Jamie123

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Everything posted by Jamie123

  1. Happy Birthday! (for when it was your birthday - sorry I missed it!)
  2. It says I'm sad on 3 different levels: Not only knowing about but actually liking the 1968 TV show The Prisoner ("You are Number 6. I am not a number! I am a free man!"). Not so much knowing about complex numbers (many people have that information thrust unwillingly upon them) but thinking that they are cool. Having read into the topic of complex numbers enough to know that i is not strictly speaking a number but an operator. (Hence the "joke".)I was introduced to The Prisoner when I was a freshman at college, by a guy who now (despite having a masters degree in engineering) makes his living writing articles for the Dr. Who magazine.
  3. It doesn't do to idolize people too much. Lord Nelson won many a battle and was loved by his men, but he neglected his wife while having a long-lasting affair with the wife of his best friend. Martin Luther King may have been inspired by God, but he was also a serial philanderer and plagiarist. And the real George Armstrong Custer was absolutely nothing like Errol Flynn. I'm sure it's the same in the US, but here in the UK there have been a stream of famous people many of us loved from childhood, who it now seems were sex predators. To start with there was Gary Glitter. He was always a bit of a "character". I saw him in concert when I was at college - not of course during his main period of fame, but during a short-lived comeback in the 1980s when he was playing to students (like me) who remembered him from when they were 9 or 10. That was bad enough, but it really took off with Jimmy Savile. I must confess I never exactly "liked" Savile: he was entertaining and funny to watch on TV, but I don't think I'd have felt comfortable meeting the guy. It's no big surprise that there was something funny going on behind the scenes. But then came Rolf Harris. Good old Rolf. We all loved him. There were his Christmas and Easter shows, Rolf Harris' Cartoon Time and Animal Hospital. Great stuff. I agree with Russell Brand that the news of what he really was makes you need to re-evaluate your childhood. But now: now there is Peter Ball. Less famous than the three I've mentioned so far he's not been in the news much, which is why I've only just become aware of this. Ball was an Anglican bishop/monk who worked a lot with young people during the 70s and 80s. I say "was" because he's not only been "defrocked" but convicted and imprisoned for sexually assaulting many teenage novices in his monastery. It's not even as if this might be a miscarriage of justice: he has fully admitted to it all - much to the dismay of his many fans and supporters. To be quite honest I don't know an awful lot about Ball, but what mostly stand out in my memory are Adrian Plass' descriptions of him. Since Plass is one of my all-time favourite writers, and Ball was a close friend/mentor of Plass, I have (without much justification) adopted Ball as a kind of "hero by proxy". Stupid I know, but there you have it... "...there is absolutely no substitute for our own individual journey with God, for spending time alone with him, and growing directly in our own consciousness of his compassion and wisdom. Leaders, systems and even theologies rise and fall, and we need that deep, personal, inner walk with Jesus that ultimately nothing can take away." Adrian Plass
  4. I think we are very similar in the Church of England to what Vort describes: a "Stake" has always sounded to me very much like a "diocese" - a Stake President being roughly equivalent to an diocesan bishop (the main difference being that the bishop is a full-time paid cleric). I don't think many Anglicans give much of a stuff about their diocese, and probably don't even know the name of their bishop; their focus is mainly on their "parish" (similar to a ward/branch) and its local leadership. Whenever the diocese is mentioned, it is usually by people on church committees, grumbling about how the diocese is refusing to pay for the new roof, or is demanding a greater "parish share" (the portion of tithes paid by the parish to help support the diocese). Having said that, there are certain things that local church leaders are not authorised to do. For example confirmations, ordinations, the inductions of new local leaders have to be performed by a bishop. On those occasions a bishop will visit the parish church and the kids will snicker about his funny hat However, the bishop who comes to do these things will probably not be the actual bishop of the diocese; each diocese has a number of so-called "suffragan" bishops who attend to the daily grind of bishoping. (Sometimes they have notional "sees"; for example the Bishop of Kingston is a suffragan to the diocesan Bishop of Southwark, but others are regular parish priests authorized to "step in" as bishops when the need arises.) Possibly they could be compared with a Stake President's counsellors - but I'm not sure about that
  5. If I remember rightly, the Simpsons' "add-ons" were: ...say It glowed (Bart: "Like a Light Bulb!" Homer: "Bart!!") ...reindeer games (Bart: "Like Strip Poker!" Homer: "I'm warning you!") ...Santa came to say (Marge: "Take it away Homie!" Homer (sings solo): "Rudolph get your nose over here, so you can guide my sleigh to...er...day" Patty and Selma: "Groan!") ...down in history (Bart: "Like Attila the Hu.....uuuugh". Homer starts strangling him.) My daughter and I always sing "Attila the Hun" at the end, though my wife always tries to drown us out with "George Washington". (I think "Attila the Hun" scans better)
  6. Notwithstanding what I said before, I now ALWAYS see the pig. Thanks Vort. Thanks a lot!! LOL
  7. Last night I got an early Christmas present from my parents-in-law: a phone/tablet "bundle", to replace the Apple I-phone I accidentally dropped in coffee last month. The phone and tablet are both Android based (not Apple) and I have had bad experiences with Android before - but both of these gizmos seem to work well and I'm very pleased and happy. The first thing I looked up on the tablet was the debate about Jojobag's "pig". I showed it to my wife but she wasn't impressed and refused to accept it looked like anything other than a kitten. (Women, ey?) She in return showed me this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oiSn2JuDQSc on her own tablet. Enjoy :)
  8. If I half close my eyes I can just about see it as a pig - but only for a split second at a time. Almost immediately the kitten returns.
