You're really not going to believe this

Okay, if you read that last post, you might be thinking as follows: Suppose, Dan, that I go along with your crazy ideas about not reading too much into the text of the Bible, and I decide not to play cryptic crossword with parallel passages, or impart too much knowingly significant double entendre to the ones that just happen to support my worldview. Tell me, Dan, is anything left of the Bible at all? Is Christian faith possible? I'm glad you asked. Without having the time to go into it tonight, let me just say a quick yes and definitely to that. There are views of inspiration, of the spiritual intervention of God in shaping the Bible, that do not require us to construct Bible codes to divine God's intent (such as we can).

I also had an interesting talk with Sarah about whether or not it is right to take these positions on marriage and the Bible when so many other people disagree with you. Are you crazy? I think she felt better to get that out there, not in so many words. I guess this is a question that can challenge any Christian thinking. Is it important to be right, in the doctrinal sense? Does right in the doctrinal sense mean right with God? And if not, what good is it? As a related issue, how can we tell Christian orthodoxy from Christian heresy? Are you a heretic? And if so, what should you do about it?

I hope to get to these questions this week, so berate me if I am being slow.

But now for something completely different. Long-time readers of this blog will have heard ad nauseam about Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and its related spinoff show Angel. It took Sarah and I most of a year to watch them all. Once, under the weather, we did 8 episodes in a day. Well, a few days ago, having no Harry Potter to read and no obvious substitutes (yet; we are taking a trip to the library soon) without much discussion, Sarah and I decided to start watching them again. 3 episodes down, 251 to go.

Again.

WHY WHY WHY DAN WHY? NOOOOO....

Well, I'm reminded of Dorothy L Sayers on Dante's Divine Comedy. She said, more or less, "Once I cracked the book, all my prejudices were dispelled. I read it as fast as I could. When I came up for air, I looked around and saw nothing better to read out there. So, I started it again as breathlessly as the first time."

Except for The Simpsons, which pile on to the DVR about three times a day (and some of the newer episodes are getting pretty good again), there's nothing better to watch this summer than Buffy and Angel. Period. Ok, ok, so Season 1 is pretty hokey-fenokee and everybody looks so young. But it's the best.

Happy 10th

Buffy the Vampire Slayer first aired ten years ago today. Sarah and I bought seasons 2 and 3 of Angel (the interleaved spin-off) and we've been chain-smoking them for the past few weeks. These are what great television can be: deep, witty, exciting, moving, and character arcs fifty episodes long.

I read the V for Vendetta comics in one sitting yesterday. Excellent. They were different from the movie in some ways, of course, but I think Alan Moore's beef with the remake was really overblown. A lot of the movie was word for word, shot for panel. If anything, some of the cruft was edited out for the movie, like the computer and the LSD trip. The strongest part of the comic, about the twin, entwined nature of democracy and destruction, came through very strongly in the movie too. I was also surprised to find that all of the great stuff with Stephen Fry was only hinted at in the comics, but it was fleshed out really well in the movie.

Inspired by my encounter with Positively Fifth Street, I finished the original great poker memoir, The Biggest Game in Town, by A. Alvarez, a writer for the New Yorker. He wrote this in 1982, chronicling Stu Ungar's second straight win of the World Series of Poker main event.

Like Positively Fifth Street, it went beyond poker into accounts of Las Vegas and the gambling life, and it managed to capture something that I think went missing from the later book. To be a gambler, you have to stop caring about being broke. Being broke happens. You have to risk it all and lose it all to win it all. This means the gambler requires a remarkable resiliency and freedom to fail, and it's one of the many reasons I can't do this for a living. On the other hand, though, David Sklansky, game theorist and gambler extraordinaire, has never been broke...

Set forward your clocks.

