Tagged

I am, according to my custom, I am behind all my friends on the blog meme. Ah well. All things in their time.

Jobs I've Held
Dishwasher at a local pizza place (before my mission)

Cashier at said pizza place (after my mission)

Cook at the Cannon Center

Window-washer and general custodian at Deseret Towers

Research assistant

Teaching assistant

Short order cook at the same pizza place.

Movies I Can Watch Over and Over
Casablanca

The Big Sleep

Star Wars (the Real Trilogy)

The Mark of Zorro

The Great Race

Ghostbusters

Places I have lived
Quantico, Virginia

Oceanside, California

29 Palms, California

Monterey, California

Goldvein, Virginia

Battle Ground, Washington

Goldendale, Washington

Prineville, Oregon

Beaverton, Oregon

Vancouver, Washington

Provo, Utah

Goldvein, Virginia (redux)

Shows I enjoy
Alf

Star Trek (especially TOS)

Fraggle Rock

M*A*S*H*

Places I've Been On Vacation

California
Tennessee
Ohio
Florida
Arizona (for an SCA event)

Favorite Food
Pizza (has been for many years)

Websites I Visit With Some Regularity
Various blogs
Gmail
rpg.net
Gaming Report
Steve Jackson Games Daily Illuminator
irregularwebcomic.net
Giant in the Playground (specifically for Order of the Stick, although it hasn't been bringing the funny as often recently)

Body Parts I Have Injured
Toe (broken)

Finger (broken)

Nicknames
Avi

Av

Incompetence

Have you ever done something totally new before, and discovered that you are completely and utterly incompetent at it? I had an experience of this type just yesterday.

In my current ward I am serving as a Sunday School teacher, teaching the 17 year olds. They are good kids, and it isn't as bad as it could be. I am however, often in their minds. So it was no surprise when one of the Young Men in my class called me up with a dilemma. Apparently they had planned a Priest/Laurel activity, but needed a Melchizedek Priesthood holder to make the activity properly legal in the eyes of the Church. Having heard (I don't where) that I do not work on Tuesdays (the pizza place where I work being closed on Tuesdays), this Young Man wanted to know if I would go with the Priests and Laurels in their activity. Of course I said yes. I was, at least initially, flattered to be asked, and the kids needed me to have their activity.

The activity was tubing down the Potomac. Tubing is activity where you take the inner tube of a tire, inflate it, and sit in the center of the resultant device, using it to float gently down the river. This is an activity which seems very common in many Young Men/Young Women organizations throughout the Church, but it was one which I had never experienced. That may be because of my disdain for water, and its attendant sports. It may be because I was terminally uncool as a teenager (a disposition I probably haven't changed, but which is less important now. After all, my daughter likes me). Regardless of the reasons, I had never been tubing before. I have been white-water rafting before, on numerous occasions, and I figured that tubing couldn't be too much more difficult than rafting. The parts of the river they let you tube on are certainly less dangerous, especially as dry as things have been this year (Safety tip from our bus driver: If you fall in the river and think you are drowning—stand up!), so I figured I had it covered.

It was an interesting drive up to the place where we were renting the tubes. My father and I were in the front, and my sister was in the back with two of her cronies. All I can say is that I am glad that my daughter is not yet a teenager. The conversation centered almost exclusively on boys, which is somewhat cliché, but apparently, like most clichés has some basis in life. My father sat in the front and we had interesting conversations about cryptoanalysis, and whether or not ancient languages could be used to up the security of a given code or cipher (the jury is still out—while anytime you use a language someone doesn't know you've essentially moved it out of their code, there is no indication that it would up the complexity of decipherment, except for that point. Thus a code written in Hieroglyphic would be as accessible to someone who read Hieroglyphics, as an English code is to someone who speaks English. Still, the possibilities are intriguing. This conversation was partially inspired by The Da Vinci Code since the codes in there are puerile. I was thinking on how I would step it up a bit, if I were in charge of Grail security, and my father is currently doing some work in cryptoanalysis, and the conversation just went from there.). Mostly we just ignored the conversation in the background.

