by Harry on December 27, 2008
Fans of Dorothy L Sayers might be interested that BBC7 is repeating the 1975 version of The Man Born To Be King. It started on Christmas Day. I can’t exactly recommend it (except that Gabriel Woolf is in it, so it has to be good) because I’m taping every part before listening to them all in a row. (It occurs to me, writing this, that it is possible that I listened to the 1975 version in 1975, but I’ve no memory of it). Sayers regarded it as the pinnacle of her literary achievement; if she is even half right it is brilliant. The BBC appears to have lost the original recording (bloody typical) but the 1970s really were the heyday of radio drama, and it’s hard to believe that the 1940s version was as good.
And if Christianity is not to your taste, here are dramatisations of Northern Lights and The Subtle Knife (next week), which I can recommend from having heard them. They made me wish, as the best dramatisations do, that I’d not already read the books.
by Harry on December 27, 2008
Russell Davies played Mark Steyn’s latest single last Sunday (you have about 18 hours to hear it). Yes, that Mark Steyn. Davies says that when Steyn wrote about music he found him to be right about just about everything, but that when he turned to politics “I was going to have to look a lot harder to find any political common ground with him”. This comment perhaps explains even more than the music he plays why I never miss Davies’s show; it’s the music that explains why I am always careful to do so when no-one else is around (my wife and daughters ridicule me for listening to “show tunes” which is how they carelessly refer to it; let’s hope that the little lad has better taste).
by John Holbo on December 27, 2008
On X-Mas I gave good ol’ PZ a visit. He had up a quote from Rick Warren:
I believed that evolution and the account of the Bible about creation could exist along side of each other very well. I just didn’t see what the big argument was all about. I had some friends who had been studying the Bible much longer than I had who saw it differently…Eventually, I came to the conclusion, through my study of the Bible and science, that the two positions of evolution and creation just could not fit together. There are some real problems with the idea that God created through evolution… My prayer is that you will have this same experience!
The Bible’s picture is that dinosaurs and man lived together on the earth, an earth that was filled with vegetation and beauty…man and dinosaurs lived at the same time…From the very beginning of creation, God gave man dominion over all that was made, even over the dinosaurs.
After that, I decided to give my X-Mas presents the attention they richly deserved. The adverb that describes the way my mother-in-law shopped for me is ‘awesomely’. [click to continue…]