So, the Ironic T-Shirt video The Whiskey Tree is currently ranked #3 on Atom.com’s Comedy Tournament. If it gets to #1 good things happen, including some monetary rewards. All you have to do to help is watch the embedded video, if you like it share it with your friends, tweet it, whatever. Every view helps. Also, it’s funny. Thanks!
One of the worst (best) things about training to be a historian1 is the enormous amount of righteous anger that reading bad history generates. Most commonly this is within popular sources, newspaper articles, films, blog posts, etc, which is of course the way the majority of people actually encounter history on a regular basis. As someone who studies a period, the middle ages, that is perhaps the most riven with misunderstandings and characterizations (thanks Renaissance/Enlightenment!) this is especially frustrating. A good example comes to us today from the Daily Mail Online: Mystery of the pregnant pope, written by Peter Stanford. read more…
- and a pedant [↩]
Concerning Theophanies
For everything that is understood and sensed is nothing else but the apparition of what is not apparent, the manifestation of the hidden, the affirmation of the negated, the comprehension of the incomprehensible, the understanding of the unintelligible, the body of the bodiless, the essence of the superessential, the form of the formless…(633A-B)
Concerning the Establishment of all things in God
It follows that we ought not to understand God and the creature as two things distinct from one another, but as one and the same. For both the creature, by subsisting, is in God; and God, by manifesting Himself, in a marvelous and ineffable manner creates Himself in the creature, the invisible making Himself visible and the incomprehensible comprehensible and the hidden revealed and the unknown known and being without form and species formed and specific and the superessential essential and the supernatural natural and the simple composite and the accident-free subject to accident and accident and the infinite finite and the uncircumscibed circumscribed and the supra temporal temporal and the Creator of all things created in all things and the Maker of all things made in all things, and eternal He begins to be, and immobile He moves into all things and becomes in all things all things.(678C)
I have no other content, and I just got a new scanner/printer. Here are some doodles (click on thumbnails for larger images):
Made me smile:
Would black Cthulhu, who slimed out of the dark stars when your most eldritch nightmares were suckling at their mothers’ pseudomammaria, who waits for the time that the stars come right to come forth from his tomb-palace, revive the faithful and resume his rule, who waits to teach anew the high and luscious pleasures of death and revelry, would he lie to you?
from: “I, Cthulhu, or, What’s A Tentacle-Faced Thing Like Me Doing In A Sunken City Like This (Latitude 47° 9′ S, Longitude 126° 43′ W)?” by Neil Gaiman
From the Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Eriugena by Dermot Moran:
In Eriugena’s conceptions of God, the cosmos and human nature, there is an extraordinarily bold emphasis on infinity. God is infinite and manifests Himself infinitely in His theophanies; the causes themselves are infinite; the created cosmos too would be infinite were it not for the Fall; finally, human nature is essentially unbounded and infinite. The Holy Scriptures too have a kind of infinite richness: Sacrae scripturae interpretatio infinita est, II.560a. Employing an original simile, Eriugena claims that the number of interpretations of Holy Scripture is like the innumerable colors in a peacock’s tail (IV.749c). Human understanding and learning are also endless. Eriugena celebrates the lack of limit and inherent transcendence not just of human nature but also of the whole of nature. Nature as a whole is an infinite series of theophanies.
Awesome, just awesome.
Daniel said post some poems (weird, I know) so here are two short, experimental pieces. Suck a dick.
Untitled 1
The rain is wet.
The grass is coarse.
The nature of things
is in their nature.
Small blue planes cascade
out of the sun, separating
people from themselves.
Light pours through the body.
It is a war -
way down in the dark,
where bone meets bone.
It is still a war.
Untitled 2
The wind sighs
and then the moon does.
They are lovers,
they are symbols of passion,
the white of the eye
flooding the dark.
When two hands come together
they are not one hand.
It is important you remember this.
Else there is no miracle.
I know it was a few weeks ago, but here’s a clambake recap.