Finally we got there, signed our lives away, received our life-vests and tubes (the high-tech kind with handles) and were driven to the water's edge. We got in the water, where I immediately got stuck in an eddy next to the shore. Eventually, I broke out of it, but by this time, the group, except my father, was many yards ahead of me. I spent the entire time, behind, trying my hardest to catch up. Apparently, these youth did believe that tubing was a quiet relaxing activity, to be enjoyed on the leisure of the river. No, these youth fought the river, going down as fast as they possibly could, i.e. much faster than I could. And, this is where I learned of my own latent incompetence at tubing. I never found the current, and if there was any eddy in the river, I found it. There was one spot where I was caught in a dead zone and spent twenty minutes trying to get out of it. All the while, the youth were playing African Queen, or at least I assume so. Other than at either end of the trip, I never saw them. Who knows what they were doing.

I eventually did make it to the end of the river successfully (ironically before rest of the group, since they had overshot our take-out point and were stuck on the other bank of the river) and proceeded back to my house. I was bruised, sunburned, sore in my muscles and a little bit cranky. I had spent the day trying to catch up with the Youth, never doing so, and I payed $23.00 for the privelage. However, I learned that I am terrible at tubing, and I never expect to do it again. Such are the lessons of life.

Excelsior!

In Which Our Faithful Readers Get Another Post

I apologize to my humble readers for my absence from the world of writing in the Aether (especially to Pseudonymous Joe: I haven't forgotten you, and I while I realize the game is long since over, there are rules for what you seek. I just haven't found them yet. I wanted to wait until I had everything ready before I e-mailed you. That turned out to be a mistake), but I have been avoiding the Internet. I haven't posted on the 100 Hour Board or anything. I'm just hiding out. However, my friends are best aware of my sometimes retiring nature, and so will not, I hope, fault me my lack of writing.

Unfortunately, this isn't going to be an original post, merely a reposting of a letter I sent to the ANES crowd. However, it represents my return to online living. More later. Here it is:

I have been working since I left Provo, except for a brief stopover in Nauvoo, where my younger brother was wed to a lovely lady. That was a nice stop, because I'd never been to Nauvoo. The temple there is beautiful, although Nauvoo is a ghost-town. The Saints left, and nobody ever came back. As I planned, I got my job at M & P Restaurant, which is where I worked both before and after my mission. In fact, except for my jobs at BYU (such as cleaning toilets at DT—I'm so sad that I won't be able to see it come down) I have only ever worked at this restaurant. Which is okay. It is convenient to my house (being a mere 8 minutes bike ride), the pay is decent, and the work is not stressful. I laugh at the fact that I learned to read Hieroglyphic Egyptian, what the difference between form and rhetorical criticism, and who Naram-Sim was so that I can return home to Virginia in order to be a short-order cook. Brian can, I reckon, testify to the irony implicit in this. It isn't bad of course—I'm just in a holding pattern for Oxford anyway, but it still makes me smile. I have to work, too, since The Send Avram to Oxford Fund failed so miserably. Nobody seems to want to become my patron. Not that I'm surprised.

Actually, getting the money to go to Oxford has been one of the more difficult things occupying my attention this summer. I can get Federal Student Loans (and I need to) but they are more complicated to get attending a school in the United Kingdom than here in the States. For one thing, the much vaunted Oxford/Cambridge has its own difficulties. For those of you who are not aware, Oxford is arranged as a series of independent colleges, which come together to form the University. All well and good. However, this means that in order to get anything done, the student has to talk with the right office, whose identity isn't always readily apparent. I ran into trouble with this recently when I received an e-mail asking me where my transcript from BYU proving that I had graduated is. I had that sent out months ago, but it turns out, upon reflection, that I had it sent to the wrong place, to my department not my centre. This is a little bit frustrating. I'm hoping that I can have the department of Oriental Studies send my transcript to Yarnton Manor, otherwise I'm going to need to get BYU to send another one. Also, I've received three different costs of attendance from three different offices. It has been very frustrating in its own way. If any of my friends do go to a British school, make sure that you are aware of this lack of communication between different units.

