Year: 2004

YES! YES! YES! TinyURL & TinyURL Creator!

Okay, you know how horrendously long some URLs get? Like this one:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect?tag=jimmyakincom-20&path=tg/detail/-/1888992050

You find yourself wanting to share what’s on the other end of such links with people (e.g,. in an e-mail), but the fact that this is such a bulky, high fiber link makes it prohibitively difficult to do so. What can you do?

Use TinyURL! Yes, that’s right, with TinyURL you can take a monstrously long link and turn it into a handy, dandy “my size” link, like this one:

http://tinyurl.com/3gpyu

This powerful petite will take you to exactly the same place as the bulky, high fiber link, but without all the hassle (try it!). Now you can be proud to put attractive links like this in your e-mails, on your web pages, among your personal notes–in place of those unsightly, prolix URLs that used to cause you so much frustration, worry, and embarrassment.

How do you get TinyURLs for the pages you want to link?

It’s simple, just copy the bloated link you want to put on an instant diet, go to TinyURL.com, paste it into the box at the top of the page, press the button, and bingo! You have a TinyURL to share with the world!

IT”S FREE!

To help you remember this new, must-use service, put TinyURL.com in your bookmarks or links bar.

AND THAT’S NOT ALL!

If you are a user of the excellent, open-source browswer Mozilla, get the TinyURL Creator plug-in, which lets you create TinyURLs without ever leaving the page you want to link!

Yes, now that TinyURL has been invented, the world is truly a better place.

YES! YES! YES! TinyURL & TinyURL Creator!

Okay, you know how horrendously long some URLs get? Like this one:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect?tag=jimmyakincom-20&path=tg/detail/-/1888992050

You find yourself wanting to share what’s on the other end of such links with people (e.g,. in an e-mail), but the fact that this is such a bulky, high fiber link makes it prohibitively difficult to do so. What can you do?

Use TinyURL! Yes, that’s right, with TinyURL you can take a monstrously long link and turn it into a handy, dandy “my size” link, like this one:

http://tinyurl.com/3gpyu

This powerful petite will take you to exactly the same place as the bulky, high fiber link, but without all the hassle (try it!). Now you can be proud to put attractive links like this in your e-mails, on your web pages, among your personal notes–in place of those unsightly, prolix URLs that used to cause you so much frustration, worry, and embarrassment.

How do you get TinyURLs for the pages you want to link?

It’s simple, just copy the bloated link you want to put on an instant diet, go to TinyURL.com, paste it into the box at the top of the page, press the button, and bingo! You have a TinyURL to share with the world!

IT”S FREE!

To help you remember this new, must-use service, put TinyURL.com in your bookmarks or links bar.

AND THAT’S NOT ALL!

If you are a user of the excellent, open-source browswer Mozilla, get the TinyURL Creator plug-in, which lets you create TinyURLs without ever leaving the page you want to link!

Yes, now that TinyURL has been invented, the world is truly a better place.

AP: Man Bites Dog

Really! No kidding! I’m not making this up! An actual, real-word instance of a proverbial “Man Bites Dog” story!

Excerpt:

BEND, Ore. – A man suspected of assaulting his girlfriend set two fires and bit a dog on the head as he tried to escape from police, the authorities said. . . .

“He was given several opportunities to come out of the pipe and he basically signaled with his middle finger,” Stone said.

A police dog named Amor was sent in to retrieve Sernett and bit the suspect in the leg.

Sernett responded by lifting the dog off the ground and biting him on the head, Stone said.

AP: Man Bites Dog

Really! No kidding! I’m not making this up! An actual, real-word instance of a proverbial “Man Bites Dog” story!

Excerpt:

BEND, Ore. – A man suspected of assaulting his girlfriend set two fires and bit a dog on the head as he tried to escape from police, the authorities said. . . .

“He was given several opportunities to come out of the pipe and he basically signaled with his middle finger,” Stone said.

A police dog named Amor was sent in to retrieve Sernett and bit the suspect in the leg.

Sernett responded by lifting the dog off the ground and biting him on the head, Stone said.

Speaking of Lurch . . .

addams_familyI don’t know if anybody out there gets the cable network TVLand (a spinoff of Nick at Night). I suspect that I am one of about six people who do get it.

Well, if you’re one of the lucky six, this weekend they’re having an Addams Family marathon. That show is SO cool.

As a boy I loved it, though I could seldom catch it in syndication. I infinitely preferred it to The Munsters, which struck me as a gaudy, less creative knockoff of The Addams Family. In the years since, I’ve decided that I *do* like The Munsters, but The Addams Family still has a kind of sophistication and subtlety that the Munsters didn’t.

