RIP auto-posting

Sometime after Sunday, I realized that my posts weren't automatically publishing to Twitter. After a bit of investigation, I learned that dlvr.it ended their free tier. Oddly enough, I was informed that my "trial" had ended, though I've been using the service for years.

Well, that's annoying. It's their business, of course, but one of my pet peeves is when long-established free services on the Internet start demanding money out of the blue.

And then I thought, "Wait a minute, I'm a programmer." Why can't I roll my own auto-poster? Polling the site and grabbing the title and URL for new posts is easy, so the only thing I really need to learn is how to access the X API. (And in so doing, I realized I'd inadvertently been "spamming" for several months, by posting substantially identical tweets to both my accounts. I'll be a bit more creative with the second cross-post, I promise!)

Not that the Faithful Readers will necessarily notice, but automatic posting will resume shortly. That is all.

2023 readiing review

2023 has come to an end. That means it's time for my year-end review of my reading hobby, my traditional first post of the new year.

My annual goal is to read 50 books of any type. Last year, I fell well short of that target. This year, on the other hand, I exceeded it, reading 70 books. That's a record, surpassing the 61 I read in 2020. According to my stats at Goodreads, by page count I've read only marginally more in 2023 than 2020. That means I've been selecting shorter titles, though for the most part not intentionally. (And not to cheat my way to meeting my goal!)

My first book this year was A Pale View of Hills by Kazuo Ishiguro, whom I resolved to read more of in 2022. During the year I also read his An Artist of the Floating World and The Remains of the Day. The last was meant to be my final novel for the year until I realized it was much shorter than I remembered. Oops.

Anyway, the last novel of 2023 is The Razor's Edge by W. Somerset Maugham. Technically, I finished it up this afternoon, but I'm not going to begrudge 2023 one last book over the last chapter. This was a re-read of a book that was required reading in my last year of high-school English. Like The Turn of the Screw a few years ago, I found I enjoyed it much more in middle age than my teenage years. Now I feel inclined to re-read and re-evaluate a lot of boring high-school literature. (The Catcher in the Rye and Heart of Darkness are still boring, though.)

The newest book I read this year was The Secret by Lee and Andrew Child, published in October. As the Jack Reacher series are the only books I make a point of reading soon after release, then unless the brothers Child change their publishing timetable or my overall reading habits evolve, this is very likely to be an annual constant.

The oldest book was, again, a play by Aphra Behn: The Dutch Lover from 1673. My original plan was to read all of Behn's plays during a year on weekend afternoons, as I had done with Shakespeare's works. I guess I'm less enthusiastic about Behn, since in nearly three years years I've managed only three out of (I believe) 18 plays. She's enjoyable, though.

My favourite book of the year? Well … The Remains of the Day has long been my favourite novel, nothing has yet displaced it, and I re-read it just this week (for the fourth time). If I leave it out of contention, however, and look at books I hadn't read before, then the nod goes instead to Stephen King's Revival, a surprisingly good horror story—surprising not because I have low expectations for King, but because his books just prior to this 2014 one were focused on crime (Mr. Mercedes, Joyland), fantasy (The Wind Through the Keyhole), and science fiction (Under the Dome), so his return to straight-up supernatural horror was a welcome one. Runner-up: An Artist of the Floating World. I'll grant this one to Ishiguro.

My least favourite of the year: Downbelow Station by C. J. Cherryh. I can't put my finger on anything particularly bad about this novel; it just failed to hold my interest. In my ongoing reading of the Hugo- and Nebula-winning novels, I was looking forward to this one, since I had read and enjoyed Cherryh's Rimrunners years ago, but Downbelow Station just didn't live up to the expectations I'd built up in my head. Your mileage may vary. Sometime in 2024 I'll also be reading a follow-up novel, Cyteen, set in the same universe as the other two, and I haven't been prejudiced against it yet. Runner-up: The Gray Man by Mark Greaney. Again, a novel that didn't live up to my expectations. It was entertaining enough to pass the time while travelling, but I thought it predictable and derivative of older thrillers such as The Bourne Identity.

The best new discovery of the year was a genre, rather than an author: the Japanese light novel. This isn't a genre that we have in the West, as such. I suppose the closest equivalent would be a young-adult series—or a comic book, if they came in prose. Near the beginning of the year, I watched the anime series Sword Art Online and Full Metal Panic!, and liked them enough to want to read the source material. I've read a handful of volumes of each series. Of the two, I enjoy the story in Full Metal Panic, written by Shōji Gatō more; but I think Sword Art Online by Reki Kawahara is better written. In fairness to both authors, I can't read Japanese, so I can't tell whether this is due to their own writing ability or the translators'. I'd never read a non-Western novel before the end of 2020, and now I've latched on to blatantly commercial Japanese juvenile fiction as a source of semi-disposable entertainment. Runner-up: The House Without a Key, the first of the Charlie Chan mystery novels by Earl Derr Biggers.

A book I finally finished: Bleak House by Charles Dickens. I visit with a friend weekly, and for many years it's been my habit on the walk back home to listen to an audiobook. In late 2019, I started Bleak House—specifically, the Librivox recording narrated by Mil Nicholson, which is excellent. Now, this is a long novel comprising 67 chapters, and my travel time was about enough for one chapter per week. And then there was the pandemic, which put a halt on those weekly sessions. Even without COVID it would have taken more than a year to finish; as it was, I finished Bleak House three years and ten months after starting. Runner-up: The Once and Future King by T. H. White, which took two years and ten months start to finish; it is, however, a series of four novels.

