For the uninitiated: RSS readers let you pull all your favorite blogs and web sites that offer feeds into a single place that is updated when the sites are updated. It’s like a webmail account that gets a new message when a site you’ve subscribed to adds new content.

After my Onfolio beta expired last fall, I was faced with a choice: fork over $25 for a single-platform RSS reader, or jump into the tempting waters of platform-independent, web-based RSS readers. I did a cannonball, transferring ~150 feeds from Onfolio to my first choice, Rojo (thanks to both readers’ OPML export and import tools, the transfer was painless).

Once I got my feeds into Rojo, I started tagging them with a vocabulary of ~10 phrases, and they started sorting themselves automatically into the proper buckets. Now I just click on a tag, and all the recent stories from the feeds with that tag appear in a nice newspaper format, with ajaxy-liscious controls and a nice read/unread distinction. If I want to subdivide multiply-tag, explode, or consolidate my tags, it’s a simple matter of clicking an icon and typing.

Now I can check my feeds from anything with a internet connection and a browser. World, I will remain on informed and aware of your events, no matter who’s OS I use!

Adding new feeds is easy. My home and work browsers have a nice javascriptlet that auto-discovers any RSS feeds for the page that I have pulled up in a tab and adds it to my feed list. Managing/tagging/deleting feeds is easy as well using the manage page to collapse, untag-retag, and delete feeds.

There are little touches all the way through Rojo that keep me happy. The url for your feeds is rojo.com/subject/tagname/recent. The feed auto-discover defaults to Atom feeds if more than one is available. You can’t accidentally delete a tagged feed. The Rojo team is continually adding features and refining the interface.

There is one big drawback, a related annoyance, and a smaller nitpick. The big drawback is that I’ve seen Rojo take up to 8 hours to pick up a new story from a feed. For feed junkies, this is a deal-killer. I like everything else so much that I don’t care, but please Rojo, give me my new stories ASAP! 8 hours is like getting an invitation to a party that just ended.

The related annoyance is that Rojo appears to mark things as read/unread based on the timestamp of the feed’s story, not on whether it was picked up by the reader when you clicked “Mark As Read”. This means that some new stories slip under my feed-radar because they get picked up 8 hours after they are published, and 6 hours after I clicked the Read button, retroactively marking them as read when in fact I haven’t even seen them!

The other nitpick: sometimes feeds that I’m not subscribed to show up. Then they leave. At the moment, I somehow am subscribed to Fark. My intelligence and happiness are suffering.

Now, in the ultimate goodness, I get both: Statler & Waldorf At the Movies, a biweekly movie review with those two old guys on the balcony pitching barbarous fits at each other and at a clueless Hollywood. Leave it to the Muppets to give an acerbic edge to my Fridays.

Thank you, Jim Henson, in that Great Muppet Workshop In the Sky.

Subject: Re: Harry Potter and the Lavender Brigade
On Jul 23, 2005, at 11:28 AM, Mom wrote:
Noel, would you please read this treatise and let me know what
thoughts you have after reading it. I would really like to hear your
opinions on what Doug Phillips has to say. Thanks. Love, Mom

…And poof, there went my Saturday morning. My Mom forwarded me an email-only essay by Doug Phillips of the Vision Forum organization titled “Harry Potter and the Lavender Brigade”. From appearances, they’re not posting the essay on their site because, one would surmise, of its rather poorly argued nature, I mean, its rather inflammatory nature. What with all the false analogies and such. Anyways, I won’t reproduce it here out of respect for their copyright, but if you want to read it, just leave a comment below and I’ll forward it on to you a poster at freerepublic.com has put up an unformatted copy. Below is my heated response to the argument that J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series should not be read by Christians because it is an imagined world that is rooted in magic as practiced by humans, which for Phillips equates to, well, I’m not quite sure, but reading about that world is like worshipping other gods, which we may all agree is bad.

Follow the jump for my savage six-paragraph retort that I wrote for my lovely Mom…

For the Last Time, Harry Potter != Satanic!

In my reading, Jerram Barrs’ treatment of Potter is more consistent logically, as well as more grounded in Biblical criticism. I wrote something along the same lines a couple of years ago. Phillips goes off the deep end here. I counted four circular arguments in a brief skim, and I have no doubt more could follow a deeper read. But really, the first circular argument sinks his entire ship.

