Birthday Inventory

It's not every day that Jack White releases his solo album on your birthday.  Just downloaded it, am listening to it now.  The man whose White Stripes provided the unofficial soundtrack of my college education is officially moving on, and helping me do the same.  Good vibe, good sign, I think this will be a good year.

In other gifts: remember the part in Wizard of Oz where Dorothy opens the door and everything switches from black-and-white to technicolor, just in time for Side 2 of Dark Side of the Moon?  That's about what the experience of listening Dark Side of the Moon remastered is like.  Oh my mercy, it's like hearing for the first time an album I've over-listened to a hundred times over!  It nigh brought a tear to my eye, for something old became new.

Also got the new Andrew Bird album Break it Yourself.  He could fart into a microphone, and it would be the purest, most melodious and nuanced fart you'd have ever heard in your life; he would run that fart through a tape loop, overlay it with perfectly synchronized classical violin, his trademark whistling, and idiosyncratic lyrics about nature and lost lovers or something, and you would want him to just keep farting all day long.  Why this man isn't the most beloved musician on earth is itself a damning indictment of our world's fallen state.

 My brother also kindly bought me a UK/USA plug adapter.  London will be wicked.

My Dad visited me a month ago, and bought me an early birthday gift in Hugh Nibley's An Approach to the Book of Abraham, which I just finished the other day.  It reads like the necessary preliminary work to The Message of the Joseph Smith Papyri: An Egyptian Endowment, which I got for Christmas.

The book's impetus was the renewed assaults upon the Mormon Book of Abraham in 1968, which in turn called to attention the previous assault in 1912.  Nibley's dismantling of his opponents' arguments is such a thorough, virtuoso performance, that my one problem with it is that  I'm not sure I could properly summarize Nibley's argument if I were to actually encounter a real-life Abraham critic.  I'd probably just hand them the book to read.

Which leads me to Nibley's other reason for writing this book--to take the Mormons to task for criminally neglecting our own scripture.  We've had literally decades to master Egyptian, anticipate criticisms, and even just learn and profit from these texts, yet we're repeatedly caught with our britches down when others express their in-credulousness.  Thus, if I'm unable to summarize Nibley's salient counter-points, that speaks less to hiss erudition than it does to my own lack of scholarly rigor.

Ironically, I wonder if the existence of scholars like Nibley have exasperated our complacency, in that it enables Church members to just assume dem folks down at the BYU are handling all these concerns, and thus we never study these texts for ourselves, which is contrary to both the principles of LDS doctrine and of honest scholarship in general.

My roommates also prank-gifted me with copies of "Twilight" and Sarah Pallin's autobiography.  Both tomes are now safely ensconced in my bathroom next to the spare toilet paper.