Powerpoint the "Ryan Air of Presentation Software"

Over on Bible Films Blog, Matt Page has a very helpful post on Using Video Clips in Presentations. He mentions that he is sad to hear that I have "now given up using video clips in lectures because they're too prone to go wrong". I had forgotten that I had said that in one of the extended episodes of the NT Pod, and I have long since repented of any such hasty decision and often show little clips in class. In fact just this morning, I shared a a Youtube clip of E. P. Sanders discussing Paul's concept of participation in Christ.

My reason for picking up on Matt's post, though, is to share a great line, to the following effect:

I know PowerPoint is the Ryan Air of presentation software (everyone slags it off but uses it anyway) and I know that smug mac types will be reading this safe in the knowledge that everything they do is better than if they did it on a PC, but here's something for us lesser mortals. I for one actually like PowerPoint. It's a tool that's widely abused, and the majority of presentations are just awful, but if you take your time to "get it" then it's a great, if somewhat flawed, tool.

The non-British readers may not be familiar with Ryanair, but it is the budget pack-em-in airline that everyone in the UK complains about but which nevertheless is widely used. Great analogy.

Romans as a "bread-and-butter" letter redux

Three years ago, almost to the day, I was teaching the Epistle to the Romans as part of my Life and Letters of Paul class, and I blogged about a quotation from J. Paul Sampley (Is Romans a "bread and butter letter"?):

It is an apostolic response to ethnic problems in those churches, and it is a “bread-and-butter” letter written in advance of his arrival, seeking support for his mission to Spain.

I raised a couple of questions about it, first the appropriateness of the term "bread-and-butter letter" and second the matter of where the quotation is from. I had copied out the quotation some years ago but somehow managed to lose the citation. In yesterday's class on the Life and Letters of Paul, I returned to the Epistle to the Romans and again mentioned this quotation. Happily, Ken Olson managed to find it for me, and it looks like something had happened in my transcription of the quotation.  Here it is with a proper citation:

A crisis brought most Pauline letters into existence. Even Romans, written to a church that Paul’s preaching did not establish, is a “bread-and-butter” letter written in advance of his journey, seeking support for his mission to Spain (cf. 15:22-24). Ephesians, however, lacks clues concerning a concrete crisis or occasion.

J. Paul Sampley, “The Letter to the Ephesians”, in Gerhard Krodel (ed.), Ephesians, Colossians, 2 Thessalonians, The Pastoral Epistles (Proclamation Commentaries; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1978):  9-39 (9)

NT Pod: The Extended Episodes

When I started the NT Pod, my general idea was to provide condensed comment on  the New Testament and Christian origins, in the ten minutes or so format.  Well, it started as six minutes or so and grew, but it has settled on ten-twelve minutes.  To my surprise, listeners would often ask for more and for longer episodes.  So a few weeks ago I began an experiment.  Duke has been automatically recording some lecture courses, though to call it "recording" is somewhat passé and the term now is "capture", in our case via Lectopia. I was offered the chance to include my current course, Introduction to the New Testament, under this arrangement and decided to go for it.  It then occurred to me that I could use the raw recordings as the basis for extended episodes of the NT Pod, as an experiment.

In a 75 minute class, there is a fair bit of extraneous material, including discussion of assignments, the five minute break in the middle and so on, but my idea was that I could edit the feeds to produce a 45-50 minute episode, with a short intro and outro to orientate the listener.  There is a precedent for this too.  Phil Harland's Religions of the Ancient Mediterranean Podcast is this kind of podcast, an edited lecture capture with added intro and outro (though a much longer intro. than I give).

So I edited and uploaded three back to back extended episodes on the Synoptic Problem, NT Pod Extended Episode 1 (The Synoptic Problem, Introduction and Data), NT Pod Extended Episode 2 (Marcan Priority), NT Pod Extended Episode 3 (Q and the Case against Q).

The episodes seem to have been popular with listeners.  In fact, I received more feedback on these episodes than I had done on the normal episodes, even though they are downloaded less often than the standard ones.  I have therefore decided to go on with these extended episodes from time to time and the fourth (on the Messianic Secret in Mark) is already in the can and will be uploaded soon;  and the fifth (on Mark's Passion) is almost ready too.

