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History is Written by the Victors

 

I have a confession to make:  I’ve been reading a book.  Yes, it’s true.

Right around Palm Sunday, I read/heard some interviews with Bart Ehrman, a religious scholar out of the University of North Carolina.  He was talking about his most recent book, “Did Jesus Exist?”  Hearing the interview reminded me that I actually own another book by Ehrman, “Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew.”  I picked it up a few years ago after seeing the interview above (on another book…”Misquoting Jesus“) on The Daily Show.  I actually tried reading it back in 2006, but one thing led to another and I stopped.  What can I say…

Regardless, I picked it back up again and am about halfway through.  Part of what intrigued me about Ehrman’s books, in general, is that they are not only discussing the content of the Bible and other historical documents, but also the context in which they came into existence, how and when they were discovered, and how accurate their translations were.  I can’t say I’ve ever been a huge fan of the idea that the Bible should be taken literally, and books like these make it clear that there was quite a bit of politics involved in which books made it in and which ones didn’t.

This book, specifically, is talking about different, early forms of Christianity that were “snuffed out” by what he terms the “proto-orthodox” church.  That is to say, the earliest version of what we have today.  He points to the Gnostics, the Ebionites and the Marcionites (thus far) as examples of competing views on how Christianity should be viewed.  The nature of Christ, Himself.  How much the Old Testament (and Judaism) should figure in to what eventually becomes “Christianity.”

Reading through it, two things come to mind:

1). The Early Christians didn’t know everything, either.  Barnabus, for example, traveled with Paul and shows up in Acts and a few Epistles.  He wrote a document, “Epistle to the Hebrews,” that suggests that Jewish Law (e.g. Leviticus, the Ten Commandments, etc.) was not meant to be taken literally and that things like “don’t eat pork” really meant “don’t eat like a pig.”  This guy knew and traveled with Paul and even he disputed the meaning of ancient texts…and he was around at the time of the writing of many of our “ancient texts.”  And these discussions between Paul and Barnabus (and others) were going on while they were writing what got into our Bible.

2). It’s easy to look at “Christianity” as a mish-mash of different belief systems today when you look at Methodists, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Catholics, Baptists, and so on and so forth.  Each one has their own “quirks,” traditions, hierarchies, et cetera.  And there are definitely individuals within each group that thinks that they have it “right” and that they are “saved” and the others are not.  Strangely enough, it seems like this is the way it has been since the beginning.  The only difference is that one group (the one inspired by the writings of Paul) won out 2000 years ago and effectively stamped out the others.

Crazy to think about what that would mean if the same thing happened today, eh?

Regardless, it’s a pretty fascinating book, and brings up many interesting ideas that help out in my various discussions.  We’ve been reading through the Gospels in our small group, so the things this book presents really gives me a different perspective than what the others in the group are bringing to the table.  At the very least, it certainly highlights the fact that the Bible is an important document to many, but as with anything historically-based, it’s shaped by those who came out on top.

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04.15.12 Baking

Meg napped for 4.5 hours Saturday afternoon, so I cooked! Batter yeast bread (this is the sandwich bread I’ve been looking for for years), homemade oatmeal cream pies, and tortillas.

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04.10.12 Dinner

Tuesday night family dinner: Shepherd’s Pie, homemade bread, and blackberries. Homemade peanut butter ice cream with homemade “Magic Shell.” Yummmmmm…

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Waning Attention Span

Remember this? ...'cause we don't get this anymore on televisions...

We’ve noticed, in recent years, that it’s getting harder and harder to sit down and watch a television series as it happens, with weekly episodes and breaks around Christmas and March (let alone summer…) where nothing new is on TV.  I’m sure most of this is due to the fact that we don’t have cable, so we’ve had to shift our viewing habits to some degree.  But even on Hulu, which has a “regular stream” of episodes, similar to what you’d have on a television network, we have a queue of 22 episodes right now waiting to be watched, across various different shows.  Some of those are “my” shows, some are Brooke’s, and others are for the both of us.  Our varied schedules (and toddler…) make it difficult to schedule that time for both of us to sit down and watch something.

