Back in the saddle

... and mighty uncomfortable it is too, since saddles are meant for butts not backs. Boom boom! Ah yes, the old jokes are best.

In Rose Street again for the first time in I don't know how many weeks, it's been at least 10 working days since I was last here to work (though honesty compels me to admit that I am not actually working yet). Starting in quite slowly with blogging and blogreading and general timewastery.

In my absence, the office has been used (I infer) by G half-time and by U semi-rarely as usual, with the exception of last week when the 15-year-old daughter of a colleague was here for a Practical Work Experience session, during which she built a model of the office's only ongoing project. So the office has been inhabited by 2.2 people per day last week, and 1.2 per day on the week before. I leave as an exercise for the reader to determine from the stack of 20 (twenty) dirty coffee cups in the kitchen, when somebody last did the dishes here, and for bonus points: who that person most likely was.

Not dead yet

Just checking in to say that I'm getting slowly but steadily better. Still coughing, but less often and less painfully; still tired, but not as likely to fall over sideways while walking to the corner shop for milk.

And now for something quite amusing, courtesy of the Lioness: An honest R&B song. (Harmless but nonetheless possibly not safe for work, because bosses don't like to see their employees falling about laughing.)

Back at work

After a lengthy Christmas and New Year's break, I was finally inspired to knuckle down and do some work on translating the Münsters' wiki, and as usual I quite enjoyed it once I got started. It seems to take roughly 90 minutes to translate a page of wiki; given that I can do three or four pages before my brain turns to mush, it would be possible to work out quite exactly when I shall be finished—if I cared to do so. This should be quite a good month financially (crosses fingers, knocks on wood, spits over right shoulder).

And with that, my dears: Shabbat shalom, good night, sleep tight, enjoy the weekend.

No: One more thing. Writing "Shabbat shalom" reminded me of a strange thing on New Year's Eve. Each of us around the table told what had been special about 2007. As I was speaking, it occurred to me in retrospect that 2007 had been a spiritually active year, what with the walk to Santiago de Compostela, and CDs by Arvo Pärt and John Tavener and Hendryk Górecki, and starting to read the Bible in German (the original 1545 translation by Martin Luther in modern type).

The particular prompter was getting a Concordance to the KJV for Christmas last year (I asked for it); at least twice a week I look up some turn of phrase or another, and that often sends me to the KJV itself to read the context. I spent most of a day in September flipping from Concordance to Bible and back, searching for an apposite quote for the back cover of the booklet to my parents' 50th anniversary party, before settling on Ecclesiastes 9:7-9 (it begins "Go thy way, eat thy bread with joy, and drink thy wine with a merry heart; for God now accepteth thy works.")

I find it quite amusing that I, a soi-disant non-believer, should have four Bibles, a Concordance and Harold Bloom's wonderful "Book of J" in the house—and requested for Christmas this year a copy of the Apocrypha in the KJV translation, made at the same time by the same committee but not included in the "official" KJV Bible. (I would point out in mitigation, and in fairness, that I also have a Koran, the Dhammapada and two Tao Te Ching's.)

Getting back to New Year's Eve: in the course of the discussion at table I mentioned—as one does—Jacob saying to Rebekah that he was a smooth man, and his brother Esau a hairy man. The others were taken aback that I should quote from the Old Testament rather than the New. Famous Photographer in particular was quite insistent that it was wrong of me to quote from the OT: the Bible is the word of Jesus, why quote from that outmoded, obsolete, Jewish stuff? I was drunk enough to be annoyed but not enough to challenge him, so I let it pass; but I now wish that I had insisted on an explanation of what he meant.

All three would probably describe themselves in terms that an outsider would classify as "agnostic," none of them goes to church more than once a year except for weddings and funerals; and yet there is this strong, reflexive Christianity lurking just below the surface which lashes out when it perceives itself to be challenged. Odd.

What do I believe? More in the Old Testament than the New, for whatever that is worth. I don't believe in God, but the God in whom I don't believe is He of Genesis, who walks in his garden in the cool of the evening and enjoys a good meal in the company of his friends. I believe in the Protestant Work Ethic: the admonition "Get up, there's work to be done" is deeply rooted in my soul. I believe that Saint Augustine was an obnoxious prig, a hypocrite and a liar. I believe that Marx was right, and that every organized religion exists for the purpose of protecting the rich and legitimizing the powerful. Here comes the big one, and I have to confess that I hesitated to write it down: I believe that Jesus is not God, a concept that appears to confuse many Born-Agains.

My hesitation amuses me, and reminds me of the story of Luis Buñuel visiting a church with a younger artist. Buñuel spat in the holy-water stoup and invited the other man to do the same. He declined politely, and on being mocked by Buñuel replied "It is not necessary for me to spit in the stoup, Don Luis, because I do not believe in God."

Finished, part three

Survived yet another NaBloPoMo with soul and senses more or less intact. As I said last time, I enjoyed the discipline of writing every day and was surprised to see how often I wished to write more than once a day. Perhaps there is some inner "Target Number of Words Daily" setting that prompts me, which falls below the often extreme length of my non-NaBloPoMo postings.

This made me laugh this morning. Perhaps I'll give Ralph one for Christmas.

The weather did change yesterday/last night, but no snow: just drizzling rain.

The Little Professor points at an article in which a Harvard Law School professor admits (a) to plagiarism and (b) that he doesn't even read the manuscripts that go into print under his name—but somehow keeps his job. Is it just me, or does anyone else find this vaguely offensive? LP raises two valid points: If the purpose of research is to discover something new, then summarizing the work of others is clearly not "research;" and: If students submitted papers written by another student, they would be reprimanded if not sent down; why then do we permit it in professors?

Today's Friday Favourite is a lovely song from a great album, ten years old already. Regular readers will have heard her voice before, she sang on one of the first Favourites, back in February.

Shabbat shalom, my dears.

Thirty down. Done the bugger!