Miscellaneous
jrosenhouse | October 12, 2011My new issue of Answers Update, the monthly newsletter of Answers in Genesis, turned up in the mail today. It's a twenty-four page magazine, more than half of which contains advertisements for their various products. But there is also a lead article on the cover, written by Ken Ham himself. Here's the opening:
I'm sure you have heard the famous saying from the Star Trek TV series, “Beam me up, Scotty!” The 1960s series, which has become a cult classic (I have to admit I've watched many episodes myself!), told stories of the crew of a futuristic starship, the Enterprise, as it explored…
jrosenhouse | September 23, 2011I am not now, nor have I ever been, married. Most of the time I like being single, but I do have my moments of weakness. They're infrequent and don't usually last long, but every once in a while, if I squint a bit and tilt my head just so, I can just see the appeal of marriage. On the other hand, I figure most married people have moments when they wish they were single, so it probably all evens out in the end.
I also do not have children, but it simply never happens that I wish that I did. I am at an age (38) where a majority of my friends have young children, but whenever I see them…
jrosenhouse | August 10, 2011Sorry for the disappearing act. I've been using this time to better myself by learning about new things. Like the various causes of sciatica. Or where you go in Harrisonburg when you need to have your back X-rayed. Turns out I have a degenerate disc in my lower back. When you consider that there are far nastier things that can cause low back pain, this is actually decent news. Happily, through a combination of lots of rest and some anti-inflammatory medication the symptoms have largely abated, and my doctor is optimistic that things will return to normal fairly soon. Since I was…
jrosenhouse | August 1, 2011I have now returned from my twenty-year high school reunion. It was a lot of fun, but it's really quite shocking just how blurry my memory of high school really is. There were about fifty alums there, but I recognized less than half of them. Happily, two of my closest friends from high school were there, including my prom date, so it was great to catch up with them.
The whole experience prompted me to pull my yearbook off the shelf for the first time in, well, twenty years actually. I browsed through some of the things that people wrote, and two things stuck me in particular. One was the…
jrosenhouse | July 29, 2011I'm going to my twentieth high school reunion this weekend. Yep. Twenty years. Sigh...
jrosenhouse | July 12, 2011Of course, I also had time to explore Philadelphia a bit. Vacations are not built on chess alone. During my explorations I stumbled upon the Reading Terminal Market. It's a pretty spectacular collection of small concessions, most of them selling food of one sort or another. Here are a few random shots to give you the flavor:
That one had me wanting to buy some veggies and make a big salad in my hotel room, but there were a few practical problems with that.
That's a lot of sausages.
Sadly, a handful of photos can't really capture the feel of the place. It seems to go…
jrosenhouse | June 24, 2011This is sad news:
Peter Falk, who marshaled actorly tics, prop room appurtenances and his own physical idiosyncrasies to personify Columbo, one of the most famous and beloved fictional detectives in television history, died on Thursday night at his home in Beverly Hills, Calif. He was 83.
His death was announced in a statement from Larry Larson, a longtime friend and the lawyer for Mr. Falk's wife, Shera. He had been treated for Alzheimer's disease in recent years.
Mr. Falk had a wide-ranging career in comedy and drama, in the movies and onstage, before and during the three and a half…
jrosenhouse | June 17, 2011I spend a lot of my free time reading, one result of which is a long list of rhetorical pet peeves. Little phrases and expressions that, for me at least, immediately make the writer look like an amateur.
Starting a sentence with “Uhm” or “Hmmmm,” for example. This is an especially common one among blog writers. It's a silly and cliched way of suggesting that your opponent has not merely made a weak argument, but has actually said something unhinged and foolish. In the early days of blogs this might have been a clever way of achieving a conversational tone, but now it's so overused it just…
jrosenhouse | June 3, 2011So, I went to the midnight show of the new X-Men movie yesterday. Short review: Wowee wow wow! What a great movie! Best comic book movie in quite a while, and since there have been several good ones that's really saying something. Longer review below the fold. Only minor spoilers ahead, but if you truly want to know nothing about the film going in then it might be best to stop reading now.
