Monthly Archives: October 2005

Housekeeping

from the old AOL blog…now you know why I switched to WordPress….

Recently, I’ve been hearing from readers that AOL will sometimes not allow you to post comments. Usually if you send them to me via email, I can post them — although last week my older sister was unable to post a comment, sent it to me via email, and not even I could post it. Alas, I am at the mercy of AOL’s blog software. I am slowly exploring other options for hosting this blog, but it will be months before I have time to finalize anything. Please bear with me in the mean time.

And, dear readers, thanks for your interest. I love hearing from you — you make writing this blog worth my while.

Fall color

On the drive down from Cambridge to New Bedford this afternoon, the traffic was heavy and slow until the Route 24 exit. I had plenty of time to look at the progress of fall color.

Leaf color is at or just past peak south of Boston. The cold snap of the past two nights means that the leaves on most trees have finally reached full color. Exceptions to peak color include the oaks, with many oaks of all species still fully green — and the swamps, where most trees have already dropped their leaves.

Overall, leaf color is not spectacular this year, with fewer brilliant reds than usual, and not much in the way of true orange. The red maples tend to have mixed red and yellow leaves this year, and yellows and muted reds predominate on the sugar maples. Nevertheless, there are some real bright spots, and on a cloudy day like today, even the more colors stand out. It’s not a breathtaking year for fall color, but still quite beautiful.

The colors become even more muted farther south. From Taunton southwards, I saw mostly yellow and even brown leaves, with many trees retaining a great deal of green. Yet there are still some remarkable spots of color — for example, the northeast corner of the intersection of I-195 and Rte. 140 has a beautiful stand of maples with yellow, bright orange and crimson red. And the most spectacular tree I saw on the drive today was in Taunton along Rte. 140, a brilliant red oak with cranberry-red leaves, so red they were almost black in places.

Buttonwood Park here in New Bedford is still pretty green. I’d guess that we’ll see peak color here in New Bedford early in this coming week.

Repairs

The laptop is up and running again. After three weeks of no progress, I finally trekked up to the Apple Store in Cambridge and talked to their tech people there. Yes, it was probably a conflict in the Finder preferences that prevented the Finder from launching. Yes, it is entirely likely that the problem was caused by the CD Verizon gave me to start up DSL. (Besides, Macs running OS X do not need any additional software to access DSL, so the CD was totally unnecessary.) The simple solution was to re-install the operating system, archiving all the old preferences.

Carol is cat-sitting in Cambridge again. This evening while Carol was visiting Ann Taylor Loft in Harvard Square, I sat down with Mina the cat and the laptop. While the new operating system installed itself, I got out Mina’s favorite toy — a long springy wire with a handle on one end, and a little chewable thing at the other end. I held the handle and twitched the wire while the cat stalked the little chewable thing. She is a pleasant little black cat with a sweet face, but when she is stalking, her face is the picture of feline killer concentration. She would catch the little chewable thing, bat it around until it was “dead”, chew on it for a minute, and then get up and eat a couple of kibbles from her dish. (I thought the bit about eating the kibbles was a nice addition to the game.)

We played this very engaging game for most of the hour it took to re-install the operating system. After all the anguish I’ve gone through trying to fix the laptop’s problem, this was a particularly pleasant end to the story — playing cat games while the computer bascially fixed itself.

Now that’s podcasting

First page of New York Times Business page today, there’s a column by David Pogue titled “An IPod [sic] Worth Keeping an Eye On.” Pogue writes in glowing terms about the new iPod with video screen, and claims it’s much cooler than it sounds. As in, that tiny screen has great resolution and looks pretty big when you hold it a couple of feet from your eyes.

And the iTunes Music Store already has video podcasts ready to download onto your new video iPod. Now that’s cool. I have kinda cooled on the audio podcast idea, but I like the idea of video podcasts.

The only downside that I can see is that some churches will start doing video podcasts consisting of unedited, one-camera videos of a worship service. That sounds horribly boring. But imagine a really rocking sermon recorded with a video montage of vaguely related images, music-video style — that’s something I might actually watch.

“Why I’m a Universalist”

This Sunday, I’ll be preaching on P. T. Barnum, the great showman and circus empressario. Barnum was a Universalist, and later in his life he wrote a pamphlet titled “Why I Am a Universalist.” The pamphlet sold 30,000 copies in its first year, and over 100,000 copies within a few years of publication.

I wanted to use some of Barnum’s words in a responsive reading in this week’s worship service. But some of Barnum’s sentiments sound a little dated to this 21st C. Universalist — and he’s a Restorationsist whereas I’m a Ultra-Universalist (or “Death-and-Glory” Universalist). So I picked out some his best phrases (avoiding gender-specific language), assembled them and edited them slightly, and cast them into a responsive reading. And to whet your apetite for the worship service this Sunday, here the’s completed reading.

____________________

Why I Am a Universalist

I base my hopes for humanity on the Word of God speaking in the best heart and conscience of the race,

the Word heard in the best poems and songs, the best prayers and hopes of humanity.

It is rather absurd to suppose a heaven filled with saints and sinners shut up all together within four jeweled walls and playing on harps, whether they like it or not.

