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My own writing practices are the direct opposite of that followed by…prolific and renowned writers. I write only when I have something to say. The big disadvantage of this is that it can mean a lot of down time. There are manuscripts of mine that sat around gathering dust for years without a word being added to them. – Thomas Sowell

So begins my latest post at The Slow Hunch. What I failed to consider for years about the quote above is that Sowell was talking about books, not blog posts. I was too worried about coming up with a grand, unifying theory of everything for every single post at The Slow Hunch, [ref]Any casual reader of my blog will realize that I fell woefully short of this goal.[/ref]  which is probably why I’ve failed to write much over there the past few years (only a couple posts per month). Plus, blogging at Worlds Without End and Difficult Run made original posts more challenging. So, I’ve decided to try a slightly different direction: I will continue to link to non-SH posts I author (e.g. WWE, longer essays here at DR). However, I plan for most[ref]I say most because I still want the freedom to blog about whatever I want.[/ref] of my SH posts to relate to the theme of “worship through corporeality,” specifically the marriage of business and theology.[ref]Nathaniel has played a role in nudging me toward this niche.[/ref] I hope to write more frequently on this subject, from brief comments to longer essays. I will continue to link to them from DR. Hopefully, it turns into something worthwhile.

This article in The Jerusalem Post is a few years old, but it is a great story:

Of the two Hebrew translations of JRR Tolkien’s classic book The Hobbit, one of them was painstakingly written down in Egyptian exercise books by [Rami] Harpaz and nine other Israeli prisoners-of-war languishing in a Cairo jail. They were eventually released in a prisoner swap brokered after the Yom Kippur War in 1973. To tackle translating Tolkien’s The Hobbit, the forerunner to the Lord of the Rings trilogy, was the brainchild of Harpaz. On the back cover of the prisoners’ Hebrew version of The Hobbit, however, no name appears for the translation – just a mention that it was a group effort by Israeli prisoners-of-war during their years of captivity in the Abaseyar prison.

“We finished The Hobbit after four months. Basically, we became two groups – those who translated and those who read the translation – and for this reason we decided not to translate the trilogy, as it was important to keep the group together as one unit,” said Yitzhak Pe’er, one of the translators. “Two of us would sit out in the sun reading sentence by sentence in English, but out loud giving a word-for-word literal translation into Hebrew while another would be jotting it all down. We had many arguments, even shouting matches, about how this or that should be translated. I think one of our total failures was the translation of the songs, as none of us really had sufficient talent to do them the justice they deserve. It was extremely difficult to translate idioms and other special words, as we wanted not only the words but also the mood of the author.”

Check out the full article.

That’s right.

There’s been a lot of good press recently about the false and impossible standards set by photoshopped fashion models. This time it’s not Photoshop to blame, so much as just good old fashioned optical trickery used in before and after weight loss photos. To make the point, a person trainer from Australia staged her own before and after shots.

The catch? The elapsed time between these two photos is about fifteen minutes. She wrote:

Wanna know my secret? Well firstly I ditched the phonewallet (fwallet) cause that *** is lame, swapped my bather bottoms to black (cause they’re a size bigger and black is slimming), smothered on some fake tan, clipped in my hair extensions, stood up a bit taller, sucked in my guts, popped my hip, threw in a skinny arm, stood a bit wider #boxgap, pulled my shoulders back and added a bit of a cheeky/I’m so proud of my results smile. Zoomed in on the before pic, zoomed out on the after and added a filter. Cause filters make everything awesome.

It’s definitely worth it to read more of her thoughts on the issue of body image and health and expectations because she’s got a lot to say, and it’s important stuff.

asfd

The stereotype is that conservatives are dumb. Anti-science. Anti-intellectual.

Until 2011, students majoring in English at UCLA had to take one course in Chaucer, two in Shakespeare, and one in Milton —the cornerstones of English literature. Following a revolt of the junior faculty, however, during which it was announced that Shakespeare was part of the “Empire,” UCLA junked these individual author requirements. It replaced them with a mandate that all English majors take a total of three courses in the following four areas: Gender, Race, Ethnicity, Disability and Sexuality Studies; Imperial, Transnational, and Postcolonial Studies; genre studies, interdisciplinary studies, and critical theory; or creative writing. (Wall Street Journal)

Well if this is intellectualism, it’s cyanide for our society, and the only reasonable course when you have swallowed poison is to vomit it out again. Thus: the repugnance with which the Ivory Tower has come to be seen by large swathes of the American people is justified. They are right. The intellectuals, if this is any benchmark, are wrong. This is less directly applicable outside the humanities, but the politicization of the sciences means that they are not immune either.

I haven’t been linking my posts from The Slow Hunch much and with school beginning, it will be difficult to do longer, well-researched write-ups. My most recent post explains the brief hiatus and attempts to spin it into a personal development of “grit.” Since posts will be rare in the next few weeks, readers will have time to catch up on the last few (I know that’s been a high priority for them…). Without further ado:

• “A Gritty Hiatus” is the one the described above and features some interesting links on MBAs, grit, willpower, and focus.
• “‘I Have Seen Hell…’” looks at the historical impact of the Christian worldview on human dignity and welfare and the power it can have for human well-being today.
• “Engaging Heaven: Further Notes on ‘The Upward Path’” is a follow-up to a two-part series at Worlds Without End (mentioned by Nathaniel both here at DR and at Times & Seasons) on worker engagement, positive psychology, and personal and organizational well-being.

There is an awesome article on the “Top 25 Informative Maps That Teach Us Something Uniquely Different About the World.” The following is the map of world level of happiness per country.

Check out the rest.