Gordon Cheng's blog

Codex Sinaiticus

2009-07-07T19:30:00.003+10:00

Be amazed.

Here's the SMH report. The tech pages of the SMH are the best bit, they tend to drop the otherwise necessary ideological sneer and do some real reporting.

Fortfarande in Sverige

2009-07-07T09:47:00.003+10:00

Still in Sweden for another few days.

Enjoying the hospitality of Åsa and Kjell, Eva, Ingrid and Peter. Tack så mycke!

Sunrise today: 3.34 am. Sunset: 10.02 pm. Hmm. Days are getting shorter.

Reading Shakespeare

2009-07-06T15:45:00.004+10:00

From a bio of actor John Barrymore (holiday reading, along with Psalms 60-70!):

Barrymore was not a Shakespearean in the academic sense of the term. I do not know how many actors have been wholesale students of the Bard, but the general feeling persists that a person with the gift of portraying the great Will's characters must of necessity be such a scholar as to possess even an antiquarian knowledge of the source material for the masterworks of Stratford's first gentleman.

Garrick, as an upbuilder of Shakespearean enthusiasm, seems to have been in literary as well as dramatic tune with the finest lyre since the golden Greeks'. And, if we may descend the stairs, several flights of them, at a swift downward bound, we find in our own time that numerous hams of our boardinghouse acquaintance actually were excellent analysts of the folios, no matter how wretchedly they carried the spears on-stage or how bombastically they hurled the labored line. Many non-Shakespearean actors are familiar with the Avon classics. Eddie Foy, of comedy a king, actually knew Shakespeare's works, majoring in the tragedies, and could recite, word for word, any of the longer speeches.

It is true that Jack [Barrymore] had heard much of the Elizabethan text in his own richly endowed home. Likewise, he had seen numerous of the "greats" perform in the classic roles. But he himself pointed out that there was a difference between reading and viewing, and once told me that he never really had "perused the iambic perfections" until he played Richard.

Jack, during his later years, used to read aloud privately from various Shakespearean plays. There were two circumstances, two reasons actually, pertaining to these readings: first, my intention to keep him for a time off the streets and away from such Hollywood philanthropists as believed that fifths of straight brandy were a specific for his duodenal ulcer; and second, the exciting pleasure stirred by his first reading of several of Shakespeare's plays.

It so happened that neither of us had read King Lear. We had seen it, of course, yet neither had ever read it in toto.

"Cardinal", he said, "let us sit here in the Sistine Chapel of your home, before the auctioneer arrives with his gavel and his sheriff's authorization to seal you out, and see what we can exhume from King Lear's whiskered mind."

He was ill at this time, as one could plainly see, yet he acted that he was well. He put on his spectacles, a pair of ancient lenses borrowed from some woozy tourist at Earl Carroll's restaurant. One temple-bar was missing from the frame, but Jack had obstinately refused to consult an oculist or permit his friends to renew the mountings of these dilapidated windows.

"It has a lorgnette effect," he said. "Makes me feel like a dowager."

He seemed a bit "caved-in" this night, as I took King Lear down from the dusty shelf to give it to Barrymore. He snorted several times, a device used, I fully believe, to cover up his pain or deflect attention from his growing lapses of memory. I am confident that these tragic-comic snorts often were employed by him instead of groans.

He opened the volume, then began to read Lear. He entered the scenes without flourish or tumult. As he sat there, his jaws sagging at first, his hair stringing down in squaw-like disarray, his face stubbled with beard-hairs, and pale with loss of blood from a recent stomach hemorrhage, his heart heavy with long misfortune, he entered upon a performance the like of which I never before had seen, and never again shall see.

A great majesty came upon him. Rather, it came from within him, for there always existed in his nature a latent dignity of mind behind the scoffing shelter of his own public mien. One forgot the nondescript eyeglasses, the stringing-down hair, the slumped man on the couch. Indeed, his own ills, his own epic disasters of the last years may have enabled him the more readily to become Lear in immediate concept and projection. The tragic king now cried out in this room, and in Barrymore's reading one say this old monarch wearing, not the customary crown of straw, but one of thorn.