The detailed wrap, provided by Freeland:
for those who were there, i had a lot of fun, it was great to see all of you, blah blah blah.
for those who couldn’t make it, one man’s brief account of the bake.
we finished with a 3-1 record thanks to the leadership of (in no particular order) rabbit, nuts, rodeo, lassie, captain jack and head (because he gave me a ride home-thanks head), the rage of (in no particular order) wedge, throat and cletus, and the cleatless beauty of feng shui on mud. on saturday, after losing to DoG in an ugly, rain-shortened game, we played the youthful clown to an 8-2 halftime deficit. during the first half, wedge became irate over a call against him and (i might be making this up-not sure) vocally vented his anger at the entire undergrad clown/chaos sideline. in a possibly related story, wedge went to bed alone that night.
halftime brought the turning point the team needed, with a boatrace single-handedly won-and not just won, but dominated-by nuts (note: 6 others drank beers, nuts just took all the credit). alcoholic momentum on our side, we began rolling off points, and before we knew it, had taken the lead. we won 15-13, and after a glorious joint-oo-aa, left to prepare for the party.
at the party, stuff happened. you’re not going to believe me; not only did i dominate the die table, but i didn’t get naked or blacked out. i told you you wouldn’t believe me.
on sunday, we beat harvard and their 12-year-old boy genius. cletus pretty much dominated the kid who hadn’t hit puberty yet (as he is known to do). highlight of the game: mom-o skying her guy. twice. in one point. then we beat old tired in an amicable rout.
until next year…
free
Some notes:
1.) It was a totally bullshit call. And I didn’t yell at the whole sideline, just at Lurch, who looked absolutely terrified that I was about to punch him, which I was. I was hitting pretty epic heights of rage during the game. During the boat race I almost spiked my can off of whomever I was going up against (Pockets? I hope it was Pockets)’s face. I’m also fairly certain that I drank my beer in under 4 seconds.
2.) Special props to Capt. Jack for his 6 and a half minute naked lap of the common room in Red Brick after I pwned him in sitting down beer pong. I’m relatively sure that this happened at about 3 am, and that we continued partying for another 2 hours or so afterwards, Jack may have been naked the rest of the night, things got a little hazy.
3.) Anti-Props to the stupid freshmen who promised to grab us beer while we were playing golf and then wandered away, seriously I will stab you. Special props to Tugboat, who passed out in the grass outside of Red Brick after I made him drink about 16 cans of stale beer.
4.) You Got Served is one of the greatest drinking games ever.
5.) Nos (sp? Noz? Noos?) is the fucking devil. A little bit of Nos + Whiskey led to an entire bottle of whiskey + nos, led to epic meltdown at beer die at the party on Saturday (from a 4-1 lead to a 5-4 loss, with roughly 8 beers added because neither Nutz or I could hit the table after a certain point), led to completely ridiculous 9 o’clock black out, led to my last memory of the night being Tang incoherently screaming at me because I stole his sleeping bag but a.) he was too drunk to communicate properly and b.) I was too drunk to understand him anyway, so it didn’t really matter.
6.) A highlight that Free missed was Throat’s incredible rage at losing his jacket on Saturday night. Sunday morning he shambled bleary eyed up to our sideline yelling: “where in the fuck is my jacket? No seriously guys, where’s my jacket?”. Then he stormed off to stab a hobo/have sex with a freshman girl. As far as I know, he’s still ridiculously pissed about it.
7.) On Sunday, after our games I got to play with kittens and they were adorable.
All in all, a damn good trip.
I love food. Think of that as my feeble disclaimer, my rationalization for the insults I’m about to levy against an entire nation’s cuisine. I eagerly dive into the national and regional dishes of each country I visit, searching for new flavors and tastes, and I’m not one to shy away from the seemingly bizarre or shockingly unfamiliar. I hold food in such high esteem that I often judge a culture by it (much as I hold breasts in such high esteem that I often judge women by them). But with Japan I may have bitten off more than I can chew. Or, more appropriately, bitten off the entire dinner course in one bite and discovered that I don’t have to chew. If that sentence doesn’t make sense, don’t worry; not much about the things I ate in Japan does. read more…
Somewhat muddled thoughts on ultimate defense.
One of the common fixtures of league ultimate, although occasionally you run into it in low-level coed play, is the one man team. Basically, I’m talking about a team with one super-good dude who can basically dominate any aspect of the game. read more…