Only the true Messiah denies his divinity

We discussed the Messianic Secret in my New Testament Introduction class at Duke yesterday, and on this topic I can never help thinking of one of my favourite scenes in Life of Brian. Brian, who is being pursued by a crowd who want to proclaim him the Messiah, makes clear that he is not the Messiah. Some bright spark comes up with the line, "Only the true Messiah denies his divinity!" The exchange is towards the end of this four minute clip. Only two or three people, out of a hundred and thirty in the class, had seen Life of Brian, so this is to whet their appetites too:



Incidentally, this is a fine example of the use of Youtube by official organizations. Since Monty Python put clips like this on Youtube, sales of their DVDs apparently multiplied massively. There is a lesson there for online marketing that is still not understood by very many people.

Using Twitter in the Classroom?

Over on Jesus Creed, Scot McKnight asks about Twitter in the Classroom. As some of my readers know, I am a bit of a twitter-holic myself but I have never tried using it in the classroom. Well I suppose on one level, taken literally, the "in the classroom" question is a bit daft because the point of social networking is that it's something done virtually while you are not in the same physical environment. I find live-voice messaging superior when I am in the same physical space as another person. But that's being facetious. Of course the question being asked is whether we extend our engagement with students outside of the classroom by using technology like Twitter.

My kids think that Twitter is the preserve of middle-aged people. The youth all use Facebook. From discussions with my students, this kind of impression has been confirmed for their generation too. I talked a bit to my Historical Jesus class last semester about Twitter and was surprised to find out that very few students in the class even had a twitter account. Our student paper here at Duke, The Chronicle, had a nice piece called Tweet tweet. What's the Rage? this last semester, but discussions with students suggest that Twitter is hardly on their radar while Facebook is their natural hunting ground. When I suggested that one of my advisees talk to another student who shared the same research interests, I said that I would look out her email address and she replied, "Don't worry; I'll just find her on Facebook". The average undergraduate apparently has over 900 friends on Facebook.

This is all a long-winded way of saying that I don't think that undergraduates are embracing Twitter yet to the extent that it can provide a useful venue -- for me -- for supplementing teaching. The time may well come, but I like to work with things that students already have some familiarity with, like Instant Messaging, which I still think provides a great way of communicating outside the classroom.

Infancy Gospel of Thomas Cartoon

In today's Historical Jesus class we are moving to Part 5 of the course where we begin to explore some life of Jesus traditions. And we begin at the beginning by asking questions about whether we can know anything about Jesus' birth and childhood. Well, if we look at the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, we find a whole series of wonderful, fictional stories about Jesus, including this piece (9), here delightfully animated:



I am grateful to Tony Chartrand Burke on Apocryphicity for sharing this link with us two years ago.

Teaching Notes: On Instant Messaging with Students

Over the last year or so at Duke, and with encouragement from the deans, I have raised the caps on my classes, first to 70, then to 100 and above. The larger numbers have required some rethinking about how I do things. One of the great advantages of teaching somewhere like Duke is that one can ask for teaching assistants, and I have had three now each time that I have taking a larger course. And I am lucky to have outstanding Teaching Assistants. However, students still want to talk to their professors (I am speaking in American here) and frankly, I like talking to students and getting to know them. Without regular interaction, crafting the course as you go would be difficult. But how does one cope with interacting with larger numbers of students? Of course I have regular office hours, but only a small percentage of the class will come to the professor's office unless they have to.

A year or so ago I began to experiment with another way of interacting with students -- using Instant Messaging (IM). I decided to tread carefully at first because I was not sure if it would work, and I was not sure if I might find it too much of an imposition on my time. Would my time be dominated by endless IM queries? Did I want a student popping up with an essay question when I was on the second or third glass of the Beaujolais on a Friday night? So I did not advertise my IM contact details on the syllabus, but I let them know that I was available to talk on IM if they emailed me to ask for my details. Several students took me up on this and in each case I found the experience a rewarding one, and I decided to continue the experiment. I now publish my IM contact details on the course syllabus and I have found that many of the students enjoy using this means of communicated with me. It has several advantages.

One of the major advantages of using IM for students is that this is a very natural medium for them. They are using it themselves all the time to communicate with one another, and they find it easier to communicate through IM than they do in other more formal meda, even email. This leads to some productive conversations. They ask you what they want to talk about without feeling that they need to flower it up in an email. I have found myself wasting much less time with mis-firing email conversations. I misunderstand students less and they misunderstand me less. And sometimes I have been able to ask students quick questions about certain elements in the course, which can be very helpful for getting a feeling for the lie of the land.

