Streets paved with what?

Quite possibly the the New Jerusalem is made of beer:

Rev 21:18 ...and the city was pure gold, like unto clear glass.

Move over Mommy Bloggers

"On another note, next time someone expresses the wish that I 'sleep like a baby', my reply will be something like, 'what, you want me to sleep for two or three hours, then wet myself and wake up hungry? No thanks.'"
-My friend the new father

There is a BBC show called Blessed that I can only find clips of from the BBCWorldwide channel on YouTube, but if you know or care at all about new mommies, this is clearly a show you should wish you had access to (you don't).

Suggested viewing clips below, rated GPC for Graphic Parenting Content:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVUPaCCrADE

Smyte this word: NUPT*AL

Which form is correct?

a) NUPTUAL
b) NUPTIAL
c) either as mere spelling variants
d) either by variance of grammatical function

Answer correctly and you could win this prize.* I managed to pick all three wrong answers to my own challenge. Really.



*To win you must post the correct answer in a comment that does not contain the correct answer. Your correct answer must have come from the prize itself. Your comment must include a valid credit card number. Prize is subject to withdrawal without notice.

Can she meet W?

Catherine Tate is funny. Scrounge her other stuff. Tony Blair is superb.

Mystischism

Defined: Everything is a Mystery but we're definitely sure we can't agree on what it means.

Free market fires an ace.

This San Jose news story indicates exactly why people like me think free-market economics are a good idea.

I don't know much about economics. All I see is that the union and lobby-ridden state was hoping to fix this overpass for $20 million and an open-bid contractor thinks it's possible to do it before June 28 for more like 5-6 million (including up to $5 million in "git 'er done" incentives).

I commuted the LA and OC freeways for two years. I don't know why it takes the state years and years to build an overpass. I suspect monopolobby unionists are the reason.

Who suffers? Commuters and tax-payers, but certainly not the out-of-shape guys in orange vests who are paid very well to block miles upon miles of lanes upon lanes for years upon years so they can maybe get some work done during the hours defined as "rush".

Hey CalTrans, since I know you're reading this space, how about making every free-way project open-bid. It worked for emergency repairs after the last major earthquake, remember? Everything got fixed under budget months ahead of time. That wasn't so bad. It sure beats the 50-year plan for revamping the 55. Or the 405. Or the 5.

That came out kind of strong. Apparently I am orange-cone-scarred for life. Maybe I could sue somebody in a monopolobby. Any venture capitalists out there want to stake a lawsuit against a guy in an orange vest? The odds are pretty good he's not doing anything else at the moment.

More Breviary

The Reverend Canon David Baumann, sometime rector, sensei, and friend, has published a robust expanded daily office. Here it is.

My copy is on the way. I suggest that you buy one. Or 50.

-MWS

Jackity Jack, don't talk quack

Somehow, that title is supposed to indicate that I don't think Lewis wrote allegories.

I just finished a paper and presentation on allegory and Lewis. There is a prevalence of opinion that we may suck the marrow out of Lewis' fiction with the sucker of allegory. I hold no truck with this opinion.

One Wheaton scholar I recently heard averred that Narnia is not an allegory but it is allegorical and allegorizing. Actually he said that Lewis denied Narnia was allegorical, but Lewis must have changed his mind because [Scholar X] could tell how allegorical Narnia is.

I suppose if Lewis hadn't written the 20th century benchmark on allegory and love we might consider this. But Lewis did in fact write The Allegory of Love and maybe he knew what he was talking about when he described his own fiction. Or so I think. At the end are selected quotes from AoL.

If Lewis wrote allegory he did it badly. The allegory too rapidly starts to break down. He omits really obvious elements. He ignores blatant conventions of allegory.

Pretty much, Lewis wouldn't do that.

My thesis was that Lewis fiction is to fire the imagination and highlight universals. Per the quote below we are perhaps dealing with a sacramental symbolism where an alternate world gives other sacramentalism for the sake of illuminating the ethereal. This is different from sticking up a mirror to reflect Christianity on Earth.

Maybe The Great Divorce is allegorical. I'm not sure.

I think that at the end of The Dawn Treader Lewis thumbs his nose at an allegory when Lucy sees through the surface of the ocean to a world upside down and mirroring what is above. It's sort of like saying, "There's an allegory, I'm not writing about it."

That's what I think. Now please, everybody stop telling me Aslan is really Jesus.

***
Allegory of Love, 44ff.
It is of the very nature of thought and language to represent what is immaterial in picturable terms... This fundamental equivalence between the immaterial and the material may be used by the mind in two ways… On the one hand you can start with an immaterial fact, such as passions you actually experience, and can invent visibilia to express them…This is allegory… But there is another way of using the equivalence, which is almost the opposite of allegory, and which I would call sacramentalism or symbolism… The attempt to read that something else through its sensible imitations, to see the archtype [sic] in the copy, is what I mean by symbolism… The difference between the two can hardly be exaggerated. The allegorist leaves the given – his own passions – to talk of that which is confessedly less real, which is a fiction. The symbolist leaves the given to find that which is more real… There is nothing ‘mystical’ or mysterious about medieval allegory; the poets know quite clearly what they are about and are well aware that the figures which they present to us are fictions. Symbolism is a mode of thought, but allegory is a mode of expression. It belongs to the form of poetry, more than to its content, and it is learned from the practice of the ancients.

Move over Descartes

Don't put the carte before the blanche.