I aim to read five nonfiction books per year. In 2023, I read eight (and part of three more). Most of these were theology, as I have from time to time been studying issues such as Dispensationalism and neo-Pentecostalism. The best of these was No Quick Fix, by Andrew Naselli, a critique of the Keswick Holiness or “Higher Life” movement.

Finally, my reading goals for 2024 include:

• completing my chronological reading of Stephen King's books, which I began c. 2010. Including the upcoming story collection, You Like It Darker, I've got ten books left. Then I'll have nothing else to look forward to but new Stephen King novels.
• blogging a readthrough of Roger Zelazny's fantasy series, The Chronicles of Amber. I'll post more details about this in the new year.
• reading Journey to the West by Wu Cheng'en, one of the four great classical Chinese novels. This is a long one. I've read the complete works of Shakespeare, Les Misérables, The Lord of the Rings, and the Bible, and I think Journey to the West outweighs any of them. Reading it is sure to be almost as much of an epic as the story itself.

My return trip to Ottawa is the day after New Year's, and my coach reading (and very probably the first novel of 2024) will be Andrew Klavan's A Strange Habit of Mind, the second of his Cameron Winter mysteries.

Happy New Year, everyone!

Christmas movie grinchiness

I'm not a huge fan of Christmas movies. I have nothing against them, apart from the occasional overweening sentimentality. I enjoy Christmas for various reasons, but I'm not overly crazy about it, and the same goes for seasonal movies.

On the other hand, for some reason, I do enjoy trying to compile random lists of things from memory: books I read in high school, plays I've seen, things like that.

So, apropos of nothing (except that it's Christmas Eve), I thought I would try to list every Christmas movie I've seen, along with some brief comments.

Friday at home: December 15, 2023

Last week I was unexpectedly out most of the day and evening and didn't get a chance to post. This week I spent a few days under the weather and in no condition to get out of bed, let alone look at blogs.

I'm trying, honest. Next week!

2022 reading wrap-up

Every year end I like to do a roundup of my reading for the year. (Sometimes I even post them.) In 2021, I set a goal of reading 50 books, and accomplished exactly that. I was a little short of the same goal this year. I read 15. It's such an embarrassingly short list, I might as well just list the whole thing with a few comments.

Time for the annual reading in perspective post

A year ago, Kim Shay blogged a reading challenge that was suggested by one of the women in her fitness accountability group, to read 20 books in 2020, in a variety of categories. While I'm not connected to Kim or her group, nor a woman, nor fit, nor accountable, I thought the challenge sounded fun, so in addition to my regular reading, I decided to take it up as well.

Deciding what books to read for each category came fairly easily for the most part, though there was a small quantity where I hadn't made up my mind until well into the year.

