Aliens in This World

2006-02-04T05:41:00.000-05:00

Moving Day!

I'm tired of Google's complicity with China, and Google owns Blogspot these days. So I'm moving this blog over to Wordpress. They're the same people that own Livejournal, but it's a format and not the annoyance of LJ. They also made it extremely easy to import not only my posts here, but even the comments.

So come over and visit me at http://suburbanbanshee.wordpress.com/.

As for the rest... I'll be leaving the old blog posts here, for the convenience of those who've linked to them and to prevent spammers from taking over my old blog's URL. I'll also be moving my public domain audiobook podcast blog, as sloon as I can figure out how to fix it so that people don't have to change their feeds.

Yes, I'm aware that I need to change my email address and find a new search engine if I wish to avoid doing business with Maogle. But this is what I can do now.

2006-01-29T18:19:00.000-05:00

Another One of Those Tests....

You Are a Dreaming Soul

Your vivid emotions and imagination takes you away from this world
So much so that you tend to live in your head most of the time
You have great dreams and ambitions that could be the envy of all...
But for you, following through with your dreams is a bit difficult

You are charming, endearing, and people tend to love you.
Forgiving and tolerant, you see the world through rose colored glasses.
Underneath it all, you have a ton of passion that you hide from others.
Always hopeful, you tend to expect positive outcomes in your life.

Souls you are most compatible with: Newborn Soul, Prophet Soul, and Traveler Soul

What Kind of Soul Are You?

I'm not so sure I'm always hopeful. Or charming and endearing. Also, I think "vivid emotions" is a little too nice of a way to put it. *eg* Otherwise, this isn't too far off.

2006-01-28T09:39:00.000-05:00

Get Ed Gets Good

Over on ABC Family Channel, there's a pretty decent slate of Saturday and Sunday morning cartoons for the young 'uns. Of course, I watch 'em too. (Not much of the Sunday ones, though! As we all know, I'm up the hill half of Sunday!) Anyway, other than The Tick, Kong, and the inimitable Super Robot Monkey Team Hyper Force, my favorite show there is Get Ed. It's a decent enough action show, and it's had a story arc from the beginning. (Also, it has a sock puppet as a character.) But I wasn't all that excited about it. I mean, every week the Dojo Delivery team tried to keep the Big Bad Guy from stealing their courier packages, or tried to steal Big Bad Guy packages from other courier companies. So Ed was an alien-built cyber-warrior with flashes of foreknowledge who was reassembled from parts by his boss. We've all seen that before, haven't we? :)

But as Ed's found a missing part of himself and the Dojo Delivery team have made friends out of hostile robots, the show has grown ever more endearing and interesting. Until this week, when the team rescued Ed from the Big Bad Guy, and Ed revealed that he'd had a vision of where he was supposed to go.

Unexpectedly, we met up with a good guy from the future -- who looks like a future version of the Big Bad Guy! Erh?! He helps Ed and the others escape, using nanobots to turn a junkyard into a giant robot. Erh?! And then, in a surprising change from the usual plotlines about a Chosen One, Ed has all his friends join him in the Secret Ancient Alien Machine so that they all get a briefing and a power-up symbol.

Including Old School, their geezer hacker skateboarder boss.

Dude! That just isn't done! The adult never gets to play! Especially not the father!

So yeah, I'm interested.

2006-01-28T09:33:00.000-05:00

Well, That Was Weird.

For some reason, Blogger didn't want to let me back on and was claiming my cookies weren't working. So I deleted my Firefox cache, and then it turned out I hadn't logged out of Blogger.

*spooky ominous music*

My theory is that the bad karma and the outraged Chinese gods are already attacking Google... and worse is yet to come....

*segue to ominous symphonic crescendo*

Run, Google, run! The Kitchen God's about to report back to Heaven on Chinese New Year!

2006-01-28T06:11:00.000-05:00

St. Augustine on Rape

I was over reading the Catholic Answers forums last night, which is always interesting, and specifically their Ask an Apologist feature, which is often enlightening. Anyway, back on the 9th, some lady had written in, sure that the Church didn't think rape victims were guiltless. Her evidence for this was that St. Maria Goretti was praised for fighting back.