Long delay

Sorry for the long delay in posting. The Playstation finally arrived. I gave some dude neutral feedback on eBay because I paid on Tuesday and then the guy said he lost the tracking information. Well, I found it on the label when it got here, buddy, and that UPS shipment was initiated Friday. Anyhow, my journey to the DDR side is complete. I am better with the controller than my feet, obviously. I did have some fun trying to do doubles on one controller. The only hard part is hitting two directions at once on the D-pad. That and blowing your mind.

We finished a season of Angel, the Buffy spinoff. Angel is a vampire and sometimes he kills people who are evil. He's out for justice for the downtrodden, and that makes the moral center of the show a bit more gooey and interesting than in Buffy. On the other hand, a lot of the fun tricks and running jokes from Buffy would have been too derivative, so the show feels a little less well-rounded.

It's been an exciting week for school, work, and the future. On Thursday is a Tech Career get-together. Micron, Dell, Novell, the FBI, and some of the other usual suspects are going to be there. I've been trying to think about the kind of job I want to get. Do I want to write software or research algorithms? And if it is research, do I need to go on for a PhD? And would I work for MS? If anyone is interested in sorting me out, or giving me some helpful advice, let me know. And my research is going better. We actually seem to be making well-defined improvements over our competitors. I may be able to write a thesis proposal and graduate on time.

I'll be back on Anna Karenina soon.

November 7 is fast approaching, so register to vote, and then vote. It's time to change the course in Iraq, and in America.

And in the end...

So, we did it. We finished Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It took us about three months from start to finish, so we got to do it about thirty times as fast as someone who saw it once a week in real time. (Of course, there's still Angel to get to, the five-season spinoff...) I can't imagine what it would have been like to see it as it came out. We were amazed at the intricacy of it all, and we got to go from a season finale to a season premiere in minutes. The original fans got to chew over the action for weeks and months at a time.

There's a reason this thing is a cult television show. It is the total cat's pajamas, people. It's wicked clever, epic, and demanding. Fall in love with it now.

Buffy update

We figured out recently that we've seen more than a hundred episodes of Buffy now. Like Sarah said last night, it's one of the most well-thought-out shows we've ever seen. It really has it all: continuity, self-reference, complex relationships, hilarity, even allegory. And to top it off, the lead character is a strong woman destroying the undead.

But last night went way over the top for us. We finally saw "Once More, With Feeling". There's a fan site for this one episode.

The episode is a musical.

What's even more amazing is that it actually advances the plot.

It wouldn't make much sense to watch it without seeing the first hundred episodes. The references to earlier action come too fast and furious. It's in Season 6, so get cracking.

We've been sick

Between the rapid-fire installments of Buffy (Season 5 is going down by tomorrow at the latest), the football (don't tell me the Seahawks score! I taped it), and a total lack of fitness for quotidian tasks (e.g., shaving), all due to the three-person epidemic spreading virulently through my house, I've been away from the blog.

Tune in soon for something interesting from my personal life, TBD.

In other news, the right wing (e.g., the executive branch) and the moderates (e.g., Sens. McCain, Graham) of the Republican party reached an agreement last week to allow the CIA to torture prisoners suspected of being terrorists, who are also losing their habeas corpus right to protest their innocence before a judge. Needless to say, when you are the one suspected of being a terrorist, it changes your whole view on the issue.

If our society is to be judged by its prisons, we are living in Hell. It's not for nothing that Jesus damned those who failed to visit people in prison (much less those who torture them), saying, "Whatever you did to the least of these, you did to me." Terrorist serial killers may be the least of us; you could call them close to the bottom of the scale of personal worthiness on the world stage.

But we can go lower than even them: we can become the devils.

Buffy strikes again

Sarah and I are in the middle of watching Buffy Season 3.

We've seen two lately that were just hilarious: the Christmas episode and the one with Xander's wild night in the 57 Chevy. We laughed helplessly.

You're really missing out, folks. Buffy is one of the best shows I have ever seen.

Whoa

Just finished watching the first season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer on DVD with Sarah.

Why didn't anyone ever tell me I would love this? Except for the people at Making Light, of course.