• A Shakespeare play: Henry VI, Part 2. Late in 2019, I made plans to read through all of Shakespeare's plays on weekends, in their (theorized) chronological order, in 2020. I actually started during my Christmas break, reading The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Taming of the Shrew, and Henry VI, Part 1. Hence Henry VI, Part 2 was my first play of 2020. This is the best of the Henry VI trilogy, and the source of the classic (and oft-misinterpreted) line, "First thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers." (Incidentally, it's thought that Shakespeare wrote the Henry VI trilogy out of order- part 2, 1, then 3. I took the liberty of re-ordering them for my own reading.)
• A classic detective novel: The Secret Adversary by Agatha Christie. This was Christie's second mystery, following The Mysterious Affair at Styles. It introduced Tommy and Tuppence. husband-and-wife private detectives. Though they're not as well known as Christie's other creations, Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple, she published five novels featuring them. To be fair, I suppose this novel may be as much an espionage thriller as a mystery. But there was plenty of detecting.
• A classic children's book: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain. As a youngeter, I had an abridged edition of Tom Sawyer as a youngster, so while I knew all the major plot points, I'd never read the full-length novel. My original choice for this category was Treasure Island (also abridged in the same volume), which I also read this summer, but once I had settled on re-reading Huckleberry Finn (see below), reading the two books back-to-back made perfect sense.
• A contemporary novel: The Testaments by Margaret Atwood. At one point, I contemplated re-reading The Handmaid's Tale (also assigned during high school) or putting it in the "classic book by a female author" category. Either way, I was going to get to The Testaments, published in 2019. This novel takes place roughly 15 years after the events of The Handmaid's Tale. It takes the form of an epistolary novel, intertwining the testimony (or confession) of three figures: the teenage daughter of a Commander, a teenage girl living as a refugee in Canada, and Aunt Lydia, the principal antagonist of The Handmaid's Tale. Each one tell their story, hinting at the cause of the downfall of the theocratic dictatorship of Gilead. It seems to me an unnecessary sequel (perhaps intended to cash in on the success of the Handmaid's Tale TV series), but I still found it an enjoyable way to pass the time. On the other hand, the big reveals toward the end are underwhelming. Overall it was a worthy read, though I'm not sure if it was a Booker Prize-worthy one.
• A historical fiction novel: Desolation Island by Patrick O'Brian. This is the fifth book in O'Brian's series of naval adventure novels featuring Captain Jack Aubrey and his surgeon and secret-agent friend Stephen Maturin. I've been reading this series off and on over the past few years. In this novel, "Lucky Jack" receives a new command, the fourth-rated HMS Leopard, and is commanded to transport a group of prisoners to Botany Bay. A battle with a Dutch warship in the middle of the novel is absolutely gripping. The Leopard was a historical ship, though of course Jack Aubrey's command of it was fictional. It was involved in a skirmish with an American ship, resulting in an international incident that was one of the indirect causes of the War of 1812.
• An ancient Greek play: The Clouds by Aristophanes. I'm sure anyone else taking up Kim's challenge opted for a better-known drama like Oedipus Rex or Lysistrata. On the other hand, I've wanted to read The Clouds ever since reading Plato's Apology in university. Socrates may have believed that his portrayal in The Clouds, in which he is portrayed as a buffoonish swindler, contributed to the charge that he corrupted the youth of Athens, for which he was put to death. As for the play itself, it's nothing special. Apparently it wasn't well received in its own time, either. The popularity of fart jokes is as old as dirt, though.
• A collection of short stories: The Complete Stories by Flannery O'Connor. I've owned this anthology (originally published in 1970) for years, but never opened it, though my university curriculum included reading "Revelation," "Good Country People," and perhaps also "A Good Man is Hard to Find." in university. O'Connor's writing was wonderful, though her characters are ignorant, nasty, and bigoted. This was by design: she was a devout Catholic, writing about how these grotesque characters encountered divine grace.
• A biography or memoir: Jack: C. S. Lewis and His Times by George Sayer. This is another book I've owned for years and never read until now. Contrasted with A. N. Wilson's better-known, unflattering Lewis bio of 1990 (published two years later) this biography paints him in a more positive light, without glossing over his faults. Sayer was a student and personal friend. The emphasis is on Lewis' earlier life. It seemed to me that his later years, apart from his marriage to Joy Gresham, were rushed through a bit too hastily. Otherwise, this was a very good book.
• A devotional work: Morning Exercises by William Jay. Admittedly, I'm terrible at sticking with daily devotions, reading the Bible through in a year, and things like that. But at least this year I read more of Jay's book than I have in past attempts. Jay was an English Congregationalist minister in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. His morning devotions are wonderfully rich; you'd be lucky to get this level of theological depth in a contemporary devotional book.
• A book about books: What Happens in Hamlet by John Dover Wilson. Wilson was the editor of the New Cambridge Shakespeare series published by Cambridge Univeristy Press in the early 20th century. His opinions on Shakespeare, though held confidently, were frequently controversial. Why, for example, in Hamlets play-within-a-play, is Claudius spooked by the murder scene, but not the pantomime murder that precedes it? Wilson argues that implicit stage directions in the text suggest that the players bungle Hamlet's modifications to their play, threatening to give away his plan to expose Claudius as a murderer. Fortunately, Claudius, is too distracted by Hamlet's antics to notice. (The dumb-shows included with plays at the time were meant to be symbolic rather than literal; more likely, Shakespeare's intent was simply that, unlike the play itself, the dumb-show caused Claudius no concern.) Even if Wilson's opinions were often wrong, What Happens in Hamlet renains one of the most influential critical works on the play.

• A foreign (non-Western) novel: The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu, translated by Ken Liu. I'm pretty sure this is the first non-Western novel I've ever read. (In fact, I'm fairly sure my non-Western reading has been limited to the Bible and some early Christian and Jewish literature.) One of my ongoing reading projects is to read all the novels that have won the Hugo or Nebula science-fiction awards, in chronological order. This novel won the Hugo in 2015, so it was in my long-term plans to read, and I bumped it to the front of the queue. In this story, an astrophysics graduate, who fell out of political favour during the Cultural Revolution, is working as a technician at a secret SETI installation when she makes surreptitious contact with an extraterrestrial civilization on a planet with three suns, whose orbit is therefore destructive and unpredictable (the "three-body problem" of the title). It reminds me somewhat of The Gods Themselves by Isaac Asimov, which I had coincidentally been reading when I switched over to Liu's book. Both novels are about first contact with an alien species, in which the laws of physics play a major role. The Three-Body Problem is the first novel of a trilogy; I'll be sure to read the sequels sometime soon.

  My original choice for this category was Journey to the West by Wu Cheng'en, a 16th-century classic of Chinese literature—until I found out it was over 2,000 pages long. Based on my experience with the (considerably shorter!) Les Misérables, there wasn't enough free time left in the year. I may still revisit this book in the future.

