Sorry for the lack of a Burst yesterday, but I got distracted doing other things. Judging by the massive outcry, though — nobody noticed the lack of the Burst of Weirdness! Snif snif….

Anyhow:

After a vigorous day of horseback riding out in the woods, I stopped when I felt a sharp pain in my purlicue, so I dismounted. That’s when I noticed that there were otters nearby, and I had stepped in their spraints and got it all over my rowels! I was so mad I closed my eyes and saw the greatest phosphenes of my life! But alas, today I’m off to Target to get some new aglets.

For help translating this gibberish, see this list of names for things that you might not have realized had names in the first place. By the way, the word “aglet” was actually used on a recent episode of CSI: Miami. I know it was that word because after one person said it, another helpfully defined it, in a fairly ham-handed “As you know, Bob” moment. (link via Lynn)

I’d also be remiss if I didn’t mention the cosmic bizarreness of Ann Althouse’s conjecture that maybe Jose Padilla’s jailers keep him blindfolded so he can’t communicate by blinking when he’s outside the jail cell! That was some prime weirdness, right there.

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Let’s hear it for Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, who’s not letting a little thing like lame-duck status stop her from bringin’ Teh Crazy to Washington!

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So I log into Blogger the other day and see a big banner thing across the top of the “dashboard” page (for non-Blogger users, the “dashboard” is the main page you see when you first sign in, before you start writing posts and stuff to your various blogs), telling me that I was at last allowed to make the migration over to the new BloggerBeta. So I clicked the link, only to be told that I actually can’t make that migration yet; and when I clicked the “More info” link, I see that this is likely because they can’t do “huge” blogs yet, where “huge” is defined as having several thousand posts (check) and/or very lengthy comment threads (not so much). So here I am, still stuck in non-Beta land. Not that this is such a big deal, but I’d like to do the “post-labels” thing, even if I have no intention of actually going through my archives and categorizing my more than 5000 posts.

(Yeah, that’s right, I’ve written more than 5000 posts in this space. Ye Gods.)

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The 20th of this month — two weeks from yesterday — will mark the tenth anniversary of Carl Sagan’s passing, and this blogger is organizing a Blogistan-based memorial of Dr. Sagan’s life and works on that date:

In his honor, I am organizing a special memorial “blog-a-thon” among Sagan’s fans throughout the blogosphere. If you’re a Sagan fan with a blog, you can participate by posting something related to him on or near that date. Read or reread a Sagan book and review it; discuss cool things that you’ve done that’s been influenced by him; pontificate on one of the many topics he treated (SETI, astronomy, critical thinking, the history of science, human intelligence….), or post about something completely surprising.

This effort is endorsed by Sagan’s son, author Nick Sagan. I will be participating; Carl Sagan ranks on my list of personal heroes and influences with Hector Berlioz, JRR Tolkien, George Lucas, Sergei Rachmaninov, and any of the other luminaries on whose behalf I have waxed poetic in this space. And if any of my readers are of similar mind regarding Carl Sagan, feel free to join in on posting on the 20th.

(via)

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OK, I know for a fact that there are lots of smart people who live in Texas, so I don’t want to make fun of the place. But sometimes they make it so damned hard:

A plan to build a mosque in this Houston suburb has triggered a neighborhood dispute, with community members warning the place will become a terrorist hotbed and one man threatening to hold pig races on Fridays just to offend the Muslims.

This story was so surreal that I had to read it several times just to grasp the particulars. It seems that an Islamic organization wants to build a mosque in a town called Katy, Texas (which is apparently in the Houston region), and they bought some land to do just that. Cue the histrionics from people who have nothing against Moslems, but are concerned about “property values, traffic, and drainage” — in short, the usual stuff people worry about when undesirable things want to move in. I wonder how much they’d worry about those things if it was one of those gigantic Christian megachurches, the ones that seat more people than some NHL venues, that was looking to build there. I bet they wouldn’t think there’d be drainage problems then! But then, there wouldn’t be terrorists either, because wherever Muslims congregate, there’s sure to be some terrorizin’!

