The KJV Study Blog

As I've been playing around with this blog during the last few weeks, I've been faced with the choice of writing entries that are timely versus entries that are timeless. Timely entries focus on the cutting edge of life as it unfolds right now. The payoff: It's generally more interesting for the reader. The problem: It becomes quickly outdated. Take my "Death of a modern caveman" entry, for example, in which I referenced FedEx and Geico commercials involving cavemen.

The alternative is to write in a style that has a timeless quality. An example of this could be my entry on "The day my dog flew." Your offspring could read this entry in 100 years and still get the essence of what I was saying. It was sufficiently vague in its references to my current situation and it also touched on general themes of the human experience (e.g., We know how it feels to be powerless in embarrassing situations.). Writing in this timeless fashion makes me more readable to future generations, but it also loses a sense of "life-as-it-is-happening-now." I want to capture that too. What can be done to resolve this tension? How can blog entries be made timely and timeless?

Infomercial Announcer (in blue): Do your blog readers fall asleep when you write about general themes without reference to current events? [Footage: Man falling asleep in front of computer.]

Do your friends struggle to interpret your pop culture references when they read your blog entries from last year? [Footage: Woman pulling her hair out in frustration while looking at computer monitor.]

Struggle no more. Introducing (strategic pause) the all new Study Blog! [Footage: An attractive, smiling woman seated in an oversized chair. She is reading from a laptop computer.] This revolutionary development will forever change the way your blogs are read. This patented and innovative design features annotated study notes on the bottom of each entry to help readers make perfect sense of even your most obscure references!

Testimonial: [Footage: A grandfather-type who removes his bifocals before addressing the camera with his slow, smoker's voice.] "Well, I'm 72 years old, and I read blogs better now than when I was 70. I didn't know what my grandson meant by DDR, but now I do, and I can tell you, the Study Blog really works."

Okay, I won't beat the commercial thing to death (anymore than I just did). But, it did get me thinking about parallels between my study blog idea and many of the Study Bibles sold today. In turn, this got me thinking about how some people might feel more comfortable reading my blog if it were written in the language of the King James Version. In other words, I might be able to combine the best of some Study Bibles by including both annotated study helps and the majesty of the 1611 tongue. Let's see how this might play out. My post on "The day my dog flew" might start something like this:

If thou werest to goest unto mine past sleepy neighborhood in Bartow, Florida, thou wouldst hath seen little evidence with thine own eyes that I had livest there. Thou mightest, I say unto you, hath foundeth a baseball rotting atop a neighbor's patio roof, and if thou werest to hath diggeth deeply enough--thou sick fiend--thou mightest hath foundeth a dead dog that hath been verily buriethed in the backyardeth of my former houseth. But it cameth to passeth in the summer of 1987 that my doggeth wuth very mucheth aliveth and thateth it...

Okay, now for the study notes. This one could go a number of different directions, but I'll limit my discussion to only two possibilities.

First, a sample study note in the tradition of the NIV or KJV Study Bible published by Zondervan: "The word livest in the first line is taken from the Greek term, zoe, which means life. When Raul writes about living, it is usually done in reference to a specific geographical location. Such living is stated in contrast to death, or thanatos, in the Greek. For more on this notion of death, see the reference to 'kill' found in the 3rd line of the 'being square' blog entry and also the entry on the 'death' of a modern caveman." This would be a bit dry, but it would also be the best approach for explaining obscure cultural references, such as to the Avacor commercial alluded to in the above testimonial. Oh, you didn't catch that the first time through? Ah, now you see the need for annotated comments.

A second direction these notes could head would to be in the tradition of the Life Application Study Bible, also published by Zondervan. "A central theme in this passage is that of finding. We should try more than ever to find what is most important in life. We can do this most effectively by asking ourselves these two questions: (1) What is it that I'm looking for in life?, and (2) Am I finding what I'm looking for? If you struggle to answer these questions, then consider asking someone to help you find yourself."

