Order Part 1

Seeing swing done well for the first time is overwhelming and intimidating. I first saw this video before ever taking a lesson. The freedom of expression the dancers exhibit is amazing, but even then, I could sense there was some kind of underlying structure and repeating footwork that I didn't understand:


After taking some lessons and getting more solid familiarity in the footwork, the structure is a little more clear, as are the variations on the structure. That video has gone from intimidating to inspiring (though it still seems completely out of reach).

Atomic Ballroom's first Saturday of the month is a swing dance. This Saturday happened to be the three-year anniversary of it's opening, a real accomplishment. They've had my full support since about a week ago when I first heard about it. Seriously, though, it's a very nice facility, dominated by the main dance floor. There's no bar, which makes it very family-friendly; The focus is on social dancing. I saw they teach couples to do wedding dances. Smart, I never thought about that. The owners Katie and Jerry are very friendly, accessible, and thoughtful teachers. I think all the beginner classes I've taken were taught by one of the two.

On a Saturday with an 8:30pm swing dance, Atomic Ballroom teaches a 7:45pm swing lesson. Remember swing dance boot camp month? I'm not likely to let you forget, though I'm sure some of you are already tired of hearing about it (day 5). The sequence we were building up to was
6-count basic
8-count sendout
Lindy Circle
Ease to Closed (a 6-count transition from open to closed)

Several of the women in the class stayed for the dance, which helped me be comfortable enough to ask them to dance. Early on, the gal I was dancing with asked me to show her the Charleston basic, which we hadn't gone over in class. Some of her friends came, and she asked me to dance with one who she had showed the 6-count basic. I was happy to. If I don't have a problem dancing with less-skilled people, does that mean that more skilled dancers won't have a problem dancing with me? Danced mostly with two other students, Lisa and Susan, after that. Ducked out about 10:30pm to get to bed so as to get to Meeting in a timely manner. Though that didn't seem to work. On the way out, I asked Katie about the turnout for the various nights they host dances. Tuesdays are about 100 people, Fridays are over 200, and Saturdays are just over 100, but can jump when they have a special DJ or live band (all numbers are over the course of the evening, of course).

Good times!

Chaos

It's embarrassing to admit this, but my apartment is a mess. A disaster. Enough of one that I hesitate to have people over. And the only way to motivate myself to clean up is to have people over! So when the opportunity to invite a gal over on Saturday presented itself, I had mixed emotions: strong desire to see her, realization that I need to pick my place up, and a weak desire to not clean up. Seeing her was the clear winner, and I spend some time in the intervening week picking things up, moving things to the appropriate room, storing things away, and running my Roomba. My one clean room, the bathroom, got a little cluttered for a while as various stuff got relocated there. I realized I still have a completely useless (to me) futon mattress which I borrowed from my mother several months ago. Need to return that.

Did some minor touching up on Saturday morning, stretched out my post-ride lactic acid with some yoga, managed to fit in a shower and shave, and did a little math homework. I got some awesome smells from my Indian neighbors' lunch, which made me re-think my impulse to eat at Renaissance Bistro. When my friend arrived, I realized my yoga mat was still out. Oops.

So yes, if you've visited my place in the last 24 hours, it's a sad fact that the state of my place represented the cleaned up version of how I live.

Lunch at Renaissance was nice, though a bit windy. Soup was the Tomato Florentine, salad was the half portion of the baby organic lettuces with balsamic vinaigrette, and the main was the penne pasta with broccoli and sundried tomatoes. Didn't realize the pasta didn't come with chicken until it arrived. Maybe the grilled chicken panini is the better choice for me. It ended up being too much food for me, and in retrospect I'll skip the soup the next time around. Note sure why that's a surprise, as last time I was there, I had the salad and panini with no soup and still couldn't finish it all (though we did share a dessert). I'm also wondering whether there's a way to eat there which is a bit more friendly to "family-style" sharing of main courses. I was eye-ing the spicy dish the whole time. And her food looked pretty tasty too.

