"Hunting the Elusive Hipster"

NPR: Monkey See Blog: "Hunting the Elusive Hipster" by Linda Holmes

Living Levitically #4: Day One

Yesterday was my first day living Levitically. What was most on my mind the whole day was my outfit - restricting oneself to clothing of one fiber isn't technically that difficult, what made it hard was the fact that something outside of myself was determining my behavior. I had to submit in an area of my life where I am not used to being told what to do. This simplified my life because I wasn't as in control, it was an eerie feeling. None of my underwear was made out of one fabric, so I will be breaking that law all week.

I am certain that I forgot to stand when elders with gray hair were in my presence. This practice forces me to be aware of my surroundings in a way that I am not used to. I will try to be more aware tomorrow.

I am doing okay not eating any animals on the black-list. I don't eat a lot of meat anyways. I’m not sure what to do about the law of not eating fat. There is fat in most things that I eat. Based on class discussions, I am assuming that this law has to do with sacrificing the best portions to Yahweh. I am interpreting this law to mean today that I should not indulge in very fatty foods.

I mention that I am doing this assignment to people and get various responses. From facebook I got jokes about me stoning people. From church friends I got questions about random laws that weren't in Leviticus. No one had ever heard of the standing in the presence of elders law.

I hated at least one of my friends in my heart. I asked for forgiveness.

Twitter predicting the Film Box Office

(from flowingdata.com)

"A recent study [pdf] by Sitaram Asur and Bernardo A. Huberman at HP Labs found that it's possible to use Twitter chatter to predict first-weekend box office revenues simply based on volume of tweets. The predictions were even more accurate when they introduced sentiment analysis (i.e. classified tweets as positive or negative)."

This is exactly the type of stuff that I did for a summer internship at a marketing research company in town. I sat in front of a computer 40 hours a week, and did "sentiment analysis (i.e. classified tweets as positive or negative)." Most of what I did was grade blogs and comments and newspaper articles about an insurance company that was involved in the hurricane Katrina disaster. It was so boring I would sometimes break down in tears at the end of the day.

Every Painting in MoMa in two minutes

found on Vulture

I got to about the 1 minute mark before my brain started melting. then i just starting paying attention to whether the tops of the paintings aligned with the top of frame of the photograph. he gets a little sloppy here and there. :)

"The Death of Nadab and Abihu (Lev. 10)

Tragedy and triumph go hand in hand in the Bible and in life. On the very first day of Aaron's high-priestly ministry his two eldest sons died for infringing God's law. In the life of our Lord his baptism by the Spirit was followed by temptation in the wilderness, his triumphal entry into Jersalem by his crucifixion six days later. In the early Church the healing of the lame man was succeeded by the death of Ananias and Sapphira (Acts 3-5).

These glaring contrasts are upsetting to the cosy bourgeois attitudes that often pass for Christian. In many parts of the Church the biblical view of divine judgment is conveniently forgotten or supposed to be something that passed away with the OT. Heine's famous last words, "God will forgive me. That's his job," have become the unexpressed axiom of much modern theology. This short story is therefore an affront to liberal thinkers. it should also challenge Bible-believing Christians whose theological attitudes are influenced by prevailing trends of thought more often than they realize."

-- Gordon J. Wenham, The Book of Leviticus

Living Levitically #3: losing before I start

I got a text from Lindsey, who is also in my Leviticus class, tonight - all of her underwear is more than one fabric. Looking at mine, same story. Welp, I guess I'll just have to break that Levitical law and put it in the journal for the class. Clothing is easy enough, a lot of my simpler items of clothing are 100% cotton - no big deal. Shoes needed a little bit of thought. But I settled on my all-rubber flip-flops.

Although we haven't discussed the meaning behind this law in class, I liked what AJ Jacobs had to say about it on the website for his book: "--No mixing of wool and linen. This taught the ancient Israelites to keep things separate, good training for not intermarrying." This was a big principle for Old Testament Israel. God was working on making Israel a model nation for demonstrating His love and introducing the gods of other nations through marriage was distracting. I'm guessing the clothing was a metaphor.

“We don’t understand how interconnected we are until you can’t do it anymore,” he said.

About 17,000 flights were canceled Saturday, and travelers scrambled to find accommodation or land routes home during what is already the worst disruption in international air travel since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, when all air travel in and out of the United States was halted for three days...“We don’t understand how interconnected we are until you can’t do it anymore,” he said."

NYTimes: "Air Travel Crisis Deepens as Europe Fears Wider Impact"