The tip of the iceberg might be found in Phillips inconsistent usage of what to call those who practice magic. He repeatedly refers to those, both male and female, as ‘witches’. In fact, he never uses the term ‘wizard’ to refer to a male practitioner of magic. I see this as the first indication of a systematic failure to grasp the place of magic in fantasy and in reality (both of which by definition of our faith are created, upheld, and brought to an fore-ordained end by God alone). The failure, moreover, is not just definitional, but hermeneutical. For a full exploration of exactly what magic in the world of Harry Potter is and means, please read my earlier-mentioned essay. I shall soldier on and explain the hermeneutical failure that Phillips shows.

Don’t be fools and think that we can imagine something outside the law of God, which has been imprinted on every human heart and is reflected in some way in every output of human imagination. The wretched trope of equating magic with homosexuality that Wilson pushes at the beginning lumbers, clumsy and insipid, toward constructing a logical equivalency between a single sinful act (homosexuality) and an entire moral vista as imagined by a profoundly fecund mind (J.K. Rowling’s moral, magical world of Harry Potter). Any small amount of brain matter that tries to reconcile this equivalency will spit it out like so much spoiled milk; they are not. Even the most morally wretched world as imagined by man, like the recent movie Sin City, cannot run far enough away that it gets away from Almighty God. To posit that Rowling has accomplished what Jonah failed elicits my laughter at the small, small god in which Phillips evidently believes.

Let me make clear here what Phillips leaves as an exercise to the reader: in his argument, The Lord of the Rings was a sinful exercise in imagining a godless, abominable world. Don’t agree with that? Yes, I thought you might not. But if we accept that the sympathetic inclusion of humans practicing magic is sinful, then that’s where we’re going to find ourselves. Not that I follow Tolkien rather than Jesus, but I trust him a hell of a lot more than Phillips.

Frankly, I’m sick and tired of the lack of hermeneutical imagination displayed by those of Phillips and ilk, and find refuting their every latent legalistic literalist law tedious. Which leads me to my strongest argument. Does Phillips actually think that Rowling created an entire world based on the worship of Satan and the practice of satanic powers by humans intent on destroying the People of God? I don’t know what Harry Potter series Phillips is reading, by its not the one that is #1 on the New York Times bestseller list (or, for those who like their lists compiled by a Christian source, World’s best selling books list. It’s on both, kids).

For the record, I find the most amusing circular argument in the third point of Phillips’ argument, where he attempts, after repeated denials that the portrayal of magic of any kind by a human is sinful and, by implication, punishable by death as under Deutronomical law, to carve out a small space for magical creatures (and reading between the lines, is trying desperately to allow C. S. Lewis’ Narnia back into his little AV1610 world). It turns out that writing about dragons is okay because the Bible mentions dragons. In the KJV. Based on a mistranslation of the Hebrew in 1610, therefore, dragons are in, but sinful bastard creatures like fauns are out. And heaven help us if we attempt to create an allegorical world that uses magic as a metaphor for society’s use of technology and as a device that examines isolation and anxiety as we grow from children to men and women. As it is said, so may it be.

Girls, you will love this album. Fellows, this album with grow on you. Actually, you will sleep through the first listen, and in subsequent days, because your girl keeps playing it while you’re around, you will suddenly realize that it is the most heartful, beautiful, clear-eyed album since Sufjan’s Seven Swans. It is the anti-Sea Change, a story of return to grace and love from breakup and despair.

There are songs on this album that deserve to become jazz standards. Notes that demand to hang in smoky air long after midnight. Sung after the chanteuse’s third martini, played after the fingers on upright bass have worked through a fifth of Jack. Strings as rich as a chocolate liqueur. Piano keys tingling like potato vodka down the hatch.

In fact, they do a jazz standard at the end: “My Funny Valentine”. Her voice stretches into a vibrating cord, and her effort vocalizes with the passion of an athlete straining forward to cut the ribbon.

The production built up in my ears until my eyes cried. The tones are absolutely perfect in every song. This is how the music sounds in your head, the sound imagination that tends to be destroyed every time you spin another modern rock record.

The music is risky, proudly broken, and bracingly assured. And you can buy it on iTunes.

