Mark Humphries: “To my mind, the traditional research paper as a tool of differential assessment is now dead. And I think it should be left to rest in peace.” I believe this judgment is correct.
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Morning on campus.
This has been a dark day for me in many respects and now I learn that Wendell Berry has died. One blow too many. Thanks be to God for his message and his work. We shall not look upon his like again.
Teri and I are re-watching Better Call Saul Season 1. It is, as we remembered, amazingly good. We’ll go at least through Season 3; a certain event occurs at the end of Season 3 that, I think, takes some of the energy out of the show. But up to that point at least it’s an absolute triumph. 🍿
If I had a serious professional podcast, the intro music would be “The Super-Natural,” by John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers. 🎵
I had to give Walter Martin a piece of my mind, such as it is.
Ideal epitaph for my tombstone:
GOOD IDEA,
POOR EXECUTION
Angus before his bath: That which I most feared has come upon me.
Fifteen minutes later: Party Time!
It seems that every Premier League match features a commemoration of someone’s death. (Maybe a former player or manager from one of the sides playing, maybe a fan.) As my son says, the real motto of the PL is “Dust thou art, and to dust thou shall return.”
Adam Roberts weighs in on the great question of our time: How tall was Dorothy L. Sayers? I also comment.
Hey look, it’s another maybe-all-this-time-on-social-media-isn’t-good-for-me thing. They keep coming, even though everyone knows what the deal is? Everyone knows. All these pieces are desperate evasions of the essential question: WHY don’t we do what everyone knows we should do?
The Detection Club looks like it might be fun, but I wonder about one thing: Why did the creators decide to make Miles Jupp look exactly like Chesterton but make Bryony Hannah and Cara Theobold look nothing like Christie and Sayers?
You all know how much I love micro.blog, but one thing drives me a little nuts: When I post something that has an error, immediately see the error and correct it, and then have to wait … and wait … and wait for the corrected version to go live. And it seems that every time that happens I get messages from people telling me I made a mistake and I want to shout “I ALREADY FIXED IT DAMMIT.”
PSA: The body of water formerly known as Lake Waco will hereafter be known as Lake Ayjay. I have also renamed the Brazos River as the Ayjay River, and the Bosque River as the Other Ayjay River. I will not be taking questions at this time.
Just learned about Freston Tower from a friend who stayed there.
“Pencil Magazine is a themed print publication featuring work created entirely with graphite pencil and paper.”
I’ve been locked out of my Baylor accounts — I changed my password and now neither the new one nor the old one works — and I’m trying to decide whether that’s a bad or a good thing.
The fourth and last post in my series for the Dispatch on the Second World War is up.
Dickovers, baggravation and botiquette: 18 new words to describe our tech hellscape:
How much time do you think we have collectively spent, as a species, convincing robots that we are not robots? By now, we must have wasted several millennia ensuring we have clicked all the various parts of a bicycle on a captcha grid of someone’s front garden, or sliding a jigsaw puzzle precisely into a pixellated hole, or clicking a box that says “I am not a robot” as if the internet has suddenly discovered the honour system. Listen, if we ever want to pretend to be robots, let’s do it the old-fashioned way, by covering ourselves in tinfoil and beep-booping our way into an enemy moon-lair.
The corrected and slightly improved paperback version of my critical edition of Auden’s The Shield of Achilles is now available. I really do think it’s his masterpiece and highly recommend it to you. Back when the first edition came out I wrote a brief essay on it for the PUP website.
If you only listen to one Dolly song in memoriam, make it this one.
If there is not a National Day of Mourning for Dolly Parton, we will have failed as a country. May she rest in peace and rise in glory.
Merlin’s Cave (1735)
Amy X. Wang on using Wispr Flow (as dictated to Wispr Flow):
We’ve been talking a lot about the so-called end of literacy, but the real problem isn’t that people don’t read — it’s that they do read and spend all day ferociously consuming words, but those words aren’t really...
