This isn’t actually a lesson; that’s why I numbered it zero, so lesson #1 will be the first real one. I thought instead of jumping right into vocabulary and grammar, I’d kick this series off by explaining why I’m doing this and why anyone should care.

Why Learn Latin Anyway?

Learning Latin Improves Your English

English is such a simple language that you can muddle along, writing and speaking it fairly well without really understanding how it works. As long as you get the words in the right order, people will usually know what you’re talking about. Not so with Latin. Since Latin changes the endings of words to indicate their relationship in the sentence, you can’t learn it without knowing how those relationships work. You’ll have to understand subjects and objects, active and passive, transitive and intransitive, or you’ll get nowhere. In turn, all that will help you speak and write better English.

At least 60% of English words descend from Latin, especially the hard ones. In a very general sense, the short words (house, cow, walking) tend to come from Anglo-Saxon/Germanic languages, while the longer ones (domicile, bovine, ambulatory) come from Latin. As you learn Latin, you’ll recognize those English words in Latin ones, and strengthen your comprehension of them in both languages.

Classic Literature

I don’t suppose many Latin students go on to read a lot of Cicero or Ovid outside the classroom in the original language. But if you want to, you’ll be able to. There are always nuances of meaning that don’t survive translation. Even if you read them in English, knowing the language behind the translation can help you understand the context.

Other Languages

All languages have things in common, so learning a second language makes the third one easier, which makes the fourth even easier yet, and so on. But Latin really stands out in this regard, because its “inflections” (changing the word endings for different parts of speech) help prepare you for other languages that work the same way, like German or Russian.

The Romance languages—called that because of their connection to Rome—like French, Spanish, and Italian, get 90% or more of their words from Latin. Having a base of Latin helps with learning those languages even more than it does with English.

History

While learning Latin, you’ll be exposed to some of the most important people and events in history, since many of the surviving texts from Roman times are historical records, like Caesar’s Commentarii de Bello Gallico (Commentaries about the Gallic Wars).

Latin has been the official language of the Catholic Church almost since the beginning. All important Church documents are still written in Latin and then translated into other languages. This way the language provides a certain amount of continuity through the centuries, since Latin is a “dead” language and the meanings of its words don’t change. If you want to study what the Popes have said over the years, or what the first complete Bibles were like, you can go to the source with Latin.

The Latin Mass

If you’re Catholic, you don’t have to understand a word of Latin to assist at the Latin Mass and have it be completely valid and meaningful for you. If you go a while, you’ll start to recognize some of the regular prayers anyway: Agnus Dei: Lamb of God; Dominus vobiscum: The Lord be with you; Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus: it’s time to kneel again. But understanding more of the prayers may help you feel more involved.

General Thinking Ability

Latin is very orderly. When you translate a sentence, almost every word has an ending that tells you its purpose in that sentence. Translating is partly like building a bridge and partly like detective work, as you move back and forth from the part you’ve figured out to the part you haven’t, building your translated text one word at a time, with each piece providing context for the next. That kind of mental discipline is useful in any field inside the classroom or out of it.

Why Are You Doing This?

I took Latin for four years in high school, and like most students, I forgot it soon after I graduated. (And I liked Latin; subjects I didn’t like were forgotten daily. Burn down the schools!!!—sorry, getting off the topic there…) I recently found my First Year Latin textbook and thought I’d re-teach myself. Serendipitously, this was just a couple months before I discovered the Latin Mass was coming to Quincy.

I breezed through the first 15 or 20 chapters, plowed through the next 10 or 15, and trudged through chapters 35-45. At first I was doing a chapter each night in about 30 minutes, but by the time I stopped each one was taking a few hours spread out over a week, and I realized it wasn’t sinking it very well anymore, and I needed to back up and regroup. This book has 75 chapters, and I don’t recall whether we used it all four years or moved on to another book. I do recall reading some Ovid and Caesar that aren’t in here, so there was probably another book. This one should provide a good grounding in the language, though.

There are some Latin tutorials and lessons online already, of course, but I haven’t been terribly impressed with them. Some seem to move too fast, some too slow, and some try to dumb it down too much. Like the modern use of “whole language” in English classes instead of phonics, they seem to hope you’ll absorb the language by osmosis from a lot of examples. Latin doesn’t really work that way; the structure (grammar) is too integral to understanding it. I intend to focus these lessons on the structure, which may make them seem hard at first, but should pay off in the long run.

