Awww.

Just because I'm in a sentimental mood: here's a cute video of Laura Bush's new puppy, Miss Beazley, being bad.

Only 355 shopping days until Christmas

If you're wondering what to get for a tecnical writer in need, consider this:

MEETINGS will never be boring again. A high-tech pair of spectacles that allows the wearer to turn one of the lenses into a personal DVD screen is to go on sale in America after appearing at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week.

The French-designed glasses, called the Eyetop DVD, can also be used on public transport or at long, boring family gatherings. It comes with headphones, a portable DVD player with rechargeable battery and a carrying bag. The price has yet to be decided.

[Full Story]

Now there's a gadget I can get behind. In fact I have been hoping someone would come up with the idea for some time. Who cares about the size of your TV when you can practically beam a movie right onto your retina?

This, on the other hand, I'm not so keen on:

[Bill] Gates will also construct a “home of the future” in the car park of the conference. The so-called NextGen05 Demonstration House will feature lighting, climate control and a security system that can all be operated via a single remote control — or a computer loaded with Windows Media Centre software.

Yeah. I'm going to trust my home security to a Microsoft product. Talk about taking the "back door security alert" to the next level.

And now . . . this

A twofer from a pair of useless attention whores. First, guess who's back?

Dr. Michael Newdow, the California atheist who sued to get "under God" removed from the Pledge of Allegiance, says he has refiled a suit regarding the pledge and filed an additional suit to try to prevent members of the clergy from praying at President Bush's inauguration. . . .

In the new case, Newdow has been joined in the suit by three families who include atheists and claim they are offended "to have their government and its agents advocating for a religious view they each specifically decry."

[Full Story]

I guess if you don't like it, change the channel only works when it's the secular brownshirts telling other people what to do when they take offense. It doesn't count when the shoe is on the other foot.

Meanwhile, another California nitwit gets delusions of grandeur:

Actor Richard Gere has recorded a TV commercial urging Palestinians to vote in their election Sunday.

In a transcript obtained by The Associated Press, he said: "Hi, I'm Richard Gere, and I'm speaking for the entire world. We're with you during this election time. It's really important: Get out and vote."

[Full Story]

Hi, Richard Gere, I'm Scott McClare, and I speak for the entire universe. Shaddap!

You have to get up pretty early in the morning to fool the authorities

An Indian helicopter dropping food and water over the remote Andaman and Nicobar Islands has been attacked by tribesmen using bows and arrows.

There were fears that the endangered tribal groups had been wiped out when massive waves struck their islands.

But the authorities say the attack is a sign that they have survived.

[Full Story] (emphasis added)

Why do I let myself get dragged into these things?

Dave Armstrong is a Roman "Catholic" apologist. One of his more recent efforts is a newly published book titled The Catholic Verses: 95 Bible Passages That Confound Protestants: 95 supposed proof-texts that we Protestants can't handle.

In my experience, whenever someone claims to have an unanswerable argument, it isn't long before it is, in fact, answered. So I can't say I'm surprised to see James White begin to respond to Armstrong's claims. (White's blog makes use of blog categories, but at this point he seems to be applying them somewhat inconsistently. Nonetheless, a good bit of the DA material appears under the Roman Catholic category, so it's a good start.)

Then the meltdown started.

DA declared that he had had enough and wasn't going to argue with anti-Catholics any more. Complaining about the tone of the debate, he listed a number of "personal attacks" that he had endured. The problem is, none of them were in fact personal attacks.

An ad hominem argument is one in which the person rather than his point is attacked. For example:

• "John Smith is an idiot; don't listen to him" is ad hominem. It is personal abuse.
• "John Smith is no different from the people he criticizes" is ad hominem. It is a tu quoques (Latin for "you're another").
• "John Smith disagrees with me here, but he agrees with me there, there, there, and there" is ad hominem: an accusation of inconsistency.
• "If John Smith really believed this, he wouldn't have said that" is ad hominem: an accusation of irrationality.
• "John Smith is an anti-Catholic, and you know how they are" is ad hominem. It "poisons the well" by associating Smith with something bad.

And so forth. There are multiple forms of the ad hominem fallacy.