*pounds head against wall*

This is especially frustrating, since when I was young, stories about St. Maria Goretti made it sound like she didn't fight back. Also, that she was an ethereal maiden and not a robust young Italian version of the song's "Irish agricultural girl". Apparently, the culture thinks Maria Goretti is damned if she does and damned if she doesn't.

But, moving on...

Anyway, the apologist gave a good answer. But I kept thinking about the beginning of St. Augustine's City of God. No, I haven't read the whole thing. But the first part, written right after the sack of Rome by Alaric's Visigoths, deals with the problems of such an event. One of them is the rape of Christian consecrated virgins.

Pagan Romans felt that raped women had lost their honor, and that it could only be regained by killing themselves, like the famous Lucretia of legend. We know that many cultures today still teach this sort of behavior -- most notably the Muslims. But for Christians, such an idea was wicked foolishness, on many levels.

St. Augustine attacks this problem head on. First of all, he proclaims that "the virtue which makes the life good has its throne in the soul, and thence rules the members of the body, which becomes holy in virtue of the holiness of the will; and that while the will remains firm and unshaken, nothing that another person does with the body, or upon the body, is any fault of the person who suffers it, so long as he cannot escape it without sin."

He acknowledged that people who are raped feel "shame invades even a thoroughly pure spirit from which modesty has not departed -- shame, lest that act which could not be suffered without some sensual pleasure, should be believed to have been committed also with some assent of the will."

First, he says (as an act of pastoral comfort to those worried about the fate of suicides' souls) that "even if some of these virgins killed themselves to avoid such disgrace, who that has any human feeling would refuse to forgive them?" (Normally, suicide was considered back then as an aggressive, controlling, act of defiance against God and the world. Considering the culture, it may well have been.)

But then he makes sure to emphasize that if a woman refused to commit suicide, she was doing a good thing, not being shameless and wicked as the local culture said. "Why, then, should a person who has done no wrong do wrong to himself, and by killing himself kill the innocent to escape another's guilty act, and perpetrate upon himself a sin of his own, that the sin of another may not be perpetrated on him?"

Furthermore, he insists that "what sane man can suppose that, if his body be seized and forcibly made use of to satisfy the lust of another, he thereby loses his purity?" In fact, the soul's intention sanctifies the body, no matter what has been done to it by others against its will.

"For the sanctity of the body does not consist in the integrity of its members, nor in their exemption from all touch; for they are exposed to various accidents which do violence to and wound them, and the surgeons who administer relief often perform operations that sicken the spectator. A midwife, suppose, has (whether maliciously or accidentally, or through unskillfulness) destroyed the virginity of some girl, while endeavoring to ascertain it: I suppose no one is so foolish as to believe that, by this destruction of the integrity of one organ, the virgin has lost anything even of her bodily sanctity. And thus, so long as the soul keeps this firmness of purpose which sanctifies even the body, the violence done by another's lust makes no impression on this bodily sanctity, which is preserved intact by one's own persistent continence."

"This, then, is our position, and it seems sufficiently lucid. We maintain that when a woman is violated while her soul admits no consent to the iniquity, but remains inviolably chaste, the sin is not hers, but his who violates her."

He also rips on the story of Lucretia: "But how is it, that she who was no partner to the crime bears the heavier punishment of the two? For the adulterer was only banished along with his father; she suffered the extreme penalty. If that was not impurity by which she was unwillingly ravished, then this is not justice by which she, being chaste, is punished."

The pagan Romans argue that suicide is a good way to prevent women getting interested in their rapist. (Clearly they've been watching General Hospital too much.) Augustine slaps this down, too.

"Now, in the first place, the soul which is led by God and His wisdom, rather than by bodily concupiscence, will certainly never consent to the desire aroused in its own flesh by another's lust. And, at all events, if it be true, as the truth plainly declares, that suicide is a detestable and damnable wickedness, who is such a fool as to say, 'Let us sin now, that we may obviate a possible future sin; let us now commit murder, lest we perhaps afterwards should commit adultery'? If we are so controlled by iniquity that innocence is out of the question, and we can at best but make a choice of sins, is not a future and uncertain adultery preferable to a present and certain murder? Is it not better to commit a wickedness which penitence may heal, than a crime which leaves no place for healing contrition?

