Having contributed to this anthology, I’m reticent to share a rating or a review. However, here are a few thoughts I figured I’d share.

First, Shields did a great job editing this book. Her tireless efforts (and those of the many other people involved) to get the book out so quickly also is to be applauded. She really made this a delightful project to contribute to. Second, the design of this book is very attractive! Third, the concept of this anthology is brilliant. Fourth, while I would say a fair number of the poems here were not necessarily my cup of tea, the talent represented here is clearly impressive and the book’s candid perspective is certainly an important addition to the growing body of “Windsoriana”. Fifth, my favorites were probably “Under Construction: August 16, 2012″ by Debbie Okun Hill and “Sidewalk Sideshows” by Natalie Hillis. Sixth, there are some haunting lines in the two aforementioned poems as well as Anne Baldo’s “Finally Sweet” which are fantastic and I simply can’t get out of my head. That’s all. I’ll let reviewers less connected to this project share their thoughts.

Yesterday there was a launch party for it at the Giovanni Caboto club. There was quite a crowd.

Here is the list of authors:

• Brendan Houghton, Eva Antonel, Karl Jirgen
• Debbie Okun Hill, Donya Tag-El-Din
• Mary Kate Brogan, Keith Inman, Rosalind Knight
• Jesse Poho, Marty Gervais, Michael Laverty
• Lynn Tait, Maria Matuscak, Laurie Smith, Sonia Sulaiman
• Donna Hreceniuk, Kate Hargreaves, Jason Rankin
• Sarah Faye Morris, Priscilla Bernauer, Natalie Hills
• Penny Anne Beaudoin, Eugene McNamara, Josh Kolm
• Leonore Langs, Ellie Csepregi, Robert Earl Stewart
• Karen P. Oulllette, Carlinda D’Alimonte, Mary Ann Mulhern
• Susan McMaster, Anne Baldo, Vanessa Shields, a.m. kozak
• Jordan Turner, Dawn Marie Kresan, R. Patrik James
• Lisa Pike Fioindi, Sarah Faye Morris, Ryan Gibs, Marisa Gelfusa
• Dorothy Mahoney, Ema Varutti, Terry Ann Carter
• Dorothy Jane Kavanaugh, Peter Hrastovec, Melanie Janisse
• Maureen Rudall, Mark Nenadov, Hugh MacDonald, Roger Bell
• Marie Groundwater, Kim Conklin Hutchinson, John B. Lee

Now, the situation has gotten even stranger. See this article. And this article.

Eric Harroun, a former U.S. solider, is now potentially facing life imprisonment, or perhaps a death sentence (in the U.S.) for personally fighting against the Syrian government (which the U.S. has loudly and clearly said should be overthrown).

This is extremely peculiar. Especially when Secretary of State, John Kerry, said:  “the United States does not stand in the way of other countries that made a decision to provide arms, whether it’s France or Britain or others.” McCain, Graham, Condoleezza Rice, and Senator Marco Rubio have said that the Syria rebels should be armed by the U.S..

Harroun’s lawyer has said: “It is extremely unusual for the US to charge a person who is fighting in a manner that is aligned with US interests”

So, this raises some interesting questions. If the Syrian rebels ought to be supported, then why is Harroun on trial for doing just that? On the other hand, if the rebels should not be supported–for whatever reason, then why all the rhetoric from both parties about the need to support them?  If a person works for a terrorist group to accomplish an objective that the U.S. supports and desires to be accomplished, can that person be tried as a terrorist?

This is a messy conflict, and it brings out many interesting contradictions. I think the situation in Syria is becoming a very helpful demonstration of the merits of non-interventionism.

• The Biblical Spirituality blog lists some good features of the Heidelberg Catechism.
• There is a new podcast for Reformed Baptists, The Confessional Baptist (RSS feed here)

Family

• Yesterday was my wonderful daughter’s 1 year birthday! I took a day off from work and I had a wonderful time with my family. As usual, my wife did a terrific job of capturing it in Ashley’s 1 year post.

Books

• Jonathan Crowe has some interesting thoughts on book reviewing.

Foreign Policy, Liberty, and Security

• More sad news from Afghanistan. It has recently been discovered that 11 children have been killed in a recent NATO airstrike in eastern Afghanistan.
• Glenn Greenwald made an interesting point earlier today when he observed that this Politico article which dismisses fears over domestic drones, only quotes from drone industry lobbyists.  That’s great journalism, isn’t it?

• R.C. Sproul Jr. has a great article about writing. Highly recommended.