As our schedules are difficult to manage, I’ve found that I prefer shorter TV seasons now.  There was a time when I balked at the idea of a show only having 6 or 12 episodes in a season, but now I can’t imagine getting through the 22 episodes most traditional networks seem to favor.

Case in point: “The Walking Dead” is a show on AMC that is based on a comic book about the zombie apocalypse (though it’s really more about how the human survivors deal with it, and less about the zombies themselves).  The first season was 6 episodes, and the second season is 13 episodes.  The first season is on Netflix streaming.

I watched all of it on Saturday.

So, because there was a shorter season, the writers were able to tell a compact, yet full story that lasted throughout their season.  They weren’t trying to keep a story line going over 22 episodes, but it also wasn’t a serial a la your typical cop drama.  Each episode was connected, made you want to watch the next one, and kept you engaged.  There were no breaks for you to lose track of what’s going on (granted, I watched it all in one day, but the show premiered on AMC with a weekly episode over 6 weeks).

I’m having the same issue with video games now, too.  I’ve been trying to work my way through “Mass Effect 2,” a sci-fi role-playing game I picked up for $5 awhile back.  Games like this take at least 20 hours to complete, while many can immerse you in the world for at least 60 hours.  Now, it isn’t unusual to spend 60 hours playing a video game, but I’m finding it difficult to keep going back to that game because the story is complicated, it’s spread over a lengthy period of time, and if I can’t go back to it within a few days, I forget what I did before.

I guess I’m saying that my attention span, or at least, the amount of time I have to devote to things that require such attention, has waned.  I just don’t have the time anymore for 60 hour games or 22 episode TV shows spread over a full season.  I’d much rather play a shorter game, or one that can be enjoyed in shorter bits of time.  I’d much rather watch a 6-12 episode season of a show that Brooke and I can watch within a few weekends.  We can get a clearly defined story and won’t forget what happened “last time on…”

Thankfully, this is a purpose Netflix is well-suited for.  Shows like “Downton Abbey,” a critical darling recently, has 7 episodes in its first season.  “Mad Men” has 13 episode seasons.  “Breaking Bad” has 13 episode seasons.  “Doctor Who” as between 13 and 15 episodes per season.  Each one of these have a general story arc that takes place over that time frame, as well as the individual “bits” that make each episode distinct.  You’ll notice a trend that all these shows are either British or from the cable networks, both of which apparently figured out how to achieve excellent storytelling decades ago.  It’s no wonder these kinds of shows are the ones that win Emmys.

It just seems like shows along these lines are easier for me to digest now, rather than being bothered with the Law & Orders or CSI:s on network television.  It isn’t even because the subject matter is stale:  it’s because they’re just too long.

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04.02.12 Dinner

Here’s what happens when our meal plan contains mostly things that need long cook times or significant preparation: grilled cheese, chips, and pineapples. Last night’s dinner was the same theme: popcorn chicken, pasta salad from a box, and mandarin oranges. Someday, I’ll learn….

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“We walking! We walking!”

Red for Brooke; Blue for Me.

Well, to some degree we are.  Meg likes to say “We walking! We walking!” whenever we go on a walk, so it seemed appropriate…

After over a month of using our pedometers, here’s what the data’s looking like.  Overall, you can see a few breaks in the chart where someone didn’t use a pedometer.  The blue line is me; the red one is Brooke.  As of today, the Average for each of us is 6062 steps/day for Brooke and 5987 steps/day for me.  To be honest, I’m somewhat astounded with how close together those numbers are.  I’ve shown the averages below along with Standard Error bars.

Red for Brooke; Blue for Me.

Now, we’re supposed to be walking 10,000 steps per day.  We only actually did that once each, and got close on a few occasions.  As a reminder, 2000 steps is approximately 1 mile for the average person, so that means we’re both walking around 3 miles per day, give or take.  Not too bad, but could be better.

