And the two dreams were one ...

Portrait of the artist as a middle-aged man

"Calvin and Hobbes" fans recall the poignant final Sunday installment of this incredible series. Boy and tiger contemplate a snowscape, and compare it to a blank sheet of paper, full of new possibilities. "Let's go exploring!" I've used this picture as a desktop on several computers where I sat for temporary assignments.

In retrospect, maybe it's not a good idea to start a job by symbolically saying goodbye.

The monitor here has a different desktop background. It's a Norman Rockwell painting of a middle-aged guy standing in an art museum, contemplating one of Jackson Pollack's spatter paintings. Homage? Or sly dig? I'd vote for the latter. Rockwell can do Pollack, you see, but there's no way Pollack can do Rockwell! Representational art takes training, giftedness, discipline, and a heart for the end user. A real artist has something more important to express than himself. Such as, a respect for the created order, and for the audience. A real artist sees fresh aspects of the world around him, and is eager to help his audience also appreciate those details. Once, at an outdoor art show, Vicky pointed out how the portrait artists were cordial, approachable, down-to-earth folks. The "others" were pompous costumed jackasses, totally full of ... themselves.

So, where is "here?" Well, my desk is a refreshing 5.5 mile bike ride from home, in Building 205, on the campus of the company that made the Research Triangle Park come alive by relocating a few thousand folks from its Armonk, NY headquarters. I am in the pink at Big Blue, surrounded by blue collar craftsmen of the pen.
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"The more useful your markup is to you, the more it will cost you, and the fewer people will share the costs."

Food for thought can pop up in the most unexpected places. For example, a company slide show on "the promise and reality of XML" had the preceding comment on tradeoffs.

XML, the "eXtended Markup Language," lets you package information more conveniently for people and computers. You tag your text with labels that describe what it is, and what it's for. Your markups can be useful to others. Or, they can be idiosyncratic, quirky, and exuberantly expressive of your own interests and categories.

I'm reminded of a story Dad told from the wall-to-wall Ohio valley townships of a half-century ago. A couple of them hired a consultant to suggest ways to improve downtown business. "You need more parking spaces," he told the assembled leaders of business and city government. "Shop owners should park behind their stores, so that customers have more room to park on the street." "No way!" one retorted. "I want to be able to keep an eye on my car, to make sure nobody's messing with it." A year or two later, the area's first shopping center opened up -- and the downtown shopowners had lots of room to park their cars.

There's a moral in that story somewhere. Something like Martin Luther's comment that "only Satan, and men controlled by Satan, bear fruit for themselves."

Color Coded Conceit

During my senior year at Ferrum College, I took classes in French and New Testament Greek. Played a little with Anglo Saxon. And dipped a timid toe in the ocean of Turkish.
Somewhere in my goods and chattels is a coffee bag from that conceited era, with crudely lettered vocabulary cards in four colors -- green ink for Turkish, red for Old English, black for French, and blue for NT Greek.

The technique is simple. Cut a 3 by 5 card into 3 or 4 pieces. Write the word or phrase in the target language on one side, in your native language on the other. Flip through the deck, and set the words you recognize aside. Concentrate on learning the unrecognized words. A neighbor, Chris Sanford, refined the technique for me recently. If you don't recognize a word, review it, then slide it back into the deck 10 spaces from the front, so you can soon review it again. If you ALMOST recognize a word, slide it in about halfway back in the deck. Known words go all the way to the back. In a kind of "bubble sort" process, the words you really need to work on work their way towards the top.

This morning, a dream I'd nursed for nearly 30 years reached a milestone. More than a year after starting, I made it through the New Testament in Turkish. With, perhaps, 30% comprehension. A lot of words defined in green ink in the margins, sometimes several times on the same page! Entropy remains an ongoing struggle -- can I push vocabulary words into long-term memory faster than they leak out? Can I increase my daily increment, my page count quota, so as to become a fluent reader within the foreseeable future? This "brute force" approach has worked for me in the past, inside the Indo-European family tree of languages. And the adventure is far from over.

Kendi kendine (he himself sez to himself ...)

It’s when you’re peddling uphill that you notice the flowers beside the road, and hear the birds or frogs singing. Amazing what you can see if you just slow down.

Every time you read the New Testament for the first time again, you’ll notice things that went past in a blur on prior readings. Sometimes, the effort of looking up new words and phrases in your bilingual dictionary jogs loose new connotations. Or, sometimes, seeing novel grammatical constructions several times piques your curiosity.

For example, the Turkish construction kendi kendine can be roughly translate “himself, to himself.” This occurs four times in Luke’s gospel, only once, in Matthew’s, and not at all in Mark or John.

Luka 9: ³⁹İsa'yı evine çağırmış olan Ferisi bunu görünce kendi kendine, «Bu adam peygamber olsaydı, kendisine dokunan bu kadının kim ve ne tür bir kadın olduğunu, günahkâr biri olduğunu anlardı» dedi.