• A "guilty pleasure" book: Catch-22 by Joseph Heller. My grandparents' summer cottage had a modest bookshelf, mostly of pulp novels: Ian Fleming, John D. MacDonald, Leon Uris, Galaxy science fiction, that sort of thing. At that age, most of the books there weren't of interest to me, but there were a few good ones that I made a point of reading every summer that I visited: Casino Royale and For Your Eyes Only by Fleming; The First Men in the Moon by H. G. Wells; and, of course, Catch-22. I don't know what the appeal of this WWII satire was to my 13-year-old self, but in subsequent years, I read it at least three or four times on the beach. I'm sure my older self would find most of those other books guiltily pleasing as well—why else have them at the cottage? I haven't spent a summer there in years, and my parents have since remodeled, but for all I know, all those books are still there, (Other than the Wells one—that's on my bookshelf now.)
• An intimidating book you have avoided: Bleak House by Charles Dickens. Having earned an English degree, I'm not precisely intimidated by literature. So I used this particular challenge to read one of my "cursed" books, which I've started multiple times but never gotten around to finishing. I've made at least two false starts on Bleak House. I have a weekly session with a friend on Friday nights, and I was using the walk home to listen to it in audiobook form. At roughly a chapter per week or a little more, I had planned to listen to the entire novel over the course of the year. Unfortunately, the stupid pandemic hasn't been helpful; with no reason to go out on Friday nights, I only made it through 15 of its 67 chapters. The curse remains, apparently.
• A book of essays: From Heaven He Came and Sought Her: Definite Atonement in Historical, Biblical, Theological, and Pastoral Perspective, edited by David Gibson and Jonathan Gibson. This is a selection of essays in defense of the Reformed doctrine of particular redemption, including such notable authors as Michael Haykin, Carl Trueman, Sinclair Ferguson, John Piper, and others. I worked through most of this book, occasionally reading one essay at a time; unfortunately that approach just didn't leave enough time to finish in 2020. It is, nonetheless, an excellent theological resource, though for casual reading I might have preferred something a little less scholarly. My original plan for this category was a collection by a notable literary essayist: G. K. Chesterton or Dorothy Parker, perhaps.

• A book by a minor author: Appointment in Samarra by John O'Hara. O'Hara was a bestselling author in the early 20th century, though today he's nearly forgotten. This novel's name comes from W. Somerset Maugham's version of a Middle Eastern legend about a man in Baghdad, who encounters a woman whom he recognizes as Death. He flees to Samarra to escape his fate—but, as the reader learns, Death was surprised to encounter him in Baghdad, as she was expecting to meet him later in Samarra.

  This legend is the Appointment in Samarra's epigraph. Once you grasp its significance, you'll understand that things are going to go very poorly for our protagonist. Julian English, a well-to-do car salesman, engages in three days of self-destructive behaviour over the Christmas season that ruin his business, his marriage, and his reputation. It all seems inevitable. I don't think I've ever read a much more fatalistic novel. Something by Thomas Hardy, like Jude the Obscure or Tess of the d'Urbervilles, might compete with it.

• A classic book by a female author: The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. LeGuin. This novel is about a human ambassador who attempts to establish diplomatic relations on a planet whose humanoid species is androgynous, taking on distinct sexual characteristics only at mating time. The emissary, as a human man, is regarded as perverted because his sex is immutable, leading to distrust and political intrigue.

  The Left Hand of Darkness won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards in 1970, establishing LeGuin as a major SF author. Oddly enough, for a novel considered a seminal work of feminist science fiction, the androgynous characters seem overwhelmingly masculine in their behaviour, even when they're in their androgynous form. I'll be sure to read LeGuin again: indeed, her novel The Dispossessed, which also won the Nebula and Hugo in 1974 and 1975, respectively, is on my list for this year.

• A complete volume of poetry by a single author: Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats by T. S. Eliot. While it's short (I read the whole thing in about an hour), I've wanted to read this collection of light verse for a long time, even before I was an English major. Eliot wrote these poems for his godchildren, so of course they're far more accessible than, say, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock."
• An "out of your comfort zone" book: How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi. This summer's race riots led to a surge of sales of books about anti-racism, amongst the most notable of which are Robin DiAngelo's White Fragility and this one. Books about race relations are not something I would normally bother with (excepting, perhaps, Martin Luther King's wonderful rhetoric). Kendi's book is engaging and personal. In some respects, he isn't as radical as some anti-racists: he strongly denies the currently popular canard that white people are inherently racist (which, by contrast, DiAnglelo does assert) while black people cannot be. On the other hand, he also makes ridiculous assertions: for example, that there can be only "racist" and "antiracist," and no "in-between safe space of 'not racist.'" This false dichotomy leads to the logical absurdity that I've termed Kendi's Paradox: if you take "not racist" in its clearest definition (an absence of racial prejudice), then a) someone can be simultaneously not racist and racist, and b) it is impossible to be both antiracist and not racist. That's obviously nonsense, but some of his other assertions are actually dangerous: he writes, "The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only reemedy to present discrimination is future discrimination." In other words, the only way to end racism is with more racism. How is this helpful? Kendi wants a constitutional amendment and government department of anti-racism, presumably to give his ideas the force of law. The anti-racism movement has sometimes been described as quasi-religious. Ibram X. Kendi is its chief theocrat.
• A reread through a book you read in high school: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain. This, probably the greatest American novel of all time, was part of English curriculum in grade 10. (My English teacher knew I had read it before, though, so he assigned me John Buchan's The Thirty-Nine Steps instead, to pass the time.) In addition to being, probably, the best juvenile adventure novel ever written (unless someone wants to make a case for Treasure Island), Huck Finn is probably the finest work of prose literature that I was taught in high school, at least before the grade 13 lit courses. Cue for Treason? The Catcher in the Rye? I ask you.