I’m also hoping this gives me something useful for my web site beyond my usual blathering about whatever comes to mind. If this becomes a useful resource, it will allow me the time to develop other useful things here. I may put this into e-book form at some point too, but it’ll always be freely available in per-lesson form here. I’m also considering doing real-life classes or tutoring, if there’s an interest in that locally.

So I’m Convinced; Now What?

The next lesson will dive into words and inflections, so I won’t get into that here. Just a few notes:

• It’s easier to learn a language (or almost anything) if you can discuss it with someone else. Please feel free to ask questions or discuss the lessons in the comments boxes. I always welcome comments, but in this case they can help everyone who’s following along.
• I’m more qualified to teach Latin than my high school calculus and computer teachers were to teach those courses, but I’m no expert. I’m bound to make mistakes, so don’t be afraid to point them out. Also, sentences can sometimes be translated in different ways, so feel free to offer better translations than mine any time. People who already know some Latin are certainly welcome to jump in and help us out.
• I’ll be following much of the format of First Year Latin, but I’ll make up my own exercises so I don’t violate their copyright. That means you won’t need the book to participate in these lessons, but if you want it for your own use, that link is to a revision very close to mine. (My exact revision from 1975 is unavailable at Amazon.)
• Each lesson will explain a few new things and provide some exercises, from short phrases to longer passages to translate. I may give the answers to each lesson’s exercises in a separate post on a later day; I’m still figuring out some of those details. I expect to post at least one lesson each week, and produce at least a hundred of them. If you’re still with me after all that, we should both be pretty solid in the language by then.
• This textbook and my previous studies were all in what is called “Classical Latin,” the language written by educated Romans during the time of the Empire. Now that I’m going to Latin Mass, my interest has shifted somewhat toward “Ecclesiastical (or Church) Latin.” Fortunately, there aren’t great differences between the two except for pronunciation, and the Church Latin comes closer to what seems like natural pronunciation to us. I’ll try to mix vocabulary and texts from both sources, so if you’re particularly interested in either Classical or Church Latin, I hope you’ll find this useful.
• Speaking of pronunciation, I’m going to try making some audio clips to go with the lessons, if I can figure out how to record audio and make it sound decent.

I think that about wraps up this introduction. Next time: first declension (noun endings), genders, and a few other basics to get us started.

By the way, if you want to subscribe to these lessons via RSS but you don’t want to read all my other random stuff, click this link. That will subscribe you to this category only. You can do with that any category or tag on my blog, simply by adding “feed” to the end of the URL that you see after you select a category or tag.

Some blog housekeeping…

I accidentally broke some of my older St. Rose images when I was reorganizing my site the other day. Oops. Sorry to anyone who tried to look at those recently. They’re fixed now.

Anyone want to learn Latin? I started relearning it this summer with my textbook from high school. The first 20-25 chapters went down easy, about one each night. By chapter 45, I was dragging pretty hard and starting to feel like I wasn’t really retaining it very well, so I decided I ought to back up and go through several chapters again.

I’ve also thought about offering to teach it, since teaching something is a great way to learn it better, and learning a language is a lot easier if you can recite words and phrases with other people. I don’t know if there would be any interest in that locally, so first I’m going to write Latin lessons here on my blog for anyone who’s interested. Then if I end up doing the tutoring thing, I’ll have those ready to use.

Looking at my stats on Google Analytics, I noticed it said my most popular search term has been “safari mahjong strategy.” Not just a little more popular, but supposedly sending me seven times more traffic than any other search term. That didn’t really match up with the other numbers I’m seeing, so I looked closer and discovered that all those hits were me! Apparently, at some point I searched for that at Google and clicked on my site from there, and ever since then it’s been crediting that search every time I view one of my own posts. Traffic stats are tricky.

Speaking of traffic, mine has declined gradually ever since about Thanksgiving, but it rose again this week, so that was nice to see. I know my main problem here is that I’m too much of a jack of all trades and master of none. I’ve got about 90 posts, but no more than ten on any one topic that a person might care about. Oh well, it’ll get there eventually. The new St. Rose site is already getting almost as much traffic as I get here, after only a couple weeks in existence. It’s just not fair.