The Pharisee who’d invited Jesus into his house says to himself, “If this man (recognize the word adam?) was a prophet, he’d know what kind of woman was touching him.”

Luka 12: ¹⁷Adam kendi kendine, `Ne yapmalıyım? Ürünlerimi koyacak yerim yok' diye düşünmüş.

The parable of the rich fool. “The man himself says to himself, what shall I do? I don’t have room to store this harvest, he reflects.”

Luka 12: . ^45-46Ama o köle kendi kendine, `Efendim gelmekte gecikiyor' derse ve kadın erkek diğer hizmetkârları dövmeye, yiyip içip sarhoş olmaya başlarsa, efendisi, onun beklemediği bir günde, ummadığı bir saatte gelecek, onu şiddetle cezalandıracak ve imansızlarla bir tutacaktır

Matt. 24: ^48-51Ama o köle kötü olur da kendi kendine, `Efendim gecikiyor' der ve yoldaşlarını dövmeye başlarsa, sarhoşlarla birlikte yiyip içerse, efendisi, onun beklemediği bir günde, ummadığı bir saatte gelecek, onu şiddetle cezalandıracak ve ikiyüzlülerle bir tutacak. Orada ağlayış ve diş gıcırtısı olacaktır.

But the evil slave says to himself, “My master delays his coming,” and goes on to mistreat his fellow servants, and eat and drink with the partiers …

Luka 16: ³«Kâhya kendi kendine, `Ne yapacağım ben?' demiş. `Efendim kâhyalığı elimden alıyor. Toprak kazmaya gücüm yetmez, dilenmekten utanırım.

The parable of the crooked manager – one of my favorites, and most enigmatic. “The steward says to himself, ‘What shall I do? My master is taking away my stewardship. To dig I am not able, and to beg I am ashamed.”

Luka 18: ^4-5«Yargıç bir süre ilgisiz kalmış. Ama sonunda kendi kendine, `Ben her ne kadar Tanrı'dan korkmaz, insana saygı duymazsam da, bu dul kadın beni rahatsız ettiği için onun hakkını alacağım. Yoksa tekrar tekrar gelip beni canımdan bezdirecek' demiş.»

The parable of the cynical judge. “At last he says to himself, ‘Even though I do not fear God or respect men, this widow will wear me out with her continuous seeking after justices.”

Luka 18: ¹¹Ferisi ayakta dikilip kendi kendine şöyle dua etmiş: `Tanrım, diğer insanlar gibi soyguncu, hak yiyici ve zina edici olmadığım için, hatta şu vergi görevlisi gibi olmadığım için sana şükrederim.

The parable of the Pharisee and the publication. “The Pharisee stood on his feet, and spoke to himself praying thus, ‘My God, I think you that I am not as other men..’”

It’s strange, but the people who indulge in these interior monologues are the villains of our Lord’s little stories. The supercilious dinner host. The rich fool. The unfaithful overseer. The crooked manager. The cynical judge. The self-congratulating, posturing “worshipper.” So what are we to learn from this? That endless internal monologues and self-promoting soliloquies are bad for your mental and moral health?

Or maybe Luke, with a deeper awareness of Greek culture, tuned into this aspect of our Lord’s story telling?

What do you all think, folks?

Sometimes, the dragon wins

I faced my annual dragon, the Firecracker 100, newly attired from head to foot. Father's Day had brought a cycling cap into my wardrobe, to replace the raffish bandanna previously worn under helmet. A more dramatic break from tradition, Shimano cleats, adorned the once-smooth soles of my seven year old Shimano shoes. I was finally going "clipless."

I thought Trey at Opsware was exaggerating when he asserted that this mod would add 2 mph to my average speed. He wasn't.

Again, in an effort to beat the heat and the crowds, I started riding a half hour ahead of schedule. One hour and 13 miles later, several hundred sleek Spandexed forms slipstreamed past with the ritual cry of "on your left!"

The day began cool, in the low 70s. The fragrance of Mimosa vied with the rarer scent of crepe myrtle along the ride. I passed nobody -- the one drawback to starting early -- but did move ahead in the pack by shortening my rest stops -- just so they could pass me again. The clipless pedals increased the smoothness and efficiency of my power transfer, and my average mph kept going up, reaching a high of 14.5. And staying there until mile 51, when my kevlar-shielded rear inner tube exploded for cantankerous reasons of its own. The spare inner tube had a hole in it, noon o'clock had arrived, and I thought it was a good time to call it a day, and catch a ride on the sag wagon. The dragon won this time.

That may have been a very wise move. My training this year focused more on interval workouts, with fewer long rides. Maintaining my all-time best pace in the face of a persistent headwind, fueled by adrenalin and endorphines, took more out of me than I'd realized.

But, wait 'til next year!