More Fun at the Atomic Ballroom

This must be terrible for people I know who don't give a rat's ass about my new swing-dance thing. My heart goes out to you. I've often been in situations where someone is passionately describing something which I know and care nothing about. Fortunately, at least part of the point of this blog is to record my thoughts, impressions about things, and activities for my benefit, not yours. So nyah! :-)

Friday night at the Atomic Ballroom. I get there for the 6:15 class covering Balboa. The basic had been covered briefly at the free opening lesson they gave at last Friday's dance, but this class started over, got us solid in the basic, and stepped up our speed. I think the speed is going to take some work. We added in the "falling off the log" pattern which are side-steps (Balboa basic moves in-line with one's partner.

Aside: Odd now that I spend time on YouTube watching dance video. And get annoyed at some of the historical footage which doesn't show footwork.

Back to AB lessons:
I believe we worked on transitioning from a Lindy Circle to the Balboa, but I might be mixing things up in my head. The second lesson focused almost exclusively on the Lindy Hop, going over the basic Lindy Circle (which helped me a lot), and a Lindy Circle ending in closed position. I don't think we covered the transition back to open position, instead moving to the East Coast basic. Got several complements on my strong lead from the instructor and experienced students filling in as follows. Still working on perfecting hand positions for the various moves.

Phil showed up for the third class as did a Girl Scout troop (high-schoolers). That's only creepy if you let it be. We covered the East Coast basic, transitioning to the tuck turn, changing places, the circle, then the the Charleston basic. Very cool. I feel like I'm in the process of really solidifying the footwork, and smoothing out the rough edges of balance and lead.

It ends up that I actually know one of the other guys, JE, in the class from high-school. His S.O. has been in several of the AB classes I've taken. We didn't really know each other back in the day, but it's nice to run into someone like that every once in a while.

Stayed for a couple hours of the dance, which a couple of the other OCSwing students showed up for. I definitely got some dances in this time around, with each of the OCSwing students as well as one of the adult chaperones (troop leaders?) of the the Girl Scouts (I think her daughter was in the troop). Cut out early in order to ensure a solid start to Saturday.

UPDATE:
March Lesson Total:
OCSwing: 1 Lesson, 1 Hour
AB: 4 Lessons, 3 Hours

Running Total:
SL 2 Hours
OCSwing 2 Hours
AB: 4.5 Hours (including .75 hours of Salsa)

Look At Those Peppers!

I don't have a filthy mouth, but I've been know to drop an F-bomb for emphasis in moments of high emotion. And I'm definitely more blue with some people than others. But more and more, I find myself saying, "F this, F that." Like saying the actual letter. Is that actually any better? I don't think it is, but somehow it's more socially acceptable. Hmmm... Maybe it isn't.

I think that lots of profanity makes something funny, but I don't mind my humor profane. The best comics use swearing as emphasis or punctuation, not as their actual punchlines. That being said, I still broke out in peals of laughter over this produce photo. Maybe it was the dissonance of seeing these words and these images together.

Might not be safe for work (text profanity):

Look at these F'ing Peppers!

Original pointer from CH.

Steampunk Star Wars

I don't care that I already told everyone I think would be even vaguely interested in this about it. Steampunk Star Wars art! It's pretty damn cool, and I'm not even that into steampunk. Or Star Wars. Or art.

Eric's Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Idea: steampunk star wars

Awesome!

Dance Boot Camp

After Tuesday at the Atomic, I was really looking forward to getting in more lesson time. I stopped by the Atomic Ballroom and paid for their month-long lesson and dance pack. As I mentioned previously, I really like the fact that I can take up to three classes in a row on the same trip to Irvine. My goal for the month is to jump from the "Absolute Beginner" group to the "Level 1" group (I didn't make up the names, but it seems to roughly correlate to beginner and intermediate). There seems to be a fairly steep jump in skill level, but we'll see how I progress.