"I say this for the sake of those men or women who fear they may be enticed into consenting to their violator's lust, and think they should lay violent hands on themselves, and so prevent, not another's sin, but their own. But far be it from the mind of a Christian confiding in God, and resting in the hope of His aid; far be it, I say, from such a mind to yield a shameful consent to pleasures of the flesh, howsoever presented. And if that lustful disobedience, which still dwells in our mortal members, follows its own law irrespective of our will, surely its motions in the body of one who rebels against them are as blameless as its motions in the body of one who sleeps."

Later, he points out that if people are supposed to kill themselves to avoid one sin, obviously these folks would advocate everybody killing themselves. Right after getting baptized, preferably. After all, that's the only sure way to avoid sinning, right?

But before that, he moves to the point which the forum questioner raised, of saints who heroically got themselves killed. In Augustine's case, actually, he deals with virgin martyrs who heroically resisted pagan Roman attacks by throwing themselves into rivers, etc.

"Of such persons I do not presume to speak rashly. I cannot tell whether there may not have been vouchsafed to the church some divine authority, proved by trustworthy evidences, for so honoring their memory: it may be that it is so.

"It may be they were not deceived by human judgment, but prompted by divine wisdom, to their act of self-destruction. We know that this was the case with Samson. And when God enjoins any act, and intimates by plain evidence that He has enjoined it, who will call obedience criminal? Who will accuse so religious a submission? But then, every man is not justified in sacrificing his son to God, because Abraham was commendable in so doing."

Augustine ends by telling the women, "Let not your life, then, be a burden to you, ye faithful servants of Christ, though your chastity was made the sport of your enemies. You have a grand and true consolation, if you maintain a good conscience, and know that you did not consent to the sins of those who were permitted to commit sinful outrage upon you." He tells them to say to the pagans, "our God is everywhere present, wholly everywhere; not confined to any place. He can be present unperceived, and be absent without moving; when He exposes us to adversities, it is either to prove our perfections or correct our imperfections; and in return for our patient endurance of the sufferings of time, He reserves for us an everlasting reward."

The Fathers of the Church are separated from us by time and culture. But this is no true separation for all those of us who are members of the Body of Christ. They have a lot to say to us today, if we are prepared to listen with sympathy.

Btw, you may have noticed on the encyclical reading over on my podcast blog that I pronounce the man's name as "AW-guh-steen". However, the preferred pronunciation among the English-influenced is "ah-GUH-stin". I say they're both correct (but point out that my pronunciation is a lot closer to the Latin, via Spanish), so I will continue pronouncing the man's name like the city in Florida. (Which I visited when I was five. It's a bit late to change now.) However, I will note that the really correct Anglicization of "Augustinus" is Chaucer's "Austin". So there. (Naeh!)

2006-01-27T23:36:00.000-05:00

Unhappy....

Apparently, Blogger thinks I've got a spam blog. So I have to type in these stupid characters until such time as they get a human person over here to look at my blog.

Guess I shouldn't have posted about all that bad stuff China's doing, huh?

Okay, that was mean. But I still can't figure out why their algorithm or whatever thinks this place might be a spam blog. Do I link too much or something?

Sigh. Whatever.

2006-01-27T23:35:00.000-05:00

Good Food Alert!

On Jan. 29 -- this Sunday -- Chinese New Year and Vietnamese New Year (Tet) begin! This means that, if you have a Chinese, Vietnamese, or international grocery in your area, this would be a good time to go pick up a few yummy things.

Like rice cakes. And bean cakes. Mmmm.

2006-01-27T22:15:00.000-05:00

Thinking of Gerard....

A lot of passages from the Pope's new encyclical, "Deus Caritas Est", made me think of Gerard, one of St. Blog's departed faithful. (You can also visit his site, which his relatives have left up.) So, a quote from the encyclical, Gerard-style:

In the love-story recounted by the Bible, he comes towards us, he seeks to win our hearts, all the way to the Last Supper, to the piercing of his heart on the Cross, to his appearances after the Resurrection and to the great deeds by which, through the activity of the Apostles, he guided the nascent Church along its path.