So by the end of 2020, I had started all 20 books in this challenge, and I finished 17. I'm going to call that a qualified success, and chalk the three incomplete books up to a combination of circumstances and poor planning. If I hadn't tried to shoehorn these selections around all my other recreational reading, I would have easily finished all of them. All in all, though, it was a fun challenge, and I read at least a few books that I otherwise might not have picked up.

This year, I'm going to set a somewhat more easygoing milestone. While I read a lot of science fiction, I don't tend to read much fantasy (apart from a semi-regular reread of The Lord of the Rings). There are some fantasy series that I've wanted to read for a long time, and this year I'm going to work my way through as much of them as possible:

• Titus Alone, the last novel of Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast trilogy
• Roger Zelazny's Chronicles of Amber
• T. H. White's The Once and Future King
• Tad Williams' Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn trilogy
• Finally, if time permits, Orson Scott Card's Tales of Alvin Maker.

But I'm going to start off 2021 the same way I've read in each new year since I discovered Lee Child back in 2012: with a Jack Reacher novel, about which (like Reacher) I will say nothing.

2019 in books

2019 ended for me pretty much as it began: reading airport thrillers on a Greyhound. I started the year with a Jack Reacher novel between Sudbury and Ottawa. I (almost) ended it on the way back reading The Institute by Stephen King. In between (and shortly after), I read 33 other books in 2019. While this falls short of my intended annual goal of 50 books, I managed to read a lot more titles than in previous years since I started tracking my reading. Usually I manage somewhere in the mid-20s.

(I think, in fact, The Institute is the only thing I read this past year that was actually published in 2019, which is kind of ironic for a post titled "2019 in Books.")

Here are some of the highlights of my reading pursuits.

So . . .

-

I just happened to notice that while I've been keeping the reading log on the sidebar up-to-date, more or less, I haven't been too bothered of late to write anything here.

Of course, there was never a conscious decision to give up blogging. Other things just got in the way. In the 18 months and change since my last post, I've returned to school and since graduated with a two-year diploma in computer programming. So I've written hundreds of lines of Java and Python code, if not thousands, but not a line of English for this blog.

In the meantime, since my last post on this blog, I've also discovered the serenity Minecraft. So I've recreationally and virtually laid tens of thousands of blocks of dirt and stone constructing Asian-themed buildings, but not a single block of text for the Crusty Curmudgeon.

Of course, I remain ever hopeful that my personal recreational life will return to its old normal in the new year. I can't promise new posts every day like when the blog was at its peak, but I can probably promise something. Maybe jump-starting Saturday Superman or my lightning book reviews will be the tonic I need. We'll see. Until next time.

The glory of the LORD shall be revealèd

Every Christmas, I make a point of listening to George Frideric Handel's great oratorio, Messiah. So do many people. If you live in a large enough city, you could potentially attend a performance several times each December. And because of Messiah's lengthy performance history (and Handel's habit of modifying the score to suit his performers), the variations are endless: modern or period instruments, professional or amateur soloists, mass choirs or small ensembles—to say nothing of the extensive catalogue of recordings! A more recent tradition is the "sing-along Messiah," in which the choir invites the audience to bring their own scores and sing with them. Paradoxically, this makes the oratorio one of Western art's highest achievements, as well as one of its most accessible.

Messiah is a Christmas institution. So it may come as a surprise to many that its first performance—a benefit in Dublin, Ireland, for the relief of prisoners' debt—took place in April, 1742. (The performance was a success, raising enough money to release 142 debtors from prison.) Its official debut in London took place the following March. Handel himself never had Messiah performed at Christmas; it was for the Easter season. Only the first of Messiah's three parts deals with the birth and ministry of Jesus, telling of the promise of judgment, redemption, and salvation through selected Old Testament passages as well as the birth narrative from the Gospel of Luke. Most of the best-known selections come from Part 1, likely because of its association with Christmas.

However, Part 2 tells of Christ's passion, his death and resurrection, his ascension into heaven, and his glorification. It continues by speaking of the beginning of the spread of the Gospel, and its rejection by the world. It culminates in the "Hallelujah" chorus, which declares the absolute sovereignty of God:

Alleluia: for the Lord God omnipotent reigneth. (Revelation 16:9)

The kingdoms of this world are become the kingdoms of our Lord, and of his Christ; and he shall reign for ever and ever. (Revelation 11:15)

The words are so closely associated with the "Hallelujah" chorus that you probably think of the music while you're reading them. We hear this chorus every Christmas, but it rightly belongs to Easter! The meaning of Messiah is not "for unto us a child is born"; it's that He is "King of kings and Lord of lords." Hallelujah!

Finally, Part 3 promises eternal life, the Day of Judgment, and the final destruction of sin and death. The oratorio concludes with the exaltation of the Messiah:

Worthy is the Lamb that was slain, and hath redeemed us to God by his blood, to receive power, andriches, and wisdom, and strength, and honour, and glory, and blessing.

Blessing and honour, glory and power, be unto him that sitteth upon the throne, and unto the Lamb, for ever and ever.