This may all seem like a lot of work right now, but perhaps there will be a payoff when future generations make better sense of what thou and I didst meaneth when we bloggethed.

Getting to the Root of Being Square

2,300 hours.

That's how long I spent riding school busses during my less-than-illustrious K-12 career. If a person were to work a 40-hour week beginning on January 1, 2006, he or she would need to keep working until February 18, 2007, just to log in the same amount of time I spent riding a bus. This is the kind of self-directed learning takes place when one has 2,300 hours to kill.

My 14 months on the bus also allowed me to ponder some of the more overlooked questions of the human experience. For example, "I wonder if my home phone number is the only one in Bartow, Florida that ends in a whole square root?" As it turns out, it was. What are the chances? There were, after all, 12,000 other people living there at the time.

Ironically, the square root was 2,309, which is almost exactly the number of hours I had spent on the school bus. Go figure. (Never mind, I guess I just did that.) The only other phone numbers that could have joined this elite class would have been the squares of 2,308 and 2,310. After a check with the city's authoritative phone guide in the public library, I learned that these two numbers did not exist. Further, the phone numbers for both 2,307 and 2,311 were beyond the range of the city's directory at the time. Bottom line: I could rest assured that my home number was unique. Now, what to do with such utterly useless knowledge? Write a blog entry, I guess.

One might think, based on my early preoccupation with numbers, that I'm good at math. I'm not. So, it's a bit odd that I discovered this odd fact about my phone number. Mysteries like this, though, are waiting to whisper themselves to those people with 2,300 hours to spare. I guess that means I had less excuse in college when I told people they could dial 726-JERK to reach me at my dorm. Anyway, math has never been my best subject, but perhaps it's being rough around the mathematical edges that keeps me from being a total square.

The Death of a Modern Caveman

In the past, our ancestors met untimely fates in various--and sometimes creative--ways. Take the caveman who didn't use FedEx, for example. Today, though, we are more likely to be stomped underfoot by a Stressasaurus. This looming threat was made more real to me last night when I watched a DVD entitled, Caught in the speech trap: Information age overload. Put simply, workers in industrialized nations are working themselves to death as increased hours and rising levels of stress lead to heart attacks, stroke, and brain hemorrhages--not to mention workplace violence. That reminds me--I need more stamps. The bottom line is that I realized that I am a prime candidate to meet the untimely death of a modern caveman.

After viewing the video, I determined to get off this deadly track, and I'm off to a good start today. I slept in late, which I badly needed given that my bedtime had averaged around 3:00 AM last week. More than anything, I need rest.

The teaching part of life comes very easily to me, and good organizational skills help here. The factor that really adds the stress is that teaching is not my most pressing obligation--finishing the dissertation for my Ph.D. at Purdue is. If I were to reorient my life according to my values, I would be spending 40 hours a week working on this research, but unfortunately, there are days in which I can't even get to my dissertation given my other responsibilities.

There aren't too many things that I can cut out of my life at present, so my strategy for the time being is to add moments of scheduled relaxation and continue to find creative ways to alter my teaching obligations. I would love to give the "mother of all lectures" for any of my 75-minute classes, but I don't have the 5-6 hours to prepare for this, especially when I consider that I would still have another 25 hours and 15 minutes of class that week to also prepare for. So, if you happen to be in a class of mine this semester, don't be surprised if you see a few more videos followed by discussion segments. It's this modern caveman's way of staying alive (Bee Gees not included).

I also plan to get back to cooking, and grilling in particular. There is something primal about cooking meat over an open flame. I find that cooking is slow-paced. And I need that right now. Rachel Ray's 30 minute meals usually take me about 90 minutes to prepare.

But, that's okay.


It slows me down.


So, I'm putting more cooking on this caveman's menu, and right now, the roast duck with mango salsa is sounding pretty good.