This is not, of course, going to be an option for professors who do not do any IMing of their own to friends and family. My guess is that it only works for those who are already familiar with the medium, who enjoy using it. But there are practical difficulties that one needs to think through. The biggest one is that there are several different IM clients. Some students have YIM, some AIM, some MSN, some Google Talk, some combinations. When I discovered Pidgin, this problem was solved instantly -- it is a free multi-platform IM aggregator and you can pull everything together in the one programme.

But what about the problem of students imposing on your free time, popping up to chat to you about the course while you are communicating with your mates? So far, this has really not been a problem for me. My students have used this service really responsibly, and if they do pop up at an unusual time, they quite understand if I explain that I cannot talk. It has not made them any more demanding; quite the contrary -- they have been civil and appreciative. And there are also the options of playing with the settings on Pidgin (or whatever you use), hiding yourself when you don't wish to be seen online and so on.

In short, this experiment has been more than just "so far, so good". I have been surprised by how successful it has been.

Teaching Notes: Life and Letters of Paul I

Each autumn ("fall") since 2006 I have taught a course that once belonged to Ed Sanders, "The Life and Letters of Paul". The title is perfect, especially for someone like me whose interests are more historical than theological. This is now the third time I have taught this course at Duke and this time I have expanded enrollment to over 100 students. This represents something of a challenge, but a challenge I enjoy. People talk much less in a bigger group, but at the same time the occasion somehow feels more major and a bit less low key. The larger group allows gives one a real variety of students, and I was happy to discover yesterday that I have the full range of students from freshers (still called "freshmen" here, a term British universities abandoned decades ago) to finalists ("seniors").

The age range requires some thought. In the UK, most universities now group into different "levels" and it would be unusual to have first years with finalists. In this class, I have some people just out of high school, who will be doing their first university writing for me, and others who are right at the end of their Duke careers, with tons of writing experience. I am lucky, though, to have three excellent teaching assistants and what we will do together is to make sure that the freshers are encouraged along the way.

I have introduced a couple of changes since I last taught the course. One thing is to introduce a third piece of assessment. I tended to find that there was some anxiety among Duke students about a whole course being assessed on just two pieces of work, a "mid-term" and a final examination. Several of them would be worried about the long gap between October and December without any sign that they were sustaining or improving on their mid-term grade. So this time I am giving them three pieces, the mid-term paper in early October, an exegesis paper in November and a final paper in early December. The mid-term is their first chance to delve into nitty gritty introductory, historical questions and to do lots of targeted reading in preparation. The exegesis paper will then encourage them to test their skills with the primary text. The final paper will see how well they have coped with assimilating the course as a whole.

One plus this semester is that appear to have been given a room with windows in it, over in the Social Sciences building. So we are borrowing from other Arts and Sciences departments rather than from the Divinity School, as previously.

In future teaching notes this semester, I hope to reflect on the way that we are learning about Paul this semester. One of the big tasks for next week is to see whether I can get the punters as interested in Pauline chronology as I am. This is not an easy task. For most students, Pauline chronology is about as exciting as the Synoptic Problem, and we all know how much fun that is.

Happy Birthday, Albert Schweitzer

Albert Schweitzer was born on this day in 1875 and as good planning (or luck?) would have it, today we are looking at his Quest of the Historical Jesus in my Historical Jesus class at Duke. I am planning to show the students a couple of videos to celebrate the day:

First, a short one minute celebration of Schweitzer's life on History.com.

Second, a remarkable French piece featuring a fairly lengthy interview with Schweitzer (in French) from dailymotion.com: Video Docteur Albert Schweitzer, apparently from 1961.

Third, a clip of Eddie Albert meeting Albert Schweitzer, from American television in the 1950s, on Youtube (Schweitzer piece lasts about a minute and begins at about 1:17):



And finally, there is a clip of Schweitzer receiving his honorary degree at Cambridge in 1955 from British Pathe News; you can download this in reasonable quality for free onto your computer, or you can pay for a high resolution version.

Is Romans a "bread and butter letter"?