  9. Interesting: maybe they'll make another show about her husband Noah
  10. Are you sure she wasn't trying to do an impression of the Cookie Monster from Sesame Street? Another thing: when you've finished your Christmas pudding, and are totally stuffed beyond belief, the next indispensable thing is to listen to the Queen on TV at 3pm.You don't really pay any attention to what she says, but her voice is soothing and Christmassy and helps your digestion. At the end of her message they play the National Anthem, and you feel like you ought to stand up but decide not to. Then you fall asleep, till you are woken up by kids trying to land their new radio controlled helicopters on your face. But you don't mind - it's Christmas after all! * mean the Queen - not the band Queen - though there's nothing wrong with listening to Queen on Christmas day. When I was 15 I got A Night at the Opera for Christmas, which I had asked for because I knew it had Bohemian Rhapsody on it, and I listened to it almost non-stop all that day.(The cat was sick all over the couch that Christmas, though I don't think that had anything to do with either Queen or the Queen.)
  11. The indispensable tastes of Christmas: Mince piesChicken or turkey, roasted with bacon, sausages and stuffing. Over cooked, with lots of gravy poured over itOh - and don't forget the roasted potatoes and parsnipsOr the Brussels sprouts (even if you hate them, Christmas isn't Christmas without them)Christmas pudding - with cream or brandy butterMulled wine (though I don't suppose many active LDS would have this)Nuts (hazelnuts, walnuts, brazils, almonds etc...)My American wife does not agree. She cannot stand Christmas pudding, or mulled wine, or Brussels sprouts, She doesn't go for nuts, or mince pies. Or parsnips. Neither does she like the chicken/turkey overcooked. For her Christmas is all about cookies. Cookies? What is it with cookies? *Sigh*
  12. How do you know that the 18/19/20-year-old "apostate" ever experienced "the truth"? I'm sure many 12-year-old kids are marched through baptism without any real understanding or belief, and only discover later that they have doubts. His own actual conversion (or otherwise) could still be in the future! (And in case you think that's ignorance talking, I remember from my own days as an investigator a member giving a talk about how the Church meant nothing to him at all until he was already some way up the priesthood ladder.) Maybe your average ex-Mormon is more likely to be sinful than a regular non-member, maybe not, but either way would it not it be far better to judge individuals on their own actions? Firstly I'm not talking about inactive Mormons - I'm talking about ex-Mormons who have left the church but have maintained their moral standards, and are in good ecclesiastical standing elsewhere. Perhaps there are few such people - I don't know. But would it not be better to expel a student based on his/her moral depravity than on whether or not they belong to a certain demographic? This is a false dichotomy. You're assuming that allowing ex-Mormons to remain at BYU would necessarily entail lowering the honour standards to the level you say ex-Mormons would wish them to be. Why not require the same high moral standards from Mormons and ex-Mormons alike, and only bring in discipline/expulsion when these standards are not met? If by "saints" you mean "latter day saints" this is quite clearly not the policy - as is evident from the case of beefche.