Amen. (cf. Revelation 5:9,12-14)

Even less commonly known, perhaps, is that Messiah is as much an apologetic work as it is an artistic one. The libretto (text) was composed by Charles Jennens, Handel's friend and frequent collaborator. Jennens was a devout Christian who was concerned about the rise in popularity of Deism amongst England's intelligentsia. Deism is a philosophical theism that rejects divine revelation as a source of knowledge, concluding that human reason alone is sufficient to establish the existence of a deity. When God created the universe, He established natural laws for its running, but He does not involve himself in its activity. Jennens' brother had lost his faith and committed suicide after corresponding with a Deist. Grieving for his brother, Jennens composed the libretto to Messiah as a response to Deism, compiling Scripture after Scripture from the King James Version of the Bible (paraphrasing here and there) to show that Christ was the promised Messiah and that God took an active interest in the redemption of the world. Jennens was reportedly less than satisfied with Handel's score (which he composed in less than a month), complaining that some parts were "far unworthy of Handel, but much more unworthy of the Messiah." The judgment of history has, perhaps, been more favourable.

My favourite selection from Messiah takes its text from Isaiah 40:5:

And the glory of the LORD shall be revealed; and all flesh shall see it together: for the mouth of the LORD hath spoken it.

The last phrase is drawn out in long, solemn notes that underscore its significance. It is immediately followed by a bass solo that thunders out: "Thus saith the LORD of hosts" (Haggai 2:6). Jennens draws out the story of Jesus almost entirely from the Old Testament, primarily the prophet Isaiah, drawing from the Gospels only for the annunciation of Jesus' birth to the shepherds by the angles (Luke 2:8-14). The Creator is no mere spectator, and this birth is no mere accident of history. The mouth of the Lord has spoken it; therefore, it has come to pass.

There is a strong relationship between good art and a good message. I have met many Christians who can appreciate many kinds of mediocre art as long as they mention Jesus enough times and are helpful for sharing the Gospel. Yet, in Messiah, a devout Lutheran composer has created one of the acknowledged masterpieces of the Western musical canon, listened to by millions every Christmas. Thanks to his friend, a devout Anglican with a concern for the spiritual state of England, those millions flock into auditoriums and churches willingly to hear the Gospel sung to them.

I wrote last Christmas about why the Incarnation is important. Only God, taking on true humanity, could atone for the sins of, and intercede for, the human race. Without that first Christmas, when "God sent forth his son, born of a woman, born under the law" (Galatians 4:4), there would be no Easter—no cross to free us from the penalty of the law. But Charles Jennens and George Handel were right to focus on the work of Christ on the cross, and the blessings that result from it. Without the hope of Easter, there would be no joy at Christmas.

September means back down to earth

Welcome to September, everyone!

If you've kept up reading this blog for more than a few years, you know what September means: it's time for my 12th annual Science Fiction Free September. Back in September 2004, I decided that I spent too much of my reading time with science fiction, so I declared a month-long moratorium on the genre, and instead used the time for something I might not read otherwise: classic literature, nonfiction, maybe just even a bunch of books I had started but never got around to finishing. (This year to date I've read three SF novels—about half what I've read in nonfiction. As the years go by the SFFS has either outlived or fulfilled its purpose, but I keep it up anyway, just for fun!)

This year, my big September reading project will be themed around the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II. My primary objective is to complete a very long book that I have had for a number of years, but never gotten farther in than, perhaps, one-tenth. This book is the blockbuster history of Nazi Germany, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, by CBS war correspondent William L. Shirer. This is a popular history rather than an academic one. Shirer was present in Berlin from the Nazis' coming to power to the first year of WWII, when he left after he heard that the Gestapo was trumping up espionage charges against him.

I actually started two days ago, since my last book finished up conveniently on Saturday night (Dolores Claiborne, the latest in my read-all-the-way-through-Stephen-King project). By page count, I am now 2% of the way in, and if I can figure out how to HTML-ize a progress bar, I'll add it to the sidebar.

At ths time I have no secondary objectives, but there's no shortage of unread books in my collection, so I'm sure I'll work something out.

Friday in the wild: October 3, 2014

I haven't done a Friday in the Wild for a few weeks, so while it might look like I'm playing catch-up, it is in fact a doozy of a week. Lots of interesting stuff to share. So, without further ado:

Come Reason posted this about the rise in relativism in Christian youth:

This kind of thinking is how tyranny is born. If one cannot tell another his actions are evil, then they will continue until those that would dare to oppose immorality are themselves labelled as immoral. . . . And now, the kids we send to college hold not the belief that they cannot stand their moral ground, but that they should not stand their moral ground, because to do so is itself an immoral act!

[Read The Epidemic of Relativism Among Christian Youth]

Woe unto anyone who declares woe unto anyone.

The anniversary and the moratorium

Welcome to September 4. This is the official 11th anniversary of this blog—though it was actually created in July of 2003, the first post went up in September. This has traditionally also been the date on which I rolled out a new look for the Crusty Curmudgeon, though this is something I've done very little of in recent years. Ever since they rolled out Blogger 2.0 some years ago, re-skinning a Blogger blog has meant more than just writing up a new HTML template and style sheet. I already know what I want the next iteration of the CC to look like, and plan on learning the new language. Sometime.

September 4 is one of two times of the year that I tend to reflect on the state of the blog, the other being New Year's Day. Usually I don't have much to say in September, either than that my writing hasn't been as prolific as I hoped, but I expect to get better, and despite my decreased output, I'm not going anywhere just yet. So, by way of my twice-yearly status updates: Unfortunately, my blogging hasn't been as prolific as I would like (though it has increased recently), I expect to post more in coming weeks, and despite my decreased output, the Crusty Curmudgeon is not dead yet. So there.