The rest of my life continues to go well. I'm attempting to teach my sister Biblical Hebrew, which is an interesting exercise, not because I don't know, but because she is in high school, and so not real keen on studying a complicated language over the summer. It is helping me keep my hand in, but has its own difficulties. Lydia continues to grow. She can walk now, and is very busy, although she is also a very obedient child. Thora has taken to working a few hours at M & P with me, since Lydia is so well taken care of by her grandparents. Even more than me, I think that Thora feels like she is in a holding pattern, and she is looking forward to having her own house again.

Since my program at Yarnton Manor is only a year program I've been looking at schools for my doctorate, which also been interesting, because it feels like I just finished applying the first time. Some of the schools I'm applying to, such as Notre Dame and Michigan, are the same, but there a couple, like Wisconsin and Duke which are new. I am thinking about applying to Harvard, which is eating crow for me, but they have this really good Semitic Philology program, and you all know how much I love the linguistic aspects of our field. I really do love language.

A Rant

Last time I posted about reading. In a moment of weakness I picked up and read The Da Vinci Code. I know that my dear friends Matt and Sarah were discussing the literary merits of this book recently, and I will not judge this book on its literary merits except to say that I, personally, did not like his writing style. However, I do have certain complaints to make from a purely historical perspective. Dan Brown made a number of errors in his description of the Bible and its history, a few of which were absolutely egregious. I do not mind someone believing that perhaps parts of our received history differ from reality (as a Latter-day Saint, I have necessarily different view on the transmission of Apostolic authority, for example). There is, however, no excuse for making factual errors that thirty seconds with a decent encyclopedia would clear up. I understand that sometimes license can be taken here and there, and I am willing to extend to the book such license (i.e. that there actually was an historical Priory of Zion, the the documents revealing its secret history were anything but the most obvious of forgeries, et cetera), but I am less comfortable with the egregious factual errors I found in this book. There are three such egregious errors that I identified in The Da Vinci Code. I realize that by posting about this topic I am playing write into Dan Brown's hands, but I couldn't help myself.

The first is the idea that Amun is ram-headed and associated with fertility. There were Egyptian gods who were associated with fertility (such as Min, who is always pictured holding his erect phallus) and there were ram-headed gods. There were even Egyptian ram-headed gods associated with fertility, such as Khnum. Khnum was occasionally associated with Amun-Ra Sonter, which I assume is Dan Brown's point, but to say that Amun is a ram-headed fertility god is wholly wrong. Amun means 'hidden', and Amun is usually depicted as a man with the the double feather crown on his head. He was worahipped as a god of hidden power and after being syncretized with Ra, the generative power of the sun, which I suppose could have some fertility issues (of course, The Da Vinci Code is about fertility in the modern sense, meaning sex, and not about pregnancy, children or any of those other ideas associated with ancient fertility). I have included a picture of Amun for my readers not as acquainted with Egyptian crowns, as well as of Khnum for comparison. Khnum, and not Amun is the god that Dan Brown's hero meant, but unfortunately Khnum doesn't anagram as prettily as Amun. The other error associated with these gods is claiming that Khnum was the consort of Isis, which he was not. Isis' consort is Osiris, which is extremely important, because there is an entire myth cycle surrounding Osiris and Isis. Incidentally, Osiris is not ram-headed either, being a mummiform figure of an Egyptian king. He was associated with fertility, since Isis rather
famously conceived Horus after Osiris was killed by his brother.

The next concern was actually the most egregious error in the book, an error so terrible that I read it twice in disbelief. The above concern is something of a specialist problem, since iconographic representations of Egyptian gods is a somewhat esoteric field, so it would be possible to make a mistake in this regard. An important conceit of this book is the concept of a secret history of Christianity that They don't want you to have which is recorded in ancient books suppressed by the Catholic church. This is the idea that the gnostic gospels such as the gospel of Philip have primacy over the canonical ones. This isn't an egregious error since there are scholars, such as Elaine Pagels, who actually believe such things. These are the same types of people who get excited over books like the Gospel of Judas, even though it was obviously written hundreds of years after Christ's ministry. No the error was in identifying how we know about these things. When our heroes go visit the grail expert he has a fascimile copy of the Nag Hammadi codices and the Dead Sea Scrolls, which, he claims, contain the real history of Christianity that the Church doesn't want the world to know. There is nothing Christian about the Dead Sea Scrolls, since they were written before the birth of Jesus Christ. The Dead Sea Scrolls can't describe a Church that worships the 'divine feminine,' because the Dead Sea Scrolls are about a Jewish sect that certainly didn't worship anything feminine. The Community was male, celibate, and had more in common with certain later Christian priests than with any group that practices the hieros gamos. Confusing the Dead Sea Scrolls with early Christian documents and then lumping them together with the Nag Hammadi documents merely because both were archives discovered in the early Twentieth Century is an enormous mistake, and I think the worst committed by Dan Brown. There is no way around the fact that he just got his facts wrong.

