Done

Woop, I have officially finished my Newbie scarf, my very first knitting project. Feel proud of me. Now, i’m going to start my new project: the Schollar Collar by Jared Flood.

Climate Change Melts Man

A man in Buenos Aires has been melted by global warming. How horrid! Read the full story here. No word yet on why he is blue.

Fortunately, he had some flyers handy.

Language

So while doing some grammatical criticism on a passage from the Gospel of Mark in preperation for my final, I found myself wishing once again that I already spoke some Koine. So I started thinking about language, because frankly exegesis is kind of boring, and trying to enumerate my languages.

Languages in which I am theoretically fluent: English, French

Dialects of the above which I can read to varying degrees: Middle English, Norman, Anglo-Norman, Scots (if you consider it a dialect of English)

Languages of which I have some knowledge/are learning: Biblical Hebrew, Latin, Icelandic, Scots (if you consider it a distinct Germanic language)

Languages in which I possess some rudiments: German, Koine Greek

Languages of interest: Arabic, Mandarin, Hindi, Scottish Gaelic, Portuguese

I think it’s quite the list.

A thought on Hume

The short-coming of Hume’s arguments regarding human knowledge of the natural world lies in his confounding abstract concepts relating to properties of objects, such as taste and smell, with the objects themselves. The objects of human sense perception are not “things” which constitute integral aspects of objects; odour is not a part of an apple. Odour is the interpretation by the mind/brain of one possessing sense perception of physical properties of apples. The apple does not actually posses an “odour,” rather the apple’s cells stimulate the different sensory receptors in the nose, and those stimulations are interpreted by the human brain/mind as a sense perception called “smell.”

A new project

Today, while working on some questions for a roundtable in my Gospel of Mark class, I was struck with a poem. It fell together from the poetry reading I attended yesterday, going out with a friend afterward, and the old Tapestry podcast I was listening to while I was supposed to be working, about the lost word “acedia.” The poem seemed to come to an end, but I feel that more will follow it as further poems fall similarly together.

I’m thinking of calling it all “Romanticise me.”

It’s heavy with imagery and self-reflexive romanticism. It is a portrait of the artist, perhaps in the popular mode, perhaps as Bacchus. You can find the first installment, and subsequent ones, here: Romanticise me.