William Reardon’s Blog

After mass, I headed over to see The Passion today. You already know if you’d like it. If you’d like a movie about the last 12 hours of the life of Christ, then you’d like the Passion. If you wouldn’t, you won’t. It’s not like there is a surprise Sixth Sense ending coming.

Overall, I thought it was quite well done. I’m far from a biblical scholar, but everything was in line with my personal knowledge of the Gospels and of the early Roman Empire. There’s a little oddness, in what I’m surmising was supposed to be Satan, but that’s about it.

Despite the clamor in the media building up to the release, this movie was anything but anti-Semitic. In fact, I can’t really identify a single scene that could be taken that way, without taking other scenes with Romans as being anti-Italian. Reading some the criticisms after having seen the movie, it’s appalling how misleading some of them can be. The Boston Globe had the following quote:

Robert Leikind, New England regional director of the Anti-Defamation League, called the movie “incredibly evocative,” but said he was also very disturbed.
“The Jews in this passion play are a caricature — they are hateful, they are haughty, they are bloodthirsty, they are angry, they are conniving, and they are capable of manipulating the greatest power in the world at that time to fulfill their goals,” Leikind said.

Errr… not quite. Certainly, the Pharisees are portrayed in a negative light, but they are a far cry from representing all of Judasim at the time. (And I would certainly hope that Mr. Leikind isn’t suggesting that they are synonymous with Judasim today.) Judasim was comprised of a several distinct groups:

• Pharisees, who emphasized the Jewish traditions and practices that separated them from the Roman pagans
  
• Sadducees, who tended to side with the Romans
  
• Zealots, who were committed to military resistance
  
• Essenes, who stayed out of politics and largely stuck to wandering around the wilderness. (John the Baptist and Jesus were probably of this type)
  

The Pharisees are not positively portrayed in the gospel – in any of the gospels. Anyone with a passing knowledge of the New Testament could tell you that. For Mel Gibson to not do would essentially be re-writing them, explicitly what he set out to avoid. Additionally, Mr. Leikind completely overlooks the other Jewish characters in the movie: Mary is clearly not depicted as hateful, Peter is not depicted as bloodthirsty, John is not depicted as angry, and Simon of Cyrene is not depicted as conniving. (Not to mention Christ himself.)

Anti-Semitism is certainly something to be on-guard against, even in today’s world. With religious intolerance still running rampant in places like France, it’s a very valid concern. However, the objection here is puzzling.

In case you were wondering, it’s a helluva lot harder to modify the context menu in Mozilla compared to IE.

In a sign of divine providence, Greg Maddux will be returning to the Cubs. They made one of the worst management decisions of modern baseball history back in ‘92, offering him less money, despite a solid record and a Cy Young. With management like that, you really don’t a goat to thwart your World Series dreams. Added him with Kerry, Prior, Clement, and Zambrano and the Cubs have not only have arguably the best pitching anywhere in the major leauge.

Screw the goat. Next year is finally here.

It’s probably overly geeky to think this, but one of the very nice perks of overcast days is that you get a lot less glare on your screen.

Despite my best wishes, I’m spending a fair amount of time these days in TWiki. I have come to appreciate the collaborative nature of it. It’s still a royal PITA to modify documents, in particular, because working in text area boxes isn’t that fun.

Some coworkers showed me a neat trick to mitigate a bit of that pain – a command line browser called w3m. It’s different from lynx in that it will pull up your favorite editor for modifying text-area boxes. That is, you can now use emacs/vim/etc. to modify a text area box. Makes life a lot less painful.

If you want to use emacs and if you’re TWiki site is protected by some sort of cookie-based authorization, you probably want to add the following two lines to ~/.w3m/config:

editor /usr/local/bin/emacs
use_cookie 1

(w3m didn’t seem to respect my EDITOR or VISUAL settings.)

If you want emacs to automatically kick into html-mode, you can add the following to your .emacs file:

(setq auto-mode-alist
      (append auto-mode-alist
              '(
                ("w3mtmp" . html-mode)
                )))

(If you already have a block like that, just add the “w3mtmp…” bit.)

I usually don’t blog twice in one day (IMHO, that’s just greedy), but I couldn’t resist passing these along:

• The most awesome slashdot comment ever:

  Roses are #FF0000
  Violets are #0000FF
  chown -R you ~/base

• From Rick’s blog, the best ad there could ever be for Frontpage. Look closely.

My nephew, Quinn Allen Peterson, was brought into the world early Friday morning. My brother, Chris, flew out with my mom that afternoon, and was kind enough to upload photos. Mother and son are doing well and are home from the hospital. Even better I got to hear him on the phone tonight. Granted it was crying, but I’m pretty sure that didn’t have anything to do with me.

Dude! I’m an uncle!

My mom passed along the results of my sister’s visit to the doctor today. In a nutshell, they thought she’d probably deliver in the next 24-48 hours! Earlier than they thought, but apparently in Reardon style, the baby’s already pretty big.

For one reason or another, I read recently about how standardized tests (e..g, the ACT, SAT, GMAT) are administered now that they are completely computerized. Actually, I think my friend Ann also mentioned it to me a while ago, shortly after she had to take one, but this random thought didn’t occur until recently.

Basically the way it works is that it starts off asking you, say, a medium question. If you get the medium question right, you start getting harder questions. If you get wrong, it starts asking you easier questions. At first blush it sounds great, right? You get a better sense of how people will do; you focus in on where they rank exactly.

There are a couple of downsides, however. The first one is the obvious implication that you can’t go back and change your answers. Meaning if something is particularly hard for you, you can’t make a reasonable guess and plan to, time permitting, come back and check your work. Additionally, if you’re someone who tends to be sloppy on easy problems (most likely, for lack of focus), but do well on the hard ones, in the automated world, you’ll never get the hard ones.

The recent revelation was that latter bit, particularly because that’s me. I still remember my high school head football coach looking at my test scores shortly after I got them back. He was also a math teacher, and thus particularly interested in that area. I was still in the zone of happy relief that my score would be sufficient for the two schools I wanted to attend and had really only digested my overall score. He looked further at my math score, laughed, and said “Reardon! You idiot! You got all the hard math questions, all the medium ones, and missed half the easy ones!” The worst part wasn’t missing the perfect – the test was scored in such a way that I still managed to get a semi-respectable 34 or something – but that all my teachers had warned me of exactly that. Harping on and on, that I tended to be fast and sloppy, wanted to be the first to finish & that didn’t matter, etc. (Being 16 or 17, I, of course knew better and clearly paid them no mind.)

To me, it’s becoming clearer that technology is out to get me. Either that or I’ve generated some bad machine karma. I don’t know if the years before I was militant about “use strict” and always checking error conditions, but clearly it’s been itching to strike back. (Just luckily it was a little late on the attack this time around.)