When introducing the Epistle to the Romans in my class on the Life and Letters of Paul yesterday, I mentioned the following quotation from J. Paul Sampley, one that I once used in an examination question:

It is an apostolic response to ethnic problems in those churches, and it is a “bread-and-butter” letter written in advance of his arrival, seeking support for his mission to Spain.

I asked the class if they knew the expression "bread and butter letter" but none of them did. As I tried to explain it, I realized that I had always heard the expression used after a visit rather than ahead of one. I think of it as a thank you letter, written to your host, traditionally, the woman of the house. I looked up the expression in a variety of places, through the ease of Google, and it seems that the usage I am familiar with is indeed the standard. An article on The art of the thank-you note, for example, has the following:

A further subset of the thank-you note is the bread-and-butter note, a letter written after a stay at someone's house. While the specific origins of this expression are obscure — members of the Writing Center at Princeton University were at a loss — "The Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English" dates the term's appearance in American vocabulary to the turn of the century.

As might be expected, Ms. Post believes the bread-and-butter note is a must, unless the host or hostess is a family member or close friend with whom the guest stays frequently. And her final word on the matter is: "Never think, because you cannot write a letter easily, that it is better not to write at all. The most awkward note imaginable is better than none."

The "Ms. Post" here mentioned is the author of Emily Post's Etiquette: A Guide to Modern Manners. Her book, written in 1922, is all available online and is very enjoyable reading, the relevant section for this topic being Notes and Shorter Letters.

As far as I can tell, therefore, the twentieth century usage of "bread and butter letter" is not used to describe a letter of introduction like the Epistle to the Romans. But did the ancients write bread and butter letters? Mary Johnston says not:

The bread-and-butter letter, as we call it now, does not seem to have been required from appreciative guests after visits. Horace addressed an Epode (III) in complaint to Maecenas after the garlic at dinner had disagreed with him, and Catullus wrote to Licinius that he could not sleep after their poetic contest over the wine. Pliny's letter to his mother-in-law (I,4) was written after a visit to her villas in her absence. Whether Caesar wrote to thank Cicero for his hospitality at Puteoli I do not know . . . ("Hospites Venturi", The Classical Journal 28/3 (Dec. 1932): 197-206).

In short, it seems that the term "bread-and-butter letter" is not ideal for describing the Epistle to the Romans.

Note: I can't find my reference for the Sampley quotation above. If anyone happens to know its location, I would be very grateful.

Teaching Notes: Continuity Errors and Fatigue

One of the benefits of larger classes at Duke appears to be that you get a nicer, more modern classroom. Instead of Gray Building, where we in the Department of Religion normally teach, I am teaching my New Testament Introduction class in one of the classes in Westbrook, which belongs to the Divinity School. If A/V equipment is easier to use, and the class arrangement more congenial to its use, I find myself illustrating classes much more regularly. Today I wanted a little something to introduce the topic of editorial fatigue in the Synoptics. I was going through the arguments for Marcan Priority, and saving fatigue for the end. In my 1998 NTS article, I wrote:

Like continuity errors in film and television, examples of fatigue will be unconscious mistakes, small errors of detail which naturally arise in the course of constructing a narrative. (46)

It occurred to me that I could illustrate the point by pointing to a couple of continuity errors in one of my favourite TV series, Columbo. Anyone who has watched the series as often as I have will have noticed the lieutenant's cigar shrink and expand between shots, and a site rather inelegantly entitled Columbo Goofs lists dozens of similar continuity errors, including William Shatner's changing moustache. Continuity errors like these are "seams" in the film that point to the history of the construction of that film, revealing evidence of shooting schedules that we might otherwise have been ignorant of. I found it an enjoyable way of illustrating some of the seams in the Synoptics in the category of "editorial fatigue", which seem to point to Marcan Priority.

Dear Jordan

There is a sobering column in today's Duke Chronicle headed Dear Professors, in which Jordan Everson challenges his teachers to take their job seriously, to do a bit of actual "professing", to enthuse students, to engage them, to throw themselves into teaching. The piece has something of a negative tone, and it is clear that Jordan's experience at Duke has been less satisfactory than that of many other students, from whom I have heard more positive things. I can't help thinking that Jordan has been unlucky in his choice of courses if he has only found one professor who has really engaged him in three years; I thought that students all talked to one another about the best, most engaging courses to go to, though of course it is never easy to judge these things from the other side of the fence. Nevertheless, Jordan's piece is a helpful call to us all to take our students seriously and to take our teaching seriously, and his plea is well taken, at least from this corner. Jordan writes:

So then profess! Enlighten your students with the marvelous task you have undertaken, the ideas that inspired you, that you have dedicated your life to studying.

