Also Sprach Gallagher

I Am, In Fact, Alive

So now that Wheeler's sitting here with a gun to my back, I'll post some test results. *sigh*

You scored 13 Strength, 12 Constitution, and 10 Dexterity!

All stats are based on the original D&D system of 3-18. 3 being tragically weak and 18 being olympic level ability. Odds are you will be more towards the middle for most things (the middle being 10-11), as that is where most people should be. If you scored above 18 in any skill, I highly suggest you go back and read the directions closer. Especially if you scored above an 18 strength, you need to take the test over and only answer ONCE on the first page. Taken properly, it is not possible to get above an 18 on any stat. Get the other half of your stats at this companion test. I am open to suggestions for improving this test. Please message me if you think I am not taking something into account, or have any questions for how I calculated scores.

My test tracked 3 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender: You scored higher than 55% on Strength You scored higher than 31% on Constitution You scored higher than 10% on Dexterity

Link: The D&D stats - Physical Test written by mojograham on Ok Cupid, home of the 32-Type Dating Test

You scored 16 Intelligence, 14 Wisdom, and 7 Charisma!

All stats are based on the original D&D system of 3-18. 3 being tragically weak and 18 being olympic level ability. Odds are you will be more towards the middle for most things (the middle being 10-11), as that is where most people should be. If you scored above 18 in any skill, I highly suggest you go back and read the directions closer. Especially if you scored above an 18 intelligence, you need to take the test over and only answer ONCE on the first page. Taken properly, it is not possible to get above an 18 on any stat, unless you' over 70 years old. Get the other half of your stats at this companion test. I am open to suggestions for improving this test. Please message me if you think I am not taking something into account, or have any questions for how I calculated scores.

My test tracked 3 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender: You scored higher than 62% on Intelligence You scored higher than 53% on Wisdom You scored higher than 11% on Charisma

Link: The D&D stats - Mental Test written by mojograham on Ok Cupid, home of the 32-Type Dating Test

I seem to have closed the politics test, and since I don't feel like re-taking it, I'll just say that I ended up Libertarian.

Back to work.

Something to Post

Well, this has been an unusually long gap between posts, even for me. Though not having access to the internet does that. See, good ol' LU has decided to add another layer of annoyance security to the network. It doesn't especially like Linux, and, as I run Windows about once every eight blue moons, I've been playing email tag with one of the IT guys. To his credit, he has been quite helpful through the whole process.

And as I've not been able to talk to anyone from off campus, between my homework and grading ~90 papers three days a week, I've had about ten hours of free time since school started. So my blogging habits will probably be even more sporadic and posts will become rare occasions for you to celebrate with your family.

Music, Music, and More Music

I dare say that very little has happened in the month since my last post. I've seen a few friends, won a couple of chess games, seen a few movies, bought tens (sic) of books, and obviously some new music.

In case someone hasn't heard, I've been working at the Grayson County Shelter's Resale Shop, which has lots of "stuff" (ranging from nice jewelery to torn jeans and broken knic-knacks) for ridiculously cheap prices. For example, I recently acquired a very nice set of ten children's classics for $50. The local used bookstore had three of these books in stock, and they were going for $25 each. Even more recently, I purchased an almost complete stereo system (I left the speakers there) for $40. Amongst the spoils are a mostly-working 6-CD changer, an AM/FM receiver, tape deck, amp, and turn table. Though this would all be relatively useless without the cable that plugs into my sound card. Thus, I can record anything onto my computer. Once I figured out that this worked, I splurged on almost 40 cassettes of classical music (including, but not limited to all nine Beetoven Symphonies, all four of Vivaldi's Seasons, five Tchaikovsky symphonies, and quite a bit more). I am currently in the process of recording all of it to my computer so I can have hours upon hours of lovely music until my hard drive dies.

My last day up there is going to be next Friday; I'll pack Saturday and arrive at school on Sunday, ready for an 8 AM class on Tuesday. Joy.

Recent Reading

What with my nice, relaxing, 14 hour-a-week job, I have plenty of time for reading, of which I have been taking full advantage. My two most recent books were A Farewell to Arms by Hemingway, and The Phantom of the Opera, by Gaston Leroux, which was suddenly inserted into my reading list because, (a) it was a library book, thus I have to return it, and (b) my mother couldn't read it because it wasn't like the musical at all. I'll try to convince her to read it when my parents gets back from vacation.

Unlike "The Big, Two-hearted River," I thorougly A Farewell to Arms, even though it is mostly written in the same utterly simple style. The thing is, it worked. For example, when Mr. Henry has a barber come to his room, the barber is described simply as "a man of about fifty with an upturned mustache." That's all the detail we get, but that's all the detail we need to picture a barber from the narrator's position.

