Veronika of Austria; Bible reading; time capsules

Cows are smarter than people think, according to the BBC.

Despite about 10,000 years of humans living alongside cattle, this is the first time scientists have documented a cow using a tool.

The researchers say their discovery shows that cows are smarter than we think and that other cows could develop similar skills, given the chance.

I’m too tired to work out the details, but I suspect that trouble lurks here for Hume’s account of testimonial knowledge.

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Bible reading report. I’m caught up reading Acts, but I’m three or four chapters behind in each of Genesis, Nehemiah, and Matthew. It’s not as dire as it sounds. Acts is by far the most thoroughly annotated of these books. The notes discuss every historical character (there’s a surprising amount of information about Sergius Paulus), every city that Paul visits, logistical reasons for travelers’ detours and delays, etc.

How, exactly, were worms involved in Herod Agrippa’s death? The possibilities are spelled out. (Bonus tidbit: the guy used to party with Caligula.)

Fascinating but long.

If I don’t begin reading before Abel wakes in the morning, I don’t finish by the end of the day.

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Less demanding is my re-reading of Jay Bennett’s Deathman, Do Not Follow Me (1968). I read it in 1995, when I was 13 or 14. It seemed dated then. But now more years have gone since I first read it than between that reading and when it was first published. And the book feels, if anything, more fresh.

I had a similar feeling the other day, showing Steve McQueen’s Bullitt, also from 1968, to my family. That movie used to seem antediluvian. Now, its hospitals and airports remind me of my childhood; they look how hospitals and airports should look.

January’s poem

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

Indiana, our Indiana

Indiana, we’re all for you

We will fight for

The cream and crimson

For the glory

Of old IU

Never daunted, we cannot falter

In the battle, we’re tried and true

Indiana, our Indiana

Indiana, we’re all for you

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

Lyrics by Russell P. Harker. Tune based on Karl King’s “Viking March” – circus music.

Adrian Mole: The cappuccino years

At 10:00pm not-quite-four-year-old Daniel runs through the house like a madman, or a young cat. So he does most nights.

So Samuel used to do. But now he must rise for Kindergarten, and has conditioned himself to retire before eight o’clock.

Abel, at thirteen months, sleeps last. He has taken a turn toward ultraviolence.

Adrian Mole is in his fifth book. He is thirty years old. He has two sons. One of them, he recognizes as his son. The reader recognizes them both. Adrian isn’t the most self-aware diarist.

It’s the 1990s. Blair is the new Prime Minister. Adrian works as an offal chef at Hoi Polloi, a Tory restaurant. In his spare time he scripts an unsold radio serial, The Windsors, about the Royal Family. Princess Diana’s death scuttles Adrian’s plot. Adrian’s own life seems plotless, notwithstanding his acquisition of sons.

His parents also are chronic failures – after a livelier fashion (even what with Adrian’s father’s depression). The most impressive figure in this book is Adrian’s mother, who unexpectedly succeeds as a ghostwriter, spinkling pages with unsolicited references to Germaine Greer (author of The Female Eunuch).

“Philistines” always succeed where Adrian fails.

Adrian considers writing his vocation. Thus he wastes time agonizing over semicolons.

Pity. He is eloquent.

I sometimes wish I lived in pre-feminist times when if a man washed a teaspoon he was regarded as “a big Jessie.” It must have been great when women did all the work, and men just lolled about reading the paper.

I asked my father about those days when we were preparing the Brussels sprouts, the carrots and the potatoes, etc., etc. His eyes took on a faraway misty look. “It was a golden age,” he said, almost choking with emotion. “I’m only sorry that you never lived to see it as an adult man. I’d come home from work, my dinner would be on the table, my shirts ironed, my socks in balls. I didn’t know how to turn the stove on, let alone cook on the bleeding thing.” His eyes then narrowed, his voice became a hiss as he said, “That bloody Germaine Greer ruined my life. Your mother was never the same after reading that bleeding book.”

Bear in mind that Adrian is on the liberal end of the political spectrum.

I reflected on his feelings as I chopped vegetables for our “hobo’s stew.”

Bible reading

The bible I’m reading this year is the Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible.

It’s available in these translations: NKJV, NIV, and – less easily obtained – NRSV.

I’m reading the NKJV because I’ve read NIV and NRSV bibles in recent years.

I’m trying to read all the notes. I’ve never done this with any bible.

There are a lot of notes. They’re interesting, but they don’t aim to redirect one’s life or improve one’s soul – except perhaps gradually and cumulatively, by shining tiny light-beams upon thousands of details of the divine portrait.

