Holy Anamorphosis, Batman!

I feel kind of cheap biting this from the great Mark Evanier's News From ME
, but it's just too much. This man, Julian Beever is a genius. Chalk and a sidewalk, and an incredible mind, hand and eye. Here's his website. It is incredibly beautiful here today--sunny, a little hazy, and such intensely refreshing cool breezes. Ahhhh.

Lots of complaining on the internets about the officiating during the Super Bowl, and the usual blah blah blah about Oh, it's so boring. Whatever. It's football. In my opinion, the ratio of truly exciting, competitive Super Bowls to boring ones is about the same as for regular season games. Football games tend to have a pretty steady low state of action/interest, punctuated by moments of senses-shattering transcendence. Kind of like life.

My Otis Redding Pandora station has gone all rock-and-or-roll on me: from North Mississippi AllStars to a great John Hiatt song I hadn't heard (Straight Outta Time) to John Mayer covering Jimi Hendrix's Wait Til Tomorrow, to Sunny Day Real Estate. Wild! Speaking of waiting until tomorrow, Sarah's plane lands tomorrow night at 7:25. I am all atingle! It's been a really long three-and-a-half weeks, and well, I barely know what to do with myself. Fortunately I've got a long to-do list.

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Three Good Things for Thursday, March 7th

No time to waste, let's hit those Three Good Things: 1. "Fifteen bucks for the whole seat but you'll only need the edge, Edge, EDGE!" An impossibly red, impossibly cute 1997 Suzuki X-90. It looks like a real-life Barbie car, a mini two-seater pickup, minus the bed and with a little spoiler on the back. Also it has a T-top. In college some buddies and I drove up to Cleveland one weekend to see the monster truck rally at the Gund Arena. Were we genuinely interested in it? Was it an act of willful irony? We were the last gasp of Generation X, so there is truly no way to know. What I remember most aside from the noise and fumes was that the promotion ran a contest in between "acts" where local schmoes could try their personal vehicles on the motocross track they'd constructed on the arena floor, with the fastest time taking home a cash prize. One of the first contestants roared out of the gate in a huge, very obviously brand new, very obviously expensively

Family and Gender in Ancient Rome

I mentioned below that Prof. Diane Lipsett delivered a wonderful lecture on the conversation currently taking place between New Testament scholars, family historians, social archaeologists and the like. The title of this post is actually the title of en entire semester-long course taught by Prof. Lipsett, so for our, geez, ninety minute session she condensed her focus to Men, Women, and Children in Ancient Rome. With her permission, I am posting my notes from this lecture below, tweaked a little for readability. Prof. Lipsett is interested in studies of gender formation among non-elites as well as elites, those people about whom we know much less because they did not have the resources or clout to commemorate and study themselves, generally speaking. Roman households were much broader than we conceive of in modern terms, with a wide spectrum of people connected by family and employment living under one roof (the terms domus/eikos/ikea capture this idea of an indiscriminate household

Be true to your school now!

This is a cross-posting of a comment I left on peacebang.com's recent post about my school, Starr King School for the Ministry. PeaceBang, who is apparently a UU Minister in the Northeast, posted a few days ago an item about my school's supposed "banning" of the term, "brown bag lunch," because of the racialized connotations of brown bags.* Her post was, to my reading, haughty and dismissive, and she seemed awfully pleased with her own wit and ability to take cheap shots at others with little to no basis for her opinions. I think the comments for that post are up to 40, and it's a pretty lively back and forth. So, here is my contribution: "This may not be the ideal forum for “deep, serious conversation,” but one of the cornerstones of Educating to Counter Oppression is the importance of having deep, serious conversations wherever they happen. The status quo of “waiting for the right moment or forum” to engage with these issues too often leads to

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