All
- “Crux fidelis” — by Sarah Macdonald
- ”Were You There?” — as arranged by Bob Chilcott
Today in the noon Good Friday service our parish choir sang quite beautifully two powerful anthems I hadn’t heard before:
(Of course I know “Were You There?” but not this arrangement of it)
Sweden goes back to basics, swapping screens for books in the classroom - Ars Technica:
So why did Sweden pivot? In an email to Undark, Linda Fälth, a researcher in teacher education at Linnaeus University, wrote that the “decision to reinvest in physical textbooks and reduce the emphasis on digital devices” was prompted by several factors, including questions around whether the digitalization of classrooms had been evidence-based. “There was also a broader cultural reassessment,” Fälth wrote. “Sweden had positioned itself as a frontrunner in digital education, but over time concerns emerged about screen time, distraction, reduced deep reading, and the erosion of foundational skills such as sustained attention and handwriting.”
Andre Malraux was a major French writer, a cultural icon, and also an arrogant, incompetent, and unrepentant thief of Khmer cultural antiquities.
The Milky Way over the Rio Grande at Big Bend National Park. Photo by Stephen Alvarez. This area is part of the world’s largest international dark sky reserve. It’s hard to describe, for the modern person who lives in brightly lit areas, the magnificence of the night sky in such dark places. I am blessed to live relatively near some of the darkest skies in the world.
Re: my recent post on how I use Claude: I have never used a chatbot to write even one word for me, and I never will. The reason is simple: I love making sentences, and paragraphs, and stories, and arguments. Love the act of writing more than I can say; wouldn’t outsource it for love or money. One unexpected revelation of the chatbot era — unexpected to me anyway — is how many writers, especially but not only journalists, dislike writing and are delighted to get someone or something else to do it for them.
Writers love to talk about how hard writing it, what a struggle, what misery, yadda yadda yadda. I have always thought this rhetoric a big smokescreen, a way to avoid admitting that they’re getting to do what they love. But maybe they don’t love it. Maybe they got into because they thought they would love it but it turns out that every job is a grind. And maybe they prefer just laying around on their ass totally watching television.
The gift which I am sending you is called a dog, and is in fact the most precious and valuable possession of mankind. For while other animals are each of them of use to us in virtue of one particular quality, and possess a special and distinguishing excellence, this one animal is responsible for greatest and highest points of excellence. A lion excels in courage, an ox in reliability and adaptability to agriculture, the horse in intelligence and speed, the ass and mule, as is stated by the poets, in patience and hard work; and other animals have other good points: this one animal combines the excellence of all others without one exception. He is naturally suitable for war work and the pursuits of peace, and equally fitted to be of use and to be a pleasant companion. It would not be easy, as you will believe, to enumerate all the excellences and all the services to ourselves of this animal.
— Theodorus Gaza, Laudatio Canis, via Futility Closet. (The date given there, 1482, is probably too late.) Further research turns up this article by Sophia Xenophontos on Byzantine dogs — from the dogs’ point of view. One important question pursued there: Can dogs actually sing?
Years ago, we bought a big box of new doorknobs for our old house. Once I had my technique down, I could replace a doorknob in a couple minutes, but every door was slightly different, warped with time, so there was enough thinking involved to keep each replacement interesting. I found the process enormously satisfying. So satisfying, in fact, that I didn’t replace all the doorknobs at once. I saved a handful of doorknobs for times when I was feeling really stressed out.