I’m posting this through the Postie plugin for WordPress, which lets me send posts by e-mail. I hope it works well, because that’s much more convenient. The editor in WordPress is pretty good, but I’m much faster with XEmacs, since I’ve been using it for e-mail for at least ten years. I can write posts up ahead of time in plain text files if I want, cut and paste easily from other files, and I don’t have to worry about losing them to browser crashes or anything like that.

That’s enough for tonight; time to go outside and play with my dog in the snow.

I suppose we all have things we never say or do, either because they sound stupid to us, or we can’t imagine following up on them. Here are some of mine, just for fun.

“Boo-yah,” “Oo-rah,” or anything of the sort.

I never served in the military, so I’m probably not allowed to say these anyway, but I can’t imagine wanting to. When I see guys shouting these, the phrase that usually comes to mind is, “trying too hard.” Maybe it doesn’t seem that way to the guys in the club. I’m really not into shouting out excited catch-phrases anyway, which brings me to:

Chest-bumping or butt-slapping.

I’m so glad my basketball-playing days were 20 years ago, when the extent of physical contact during a manly celebration was the high-five.  (Or if you were really excited, maybe both hands for a high-ten.) The first time an athlete decided to slap his teammate on the rear, didn’t the other guy stop everything and ask him what the heck he was doing? And the chest-bump: at least two of them had to arrange that one the first time, or someone would have gotten hurt. My pool league teammates like to fist-bump, which isn’t too bad, although I’m not sure why that’s cooler than a high-five.

“Houston, we have a problem.”

Is it just me, or do we all have phrases that are like nails on a chalkboard when we hear them? I’m getting a rash just typing this one. I don’t know why, but when Apollo 13 came out and people started using this to refer to everything from a bad grade on a report card to the toilet getting plugged, it drove me nuts. I hope I never hear it again, and I’ll certainly never say it.

“What happens in XYZ stays in XYZ.”

This is another one in the “makes me wince” category. I may never go to Vegas for this reason. Again, I don’t know why it grates on me so much, but when someone says this, I just want to punch him. So far, I’ve been able to resist.

“Where are the really big rides?”

For those who don’t know, I don’t do rides. No, not even Ferris wheels. Any sort of heights makes me dizzy, and being in a moving vehicle where I can’t at least see the controls doesn’t thrill me either. I could probably handle a merry-go-round, but I haven’t tried since I was a kid, so I can’t really say for sure. The last time I accidentally wound up on a ride—because it was almost stationary and only used vision and slight movements to give the illusion of flying, so I let people talk me into it—I lasted about two seconds before I shut my eyes and kept them closed until it was over. At least I didn’t puke.

“I’m tired of staying home so much.”

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a total hermit. When I lived and worked in an apartment in Barry, I’d start to miss human contact after 3-4 days at home by myself, so I’d go get groceries or something. But for the most part, I don’t feel the need to get out much. Everyday life and other people’s plans usually get me out in society plenty often for my tastes.

“I’ve got nothing against XYZ people, but…”

Every time I hear this I know there’s something offensive coming, so I get away from the person if I can. I can’t imagine saying it. Might as well announce that you’re about to have bad gas.

“There’s nothing to do here, let’s go to Neighboring Big City.”

I’ve been hearing this all my life. No matter where I’ve lived, in towns with populations from 200 to 500,000, people always think their hometown is backwards and boring and Some Bigger Place is so much more fun and sophisticated. Well, it’s just not true. Sure, there are a few things St. Louis has that Quincy doesn’t, like pro sports teams or ethnic restaurants other than Mexican and Asian. They also have more crime, a higher cost of living, and lots of people saying, “This town is so boring, I wish I lived in New York.” Most people, wherever they live, go to work, go home, take classes, go to movies, order pizza, meet friends at bars—all things you can do in any town with more than a few thousand people. Most of the rest is just seeing the grass as greener over there. No thanks, I’ll stay in my small town; there’s plenty to do if you look around.

(This is the third in a series of posts called Why the Latin Mass? I’ve been asked by several people why I like the Latin Mass—why people will drive a hundred miles to get to one, or spend a lot of time and money bringing it to their area. I’m trying to answer that from my perspective in this series.)

