Daily Archives: June 23, 2008

In the California Summer, Van Gogh Meets General Motors

On an evening walk with my camara I saw a vintage, baby blue truck with a baby blue “Starry Night” sunscreen. It’s an odd combination: high art mass produced for casual visual consumption, and perhaps purchased at a museum store, contrasted … Continue reading

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Moses, Monotheism–and Akhenaten

I recently read the book, “Akhenaten and Tutankhamun: Revolution and Restoration” (Silverman et. al. 2006). The book is 188 pages long. About half of those pages are taken up by image, the other half by text. Thus, in about 90-100 pages you … Continue reading

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Gay for brains?

The Washington Post reports today on yet another major study linking homosexuality with brain differences. The evidence is not conclusive, as reading the article fairly notes, but if scientists, over the next twenty years, solidly lock down the evidence that … Continue reading

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William Blake: Image of Firefighters

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Jacob and the angel–or Enkidu and Gilgamesh

The Gilgamesh Epic embodies the tensions between order and wildness, not in the gods Apollo and Dionysus, as Nietzsche claims that the ancient Greeks do, but in the god-like characters of Gilgamesh and Enkidu. Gilgamesh is a city-dwelling ruler of a … Continue reading

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Fraudulant Attribution: Gilgamesh, Moses, the Apostle Matthew—and Ancient Authorship

The Epic of Gilgamesh began perhaps around 2500 BCE as stories told orally, and were not written down until perhaps 1200 BCE. The version we have (discovered by archeologists in Ashurbanipal’s Nineveh library) dates to 700 BCE. Nevertheless, it claims Gilgamesh himself … Continue reading

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Gay Children’s Gender Confusion Book Proposal: Eve has Two Mommies—Or Are Those Daddies?

This is a curious late-Medieval image. Gender seems oddly reversed—God the Father appears rounded, as if pregnant, and Eve comes out of Adam’s body, rather than the other way around. Perhaps Eve’s first words out of the womb were the same as Miranda’s in Shakepeare’s the Tempest: … Continue reading

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Bart Ehrman’s book, “God’s Problem: How the Bible Fails to Tell Us Why We Suffer”

I read Ehrman’s book recently and strongly recommend it. I liken Ehrman to an intelligent chess player who puts the squirming reader (who may not, at first, be inclined to agree with him) into methodical and logical checkmate. Ehrman shows why … Continue reading

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Predator and Prey–and Alliteration and Rhyme

At the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History yesterday, I learned a little memnonic device for distinguishing predators and prey. Predators tend to have eyes oriented to the front of the skull and prey tend to have eyes oriented … Continue reading

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Picture of the day: Dylan Thomas 1941

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Life, liberty, and the pursuit of gay marital drama

Let the pursuit of happiness, equality, freedom, and newly discovered marital drama ring:    

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Pastor Michael Alexander: The Voice of One Crying in the Wilderness

An anti-gay rights pastor in my local area seems to be auditioning for the lead role of John the Baptist in the ongoing drama of gay marriage in California. He has manage to get quoted in not just the Antelope Valley … Continue reading

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Gilgamesh: A literary Pompeii

When we talk about reading the Epic of Gilgamesh today, we are talking about a version of the story discovered in 1872 at Nineveh, the city perhaps best known for its prominence in the Biblical book of Jonah, in the … Continue reading

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