The Inner Minstrel

Most of us, I think, have an Inner Minstrel. You know - the guy (well, mine seems to be male, at least) who insists on singing inside your head. Sometimes this isn't too bad; sometimes I'll even sing along out loud. But he never seems to know when to shut up.

Today, he's taken to singing "I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus". That would be bad enough even if it were the Christmas season; I have no great liking for the song. But he keeps messing up the last few lines, thus:
What a laugh it would have been
If Mommy had only seen
Daddy
Kissing Santa Claus last night!

Sigh.

In other news, the last couple of days I read John Polkinghorne's The God of Hope and the End of the World. An interesting book, for a scientifically-oriented Christian; he makes clear the problems involved in reconciling Christian eschatology with the teachings of science. He rejects a number of popular ideas, ranging from simple millenarianism to Frank Tipler's "Omega", while presenting a genuinely hopeful, if incomplete, resolution of those problems. It's a short book; Polkinghorne wrote it as a distillation of the results of a conference, which were presented more fully in a volume of essays co-edited by Polkinghorne and Michael Welker. I'm tempted to go look for that.

Afterward, I moved on to The Man Who Loved Only Numbers, a popular biography of Paul Erdos. It's an entertaining book so far, although I'm not sure I like the man it depicts. (I heard him once; he gave a talk at UCSB while I was there, describing ten mathematical puzzles. All of them were easy to state, but nontrivial to solve; alas, I only remember one of them, and that one only partially. He called it "The Rational Hole-Punch"...)

I'm also still on an Anderson kick; I'm rereading Fire Time. I will write those essays at some point!