Another weblog

Chant is a way of musically speaking prose texts—in particular, religious texts. One advantage of chant over other types of singing is that any prose text can be sung. This means, for example, that the Psalms do not need to be paraphrased metrically; they can be sung as-is.

Read the rest of this entry »

• It doesn’t play Flash videos
• It doesn’t weigh less than half a pound
• It doesn’t grow a full-sized keyboard when you need it
• It doesn’t have 7.1 surround sound
• It doesn’t have a built-in USB port
• It doesn’t have a port for garbage disposal either
• It doesn’t have a camera
• It doesn’t have fingerprint-recognition technology (even though the fingerprints show up so well when the screen is off)
• It doesn’t have bio-sensors that spot wanted criminals on the street
• It doesn’t read people’s minds, for that matter
• It doesn’t produce realistic three-dimensional holograms
• It doesn’t make telephone calls
• It doesn’t fax letters either
• It doesn’t turn your PC into a Mac, even though it’s supposed to be ‘magical’
• It doesn’t work as a footwarmer
• It doesn’t respond to your email for you
• It can’t walk your dog for you
• It can’t drive your car for you
• It can’t take you to the moon and back
• Even if it could, it wouldn’t do it in less than twenty minutes
• It don’t automatically generate a list of the things it don’t do with the correct number of bullet points

Ambiguity can be fun.

There are two basic kinds of ambiguity in language: lexical ambiguity and syntactical ambiguity. (Those are big words, but the concepts aren’t hard.) I’ll be going over lexical ambiguity in a later post.

Read the rest of this entry »

Today is Holy Saturday, which commemorates the Sabbath that Christ rested in the tomb.

Some people have a problem with the established, traditional view of Holy Week, arguing that because Jesus predicted that he would be in the earth ‘three days and three nights’ (Matthew 12:40), he could not have been crucified on a Friday. However, the problem is not with the historic calculation of Holy Week; the problem is in the interpretation and translation of ancient languages.

Read the rest of this entry »

To score the three submissions for my trivia quiz, I followed the following scheme:

Read the rest of this entry »