Even though his style is simple, Hemingway accurately portrays a wide array of emotions. For example, when describing the love between Mr. Henry and Catherine, he says,

Often a man wishes to be alone and a girl wishes to be alone too and if they love each other they are jealous of that in each other, but I can truly say we never felt that. We could feel alone when we were together, alone against the others. It has only happened to me like that once. I have been alone while I was with many girls and that is the way that you can be most lonely. But we were never lonely and never afraid when we were together.

Near the end, we some of the pessimism that surrounded World War I.

That was what you did. You died. You did not know what it was about. You never had time to learn. They threw you in and told you the rules and the first time they caught you off base they killed you. Or they killed you gratuitously like Aymo. Or gave you the syphilis like Rinaldi. But they killed you in the end. You could count on that. Stay around and they would kill you.

There's also a lovely, if too lengthy to put here, passage that is stream-of-consciousness if there ever was such a thing. While it's not from a mad mind, it is from someone who is very agitated, and while his thoughts are all on one subject, they bounce around from question to answer to completely different question to reprimand and back.

All in all, I highly recommend A Farewell to Arms, a "poignant novel, set in Italy during World War I, [that] is one of the most moving love stories ever written, a classic of its kind" (from the back cover).

Yesterday evening, I finished Alexander Teixeira de Mattos' translation of Gaston Leroux's Le Fantome de l'Opera on which Andrew Lloyd Webber's show The Phantom of the Opera is based. While the two have the same general plot, the details are almost universally different, and the musical leaves out one very crucial character.

After watching the musical, I was glad to see Christine leave the phantom and return to Raoul. The phantom is a monster, who shows a single act of mercy, but in spite of that, you don't pity him. He's a murderer. At the end of the novel, I found myself, like Christine and the Persian, at once despising Erik for being such a monster and pitying him because all he wanted was to love and be loved in return. In the end, Christine's pity saved Erik. He says,

I felt here tears flow on my forehead ... on mine, mine! [...] I tore off my mast so as not to lose one of her tears ... and she did not run away! ... And she did not die! ... She remained alive, weeping over me, with me. We cried together! I have tasted all the happiness the world can offer!

While Erik's supreme good act is hardly enough to redeem him in the eyes of the reader, it seems that Christine's salvific tears have that power. We have the archetypal Christian narrative played out on a small scale. The tears of the innocent Christine cleansing the soul of the monster. After this redemption of sorts, Erik does his best to right all the wrongs he has committed, letting Christine go, and returning his "salary" to the managers of the opera. While nothing else is explicitly stated about what he does in his last days, I would like to think that he is mourning his past, while keeping the image of his angel, Christine, to affect his total redemption.

My only complaint about the novel is the addition of the prologue and epilogue, which "add authenticity" to the story. The epilogue in particular detracted from the novel. We go from a very touching scene between Erik and the Persian to a dry explanation of the "authenticity" of the story. The other problem was with the particular printing that I read; there were tons of typographical errors. In the first two chapters, for instance, Meg Giry is referred to as "little Gary," and Raoul is "Roul." When you read the novel, as I recommend you should, I suggest taking a nice break between finishing chapter 26 and beginning the epilogue.

Whatever Happened to Class?

I had a wonderful day at work today. As I arrived to sign my time card, the director of the shelter told me to carry a box down to the shelter, and to see if the electronics contained therein worked. So I take it down to the shop and pull out a VCR and a turn-table. We discovered that the record player worked by the sound of Nat King Cole. The director came down and bought it from us, but let us keep it there (for at least the day), so I spent the rest of the day listening to records of Nat King Cole, Johnny Mathis, Gustav Holst, Cabaret, and Glenn Miller. Through the course of the day, a kindly gentleman also told me of a radio station from Dallas that plays big band music. I hadn't discovered it because I haven't listened to any AM stations in years. But on my drive home, I was happily listening to Sinatra. It was a beautiful thing.

Also, below the fold I have a new list of books that I'll get for anyone, gratis.

Continue reading "Whatever Happened to Class?"

Shakespeare in Texas

Colorado was nice. Why we went to a tea-processing factory is beyond me.

I've returned to Sherman after a visit to Longview to watch A Midsummer Night's Dream and MacBeth, and, incidentally, to visit friends. The highlights of the trip were (in no particular order): A Midsummer Night's Dream, MacBeth, Anna's lasagna, Anna's cheesecake, seeing the Scholl apartment, seeing the Scholls, Sharpton, Scott, Wheeler, and Wilson, helping Wheeler pack stuff into the attic and moving other stuff to Quad 3. Getting stuck behind a person going 45 in a 70 on one of those country roads was also nice.