The Munsters were all established types of monsters: Hermann was a Frankenstein monster, Lily and Granpa were vampires, and Eddie was a werewolf. Then there was Cousin Marilyn, the drop-dead gorgeous ugly duckling of the family.

The Addamses, by contrast, defy categorization. Morticia is vaguely Vampira-like, but she isn’t a vampire. Lurch is vaguely Frankenstein monster-ish, but he isn’t a Frankenstein monster. Gomez and the children aren’t monstrous in appearance at all, and Uncle Fester, Cousin Itt, and Thing defy classification. The only Addams that approximates an established stereotype is Grandmama, who is a hag.

The humor on The Addams Family also is more subtle than that on The Munsters. The writers didn’t go for as many predictable jokes. Thus, for example, in one episode this weekend Morticia offered a visitor to the house a dish of brazed giraffe whereas Lily Munster might have offered a wolfsbane casserole or something. Brazed giraffe is odd and exotic without being predictable and invoking a cliche.

That seems to be the main difference between the two oddball families (both of whom got their serieses in the same year: 1964). The Munsters are a fun romp through established monster motifs (mostly derivative of the 1930s and ’40s Universal monster movies), while The Addams Family is a quirky, understated, never-quite-predictable look at a family from The Twilight Zone.

One thing both shows have going for them is wicked cool main title sequences. The Munsters’ theme has those hard-driving (for 1964) electric guitars and saxophones, while The Addams Family has the lively harpsichord and finger snapping.

Both families also are functional, despite their oddballness. The family members care about each other, the mother and father in each are in love, and everbody has a kind of quirky zest for life. Gomez Addams (played by John Astin, father of Sean Astin or “Samwise Gamgee” from The Lord of the Rings movies) in particular seems to be thoroughly enjoying life with a passion that sometimes borders on mania.

When I was a boy, one of my favorite aunts (who reminds me of a non-spooky, Texas-accented version of Morticia, if that makes any sense) once compared my sense of humor to that of Charles Addams, the cartoonist on whose work the series is based. Maybe that’s why I like the show so much.

Now if they’d just put it out on DVD. It only ran two seasons, so it wouldn’t take much work to put the whole thing out. Just two, one-season volumes. Since TVLand has started releasing DVD sets of the shows it broadcasts, maybe it’ll put this one out. If so, I’ll get my copies pronto!

Septuagint & Other Greek Resources

A reader writes:

Jimmy, I noticed that there are no books concerning the Septuagint. Do you know of any interlinear versions? While it’s use will naturally bring up the issue of canonicity with non-catholics, wouldn’t it be usefull in establishing contextual usages? An example that comes to mind was when I was trying to establish the usage of Trogos in John 6 as literal to a friend of mine. I found only two other occurances in the N.T. external to John 6. I gave up on the only online version I found when I realized it was universally translated every word for “eat” as Estheo. (I don’t know greek but as an engineer I recognized enough of the letters to get suspicius when the letters were spelling Phegos.)

Putting together an interlinear is a very difficult thing, and they don’t sell that great to begin with. I am not aware of anybody who has put together a Septuagint interlinear in book form. Normally it is either published with straight Greek text or as a diaglot (i.e., a work with two languages on the same page or on facing pages, but not woven together line by line in interlinear fashion). Here’s an example of a Septuagint-English diaglot.

There’s also an NIV Hebrew-Greek-English triglot Old Testament that Amazon has available from their used bookstore contacts.

Though there is no print interlinear of the Septuagint, there is one available in .pdf form, which you can get from www.ApostolicBible.com. It can be ordered on CD-Rom for sixty bucks or downloaded it for forty three. Here’s a peek inside it:

lxxinterlinear

Now, you may notice that there’s something odd here. The words in the English lines are not strictly lined up under the corresponding Greek words. In Gen. 1:1, for example, the Greek line has “epoiesen h theos,” which in literal word order is “[he] made the God” (putting the verb before its subject) but which the English line has rendered idiomatically as “God made.” The same thing happens in 1:3 with “God said.”

This is not standard practice for an interlinear, and since I can’t find adequate online statements about who made this interlinear, what their agenda was, and how rigorous they were in doing it, there may be imperfections or biases in the thing, so fair warning.

Another way to accomplish the same effect (and which would be far better than buying the Septuagint in .pdf form) would be to use Bible software, opening a Septuagint window and linking it to an English window with corresponding words highlighted.