On the other hand, saying that Dave Armstrong "doesn't even seem to understand what would be necessary for him to establish such a claim," as I quoted James White from DA's complaint page, is not an ad hominem. It says that DA's argumentation, not his person, is lacking - not that he is stupid, or that he does what he accuses others of, or that he is inconsistent or irrational or runs with the wrong crowd.

So, after having pointed out the obvious myself, one thing led to another and I found myself the privileged recipient of a trademarked Armstrong bloviated response,¹ pointing out the many times that James White had, in fact, used an ad hominem argumentation. Disregarding the fact that out of about a dozen citations, only one of them was a clear-cut case of ad hominem, DA completely missed my point: that what he was billing as a "personal attack" was not, in fact, a personal attack.

What really gets DA going, I think, is that not only is White answering his "unanswerable" 95 proof-texts, but he's making it look easy and showing up DA's shoddy methodology to boot. So DA's packed up his ball and gone home.

¹ Now that is an ad hominem argument.

Name that tune

There's a game going around the LiveJournal blogs: you set your MP3 player (or whatever) to shuffle play, then post random lyrics from the first 20 songs. As readers guess what the songs are, they're struck off the list.

Not only does a game like this satisfy my obsession with lists, not to mention my interest in music, but I kind of like the look of short lyrical fragments taken out of context. (I use them for font samples, for example.)

So here's my 20 songs. Hints: iTunes' Party Shuffle feature was using my 80's Hits playlist, and I edited out any repeat artists. Have fun.

1. where's the streetwise Hercules to fight the rising odds?
2. but I know the reason why you keep this silence up
3. maybe I just wouldn't know what to do with my strength anyway
4. and you can act real rude or totally removed and I can act like an imbecile
5. the music makes you groove through the night
6. either I'm wrong or I'm perfectly right every time
7. I feel tragic like I'm Marlon Brando
8. got a lion in my pocket and baby he's ready to roar
9. never understood, never had a thing to prove
10. I'll take any risk to tie back the hands of time
11. just like a rainbow you know you set me free
12. people in the park playing games in the dark
13. there was a woman in the jungle and a monkey on a tree
14. get angry at the weekend then go back to school
15. like a Philistine we're burning witches too
16. a skill I needed to have to be a survivor
17. my heart's staying where my heart belongs
18. strange is your language and I have no decoder
19. the golden dance life could be
20. when you fake it's hard to tell

2005 predictions (Or, blatant Carnival-bait)

(Wow, some original title, eh?)

I have been sitting out of the Christian Carnival for about the last month. Christian Carnival 51 (which I would abbreviate as "CCLI" except then I would have hordes of lawyer-toting Christian artists banging on my door) is being hosted at Weapons of Mass Distraction. This being the first carnival of 2005, the host asked contributors to consider making some predictions for the next year.

I'm certainly no prophet, or even much of a pundit. I pay far less attention to the news than even I would like to. No doubt about half my readers are going to think this is about the most naïve thing they've ever read, and the other half will think they're pretty unoriginal. So be it. Nothing ventured, nothing gained, right? These are the sorts of stories I expect to see in the news over the next 362 days, extrapolating from what I have personally observed over the last year or so.

In the world:

• The secular Scrooges get a lot of press every Christmas season for their attempts to squash every last vestige of Chrsitianity out of December 25, but it seemed to me that the exposure was a lot higher this year. For 2005, I predict a major backlash against the ACLU, Americans United for Separation, and their ilk, as Christians and others get fed up with being told to keep their beliefs out of the public square. Remember a few years back when a graduating student brought a lawsuit against the high school that resulted in an injunction against an invocation at the commencement ceremony? Another student who was to deliver a speech that evening staged a sneeze, and a number of students who were in on the stunt replied, "God bless you!" thereby circumventing the court order and thumbing their nose at it. That kind of backlash, orders of magnitude larger.
• The election in Iraq will go ahead as scheduled, but it won't be pretty. Whatever the outcome, I predict a lot of violence leading up to, and during, the election, and afterwards, as insurgentsterrorists continue to attempt to destabilize the country.
• At least one of President Bush's Cabinet or Supreme Court nominees is going to get Borked, big time.
• Here at home, the passing of legislation legalizing same-sex "marriage" is a foregone conclusion, but at a price to the minority Liberal government. I expect to see at least a few defections from Paul Martin's Cabinet, and possibly a few members actually crossing the floor over this. This issue is going to weaken the Martin government. (This is also the first year in a long time in which a minority government tabled a budget. For those unfamiliar with a parliamentary system of government, this is the most important legislation of the year, and a defeat of the budget is a vote of no confidence in the government, forcing the dissolution of Parliament. To pass this year's budget, the Liberals need around 20 more votes than they have seats.)
• Generally speaking, same-sex "marriage" will continue to be the main battleground on which the culture wars will be fought this year.