F5 #4: Writer's block

Yes, not only am I late, I'm so late (How late was he?) that I'm writing the last post of February a week into March.

Well, I began this year's F⁵ theme, pet hates, with good intentions: spend the month when I'm most personal on the blog talking about things I dislike, rather than things I like. I had a pretty good idea what I wanted to say for the first three weeks of February. But I never came up with a fourth topic. My most hated books, music, or movies? Wouldn't know; never had to read, listen to, or watch them. I don't waste time disliking what I don't have to be exposed to.

Which leads me to believe that I'm a lot less cynical or curmudgeonly than I thought. In that case, perhaps I'll just voluntarily close the series off a little early this year, and start thinking about next time. No one's keeping score, right?

On the other hand: I really, really hate not knowing what to say.

F5 #3: Can't we all just get along?

I come to this week's F⁵ installment with six words on my mind: "Judge not, lest ye be judged." All of us are both capable and guilty of doing very irritating things, and I'm sure that if someone else were writing up this blog post, I'd see myself as, in part, the object of their ire. (Let's get pet peeve #1 out of the way: procrastinators. Though it's back-dated on the blog, I'm writing my obligatory February Friday post on Saturday afternoon.)

We have etiquette for a reason. It helps us get along with each other in company. Some past societies have taken the rules of etiquette to a ridiculous extreme, but the point was the same: the art of courtesy and politeness makes our social interactions go a lot more smoothly.

F5 #2: Are you gonna eat that? ('Cause I'm not.)

Today is, of course, Valentine's day. Legends about who exactly St. Valentine (or Valentinus) was, are many and conflicting. Some say that he was a priest who refused to stop marrying Christians. Others say he was martyred for attempting to convert the Roman emperor Claudius. I choose to believe that, given the choice between dying for his faith at the hands of the Romans, and facing his girlfriend after he failed to get dinner reservations, he chose the easy way out.

So, in honour of the hardest day of the year to eat out, I present my second pet hate of 2014: the three foods on my "do not serve" list. Note that this isn't quite an absolute list: while under no circumstances would I ever voluntarily serve these abominations to myself, I'm too polite to refuse them if I'm served them as a guest. Usually. And I probably won't look happy.

F5 the Sixth: #1: English as she is spoke

Here we go again. Four Fridays of February means four further F⁵s: Four February Fridays of Fabulous Frivolity.

And, one major headache. This is the sixth time that I have done this blog tradition, in which I extol the virtues of my loves, likes, favourites, guilty pleasures, and bad habits. Over the years I've covered such eclectic topics as shaving habits, preferred aftershaves, fountain pens, Godzilla, Doctor Who, wine, spicy foods, Arnold Schwarzenegger, William Shakespeare, Buffalo wings, 80s pop music, James Bond, coffee, and comic books. That's a somewhat fair snapshot of the simple pleasures I enjoy, so it's actually getting harder to come up with new ideas, unless you want to read me extolling the virtues of, say, tasty ice water, or why spiral-bound books are better than Cerlox.

So I thought that this year I'd do something different this year, and talk about my favourite pet hates. I don't mean the things that I genuinely and deeply loathe, like abortion or Scientology^TM. Rather, I mean pet peeves, or severe annoyances: the things that bug me to no end.

Being a writer by profession, I thought I'd start off with bad writing.

Ten years later . . .

Yesterday marked the tenth anniversary of the first post on the Crusty Curmudgeon. I'm posting less, and probably less interesting, but unlike the vast majority of blogs, arguably, I'm still kicking.

It's hard to say what the primary fuel is for the slowdown in posting frequency. First, I'd chalk it up to a change in employment back in 2006, which reduced the amount of free time I had for blogging, as well as the time for reading, listening, or viewing anything that I might be interested in writing about.

Second, there are a lot of different venues now for venting that weren't around in 2003. I used to "bank" two or three news articles that I wanted to comment on, for a single post. Now, I can just make an off-the-cuff comment on Twitter or Facebook. So it's less that I'm not saying as much, as that I'm spreading it out over multiple services.

Third, I'm just lazy. Why write a 1,200-word blog post when I can just sit back and watch a bad old monster movie?

Nonetheless: I'm still here, the Crusty Curmudgeon is still live, and I'm not going anywhere soon. In fact I've got a few lengthy things to put up before the end of the year. More than anything, I guess I'm surprised that the weblog has survived for this long, essentially unchanged in its format since the early 2000s. Who knows what the Crusty Curmudgeon will be in 2023?

Who in Xenu's name is FanBox, and why are they annoying me?

Over the last couple of weeks, I've frequently been getting emails from an outfit called "FanBox," claiming to be a "daily earnings statement" of an incrementally large sum from day to day. (It started at about $8.00 and currently stands at about $75.)

This just in: As I was writing this, I received a new "statement" to the tune of $82.21. Huzzah!

As these messages go, I've earned this wallet-bursting packet by "Boosting," i.e. funding other people's ads and getting money when they're clicked on.

Today, however, I received something a little more ominous: a "Courtesy notice" from "FanBox Customer Protection," informing me that:

I noticed that your FanBox account is not protected, despite your sizable earnings of $82.21.

