7 things @ 9 o’clock (11.7)

1. Caleb Wilde, who blogs at Confessions of a Funeral Director, writes about “The Day the Pallbearers Dropped the Casket.” Tell me you don’t want to read that. (I believed all of it right up until the last line.)

2. Trajectory, baby. Always good to see more theologians and biblical scholars talking about trajectory. “A new covenant, not of letter, but of spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.” You can’t exegete the pointing finger unless you look where it’s pointing.

3. “Credit Report Wrongly Says Man Is Convicted Felon, Forces Him to Prove Innocence.” Credit-scoring agencies are terrible at their jobs. They claim to provide quantifiable measures of credit-worthiness, but they’re unable to do that both because their quantitative models are not meaningful and because the data they plug into these sucky models is often inaccurate. The laws regulating these agencies are inadequate and poorly enforced.

So as an initial first step, I would like to see the credit-reporting agencies better regulated so that they are more accountable to the law and less able to run roughshod over individuals, ruining lives as a business model.

As a second step, I would like to see all of the executives and directors of Transunion, Experian, Equifax deported.

4. Well done, Sen. Rob Portman. Sure, maybe Portman just wasn’t deluded by screwy “unskewers,” and didn’t want to lash himself to the mast of a sinking ship for a long-shot chance at the office John Nance Garner called “a bucket of warm [spit].” Or maybe, like most people, he just didn’t like Mitt Romney very much. But in any case, Portman had a choice: Political ambition or his son’s best interest. And he made the right choice.

5. Twelve years after 12 Years a Slave:

In spite of the memoir’s commercial success, Northup earned only $3,000, and his ultimate fate is still a mystery. The last mention of him in the press occurred in 1857 when a Canadian newspaper reported that he was forced to flee a scheduled lecture appearance in Streetsville, Ontario, when audience members jeered him with racial epithets. There is speculation that money woes forced Northup to become a vagabond, and there are even far-flung theories that he was murdered by Merrill and Russell or abducted into slavery for a second time.

6. James McGrath laments the History Channel’s “ridiculous hype” promoting it’s upcoming Bible Secrets Revealed series, but the show really does have a terrific line-up of scholars and interview subjects:

7. I’m not sure if the narrator in that video is Avery Brooks or is just someone who sounds like Avery Brooks, but having already mentioned Solomon Northup’s memoir, here’s a bit of the 1984 PBS American Playhouse production Half-Slave, Half-Free: Solomon Northup’s Odyssey, with Capt. Sisko in the title role: