I just finished watching the movie 2012, which uses religious imagery and ideas in interesting ways. On the one hand, there is a strong anti-religious message. It is as though every time someone prays in the movie, their death is ensured to follow shortly thereafter. Now it may be fair to poke fun at those who would choose prayer rather than science when facing a disaster of which science is the prophet predicting it. But 2012 seems to go further, for instance... Read more

Some performers that will be familiar to you playing the 3rd movement of Seitz’ Violin Concerto No.5 from Suzuki book 4. Read more

The blog Grasping Mashi’ach has posted a review of my book The Only True God. Take a look! Read more

I am a fan of Eric Whitacre’s choral music, and was pleasantly surprised when his name popped up on some blogs whose feeds I subscribe to. Both were highlighting a project in which people were encouraged to record themselves singing parts of his composition Lux Aurumque and post them online. Whitacre then compiled them into a single “virtual choir” performance. Here’s the result: HT Bene Diction Blogs On and Greenflame, who also have the text of the piece and further... Read more

The latest biblioblog Top 50 has been posted. Read more

I just saw the recent Sherlock Holmes movie [SPOILER ALERT], and was surprised to find it so full of Hebrew/Aramaic letters. I resisted the temptation to rewind and freeze each time to see if what was shown consistently spelled actual words. Movies take so much longer to watch when you do that. Sometimes there were genuine words (I glimpsed tsedek and shelemuth), and I let myself be content with that. I really liked the movie’s “scooby-dooishness” (yes, that is indeed a word). There appeared to be genuine black magic at work, and this... Read more

The New York Times (HT Jim Davila) has a video about rare languages spoken in New York. One of them is Mandaic, that is, Neo-Mandaic, the modern spoken dialect. Unfortunately the video cannot be embedded. If Dakhil Shooshtary or any other Mandaeans living in the United States have in their possession copies of the Mandaean Book of John, I hope they will get in touch! Read more

In connection with a discussion of banning laptops in classrooms, a music video has been made with that well-worn phrase that sometimes accompanies in-class laptop use: “Please repeat the question.” There’s a transcript as well as the video here. http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=3508179&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=&fullscreen=1 Please Repeat the Question from Amanda Bakale on Vimeo. HT Greenflame Read more

The latest LOST Untangled is a music video about the life of John Locke. It is called “Locked and Loaded,” although the chorus is “Don’t Tell Me What I Can’t Do.” Fans are going to love this… http://a.abc.com/media/_global/swf/embed/2.6.1/SFP_Walt.swf HT DocArtz Read more

Here’s Part One of a video of Jennifer Knapp being interviewed by Larry King on CNN: You can find a transcript on the CNN website. The parts are also on YouTube, and the whole thing is interesting. HT a time to rend Read more