Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

John Scalzi wrote on 2004-02-24:

[...] one of the posters wondered why many fundamentalists spend so much time in Leviticus and so little time in the New Testament, and I think that's a remarkably cogent question. Indeed, it is so cogent that I would like to make the suggestion that there is an entire class of self-identified "Christians" who are not Christian at all, in the sense that they don't follow the actual teachings of Christ in any meaningful way. Rather these people nod toward Christ in a cursory fashion on their way to spend time in the bloodier books of the Bible (which tend to be found in the Old Testament), using the text selectively as a support for their own hates and prejudices, using the Bible as a cudgel rather than a door. That being the case, I suggest we stop calling these people Christians and start calling them something that befits their faith, inclinations and enthusiasms.

I say we call them Leviticans, after Leviticus, the third book of the Old Testament, famous for its rules, and also the home of the passages most likely to be thrown out by Leviticans to justify their intolerance (including, in recent days, against gays and lesbians -- Leviticus Chapter 18, Verse 22: "Thou shalt not not lie with mankind, as with womankind; it is abomination").

To suggest that a Christian is actually a Levitican is not to say he or she is false in faith -- rather, it is to suggest that their faith is elsewhere in the Bible, in the parts that are easy to understand: The rules, the regulations, all the things that are clear cut about what you can do and what you can't do to be right with God. Rules are far easier to follow than Christ's actual path, which needs humility and sacrifice and the ability to forgive, love and cherish even those who you oppose and who oppose and hate you. Any idiot can follow rules; indeed, there's a good argument to made that idiots can only follow rules. This is why Leviticans love Leviticus (and other pentateuchal and Old Testament books): Chock full of rules. And you can believe in rules. That's why they're rules.

Pushed a little harder than I should have yesterday, and recovering from that is messing up today's plans, which were really several-days-ago's plans that got pushed back because of my not feeling well before. Also looks like I'll be missing today-specific stuff.

Bleah.

... but which amuses me greatly to contemplate nontheless: cell phones which recognize ABC notation (or some other similarly compact and thumb-enterable music notation) in SMS messages they receive, and can play the tunes sent that way. To be really obnoxious, they could play the message instead of using the normal "new text message arrived" sound if the message contained music.

Hey, at least the tunes would have to be short, with the 160-byte limit on SMS messages.

This is definitely a night to remind me of mathilde's comment abouut the Baltimore sky.

I kept seeing flashes of light to the north that looked like police car strobes (especially coming from that direction -- I often see flashing blue lights from the intersection or from the bit of Fulton Ave. I can see from my house), but they were too infrequent. So I hauled myself off the bed (I'm not feeling well tonight) to have a look. Nope, it was lightning. Pretty, cloud-to-cloud, watch-it-move (not just FLASH) lightning. Some of it below the tree/roof line across the street, creating backlighting. Some of it above the rooftops but behind the cloud, casting a different kind of backlight. And some doing that wiggly-crawly-squirmy thing horizontally across the sky in sharp, bright traces. But that's not the freaky part, that's just unusually pretty.

I wrestled with the question of whether I had the energy to switch into "photographer mode", and finally decided that I'd kick myself a long time if I didn't, so I fetched a camera and a tripod, shot the tail end of a roll of colour film, and went to load a fresh roll into a more suitable camera. Since the sky was mostly blacks and greys, and the lightning mostly white-looking, I loaded black-and-white film. (I'm scraping the bottom of my film supply and don't have a lot of what I usually use left. I may not be able to do much shooting at Pennsic this year.)

There's black sky above my house and above Lombard Street (and a nice bright moon on the other side of the house). There are whitish shreds of cloud up over Fulton a ways north of here and hanging in the sky over the building across the street from me. And there was a dark grey cloud making a Huge Shape over top of the fluff-shards and puffy bits, looming like a broken sheet of something sticking up over the north half of the west side of Baltimore (okay, far west side -- looking off to the east toward MLK the sky looked rather different).

And that dark grey sheet gradually, over the course of half an hour, turned a most unusual shade of blue. An eerie, glowy kind of blue. A blue full of not-blue-ness, or blue-wrongness, or something. A curious blue that might be a lot of fun to explore in a blouse[1] or a car, but a Very UnCloudLike Colour. Did I mention the "glowy" aspect? (Not quite glowing, but it gave the impression it was about to luminesce at any moment.)

Freaking' pretty. Pretty freaky. Freatty. Preaky. (Preetky?) And a lighting situation that it would probably cost me an entire roll of slide film worth of trial-and-error to capture properly, and I'm not sure I'm quite ready to spend that much right now i just to catch a colour. (With a different foreground, maybe). But ... well, wow. I can think of at least two people on my friends list who would write utterly amazing descriptions of it (far better than what I'm doing) if they were here, but without a teleporter, oh well. And the lightning flashes were frequent enough that I'm pretty sure I got some decent lightning shots anyhow.

Anyhow ... glowy ... and un-cloud blue ... and, well, I guess I see what mathilde means. Preaky.

[1] I can think of a couple of my friends who would be extremely distracting in a blouse that colour in a shiny fabric.