In the church:

• If same-sex "marriage" remains a hot-button topic, then Bible-believing churches are going to start to examine their relationship with the state as the line between politics and religion becomes blurred from the secular side. Notwithstanding the fact that there are plenty of mainline churches more than happy to solemnize such a union, I see the possibility that someone will try to sue to compel a clergyman of their choice to do so. (Whether they will prevail is another question, particularly in Canada where supposedly the proposed legislation specifically exempts clergy from this obligation.)
• Judging by the way the issue is heating up amongst the Godbloggers, the whole Emergent Church thing will start to look less like a fad and more like a full-blown theological controversy, as more people read and scrutinize what its leaders believe and stand for.
• While Open Theism remains an important controversy, the furor that culminated in the controversy over Pinnock and Sanders in the ETS has largely died down. The justification/imputation/"New Perspective on Paul" controversy will cease to be an in-house debate between professional theologians and interested by-standers, and take its place as a front-burner issue.

But most importantly: "the word of the Lord spread widely and grew in power" (Acts 19:20). This is, as it has always been, inevitable. Soli Deo gloria.

Sacra Eloquia is live

Not much to see yet, but my parallel theological blog Sacra Eloquia is open for business.

If you are using Internet Exploder as your browser, you may note a number of technical deficiencies. If you're well versed in HTML/XHTML and CSS, I'd love your assistance making it look consistent across browsers. The look in Firefox is the norm.

All my reviews - the master list

Books

• Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly (2008/12/30)
• Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (2010/10/03)
• Tom Clancy, Dead or Alive (2012/01/15)
• Simon Clark, Night of the Triffids (2004/10/15)
• Arthur C. Clarke, The Fountains of Paradise (2023/08/22)
• Arthur C. Clarke, Rendezvous with Rama (2021/04/01)
• S. Maxwell Coder, God's Will for Your Life (2004/07/29)
• Stephen A. Cooper, Augustine for Armchair Theologians (2005/04/22)
• Peter David, New Frontier (2004/08/23)
• T. S. Eliot, Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats (2020/01/20)
• Michael Jan Friedman, Starfleet: Year One (2004/08/23)
• Michael Jan Friedman, The Valiant (2004/08/23)
• Neil Gaiman, American Gods (2004/06/22)
• Mark Greaney, Support and Defend (2021/01/21)
• Zane Grey, Riders of the Purple Sage (2023/09/18)
• Kazuo Ishiguro, An Artist of the Floating World (2023/11/14)
• Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House (2019/09/09)
• Stephen King, Doctor Sleep (2014/09/25)
• Stephen King, It (2014/05/10)
• Stephen King, Joyland (2023/09/17)
• Stephen King, Under the Dome (2011/12/18)
• Donald R. Kraybill, The Riddle of Amish Culture (2006/12/23)
• Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird (2023/10/28)
• C. S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (2004/10/18)
• Robert Ludlum, The Bourne Identity (2012/01/19)
• Yann Martel, The Life of Pi (2004/09/12)
• Richard Matheson, Duel (2006/06/26)
• Cormac McCarthy, The Road (2012/01/27)
• Larry Niven, The Ringworld Engineers (2004/05/22)
• Larry Niven, Tales of Known Space (2004/06/12)
• Frederik Pohl, Gateway (2004/08/16)
• G. A. Riplinger, Hazardous Materials (2012/04/27)
• Andrew Roberts, The Storm of War (2019/11/09)
• Francis Schaeffer, The Church at the End of the 20th Century, (2008/12/30)
• Josepha Sherman and Susan Schwartz, Vulcan's Forge (2004/08/23)
• Tom Shippey, ed., The Oxford Book of Science Fiction Stories (2022/08/25)
• Lynne Truss, Eats, Shoots & Leaves (2007/04/03)
• John Vornholt, The Genesis Wave (2004/08/23)
• Charles Williams, War in Heaven (2023/09/11)
• H. G. Wells, The War of the Worlds (2004/10/15)
• Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth (2023/11/09)
• Charles Williams, War in Heaven (2023/09/11)
• Herman Wouk, The Caine Mutiny (2012/01/17)
• Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (2008/12/30)
• John Wyndham, The Day of the Triffids (2004/10/15)
• Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road (2023/09/09)