I grew up on rock and roll. It’s not my parents’ fault; they listened to country at home, and not a lot of that. But I picked up 80s rock and pop from friends: AC/DC, Reo Speedwagon, J. Geils Band, Foreigner, Pat Benetar, Rick Springfield, Toto, and yes, Michael Jackson. (Hey, 10 million other people bought Thriller too; we didn’t know what a freak he was then.) My favorite then was Billy Joel—the Angry Young Man version who did Captain Jack and Glass Houses, not the happy version that was married to Christie Brinkley or the morose version she divorced. Later, when I lived in range of a classic rock station for a while, I caught on to the Eagles, Clapton, BTO, and the like.

All that left me with a definite expectation that music would have a strong drumbeat, and usually a melody carried by electric guitar. Popular music tells you plainly when to tap your foot. There’s nothing subtle about it, but it’s catchy. Now that I’m older and trying to expand my cultural horizons, I try to appreciate classical music and chant, but it’s hard to. It doesn’t give me that obvious beat, and soon my mind is wandering off. The only time I really seem to appreciate classical music is in an auditorium, listening to an orchestra play live.

And the one time I definitely enjoy chanting and “church music” is when I’m in church, fortunately enough. There it just fits. Like most Catholics my age, I grew up with Masses where people played guitar, shook tambourines, and probably even whipped out a kazoo or two that I’ve blocked from memory. Those things all have their place elsewhere, but there’s something special about organ music and chanting in church. I’ve been told that the reason the organ was always allowed at Mass was because it “breathes” through the pipes, so it’s similar to a human voice. I don’t know if that’s the real reason, but whatever the reason, the result works. A choir backed by a real organ makes a sound that is unquestionably “churchy,” that you can’t mistake for an Arlo Guthrie concert.

I don’t know enough about chant and terms like “polyphonic” to appreciate it on any deeper level than that. Most of the time I attend Low Mass, which doesn’t have any music, and that’s fine by me too. Either have the real thing, or don’t have music at all, and I’ll be happy. Just keep those tambourines away!

The Giant glanced up at the chill sky, then looked at Covenant’s gaunt face. His cavernous eyes glinted sharply, as if he understood what Covenant had been through. As gently as he had spoken to Lena, he asked, “Do you now believe in the Land?”

“I’m the Unbeliever. I don’t change.”

“Do you not?”

“I am going to”–Covenant’s shoulders hunched–”exterminate Lord Foul the bloody Despiser. Isn’t that enough for you?”

“Oh, it is enough for me,” Foamfollower said with sudden vehemence. “I require nothing more. But it does not suffice for you. What do you believe–what is your faith?”

“I don’t know.”

Foamfollower looked away again at the weather. His heavy brows hid his eyes, but his smile seemed sad, almost hopeless. “Therefore I am afraid.”

Rating:

Through these first three books, Covenant keeps trying to find the answer to Lord Foul and to his own relationship with the Land. Refusing to believe or get involved didn’t work in the first one; and deceit and bargains failed in the second; so this time around, he tries hate. As you might expect, that doesn’t go so well either. Eventually he finds an answer that works, for him.

At the same time, Mhoram is finding his own answer as he realizes the Lords’ Oath of Peace is just as damaging in its own way as the violent destruction it was created to prevent. Just as Covenant has to find the balance between wild magic and impotence, Mhoram has to find the sweet spot between passion and restraint, to battle an even greater army than the people of the Land faced in the last book. Mhoram nearly steals the show in this book, as the Land’s tremendous need pushes him to feats he never thought possible.

And Foamfollower is back! After disappearing for a while, he’s back here, and he’s not the smiling optimist he was in the first book. He’s carrying a load of guilt for the terrible things he’s seen and done, and may need redemption as badly as Covenant does. He again becomes Covenant’s best friend in the Land, and is there to make the difference in Covenant’s final battle with Despite.

There are so many good stories here that I can’t get into without spoiling it. The Bloodguard react to their failure in the only way they know how. Triock, even though he hates Covenant, helps bring him to the Land when he realizes the white gold is the Land’s only hope. The Ranyhyn are still keeping their pact with Covenant, even though it’s slowly killing them. The jheherrin are one of my favorite parts of the book: creatures discarded as the waste of Foul’s failed experiments over the years, they live in fear of him; but they find the strength in themselves to help redeem Covenant and Foamfollower.

This book wraps up all the threads from the first two very well; and, for me at least, it makes all the bleakness and setbacks and wrongs that went before worth it. In the end, Covenant is still a leper and evil still exists, but he’s learned to deal with it without self-hatred and has found a sort of peace.

