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.

Body-text fonts, pt. 22: Caslon no. 540

“Colorado Supreme Court Disqualifies Trump from State’s 2024 Ballot.”

Another in a long list of amazing yet ho-hum headlines about Donald Trump.

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Congrats, again, to Alexander Domínguez for carrying Liga de Quito to a championship – this time, in the domestic league. He stopped two spot kicks in Liga’s shootout victory over Independiente del Valle.

The prodigy Kendry Páez scored IDV’s goal.

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At least four parties to go, and I’m already Christmas-partied out. The partying hasn’t been bad, but the gorging has been. For the first time in years, I’m repulsed by the prospect of eating cookies and potato chips.

Come to think of it, I ate cookies and potato chips today. At home.

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There are thinner and fatter Caslons; of the fatties, my favorite is Caslon no. 540.

The italics are … dramatic. Good for occasional emphasis; bad in bibliographies.

The dubiously named QualiType Caslan is a serviceably priced (i.e. free) imitation of this typeface.

February’s poems

More of Iona Opie’s and Rosemary Wells’s Mother Goose.

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

Oh, the brave old duke of York,

He had ten thousand men;

He marched them up to the top of the hill,

and he marched them down again.

And when they were up, they were up,

And when they were down, they were down,

And when they were only halfway up,

They were neither up nor down.

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

From Wibbleton to Wobbleton is fifteen miles,

From Wobbleton to Wibbleton is fifteen miles,

From Wibbleton to Wobbleton, from Wobbleton to Wibbleton,

From Wibbleton to Wobbleton is fifteen miles.

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

If these two poems are about “relations of ideas,” this one is about “knowledge by acquaintance”:

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

Whose little pigs are these, these, these?

Whose little pigs are these?

They are Roger the Cook’s,

I know by their looks –

I found them among my peas.

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

Or perhaps the speaker is not identifying which pigs they are, so much as deciding what will become of them.

Now, a more famous poem:

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

Baa, baa, black sheep,

have you any wool?

Yes, sir, yes, sir,

Three bags full.

One for the master,

and one for the dame,

And one for the little boy

Who lives down the lane.

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

This is Samuel’s favorite in all of Mother Goose. He recites it with gusto (goose-toe). Yessir! Yessir!

Karin admires it, too. I like it that the sheep is implying: I do have wool, but not for you.

But this is not the only way of reading the poem. In Wells’s pictures, the sheep appears to be conversing with the little boy. I have wool for YOU, the sheep means (this is a more tender interpretation).

My favorite is this poem about a donkey:

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

If I had a donkey

that wouldn’t go,

D’you think I’d beat him?

Oh, no, no.

I’d put him in a barn

and give him some corn,

The best little donkey

that ever was born.

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

100 greatest Britons

My little boy turned six months old. See him with his mother:

Ziva is in the background, at one o’clock.

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Do you watch so much British TV that, occasionally, you need to be reminded that you aren’t British?

You may be helped by this BBC poll from 2002 that identifies the “100 Greatest Britons.”

Consider: who was Isambard Kingdom Brunel?

Not only had I not heard of him, the alleged second-greatest Briton (ahead of the likes of Darwin, Newton, Shakespeare, and Elizabeth I); I’d be surprised to encounter five non-Britons who could tell me who he was.

(Reading about him, it’s obvious that he was a tremendous figure. It’s just that, on this side of the Atlantic, the Industrial Revolution looms less large in the imagination.)

I understand the high rating of Diana, Princess of Wales, even if I don’t agree with it. I even understand the inclusion of J.K. Rowling to the detriment of Agatha Christie, Arthur Conan Doyle, and other genre fiction writers. People get fixated upon recent figures.

It’s surprising, though, to see a 17th-century terrorist such as Guy Fawkes rated so well (30th). Not that I object. I think I understand his appeal. But it wouldn’t have occurred to me to make it a criterion for “greatness”; no, not even though I love to watch Midsomer Murders, which is close in spirit to how Guy Fawkes Night is celebrated. (And since Fawkes is included, why not Jack the Ripper?)

The list has no philosophers unless Darwin and Newton are counted as such. Hobbes? Hume? Absent. Locke? Adam Smith? They must have been reserved for the U.S. list.

Blake, not Turner, is the only painter.

No Yeats; no Joyce. Instead: Bono. Pop singers abound.

