Ken Martin's Blog

Yep, 15th! Wow, it's been a while since I blogged on the class. Been to busy simply trying to do the work. We finished verbs and just tonight finished participles. Had a nice eureka moment: the "noun part" of the participle is only necessary to identify the antecedent, and can be ignored after it's served that purpose! I kept trying to squeeze a genitive key word in (for instance) and it just didn't make sense. I finally get why.

Also, Mounce, in my opinion, talks backwards sometimes. He asks something like "why do we know it's dative? Because of it's function in a sentence!" Well, yeah, from the writer's perspective. From mine, I know it because it ends with iota. That little revelation cleared up a lot of misunderstanding I had when listening to him on CD. (iPod, actually.)

###Homework

• Read chapter 31
• Chap 31 workbook: parse all, translate 1-5

###Preview

• Understand differences between indicative and subjunctive
• Note (but not necessarily memorize) subjunctive paradigms
• "Uses" on pages 293-295
• Section 31.19

###Book Recommendations

• (coming soon)

###Other notes

• "Mood" = How the action of a verbal form relates to reality
• Need to tweak Pete's Participle Chart, I think to have three starting points to avoid mistaking participles for verbs as quickly as possible
• Eight Parsing "Slots" covering all verbal forms: Augment | Reduplication | Tense Formative | Connecting Vowel | Participle Morpheme | Personal Ending | Case Ending

And farewell to Nicole! I hope we'll see you back in the fall! If we have Greek 2. Time to start petitioning the MacLaurin men. :)

The audio recording I made as a test tonight didn't work very well... too far away. But I'll have a nice recording of next week's class available for you to download so you can keep up. :)

Yesterday. Very nice day. The sun broke through after four grey days of rain. I had an office party on Monday where I got pizza, pie, and a nice Apple Store gift card. What to get? I think I'd like this iPod audio recording accessory, but it's not actually out yet.

Later I had a nice evening at home, even though yet one more has fallen to strep; Anna. Not fallen like died. Been stricken, maybe? Anyway, Helen, despite illness and sick kids, prepared an awesome meal: chicken tortellini alfredo, ceasar salad, nice bread, and creme bruleé for dessert. Well, first dessert. Then there was cake.

Kenny spearheaded (and mostly financed) the family buying me The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (2005) widescreen DVD. Cool.

Well, I didn't want to think Holly Wenzel's East Side Review coverage of the shakeup in Maplewood, Minnesota politics was just the rambling of an unhappy constituent or partisan, but good heavens, what can I conclude after this week's piece "Fursman firing raises resident ire" with the promised next in the series "Who ordered a background check on Interim City Manager Greg Copeland?". Even the way the three pull-quotes were done bugged me. In the second, why highlight "loser" and not "move on"? Well, because "move on" doesn't look as negative in bold. "Loser" can be mistaken to be in like spirit to the other two comments. (You lose a bit of this without seeing the actual paper.) The article spends little time on Fursman, and somehow still can't seem to track down any reason he was fired. Great reporting. But perhaps this isn't meant to be reporting.

Well, Kenny's been talking a lot about how he wants to be a writer when he grows up. So now he has to blog three posts a week. Poor kid. :)

He likes it, though. I told him he'll need practice, and the technology part helps make it interesting. And the fact that friends and family can take a peek at what he's up to and comment back will help him along, I think. Hint. ;)

Anyway, see what's on his brilliant ten year old mind at www.kennymartin.com.

Well, there was one of those important, meaningful protests in town today. A bunch of kids protesting a couple of recruiting offices. Supported by groups like "Socialist Alternative", they came to share their anti-war perspective. Is that bad in itself? No way. They should be free to express themselves... Freedom of Speech and all, right? Well, the protest itself is so iconic it's pretty useless as a method to meaningfully express the intended viewpoint. But what was revealed was interesting.