2006-01-24T21:15:00.000-05:00

Sources

The first time I read this, it was quoted at the beginning of Edgar Allan Poe's "Murders in the Rue Morgue". Sayers quoted it too. But later I read it in the source, Sir Thomas Browne's "Urn-Burial":

What Song the Syrens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women, though puzling Questions are not beyond all conjecture. What time the persons of these Ossuaries entered the famous Nations of the dead, and slept with Princes and Counsellours, might admit a wide solution. But who were the proprietaries of these bones, or what bodies these ashes made up, were a question above Antiquarism.

But who was Browne quoting? For that, we go to Laudator Temporis Actii on "The Pleasures of Pedantry":

Tiberius was fond of questions like this, according to Suetonius (Life of Tiberius 70.3, tr. J.C. Rolfe):

Yet his special aim was a knowledge of mythology, which he carried to a silly and laughable extreme; for he used to test even the grammarians, a class of men in whom, as I have said, he was especially interested, by questions something like this: "Who was Hecuba's mother?" "What was the name of Achilles among the maidens?" "What were the Sirens in the habit of singing?"

maxime tamen curavit notitiam historiae fabularis usque ad ineptias atque derisum; nam et grammaticos, quod genus hominum praecipue, ut diximus, appetebat, eius modi fere quaestionibus experiebatur: "quae mater Hecubae, quod Achilli nomen inter virgines fuisset, quid Sirenes cantare sint solitae."

Knowing this makes me very happy. So I guess I too am a pedant!

Wikipedia on "Urn Burial"

2006-01-23T21:49:00.000-05:00

Requiescat in Pace

Late on Friday night, one of my neighbors, a middle-aged lady with many health problems, had a heart attack. She apparently tried to consult one of my other neighbors, who's a nurse. She got no answer at the door, so she left a note and went and sat down by her own door with a pillow. That's where she died, not long after midnight, before the nurse came home. All alone. The only good thing is that she doesn't seem to have felt much pain or realized she was as sick as she was. (We're only about three minutes from a hospital. If she'd felt that sick, she would've called.)

The whole thing is spooking the apartment building pretty fierce. Normally, somebody would have been in that hallway on a Friday night. But somehow, nobody was. Normally, the ambulance and the commotion with the police would have woken everybody up, too. But mostly, it didn't.

There's been a lot of gunk going around, so I think a lot of folks were just like me. I was sick, so I went to bed early with a big dose of cough medicine. None of the comings and goings all weekend even registered on me, since I was staying in my apartment or in bed most of the time.

All the same, it doesn't seem like anyone should have to die alone like that. So surely God was with her when the rest of us failed her. Surely.

Grant her eternal rest, O Lord, and may light eternal shine upon her.

2006-01-23T21:46:00.000-05:00

"Chris Johnson, Anglican Investigator" Returns!

This time, the name of the game is "Switcheroo".

Amy Welborn shut her eyes and was silent for a few moments. Then she sighed, reached into her briefcase and handed me a piece of paper. "Two weeks ago, Bishop Sullivan delivered that sermon."

I began to read. "In the name of God the Creator, God the Redeemer and God the Sanctifier." I looked at Nicky and said, "Uh oh."

2006-01-22T22:24:00.000-05:00

The Audiobook Problem

So why is my iPod still bookless two weeks post Christmas?

I won't pay the price that's being asked. I won't pay hardcover prices for a digital file. I won't even pay trade paperback prices. I believe that a digital book should cost about the same as a paperback.

Amen.

I know my Maria Lectrix podcast is more than a little quirky, but I really need something in the way of an audiobook to listen to at work. (Radio's just not enough.) I need to feel like I'm doing some kind of uploading to pay for all that downloading from Librivox and other audiobook podcasts. And I can't go to the library every five minutes to feed the need. So there you go.

Just to prove that this blog puts its time where its mouth is, the folks behind it have put up a serialized podcast of hackoff.com, a mystery novel set waaaaaay back in the days of the dotcom bubble. (That was about twenty years ago in Internet time.)

2006-01-18T12:33:00.000-05:00

Things That Make My Brain Ooze from My Ears, Part 1

People who read strongly rhythmic and rhymed poetry out loud and try to make it sound like free verse, thus laming the horse instead of riding it.