It sounds like, though, that what you’re after may not require a Septuagint at all (interlinear or otherwise). If you want to do primary source research, you would need the text of the Septuagint–for it is quite useful in fleshing out our knowledge of how words were used–but there’s probably a much simpler way to get the info that you’re after. A good Greek dictionary will tie together not only word usages from the Greek NT and the Septuagint but also from extra-biblical sources, and it’s *much* easier (and more reliable) to figure out a dictionary entry than to do your own primary source research. A professional Greek scholar might need to do the latter, but for a normal person’s purposes, a good dictionary is the way to go.

Though there are more detailed dictionaries available, the Abbott-Smith lexicon is a fairly simple one to use that includes data from the Septuagint, extra-biblical sources, and the Hebrew and Aramaic texts of the Old Testament. Little Kittel would be a step up in detail from Abbott-Smith, but it isn’t comprehensive and you have to be careful with it since the authors of the work it’s based on had an agenda (they were trying to write a theological encyclopedia disguised as a Greek dictionary). It still can be useful; you just have to be careful. There are also more detailed dictionaries, but they’re probably more than what you’re looking for.

If you need an English-Hebrew/Greek dictionary (i.e., one organized by English word order) so you can see what different words are translated as a particular English term, a good basic one is Vine’s Expository Dictionary. It’s not exhaustive (and the scholarship is a bit out of date), but it’s a place to begin. Bible software also frequently can perform this function.

P.S. The verb you’re after in John 6 is trogo, not trogos.

Septuagint & Other Greek Resources

A reader writes:

Jimmy, I noticed that there are no books concerning the Septuagint. Do you know of any interlinear versions? While it’s use will naturally bring up the issue of canonicity with non-catholics, wouldn’t it be usefull in establishing contextual usages? An example that comes to mind was when I was trying to establish the usage of Trogos in John 6 as literal to a friend of mine. I found only two other occurances in the N.T. external to John 6. I gave up on the only online version I found when I realized it was universally translated every word for “eat” as Estheo. (I don’t know greek but as an engineer I recognized enough of the letters to get suspicius when the letters were spelling Phegos.)

Putting together an interlinear is a very difficult thing, and they don’t sell that great to begin with. I am not aware of anybody who has put together a Septuagint interlinear in book form. Normally it is either published with straight Greek text or as a diaglot (i.e., a work with two languages on the same page or on facing pages, but not woven together line by line in interlinear fashion). Here’s an example of a Septuagint-English diaglot.

There’s also an NIV Hebrew-Greek-English triglot Old Testament that Amazon has available from their used bookstore contacts.

Though there is no print interlinear of the Septuagint, there is one available in .pdf form, which you can get from www.ApostolicBible.com. It can be ordered on CD-Rom for sixty bucks or downloaded it for forty three. Here’s a peek inside it:

lxxinterlinear

Now, you may notice that there’s something odd here. The words in the English lines are not strictly lined up under the corresponding Greek words. In Gen. 1:1, for example, the Greek line has “epoiesen h theos,” which in literal word order is “[he] made the God” (putting the verb before its subject) but which the English line has rendered idiomatically as “God made.” The same thing happens in 1:3 with “God said.”

This is not standard practice for an interlinear, and since I can’t find adequate online statements about who made this interlinear, what their agenda was, and how rigorous they were in doing it, there may be imperfections or biases in the thing, so fair warning.

Another way to accomplish the same effect (and which would be far better than buying the Septuagint in .pdf form) would be to use Bible software, opening a Septuagint window and linking it to an English window with corresponding words highlighted.

It sounds like, though, that what you’re after may not require a Septuagint at all (interlinear or otherwise). If you want to do primary source research, you would need the text of the Septuagint–for it is quite useful in fleshing out our knowledge of how words were used–but there’s probably a much simpler way to get the info that you’re after. A good Greek dictionary will tie together not only word usages from the Greek NT and the Septuagint but also from extra-biblical sources, and it’s *much* easier (and more reliable) to figure out a dictionary entry than to do your own primary source research. A professional Greek scholar might need to do the latter, but for a normal person’s purposes, a good dictionary is the way to go.

Though there are more detailed dictionaries available, the Abbott-Smith lexicon is a fairly simple one to use that includes data from the Septuagint, extra-biblical sources, and the Hebrew and Aramaic texts of the Old Testament. Little Kittel would be a step up in detail from Abbott-Smith, but it isn’t comprehensive and you have to be careful with it since the authors of the work it’s based on had an agenda (they were trying to write a theological encyclopedia disguised as a Greek dictionary). It still can be useful; you just have to be careful. There are also more detailed dictionaries, but they’re probably more than what you’re looking for.

