Random Monday Musings

1. Cheerios with a dab of FiberOne may be good for the heart and innards, but it’s not food to feed the soul or the taste buds.

2. Kanye West must shop my Wal*Mart; there are Beyonce CDs scattered all over the music section. Maybe that’s what he’s doing now his tour is canceled.

3.  If I have a car accident, it will be in the Wal*Mart parking lot. Most dangerous place I drive by far.

4. Blu-Ray is only as good as the transfers. How like DVDs.

What’s in My Pockets

Because I have so many important things to say. So here we go, in homage to Nick Norelli:

1. Wallet: Mostly consists of book and DVD store discount cards and one or two small denomination government bills. Don’t bother mugging me unless fast food or Red Ripple is your idea of a great meal. I also keep a mini magnifying sheet here because serial numbers on Ipods and mp3 players are getting ever smaller.

2. Keys: Not many because I don’t own much. Including my leased car.

3. Eye drops: Because I have glaucoma to go with my diabetes, so soaking them peepers with medicine a couple of times a day is a must.

4. Box cutter: Not that I cut that many boxes; it’s mostly tape on boxes. I could easily use a pocket knife, but one of my regular duties at Wal-mart is picking up box cutters left lying around by associates and shoplifters. I have a horror of seeing some kid doing a test cut on his/her arm with a discarded box cutter. I also have a horror of being attacked by a customer I’ve said “no” to.

5. MP3 player: 8 gb Philips Go Player. What’s on this might say a lot about me:

a. Trailer music: Thundering orchestra and screaming chorus. That’s to wake me up on slow days.

b. NET New Testament: Yes, I carry part of the Bible everywhere.

c. NT Textual Critical lectures: I’m that sort of bible geek. Dan Wallace, James White, Greer-Heard ‘08, etc.

d. James White You-Tube videos: Talking head videos are good for a small screen. In fact I need to convert and add a few more.

e. Abel’s viola da gamba works: Some of my favorite classical music

f. Classical music: This varies depending on my mood. Lately it’s lots of lush string symphonies counterbalanced by Philip Glass’ minimalist soundtracks and string quartets. Frequently it is various violin, cello, and viola da gamba works, especially Bach.

6. Key chain flashlight: Because Wal-marts are dark caves when the lights go out.

And that’s about all I regularly carry around. What books I tote and what sample DVDs I play are discussions for another day, and of course change much more frequently.

Useless Entertainment Roundup

So I finished reading Eight Lives Down(salty language alert!) and The Apostolic Fathers and the New Testament. Two thumbs up for both.

Seeing as we are studying Psalms this new quarter in Sunday School, I’ve taken up Emmanuel Tov’s Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible again. It doesn’t seem so scary as last time.

I’m still on my Japanese jidaigeki kick in DVDs, but I’m about to switch over to the two Ghost in the Shell tv series.The two newest American Doctor Who releases are about to reach my door. And I’m contemplating an episode a day of Discovery Channel’s A Haunting in preparation for Halloween.

Oh, and did I mention I hanker to listen to some Celtic fiddle again? Amazon MP3 has quite a selection.

Now, how will I find time to work and do Sunday School notes with all this going on?

Vacation Roundup

What did I do last week?

1. First and foremost I attended my grandmother’s 100th birthday party.

There were about seventy-five people in attendance and lots of cake and punch left over, mainly because it was all too sweet for my diabetic self to partake of.

2. I watched over thirty DVDs including the complete Zatoichi series (that’s 25 DVDs right there alone!)

The first twenty or so are quite entertaining, but the last few were made in the Seventies, and lost the light-hearted general audience feel in favor of grimmer, bloodier action plots. Zatoichi is something of a Japanese superman type, a blind masseur who turns into a superhuman swordsman upon being confronted with injustice and evil. Those first twenty or so films are great entertainment, world cinema classics, even.

3. I read one and one half books:

a.  I finished Hank Reihardt’s posthumous Book of Swords, which is a very good examination of the sword in history, especially European medieval swords.

b. I am seventy-five percent through Eight Lives Down, a very good memoir of a tour of duty as a bomb disposal technician in 2004 Iraq.

Chris Hunter’s memoir took a lot of the edge off my only movie of the week, The Hurt Locker, a limited run film that showed up at a local theater finally. It’s shot in documentary style and is a good if familiar tale of the effects of war on people. I felt it minimized the dangers of IEDs in order to make a broader point.