Movies

• Blood Simple (2005/03/19)
• The Corporation (2004/09/15); see also Evil corporations and The Corporation
• The Day After Tomorrow (2004/09/15)
• Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004/06/15)
• Hell House (2006/10/31)
• Indoctrinate U. (2008/03/05)
• I, Robot (2004/07/21)
• The Ladykillers (2004/07/15)
• Loose Change: 2nd Edition (2006/08/03)
• Luther (2004/10/31)
• The Man Who Wasn't There (2004/11/18)
• 911 In Plane Sight (2006/08/03)
• Serenity (2005/10/01)
• Soldiers in the Army of God (2007/06/05)
• Star Trek (2009/05/11)
• Troy (2004/05/18)
• The Village (2004/08/03)

Music

• Dire Straits, Brothers in Arms (2005/05/07)
• George Frederic Handel, Ode for St. Cecilia's Day, Trevor Pinnock/English Concert Choir (2005/11/22)
• Roger Hodgson, In the Eye of the Storm (2005/05/28)

2005 on the Crusty Curmudgeon: a preview

And now that the new year has been ushered in, here are some rambling ideas about my plans for the rest of 2005.

Biggest change: I am happy to announce the inauguration of Sacra Eloquia, my theology blog. This isn't a "division of labour" thing; I'm not going to change the general focus of the Crusty Curmudgeon. Rather, I feel that the anything-goes format of my current blog just isn't conducive to extended and detailed expository theology, so I've started another one where I can post on-line "sermons" on a somewhat regular basis.

I am going to start by duplicating the material I posted here on sola Scriptura and solus Christus, and add the remainder of the five solas as the Carnival of the Reformation progresses. Then I am finally going to convert my partially completed Sunday school series on Galatians to Web-friendly HTML. Lord willing, I will complete that series online even if I never get a chance to preach it. My plans in the longer term include:

1. switching to the Old Testament, to Daniel
2. "First Principles," a series on Hebrews
3. back to the OT again to work through Ezekiel, then segue into . . .
4. . . . the Gospel of John

I have no intention of deprecating theoblogging here. If anything, I hope to revive and finish the series on God's will that sort of fizzled in the fall.

Reading and reviewing: In 2005, I don't intend to push myself to read more. I do enough of that as it is. But I want to double my writing output; my goal is to post at least one book review every two weeks: 26 book reviews for the year. I'm also going to focus my reading efforts: a few years ago I started reading all of Stephen King's novels in order of publication, so I'm going to pick that up where I left off, with Pet Sematary. I started reading through Dorothy Sayers' mystery novels last month, and I'll finish that series next year. And I'm just about due for another Tolkien blitz; it's been a few years. Apart from that, come what may.

Theatre time: My goal for 2005, again, is not to artificially increase my viewing. I watch enough TV and movies as it is. But I intend to bump up my writing about movies by focusing my viewing on a few subjects. First, as I mentioned some time ago, I intend to view all the Coen brothers' films in order of production, one film per month. Second, I want to go through all ten of the Star Trek feature films - again, one per month. And third, awhile back I made a list of my personal favourite SF movies, two per decade; having done so, it's only fair that I should post some extended critical commentary on all of them, starting with my Top Three: 2001: A Space Odyssey, Blade Runner, and Contact. "First," "second," and "third" don't indicate priority, just intention to focus on these three areas, but I do intend to finish the first two and at least make a serious dent in the third category.

Other plans: Not much, so far. One area I haven't explored yet is reviewing music. I listen to an awful lot of it, but I haven't felt that I could write an album review to quite the same standards as I can for books and movies. That's starting to change as I get more interested over time in listening critically to a wider range of composers and genres.

And, of course, there will undoubtedly be a redesign of the whole site sometime in September, on or about its second anniversary - as I always like to put what I learn about Web and graphic design over the year into practice.

I'm looking forward to sharing this year with you all. Soli Deo gloria.