Poets were sometimes the rock stars of other eras -- and part of their power was the primal interaction of sound and rhythm, combined with the more cerebral pleasures of imagery and meaning. If you don't combine them, your reading is going to sound horrible. Like William Shatner "singing".

I don't care how much your English teacher feared you sounding "singsong". A prosy drone with no rhythm and no power is worse.

A poem with a driving beat is not the same as a lyrical piece of free verse, any more than a dance hit is the same as a meandering 30 minute guitar solo. Pay attention to the poem. Read what it says, the way it says. Otherwise, you're not reading the poem at all.

2006-01-17T18:54:00.000-05:00

Iran: In the Fire of Spring?

In case you've been totally out of touch with world events, Iran is just a tad bit volatile these days. The people don't like the mullahs anymore. They run corrupt elections. They ban everything fun, including the big Spring family holiday, Nourooz, celebrating the traditional New Year on the spring equinox. So every year on Nourooz for the last few years, the students and the people have been demonstrating. And burning mullahs' cars and houses, just to make their point clear.

The current president is not just a hardliner mullah; he also thinks the Mahdi is coming. And since it turned out that Khomeini wasn't, he thinks he's probably he's it. (Roll your Paul Atreides clip here....) He has visions of being clothed in a beautiful light and an Armageddon battle in Iraq. Near the holy city of Najaf.

Oh, yeah, and he's got this thing for developing nukes. Not to mention several Saddam scientist alumni in fun fields like biological and chemical weaponry.

Meanwhile, the holy Shi'ite city of Najaf, in Iran, is now open to just about anyone who wants to go there for the first time in years. So the faithful Shi'ites from Iraq and Iran are back to regarding Najaf's mullahs as the authorities on what to do to be a faithful Shi'ite. Najaf's mullahs, who now advocate democracy. Instead of Khomeini's mullahs in Iran, who only came to prominence there because Saddam had pretty much shut down and cut off the mullahs of Najaf.

And Ahmadinejad, who has method and motive and can create opportunity, is dreaming of an Armageddon battle near Najaf. Convenient for him, isn't it.

But he has to move fast, because Nourooz is coming, and the Iranian people are angry, and the Iraqi people are growing strong.

So what will happen? Will the Iranian people jump over the bonfires on Chaharshanbeh Souri without getting burned? Will it be out with the old, and in with the new -- freedom, peace with Iraq, and prosperity for all?

Or, God forbid, will the fires of Spring be the consuming kind?

The bird of Time has but a little way
To flutter -- and the bird is on the wing.

On a more hopeful note, if anybody out there wants to invite me to a Nourooz party...

...and 2006 is also the Year of the Dog according to the old Persian year calendar.

2006-01-06T16:17:00.000-05:00

Just a Quick Check-In....

Greetings from the Southern Command of the House Ui Bhriain! All is well here, although there are heavy emotional downpours in our future. (Grandma sorta kinda didn't mention the bit where she'd totalled her car. Back in October. And the insurance company refused to pay for it. And she consulted her buddies, her boyfriend, and an attorney, but didn't tell any of her kids or other relatives....) But at least everything is going well on the health front, and that's what really matters.

I got very interested in Sudoku right before the trip. But now I know how to do them, so the fascination has passed. After all, there's not much fun in putting numbers in order, over and over again. I think I will try next to conquer cryptic crosswords -- but I hold out no great hopes. Those things are pure evil and extremely specialized, and no amount of punning knowledge is of any aid to you.

That's about it from me. See you all in another week and a half or so.

2006-01-01T08:08:00.000-05:00

Happy New Year! And Merry Chrisbris!

Since Cacciaguida has coined the perfect word to describe the old Feast of the Circumcision, I figure I need to use it as often as possible.

Not that I'm dissing the Feast of Mary, Mother of God. Heck, no. Considering how many people on the Internet seem to be closet Nestorians, we need to proclaim that Mary is Theotokos as often as we can. But heck, if you don't believe Mary's the Mother of God, you're well on your way to becoming either an Arian (Jesus isn't God, he's just really special) or a Docetist (Jesus was just God wearing an elaborate costume. He didn't really share in our human pains and troubles; he just pretended that he did.)

But it does seem anti-ecumenical to give up the Feast of the Circumcision, doesn't it?