It may seem from my descriptions and quotes that these books are nothing but anguish and talking, so I’ll wrap up this review with a piece of an action scene from this book (one that would look great on screen). The next review will be the first book of the Second Chronicles, which I think is even better.

With all his strength, [Mhoram] leveled a blast of Lords-fire at the Raver’s leering skull.

Satansfist knocked the attack down as if it were negligible; disdainfully, he slapped Mhoram’s blue out of the air with his Stone and returned a bolt so full of cold emerald force that it scorched the atmosphere as it moved.

Mhoram sensed its power, knew that it would slay him if it struck. But Drinny dodged with a fleet, fluid motion which belied the wrenching change of his momentum. The bolt missed, crashed instead into the creatures pursuing the High Lord, killed them all.

That gave Mhoram the instant he needed. He corrected Drinny’s aim, cocked his staff over his shoulder. Before samadhi could unleash another blast, the High Lord was upon him.

Using all Drinny’s speed, all the strength of his body, all the violated passion of his love for the Land, Mhoram swung. His staff caught Satansfist squarely across the forehead.

The concussion ripped Mhoram from his seat like a dry leaf in the wind. His staff shattered at the blow, exploded into splinters, and he hit the ground amid a brief light rain of wood slivers. He was stunned. He rolled helplessly a few feet over the frozen earth, could not stop himself, could not regain his breath. His mind went blank for an instant, then began to ache as his body ached. His hands and arms were numb, paralyzed by the force which had burned through them.

You’ll have to read the books to see how it turns out.

Sometimes I wonder about my brain, if I burned out too many cells back in my drinking days.

I’ve been doing this low-carb thing for several years now, and I know exactly what I should and shouldn’t eat. I’ve read all the books, discussed it ad nauseam online, and written enough about it to add a couple more books to the pile if I were organized enough to put the words in manuscript form. I got a blood glucose tester and used it regularly for a while, so I could see exactly what different foods were doing to me. I’ve seen my blood sugar shoot up to 160 after a bowl of ice cream, or 180 after potato sticks. (Beta cell damage starts at 140, or 120 according to some people.) I lost 60 pounds by eating the right things, gained back 30 by getting sloppy, and have re-lost 20 so far by eating right again. I know exactly what to do.

I even like low-carb foods! I like steak, burgers, pork chops, brats, cheese, nuts, eggs, broccoli, green beans, Swiss chard, spinach, mushrooms, sunflower seeds, fish, chicken, and pretty much any other low-carb food except green peppers. This should be easy. Yet every once in a while I get a major hankering for something poisonous. Usually it happens soon after I strayed off the plan just a little, which is why people shouldn’t say, “Oh, surely one small piece wouldn’t hurt you.” I had a piece of my mom’s cherry pie over a week ago, and ever since then I’ve been looking for an excuse to binge on something carb-filled. One day, the only reason I didn’t was that I’d forgotten to carry any cash while I was out walking the dog.

Yesterday I caved and stopped at Long John Silvers while I was out. Now, if I wanted fish, I could have gotten fish at the grocery store and fried it myself, or gotten grilled fish without breading. But no, I had to have the breaded kind—and the fries too, and even those nasty bread-ball things. I know it’s all horrible stuff, probably fish caught in China by political prisoners and fried in hydrogenated soybean oil, but I’ve always loved the taste of their stuff, and when I get one of these craving fits, LJS calls to me.

After I ate it, I didn’t feel too bad at first. A little wired and spacey with some heartburn, but I was still functioning. A few hours later, I seriously needed a nap, but my mind was racing too hard to sleep, so I tried to read. After a while, I realized I was getting too shaky and dizzy to absorb the words and my vision was getting kind of weird, so I thought I’d check my blood sugar. It was 37, which is well below the normal range of 70-100. Seizures start being a possibility below 40, so I checked the other hand, and it was 41. Either way that’s dangerously low, so I quickly drank some cream and ate some meat and cheese to help stabilize it. Today I’m feeling mostly normal again, but still a little spaced-out at times.

Funny thing is, one myth about low-carbing is that, if you don’t eat enough carbs, your blood sugar will get dangerously low. That’s simply not true, unless you’re taking insulin or some drug that artificially lowers it. Your body will remove glycogen from storage or convert protein and fat to sugar to maintain the very small amount of sugar (about a teaspoon) it needs in the blood stream when you aren’t eating that much.