And then there’s the guy who plans to race pigs next door to the new mosque, just to offend the Muslims. First of all, it seems that this guy originally thought that the new mosque meant he’d have to give up the land he already owned, which turned out to be his own mistake, but no matter — he’s gonna run his pigs anyway!

Though he now concedes the Muslims are probably not after his land, Baker said he is obligated to go through with the pig races, probably within the next few weeks, because “I would be like a total idiot if I didn’t. I’d be the laughingstock now because I’ve gone too far.”

See what happens? You get yourself in so deep, and then you promise people some pig racin’, so how are you gonna look if you don’t follow through? You’ll look like an idiot! Because that’s what makes you look stupid — not overreacting to a mistake you yourself made in the first place. That doesn’t make you look stupid at all!

Let’s face things here, dude: you look like an idiot and a laughingstock already. Racing the pigs is just going to be the icing on the Stupid Cake — especially since, as the article notes, Muslims don’t worship pigs or anything, they merely refrain from eating pork. Pigs are not to Islam as cows are to Hinduism, a distinction that I’m sure will be lost on the pig-farmer. After all, he’s got to strike his blow against the Coming of the Caliphate, just after he slops old Wilbur.

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On a Usenet thread about film music acquisitions in 2006 (yes, for reasons that are odd enough, rec.music.movies is active again), I just wrote a post about my recent acquisition of Jeff Danna’s score to The Gospel of John, and I want to repeat that post here, edited to include some linkage:

At the church my family attends, the services (like most) always include a reading from the Bible. Now, when it’s from the Old Testament or from one of the letters of Paul, the pastor just reads it out loud. But if it’s from one of the Gospels, he plays a video clip corresponding to the reading from one of several “video bibles” they use. I’ve noticed over the last two years that two of these video Bibles are in use, with two different actors playing Jesus.

One of these Jesuses has an American accent, and plays Jesus in a very down-to-Earth manner, always smiling a lot as he dispenses his wisdom to the flock. The other Jesus, though, has a British accent, and speaks in a much more mystical manner — in fact, the general tone of all the scenes with “British Jesus” tend to be more mystical in tone than those with “American Jesus”. I’ve also noticed that the “British Jesus” scenes always featured very beautiful and meditative music. I tried doing some Google searching to identify this production, in hopes that maybe there was a music CD out there, but no dice. (Yeah, I could have asked the Pastor directly — but if God wanted us talking to Pastors, he wouldn’t have invented Google.)

Flash forward to about six weeks ago, when I’m channel-flipping at home on a Wednesday night. I flip by that night’s episode of “LOST”, a show which I don’t watch, but my eyes were caught. There was an actor standing on the beach who looked a lot like “British Jesus” from church. (My daughter was already in bed, fortunately, thus sparing her my disconcerting yelp of “Holy Shit, there’s Jesus!”) Anyway, I watched that episode long enough to hear this guy speak, and he sure sounded like “British Jesus”. So it was off to IMDb, where I dug into the “LOST” page and found an actor named Henry Ian Cusick, whose little headshot looked Jesus-like. Following the link to Cusick’s IMDb page, I saw that he did play Jesus in “The Gospel of John”. And a little further investigation turned up a CD on Varese of the film’s haunting score by Jeff Danna.

Interestingly, the score makes extensive use of instruments existing at the time of Jesus, along with Aramaic texts. It’s interesting to compare the work of Danna to that of a Miklos Rosza, since both took great pains to extensively research their scores for films set in Biblical times, with greatly differing results.

It’s a genuinely moving score, a gem I’m very happy to have uncovered.

For what it’s worth, the American Jesus is an actor named Bruce Marchiano, who played Jesus in a Visual Bible edition of the Book of Matthew. So upon further review, it turns out that we don’t watch video clips from Mark or Luke, I guess.

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You can’t go wrong with stuff from Warren Ellis: suppose your father is buried in a cemetery, and then suppose that a developer buys the land where that cemetery is located. What happens to the body of your father when the developer decides to build something? Why, they mail it to you in a nice big box!

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