2005-12-31T06:45:00.000-05:00

Department of the Best Things in Life Are Free, Computer Division

If you're a parent whose kids didn't get a new computer game for Christmas -- or if they did, and they've already beaten it -- or if you're feeling in need of a new game yourself -- you probably ought to look into freeware games.

Moreover, if you want to play one of those MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game), you don't have to shell out money for a monthly subscription. There are quite a few free MMORPGs out there which are free to download, free to play, and just as fun to play as the big-name ones. But pick carefully. Some games are free, but playing them on the server isn't... which means it's not really free.

Maple Story is a good example of a company-run semi-free MMORPG. It comes from Singapore, but folks from all over the world play. It's only got 2D graphics, but those graphics are charming. It's still a work in progress, but the world is big, the community seems nice, and you can't waste your time on pointless player vs. player battles. What's not to like?

However, not everything is free. The money-making idea is that there are items in the game (character facial expressions, non-stardard issue clothing, and similar cute things) which customize your character and can be bought with earned-in-game money. But what if you really really want something and don't have the in-game money? Why, you pay real money to get a card full of game money. Devious, huh? But wait, there's more! Some of these cute items only exist for 90 days or so. At which point, you'll naturally want more cute stuff for your character, so....

Yes, there are games out there which are absolutely free, whose creators don't even ask for shareware donations. There are also whole communities of people who love to play games so much that they'll even play untested freeware games and tell you what's good, bad, and indifferent.

Acid Play seems to be a very solid site for freeware downloads and reviews. You can pick out free games by genre, or look up at the top for lists of the best rated freeware games out there. There are even forums to discuss the game or get help. You can also download trial versions of commercial games.

If you like a free game but it's giving you trouble, you can also search the Web for the game name and "walkthrough" or "manual".

2005-12-31T00:24:00.000-05:00

Bible Comics... Sorta.

Okay, this link is definitely twisted and not really work-safe, but since the good bits made me laugh hugely....

A comics retelling of the Bible, as told by a guy who has trouble remembering the plot.

But it's funny on purpose, see, because his buddy (raised Catholic) is amused by the fact his non-religious friend never learned any of this stuff except what he picked up from pop culture, as those whose parents are heathens don't have to go to CCD class. The raised-Catholic guy then proceeded to transcribe the non-religious guy's oral retelling and turn it into a script. (This would be really cruel, except that clearly, the non-religious guy also had a little fun with the retelling. The apostle Levon?) Then the non-religious guy illustrated the script. (With Sharpies!)

Typical narration:

Next up are Cain and Abel, Adam and Eve's kids.

Cain killed Abel, because he was jealous over something.

Maybe a girl? I don't remember.

The scary thing is, this comics interpretation is actually more accurate than many things I've seen written about the Bible on the Internet. Definitely better than Jack Chick comics. Probably a good insight into a non-Christian Everyman's Bible knowledge, for all you apologists and evangelists.

And really, some of the illos aren't bad at all, especially given the context. I think Mary comes off rather well. Not to mention some of the crucifixion scenes.

Of course, it's a bit depressing that some cartooning fanboy without religion and with Sharpies can do a better religious illustration as part of a joke than a lot of folks who get paid to do this. But let's focus on the positive here.

2005-12-30T17:09:00.000-05:00

Dog Health Alert!

Little did I know, but my parents were very busy last night. Our Irish wolfhound Liath was a very sick little hound indeed. Her stomach swelled up hard and hollow like a drum and stopped making digestive noises, she kept retching and hacking unproductively, she foamed gunky slobber at the mouth, she didn't want to lay down, her heart raced, and she kept trying to find a place to hide.

What they (and I) didn't know is that this is called bloat. It's the earlier form of that killer condition, torsion -- which is when the stomach or the intestines get twisted by all that gassy bloat. But even if torsion didn't occur, the chances were extremely good that Liath was going to die from bloat alone.

Now, my parents did give Liath simethicone anti-gas pills, which was exactly right. And it probably didn't hurt that they gave her plain yogurt and massaged her stomach to try to release the gas.