One reads about, e.g., ziggurats because the Babel tower probably was a ziggurat. One learns why ziggurats were built, how they differed from Egyptian pyramids, etc. Does this change one’s life? No. Does it change one’s understanding of the Babel story? Up to a point, yes: it turns out that the builders weren’t trying to climb up to the heavens but coaxing heaven-dwellers down to earth. (Other ancient sources tell us that this is what ziggurats were for, and this information is summarized in the notes.)

One learns how radical the Abrahamic covenant was. Abraham’s society assumed that gods were to be manipulated, not covenanted with. What is more, gods – at least, the ones whose favor people typically sought – were associated with particular groups and places. It was believed that their powers were limited to their localities. But Abraham’s God told him to leave his family and its lands and to trust Him in a new place, among strangers. God asked Abraham not to try to establish himself in his own people’s memory. And that was radical because remembrance of the dead was thought to sustain the dead in the next life (as in the Disney movie Coco) (this last comparison is not in the notes).

This bible is bulky. I can’t read it with Abel in my lap – a significant limitation, since Abel rests in my lap much of the day.

It takes a long time to read each day’s passages and notes.

Frankly, I’m struggling to follow the schedule. But I think it’ll be very rewarding if I do so.

Body-text fonts, pt. 47: Agmena

The group has been reading Being Mortal: Medicine and What Happens in the End – hardly the last word on dying, but a good starting-point for preparing for one’s own death and thinking how to help those whose turn it is to die.

The best thing about reading this book – and I mean this as a sincere compliment, not in any backhanded way – was that it prompted me to finally read “The Death of Ivan Ilych.”

It, it, it … the passage is like that horror flick – that great mortality parable – It Follows.

The typeface sampled above is Jovica Veljovič’s Agmena. Tolstoy’s story serves as the epilogue of the anthology Leading Lives that Matter.

R.I.P. Keith and Stu

… missionaries to Ecuador (and other countries) who died within days of each other. Fixtures of my early life. Good men. Heroes, arguably. Keith gave his wife, Ruth Ann, a kidney. He died of complications from the surgery. Stu’s death was brought on by lung trouble resulting from Vietnam War wounds. He climbed mountains and ran marathons, but, over time, his injuries took their toll.

Stu and his wife, Bev, managed my dorm during two of my boarding-school years. They were kind. Stu used to take me jogging, and he helped me to get the hang of algebra. We’d talk about his reading: Dante, Cervantes, Hugo, Tolstoy, Pasternak, Herman Wouk, Bodie and Brock Thoene. I got him to read Kenneth Grahame and Jerome K. Jerome.

I remarked to someone, the other day, that my favorite missionaries were from Canada and the Midwest – especially, Minnesota. Keith was from Ontario, and Stu was from the Gopher/​North Star State.

R.I.P. “Minnie”

… a.k.a. Cinnamon Sprinkle, a.k.a. Cinnamon Sparkle: Cornell’s beloved miniature horse, who arrived on campus the year I moved away. (See, also, this earlier piece.)

Now that’s the kind of alumni reporting I’d like more of.

Had I known Minnie was at Cornell, I would have taken Karin to see her when we traveled to campus for my PhD defense.

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Happy New Year. Today, the USA attacked Venezuela and captured its head of state.

All day long, I worried about geopolitics, not least about soccer.

What will FIFA do about the World Cup? It would be consistent to ban the USA, since Russia is banned for attacking Ukraine.

If only.

What will CONMEBOL do about the Copa América? The USA is a hosting candidate but has just attacked a CONMEBOL member.

I went on Facebook to see what my “friends” are saying about the attack.

The Ecuadorian church leaders are silent. I don’t object to that. Not everything needs to be discussed.

Other Ecuadorians are making jokes about Venezuelans. Many Venezuelan refugees live in Ecuador. The jokes hint that now is the time for Venezuelans to return en masse.

(A Venezuelan says goodbye to her Ecuadorian sugar daddy.)

My U.S. “friends” who used to live in Ecuador are debating whether the coup is a canny U.S. foreign policy move; whether it’s good for Venezuela; whether Venezuelans, in preponderant numbers, support it; whether Maduro was entitled to rule; and whether “individualism” is better than “collectivism.”

I’ve seen none of these “friends,” none of them, say anything like this:

The geopolitical order is an order of sovereign states. An order of sovereign states forbids particular states from unilaterally attacking other states and deposing their leaders, even bad leaders.

It’s amazing how this simple norm, so dear to Latin Americans – including Venezuelans (even, I daresay, opponents of Maduro) – appears not to figure in ex-missionaries’ thinking.

What were they doing in Ecuador, all those years?

Not reading the room, it would seem.