I know, I know, you spent years researching for that Ph.D., and before arriving here your main concern has probably been research.

There is little for you to gain from professing; Research, not teaching, determines your career advancement. Only disastrously bad student evaluations will hinder your upward mobility, an easily avoidable fate so long you reserve low grades only for the truly indolent and hand out evaluations during the last day of classes.

Still, as professors you have an obligation to teach us, your students.

In my perhaps naïve optimism, I am inclined to be a bit less cynical than this, not least because for me, and for colleagues I know, there is a genuine interaction between research and teaching. Some of my best research ideas emerge in teaching, and my teaching often provides the occasion for testing new ideas, or developing new ways of communicating older ideas, to talk to students about work in progress. One of the things I love about teaching at Duke is that the students are so bright, so engaged. I often come back from class thinking about some interesting question or observation that a student put to me. I might even dare to suggest that the best kind of research, especially if we are talking about the humanities, comes directly out of teaching, and the best kind of teaching emerges from the professor's research.

Perhaps I might throw in too that this week, after the summer hiatus, I found myself really looking forward to returning to teaching. Yes, it gives me less time to write, but it gives me no less time to think, to communicate, to engage, all of which are elements in research in the humanities. And somewhere like Duke gives one the luxury of being able to teach right in one's major areas of interest. It is not as if one has to teach courses in subjects that one has no primary competence or expertise in. Furthermore, Jordan underestimates just how important teaching is in hiring practices at Duke. Bear in mind that one of the major tests for incoming candidates is to present a lecture in which you need to be able to communicate effectively to undergraduate students, and the search committees, in which I have participated, spend a lot of time thinking about the candidates' teaching record (or potential). It is by no means the case that people are hired on research alone. Jordan later writes:

Professors, I implore you: Engage your students. Change the world not only through erudite publications but through the spread of wisdom to the men and women you have the luck to influence.

Do not return papers with a short comment and a letter grade, leaving your TAs to fill in the gaps. Write a paragraph about our work, about our thoughts against yours. If our only feedback on a paper is the letter grade, how can the goal of our learning be anything other than achieving a high letter grade? Before muscle can grow it must be torn. Provide resistance, be engaging, be demanding, and do not accept complacency.

The first paragraph I endorse, and the challenge is accepted, and encouraged. The second paragraph quoted is, I think, one of the most useful things Jordan says. I well remember receiving papers back, as a student, with only minimal guidance about what was good, bad or ugly in them, and I think it is vital that we try to give the fullest feedback possible. I will certainly be bearing this in mind in grading later this semester. The only thing I would want to add is that I am always happy, and I know that I am not alone in this, to provide detailed feedback in appointments with students. Many students, usually in my experience the ones with As and A-s, do not come for that feedback, but the door is always open.

Thanks, Jordan, for a provocative piece. One of the things that makes Duke a great place to teach is that it is full of students, like you, who take the academic experience so seriously, and who want to get the best out of their education.

Teaching Notes: Reading the New Testament Historically

Term began at Duke yesterday and I had my first class, New Testament, at lunchtime. This is the fourth time I have taught this course at Duke. Initially I was slated to do it every semester, which seemed a bad idea to me, not least because it would be rather monotonous for me. We adjusted it to once a year, each Fall, giving me a chance to teach Jesus and Paul each year too, rather than rotating them on a year by year basis, as EPS used to do. So I increased the cap on the class this time to 70, one of the benefits of which is that you get given one of the nice new rooms in Westbrook, which belongs to the Divinity School. (Smaller classes go in Gray Building, where we in the Department of Religion are based). At Duke, undergraduate classes get 150 minutes a week, and one can take them either all at once, in 2 x 75 minute sessions, or in 3 x 50 minute sessions. For my New Testament class, I have gone for 3 x 50 minutes this time, which is ideal for a class like this. And I greatly prefer these bite-sized chunks.