-Good Night, Sweet Prince: The Life and Times of John Barrymore by Gene Fowler, pp. 168-170 (New York: Pocket Books, 1947 [first edn. Viking Books, 1944])

If you don't understand Dutch

2009-06-12T22:34:00.001+10:00

If you don't understand Dutch, this shouldn't be funny. But somehow it is:

Magical funk

2009-06-12T22:03:00.002+10:00

Expialidocious. Strangely haunting. Reminds me of Philip Glass.

Thanks to that master of cool, David Ould.

The Silence of the Blog

2009-06-10T23:15:00.002+10:00

Things will be quiet on blog for a bit more than a month. I've got a staff conference next week and then off to Sweden for my sister's wedding celebration! Computer access will be restricted.

Sorry about that faithful readers, and see you towards the end of July.

Your news photos retouched

2009-06-08T18:38:00.001+10:00

A top ten of digitally doctored photos.

Thanks Roughth.

2009-06-07T23:18:00.000+10:00

I take it you already know
Of tough and bough and cough and dough?
Others may stumble, but not you,
On hiccough, thorough, lough and through?
Well done! And now you wish, perhaps,
To learn of less familiar traps?
Beware of heard, a dreadful word
That looks like beard and sounds like bird,
And dead: it's said like bed, not bead -
For goodness' sake, don't call it deed!
Watch out for meat and great and threat.
(They rhyme with suite and straight and debt).
A moth is not a moth in mother,
Nor both in bother, broth in brother,
And here is not a match for there,
Nor dear and fear for bear and pear.
And then there's dose and rose and lose -
Just look them up - and goose and choose,
And cork and work, and card and ward,
And font and front, and word and sword,
And do and go, and thwart and cart -
Come, come, I've hardly made a start!
A dreadful language? Man alive!
I'd mastered it when I was five!

Keep praying!

2009-06-06T14:43:00.002+10:00

So, persevering in prayer is an essential characteristic of prayer. It shows, not only that we really desire what we are asking for, but that we also believe that God will answer.

Broughton Knox makes the point, with examples, in today's Sola Panel post.

OFFENDETH

2009-06-06T12:18:00.003+10:00

If this counted as a word in the game Lexulous (the facebook ripoff of Scrabble) I would have scored 266 points just now.

If thy lexulous game offendeth thee, pluck it out.

That'th what I saith,anyway.

Thuffering thuccotash!

Farewelling the cat

2009-06-06T11:32:00.005+10:00

We've owned Grover, the daughter of Rover since 1991. She moved with us from Brunswick to Carlton, back to Brunswick, and then in 1999 made the big trip north to Sydney.

This morning we came out and our cat, who was once medium sized and quick witted but in the last few years has become as skinny as a skinny thing, and arthritic. This morning she was breathing heavily and had suddenly lost the use of her back legs.

The girls and I gathered to say goodbye on the veranda and Fiona has just driven off to the vet with her.

Goodbye Grover.

Psalm 68:1

2009-06-05T10:51:00.001+10:00

God shall arise, his enemies shall be scattered; and those who hate him shall flee before him.

If that is so, then it makes sense to make peace with him.

The swine has no clothes

2009-06-04T09:49:00.002+10:00

Took Ruby to see Dr Big Trev yesterday. He hasn't seen any patients with swine flu. Well he wouldn't, would he, seeing as how this is NSW.

But it's pretty clear that this is not a major pandemic of the sort that kills people. In fact, it's been pretty clear for quite a while now, when you look at the figures for Mexico where it all started.

This is good, but has involved incredible amounts of expense in the process. Imagine if that effort had gone into helping fight some of the third world diseases that actually kill people.

Bonhoeffer on psychologists (and the like)

2009-06-01T10:03:00.003+10:00

Found a quote from Dietrich Bonhoeffer on theologica which happens to express some of the problem with getting worked up about sociological distinctions like Gen X/Gen Y and the like. I already linked it on the Sola Panel but I'm rescuing it from comment oblivion by reproducing it here:

The most experienced psychologist or observer of human nature knows infinitely less of the human heart than the simplest Christian who lives beneath the Cross of Jesus.