What's that? I was there just in time to take an Absolute Beginner Salsa class? Why not?! It was almost as if I planned that. I had lots of fun learning a new basic pattern (though my mind might be getting a bit cluttered), and just to get some more "floor time" in.

Dance "frame" seems to be fairly important in Salsa in order to communicate from lead to follow, and my partners seemed to have problems keeping a good frame. I tried to communicate that to them subtly by doing slight push-pulls with my hands in open position to emphasize their loose frame, but had to resort to asking them to help me out by being firmer. I'm not quite sure what the etiquette is to do that when one's in a lesson, so I tried to frame it as a "I'm having this problem, and you can help me by doing this thing," statement. This was a bigger problem when trying to learn the spin. I wasn't quite getting the timing of the turn, or the hand-work. This video covers my 45 minute class in 7 minutes, with a slightly different emphasis on the hand positioning for the turn (we didn't learn the "J" motion, just raised our hands).



As I watch it again, I recognize that my instructor last night (Jerry) talked about using the raised hand to help the follows start their turn, which the instructor in the video didn't mention. I'd really like to work some more on that turn.

Salsa's closed position isn't something I'm used to, so I'm sure I had problems there. Again, we needed to communicate our position with strong open hand and strong elbow and forearm connection, but the follows didn't seem to pick up on that and our communication suffered. As much my fault as theirs, I'm sure (he said, insincerely).

The class ended at 7pm, which gave me just enough time to get over to Heritage Park for the OCSwing lesson at 7:30. It's nice to have a class which is definitely progressive as opposed to the Atomic one's which are mostly drop-in classes. We did a review of the six-count basic, the tuck-turn, switch, circling, and then learned the Charleston basic. This was mostly review for me after the Tuesday Atomic Ballroom class, but the Charleston footwork is a bit trickier than the other stuff we've been doing and I was far from perfect. We then tried a variant of the Charleston where we did six kicks then returned to the basic pattern. Then we worked on transitioning from the six-count pattern we learned last week to the Charleston pattern. And then we worked on transitioning from the end of the Charleston pattern back to the six-count pattern. Very nice.

After class, one of the guys, Phil pointed out that we could really do that repeating pattern of six-count to Charleston all night long and be ok. Good call, Phil. Would be nice to learn some other basic turns, but I'm sure the instructors have their own ideas about what we should learn and in what order. Phil and I made plans to meet up at the Atomic again on Friday. Tried to sell Theresa (?), Maryann, and John on the idea as well. I'm planning on taking the three lessons from 6:15 to 8:30, and Phil plans to be there around 7. Oops, am I supposed to be riding Saturday morning? Well, I might not be staying up to 2am, but it should be fun.

So, the count for the month of March:
OCSwing: 1 lesson 1 hour
Atomic Ballroom: 1 lesson .75 hour

Running Total:
2 hours with SL
2 hours with OCSwing
2.25 hours with Atomic Ballroom (.75 of which is Salsa)

Misquoting Jesus - Chapter 3

Part of a continuing series of reactions to the Mind on Fire reading group's reaction to Misquoting Jesus by Bart Ehrman. You can also read my entries on the Introduction, Chapter 1, and Chapter 2.

It isn't my goal to summarize the chapter, grade-school book report style, but to highlight the information which I found striking and worthwhile to remember, along with some of my reactions.