I should note that I generated these with Google Docs and, for some reason, it won’t let me annotate the Legend on the graphs to associate a name with a color.  Oh well.  Perhaps I’ll e-mail Google and complain about their free service… 😛

 

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Upcoming Movies

The last two years have yielded something of a famine with regards to summer movies I’m excited to see.  To be fair, the last two years have also encompassed this little thing called “fatherhood,” so I haven’t exactly had the time or money to go see as many movies as I used to.  That, and living in Iowa away from my usual movie buddy made it difficult to get to see the flicks I wanted to check out.

To be fair, last year especially didn’t really have much I was excited to see.  Within the realm of comic book features, movies like Thor, Captain America and Green Lantern didn’t really entice me to find someone to go to the theater with.  I caught most of these movies, and others, through Netflix rentals in the Fall and Spring and I don’t really think I missed all that much.

That said, now that we’ve made our triumphant return to St. Louis, I thought it best to outline the movies I’m excited to go see this Summer, provided The Wife (…and Josh’s wife…) will allow such things…  🙂

  • The Avengers (May 4, 2012) – This one is gonna rake in tons of cash, if only for the slate of actors they’ve got lined up.  Just about everyone is in this movie and it promises to blow up everything in sight.  Definitely a great way to kick off the summer blockbuster season.
  • Men In Black III (May 25, 2012) – To be honest, I don’t like the idea of effectively replacing Tommy Lee Jones with Josh Brolin. Then again, if you wanted a young looking Tommy Lee Jones, you could do worse than Josh Brolin.  I loved the first movie, but didn’t particularly care for the second one.  We’ll see how this one turns out, I guess, but I’ll probably end up seeing it.
  • Prometheus (June 1, 2012) – Billed as a loose prequel to the Alien franchise, Ridley Scott returns to sci-fi horror after a long absence.  This one probably won’t bring in the bucks as the others on this list, but I expect it’ll still be pretty awesome.
  • The Amazing Spider-Man (July 3, 2012) – I like me some Spider-man, and this re-boot takes the story back to the beginning with Andrew Garfield as Peter Parker and Emma Stone as Gwen Stacy.  When I heard those two names announced, I was a bit apprehensive, but Stone’s good in just about anything she’s in and Garfield was good in The Social Network, so I’ll cut him some slack.  That, and at least in the clips I’ve seen, he seems to pull off the “wit” of the character a bit more convincingly than Tobey Maguire did.  Call me “optimistic” on this one.
  • The Dark Knight Rises (July 20, 2012) – Uh.  I don’t need to write anything here really.  While Batman Begins was a great movie, The Dark Knight practically redefined what a “comic book movie” could be.  I will be shocked if this movie is anything less than stellar.
  • Total Recall (August 3, 2012) – To be honest, I haven’t seen the Schwarzenegger version in quite awhile, but the trailer for this one, this time with Colin Farrell, could be good.  The effects look pretty sweet and it’s got a good slate of actors.  My only concern is that Len Wiseman is directing it, mostly known for the Underworld franchise, so while I’m hopeful this movie turns out to be good, I won’t be too surprised if it’s “middling,” at best.
  • The Bourne Legacy (August 3, 2012) – So, as I was compiling this list, I saw this movie coming up.  I’d heard they were continuing the franchise without Matt Damon, but didn’t realize it was coming up already.  Jeremy Renner will be carrying on as a new character, though some old favorites from the previous movies will show up, too (Renner is also in The Avengers, earlier in the summer, so he’s packing quite a payday this year).  It’s a strong series of movies, so as long as they stick with the fiction, it’ll probably be alright.  There’s a bit of concern, though, as Paul Greengrass isn’t directing these (he did the previous three), but it is being directed by the guy that was involved with writing the earlier movies, so at least there’s some pedigree there.  Again, I’m hopeful for this one.

