How my guesses fared in 2014

If you recall (HA), I made some guesses earlier in the year.

Here's how I did:

1. Steve King won and the Republicans did much better than I thought.
   
2. The Cubs won 73, which is slightly better than expected.
   
3. There wasn't a filibuster.
   
4. I was far too conservative here.
   
5. The rest of Sherlock was awesome. Not as awesome as it could conceivably be, but I enjoyed it a lot.
   
6. Bitcoin may have stabilized at some point, but it's still a comedy of errors and drops quite a bit, seemingly at random. The IRS ruled that it is treated as property, not as, say, "foreign currency". However, I was definitely correct that it's technolibertarian nonsense.
   

As for my hopes, #2, the Medicaid expansion, did expand a bit. I have not one good thing to say about opposing Medicaid expansion.

And David Brooks is still a wanker.

Some more stuff - stichera to the "House of Ephratha" melody

This Saturday had some stichera to the "House of Ephratha" melody. Here are two of them set in the call-and-response style of the SVS Press Nativity music book. I was going to use them during clergy communion, but was not able to rehearse them last night, so we will do something else. Somebody somewhere could get some use from it.

Taneyev "Lord I Call: Tone 1"

I have done a translation of Taneyev's "Lord I Call: Tone 1" into English. Rather, I have taken the existing English text and shoehorned it to the music, which I presume is in the public domain because Taneyev is long dead. There are one or two places where one might want to quibble with how it was done. I'm not really a musician, so criticism is welcome. But, I thought it sounded nice in Slavonic, so I thought I'd put it in English, and since I won't really be able to have a choir do it here in the conceivable future, I thought I'd put it out there in case anybody else might like it.

Here is a performance of the Slavonic version (with the music):

I wonder.

or: Gossip is a sin.

In a discussion of a recent article, people began discussing the intimate details of the personal lives of some parishioners somewhere and how this intersected with their sacramental life. Now, the Church itself did not comment on this, because it cannot and will not comment on the anything even approaching the seal of the confessional and it would be wholly inappropriate to discuss private individuals openly on the internet for everybody. That would be evil, that would be gossip. And so, to the clergy of a certain city who wrote a complaining letter about something, and to others who talk on the internet about private individuals, I have a handful of questions:

How are you so familiar with the intimate details of the personal lives of these parishioners? And why are you sharing it with the world at large? If you're sharing it with the world at large, you surely didn't hear it in the confessional, but that would surely also mean you don't know their sins, so why are you discussing them so surely?

And then, just as a reminder, the bishops of the church frequently and continually refer to their encyclicals on marriage which clearly state the Orthodox teaching on the matter. In fact, they seem willing to sign their name to these declarations and encyclicals at every opportunity to comment. But this seems not to be enough, they want the bishops to discuss how they deal with private individuals and to do so publicly on the national stage. I believe some important guy somewhere once said something along the lines of, "What is that to you?" once, and this seems like it would be an appropriate response.

A note about a certain Orthodox facebook group

I have had enough of the Takfiri Orthodox. If all your religion does for you is give you more and better ways to be an asshole, you're doing it wrong.

I mean, I know I'm an asshole. I don't pretend that my assholishness (except for this precise moment) is in any way virtue or an exercise of religion.

This is not just about a facebook group. There is a certain strand of Orthodoxy in America that needs to be right, and it's willing to fight for what is right, but it seems to confuse being an asshole for being right. And so they do assholish things in the service of fighting some battle that doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things, but they're justified because they're right. The Fathers were polemical, you know. So they feel free to trot out personal details and drag them through the mud, for instance, in the service of their petty battles for the phronema. cf the little, little man Rod Dreher demonstrated himself to be a few years ago. cf in the Arida matter, some people are bringing up familial details of people nearby - this is not kosher. I realize that, for the LARPodox, this is all Serious Business, and therefore the tactics appropriate for a knife fight in a phone booth apply. For the adults in the room, however, a better path presents itself: repenting and following the gospel of Jesus Christ.

HUMBLE YOURSELF.

A few useful resources for Russian-style Orthodox music in English

Particularly for those in the OCA. Choirs in small parishes often have to cobble things together from scratch in a rush. To that end, here are a few useful free resources, particularly for those in the OCA. However, I do strongly suggest purchasing resources (and if any of the resources below are not free for liturgical use, please acquire the rights to use them before using them). These resources here are also interesting in that they give some insight into what other people are doing with their choirs, which sometimes we don't get a good sense of. I mean, there are few places in your life that you're going to spend enough time at to get a good sense for how many different settings of the Cherubic Hymn they use, or perhaps you might not realize until you see Podoben.org that there are a LOT of different settings of the anaphora and perhaps some places use quite a few of them. Or perhaps you knew of the existence of some of these acrobatic settings, but never expected a choir to actually use them.

• The OCA site itself has a lot of material. The Divine Liturgy section has a good chunk of the SVS liturgy book (which, by the way, you can sometimes find used for very cheap - I paid $3.98 for mine). However, not to be missed is the 16th AAC page, which has a link to all the music they used in the AAC.
  
• The Canadian Archdiocese has a lot of material. There is almost enough to put on everything, though not necessarily all of your favorite settings of things. Between these two sites, you can perform vespers and liturgy with a fair amount of variation in everything. This site also has a goodly portion of the material needed for Lent, Holy Week, Pascha, and beyond. Several other OCA dioceses have some additional material on their sites.
  
• Podoben.org A lot of everything. Quite fantastic. The first place you should look for variety.
  
• The Saint Romanos the Melodist Society, not to be confused with the Society of Saint Romanos the Melodist. We need a few more saintly musicians... They have some wonderful and relatively complete stuff in more ROCOR translations for both vigil and liturgy.
  
• Speaking of ROCOR music, the Chicago Diocese has a site.
  
• Some parishes have put their choir binders online (or a good portion). For instance Dayton, St Seraphim, Salem (includes some mp3), the Riggs' site (quite a lot, not OCA translations), Merseyside, St John the Baptist in DC.
  
• Some other parish sites have significant resources online, such as St Nicholas in Juneau, Rogers AR puts the weekly variable sheet music online,
  
• The Antiochians put their music online as well, and a good portion of it is from the Russian tradition. I'm not as much of a fan of relying on them, since they have idiosyncratic translations and the good stuff can be found elsewhere, but to each his own.
  
• There are a couple composers out there, like Kurt Sander and David Lucs, who provide good music. Richard Toensing, RIP, still has his site up. This is by no means everybody, but I'm not aware of any other composers with a substantial body of work on the internet on their own site (and welcome correction on this).
  

I know for a fact I'm leaving some resources off, I have a large folder full of bookmarks. I also have a large folder on my computer with a folder for every site containing all the PDFs I have pulled off of them. There are browser plugins that let you do this with the touch of a button, by the way. Of course, these are just the English resources. If you can typeset music on your own (by the way, Lilypond is very easy to learn, especially if you use Frescobaldi as the editor) and read a little Russian, even more scores become available for your use. EDIT: and sometimes you can find recordings of high-quality choirs, like this from November 2nd or November 16th which may give you ideas of what can be done.