If you need an English-Hebrew/Greek dictionary (i.e., one organized by English word order) so you can see what different words are translated as a particular English term, a good basic one is Vine’s Expository Dictionary. It’s not exhaustive (and the scholarship is a bit out of date), but it’s a place to begin. Bible software also frequently can perform this function.

P.S. The verb you’re after in John 6 is trogo, not trogos.

Possible CNN Interview

Yesterday I did a phone interview with a reporter from CNN. She wasn’t clear, but I got the impression that it was essentially a pre-interview to decide if they want to do a real interview with me. What was clear is that they are doing a story on the denial of Communion to supporters of abortion and homosexuality. If they decide to use me for it, they’ll let me know. Should happen in the next few days if it does. I’ll let y’all know.

Mr. Misdirection

James White has replied again. His latest reply is pure misdirection. It contains two paragraphs, the first of which consists of jellied sarcasm and the second of which is a renewed attempt to misdirect the audience by reissuing challenges as to what he’d like me to talk about instead of his recent errors.

These errors, one will recall, were the following:

1) White referred to “the biblical definition of a saint,” implying that there is such a thing.

There’s not.

There are several different biblical uses of the terms corresponding to “saint” (Gk., hagios, Ar. qaddish, Hb., qadhosh), and we must be sensitive to these uses.

2) White said that “in Roman Catholicism a saint is a person who has more merit than temporal punishment upon their soul at death, so that they do not need to pass through purgatory for cleansing, but are fit for the presence of God immediately.”

This is not only false, it is preposterous. In common Catholic speech, the term “saint” means either “someone who is in heaven” or “someone who has been canonized.”

The closest White comes to admitting he was wrong is when in his first reply he says:

Obviously, the term “saint” is then used of those who have been cleansed and “left” purgatory at a later time, but I wasn’t addressing that usage in explaining the basics of the Roman position [emphasis in original]

This is not an admission of error because it implies that there is a usage of the term “saint” that corresponds to the one White proposed. He thus remains in the wrong.

Suppose that I said:

In Evangelical Protestantism, a minister is a person who has more fervor than he has book learning, so that he does not need to pass through seminary for education but is fit for preaching in the pulpit immediately.

White would rightly object to this characterization, and it wouldn’t be much of a defense for me to say:

Obviously, the term “minister” is then used of those who have been eduated and “left” seminary at a later time, but I wasn’t addressing that usage in explaining the basics of the Evangelical position

There is simply is no established Evangelical usage reserving the term “minister” for those who have not gone through seminary (there might be among certain extra-snarky Fundamentalists, but I’m not talking about them), and in the same way there is no Catholic usage reserving the term “saint” for those who have not gone through purgatory. White is simply wrong and trying to hide it behind huffing and puffing and misdirection.

The reason this stings White so much is that he thought he was safe here. If you read his original post, he’s setting up a classic sneer–as he so often does–between his own “biblical faith” and “man-centered religion.” The first horn–or perhaps we should say, nostril–of the sneer is when White introduces “the biblical definition of a saint.” Here he is setting up the “biblical faith” element, with which he wishes to identify himself. The second horn–or nostril–is when he introduces his nonsense about what a saint is in Catholic theology. The content of this nonsense is meant to make Catholicism look bad as being a “man-centered religion” of “works.”

Thing is: A person only tends to sneer at others when he thinks he is on safe ground. It is thus very surprising and upsetting to have it suddenly turn out that he is wrong. The effect is like having a door pop open and bop you in the nose.

Unable to say “Oww! Okay, I was wrong in what I said, and I shouldn’t have been sneering,” White thus turns to misdirection.

Michael Eisner Enters The Tower Of Terror

The last few weeks we here in California have been bombarded by ads for the Twilight Zone Tower of Terror at Disney’s California Adventure theme park.

Don’t know if you’re seeing these ads in the rest of the country, but they’re all over the place here.

Now, as this photo essay, it’s Disney head Michael Eisner’s turn in the Tower of Terror, the ultra-expensive ride he has been backing to bring bucks into Disney’s latest lackluster theme park.

Apparently, the California Adventure is a cost-cut, trimmed-down version of what was originally envisioned to be a much larger park, but the reaction of the public has been “ho-hum.” That’s my reaction, too. The concept of “California” just doesn’t send me, and it hasn’t been paired conceptually with the concept of “Adventure” since the 1890s.

In any event, the photo essay–taken this past Memorial Day–shows very few people seem to have the park resonating for them, either.

Terror time for Michael Eisner.