The Day my Dog Flew

If you were to go to the sleepy neighborhood in Bartow, Florida, you would see little evidence that I had lived there. You might find a baseball rotting on top of a neighbor's patio roof, and if you were to dig deeply enough--you sick fiend--you might find a dead dog buried in the backyard of my former house. But in the summer of 1987, that dog was very much alive and was more often than not chasing after baseballs that I hit in a field that was situated in the middle of our block. All houses backed up to this field that was maybe 200 feet long by 100 feet wide. In general, this was a quiet block in a sleepy, Southern town, but there were exceptions.

One notorious exception involved a sunbathing woman, a baseball, and a "flying" dog. Dusty was my 3-year-old black lab whose favorite activity was to fetch baseballs that I would hit onto this field. One sunny afternoon, I hit a ball that sailed majestically through the air and landed 40-feet deep into a neighbor's back yard. Enter Dusty, my dog, running at full speed to fetch the ball. We're talking about a flying fury of focused animal energy.

Now, these neighbors had a log "fence" that stood about 2 feet high--short enough for a person to step over, but tall enough to keep a dog from seeing what was on the other side. And what happened to be on the other side--as I saw to my horror only as Dusty was at full speed and beyond the point of distraction--was the woman of the house wearing a purple bikini and sunbathing on a reclining lawn chair only feet from the other side of the fence. To make matters worse, she represented an exact point on the quickly shrinking line running from dog to ball.

The dog is now fully airborne, so let's pause the action Dukes of Hazard style.

It all really comes down to physics--the speed, the weight, and the angle of liftoff. As I was assessing the situation, I guessed that Dusty likely had the speed to make it over both the fence and the woman. It was a Mrs. Adams, I believe. I had previously timed her on this field to see how fast she was (my dog, not the woman), and I did this by hitting a baseball through two walls of flags placed a precisely measured distances. I would hit the ball to the other side of the flags and then measure the time between Dusty hitting the first and second row of flags. Dusty's best time in the 30 meters was 2.54, which ironically is the number of centimeters in an inch. "Coming up on Dateline: The hidden connection between animals and the metric system. What you need to know." The bottom line on speed is that we have a very focused dog traveling at 26.6 miles per hour. She also weighed in at about 60 pounds. That doesn't sound like much, but we're talking about 60 pounds at 26.6 MPH and aimed claws first at an unsuspecting and scantily-clad Mrs. Adams. So it all really came down to the angle of liftoff.

And, in fact, that is exactly what happened.

Since then, seasons have come and gone, and with the passing of time came also the passing of my baseball fetching buddy. But memories live on, and I'm confident there is one woman will never fully erase the memory of a black lab performing a bikini-clearing jump that would rival any you'll see in the Winter Olympics, just without the skis.

Pitcher Perfect

If I could do any job in the world, I'd like to be a starting pitcher in the National League. This would sure beat the pants off Mike Rowe's gig on Dirty Jobs. When I say pitcher, I'm not talking about a chump who goes 6-15 on the season with a 4.78 E.R.A. I'm talking about a perennial 20-game winner who can dominate a game with lights out "stuff." I'd want the fastball of a Billy Wagner, the knee-buckling curveball of a David Wells, the nasty slider of a John Smoltz, and the devastating change-up of a Trevor Hoffman. Add to that arsenal a Greg Maddux-like ability to locate the ball, the on-mound poise of a Tom Glavine, and the intimidation factor of a Randy Johnson.

It's that intimidation factor that has me intrigued. In the era of media driven sports, even the best starting pitcher could use a well-run image campaign. My personal PR campaign would center around the most intimidating pitch of all--a fastball with great movement thrown consistently in the mid-to-upper 90s and capable of hitting triple digits when I reach back for that little extra (insert "grunting" sound effect here). A fastball like this deserves a denotative upgrade. I will call mine--drum roll please--the "Velocitor."