In the first session yesterday, I talked about reading the New Testament historically, and adopting a critical approach. I think it's really important to spend some time at the outset talking about this, and asking students what they expect to get from the course, and what their hopes and concerns are. One of the key issues here is that for many of the students, this is their first Religion course, and they may be coming into it expecting a confessional or a devotional approach; they may be surprised by what they find so it is good to clear the ground at the outset. I explain that we will be adopting an historical approach, and that this involves analysing the text in the same way that an historian would analyse any ancient text: in this context, it is the object of study and not the subject of inspiration. I like to explain too that critical study of the text is also about being self critical, i.e. to be willing to have one’s own presuppositions and biases questioned.

Teaching a Course on Paul

Over on Euangelion, Joel Willitts has an interesting enquiry-style post on Teaching a Course on Paul. To me, one of the great benefits of the blogosphere is the chance to compare teaching notes, and to pick up tips from one another to use in strengthening our own teaching. There are already several interesting suggestions and remarks in comments to the post, and I will throw in some of my own thoughts based on the course I taught on Paul here this year, which I will be teaching here again next year. Here are Joel's questions:

1) What will this course be about? Paul as a historical figure, Paul's theology, Paul's letters, all of these?

This kind of question depends a bit on what the course is called, and how it is advertised. The course I inherited from EPS was called "The Life and Letters of Paul", and I am happy to say that that gives me a good deal of freedom to explore, well, Paul's life and letters. So I feel happy about dealing with all of those things Joel mentions, Paul as a historical figure, his theology, his letters. And I like to work through all the key methodological issues, Paul and Acts, Pauline chronology, the authenticity and integrity of the epistles and so on. The issue for me is focused by the fact that while some of my students will have taken my New Testament Introduction class, some will not, and so I have to factor in some introductory discussion without the introduction getting dull for those who have taken New Testament Introduction. (This is not ideal, but it is a quirk of the system here that we can't introduce prerequisites).

2) What is essential and palatable for undergraduates? Complicated discussions about Paul and the Law will be way over their heads.

There's no question but that you must do Paul and the Law if you are devoting a whole term to Paul; it is too important not to cover. And it is one of those great challenges for the teacher to find ways of teaching the more complex topics. What I like about those challenges is that they often provide the best research opportunities, because it is in thinking through the topic in question afresh that one gains fresh insights. In any case, though, I'd say students struggle more with Pauline chronology than they do with Paul and the Law.

3) What about exegetical method for reading Paul? Should I introduce and have them practice exegeting Pauline texts?

I think I'd be inclined to avoid talking too much about "exegesis" because it tends to make the students think of the text as a kind of code that needs to be cracked, and that can only be cracked if you learn about this mysterious thing called "exegesis". I talk about reading and interpreting the text, and these sound much less threatening and mysterious. But yes, one should definitely get the students stuck into the text. I set students one piece of reading from Paul before every class, and one piece of scholarship. And we also do extensive reading from the text in class. On the general question of text and theme, I try to build from the first half of the course, where I introduce the methods and the texts, to the second half of the course where we go thematic. The value of this, I think, is that it provides the proper basis for the students to understand properly things like Paul's soteriology, realizing that discussion of it is grounded in contextually specific letters; it discourages the kind of proof-texting approach that inevitably happens if one leaps straight into themes at the beginning. I like the students to get to know Paul, his personality and his life's battles before they start saying anything about his views on ethics (and so on).

4) What should I use for textbooks? Is there a good accessible primer on Paul? (Of course when Mike's book comes out this will be the class text)

I have previously commented here on my distaste for the American style textbook culture. University education, at least in the humanities, should be about critical engagement with the literature and it is difficult for students to do this if they have a central textbook that is their guide for the whole. It encourages a fact-based, accumulation of knowledge model of teaching that is condescending to university students who have come to develop their abilities to engage in intellectual exchange. Having said that, it can be useful to have a couple of good starting points for a given course. Last time around, I recommended two books as good starters for the Life and Letters of Paul, David Horrell's Introduction to the Study of Paul and E. P. Sanders's Paul: A Very Short Introduction. But they are only starter texts, and the key is to encourage students to read as widely as possible. For that, there are dozens of useful texts available on the internet, and I supplement those with one or two extras on Blackboard, as well as setting a research paper that encourages them to read more widely still.

I'll be teaching Paul again in the autumn (the fall, as it's called here) and I look forward to comparing notes with Joel and perhaps others too.