The greatest psychological insight, ability, and experience cannot grasp this one thing: what sin is.

Worldly wisdom knows what distress and weakness and failure are, but it does not know the godlessness of man. And so it does not know that man is destroyed only by his sin and can be healed only by forgiveness. Only the Christian knows this.

-Bonhoeffer. Click on the Theologica link for the extended quote and the reference.

Got two tickets to ACDC

2009-06-01T09:59:00.001+10:00

So Fi and me
We get to see
ACDC
but not for free.

Don't go to Moore College to become a theologian

2009-05-30T22:49:00.002+10:00

There are times when it's good to get straight to the point. Here, Andrew Barry says that it's a gracious work of God to turn someone into a theologian, and describes how it happens. Short and to the point.

Trinity in Creation

2009-05-29T10:12:00.003+10:00

I've had some thoughts about the Trinity on the Sola Panel, here.

Trying to work out some of the connections between John 1 and Genesis 1, and there are a lot.

When I was on horseback

2009-05-29T00:19:00.003+10:00

Speaking of Cork...

when i was on horseback wasn't i pretty.
when i was on horseback wasn't i gay.
wasn't i pretty when i entered cork city.
and met with my downfall on the fourteenth of may.

six jolly soldiers to carry my coffin.
six jolly soldiers to march by my side.
it's six jolly soldiers take a bunch of red roses.
then for to smell them as we go along.

beat the drum slowly and play the pipes only.
play up the dead-march as we go along.
and bring me to tipperary and lay me down easy.
i am a young soldier that never done wrong.

when i was on horseback wasn't i pretty.
when i was on horseback wasn't i gay.
wasn't i pretty when i entered cork city.
and met with my downfall on the fourteenth of may.

-Steeleye Span.

If you've never heard Maddy Pryor, or especially if you have, do yourself a favour and click on the YouTube link.

Mournful!

Diamantina Drover

2009-05-29T00:04:00.002+10:00

For the rain never falls on the dusty Diamantina
And a drover finds it hard to change his mind
For the years have surely gone
Like the drays from Old Cork Station
And I won't be back till the drovin's done

-Redgum.

Why trust God?

2009-05-27T11:19:00.000+10:00

I can trust God because

he sent his Son to die, and in the Bible it shows how lots of people trusted him and he didn't let them down.

-Matilda Cheng

As it happens

2009-05-27T06:55:00.001+10:00

What's the role of providence in the life of the Christian?

"As it happens, my mum was at EQUIP too."

Nicole talks about it.

Leaf blowers

2009-05-26T10:37:00.003+10:00

They'd have to be the dumbest invention wouldn't they? I walked past a guy at school this morning who had one going at full bore (and that is the only way they can go). I felt like grabbing a broom and showing him how it was done more efficiently, more effectively, and MORE QUIETLY.

"Help us to repent"

2009-05-25T09:37:00.004+10:00

That was one of the prayers that we prayed in church, and I said a hearty internalized 'Amen' as well (being Anglican, I don't like loud noises).

But I also thought that Cranmer (author of the Anglican Book of Common Prayer), had he been rostered on for prayers at our church, would more likely have said "Cause us to repent."

More Cranmerian, more Calvinist, and ultimately more biblical.

1 And you were dead in the trespasses and sins 2 in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience— 3 among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind. 4 But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, 5 even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved—6 and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, 7 so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.

-Ephesians 2: 1-7 .

My book nearly got reviewed

2009-05-24T16:19:00.002+10:00

by Tim Challies, who does a very good job of not reviewing it here. It's one of the nicest non-reviews I've ever seen, so I thought I would not mention it in this place.

Move along, nothing to see here.

Reformed Charismatics

2009-05-22T23:23:00.004+10:00

Phillip Jensen cuts to the chase:

“The Reformed system of belief and the Charismatic system of belief are incompatible.”

That's at about the 10 minute point of this half-hour video.