4. I did not do yardwork, as the rains came and soaked us. Yes, that really disappointed me.

5. I bought a new printer, the HP 4440 All in one, which is essentially the newer version of my previous printer, with faster printing and a handy ink catridge ink level indicator.

6. I slept a lot.

Look Who’s Forty….

Kind readers, I direct your attention to news of great import. My pastor, Dr. Jay Cook, turns the dreaded forty years old Friday, June 19.

We already welcomed him into prayer meeting tonight with black armbands, but I suggest that if you so choose, you might send him an e-mail at “jayc@fbcpas.net”. In particular you might send messages along these lines:

Congratulations:

1. You’ve turned forty, so now people will listen to your opinion even without the “Dr.” at the front of your name.

2. You’re a lucky man to have so nice a family as to gracefully put up with the infirmities of your advanced age.

3. I saw your blog and am pleased to see you didn’t die sometime last November from advanced years.

4. You must be so happy to come to pastor a church with such wonderful members as the Goulablogger in your declining years.

5. You look great for your age.

Condolences:

1. I’m sure your son didn’t intend to be mean when he said “Only God has more candles on his birthday cake than that.”

2. Many famous people did their best work in the later parts of life.

3. You’re not getting older… Well, actually….

4. The print in everyone’s Bibles gets smaller after forty.

5. It was a teenager who called you “Gramps” yesterday, after all.

Question:

I only offer one suggestion: “NKJV– Why?”

Oh, and you might leave a message on his blog, to convince Jay he isn’t a voice crying in the wilderness, that only he remains on the Internet.

Thought of the Day

Short but profound: “Isaiah 53 is a huge topic”.

Guess what our upcoming Sunday School lesson is about?

To misquote Sheriff Brody from “Jaws”: “I think I’m gonna need a bigger commentary collection”.

What I Did This Vacation

1. I got a nice head cold. It’s still lingering, but signs are it’s finally letting go.

2. I bought more NIVAC volumes. Yes, I now have the whole set and a definite reading agenda. Thank you IRS for my “refund” and Lifeway for sales and coupons.

3.  I watched almost all of the first two seasons of “Without A Trace”. I understand the praise heaped on the show now, as it manages to stick to a formula while also doing character arcs, a neat writing trick.

4. I read all my commentaries on Isaiah 5 several times, because it took that many readings to get used to the stylistic change between the Thessalonians commentaries and the Isaiah ones. When John Glynn says there is a need for a good conservative semi-technical commentary on Isaiah, I have to agree, based on what I’ve read.

5. I did some yard work, because weeds never stop growing on the Gulf Coast.

6. I continued reading Craig Keener’s NIVAC: Revelation. It’s an excellent commentary but not for the faint of heart. Lots of footnotes, multiple interpretive options, and 511 pages. But Keener shines in the application sections, where only a reader completely dead to what the Spirit is saying won’t be squirming in his seat as he reads.

7. I got paid for doing all of the above, and for a lot of goofing off.

Why So Slow on the Notes? The New Toy!

Having received a substantial sum of money for Christmas, there was of course a hole burning in my pocket the day after Chrsitmas. Imagine my surprise and delight in discovering this little wonder crammed in the wrong box in the overstock at my store. I did a little research online and then had a talk with my store management, resulting in my bringing this new toy home for about the cost of a used model of the same.

What is it, you ask? The device you see at the left is the Archos 404 30 gb personal media player. It has a 3.5 inch 320 x240 screen crammed into a 4 inch wide body. It plays mp3, wma, jpg, wmv, and mpeg4 files, together with mpeg2 and mov files with (overly) expensive add-ons. What has really sold me on the Archos was the fact that it also reads pdf files.  Not, I have discovered, really big ones, but I am thrilled to now have the NET Bible, Wieland Willker’s Greek Gospels Textual Commentary, Peter Misselbrook’s Greek New Testament Notes, and a number of commentaries (John Gill, Adam Clarke, John Calvin, Albert Barnes, and A.T. Robertson) in an easily portable form.  I’ve also been able to download and play a selection of videos from the Veritas Forum without the hassle of converting the files. And yes, I’ve got a whole heap of biblically-themed video from the web that I had previously converted for my former toy, a Phillips 8 gb 2.5 inch 320 x 240 res  mp3/video player, as well as lots of mp3s.

However, all that video conversion and searching the web for suitable pdfs has eaten into Sunday School notes time, though. Video conversion is seriously computer processor intensive. Thus notes are going to run late this week, but I’m determined to do them before I totally forget how.