A Simple Way To Go Faster Than Light That Does Not Work

I am under the impression that several of this blog's readers have nonzero knowledge or interest in the topic of the Historical Jesus: the ancient Jewish prophet and rabble-rouser. No more divine than you or I, perhaps, but apparently possessing of a remarkable presence, and maybe a shocking orator for his time, so outrageous that the authorities saw it necessary to silence him.

To you I ask: if I wanted to read a really solid, secular account of the life of this man, where would I turn?

I suppose I would prefer non-fiction, but fiction is OK, so long as it's appropriately informed. Specific books and chapters of the New Testament are also OK to recommend. Assume I know nothing. I am coming at this not so much raw as tinted. I carry nearly 20 years of actively Christian education and upbringing and all its attendant assumptions in my personal baggage, and I have never really properly unpacked it.

(Is this for a project? Yes, it is for a project.)

Earlier today, ran into a reference to Julius Caesar's The die is cast, and its meaning in context. Here we are crossing the river, and while I have stacked up the odds in my favor to the best of my ability, from here on out its all down to ol' dame fortuna. Roll 'em.

As someone who loves the mechanisms and the history of cards and dice, this should really be one of my favorite quotations, right? But the fact is, for the time being anyway, I get vaguely irritated when I hear it. For most of my life, I thought the metaphor had a completely different referent: one of my well-meaning teachers, at some point early on, introduced me to this phrase, and taught that Caesar was comparing his crossing to metal-casting. ("Die" as in "tool and die", see.) And that made enough sense at the time - Caesar, in this version, was saying that the blow had been struck, the metal had been cut, shaped, and cooled, and there was no unbending it now. I had no reason to question this interpretation.

And indeed, I don't think that I did reëxamine it until, honestly, only a year or two ago, when it occurred to me that he was talking about rolling dice - as if he had just committed all his units in a tense war game! Luckily, the web had been invented and distributed in the intervening years, so it took only a moment for me to confirm that I was correct. It floored me. Not only was that a cooler version - because, you know, games and all - but it makes a so much more compelling story. Caesar at the height of his ambition, making the move that would forever seal his place in the tale of human history, and his pull-quote utterance is his admission of uncertainty despite it all. That's awesome.

So yeah, running into the quote now makes me itchy, annoyed that I was mis-taught something that strikes me as so relevant, and yet probably wouldn't have had a huge impact on my life had I learned it correctly. Whew.

It occurred to me last night that, if you use the same metrics that I do, Obama just squeaks under the bar for qualifying as a fellow Gen-X-er. He was 19 on Jan 1, 1981, and therefore was a teenager during some part of the 1980s no matter how you slice it, even if only for a few months.

So, there you have it.

This has been going around, but I just wanted to comment that it's the most alarmingly otaku thing I've seen all month, in the William Gibson sense of the word. A Batman / Dostoyevsky mashup where someone absolutely nailed the circa-1940 American comics art and layout style. Holy smokes.

Did you know that Boston is named after St. Botolph, the patron saint of travelers?

I somehow missed the release this crazy new Keith Schofield music video at the start of the year. I'm not going to tell you what it's about.

(The story in it is absolutely true; I already knew it. The resolution it depicts though, eh, maybe not.)