Threads from Henry's Web

Category: Humor

  • A Science Comedian

    … no, really!

  • Is this YOUR Worship CD?

    I was tempted to title this “What we REALLY mean when we sing those praise songs.”

    HT:  Peter Kirk.

  • The Great Akkadian Final Exam

    While I was writing about my mother reading Hebrew yesterday, I recalled another person who was substantially involved in my Biblical Languages training, Dr. Leona Glidden Running.  She was a Biblical Languages professor at the Seventh-day Adventist Theological Seminary when I took my MA from the Andrews University graduate school and was my academic advisor.

    But this short story has to do with her as a languages teacher.  I wanted to take Akkadian as part of my program, but there were no other students taking it, so I got my program one on one.  It was a one quarter course that should have been a one year course.  It turned out that there was only one test, the final, which would be open book.

    Come the day of the test,  she walked in, put before me a legal size sheet of paper crammed with cuneiform text front and back and told me I had two hours.  The print was medium smallish, and with my one quarter of work, I was relatively certain I couldn’t come close to translating this.  There was, however, no point arguing with Dr. Running.  One just dug in a worked.

    So I plowed forward as fast as I could, not spending the time rechecking some signs that I would have liked, and making the best sense of the inscription that I could.  I can’t even remember what it was, though I’m thinking it was something from Ashurbanipal, and had some narrative sense to help me.  Nonetheless I only got done half of one side, which will tell you just how far I had gotten in learning Akkadian–hardly reading knowledge!

    Well, I turned in the test, thinking it was an abysmal performance.  A couple days later I got it back with only a few corrections and a grade of ‘A’.  With more curiosity than good sense I asked just how I could get an ‘A’ for translating about a quarter of the assigned text.

    “Oh, I never expected you to translate it all.  I just didn’t want you to have time to check and revise your work!”

    Oh.

    Well.

  • My Movie Rating

    . . . and it is to laugh

    OnePlusYou Quizzes and Widgets

    Created by OnePlusYou – Free Dating Site

    What’s to laugh about?

    It says this rating is based on the presence of the words “dead” (2x) and “torture” (1x).

    Hat Tip: C.Orthodoxy and a crowd of others.

  • Mamas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to be Pastors

    I don’t usually like to be the umpteenth person to post one of these, but this is too good. With many friends who are pastors, not to mention a son-in-law, I’m in tune with it!

    Update: Oops! Forgot the Hat Tip to One Thing I Know.

  • A Hippopotamus for David Ker

    Well, not really.  It’s mine.

    Here it is:

    Hippo in a frame

    I’ve had it since last Christmas but didn’t think of it until today when I looked at it sitting on my desk.  You see, last year I commented to my wife that I thought the song “I want a hippopotamus for Christmas” was “cute.”  She never forgets things like that.

    Christmas morning there was a picture of a hippo in a frame so I could have my hippopotamus for Christmas.

    And even though I said it was “for” David Ker, well, this post is, but I keep my hippo.

  • Tagged – but I can Break the Rules

    Just to be honest, I probably would have in any case.

    Tony from Thoughts from the Heart on the Left tagged me with the meme created by L. L. Barkat, so here goes, as I break rules.

    I’m going to copy the rules from Tony’s post rather than the original, just to be a bit perverse. They are:

    • Write about 5 specific ways blogging has affected you, either positively or negatively.
    • Link back to the person who tagged you
    • Link back to this parent post
    • Tag a few friends or five, or none at all
    • Post these rules— or just have fun breaking them

    I would have not posted them, but there was that pesky permission not to do so, and then also how would you know in what ways I break them? Indeed, the permission to break the rules is the main reason I responded, as I generally dislike memes and getting tagged, and all that goes with it.

    So as for five specific ways blogging has affected me positively or negatively, allow me to provide any number but five.

    I think I was created to blog. I was merely waiting for the idea of blogging to come along so that I could fulfill my destiny by writing long blog posts that very few people read. I have opinions about everything, and a relatively high opinion of my own opinions (funny how that works), so I like to talk about them, and quite frankly there aren’t that many people who want to sit around an listen as much as I want to talk.

    Enter blogging. It doesn’t matter any more! I can imagine the legions of readers of my blog checking and rechecking their readers to see if I have let more wisdom flow so that they might take it in.

    If someone tells me that I have few readers, and cites my SiteMeter report as evidence, I can simply point out that SiteMeter doesn’t get all those folks who have subscribed via Bloglines, Google Reader, or some other service. In addition, who knows how many people, overwhelmed with appreciation for my prose, e-mail pages to their friends or share them via some of the aforementioned readers or aggregators.

    Consider that I used to regard it as a good day when a Sunday School class of a dozen people wanted to listen to me talk. Now I can just go to the computer, pour out my thoughts, and make them available to an audience of millions. Admittedly, most of those millions will fail entirely to read my stuff or even know that it exists. But they won’t tell me they didn’t read it, and if nobody tells me, it’s an inconvenient fact that I can conveniently ignore.

    If one has discovered a technology that provides a tool that allows one to become completely fulfilled in one’s calling in life, what possible need can there be for other reasons? Thus, reasons 2-5 have been superseded by the awesome and sublime power of reason #1.

    As for tagging, think of it this way. If you read this, and felt that you just can’t resist saying something about what blogging means to you, then consider yourself tagged. If not, well, not so much.

    PS: If you didn’t read this, please don’t tell me. It will disillusion me, and I really like my illusions. I’m planning on keeping them.

  • Bug Report

    Bug Report
    Bug Report (Click to see full size)

    (HT: The Christian Cynic in a comment on Dispatches.)

  • Great Way to Call Someone a Liar

    I’m not following the controversy in question very closely, as it’s largely a UK thing (or so it appears to me), but there is a great dust-up about the management of the former SPCK bookshops in the UK by the Saint Stephen the Great Trust (I’ve seen a few variations on this). If you want the story, start here.

    Sam Norton received a cease and desist letter from Mark Brewer (of SSG), which he published, and Doug Chaplin published a blog post in support, from which I just had to quote this sentence:

    . . . Indeed, his letters as quoted by Sam, like many of his past statements, seem to bear such a complex and tenuous relationship to reality that it would be difficult to describe them as truthful without placing an inappropriate burden on the semantic resources of the English language.

    Classic! Absolutely classic!

    (HT for all links: Metacatholic.)

  • Ad for New OT Professor at WTS

    While I acknowledge that a seminary has a right to choose their people and support their confession, this suggested ad gets closer to the way I feel about it. Peter Enns was pretty conservative from where I sit.