

0.5 weeks in the hospital;

1.5 weeks at home, in front of the TV (all of us, not just Karin), with the occasional visit to the doctor.

We are quite fattened up, due to well-wishers’ generous gifts of food – mainly, pastries and pasta – and our failure to exercise. Daniel, who has been jaundiced, is swallowing more milk now that his tongue-tie is severed.

Samuel loves Daniel. He is, if anything, too affectionate.

I have been reading about Russia’s war with Ukraine; and I’d begun to write about it, when I decided I have nothing of value to say about this distressing event. I daren’t even repeat which pundits’ remarks I’ve found interesting. (This is not meant as a comment on anyone who has been remarking on the war or relaying others’ remarks. It’s just a comment about myself.)

It’d be better if I only talked about what I had for lunch (meat loaf, potato salad, pie), or if I started a new, utterly trivial series of posts. “Body-text Fonts, with Samples from My Own Bookshelves.”

Yes, that’s more my speed. This month’s font is Cochin.

Harlan Coben’s Netflix

I continue to hunt for free books, resolving – ruefully – to borrow more from the Internet Archive. Yes, this will require me to read from a screen. But the books on that website are free.

Maybe I’ll stop carrying four or five volumes to bed with me.

My mother reads from a screen. Today I showed her how to search in the Internet Archive. We quickly found a few cherished books that she hadn’t read in years.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

One guy I won’t be reading onscreen is Harlan Coben. No need: his books are in the library.

And I don’t like them.

Oh, I’ve tried. I’ve been fascinated with Coben, or the idea of Coben, since I read this Atlantic article fifteen years ago.

He was popular then; now, he’s stratospheric. He and Netflix have contracted to turn fourteen of his books into different shows. Fourteen. How does such a thing occur? Netflix has been transposing these stories to England, Poland, France … just about anywhere outside of New Jersey, which is to Coben World what Britain is to Middle Earth.

The good news is, the shows are a hoot. Safe was all right. I liked the family of strivers who, out of sheer social panic, keep a body in their freezer. But the series that hooked me was The Stranger, with its “good kid” teenagers who go on a candy-colored drug trip and cut off an alpaca’s head.

Right now, Karin & I are watching Stay Close. Why are so many scenes set around a huge statue of a skinny, white head – a statue reminiscent of a certain Pink Floyd album cover? Why has this statue been erected in a clearing in the forest? Why do the characters not seem to notice it much? (Who writes this into a crime show?)

Why is the grizzled lead detective saddled with his ex-wife as his investigative partner? How could their boss allow this? And why does the boss look like he’s twelve?

And how does the ex-wife get away with letting her son ride around in the back seat of the police car? (“Childcare issues,” she vaguely explains.)

Why do so many perfectly manicured middle-class marriages have ridiculous secrets? How are the wives and husbands so oblivious to one another’s pasts? Why do these pasts involve things like embezzling and stripping and committing manslaughter?

How do such outlandish tropes get repeated in story after story?

Karin & I get a kick out of all this.

Coben World – the Netflix variety, anyway – is different from any I’ve encountered.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Today, I started to read Babbitt. This year is its centennial.