I strongly recommend that you protect your funds by validating your account immediately. [link redacted]

If you need assistance, chat with a community expert.

-Maria Ashford, Customer Protection Team FanBox – Uplifting humanity by enabling opportunity

So, basically, I'm in danger of losing phantom money that I've earned for phantom services on a phantom FanBox account that I never created, but now need to "validate."

Amazingly, someone has to be falling for this stuff, if it's profitable enough for them to persistently send out all this spam. What really annoys me is that at some time I must have accidentally clicked on a link in an email I didn't realize was a spam message—something I'm usually very careful about, since this is exactly the sort of thing I don't want.

Arrrgh.

F5 #4: Look! Up in the sky!

I've always been a big fan of comic books, which is kind of paradoxical, because I read relatively few of them (maybe a couple of dozen, tops) as a child, and my knowledge of comic-book superheroes came more from Saturday-morning cartoons than the pages of Action Comics or The Amazing Spider-Man. On the other hand, I did read a fair number of the kinds of comics that were published as books rather than magazines—such as Tintin or Asterix&mdash (both of which I also read in the original French in high school, as a way to improve my French comprehension)—and I got interested in graphic novels while I was in university.

Comic books were marketed to people of my age back when I was 10 or 11, and they are still marketed to people of my age today—that is to people who grew up reading them when I was young. The maturity and complexity of the stories has also increased proportionately. No matter where you go, they're still age-appropriate! (And even if they weren't, I've never been ashamed of reading well-written juvenile fiction, anyway.)

So, to close off this year's installment of F⁵, here are:

My Four Favourite . . . Comic Book Superheroes

• Superman: The hands-down winner. But you've already probably figured that out from my regular Saturday posts. Superman is the prototypical superhero: the first, for example, to wear a fancy costume (modeled after a circus strongman's outfit) instead of the trenchcoat and mask worn by the other mystery men of the day. In fact, I actually prefer the Golden Age Superman somewhat, when his abilities were nowhere near the godlike powers he needs today to save the world from cosmic foes. There was a time when he beat up hoods instead of Darkseid.
• Firestorm: A nuclear accident fused teenage jock Ronnie Raymond and nuclear physicist Martin Stein into a single entity, who is capable of re-organizing matter at the atomic level. Because Professor Stein was unconscious during the accident, he can only provide advice while Ronnie controls Firestorm's body. The high point of the series was the dialogue between them; humour was a major component of the comic despite its full title of The Fury of Firestorm. Different characters have joined or left the Firestorm persona as the comic series developed; I preferred the original lineup of Ronnie and Stein, though the current "New 52" team of Ronnie and Jason Rusch does have its moments. When I first read Firestorm back in the early 1980s, he didn't have a monthly title of his own: he was, in fact, the B story in . . .
• The Flash: As a kid, the Scarlet Speedster was always my favourite "guest" superhero on The Super Friends. The Barry Allen version of the Flash is arguably the first superhero of the Silver Age, coming on the scene in the late 1950s. As a general rule, my favourite incarnation of any given hero is the one from the Silver Age (Superman excepted), and that's certainly true in this case, too. However, give Barry the costume of Jay Garrick's Golden-Age Flash, and you'd really have something.
• Iron Man: Yes, although clearly I prefer DC superheroes, there is one Marvel character on the list: Tony Stark, billionaire playboy and genius inventor, who fights crime in a high-tech armour suit. I was almost entirely unfamiliar with Iron Man prior to the 2008 movie, which has since become one of my favourite superhero films. I'm looking forward to this year's Iron Man 3 if only because Shell-Head finally squares off against the most significant rogue in his gallery: the Mandarin.

And that is that for another February of Fridays. Until next year, we return to the blog's usual fare of stupid criminals, drunk moose, and monkeys. Heh.

F5 #3: In which I get needlessly commercial

When I do this F⁵ series, they have a general tendency to follow a recurring pattern: movies, music, books food, though perhaps not in that order. I'm pretty sure I've never just listed a bunch of addresses of a café chain for kicks, so this is perhaps one of the quirkiest things I've ever posted to the blog. But it's partly about food (and so it sticks to the pattern), and it's also about me (and so it sticks to the purpose).

I began drinking coffee in my late teens—perhaps around 17. (I'd already been drinking tea for a few years). Living in a small town with limited opportunities, my options were whatever I could make myself (usually instant) or what I could buy in a spare period from the school cafeteria, which, suprisingly, wasn't that bad. When I moved to the city for university, I was almost turned off coffee entirely, thanks to the horrible, tar-like substance dispensed by my residence's dining room. As a classmate once remarked to me, the real advantage of residence coffee was that you could drink a cup in the morning, and if you felt drowsy during class, just lick some off the roof of your mouth later.

In fairly short order, two things redeemed coffee for me: I discovered Tim Hortons coffee (unavailable to me in my teens), and also how to make my own coffee properly, out of ground beans. I soon wanted to try something other than the usual medium roast found in donut shops, or canned grounds from the supermarket. Also, the coffee shops around campus sold flavoured coffee, something not widely available in bean form outside of specialty shops. (But try and find raspberry chocolate or orange brandy coffee today!) So it's no surprise that I soon found myself shopping at Second Cup for my beans—and, when I wasn't living around the corner from one at school, frequently sitting in one.

So, without further ado, I present . . .