 

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Harry Potter and the Digital Copy

This week saw the announcement and launch of the Harry Potter franchise on e-book formats, though the details of this particular deal are remarkably different from previous, “traditional” book launches on Amazon’s Kindle or B&N’s Nook.  Through the Pottermore website, you can buy the first three books for $8 each and the final four books for $10 each.  Once you buy a book through Pottermore, you can choose up to 8 different formats to get that book, so if you want it through Amazon, B&N, Sony, Kobo, Google Books, etc., you can do it.  Buy it once, read it where you like.  Once you assign it to a format (e.g. Amazon), you can download it as many times as you want through that carrier.

For the uninitiated, this is not how it usually goes, and this is a problem that the “Power of Potter” is helping solve.  It used to be that you could go to any bookstore you want and buy that book.  You could sell it, you could move it, you could loan it to a friend, and you could pass it down to your kids someday.  With e-readers, it doesn’t work like that.  If you buy a book from Amazon for your Kindle, but then you decide to switch to the Nook, you don’t get to take that book with you: you have to buy it again.  Furthermore, while you can loan said book to friends, you can only do it if they have the same e-reader format (i.e. Kindle can lend to Kindle and Nook can lend to Nook, but not to each other…though there are ways around it…), and you can only do it for something like 2 weeks at a time.

Then there was another thing I recently read about what J.K. Rowling did with the “Potter” books, specifically with regards to libraries:

Among the other innovations Rowling offers is the ability to download up to eight digital copies of each book, either for use on another device or for lending. Again, this seems like an obvious feature that e-book publishers could provide — since digital copies effectively have no cost — but very few do. And at a time when publishers either don’t allow their books to be loaned through libraries at all (as most of the Big Six do not) or have jacked up the prices they charge libraries (as Random House recently did), the Potter books can be loaned an unlimited number of times, and the lending license lasts for five years.

This is a big deal.  Publishers have complained since e-readers first took hold that they lose revenue when libraries lend out e-reader copies of books.  With physical books, libraries would buy books for a flat fee and then lend them out, but the understanding was that libraries would have to buy new books to replace others that had undergone too much wear and tear.  This doesn’t happen with digital copies of books, however, so the publishers created licenses that granted libraries a limited number of “slots” for each book (i.e. the number of people that can have a copy of the book at a given time) and a limited number of “lends” (i.e. the number of times each “slot” can be sent out).  Libraries have found e-books to be very useful to their patrons, so they’re getting popular, but the book publishers still aren’t reaping the revenues they think they should.  Thus, as mentioned above, publishers like Random House are trying to either reduce the number of “lends” for each license, or increase the cost of the license.

Because of the power behind the “Harry Potter” brand, Rowling is able to buck this trend.  She holds the rights, she dictates the terms.  And for once, the individual in control realizes they have enough money, so they do what’s fair.  You get that license for a Harry Potter book and it can be loaned out to as many people that want it and the license needs to be renewed every 5 years.  Spectacular.

The article quoted above also quoted the new CEO of Pottermore, Charlie Redmayne, who used to work at HarperCollins.  He was talking about what book publishers could learn from the music industry as they went through similar “growing pains” a decade ago:

My view is that the one thing we should learn from the music industry, is that one of the best ways of fighting back against piracy is making content available to consumers at a platform they want to purchase it on, and at a price they are willing to pay, and if you do that most people will instinctively want to buy it.

I’ve said this before, so I won’t go over it again.  Suffice to say, I agree completely.

Regardless, I’m glad that J.K. Rowling is shifting her considerable weight in the industry to move the ball a bit closer to where it should be.  It’s great to see some progress on this front.

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03.26.12 Dinner

Used up some leftovers for this one: Barbecued cherry sausage, blue cheese mashed potatoes, and green beans.

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03.25.12 Dinner

After a Sunday afternoon of working outside, we had grilled chicken, green beans from last summer’s garden, and homemade bread. Note the new butter crock – no refrigeration required, so the butter stays spreadable!