The X-Men are a bit of a hole in my comic book education. A while back I worked my way through the first volume of The Essential X-Men, which collected some of the original 1960's comics, but that's…
jrosenhouse | May 23, 2011The BECB, that is. (That's the big evolution/creationism book, for those not up on the local slang.) Many years ago, my thesis adviser, exasperated that I was “putting the finishing touches” on my thesis for about two straight months, told me heatedly that at some point you have to stop revising and just hand in the damn thing. So I took that to heart. Each time I proofread the BECB I found something new to fiddle with, but at some point you just have to say that enough is enough. It's as good as it's ever going to get. So I sent it off to my editor this morning.
Of course, it will be a…
jrosenhouse | April 5, 2011Time to lighten the mood around here. So how many of these are you doing wrong?
jrosenhouse | March 26, 2011Well, here's a happy development. It seems that today is Richard Dawkins' seventieth birthday. So happy birthday and best wishes for many more!
jrosenhouse | March 17, 2011Here's an interesting item from HuffPo. The following appeared as an essay question on the SAT:
Reality television programs, which feature real people engaged in real activities rather than professional actors performing scripted scenes, are increasingly popular. These shows depict ordinary people competing in everything from singing and dancing to losing weight, or just living their everyday lives. Most people believe that the reality these shows portray is authentic, but they are being misled. How authentic can these shows be when producers design challenges for the participants and then…
jrosenhouse | March 7, 2011The BECB, that is. That's the big evolution/creation book, for those not up on the local slang. Finished the first draft last night. Very cool.
On the other hand, looks like I just lost my excuse for sporadic blogging...
jrosenhouse | February 9, 2011This is clearly the result of my earlier blog post.
Our customers have told us they want real page numbers that match the page numbers in print books so they can easily reference and cite passages, and read alongside others in a book club or class. Rather than add page numbers that don't correspond to print books, which is how page numbers have been added to e-books in the past, we're adding real page numbers that correspond directly to a book's print edition. We've already added real page numbers to tens of thousands of Kindle books, including the top 100 bestselling books in the Kindle…
jrosenhouse | February 7, 2011The BECB (the big evolution/creatio book) has been all-consuming lately. I've been struggling to meet my April 1 (no foolin!) deadline, which led me to spend virtually every waking moment last week either in the classroom, grading papers, or writing. My worry wasn't so much finishing the manuscript on time, since it is very nearly finished now, but finishing with enough time left over to send it out for feedback and comments. As it happens, though, late last week my editor contacted me and told me that for various reasons they wanted to push the deadline back to May 1 instead of April 1.…
jrosenhouse | January 20, 2011The book gods have punished me for my apostasy. It turns out the Kindle has no mechanism for telling you the physical page number you are on in the book. This makes it problematic for scholarly purposes, since page numbers are usually expected for a proper citation.
It never even occurred to me that this would be the case. I knew, from having seen other people's Kindles, that it identifies your position in the text via a system of “locations,” and with a little scroll bar along the bottom of the screen. I just assumed (!!) that there was some feature that allowed you to convert from a…
jrosenhouse | January 18, 2011I'm not sure when it happened, but at some point technology left me behind. I still can't play those first-person video games without getting dizzy and confused. On those rare occasions when I want to record a television program, I use videotape. I despise cell phones, though I do begrudgingly admit they have their uses. (During my recent trip to New Orleans I sent my very first text message!) I still buy CD's from time to time.
And ever since I started reading articles about the demise of print books, I have been doing my part to keep the industry afloat. This is partly because I…
jrosenhouse | January 4, 2011Shame on you if you don't know Al Jaffee. He's been a cartoonist for Mad Magazine going back to its founding in 1954. He is best known for the “Fold-Ins” which are hard to describe if you've never seen them. Click here to have a look. He also wrote the “Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions” feature. At 89 he's still going strong. Here's the interview.
I found this part especially interesting:
Antonio ProhÃas (Spy vs. Spy) was a refugee from Castro's Cuba, and Sergio Aragones' (the margin art in Mad) parents fled to Mexico from Franco's Spain. Considering your own situation, was it common…