Saturday's Mini Codices

From now on Ι'm going to share a list of interesting things every Wednesday and Saturday. Think of something roughly similar to Tim Challies "A La Carte".

I've already posted Wednesday's installment, now here are the featured blips on the radar screen for Saturday..

• The Archive.org Way Back Machine is very useful when you want to see what a web site looked like or what content it had back in time. It is accessible from the Archive.org front page.


• Check out the blog of Douglas Groothuis. Doug left some feedback on my blog one day, and shortly after I was looking at the Philosophy section in Chapters and I found his book "On Jesus" there. I thought that was cool!


• If you haven't discovered it yet, you should listen to the Men of Whom The World Was Not Worthy series on Archive.org by John Piper. It covers John Owen, Charles Spurgeon, John Newton, etc.


• For those interested in 1930's films, Archive.org has Rogues Tavern, The Man Who Knew Too Μuch, Shadows Over Shanghai, and Chinatown After Dark


• For bloggers that use blogging software that doesn't natively support category tags, there is a web-based technorati tag generator.


• A mockumentary is a fictitious and satirical documentary.


• I'm seriously considering reading Archive.org's scan of "Mistakes of modern infidels : or, Evidences of Christianity : comprising a complete refutation of Colonel Ingersoll's so-called Mistakes of Moses, and of objections of Voltaire, Paine, and others against Christianity". For more information, see the summary. It does look interesting!! Besides the interesting subject matter, it is also interesting in that it was published in Detroit and dedicated to someone from London, Ontario!


• Archive.org's scan of "The wars of religion in France, 1559-1576; the Huguenots, Catherine de Medici and Philip II" also looks interesting. Samuel Froehlich (who founded the ACC) was a descendant of Huguenots who fled France.


• If you haven't noticed, a lot of todays blips are from Archive.org. It's really a fine project that has a plethora of stuff!!

Putting Someone/Something Down With Dignity

There was once a day when the art of insulting someone was actually quite a refined art. The idea back then was not necessarily to find a despicable noun or verb to associate a person with, but rather to discover a humorous witty quip that may take more than a few brain cells to parse.

I guess you wouldn't necessarily call them "insults" persay, they were more literary sabre rattling. Men who had a way with words, tended towards having a way with clever jabs too.

For instance, mark the following jab which Mark Twain documents in "Roughing It":

'Once, while editor of the Union, he had disposed of a labored, incoherent, two-column attack made upon him by a contemporary, with a single line, which, at first glance, seemed to contain a solemn and tremendous compliment--viz.: "THE LOGIC OF OUR ADVERSARY RESEMBLES THE PEACE OF GOD,"--and left it to the reader's memory and after-thought to invest the remark with another and "more different" meaning by supplying for himself and at his own leisure the rest of the Scripture--" in that it passeth understanding.'

And lest we misappropriate these colorful jabs exclusively to frontier ruffians, let's consider the exploits of the noble and pious preacher Charles Spurgeon. He had a way with words too. And one would prefer not to be on the business end of his witticsms. In his "Commenting on Commetaries", he executes some most creative assesments:

"The author professed to offer his work with great diffidence, and he had just cause to do so: he had better have burned his manuscript."

"This book reads to us like utter nonsense. We question if anyone except the author will ever be able to make head or tail of it, and he had better be quick about it, or he will forget what he meant."

"It is easy to divide an egg by letting it drop on the floor, and in this fashion this author divides texts."