Which brings us to the third error. This one actually had me out of my seat in surprise. When discussing what documents the Holy Grail contains they mention that it contains Q, the actual written words of Christ. I laughed out loud at this one, since it shows that Dan Brown was passingly acquainted with Q theory, but missed the whole point. Q is a theoretical sayings source, which scholars believe was likely oral. No Q scholar would ever expect to find the Q document, because it doesn't actually exist! Seriously, there could have been a source that Matthew and Luke used independent of Mark, but you wouldn't find it written down, because it is a theoretical reconstruction. It sounds like Dan Brown heard of Q and thought that is was supposed to be a written sayings source that was used by the gospel writers. Regardless, by suggesting it was a document, our author showed his ignorance.

I had other issues, primarily with omissions and misconstructions of obvious facts, but those three were the biggest. I am sorry if you like this book, but I cannot in good conscience recommend this book. I think it is a sensationalist attempt to cash in on the liberal scholarship of certain New Testament scholars. I appreciate your putting up with my little rant. These things are important to me.

Excelsior!

The More Things Change...

I'm back at work at M & P. It has been interesting. Not a whole lot has changed there, which is a good thing. It is not quite as stress-free as I would have hoped. When I worked there before I was a cashier, and I had the work of cashiering down pat. However, they decided to start training me on the grill, so instead of going and performing a stress-free job which I know frontwards and backwards, I am being trained on a job that has even more stress than ever before. Oh well. I guess that like President Smith, “it is deep waters that I am wont to swim in.” Not by choice mind you, but the Lord seems to want to give me deep waters in which to swim (although admittedly, these aren't particular deep, neither do I wish to appear like I have great difficulties—I am merely observing that it seems in my life, given a choice between the easy way and a more difficult way, my life seems to pick the more difficult way). It is a good job though, full of many old friends, and so forth. I reckon I've just been spoiled by working as a Research Assistant for Doctors Jackson and Seely. There is, of course, nothing of kind to do out here in the middle of nowhere, so we do what we can. My job is only a short bike ride away, so that is convenient too.

I've been taking some time to read, as well. I read this really weird commentary on Genesis 1 through 3, which essentially had Adam choosing himself. It was very weird, being written by a modern Jewish philosopher, which helps to strengthen my long held position, that you should never trust philosophers. A tricky bunch from start to finish. Admittedly theologians aren't much better, but I don't like to read their commentaries either. You all, however, know me. I am trying to find the plain meaning of the Biblical text, which is a much more difficult proposition than it sounds. In addition to the occasional Biblical commentary, I have been reading a book about Napoleon as a military commander, and a history of Jewish textual history: the Hebrew Bible, Mishna, Talmud, haggadah, et cetera. A fascinating book. I have also been reading the occasional fiction book. I'm thinking about reading through the Wheel of Time again. I've been enjoying my reading, while attempting to squeeze in the occasional Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movie.

All Good Things...

Well, he's gone. Samuel and Aleatha just left to return the long road to Utah, while I remain here in Virginia to work at a Pizza place in preparation to going to Oxford. I am very sad. I am going to miss my brother. In some ways this is even sadder than when he went on his mission. I knew then when I would see him again, something I am not sure of this time. It may only be a year or two, or may be several years. I simply do not know. I understand that this is an important part of growing older—moving on, and all that jazz. It just makes me sad. I know I keep saying that, but I do not know any other way to express this emotion. I'm sure that I will soon be caught in the wonderful prospects of my future, but for now, I'm going to miss my brother.