Seriously, though, the performance of Midsummer was positively hilarious. I recommend the Texas Shakespeare Festival to all within driving or flying distance.

The only downside to the whole thing was that it was July in Texas.

Acquisitions (and Advertisements)

Things have been going very well since I started working at the shelter's shop. It's very quiet, and I generally just bum around, fixing up the few things that need fixing up, and browsing through the humble book collection.

Speaking of book collection, mine has grown a little since summer started. As I mentioned previously, I've read Moby Dick, and I decided to read Origin of Species, which I'm about halfway through now. I got those books at a Waldenbooks "Buy 4, get the 5th free" sale. So, for $35, I bought five relatively massive books: the two already mentioned, The Complete Works of Edgar Allen Poe, 50 Contemporary Short Stories, and The Greatest Essays of Mathematics, Physics, and Astronomy. Yesterday, at the resale shop, I payed $1.08 (total) for Literature of the Americas, Selected Stories of Bret Harte, and Stephen King's Different Seasons, which includes the novellas Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption, Apt Pupil, The Body (the basis for the motion picture Stand by Me), and The Breathing Method. There are several other books that I'd like to get, and some I might buy for some friends (anybody want The Miracle of Seed-Faith?).

In other news, my family and I are leaving for Colorado around 2 A.M. tomorrow morning, and won't be back until about the same time Monday. So I'll have a good reason not to post for the next few days.

If you or someone you know would like any of the following books, contact me
by next Thursday. Chances are I won't even ask you to pay me back...

Continue reading "Acquisitions (and Advertisements)"

Finally, Some Good News

Well, I've been avoiding posting because I haven't had anything I wanted to say. Thus far, I haven't been particularly busy, except in trying to find a temporary job. See, Baylor thought that I wanted to take classes in the Fall, and by the time I got them to let me register for the summer, the Greek classes were full. Thus, no Greek for me this Summer. Which means I'll be graduating with my CSMath degree in three or four semesters, depending on how much I want "The Honours Programme" printed on my degree. If I figured it correctly, I'll be able to take 15 and 16 hour semesters for three semesters and graduate with a B.S. in CSMath with an English minor, but no honors. I guess it also depends on how soon I want to get a job/find a grad school. I'll be talking to Coppinger sometime this Summer to figure things out.

Tomorrow afternoon, I start working at the Grayson County Homeless Shelter, though I'll probably work more in the adjacent resale shop than the shelter itself. That's only for fourteen hours a week, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday afternoons. So I think I'll try to volunteer at the library or something when I can.

Aside from that, I've pretty much just been reading and playing old NES and SNES games on my computer. And a little programming. I finished Pride and Prejudice some time ago, finished Moby Dick this morning, and think I'll start in on The Origin of Species and/or Silas Marner now.

Content?

So I have this bad habit of not posting. In an effort to fix that, Wilson has kindly asked me to put this on my blog.

• You are stuck inside Fahrenheit 451. Which book do you want to be?
  I'm going to assume that this is really asking which book I would like to save for posterity, should I find myself stuck in that world. Naturally, I would be Euclid's Elements.
• Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?
  Hmm. Can't say that I have. As for being "struck by a fictional character," I remember Aiden from Byzantium and Taliesin, from, well, Taliesin (both by Stephen R. Lawhead) as two particularly gripping characters.
• What is the last book you bought?
  Learning Python, which I bought Monday. That same day I also bought Fermat's Enigma, a pop math book on Fermat's Last Theorem.
• What are you currently reading?
  Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen, and ANSI Common Lisp, by Paul Graham.
• Five books you would take to a deserted island:
  Tough, tough question. However, I would have to say
  1. The Bible, preferably with the Septuagint and Greek New Testament as well as a literal English translation.
     
  2. The Art of Computer Programming, by Donald Knuth. As much as computer books would seem out of place, these are as much math as computer science. Besides, the exercises could provide years of "entertainment."
     
  3. Euclid's Elements. What else can I say?
     
  4. The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (unabridged). Just think, I could kill myself in sword fights hundreds of times over!
     
  5. A grammar for Koine Greek. See number 1.
• Who are you going to pass this book meme baton to and why? (only three people)
  I'm supposed to know three people?

The Storm

Turbulent clouds above me.
A sheet of gray behind me.
It's beautiful.
Let it rain.

Lightning strikes.
Thunder rolls.
It's beautiful.
Let it rain.

The downpour begins, accompanied by hail.
It soon calms to a steady flow of water.
It's beautiful.
Let it rain.

Fearing the unknown,
Hoping in what is to come.
It is beautiful.
Let it rain.

Living without,
Yet trusting God.
It is beautiful.
Let it rain.

Let it rain.