42 Astounding Scripts

There are several hymns sung to the tune of the “Irish folk melody” Slane. It’s a storied tune, supposedly named after the Irish Hill of Slane were St. Patrick “lit an Easter fire in defiance of the pagan king Lóegaire”. It’s also very evocative. I first heard the tune in Lord of All Hopefulness, which ends each line with a countdown of the passing day: the break of the day, the noon of the day, the eve of the day, and the end of the day.

But my favorite is Be Thou My Vision, using words translated from a much earlier Irish poem. The original is, by tradition, attributed to the Irish poet and saint Dallán Forgaill. According to online sources, Mary Elizabeth Byrne translated “Rop Tú Mo Baile” from a Middle Gaelic poem to an English-language poem, and published it in 1905. Eleanor Hull “versified” the poem in 1912, though I can’t see whether she was versifying Byrne’s translations or going back to the original Gaelic.¹

It’s not just that this earlier date puts it into the public domain that makes it my favorite—although that helps! As much as I enjoy Lord of All Hopefulness, there’s something contrived about its lyrics. In contrast, Be Thou My Vision is heartfelt and simple.

Looking at the various versions, the conversion from poem to hymn is an interesting class in how to translate a very personal prayer into a hymn to be sung during Catholic Mass.

Earlier this year I discovered the Brian Setzer Orchestra’s Boogie Woogie Christmas at a garage sale in Michigan. Their version of O Holy Night reminded me just how wonderful and inspiring a song O Holy Night is. And after a difficult year, how much it expresses the yearning and emptiness that celebrating Christmas both secularly and religiously can fill.

• • Long lay the world in sin and error pining,
  • Till He appeared and the soul felt its worth.

“A thrill of hope, the weary world rejoices…” Some Christmases we need the opportunity for rejoicing more than others.

There are three verses, but in my experience, “O Holy Night” is almost always sung with only the first verse. Partly I suspect that’s because the second and third verses don’t scan very well, and in addition the third verse’s mention of slavery is viewed as somewhat outdated. The line wasn’t initially directed at American slavery: the original lyrics were French. They were written in after the French revolution, in 1843; my guess is that the slaves in the lyrics almost certainly referred to French citizens, no longer slaves of the King and other royalty.

The lyrics were translated into English by Bostonian John Sullivan Dwight in 1855. Dwight’s translation is very loose, but the original third verse’s “Il voit un frère où n’était qu’un esclave…” tracks very closely with Dwight’s “for the slave is our brother”.

I can find no evidence that Dwight was an ardent or even occasional abolitionist. He was a music critic and magazine publisher. He did, apparently, include “the music of black Americans” in his magazine when submitted. The 1855 volumes of his magazine, if the Internet Archive’s OCR is to be trusted, contain no mention of “abolition” other than one about “the abolition of the mock auction system” in the selling of concert tickets and another about the “total abolition of hymn books”. The only mention of “negro” is in reference to music.

I apologize for putting this off for so long; I’ve been expecting to see more changes that need to be made in scripts after upgrading to Ventura, because this is hardly worth a post. But it could be very annoying if you’re relying on padmath.

Padmath stopped working after upgrading to Ventura. I noticed that very quickly—it’s one of my most commonly-used Services. But it’s a simple fix. The version of bc on Ventura now has an abs function. This means that abs is now a reserved word, and cannot be used to create a custom function.

Since the custom function was just a means of adding an abs function anyway, delete the lines that define the custom abs function and padmath will start working again.

I haven’t yet noticed any other issues with using the scripts under Ventura.

Make sure Script Menu is enabled in Script Editor.

I am an information packrat; I never throw out emails, and have messages dating back to the last century. I manage this using hierarchical mailboxes to keep the archives from cluttering up my Mail window.

I have Rules set up to send various messages directly to the mailbox where they should be stored, and then Smart Mailboxes to display unread messages of various classifications: Unread Mail, Unread Mass Mails, Unread Spammy, and Unread Junk, each less critical than the previous.

In the past, it’s been easy enough to see where any message is stored. The macOS Mail app has acted like any other application on the Mac: documents (i.e., messages) could display the full path to the document by option-clicking the document’s title (i.e., the message’s subject) in the window’s title bar.

As far as I can tell, this is no longer possible. Mail has been moving away from a document-based model toward a flat, search-based model, and no longer makes it easy—or even possible—to find the full path to a viewed message. The immediate parent mailbox’s name is displayed in the sidebar, but the mailbox’s parent is nowhere to be found. So that I can see easily enough that the order I’m waiting on is in the eBay mailbox. But not that the eBay mailbox is in the Purchases mailbox of the Finances mailbox. The latter two are completely hidden.

Obviously, however, the Mail app itself knows where these messages are, and that information can be displayed using AppleScript.