Actors abound: Richard Burton the actor makes the cut above Richard Burton the explorer. (Explorers abound, too.)

The theatre-goers

On Saturday, we drove to Fort Wayne – a city of a quarter-million people, Indiana’s second-largest – and spent the night with Carol, Karin’s dad’s girlfriend. We met Carol’s family and viewed a local production of Roald Dahl’s Matilda. It was our first trip, since Samuel’s birth, away from the environs of South Bend.

We drove home the next day and took Samuel to his first cinematic screening. It was of Kiki’s Delivery Service, at Notre Dame. Samuel was quiet through the first half of the movie. Then we lost his pacifier and he howled. We watched the last scenes behind the other audience members, near the exit.

It was a good movie to watch in an auditorium full of children. They all cheered for Kiki at the end.

Tomorrow night, Karin and her mother will view a theatrical production of The Lion King. I’ll stay home with Samuel. Matilda and Kiki were quite enough for me.

Besides, there’ll be more of Matilda in the coming months: South Benders will perform the play.

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R.I.P. Terence Penelhum (1929–2020), a Christian philosopher who wrote on religious topics, as well as on David Hume and Joseph Butler. His autobiographical chapter in InterVarsity Press’s Philosophers Who Believe is, for me, one of the more compelling ones. I especially like this passage:

For a period of some four or five years, … my parents became influenced by Christian Science. This is a sect toward which I have never since been able to assume the attitude of easy derision shown it by both Christian and non-Christian philosophers. Its thought may be egregiously confused; but it has no religious monopoly on this. I can well recall the exemplary serenity of one of the lady readers whom we came to know, and who had been converted to Christian Science through the dramatic physical healing she experienced from it. I also recall very clearly one occasion during the war when we were attending a service and the air-raid sirens sounded. The service was moved to a supposedly less vulnerable part of the building (I think a corridor). Another of the readers made the comment that the move had been made to conform to government regulations, but that since we were all in the care of God’s love, where could we possibly be safer? Such a direct and simple absorption of the New Testament preaching of Jesus (and there was no particle of anxiety) is something I much aspire to now, and have rarely encountered. If it was combined with muddled metaphysics, I am not so consumed by analytical fervor as to believe that this matters greatly.

This brief period introduced me to the possibility of deriving unorthodox results from biblical texts. My recollection may now be faulty; but a frequently repeated juxtaposition of readings yielded the following argument: All things were made by him, and without him was not anything made that was made; God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good; ergo, evil and disease do not really exist. The well-known dismissal of the reality of evil as “error” follows from this conclusion, and the perhaps muddled, but certainly very real, spiritual life of the few Christian Scientists I knew rested in no small measure on this argument.

One can see why Hume should have appealed to this philosopher, un-Humeanly modest though he is, Christian though he is.

There’s also this story about Penelhum, from a Leiter Reports correspondent:

[H]e didn’t like going to the American Philosophical Association meetings. He said he couldn’t abide sitting around with his fellow tenured friends drinking while watching all the unemployed new PhD’s running around begging for jobs. This was in the early 80’s. I don’t think much has changed. I always thought well of him for that comment. It revealed to me a kind heart.

I return to Bethel

Finally, my Xanga has been shut down.

I moved into Mary’s & Martin’s new house. My helpers were M&M, my uncle, my brother Stephen, and Sabby — heroes.

Right now, M&M’s basement contains approx. 30 boxes of my books. Their garden contains my treadmill, abandoned to the recyclers. So long, Timothy. …

I teach just one section at Bethel but often walk across campus to get to IUSB. What an innocent place, Bethel. There isn’t much feeling of urgency …

… except in the class that I teach. There the students sit up straight, eyes wide open.

Through the grapevine I hear:

The readings are difficult;

When he lectures he uses big words.

(And I thought I was so colloquial!)

Our first textbook is Hume’s Dialogues, which many of the students have been supplementing with SparkNotes (not what I recommended, but OK). The class discussions are satisfactory. The students make good points. I wonder which points are from SparkNotes.

Yet somewhere a screw has come loose. In previous years I would quickly learn all the students’ names; this semester, so far, I haven’t bothered to. I know the names of the most frequent talkers. That’s all.

Maybe the reason is that I have so many students (one section at Bethel, two at IU). Even a few students’ faces seem unfamiliar. I never used to have this problem.

Or maybe, during the last year, something happened that is now preventing me from caring like I used to.