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Archive for January, 2008
The premise of this film is very simple and very implausible. An aged former Nazi (Laurence Olivier) has “escaped justice,” ending up in New York. He has a stash of diamonds in a safety deposit box worth tens of millions of dollars. He wants to get them out and go back to safety in Uruguay, but he’s afraid he is being watched and might be robbed while leaving the bank with such a hoard. Put yourself in his shoes and guess which of the following plans would make sense to get the loot out of the bank: Continue reading…
Guess which of the following are honored at Westminster Theological Seminary with a day off. You may select more than one of course. (Note: you may regard one of the selections as a joke.) Continue reading…
And now comes Rev Michael Eric Dyson to defend Martin Luther King’s plagiarism.
The facts can be summarized rather succinctly. Continue reading…
The greatest opera ever! Continue reading…
In a discussion with a co-worker last week, I discovered with shock that some people are still not aware of M. L. King’s chronic cheating: plagiarism in his literary production, and serial adultery and worse in his personal life. The burden of this post will be to examine the discussion of this facet of King’s life given by Rev. Michael Eric Dyson in a book summarized elsewhere. Page numbers in parentheses refer to that work. Continue reading…
In his book, I May Not Get There With You (full bibliog. info at bottom), Rev. Michael Dyson discussed a variety of contemporary topics in racial politics using the life of Martin Luther King, Jr. (hereafter: MLK) as springboard. He is clearly upset that conservatives of many stripes and variations have appropriated the MLK mythos, and wants to set MLK’s iconic status back in service to radical politics. Actually, blacks, whites, liberals, and conservatives have all wandered from the right track due to having come under one or another forms of “amnesia” (290-4) which Dyson details. Continue reading…
Tune in to your NPR station at 1:30 today (Saturday 1/19/08).
Earlier, when discussing the (lack of) inherent advantage of the metric system, I promised a discussion of the alleged advantage of using a system built around multiples-of-10. Continue reading…
Original German: Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam (“Golem: How He Came Into the World”). This is an early silent masterpiece. It is a telling of the most famous golem-legend, which takes place in Prague during the Elizabethan period. Using astrology, kabala, and invocation of an evil spirit, Rabbi Judah Löw (Albert Steinrück) succeeds in animating a clay model of a man. With this Golem, Löw is able to defend the jews from persecution by the Empire; in addition, the Golem (played by Paul Wegener who also directs) is marshaled to kill the Gentile lover Continue reading…