Poetry

• Poetry fans in the Windsor, Ontario area will be interested to know that the launch for the Whisky Sour City anthology (of poems about Windsor) is this Wednesday. One of my poems is featured therein.

Foreign Policy

• Eric Margolis has an article about what a third Korean war could look like.  He concludes by saying “The Pentagon estimated a full-scale invasion of North Korea could cost 250,000 American casualties. In short, a real war, not the jolly little police actions launched by the US in Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia.”
• More civilians (and police officers) are dying at the hands of NATO in Afghanistan.

Theology

• Did you know that Herman Bavinck wrote about “The Christian Family”? Here is a bit of a taste.

Varia

• In case you haven’t heard, and it is unlikely you haven’t, the film critic Roger Ebert died recently.
• This court case reveals some of the assumptions federal courts have about the ownership of digital downloads.

It was then that I turned to look at self-hosted solutions, namely solutions that you can put on a web server and run on your own. In exploring what was available, I discovered selfoss. I’m very pleased about this open source product, which is run by Tobias Zeising. It isn’t perfect, but I believe it is useable for my purposes.

The app is licensed under GPLv3  (if that means anything to you–basically, it means you have a great deal of freedom to do what you want with it, including modifying it). It is written in PHP and can use Postgres, MySQL, or sqlite for the database. I decided to use sqlite since that is the optional was the quickest to setup for a test run. In the future, if I run into issues, I can always switch over to a more heavy duty database.

The app is really easy to setup if you know the basics of running a web server. It has an OPML import, which was what I needed to get all my Google Reader feeds into it. I made a few minor config tweaks (added the update script to my crontab, changed it so it ‘marks read’ automatically, setup authentication, etc.).

The one key thing in starting to read through items on selfoss, is to realize that there are a few important keyboard shortcuts. “Space” takes you to the next item, and that’s very import for the way I quickly read through feeds (shift-space takes you backwards, for instance). For my purposes, the only keyboard shortcut I will need to remember is “Space”.

selfoss has a nice mobile version on the web interface that, while certainly not anywhere close to great, is fairly useable (unlike The Old Reader and others). The Twitter sharing option is pretty good (seems to work better than Google Reader twitter share). Sharing via e-mail is also quite straightforward.

At this point I only have two outstanding annoyances:

1. There isn’t any easy way to mark your entire list of items (across all feeds) as read. I like do that once in a while when I get behind. Maybe I’m missing something, but so far the only way I could do that was to go into the sqlite database.
2. On the mobile version, when you click into an item, there isn’t good navigation to the next item (nothing like ‘space’ on the traditional web version of the interface) . You can’t swipe over to the next items (which makes sense, since this is a mobile web site, not a full out mobile app), but there are also no navigation buttons to go to the next item. Very annoying!

I hope improving navigation through items remains a huge priority in future development of this product!

I suspect that only #2 will bother me long term. I hope that #2 will either be fixed in future version, or I may have to fix it myself. But that requires touching PHP. Yuck. We shall see.

In any case, it seems I am now ready for Google Reader to go goodbye!   I would almost start offering to host instances of selfoss for friends, but at this point I’m not sure I want a ton of extra traffic on my server, especially since most people have a lot of feeds. My wife can have an account if she wants, though

In his post, he lists a number of fantastic resources:

“Thankfully, Baptists have begun to recover an emphasis on catechisms over the past generation or so. Many noteworthy Baptist catechisms have been compiled in edited volumes by authors such as Tom Nettles, Timothy George, Jim Renihan, and Tom Ascol. First Baptist Church Tallassee, Alabama has published a catechism based upon the Baptist Faith and Message 2000. My friend Steve Weaver is working on a new edition of the Orthodox Catechism, a Baptist revision of the Heidelberg Catechism first published in 1680. John Piper published an updated version of the famous Baptist Catechism of 1693. Solid Ground Christian Books has reprinted Benjamin Beddome’s Scriptural Exposition of the Baptist Catechism, first published in 1752. Jim Scott Orrick has recorded an album that puts the 1693 catechism to music. Greg Nichols has edited a Baptist revision to the Westminster Shorter Catechism (1648). No doubt there are others of which I’m not aware. The texts of many Baptist catechisms can also be found on the internet at such websites (let Google be your guide).”

I wore a Donald Duck t-shirt
and a yellow coat,
mellowly posing for pictures
sitting in boats and on decks
with stringers filled with fish,
boxed in by majestic
moss-covered rocks.

My life at that time
often seemed like whimsy
but big, fierce things
were being etched
into my bones
there at Stoney Lake.

Take the dark and chilly water,
infinitely deep it seemed,
cooling off the hot air
as it comes to the shore.