My friends at The MacLaurin Institute are helping to bring the "Christianity in a Consumer Culture" conference to the U of M campus this weekend. I might try to take in some little bit of it, though Kenny got strep (again), so that will mix up the weekend a bit. Looks like good stuff, though. From the supporting website:

Consumerism is the driving force in our society—a spirit of our age. It is enmeshed within the fabric of our society. There are many critics to consumerism—those who are rightly concerned about the destructiveness of consumerism when it comes to economic justice or environmental issues. However, consumerism also reaches deep into the heart of American spirituality. Consumerism shapes the way we relate to each other, to our society, and to our God. Christians need to intentionally and carefully navigate our consumer culture, responding to its dangerous complexities with a deepening awareness of its promises and perils. The Conference on Christianity and the Consumer Culture will be both informative, fostering a deeper understanding of consumerism and its role within our society, as well as formative, providing strategies for faithful living in light of the promises and perils inherent to our consumer culture.

Towards this end, we will bring together Christian thinkers and practitioners who will offer analysis of the way our consumer culture shapes Christianity in America as we cultivate practices which will help us faithfully respond to Consumerism as a driving force in our society.

I'd go, but I have some shopping to do.

Kidding! Consider it if you're interested. Maybe I'll see you there.

I was going to chronicle my epic, nearly week long struggle with Qwest and USFamily.net, but I think I just need to let the whole episode slip into fading history. We're back up and Helen has posted something about it, so I think I'll leave it lay.

However, I do want to congratulate modern corporate society for the invention and skillful implementation of the Customer Service Moat: a carefully crafted network of automated answering services and half-informed first tier customer "service" staff whose purpose is to ensure that no one penetrate too deeply into the corporate castle. Never have I so clearly and so often heard the auditory equivalent of the blank stare. Modern physics is wrong; energy can be turned into nothing.

Please, someone somewhere... please note that I will always try powering down the modem before I run to the phone for the pleasure of the customer service experience.

When I see things like this, I think "cool", "I should do that" (yeah, sure, in my spare time), and "that is so Rob."

UPDATE: Under construction?! Shame on you, Rob. :)

Lately I've really enjoyed perusing the local "neighborhood" paper, The East Side Review. Seeing all the local little things that escape notice in the larger metro area, scanning the police blotter, looking at the ads; it's all interesting. Yesterday, I was almost giggling over the coverage over what seems to be a pretty big deal and which plainly has stoked passions: "Surprise! East Side activist named interim Maplewood manager". The best I can tell, the Maplewood city council newly has a Republican majority and Mayor Diana Longrie is also a Republican. The city administrator Richard Fursman, who seems not to be, has been fired. Apparently, the mayor and city administrator were not getting along. And Greg Copeland is the surprise interim replacement city administrator. An "activist"! Oh no! Copeland seems to be a long-time, persistent conservative in a region where conservatism isn't necessarily very cool. (Well, conservatism is actually way cooler. Some folks are just out of touch.) And he may very well be an activist. But it was odd to see the label. I didn't notice anyone else labeled similarly. Anyway, I could be completely wrong, but my perception was that author and managing editor Holly Wenzel seems displeased about the firing of the Fursman. If you read the article, I wonder if you can figure out a substantive reason Fursman was fired. I expect the answer would come back to me "well, no one knows... there is no good reason" as this was alluded to in the article. Still, is there really nothing to find concerning this? What was the history like since January? What were the city council meetings like? What policies is the mayor wishing to change that Fursman supported? A brief peek through the city council minutes makes me wonder if wetlands/public use/property rights might be a point where they differed. Sure, that's a bit of homework, and maybe too much to expect from a small local paper. But then you find the companion story on the jump, "Greg Copeland, too, has been ousted from office". Well, apparently some research was done then! Go back ten years and we find he was fired, and printed right there is a selection from "a long laundry list of 25 alleged improprieties". How odd. Why print a ten year old list of allegations about the Republican newcomer, but print nothing negative and no allegations about the fellow actually being fired? Or, oft-quoted council member Will Rossbach has run for mayor, and Copeland has run for House and Senate, but only Copeland is noted as losing his bids. (Rossbach did, too, and had he garnered just a few hundred more votes, this story could be quite different.)

Since I'm a bit busy due to our internet outage, here's a couple of little keyboard tricks for Mac:

• function-delete deletes forward instead of backwards
• option-delete deletes a whole word backwards

Thrilling, eh? Well, I couldn't find them online when I wanted them, so there you go.