Do Vegetarians Eat Eggs?

A few days ago, Merianna asked me if I was still eating eggs. It’s a good question, after all. Part of my 2015 package of resolutions (trying to make it sound congressional) was to not eat meat or animals unless I killed them (which is unlikely, but had to make that allowance).

When I moved to Connecticut for graduate school, I became vegetarian for a while. It didn’t hurt that there was an abundance of vegetarian shops around me, as well as a falafel stand right outside of the house where I had an apartment. I even dabbled with being a vegan for a short time but couldn’t stomach that much tofu cheese.

As a matter of theology, I decided 2015 would be the year I’d stop eating meat altogether. So Merianna’s question this week was a valid one.

I said “no” to eggs (again, out of a theological choice based on how eggs arrive in our grocery stores). If we had chickens or got the eggs from my parents’ collection of chickens, I’d have no problem eating them.

On her podcast with Elisabeth this week, Merianna starts with her take on the discussion. It’s a fun listen.

Are Eggs Vegetarian?

via Are Eggs Vegetarian? Can I Eat Eggs If I'm Vegetarian?.

Keeping the Canon

The older I get, the more I want to share the joys of “the canon” and liberal arts in general. Every generation feels that its world is slipping into the morass of public, but our Amazon reviews and Buzzfeed listicles don’t make me feel any more assured that we’re not…

Although serious writers continue to work in the hope that time will forgive them for writing well, the prevailing mood welcomes fiction and poetry of every stripe, as long as the reading public champions it. And this I think is a huge mistake. Literature has never just been about the public (even when the public has embraced such canonical authors as Hugo, Dickens, and Tolstoy). Literature has always been a conversation among writers who borrow, build upon, and deviate from each other’s words. Forgetting this, we forget that aesthetics is not a social invention, that democracy is not an aesthetic category; and that the dismantling of hierarchies is tantamount to an erasure of history.

via What We Lose if We Lose the Canon – The Chronicle Review – The Chronicle of Higher Education.

New Album with Old Music

Looks like a beautiful collection of ancient Mesopotamian poetry set to the original lyrics (relatively, of course) with close-to-original instruments.

I’ve always wondered what the Hymn to Nikkal (the world’s oldest song that we’ve recovered) might have sounded like.

Of course, we don’t really know what ancient Sumerian, Babylonian, Akkadian, or even Attic Greek really sounded like, but we do know that these languages were inherently more “musical” than English.

What did ancient Babylonian songs sound like? Something like this.

Ordered!

Who Is Paul McCartney?

I hope that many of these tweets are people just trolling us old folks…

Kanye West’s emotionally charged new single, “Only,” is dedicated to his late mother and 18-month-old daughter. It’s become an instant hit, with a little help from another musical genius, Paul McCartney, on keyboards.

Based on their tweets, it appears that some of West’s younger fans don’t’ know who the Beatles legend is.

via Who's That Guy Paul McCartney? Some Kanye West Fans Apparently Have No Idea – Yahoo.

Apple’s Marketing Problem

I suspect the rapid decline of Apple’s software is a sign that marketing has a bit too much power at Apple today: the marketing priority of having major new releases every year is clearly impossible for the engineering teams to keep up with while maintaining quality. Maybe it’s an engineering problem, but I suspect not — I doubt that any cohesive engineering team could keep up with these demands and maintain significantly higher quality.

via Apple has lost the functional high ground – Marco.org.