Finding the Humor

I've been continuing on with the KJV update. Quite a bit of it's tedious. They used the word unto the way we use to. Having to change 99% or more of those gets old after a while. But it's been pretty educational. I've been going verse by verse checking most of them against the Greek. It's been interesting to see the choices the KJV translators made and what they considered translation versus paraphrasing and such. Amid all that I found a verse that made me laugh, once I saw what it literally says. I'm up to John now. This is from back in Luke 24. The situation is after the crucifixion. The disciples are devastated. Mary is devastated. All of Jesus's followers and supporters are at the bottom. A group of mourners goes to the tomb to take the spices for when the body starts to decay and stink and all those death things. They're all completely devastated. They get there, and the stone over the entrance has been rolled back. They go inside. There's no body. What? And then in Greek it says this: 4 And it came to pass, as they were at quite a loss about this one indeed, behold, two men stood by them in shining garments:

That Luke cracks me up. The chapter had a couple of more things like that. 18 And the one of them, whose name was Cleopas, answering said to him, Are you only a stranger in Jerusalem, and has not known the things that are come to pass there in these days? I'm not a Greek expert, but it looks like what he was really saying was, Are you the only one in Jerusalem who doesn't know what's going on? I think it depends on whether Cleopas said it sarcastically or not.

And, course, the KJV translated one of the funny lines. It's the reply to Cleopas's question. The he in this verse is Jesus. 19 And he said to them, What things? So, he was just beaten to a pulp, crucified, died and resurrected. Cleopas asks if he's the only person in town who doesn't know the things that have been going on, and he says tongue in cheek, What things? And the KJV guys had to leave it in, because it's literal. hehe I can't help but wonder if those three things are in there on purpose to show us how silly we can be sometimes, when we're not trusting like we should be.

What a long, strange week it's been outside of the update, which is taking massive amounts of time. I'm still trying to figure out how to balance it all regarding the next book. Changing all the older language to modern English will take to September or so, if I can keep pace. Not counting rechecking everything. It's really a huge project.

Have a great weekend.

The Generous, Rich Widow

I got an email from a rich widow in Germany whose husband was a minister and left her $5.6 million. She only has two months to live and wants to send it all to me so I can start a business. She gave me an email address where I can contact her. However, it has a domain suffix from Poland. That's a bit odd, I believe. I don't think Poland's been a part of Germany since 1945. Maybe her mind is playing tricks on her due to the illness.

$5.6 million is a lot for a minister. I can't help but wonder how he had so much. After a lot of thought, it occurred to me that he was probably friends with the Nigerian prince. Evidently, the prince was able at last to get some of his fortune out of his country. I'm glad it finally worked out for that fellow. I know how hard he's been working for years to achieve that dream. And who better than a minister to offer aid to the helpless? I'm glad he was able to render assistance before his unfortunate demise.

After some delayed feedback on Book 2, I decided to do something I've been thinking about for a while. I pulled it off Amazon. I've mentioned before that I took some risks. I've been second-guessing them all year. It started 3.5 years after the first book. That was really too long. There were things I wasn't completely sure worked, but I've finally concluded the biggest problem is that it didn't fulfill promises made in the first book. Between the time gap and the change of direction, maybe it was too much risk. So, the plan it to either rework it and use parts of it or start over directly after the events of Book 1 while following more closely in the footsteps of those events.

I don't know how I'm going to make all this work. I'm still working on the update to the English in the KJV, which is going well but very slowly. It's extremely time-consuming. I'm on Luke. I picked up a couple of shirts to use on the YouTube channel. I need to get some more videos made.

Have a great weekend.

More Updating, Unhiding a Bushel

This week has been more KJV updating. I finished Mark. Counting Jude and Matthew that makes three books. I did a dash of Philemon, but it was harder than it looked. Not being a Greek translator, I'm trying to limit myself to updating and not trying to translate, although there was one place I stretched myself a little, but more on that in a second. What is Greek like? Pretending to be sober, Yoda, on drugs. It's kind of like that. It's like Yoda but worse. Yoda is fun and understandable. Greek is neither. It takes some time to get used to.

Back to where I stretched myself. Matthew 15:26 But he answered and said, It is not meet to take the children's bread, and to cast it to dogs.

That word dogs is not quite correct and could be translated as puppies, so I updated that. The problem word was meet. I already knew it meant proper, but that didn't really fit the Greek lexicon, which had multiple ways to translate it, although proper was a word of last resort sort of. None of the other words really matched except suitable. I started substituting words to see how they sounded and whether they made sense in the sentence. As I was going through the list, it suddenly occurred to me what the word should be. Kosher. It's not kosher to take the children's bread and give it to their puppies. Unfortunately, kosher isn't one of the lexicon words for this, at least not the lexicons I'm using so far(Thayers, Strong's, LSJ and online resources). Inner conflict. I wanted to use kosher, but I'm limiting myself to the lexicons. That would be translating.

This problem pops up sometimes. The lexicons are not at all complete. On occasion the right word is not in a lexicon, and I can't use it. This verse and the matching one in Mark was the one place I made an exception. Suitable is in the list. The word fit means suitable. Fit is also another way to say kosher. So, I translated meet to fit. It's correct while still giving extra meaning to people who know what kosher means.

In other news, I bought a new laundry hamper. At the store I narrowed it down to two. They had different dimensions, so I couldn't tell which one held more. When I checked the labels, I found a surprise. I expected them to be in liters. They were in bushels! What? One held 2 bushels and the other 2.5 bushels. How can people still be using bushels in 2017? Am I sheltered? Am I unobservant? Is this going on all around me, and I've never noticed? Why are garbage cans in gallons/liters but laundry hampers in bushels? The world's gone mad.

Have a great weekend.

A Touch of Malware

I lost nearly three nights of work on the KJV update project after downloading some malware. I needed another Greek lexicon and found a trusted site to get it. It turned out not to be so trustworthy. When using Chrome, web pages started opening in another tab. I could click a place in a page or in a search box, and it would happen. Reimageplus is usually where it would take me. It's a known malware and not too difficult to get rid of normally. I did all the normal things, including a 3+hr full scan, but it didn't go away. It's supposed to show up under Programs in Control Panel. Not in mine. After the first good scan, my system showed clean. But I still had the problem. Normally, Firefox and Edge would be affected. Not for me, just Chrome. One of the first things I did was delete and re-download extensions. They seemed clean. I even uninstalled Chrome and deleted some of the things it left behind before reinstalling.

By the end of night two everything was working. Night three it was back. But scanning showed my system to be clean. I finally decided to delete extensions again but this time one by one, even though I had already deleted them all more than once. I picked one at random and deleted it. Problem solved. The scary thing is it had still been infected after I had synced the browser with Google. I had not reinstalled that extension. I had let it sync. So, hmm.

Anyway, the backdrop is nearly finished. It looks kind of like this. Sorry about the fuzziness of the cell phone pic. I don't have a non-video camera. It'll look better in the videos.

The big gap in the middle is where the chair I would be sitting in goes. All I need is to have the space around the chair filled in. I still need to finish titles and paint in the books on the sides and possibly do some more detail work on shadows and highlights that would add more dimensionality. I may not bother. This is going to be in the background and out of focus. As long as I get the details right, it should look okay. I can always tweak it later.

The malware was kind of encouraging. I've never had any. It was directly because of the KJV update work. It makes me think I'm on the right track with that. Most of Matthew is done as well as the entire book of Jude, the whole thing.

Have a good weekend.