April 2009
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Behold: BaR2D2, the robot bartender. Pre-TypePad http://js-kit.com/for/lightondarkwater.com/comments.js
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As he tells the story, in 1971 composer Gavin Bryars was fooling around with a tape loop of an old tramp singing a fragment of a hymn, “Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet.” When I copied the loop onto the continuous reel in Leicester, I left the door of the recording studio open (it opened…
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Current temperature at my house: 83F / 28C. It’s about 3:15 in the afternoon. I know you folks in northern realms are just now getting well into spring, but in effect our spring is over, and summer has begun. We’re beginning now to have the weather that the northern part of the USA will have…
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Meaning: from Shakespeare’s poetry and Francesca Murphy’s deep and rich theological work to…Dr. Who. I just thought I ought to let everybody know that IF you’re a fan of the later incarnations of the show—for instance, the Tom Baker period—and IF you have a Netflix subscription, and IF you notice there the three disk set…
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Wanting to post a bit of Shakespeare for the occasion, I thought of these two passages. From King Lear, bitterest grief: KING LEAR: A plague upon you, murderers, traitors all! I might have saved her; now she’s gone for ever! Cordelia, Cordelia! stay a little. Ha! What is’t thou say’st? Her voice was ever soft,…
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As regular readers know, the author of this book is a theology professor at the University of Aberdeen, and a frequent contributor to conversations here. This is a published version of her doctoral dissertation, and that partly accounts for the fact that I didn’t understand a great deal of it. Not only didn’t, but couldn’t:…
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Students at St. John’s College in Annapolis are known as “Johnnies.” St John’s is a small liberal arts school where the curriculum is the great books of (mostly) Western civilization—a non-Catholic Thomas Aquinas College, you might say. One of my children went there. It’s literally next door to the Naval Academy, and every year the…
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These are just a few off-the-cuff (what does that mean, anyway?) thoughts which I’m not going to make any great attempt to organize. They’re provoked by two things: one, this remark by Louise in a comment on the previous post: What women seem to want (from my POV, though I am reluctant to extrapolate to…
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I finished this earlier in the week, and considered writing a somewhat extensive review. But I have a backlog of things I’ve been trying to write about, and some unfinished correspondence, so I think I’ll just confine myself to this short notice. Those who are very interested in O’Connor are probably going to read the…
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Someone took one of the greatest pop songs ever written and did something wonderful with it, and the technical term for the result is awesome. It’s a little over five minutes long. http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=2897417&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=&fullscreen=1Stand By Me from David Johnson on Vimeo. Hat tip to my uncle Al for pointing this out to me. (Red)Wire (logo seen…
Light On Dark Water 