Give me Hymnals

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(At right: Sermon notes doodle from church last Sunday.)

I’m a big fan of hymnals. Though I was raised on text-only lyrics sheets inserted into missalettes (as a Catholic) and overhead projectors (later as a pop-Baptist), I found my home of worship when I first came to a church with hymnals in the pews. (Berean Bible Baptist Church in Paranaque, where I discovered that there are actually Filipino Baptists who sing traditional hymns.) In my opinion, projectors, especially those that run on computers, serve only to detract from a church service. Computers crash, Powerpoint shows the wrong slides, lyrics software shows the wrong words, and bible passages flashed on screen distract people who can easily read along with their own bibles or even listen to the Word as it is read.

Give me the rock-steady certainty of a community-shared hymnal any day, so we know the parts for our voices; so we know that we’re all singing the same words as is in the choir’s own songbooks; where “Ein Feste Burg” is always on page 151, “Victory in Jesus” is always on page 353, and “The Star-Spangled Banner” is on page 802. (Okay, maybe not that last one.) Give me the written word rather than an electronic flash card; a page which does not ephemerally pass away like the world; a book I can grasp with my hands and know that it was there yesterday and will be there tomorrow. Give me hmynals!

(And throw the drums and electric guitars out of church! Burn them! Burn them all!) </miserableoldcoot>

The Approach of Autumn

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(The Approach of Autumn uploaded by brownpau.)


(Clovers in Afternoon Sun 1 uploaded by brownpau.)

I spent the weekend in NJ with Amy and her folks, with a Saturday jaunt to NYC to eat pizza with Stynxno and view an exhibit on “Prague, the Crown of Bohemia” at the Metropolitan Museum. Weather was just this side of cool, temperate in the daytime and nippy at night. Summer hasn’t quite let go yet, but the sun is setting earlier and the leaves are starting to turn. It won’t be long before the jackets and long johns come out of the closets.

More in the NJ/NYC Sep 2005 photoset.

Death of a Coleus

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(Death of a Coleus (zoom) uploaded by brownpau.)

This potted coleus cutting sat outside my window all through summer, but was blown off the ledge by exceptionally strong winds last week, to fall to the second level roof below. The pot survived intact with soil in it, but the leaves were stripped from the stem. I haven’t gotten down to knocking on the door of the apartment downstairs whose window opens onto that roof so I can retrieve the pot. Ah, well. I still have the huge, gangly parent coleus on my desk, and this plant’s outdoor season is coming to a close anyway.

Bug on my Ceiling

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(Bug on my Ceiling uploaded by brownpau.)

This spotted green beetle flew into my room and landed on my ceiling several nights ago. I was able to coax it into a jar and let it back out the window, but I sure hope it didn’t lay any eggs on my plants while it was visiting. Anyone know what kind of beetle this is, and if it’s a predator or herbivore?

Juxtaposition of Rich and Poor

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Working from this BBC story on Philippine poverty, Deebeedee posts a bunch of his own photos showing the stark contrast between rich and poor on his recent visit to the Philippines. It’s a sad and shocking juxtaposition: shanty towns beside mansions, squatters beside business centers.

We Filipinos, unfortunately, have grown rather jaded to it all. Poor, ragged children begging at city street corners are not uncommon, and the averted eyes and nonchalant “nothing-for-you” double knock on the window are part of a learned daily routine for most in our social stratum. It’s a huge problem which grows with the population; the country gets poorer and hungrier everyday, and it’s not something you can fix by just voting in a better president or switching to a parliamentary form of government.

More from CountryStudies.us.

Closeups of Tethys

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Cassini flies by Tethys and Hyperion, and the photos so far have been awesome and weird! I especially want to point out this fascinating view, which, if you look at it closely, reveals what appears to be a string of small impact craters, in a straight line over older terrain. What kind of meteor impact could have produced such an excellent formation of craters?

Update: On Metafilter, freedryk mentions Shoemaker-Levy 9, the comet that broke up as it crashed into Jupiter in a series of linear impacts. Similar forces may have been at work in the line-of-craters on Tethys.

Update: Hyperion photos are coming in.

Kokogiak’s got backup in case the JRUNS strike. More from Planetary.org. Also crossposted to Metafilter.

Accordion Guy and the Redhead Get Hitched

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Congratulations to Joey “Accordion Guy” de Villa and his lovely bride, Wendy “The Redhead” Koslow, who were married last Saturday in a mixed Filipino-Judaic ceremony which I would have loved to see. Joey wore his Barong Tagalog, as he said he would, and I think it a good sign for my own future plans to someday marry a redheaded Polish girl as I wear my own Barong.

More from Reverend AKMA, who introduced them, and The Velveteen Rabbi, who officiated the ceremony.

Solanum quitoense

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Those of you who were wondering what the thorny green-and-purple plant here was, I asked about it on Metafilter. It’s called the Bed of Nails plant, or Naranjilla in Central America, scientific name Solanum quitoense. I don’t think I’ll be growing any of those soon, as they would probably be a literal pain to repot.

Amykow v2

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I’m happy to announce that Amykow.com is back in action. Amy wanted to start with a clean slate so she could focus more on her art, so the older Blogger entries are now lost to the ages.

The site now runs on WordPress, with a template I specifically designed to act as gallery rather than weblog. This meant dispensing with comments and trackbacks (so as to avoid the travails of spam and community moderation) and moving most other conventional weblog trappings — date-based archives, categories, and search — down and out of the way, to draw focus to the current piece. Hence the bottom-positioned “side” bar.

Amy thought a black background would accentuate her work, and I agreed, having seen a similarly vivid sharpening effect in a book on Vermeer paintings which used glossy black pages. However, I still don’t think I’ve done enough for the design to visually center on the art; the text and link colors seem to compete too much with the painting, though for readability’s sake, the font cannot be made any smaller or darker. For now, I’m okay with this, and I’ll have a tweaked version of that theme up for other WordPress users desiring a similar layout.

(P.S. Note that I formulated this footer-oriented layout well before Powazek’s “Embrace Your Bottom.” In this case, it was the Flickr “Fruit at the Bottom” approach I had in mind.)

Hurricane Rita Approaches

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Scarcely a month after Hurricane Katrina, now we have a new Monster from the Gulf: Hurricane Rita. (Well, from the Atlantic, actually, via the Gulf, but it’s the warm water in the Gulf of Mexico this time of year that feeds these beasts so they grow monstrous.) Texas and Louisiana are at risk, but having seen the havoc wreaked by Katrina, millions have evacuated. (What’s being done for the NOLA evacuees at the Astrodome, I wonder?)

Houston, which is right on the coast, and Galveston, a shield island jutting out into the Gulf, are going to be hit hard by this storm; but a direct hit may now be avoided as the storm veers east, and Rita is weakening from Category 5 to Category 3. Sad to say, New Orleans is getting pounded once more: weakened, patched-together levees are breached again, and parts of the city are re-flooding. The only reason New Orleans will be spared massive destruction this time is because the city already lies in ruins from Katrina.

Satellite and radar imagery:

More news and links:

Update: Rita came and went, and the impact was not quite as bad as Katrina’s, probably because it didn’t hit as flood-prone an area as New Orleans. There was damage, still, however, but oil seems to have dodged the bullet.