Life framed by rocky edges and sedges
littered by pine needles
from the trees lining the horizon,
separating the sunny sky
from the razor sharp eye
of the ancient lake.

MJN

• Tony Reinke has a great post about why defining sanctification merely or primarily in relation to gratitude for justification is wrong.
• As you might very well of heard, Edith Schaeffer died recently.  Many people have written about this, but here is a message from L’Abri.
• Justin Taylor posted about Jerram Barrs’ forthcoming book on Christianity and the Arts, East Of Eden. I’ve come to appreciate Jerram’s teaching through L’Abri and this book looks really good!

Liberty

• Ian Clary’s post George Orwell on Press Freedom is worth reading.

• Saint Athanasius: The Father of Orthodoxy by F.A. Forbes
• Memory: How to Develop, Train, and Use It by William W. Atkinson
• On The Babylonian Captivity of the Church by Martin Luther
• Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
• Resolving Everyday Conflict by Ken Sande
• Jesus, Keep Me Near the Cross: Experiencing the Passion and Power of Easter edited by Nancy Guthrie
• Ghost Ship: The Mysterious True Story of the Mary Celeste and Her Missing Crew by Brian Hicks
• Laughable Lyrics by Edward Lear
• Fatherhood by Bill Cosby

• Last  week, Chinua Achebe, a prominent African novelist, died. He is among the African authors I would like to read this year.
• Fans of Edward Lear will be happy to know that Librivox now has a recording of his Laughable Lyrics.
• The New York Review of Books has featured a translation of Italo Cavino on Why Read the Classics?
• This is so cool! It’s a table made of books that Canon Press has published!

Theology

• The Truth of the Cross, by R.C. Sproul is available for free in Kindle and other formats through April 30th.
• The Reformed Forum’s episode on Francis Schaeffer and the Christian life (with William Edgar) is well worth listening. I do wish it were longer!

Local Interest (Windsor, Essex County, and Detroit)

• These photos of Detroit houses in disrepair are well-done and chilling.

American Politics: Foreign Policy, Liberty, Security, Privacy

• Obama is going to close Guantanamo, right? Or so he promised! Here is what is actually happening!
• Slate has an article about the FBI’s desire to spy on Gmail in 2013. The FBI seems concerned that that the “rise in popularity of email and social networks has stifled its ability to monitor communications as they are being transmitted”.  Alas, “the FBI is not happy with the current arrangement and is on a crusade for more surveillance authority”
• This article over at the Huffington Post shows some of the effects that drone strikes are having on the people of Afghanistan.

• “abysmal caricature who postures as a ‘gentle­man and a scholar’ “
• “monster”
• “incredible, medieval monstrosity”
• “abysmal bastard”
• “fool”
• “abys­mal scum”

Source (Nick Steffan)

I came around to reading this book when my brilliant wife selected it for the book she chose for me to read in March. What a fantastic book!

The book centers around the perplexing mystery of the Mary Celeste, a ship of Nova Scotian origin. It was found abandoned around the Azores Islands, which are on the way to Portugal. The ship showed no signs of struggle and little to suggest that the weather conditions were heavy enough to drive an experienced captain to lead his wife, young daughter, and crew to risk their lives on a lifeboat.

The author does a great job of building suspense and yet avoiding sensationalism. He skilfully navigates background material, historical data, press reports, and weighs prevailing theories. In general, he deals with these theories fairly, showing their plausibility, but also debunking them, or showing that they have already been debunked.

Eventually, at the end, and only after giving much space to some far-fetched theories, the author presents his theory. It’s quite a simple and yet plausible explanation and certainly satisfied me. I found myself launched back into my early days of reading National Geographic’s World Magazine, which, for a young audience, once in a while discussed things such as lost treasure, ships, and mysteries.

I found myself drawn into the life of the people involved. I felt a lot of sympathy for the Briggs family. Their story is an extremely sad story. And what was public charade and cause for far-fetched tales for some, was a serious, string of sea-born tragedies for others.

I did not find any “dry” spots in this book. It is rather exciting, and even in the rather belabored section covering the salvage trial, the antics of the crown attorney keeps the narrative on its toes.  Another nice touch of this book is the way it connects the story to a broader story. You will find about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s fictional tale based on the story of the Mary Celeste, which was often taken as a true account. There is also a discussion about how this story connects into a broader tradition of lore that includes the Bermuda Triangle. And the short anecdote about the Mary Celeste‘s final demise off the shore of Haiti is short, but fascinating.

I heartily recommend this book to anyone who wants a delightful read about a true mystery.