Friday, April 17, 2009
[pascha] good friday today
It's Orthodox Easter Friday today and you might be wondering about the discrepancy between east and west.
The Christian Easter is tied in with the Jewish Pesach or Passover.
The Passover itself is complicated and ties in with the Metonic cycle of years, which involve the Golden Numbers 3, 6, 8, 11, 14, 17, and 19.
From this come calculations for the Jewish calendar year which - the Hebrew Pesach is determined in the Old Testament to begin on the 15th day of the Jewish month of Nissan.
Originally, this meant, from observation of the moon, that Passover was celebrated on the first full moon after the vernal equinox. Christians, therefore, celebrated Pascha according to the same calculation-that is, on the first Sunday after the first full moon following the vernal equinox.
Almost from the very beginning of the existence of the Christian Church, the issue presented variations. Although the New Testament relates these events to the Jewish Passover, the details of this relationship are not clear.
On the one hand, the tradition of the synoptic gospels identifies the Lord's last supper as a passover meal, placing the death of the Lord on the day after Passover. On the other hand, the tradition of the Gospel of St. John situates the death of the Lord at the very hour the paschal lambs were sacrificed on the day of Passover itself.
In practice, one group were celebrating it on any day of the week [wherever the Jewish mid-Nisan fell] and the other was putting it on the Sunday after Passover.
The First Ecumenical Council convened at Nicaea in 325 took up the issue. It determined that Pascha should be celebrated on the Sunday which follows the first full moon after the vernal equinox-the actual beginning of spring.
There was a strong feeling in some quarters that the Christian tradition should not tie in with the Jewish calendar.
Also, there was the question of determining the calendar. In the East, the 19-year cycle was eventually adopted, whereas in the West an 84-year cycle. The use of two different paschal cycles inevitably gave way to differences between the Eastern and Western Churches regarding the observance of Pascha.
A further cause for these differences was the adoption by the Western Church of the Gregorian Calendar in the 16th century. This took place in order to adjust the discrepancy by then observed between the paschal cycle approach to calculating Pascha and the available astronomical data.
Therefore, in practical terms, the invariable date of the vernal equinox is taken by the Orthodox church to be April 3 in our current calendar (but March 21 on the Julian Calendar).
To this blogger, except that it is celebrated vaguely round the spring equinox, it hardly matters, as long as it is celebrated. Personally I like the two Easters plus the rabbits and eggs but I also like the kulich and all that tradition, as well as the midnight vigil.
It all seems to give a nice balance of gravitas and fun. After all, the Resurrection is joyful by definition, not gloomy.
[censorship] do community standards exist
Does anyone remember the 1971 Schoolkids Oz pornography trial in the UK? Does anyone remember Judge Alex Kozinski in 2008?
Not only does there seem rampant hypocrisy in the matter of what constitutes community standards and the actions of its supposed defenders but these days, I wager no one really knows what community standards are.
Let's face it, the games kids are playing on the net and using the new technology, the sex, drugs and the instantly clickable gross porn kids can access any time they want on the net has changed the ground rules completely. Parents are either naive, turning a blind eye or throwing up their hands in despair.
What are community standards now?
Censorship classifications are a case in point. Take three films I've seen in the past months - Saw [18], In Bruges [18] and From Russia with Love [12].
Now Saw deserves its classification for gratuitous violence [people hung up with meathooks, limbs being twisted asunder and so on]. So if that constitutes an 18 rating, then what of In Bruges?
It has tame sex [Clemence Poesy even keeps her clothes on], has swearing and one drug scene. There's a point where someone throws himself off a tower and you don't see the splat, you see a closeup of his face, still alive, with some ketchup spread about. Poesy, in an outtake, uses the F-word to describe the F-act.
That's it. So where's the 18 and for what? For swearing?
On the other hand, the re-released Lowry Bond FRWL is tame in itself but the menu and links feature unclad females who are quite clearly unclad and therefore the silhouettes don't work. Let alone the womanizing theme of Bond in the early episodes.
This is rated 12?
So I ask again, what are the community standards which lead the censors to decide on classifications, on what do they base it, who enforces it and is there any need for it at all?
My own view is that what adults watch is their affair but that kids need some form of protection. However, I'm well aware of the obvious flaw in that - where is the line drawn.
Thursday, April 16, 2009
[keyes] beautiful
Hat tip Lord T, from here.
Changing the topic, this on privacy and the lack of choice in the UK now:
Just look at what BT does with your phone service now. You don’t even want a BT phone but you need one to get a broadband connection with any ISP so you pay BT £11+ a month even if you don’t need, want or use the phone. OFCOM should fix this but is clearly toothless. It’s effectively a cash cow for BT and an additional cost for subscribers that looks very much like a license fee on broadband. BT marketing did well here. What consent is required for this? If you want broadband by anyone other than Virgin then you need to pay it and sign up to their user agreement. No options.
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