Mark 4:21-25

This is the parable about not hiding your light under a bushel, except I didn't realise it at first, because modern translations just say "people don't put their lamp under a basket", which makes a lot more sense.

I never knew what a bushel actually was. I had a vague idea it was a pile of grain or something. Apparently it's a unit of dry weight, or a woven basket of that size.

I also note, the meaning seems to be about the metaphor of hiding a physical lamp under a basket, not of hiding radiated light under a basket, though they have the same meaning.

The version in Mark isn't very clear to me -- it's clear we're not supposed to hide something, but I can't easily tell what. Our awesome Jesus-following-ness is one interpretation, but it could almost equally well be "don't hide things you're ashamed of, they'll come out anyway, own up to them now"

Whereas Matthew explicitly says something close to the modern colloquial meaning "let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven."

How to make an opening bid

On the train home from London, we joked that there should be a flow chart telling you what to bid in a given situation. (Obviously bridge-playing computer programs already do this.) As an experiment, I started writing one up, and even for the most systematic bids, the opening bids, it was surprisingly complicated. I don't think the result was actually very useful, but I thought the process was very instructive for what it told me about how I actually make the decision.

One thing is, most of the casual players I know pretty much have internalised everything below, even though there seems like an awful lot of it. There are occasional edge cases where it's easy to forget to do something which will make a difference three bids from now, but mostly, for anyone I play with/against regularly, I'd normally trust their opening bid to be accurate.

One of the things I find hard to convey is the different sorts of bids. Not just the next bid, but that you're choosing a strategy for the rest of the bidding sequence. If you have 2 points, you will almost always make the weakest bid available at every round (which is almost always pass, but not always). If you have 12 points, you will open the bidding but thereafter make the weakest bid available, because you've already told partner all the strength you have, and anything more you say would tell partner you have more strength. If you have 19 points (or 4-5 losers), you will open at the one level, not 2C, but if partner responds at all you know you almost certainly have the combined strength for game, so priority #1 is to make sure you bid game, and bids before that are only useful if they help you choose _which_ game, or help you choose whether to try to bid slam.

I include the list below, although:

• I've deliberately simplified some things I didn't think I had room to explain, so do point out corrections and omissions if you think they'd be helpful, but don't assume I don't know them
  
• I wrote the system I use most often, but didn't put it the differences if I play strong NT or strong 2s, etc
  
• Given occasional omissions I don't know if it would be more helpful or more misleading for anyone actually trying to learn more

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