The show kind of reminded me of this NYTimes article I read today: nerdy, but able to rock. These were lit nerds, though. Colin Meloy had his crew of motley musicians jumping at his bark. They pulled yeoman’s work, each playing several instruments and styles, while throwing off some fun motifs and faces. Elissa and I had to laugh when Meloy proclaimed, after energetically working through the first four songs from Picaresque, “Now we’ll begin to address the ocean-related material.” What a pretentious lot. But when you are smart, funny, rhythmic, and melodic, you can get away with that sort of thing. A grand voyage we enjoyed.

P.S. Be jealous of any of the following three: (1) seeing the guitarist named “Chris Funk” fall into crowd-surfing to a sea shanty, followed by a sweet solo by the electric organ (gosh, I love electric organs in rock bands. It’s like the chocolate sludge on an ice-cream cake: thick, complementary, and yummy.) (2) “Eli the Barrow-Boy” done Chipmunk-style (3) Colin Meloy telling everyone to “be quiet. Now sit down,” and having the room full of indie kids (who stood outside earlier saying “I though I was the only one who knew about them!”) unexpectedly and randomly do just so while aforementioned guitarist calls out the disobedient by saying “I see you bros there who aren’t sitting. I was a bro once. I have the pink tattoo. You bros need to sit down like everyone else.”

P.P.S. That last one isn’t even made up!

Ahem. I begin:

B-. Cobb said that Slartibartfast should have been John Cleese, and I agree. The bits with the yarn and couches were clever and worthy of the invention of the books. Marvin would have been better served with a face that actually moved in any fashion, because he came off completely flat visually. The movie worked best as a love story. Mos Def was so completely cool the whole time I think he was high–the constant invention with the towel has me practicing in the mirror. Sam Rockwell was so completely off I’m not sure if he had a masterful performance or if he should be carted off to the nearest exploding star and refused reproductive privileges. Zooey was cute as a button, but the poor thing struggled with herself the whole way though, which may have been the point. I suppose that Zooey and Sam could be playing in the Wes Anderson character, where the overwhelming irony counterpoints the overwhelming sadness, which, when laid on too thick, leads me to not get it like I didn’t get the second half of the Royal Tennenbaums. The modern directors’ habit of making random camera cuts during a supposedly contiguous scene with no additional revelations of the camera annoys the heck out of me–McG, I will own your soul someday, and you will pay. I liked the Heart of Gold, and the house/earth destruction sequence. The musical number is just begging for a cover by W. Shatner. I would pay good money for that. I’m giving it a straight B now, after typing my way through it all. I gotta go to a meeting.

My first usage story: I am currently taking a night class at my alma mater. This means that i tote my home iBook up to campus every Tuesday night, along with power brick, books, water, Pepsi (free iTunes songs!), assorted papers, iPod + headphones, Altoids, pens, a pencil, work id badge, newspaper, checkbook, office directory, and myself. Of course, sometimes I run in straight from work, which means that I’m carrying another laptop + power brick. Where, oh where, does all this go? All in my bag, of course. Yes, just one bag. No, not from the military (Army, DARPA, otherwise). Tom Bihn.

If you took those office-tastic Kensington laptop bags, stripped them apart, handed the materials to a bunch of NorCal fair-trade textile fanatics who rolled their own daypacks in seventh grade, and then housed them in a fallout shelter while they worked on reconstructing the laptop bag, this would be the result. And it would be bomb-proof and fashion-proof.

I looked at the leather stuff. There was heavy consideration of the Filson bag. But for the price, my black-on-the-outside-and-blue-on-the-inside Empire Builder rocks the house, or at least the corner of my desk where it sits, full and upright, happily for the day, awaiting 5:30 so that it may once again be stuffed with my life and transported home.

Yes, I said upright. This brings me to usage story #2: The bag stands upright, like a good little homo sapien servant. Even the handles sit upright, at attention and awaiting your hand around them. You know how you usually have to buy hard-shelled bags/satchels/briefcases in order to have something that will sit upright if its unevenly loaded, empty, or full? Not this baby.

Storage capacity reminiscent of a non-lossy black hole? Sits upright like a highly-evolved life form? Tough black exterior opens in myriad ways to show off stylish and elegant sapphire blue interior? Bomb-proof? My Empire Builder bag clearly deserves its place as A Thing I Like.