We're all just a little mixed up here

I renewed the mixed-up.com domain name today for another nine years. We'll be happily dancing, computing and blowing smoke until at least February 2014.

We've had this domain name since 1998. It has always been hosted at www.rawbandwidth.com
Raw Bandwidth Communications, although in 1998 they were known as Tsoft. Thanks to *Chris Songer* for telling me about them (among many other things I owe him thanks for).

Why mixed-up.com? Well, the name goes back to way before the internet. Around 1989, I had the late *Milt Strong* make me square dance badges that said "Mixed-Up Squares." The name comes from the old C2 square dance call "Mixed-Up Square Thru," which you can look up on the
www.mixed-up.com/dict/ square dance dictionary page.

The name is also a commentary on the skills of the square dancers I have workshopped with over the years. :-) I've enjoyed "inducting" dancers into the Mixed-Up Squares when I see them flailing in a C2 workshop, unable to remember how to do "Fan the Top" (a mainstream call).

The mixed-up phenomenon is a little less noticable among round dancers. It may be that in round dancing one has to work with only one other dancer (the partner) in order to complete a routine. Thus the chances of working with a mixed-up person is 86% lower when round dancing (there is only one other person) than when square dancing (there are seven other people).

This of course doesn't take into account that the person doing the calculating is the one who is mixed up ... in that case, the chances of having a mixed-up person in your couple or or square go up to near 100%.

mixed-up.com

A Nation of Faith and Religious Illiterates

Los Angeles Times Commentary By Stephen Prothero

The Dutch are four times less likely than Americans to believe in miracles, hell and biblical inerrancy. The euro does not trust in God. But here is the paradox: Although Americans are far more religious than Europeans, they know far less about religion.

In Europe, religious education is the rule from the elementary grades on. So Austrians, Norwegians and the Irish can tell you about the Seven Deadly Sins or the Five Pillars of Islam. But, according to a 1997 poll, only one out of three U.S. citizens is able to name the most basic of Christian texts, the four Gospels.

U.S. Catholics, evangelicals and Jews have been lamenting for some time a crisis of religious literacy in their ranks.

When Americans debated slavery, almost exclusively on the basis of the Bible, people of all races and classes could follow the debate. They could make sense of its references to the runaway slave in the New Testament book of Philemon and to the year of jubilee, when slaves could be freed, in the Old Testament book of Leviticus. Today it is a rare American who can engage with any sophistication in biblically inflected arguments about gay marriage, abortion or stem cell research.

Since 9/11, President Bush has been telling us that "Islam is a religion of peace," while evangelist Franklin Graham (Billy's son) has insisted otherwise. Who is right? Americans have no way to tell because they know virtually nothing about Islam. Such ignorance imperils our public life, putting citizens in the thrall of talking heads.

How did this happen? How did one of the most religious countries in the world become a nation of religious illiterates? Religious congregations are surely at fault. Churches and synagogues that once inculcated the "fourth R" are now telling the faithful stories "ripped from the headlines" rather than teaching them the Ten Commandments or parsing the Sermon on the Mount (which was delivered, as only one in three Americans can tell you, by Jesus).

Americans -- of both the religious and the secular variety -- need to understand religion. Resolving in 2005 to read for yourself either the Bible or the Koran (or both) might not be a bad place to start.

http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-oe-prothero12jan12,1,3110459.story?ctrack=2&cset=true

C1 and C2 Definitions Posted

When we danced at Ben Rubright's C3A week at McCloud Dance Country last September, I asked Ben for permission to post his C1 and C2 definitions  on this web site. At that time, my database consisted only of C3 and C4 calls.

Ben gave permission to do so, and I've just finished posting his definitions. So now the database includes most calls from C1 through C4. (Many of the newer C4 concepts are not in the database.)

My database actually contains a lot more than just definitions. It also includes starting and ending formations for most calls, and some bibliographic information such as author, call number in Burleson's Encyclopedia, and so on. There are also pictures for many C3-C4 calls.

The calls Ben contributed each contain the attribution "Definition courtesy of Ben Rubright." The bibliographic information is from Clark Baker's infamous Lisp database. I quickly scratched out
the starting and ending formations myself, and if there are any errors you can blame those on me, not on Ben or Clark.

Unfortunately, there were few pictures for C1 and C2 calls in Clark's database, and I don't have time to put them together from scratch right now. So you'll find only a few pictures for C1 and C2 calls.

The database is here:
www.mixed-up.com/definitions/