Marriage in Old Nauvoo

Well, I am actually in Virginia as I write this. I intended to write a couple of posts concerning my ongoing thoughts on Samuel's wedding and experiencing Nauvoo, as well as moving from BYU, but that obviously did not happen. As my wife's faithful reader will note, I was sick for at least part of that time, and so was unable to really write anything. This may be mere excuses, and you, O Best Beloved, may be fairly crying at the screen at this time to stop hemming and hawing and actually get to the substance of my post. Ahh, but therein you have discovered my secret: my writing always has more fluff than crunch, at least for unimportant writings, such as this one. Not I that I mean to suggest, my beloved readers, that you or your regard are in ways unimportant to me. Nothing could be further from the truth—my concern for you is what keeps me writing. That and the enjoyment of writing. For example, I am currently attempting to see how long I can continue this introductory paragraph without actually saying anything. I am, I think, doing a decent job, not that I have any desire to praise myself. Well, I do have that desire, but hopefully no more than any man. Regardless of how much I wish to praise or not praise myself, I will proceed with the bulk of my post.

Part of my reason for hemming and hawing so much over the facts is that some of the emotions that I feel as I look back over the wedding and sealing are somewhat difficult to deal with. Not because they are sad, or even unhappy emotions. There is, however a bittersweet edge to my feelings. My brother was the closest man to me of any that ever I met. Only my wife and perhaps my parents can boast to know me better. Because of this marriages have been hard for the two of us. Samuel had difficulties dealing with Thora, and while I had no personal difficulties with Aleatha (I rather like her), still Samuel's and my relationship became strained particularly during the early part of their engagement. Things improved toward the end (we are too good of friends at the core for it not to), but it was difficult for a time. This was exacerbated by the fact that I was graduating and leaving, which of course, by now I have already done. It saddens me, but that is part of life. We move on. I intend to keep in touch with my brother now that we no longer live in the same city, and I expect that we will have many great and wonderful conversations. I just don't know how I am going to work gaming without my stalwart player. How can I play L5R? I don't even really know the rules. That is, of course, only a small concern in the larger world of my ongoing life, but Samuel and I have always had time together. I'm not sure we necessarily will any more, except at times and seasons as we grab it for ourselves. There may, however, be a positive externality to this point, since hopefully we make better use of the time given to us.

The marriage itself was very nice. Nauvoo is a beautiful temple. I actually I enjoyed Aleatha's endowment more than I did the actual sealing. There are a number of factors that led to this, I think. One, the Nauvoo temple sealing room, while beautiful, looked like every other sealing room I'd ever been in. It was a fine ceremony, and we want to wish Samuel and his new bride a hearty mahzel tov from all of us. The endowment rooms, however, were a wonderful thing. One moves from room to room in the fashion of a live endowment, and the walls have murals on them, once again, in the fashion of older temples. My wife and I were asked to serve as witnesses to the company, which was a very fun experience. The Nauvoo Temple, and the endowment therein, were the highlights of my trip to Nauvoo. The sealing was nice, but I was mostly a spectator (which is how it should be). Old Nauvoo was very interesting, but memories of our religion are not he same as living our religion right now. Some of my interactions with the Community of Christ reminded me of this point. They, like us, remember and mourn the lost of Joseph Smith. But those memories alone do no good in the grand eternal scheme of things. Only faith in Jesus Christ and membership in His Church brings salvation. A Temple in Nauvoo again. The thought of it makes me smile. As I was walking back up Parley Street, I saw it there up on the bluff. I turned to my wife, and said, "There is a finger in the mob's eye." Then I began to quote the Standard of Truth, from the Wentworth Letter. It seemed very appropriate. The Nauvoo Temple represents what the Church really is, how it is growing. It is more than just a memory of a dead prophet. It is the work of a living prophet. And without a living prophet, we are not the true Church of Jesus Christ.

Just some thoughts. Until next time:
Excelsior!

(I intended to post this days ago, but got caught up with moving into my new home. -ARS.)