  13. I totally agree that as a private church-sponsored institution, BYU can make and enforce any rules it wants. (Within reason of course - the alleged former policy of withholding academic credit from departing homosexual students until they had submitted to electric "degayification" could be open to question.) But consider two students: Student A is a non-LDS Christian. He has an acceptable reference from his minister, and has agreed to live by the Mormon lifestyle during his time at BYU. Student B is a former Mormon who still abides by all the moral standards of Mormonism, but who found (at some point while at BYU) that he could no longer believe that the Church is true. He applied for name removal and has now joined a different church. Both are living the same moral standards. Neither believes that the LDS church is true. Yet A is considered worthy to be a BYU student and B is not. Why? What is the difference between them?
  14. This from the Wikipedia page on EO13603:
  15. "Monies" (plural of "money"). This follows the same rule as monkey/monkies, but you can't have "a money" the same way that you can have "a monkey" can you? The same thing is true with "water" and "waters", but somehow that doesn't bother me - probably because it appears in the Bible. The word "monies" has always looked and sounded naff to me.
  16. I've read about that: Greek has the letter "theta" which is supposed to make the same sound as the modern English "th" but Latin has no equivalent and the first printing presses were designed to print Latin. It had supposedly not yet occurred to anyone to use "TH" to represent the "thorn" rune. Until recently that puzzled because "TH" does sometimes appear in Latin : like "thema" (horoscope) and "theatrum" (theatre), but Ilately discovered that the T and H in those words would originally have been sounded separately: t'heatrum or t'hema. But I'm still not totally convinced because Latin has many borrow-words from Greek in which theta has become "TH": like "theologos" (theologian) or the name of the Roman emperor Theodosius. Maybe in Classical times the Greeks would have pronounced theta as "t'h" but it seems unlikely: the "th" sound comes so natural that it's hard to believe no one in those days used it.
  17. I always pronounced Pyrrhic to rhyme with "lyric" - maybe I've been saying it wrong all these years. It wouldn't be the first time: for years I only encountered the word "paradigm" in print, and had I ever been called upon to say it I would have probably said something like "para-dijum". A colleague of mine was surprised when I told him how Persephone was pronounced (he had always imagined it was "Persi-fone"). My father tells me that when he was young he used to talk about "Jung" (as in Carl Jung, but pronounced with a hard J) and people would have no clue what he was talking about. On the other hand, what about "quixotic"? For years I imagined that was pronounced "Kee-hotic" (I knew how "Don Quixote" should be pronounced because of the song by Nik Kershaw). I was surprised later to learn that it was actually "quicks-otic". P.S. Another word is "Vigenère". About 3 years ago I was called upon to teach cryptography - a subject I then knew almost nothing about, so I had to bury myself in books for a few months learning about one-time pads, block ciphers and elliptic curves. The first year I taught the class I had no idea that Vigenère is pronounced "vision-air", so I told the students all about the "vig-ner-aye" cipher. Luckily none of them knew how it was pronounced either so I got away with it!
  18. Another thing about the KJV is that when a word is written in italics like this it does not mean that reader should stress the word. It means (so I understand) that the word was inserted by the translator and does not appear in the original Greek/Hebrew.
  19. You may be a long way from where God wants you to end up, but does that mean you are not where He wants you to be now?
  20. You're not seriously telling me that Grumpy Bear is "grouchy and cantankerous" by the standards of anyone other than the Care Bears? Grouchy Smurf would be more of a warning!
  21. I totally agree. I think we all admire Martin Luther King - even though he was (i) a serial adulterer, and (ii) an academic cheat. Philip Yancey paints a very warts-and-all picture of him in his book Soul Survivor but still explains why he finds King an inspiration in his life. I've done enough things "worthy of disgust and rejection" myself over the years without worrying about what other people might or might not have done. Though that doesn't always stop me feeling cross and judgmental though...
  22. One I heard about once is that the Smithsonian uses the Book of Mormon as a reference on pre-Columbian America. This is obviously untrue (if it were true then the Smithsonian would be a bastion of Mormonism, which it isn't) but whether this idea was ever seriously believed by Church members I don't know.
  23. You mean Mormons *don't* try to pass themselves off as Amish? Seriously though I didn't spot that in the OP (hangs head in shame! )
  24. "Mormon" is another word for "Amish" "Mormon" is another word for "Quaker" All Mormons are Freemasons Mormons are banned from being Freemasons Mormon men can have as many wives as they like but cannot drink Coca Cola Mormons believe that God communicates with the saints using tachyons Sir Richard Branson is a Mormon (I actually believed this for some time before I looked into it)
  25. Ditto. I guess I'm not that phallically minded! A thread starts with Downton Abbey....and now it's about the symbolism of sand worms! Interesting :)