Texts of the New Testament

I believe the goals of this chapter were to

• show the practical consequences of previously discussed issues with early copyists of the New Testament
• highlight and give back-story to the historically and scholarly significant Bible editions
• give an overview on the types of changes to the Bible made by copyists

An interesting opening point was the idea of regional differences in copies of the Bible. Before the rise of the professional scribe, books were copied by individuals with less than perfect literacy skills (again, as highlighted in the previous chapter). Since copies of books were more difficult to produce in these pre-scribal times, one can imagine that an individual copying a book on his own would introduce unique mistakes to his copy. Then if that copy was taken to an area which didn't have copies of the book, then copyists in that area would base all the area's copies on the uniquely mistaken copy. Thus the idea of errors or variations in texts unique to an area. I wonder whether it's possible to create an early family tree of book copies based on the variations within the text. Or even identify the region a book came from based on the errors contained within it, like a fingerprint. Perhaps the transposition of two key words shows up in a certain city's copies. I hope that idea gets addressed later on.

After the rise of the professional scribal class, copies of manuscripts became more uniform. Because of their uniformity, they were presumptively superior, but of course the manuscripts were based upon flawed copies of flawed copies of flawed copies of manuscripts. So we need to question the source of these professionally copied manuscripts.

Byzantine manuscripts are the scholarly jargon for manuscripts in Greek made in the area formerly known as the Byzantine Empire.

The Latin Vulgate (4th century) was motivated by the multitude of varying Latin translations of Greek manuscripts. The Pope commissioned an official translation, which was based upon the best available translations as well as Greek sources. Vulgate is Latin for "common."

After the invention of the printing press, the Vulgate was the translation use for the Gutenberg Bible, the first book to be print-published (1450's). After being standardized upon over 1000 years before, it was thought of as the source manuscript, though of course it wasn't even the source language. The Complutensian Polyglot was a project to produce Latin, Greek, and (for the Old Testament) Hebrew translations side by side. Started over 50 years after the first print publishing of the Vulgate, it was the first time a Greek manuscript would be printed.

After the project started, Dutch scholar Erasmus raced to get his own Greek printed edition published, actually beating out the Complutensian Polyglot with his edition, Textus Receptus. Erasmus was less than thorough in getting multiple sources for the Textus Receptus, using a single 12th century source for Acts and Epistles and translating some of the Vulgate back to Greek for missing pages of Revelation. Ehrman makes a nicely snarky point that the Textus Receptus is based on a few Greek manuscripts at best to few or none (Revelation) at it's worst. The quality of the source manuscripts wasn't the best, and included the "woman taken in adultery" story and the last 12 verses of Mark, both mentioned in chapter 2 as problematic. It didn't originally include the Johanine Comma (only source reference for the idea of Trinity), as Erasmus couldn't find a Greek manuscript which included it. In a revised edition, he did include it after some contemporaries manufactured a Greek manuscript including the Johanine Comma! With all these problems, the Textus Receptus is the basis for 500 years of Greek manuscripts of the Bible, including the source for the King James translation. That's pretty mind-blowing to me, though I'm probably just a guilty of uncritical reading as the next guy. For example, I haven't read any of the source material referenced by Ehrman. I've just accepted his expertise... It's pretty disturbing that hundreds of years of Biblical tradition can be inspired by a rush-job, though.

Mill's Apparatus (1707) was a 30 year effort by John Mill which was based on a 1550 Greek edition by Stephanus (itself based on the Textus Receptus). It included "variant readings" from 100 Greek sources, and noted thirty-thousand places of variation, leaving out most word-order variations.

Today, there are 5,700 known Greek manuscripts from the 2nd to 16th centuries, ten-thousand Vulgate manuscripts, and all-in between 200-thousand and 400-thousand variants.

The chapter closes with a section on the types of changes which occurred during copying from accidental (misreading, misunderstanding abbreviations, and line skipping) to intentional (correcting factual errors, interpretive errors, circumventing misunderstanding, adding doctrinal emphasis, synchronizing texts with oral traditions).

For me, the chapter really shatters the idea of the literal, inerrant word of God being preserved in the Bible. Of course, that doesn't mean much, as that was my bias. However, I found it fascinating at the quantity and quality of the scholarly work which has gone into clarifying the details of the variants, yet how little is spoken of it in contemporary spiritual life.