I have faint hopes that after another hundred years or so, it will begin to dawn on the minds of those to whom this idea is such a weight, that nobody with any sense holds this idea or ever did hold it.

To the Universalist, heaven in its essential nature is not a locality, but a moral and spiritual status, and salvation is not securing one place and avoiding another, but salvation is finding eternal life.

Eternal life has primarily no reference to time or place, but to a quality. Eternal life is right life, here, there, everywhere.

Conduct is three-fourths of life.

This present life is the great pressing concern.

— Phineas Taylor Barnum, recast by DH

Committee

A dozen and a half people gathered over at the Bethel AME church this evening to begin planning for a January celebration of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. It’s a diverse group, and not just racially but religiously and organizationally as well. In addition to Pastor Mark Green and lay leaders from Bethel AME, there were people from Trinity Lutheran, Grace Episcopal, the local Baha’i community, the local NAACP chapter, the Interchurch Council, New Life church, the Methodist church down the block, some others that I’ve now forgotten, along with two Unitarian Universalist ministers.

I happen to like going to committee meetings. Committee meetings are never boring because you get to watch a little human drama unfold as discussion ebbs and flows and ideas bounce back and forth. And you get to hang out with a group of people who care about something enough to give up an evening of their precious free time (I mean, hanging out with a group of people who want to maintain the legacy of Dr. King’s work — can you imagine a better way to spend an evening?). Yes, I do like committee meetings.

Of course every large committee has to have its subcommittees. I jumped at the chance to be on the publicity subcommittee, a perfect place for a former salesman who loves to do sales and project management and marketing communications. Plus that meant I got to avoid being on the program subcommittee, planning the music and the keynote speaker and lining up the requisite politicans to speak and all that (can you imagine wanting to be on the program committee? –sounds like work to me). And I get to avoid being on the finance subcommittee, the refreshments subcommittee, or one of those other subcommittees.

Which brings up a good, solid reason why diversity is a Good Thing. The world does need people who will take care of finances, and people who will (shudder) find a keynote speaker. Thank goodness for diversity, because diversity means I don’t have to do those things.

What th…?!

Sitting at the table in our apartment having lunch today, reading Mark Twain, and every now and then gazing out at the sunny courtyard of the Whaling Museum. Suddenly, I realize that there are two eight-foot-long white sperm whales in the courtyard, lined up one behind the other, facing me with their heads up, smiling with pendulous lower lip hanging down, and tails pointing smartly to starboard. I stand up to get a better view. No, I was not imagining them. Funny I didn’t see them before. Must be some exhibit for the Whaling Museum. Back to lunch and Mark Twain.

Five minutes later, I look up again. Now there are four white whales, two ranks of two, all facing me and smiling, all four tails pointing smartly to starboard. I know the other two whales weren’t there five minutes ago — were they? I get up to look. No one standing in the courtyard. No truck or delivery vehicle on the street. Who put them there? Maybe I just missed them before — ? Oh well. Back to lunch and Mark Twain.

Five minutes later, a fifth white whale appears, smiling at me with nose in the air and tail pointing smartly to starboard — but this time, I see the two guys in Whaling Museum polo shirts just straightening up after setting this last whale down. At last I know — that’s where the whales have been coming from.

Is podcasting as cool as we thought?

When podcasting first burst on the scene about a year ago, I thought, Wow, this is going to be the coolest thing ever! I love radio — I used to do college radio and community radio, and I still listen to radio more than I watch TV — and I thought podcasting was going to be a way to do radio on the Web. So I listened to a few podcasts, even tried recording a couple myself, but my interest in podcasting quickly waned.

Podcasts lack the immediacy of radio. When I did college and community radio, people would call in to the station and talk to me — I loved that. I like to listen to the BBC World Service for breaking stories. I love listening to Click and Clack, the Tappit Brothers, on “Car Talk,” as they handle all the crazy phone calls they get. Because podcasts are pre-recorded, you don’t get that same sense of immediacy.

And podcasts are essentially a one-way medium. Your only choice is to turn it on or turn it off. Radio combined with the telephone has a far greater potential to be a two-way medium — listeners can call in and interact with the radio show.

So for now, I’m sticking to frequent blogging. It’s much more fun for me. I try to post daily, so I get that sense of immediacy. And I get fast feedback from my readers via comments, email, and face-to-face. But I’d be curious to hear from readers of this blog –do you listen to podcasts? –which do you prefer, and why?

Sucking up

Friday is my sabbath day — no work, just personal and spiritual renewal. This week, I spent my sabbath at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. The trolley drops you off past the front entrance of the museum, and right now you can’t help but notice the two racing sail boats cleverly supported above the grass in front of the museum’s front entrance.

The two boats, former contenders for the America’s Cup, are beautiful objects in of themselves, like the helicopter and racing cars in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Unfortunately, the boats are really there to draw attention to a new exhibit, “Things I Love: The Many Collections of William I. Koch.” It feels like the show’s only reason for existence is to puff up the ego of William Koch in order for the museum to get some kind of donation(s) out of a very wealthy man. Nothing wrong with that — puffing up the egos of rich patrons has been going on since the beginning of the history of art. But the show itself is a bit of an embarrassment. The collections show little sign of informed and intelligent taste, merely signs of overwhelming wealth. Not recommended.