Icon Pie

At last night's dinner in Waterman (with apologies if I got the exact wording of this wrong):

Laura: [brings out the lemon meringue pie and sets it on the table]
Paul: [gets down on his knees before the pie]
Laura: "Paul -- get up. Stop worshiping the pie."
Paul: "I'm not worshiping it. I'm adoring it."
Laura: "So stop adoring it, then."
Paul: "But it's not an idol, you see...it's an icon!"
Laura: "Paul..."
Marie: "He's right! You've taken things that are good, and made them into something very good!"
Paul: "I'm looking through it! And this pie definitely shows me something of the glory of God."
Laura: [mumbles profound disagreement with the whole thing]
Everyone: [eats pie]

Which was probably only uproariously funny to us because we'd just had Aiden Hart (an famous English iconographer) come through and give a couple lectures. Still...'twas fun.

Walks and Such

I like crisp, gray, cloudy days. And night time. And rain. And taking long walks outside in any combination of the above.

So if you see me with sniffles and a cough and a cold at some point, this is probably why. :-)

Yay Seven Hours of Swing Over the Weekend

I now know enough Lindy to teach my sisters some basic stuff when I go back home for Thanksgiving. 'Twill be quite fun. (The lead steps BACKWARD at the beginning of BOTH sections! Transitions into Lindy from East-Coast happen on the 5-6-7-8! RIGHT FOOT (backwards!) after the triple step! "rock-step triple-step 5 6 triple-step!"). Though really...the super-good people don't seem to worry about any of that. They just get the 1-2 on the beat, and do nutso stuff for the rest of it.

I would love to be able to show said sisters some of the more complicated turns, but I still have to solidify my following on those before I can lead them.

Lindy is much more fun than east coast. Far more momentum; far better counterweight and tension. At least when you're comparing both of them on the basic level.

Leading is hard on the right hand. Lots of support and catching happens with it.

What I should really be doing is getting down the waltz steps, as I'll actually be tested on those for an actual class. But I get the lead and follow terribly confused when I do so...and Lindy is a lot more fun.

Snippets of the Good Side of Hillsdale

Because for all it's nutso problems, there's plenty of reasons why I'm sticking around up here.

Discussing the book Amusing the Million (about Coney Island) in HIS 307:

Dr. Kalthoff: "Well...Americans have NEVER been particularly good about philosophizing, about thinking deeply about things. We're a very practically oriented people. This, I would venture, is very closely tied to our frontier founding -- if a pioneer finds a river in the middle of his path, he's not going to sit there and write a poem about walking through the forest. He just wants to figure out how to get across the damn river!

But when the time comes that we can reflect, when we can read Plato and Virgil and what have you, we're not able to. If we can't find a practical, utilitarian purpose for something, we're liable to just dismiss it as useless And saying "you're improving your soul, living up to your potential as a human being made in the image of God" -- huh??? What's that mean? Where's the cash?"

Dan: "I worked third shift this summer at a factory, making boxes. And honestly...by the time I was done, I just wanted to get wasted. The last thing I wanted to was read Plato, or go to a symphony -- not that the symphony opens at midnight, but still..."

Guy-whose-name-I-don't-know: "With agricultural production there's also the sense of bringing order out of chaos. Something you don't get with industrial work, maybe."
Dan: "Hey -- you start with flat sheets of cardboard, and they become boxes! What are you talking about?"

Dan: [some comment about how the reformers had a bit of a vested interest in making the city life work; if they could alleviate the problem enough to keep the status quo, they could keep their own privileged position in society]
Dr. Kalthoff: "That's probably the most cynical interpretation you can give to it...but often cynicism is the right response to reality."


And Fairfield Society was pretty cool this week, too. Basically another discussion about iconoclastic views of God. And some rather funny stuff as well:

Dan S.: "When I tell people I'm studying 'death of God' literature and philosophy, the first response is overwhelmingly negative. But if people actually took a look at some of this, what it's actually about, they'd realize that a) they're either already in the process of doing it themselves, or b) that they ought to be doing it. If you've got the same picture of God you had in kindergarten, something's wrong, there."

Dr. Reist: "So -- what I'm wondering is...how come we never hear about this kind of stuff in the Hillsdale commencement addresses?"
Dan S. "It doesn't get us any donors?"

And there followed much uproarious and knowing laughter.

Stupid Politicized Public Image of My College...

Fun Hillsdale fact of the day (which-you'd-never-learn-from-reading-our-fundraising-propaganda): The Hillsdale Democrats number 50 members. They still need to get some better slogans...Chesterton on progressivism would generally go over better up here than Lennon's "Imagine." (I like Dr. Wyatt-Hayes's office door). But otherwise, go them, especially for trying to get a speaker to come in to talk about Hillsdale County poverty.

I am getting irked by politics and Hillsdale again. When I say "I go to Hillsdale" -- what does everyone think of? POLITICS. Why is it that we can't get any grand publicity and promotion of our history and English departments, our conservative ecumanism, or our honors program? Why is it always "yay conservative politics!" Thank God that ideologism has pretty much confined itself to the economics and poly-sci departments -- but it would be nice if they weren't the only facet of Hillsdale that got all the publicity and attention.

Worldbuilding and Single Sunrises

OK. This thing has been bugging me on and off for about two weeks now.

No matter how incredible the "what if there was a world that only had one sunrise [for hundreds of generations]" idea is...I can't think of a way to make it plausible. Or, even if you could, you certainly couldn't have people "lined up on the eastern horizon" to watch it.

I'm not a science or math kind of person, so maybe I'm dead wrong about all this. And if you can think of a way to make it work, I'd really love to know. I've just kept coming up with dead ends.

Por ejemplo...

• Assuming that the inhabitants of this world are natives to that world, they'll have lived hundreds/thousands of years in darkness. Their eyes and such will be adapted to/created for that kind of world. They won't be able to handle the piercing brightness of a sunrise.
  
• And what would happen to the plant life of the planet? You'd end up with something of a wasteland, I'd think, when the sun came around.
  
• Exactly how slowly would this planet have to rotate? Can planets rotate that slowly?
  
• What sort of whacked out weather and temperature conditions would this planet have? And what sort of atmosphere would be necessary to prevent super-extreme hot and super-extreme cold?

I'll give Dr. Root credit for a wondrously glorious and inspiring image. But I can't make the stupid thing work!

Would transplanted humans solve some of the problems? What if the sun came around at regular intervals (albeit super-longly-spaced ones)? Could everything be like the 13-year cicadas? It would have to be more like 1300 years, but it might be a possibility. What if this hypothetical world were flat? The scenario would actually make a bit more sense. Sort of.

The best solution I can think of is to roll with the absurdities of the matter, and push the thing REALLY far into the realm of fantasy. The earth is flat. The sun circles it. People survive. Plants survive. Why? Who cares? It's the way this place works. Our natural laws don't apply in these cases. Deal.

Lewis wrote Narnia as a flat world. So it's not impossible to pull of. And Lim has some even crazier worldbuilding going on here. And Martin has his non-sensical 30-100 year seasons. Maybe there's a bit of hope for it. :)