Woman in New Zealand is fired for using BOLD, RED, ALL-CAPS in email to co-workers. She has sued and won a wrongful termination verdict. Seems to me a little personal communication would have helped here. Just to fire her after the bosses take an email the wrong way is so mechanical.
In other news, hackers are targeting Christians on Facebook. Watch your privacy settings.
Joe Carter at First Thoughts passes on excerpts from a Financial Times article, about how Amazon’s and Google’s pricing policies are destroying the market for hardcover books.
Arnaud Nourry, chief executive of French publishing group Hachette Livre, said unilateral pricing by Google, Amazon and other e-book retailers such as Barnes & Noble could destroy profits and kill the lucrative trade in hardback editions.
Most of my book buying is in softcover, mainly because I’m poor. I made it a project, years back, to get most of my C. S. Lewis in hardcover, though. I suspect that if I checked closely, I’d discover that the majority of the hardcovers I own have been bought used or from clearance tables.
But still…
Our friend Ori sent me this link today, about the upcoming really, really even newer revision of the New International Version of the Bible. The tone of the article is that they’re going to make it even more gender neutral, and that people who objected to the last “humankind” revision were complaining on purely ideological–not scholarly–grounds.
And over at Worldmag.com, I see this piece by Alisa Harris, linking to this article from Christianity Today, which talks about the same revision. The tone of this article is that they’re going to tone down the changes, and that the publisher recognizes the legitimate concerns of past critics.
Methinks, if you’re looking for a job, they’re hiring in the Spin Control Department over at Zondervan.
Me, I still sometimes use my old (pre-revision) NIV Study Bible, because the notes are excellent.
But in general, I’ve decided I prefer something a little more literal, like the New American Standard or the English Standard Version.
If I live long enough, I’ll probably just go back to the King James. Or the Geneva Bible, just to irritate people.
Why I wrote Hostile Intent. Michael Walsh says: “When I created ‘Devlin’ [the lead in Hostile Intent] – a man you could walk right by and never notice, so protected is he by his cloak of anonymity – I was looking to honor the kind of men and women who fight our nation’s battles in the bazaars and back alleys of the world’s least glamorous places, with no public acknowledgment of their bravery or their accomplishments, people who often lead (as Devlin does) lives of surpassing, nearly unbearable loneliness.”
Filmmaker Patrick Courrielche has been doing the rounds lately because he was on a conference call with the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) in which the government agency called on us, the artists of our times, “to help lay a new foundation for growth, focusing on core areas of the recovery agenda – health care, energy and environment, safety and security, education, community renewal.”
In other words, if we could do a variation on “Yes, We Can” or put together another one of those cool Hope posters on the theme of government-run health care or obeying the Feds without question–all volunteer work, you understand–that’d be great. It’s for the cause, you know.
Now, the NEA is denying it coordinated that call, and of course, it doesn’t see anything wrong with it’s blatant politicization.
It was a strenuous weekend, by my standards. And quite a lot of fun, all in all.
A while back a fellow I know through Viking reenactment alerted me to an event coming up in September in New Ulm, Minnesota. It’s a battle reenactment, in honor of the 2,000th anniversary of the Battle of Teutoburg Forest (something that only happens once a millennium. I did the math). They’re bringing in a bunch of Roman reenactors from various places in the U.S., and they needed something approximating Iron Age Germans. Vikings are close enough for the purposes of the exercise.
You can read about the battle of Teutoburg Forest here, and about Arminius, the German chieftain who made his name there. Whatever it was. We don’t actually know what he called himself, but Martin Luther (who got pretty excited over the story of a German who smashed the Romans) decided his name must have been “Hermann,” and “Hermann the German” he has been, in popular imagination, ever since.
I drove down with a (different) Viking friend, and we managed to show up only about an hour late. (We wanted to avoid Highway 169 because the Renaissance Faire tends to back it up pretty awful on Saturday mornings in season. So we took a roundabout route, and managed to miss every intersection we tried to find. But eventually we made it, mostly by process of elimination.) Continue reading My Roman holiday
This year’s CYBIL Awards, the Children’s and Young Adult Blogger’s Literary Awards, will start taking nominations for books published primarily this year on October 1. Learn more about the award and how to nominate your favorite book on their website.
Edward Bryne, a poet, blogger and professor, posted a list of 100 recommended books of American 20th Century poetry. He invited his readers to comment and add to the list, and he got a good bit of feedback. (via Books, Inq. for both links) Bryne notes:
At first I was hesitant about sharing this list, thinking along the line that Robin Kemp stated in her comment, “Boy, you’re really asking for it, aren’t you?!” Nevertheless, I believe readers’ replies exhibited something expressed in John Guzlowski’s comment: “I think that what this list and the comments adding more names to the list suggest is that poetry isn’t dead. It’s alive as you or I.” On the other hand, Daniel E. Pritchard at The Wooden Spoon offered a contrary view as he observed: “I’m struck by how sparse the century was in terms of really obviously great poetry. This list probably could have been 50 titles and some of them still would’ve been in dispute.”
On Big Hollywood, Jeremy D. Boreing writes about America’s founders.
Of the four claims about God and Americans outlined in the Declaration, it was the idea that man was made by God to be free that was the most radical, and which was so pivotal. The British press mocked it openly. It is, however, at the very heart of the founding ideology. If it is God who made men free, then Liberty is not a pragmatic imperative; it is a moral one. Governments that encroach on that liberty are not only violating the preferences of the governed, they are violating the very intention of God for government. For the Founders, this idea would fundamentally redefine the relationship between government and citizen. Man does not exist to be governed; governments exist to protect man’s freedom. Man does not owe government anything, other than what is necessary to aid that government in securing his basic rights. Likewise, government does not owe man anything other than protection from those who would intrude upon his freedom, be it his fellow citizen, foreign enemies, or the government itself.