A Random Assortment

This is amazing--I'm going to have to put it on the projector for our holiday gatherings. (That said, I'm not really sure if we're having holiday gatherings [at our apartment, not in general].)


 ~ These are amazing flight attendant outfits.

~ PAL on Thanksgiving:

The greatness of Thanksgiving is that it doesn’t aspire to greatness, but only to the shared experiences that make living worth living for each one of us.

I'm a sucker for almost everything he writes.

~ Breastfeeding as beneficial, not just for the baby, but also for the mother.

~ Augustine to the digital humanities:

When Augustine of Hippo recounted his conversion in the Confessions in 398 CE, he challenged an ancient ambivalence about writing and tied reading to self-transformation. In Book 8 of the Confessions, distraught and tormented by an internal battle of wills, he leaves his friend Alypius on a garden bench in Milan to seek solitude under a fig tree. There, weeping and crying out to the Lord, Augustine hears the repeated words of an unseen child that would echo beyond the garden in Milan and throughout the history of reading in the West: “Pick up and read, pick up and read.”8 The child’s refrain sets off in Augustine a series of memories of other conversions by book. He immediately recalls how another Christian was “amazed and set on fire” while reading The Life of Antony. This conversion story had been related to Augustine by his friend Ponticianus, who, in turn, began his account after picking up a Bible to discover that it was opened to one of the Apostle Paul’s letters.9 The unseen child’s hortatory refrain incites a series of memorable scenes of reading and ultimately prompts Augustine to interpret the refrain as a divine command to “open the book.”

Augustine then hurries back to his friend Alypius and grabs his Bible. “I seized it, opened it and in silence read the first passage on which my eyes lit,” he writes. He reads Romans 13:13−14, in which Paul exhorts his Roman brothers and sisters to turn away from their past lives of sexual excess and debauchery and be made anew, to “put on the Lord Jesus.”10 This brief, glancing reading, which begins in the middle of the text and lasts but a minute, changes Augustine forever. It allows him to attend to an internal state apart from the external world, and thus to avail himself of a “light” that comes from beyond himself and the text itself. When he opens the book and turns its pages, he opens his soul and prostrates himself. Here reading is a vulnerable act. A word, a verse, a page—all are potentially transformative.

(Via Francisco)

~ A dress for female meteorologists.

~ On the allure of pseudonyms.