On the Effects of Graduate School
jimi sometimes talks about the awful toll extracted by graduate school, how oft times the merry life of a pizza delivery driver seems like a frolic in paradise compared to the dreary misadventures of those seeking stature in the academy. Harry Hutton (who I’ve just discovered) wonders about the downfalls of professorship too: But is it good to spend so much time in universities? In The Sleepers by Walt Whitman there is a phrase, “The sick-gray faces of onanists”. Another four years in higher education and that would be me. In four years time I would emerge thin and pasty, blinking like a mole. I can see myself on my release day as I stand on the pavement, shabby and pathetic. I am hunched against the biting wind, and all my possessions are next...
Recent Pictures: Six O’Clock Vintage Photography
Don’t forget to check out Six O’Clock Vintage Photography. Find a new image posted every day. In addition, Six O’Clock Vintage Photography has recently been added to VFXY Photos, Photoblog Community, and photoblogs.org. Don’t forget to check those sites out as well. A preview of the last 5 days of photographs from Six O’Clock Vintage Photography is...
Great Fantasy
I’ve been craving some George MacDonald lately. I’ve scoured all the best used bookstores in town over the last week and have come up essentially dry. I did find an old illustrated hardback copy of At the Back of the North Wind, but it was illustrated by Jessie Willcox Smith, and I guess anything illustrated by her is semi-precious, out of my price range at least. I found a slim copy of MacDonald’s The Fisherman’s Lady too, which I’ve never read and never heard of and so consequently wasn’t craving. Really, I want to read Phantastes or one of the Curdie books or the North Wind thing again. I’ve got this overweening desire for superb literary fantasy right now, and clearly MacDonald is it. The man is one of masters, if not...
Climate Change: Caused by Humans?
Regardless of what you think about Global Warming and whether, or to what extent, human actions are primarily responsible for it, there’s a good chance you might be interested in the potential event below. The following text from an actual invitation: The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley presents his compliments to Vice-President Albert Gore and by these presents challenges the said former Vice-President to a head-to-head, internationally-televised debate upon the question, ‘That our effect on climate is not dangerous,’ to be held in the Library of the Oxford University Museum of Natural History at a date of the Vice-President’s choosing. Forasmuch as it is His Lordship who now flings down the gauntlet to the Vice-President, it shall be the...
Nehemiah Mission
Yesterday I returned from a weekend missions trip in Cleveland at the Nehemiah Mission. My Lifegroup spent almost two days at the Mission doing service projects and interacting with the community. The time was really meaningful to us and I hope to the community we served as well. Cleveland is the poorest city in the United States, the Pastor of the Mission told us that “that’s one of the few things we beat Detroit in–we’re poorer.” In most cities there are rundown areas surrounded by suburbs or more well to do neighborhoods, but in Cleveland the slums go on for miles and miles. The whole city is old and dirty, like one giant moldy puddle sitting on Lake Erie. The Nehemiah Mission works closely with other area churches and...