That's a good start, but I also need an image to go along with the name for marketing purposes. It's a bit fuzzy in my head, but I can see this picture beginning to form, of a velociraptor atop a pitching mound. I can see it's piercing eyes glaring in toward home plate, and it has a baseball clinched in the claws of its prehensile-like throwing arm. Well, it's a start anyway. And, the marketing potentials are promising. I can hear Stuart Scott on Sports Center stating emphatically: "The Yankees will not be able to hit the Velocitor in the opening game of the 2006 World Series!" Then there are the t-shirts, the freezer mugs, the ball caps, and of course, baseballs with claw mark etchings. And with the continued growth of the Christian gift store industry, there could also be the Velociraptor Study Bible in the NIV with a special section on how to "strike out sin" in your life. "Special Offer: Buy this Bible and get two upper-deck tickets to see the Velociraptor pitch in Jurassic Park." But enough about the Korean connection.

There are also drawbacks though. A flare-up of tendonitis could lead sports writers to pen articles with headlines like "Armasaurus." And in the National League, I'm just begging to be called "Buntasaurus" when it's my turn at the plate. Inevitably, there is also the obnoxious fan in a frigid, late October Yankee Stadium holding a sign that reads: "Watch out Velociraptor--the Ice Age is coming." Yeah, very funny. Now put your shirt back on.

The biggest drawback, though, to the velociraptor image boils down to simple physics. Let's face it, there's no way it's dog-like arm could throw a ball to home plate, much less throw a pitch resembling anything close to the almighty Velocitor. So, don't send those Bibles to the press quite yet.

Perhaps an orangutan with it's longer arms would be a more logical choice. Does that mean I'd be the "Velocutan?" Not quite sure if that works, although there are also endorsement opportunities. Commercial: "Hi, I'm the Velocutan, and when it comes time for me to jump start my day, I reach for a tall glass of delicious Tang..." Hey, it would be money I don't have right now, even if it was only "chimp-change." And speaking of the zoologically-challenged, I would also dread groupies hoisting signs over the dugout reading, "We're ape for the Velocutan," not to mention signs on ESPN's Sunday Night Baseball reading, "Entertainment Sports Primate Network."

Well, if anything in this entry, I've monkeyed around with a plan to become a dominant pitcher in the National League. Now, I just need a few other things to fall into place, such as being able to throw a major league fastball, being 15 years younger, and being in superb physical condition. In the meantime, though, it's time for another glass of Tang.

Paging Mr. Fudpucker

I've known Orville E. Fudpucker for 22 years. The problem is that I've never met him. Nonetheless, his name has lived with me from the time I heard it used in vain in the back of a school bus. Apparently normal interests were too routine for fellow 8th grader, Greg Brill. Somehow, he was moved to "read" the local phone book. My guess was that he was just feeding his adolescent curiosity by looking up a few choice words, but that's only a guess. Perhaps it really was by freak chance that Greg had stumbled upon the noble surname of Fudpucker. Laying aside Master Brill's research methodology, the real issue is that while Greg has likely forgotten about Mr. Fudpucker, I haven't. And after 21 years, I feel compelled to resolve an epistemological tension I have between knowing the name but not the person.

So, I've decided to contact Mr. Fudpucker.

The only problem is that I'm not sure what to say. This would no doubt be one of the oddest letters anyone has ever received--even odder than the letter my family got from the U.S. Department of the INTERIOR that had NOTHING in it. Anyway, here's a rough draft:

February 13, 2006

Mr. Orville E. Fudpucker
1021 E. 15th Street
Plano, TX 75074-6221

(Yes, that's his real address, and he might be happy to hear from you also.)

Dear Mr. Fudpucker:

I've known about you since 1984 when a buddy of mine on the school bus came across your name in the phone book while looking for the "F" word. Anyway, I just wanted to write and say "Hi." I just figured that since I have known your name for the last 21 years, it's time you know mine. Granted, my name isn't as fun to say as yours, but it's what people call me.

Well, that's really about all I have to say.

Sincerely,

Raul Mosley

PS The kid on the bus who was making fun of your name was Greg Brill. There are only 14 of them in the country, so best of luck in tracking him down.