But high-carb eating can cause dangerously low blood sugar in people without solid blood sugar control, as I demonstrated yesterday. (For people with great blood sugar control, it doesn’t matter what they eat; they’ll always make just enough insulin to maintain the right blood sugar levels. Until their pancreas wears down from the constant stress of high-carb eating, anyway.) From past experience, I’d guess mine shot up to 200 or so right after lunch yesterday, and then dropped to 40 within 3-4 hours. If I ate carbs regularly, I’d be on that roller-coaster every day, burning up the beta cells in my pancreas for a couple hours after each meal, followed by shakiness, headaches, and mood swings a couple hours later. No thanks.

Maybe I just need to do this to myself a couple times a year to remind myself why I’m eating this way: why I have to disappoint my mom when she makes my favorite pie; why I can’t just grab a sandwich and fries from the nearest fast-food joint anymore. Maybe I have a fear of success, and I’m afraid of how people will see me differently when I’m lean and mean. Or maybe I’ve got a little devil on my shoulder that’s trying to kill me. Whatever the reason, I sure hope I learned my lesson this time.

A recent visitor to Quincy posted some beautiful pictures of St. Rose on her blog, so go check them out.

The St. Rose website is now up and running! There’s a photo gallery with all the images I have so far, including the ones I picked out for my blog earlier, and an event calendar that includes information for upcoming daily Masses. More features will be coming, so keep an eye on it. Suggestions are most welcome. I’ll continue also announcing things here for now, since the site is so new that the search engines won’t have found it yet.

Today is the feast of the Immaculate Conception, a holy day of obligation, so there will be a special High Mass at 6:00pm in addition to the usual weekday Low Mass at 12:10pm. The High Mass will be followed by Adoration until 1:00am. More info at that link.

There will be a Christmas Midnight Mass, beginning at midnight (when else?) Christmas morning, preceded by Christmas carols at 11:30pm. The organ is expected to be working again by then, so it should be a beautiful ceremony.

Officially, I still think the no-smoking law is stupid. Most people I know hated all the smoke in bars and the way their clothes reeked the next day. Even some smokers complained about it. When that many people really want something, the market provides it. People want movies through the mail, deep-fried nuggets of chicken, and sweaters for dogs, so the market provides them. If thousands of people in Quincy really wanted a non-smoking bar, someone would have opened one a long time ago and be raking in the profits. Apparently we didn’t want it that badly.

But I can’t say I miss the smoke. It’s nice to be able to go shoot pool for a few hours and not leave with burning eyes, dry mouth, and a coat that will need to be dry-cleaned before it smells decent again. Last night we played league pool at a bar that’s closing down; so the great legal minds who owned the place decided that, since they weren’t selling alcohol anymore, they could smoke. I don’t know if it was because I’m not used to it anymore, or maybe the thrill of getting away with something had them smoking three times as fast as normal, but it was hard to take. After an hour, my eyes were stinging and there was a definite haze in the air. Luckily, I shot first. Normally I stick around to watch the whole team play, but last night I got the heck out of there as soon as I was done.

That was the last time we play this session, unless we made the city tournament. After playing every Sunday night for the last few months, I’m ready for a break. Especially this time of year, there are plenty of other things to do.

We just got back from the “Christmas Memories” concert put on by the Quincy Symphony Orchestra. I’d recommend it, but it looks like it’s a one-time show; so if you weren’t there, you’re out of luck. At $15, the tickets might seem a bit pricey, but it’s nice to know that you’re supporting a Quincy institution and most of your money isn’t going off to Hollywood or China or someplace.

I’m resistant to the way people keep celebrating Christmas earlier and earlier, and then dropping it by about 3pm on Dec. 25th. (Salvation Army bell-ringers who were out by mid-November, I’m loooking at you.) I try to pace myself so I still have some Christmas spirit for the real Christmas season: the twelve days after Christmas. I guess you have to make an exception for Christmas concerts, though. Who’s performing one on Dec. 26th? I don’t listen to Christmas music on the radio or see seasonal commercials on TV, so I’m not in much danger of overload.

Anyway, I thought it was great. I learned that I need to sit closer to the music next time, though. Lots of people behind us had ants in their pants or something and couldn’t sit still, so the constant rustling and my poor hearing made it hard to hear some of the quieter pieces. They did the Mannheim Steamroller version of Silent Night, which has long been a favorite of mine, and I just couldn’t hear it very well. Next time: up close.

