books and beards

The road running past my college is closed for road works. A sign read 'Access to collage car park only.' It's since been corrected.

At least it got the meaning across, unlike the Welsh of this sign:

The Welsh actually says "I am not in the office at the moment. Please send any work to be translated." Guess what happened. (The BBC explains)

Someone has spent a year reading through the Oxford English Dictionary in its entirety (and written a book about it). This is a bit like the guy who read all the way through the Encyclopaedia Britannica (and wrote a book on it). (He also wrote a book about trying to follow every command in the Bible for a year). I find it interesting that the OED and the Encyclopaedia Britannica are quintessentially British reference works and yet these feats of reading have been performed by American writers.

Last year a French professor wrote a book entitled How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read. I haven't read it, but I think it's great.

Today is my grandfather's 92nd birthday. It is also Reformation Day, to celebrate which, here is a polka and a rap about Luther and the Reformation:




While we're on church history, I recommend reading this post about why it is a biblical norm for men to have beards. There are also some references to great beard proponents of church history. My favourite quotation in this post is from the church father Clement of Alexandria:

"How womanly it is for one who is a man to comb himself and shave himself with a razor, for the sake of fine effect, and to arrange his hair at the mirror, shave his cheeks, pluck hairs out of them, and smooth them!…For God wished women to be smooth and to rejoice in their locks alone growing spontaneously, as a horse in his mane. But He adorned man like the lions, with a beard, and endowed him as an attribute of manhood, with a hairy chest—a sign of strength and rule"