Truth Like The Dark

Robert Funk was the founder of The Jesus Seminar, an organization performing research into Jesus without the implicit goal of propping up a particular faith. Rare.

For those people who are really interested in Jesus, I strongly recommend two books by The Seminar: The Complete Gospels (an annotated scholar’s version of historical documents describing Jesus, including, but not limited to, the canonical four books) and The Five Gospels: What Did Jesus Really Say? (a popular book meant to summarize the findings of The Complete Gospels).

For something you don’t have to buy, I recommend Funk’s 21 Theses, which nicely sum up what I predict to be the truly lasting image of Jesus.

Funk is departed, but I predict he’ll be resurrected, through the persistence of his work.

If LA is America’s cosmetic face,
Washington its devious brain,
New York its jaded heart,
Boston its detached intellect,
Chicago its coursing gut,
then New Orleans,
New Orleans is its naughty package.

All things ecstatic and filthy pass
through the bottom,
the secret purpose where unexpected
germs and gametes are mixing still.

Kneed, we’ve feebly grasped
at our potent, exposed delicacy,
fragrant and stripped
of the shadowy mesh
that so titillated tourists.

For really poetic words of NOLA,
listen to (the sadly defeated-sounding) Andrea Codrescu,
or try on this past work of his:

Tourists come to New Orleans to get drunk, to get weird, and to get laid. They also come to eat and, some of them say, to dance and hear le jazz. They get that. And plenty more. Sometimes they get rolled and killed. Sometimes they get arrested for running a red light and put in jail with theives and killers. You can’t ask for anything better in America. To get all those thrills separately you’d have to go to Belfast, to Bangkok, to Haiti, to Paris, and you’d still have to come to New Orleans for the music.

I seldom bulk propagate blog items from elsewhere, but since most of my readers don’t read DefenseTech, I’m going to point you at the excellent post there that spells out why Katrina is a National Security issue. After 9/11, our government set itself the challenge of creating a Department of Homeland Security for:

Response — Lead, manage and coordinate the national response to acts of terrorism, natural disasters, or other emergencies.

and

Recovery — Lead national, state, local and private sector efforts to restore services and rebuild communities after acts of terrorism, natural disasters, or other emergencies.

Clearly, DHS has spectacularly failed its first real test. As the author of DefenseTech cautions:

Now, imagine what would have happened after a surprise attack. Al Qaeda operatives have to be wondering the same thing. It’s as if we’ve hung a giant “kick me” sign around the nation’s neck.

There are downright secret moments of my life that are intimately tied
to New Orleans. There are images in my mind that are the most personal
I can imagine, and I’d not soil them by sharing.

But I’ve seen the sunset over the volcano rim at Santorini, and stood
on the newest land on earth on The Big Island of Hawaii. I’ve wandered
the streets of Paris many times, and stayed in a 5 star Ian Schlaeger
hotel with a woman I loved. I’ve sat in the ruins of Agamemnon’s
throne room, and sat at a plastic table and had homemade calderada in
a Madeira beach cafe. I’ve had a wonderful meal in a randomly selected
family restaurant in Rome (complete with yelling relatives in the
kitchen), and I drank regularly in the pub where Daniel Defoe
met the model for Robinson Crusoe. I’ve dined at Martin’s in
Edinburgh, where Martin himself tells you the names of the cows that
produced the cheese platter.

In other words, I’ve been around. I’ve never been to the orient, but I
can speak of the West.

And there is no place, no place in the West that is like New Orleans.
It uniquely reflects the best and worst things of America, and
humanity itself.

I can’t say it well. But I’ll share one memory, one that I think is
public enough to share. I remember sitting in the Super Dome (of all
the tacky places), at a Tulane graduation. As an academic, I’ve been
to more graduations than I can remember. They don’t generally move me
much.

But when a woman got up and sang “Do You Know What It Means to Miss
New Orleans?”, everyone cried, and everyone understood something about
one another’s hearts: the love for that amazing place, for that amazing
concentration of humanity.

Well, I’ve had my shiny new Archos Gmini XS 202 music player for about a week now, and I’m glad to report a positive experience. I’m not going to do one of those full length geek reviews here: you can get the specs on the manufacturer’s site. I ordered it from them, and they were unbelievably prompt in delivery. It was here in about 3 days.

The Gmini is tiny (shorter, slightly wider, slightly thicker, and slightly heavier) than the iPod Mini. It costs me a little more, (around $300), and it is clearly not as physically attractive as its iAncestor. The interface isn’t as nice (though it’s very functional). I would like to have one of those wonderous white wheels!

But the XS 202 packs an obvious technical punch the lil’ iPod lacks. It has 20 Gigabytes of storage, and 17 hours of battery life! Compared to the iPod Mini’s 6GB, this is the difference between pondering how to select what part of your music collection to take with you, and just taking everything, and still having half the drive available.

And you could actually use that extra 10Gig with someone else’s computer, since the XS 202 acts just like a disc drive. You will have to have the proprietary cable with you, though. But with that in your case, you’ve got a fully functional external drive, as well as a music player.

The device is not limited by any native DRM, but it does support Microsoft’s WMA Playforsure DRM, if you want to enjoy the impulse buying of online music stores,. You can’t use the Apple DRM, so you can’t shop at iTunes, which is a slight drag, since it’s clearly the best store. But big deal.

It was pretty easy to setup Windows Media Player to sync not only all my ripped CDs, but also the podcasts I setup to autodownload via iPodder. I have my precious NPR automagically! And the sync is blindingly fast.

The player sounds good, and is easy to use. The playlist building facility does the most it can with the screen. The library nicely exploits ID3 tags to organize your tunes.

The only hiccup I had was that initially the device’s library wouldn’t include more than 2094 songs (and it hung when it reached that number, requiring a reboot). But a simple firmware upgrade from the manufacturer’s site fixed that right up.

This is my first MP3 player, so I may be naive in thinking that this thing’s the bee’s knees. But I’m definately happy.

Now, to keep myself from using it so much that I completely shut off from the fascinating sounds of London town.