They had a harp ensemble that was pretty cool, although I definitely don’t know anything about harp music. I think there were eight harps (and harpists), which is about eight times as many as I would have guessed existed in Quincy. Apparently, thanks to a lady who has been teaching the harp in Quincy for 62 years, Quincy has more harpists per capita than any other town or city in the United States. This town sure excels at some unusual things.

There were two choirs, one adult and one youth, and they both sounded good. I could have done without the karaoke portion of the program, personally—I’d rather listen to people who have practiced the songs together for weeks than the random crowd around me—but it seemed like people who can sing enjoyed singing along. I especially liked the choirs singing Christmastime is Here from the Charlie Brown Christmas show, and the song the Whos in Whoville sing together in the Grinch show (the cartoon, not the Jim Carrey abomination).

All in all, it was a nice time with a lot of good music, and I hope to attend some of their future performances. When people complain that Quincy doesn’t have enough big-city entertainment options, they should know we do have a pretty darn good symphony you don’t have to drive to St. Louis to see.

This will probably only be of interest to other bloggers, but I’ve found some cool plugins and thought I’d let people know about them.

CodeColorer

If you want to paste program code into a post, it can be a real pain. Lines may run together, and you usually loose the indentation. The plugin fixes that, and adds syntax coloring like many text editors now have. It sets the code off nicely, and optionally can add line numbers, like this:

FD Word Stats

I just found this one a couple days ago, but I like it. While you’re editing a post, it shows the number of words and sentences, and some calculations about the readability of the post, like this:

Words: 103 Sentences: 7 Fog: 9.8 Kincaid: 6.4 Flesch: 75

Those last three numbers are attempts to show how readable the post is, based on the average number of syllables per word, the number of words per sentence, and so on. Fog and Kincaid try to estimate the number of years of education a person would need to understand the post. Obviously, these are pretty vague and don’t agree at all in this case, so it’s probably not very useful, but it’s kind of cool. I mostly wanted it so I could see how many words I’d written so I wouldn’t get carried away so much.

Quotes Collection

This plugin runs the “Random Quote” box I’ve got in the right sidebar now. I wanted to start putting quotes I’ve collected into my blog somehow; and sure enough, there was a handy plugin for it. It’ll also let me plug them into posts, by keyword, author, or other methods, so I may start using it that way too.

Spam Karma 2

This one is saving me some time, now that I’m getting more hits from spammers. It does a much more thorough job than the default Askimet spam checker that comes with WordPress. (Askimet checking is included in SK2.) It trashes the really obvious spam so I don’t have to sort through it all, and it’s smart about letting through the real comments. Toss in the SK2 Moderate Plugin and it’ll send the good ones through moderation, so you can double-check them.

Star Rating for Reviews

This plugin makes the nice little 1-5 star ratings on my reviews. I just put rating:3.5 between square brackets, and it turns that into 3.5 stars. It can use other ratings ranges like 1-10 or 1-100, and it can use up to 20 stars. It can use other graphics in place of the stars, and it’d be easy enough to make some.

WP-EMail

This one sits behind the little e-mail envelope at the bottom of each of my posts, and lets people e-mail the post to a friend. No one has used it yet, but when they do, it’ll make that easy for them and keep statistics for me on how much each post gets e-mailed.

StatPress

Statpress is a pretty nice WordPress-specific traffic analyzer. In other words, it keeps track of all the visits to the blog and gives me lots of information about them. It can’t tell me who visited (nothing can), but it tells me how many came each day, what pages they went to, where they came from, and things like that. It tells me what search terms people used when they found my site on the search engines, and what posts get visited the most, so I can tell what stuff that I’ve written is the most popular. (Based on that, if I were smart, I’d write a hundred articles about the Latin Mass and forget everything else.)

I also use Google Analytics, which isn’t a plugin but is Google’s free traffic analyzer. Its main difference from Statpress is that GA is done in Javascript, so it only tracks real browsers (or the 99% of them that have Javascript enabled). Actual readers, in other words. Statpress tracks everything—search engines, spam bots, hack attempts—so it inflates the numbers quite a bit. By comparing the two, I can tell whether a burst of activity is real people who might care what I’m writing or just random traffic from machines.