But they did not take her to the 24 hour vet hospital, and that was wrong. If need be, the vet could have released the gas with a needle directly through the stomach wall, given her other helpful medicines, and used an X-ray to find out what else was going on in her innards -- like torsion. If they had taken her, she would have gotten immediate attention. Bloat is always a dire emergency. It is nothing to fool around with. (And some dogs even re-bloat, right after getting their stomachs decompressed!)

Bloat makes lots of bad things happen to a dog's body -- toxins in the blood, heart strain, bloodveins to important organs blocked, important tissue slowly dying -- and torsion is even worse. Dogs can have heart attacks or go into shock, too. If any of these things happen, the dog can die in less than an hour, or suffer on and on for an interminable time before having a painful death. So the fact they didn't go to the vet is pretty scary. (Especially since they suspected it might be something like torsion, and we lost one of our previous wolfhounds to that.)

As it happened, Liath finally managed to pass a mighty burst of wind through her constipated guts, and that seems to have relieved the whole problem. (If a dog manages to burp, that's also a good sign.) But frankly, I'd be a lot happier if Mom and Dad would take Liath for a checkup before they take her on vacation. (Especially since they're traveling to a state not known for medicos who care about their patients, so I assume that veterinary care is probably as bad or worse.)

Bloat and torsion are more common in deep-chested dogs, like Irish wolfhounds. But all dogs can get it. So please be aware of the symptoms.

The major cause of the disease is not understood well at all, but it seems to be associated with wolfing down dry kibble, drinking lots of water, jumping around, and then having the bad luck to have the stomach's rhythms disrupted for some unknown reason. The last part is the important part, of course. (Liath didn't drink an unusual amount, didn't run around at all before or after, and only ate her normal evening ration of food.)

The major way to try to prevent the disease is to feed the dog more than once a day. Feeding the dog kibble that's already been sitting in water half an hour, or including more meat or table scraps also seem to reduce the incidence of bloat and torsion. But nothing is sure.

Dogs who have gotten bloat once are more likely to get it again. There is a surgical remedy, though -- sewing part of the stomach to the wall of the body. It sounds gross, but is apparently pretty simple and effective.

Liath was always fed twice a day, since she's always bolted her food. But she is going to four times a day now. I am going to work on my mom to wet down Liath's food a little. Other than that, I don't know what we can do. She can't have surgery, since wolfhounds are apparently notoriously bad at surviving anesthesia.

She seems to be all right now, and I hope she never gets bloat again. But people need to know that this can happen, and what they should do.

"Stomach Bloat in Dogs" by Anita R. Weidinger, D.V.M.

A bloat FAQ

Bloat in dogs

Bloat statistics and risk factors

More bloat statistics

Raised dishes -- good or bad? Plus other comments on the Purdue bloat study.

Bloat First Aid has a list of stages of bloat and appropriate things to do about it.

If you're really desperate, the vet's far away, and your dog's all shocky, here's "How to Tube Your Dog" by Karen Leshkivich, DVM. This article explains how to safely work a tube down a dog's throat to let the air out of his stomach, as well as a few other emergency bloat treatments. Read this and be prepared, I'd say. (If this link disappears, try "tube your dog" as a Google search term, and use the Google cache if need be.)

Bloat First Aid also has pictures of the tube procedure.

Gaysie Mae's bloat story

Signs of bloat noticed by owners.

Bloat links

2005-12-23T07:54:00.000-05:00

Watching Morning Toons....

I tell you, having days off certainly lets you see quite a few interesting shows that you'd normally overlook. (Especially since I don't have kids, and hence don't monitor the shows for the really little kids.)

Cartoon Network has been running a weekday morning show for little kids for the last few years. Tickle is the current name of the block. Peculiarly, the channel runs perpetual parental humor hints at the bottom of the screen. (This part is called Tickle U, and they must be getting a grant for it. Still, I suppose they may be a blessing to really harried young parents.)

Following up on Krypto the Wonder Dog, Alan Burnett has another little kid show -- Firehouse Tales. This pretty much tries to be an American Bob the Builder or Thomas the Tank Engine, except with CGI. I can't tell you how charming the firetruck characters are, with their big googly eyes! But what really strikes me is the exaggerated realism of the backgrounds. It's set in Burbank and surrounding areas, and even I, who visited Burbank all of once, can often tell the exact street that the trucks are traveling by the landmarks. Furthermore, just like in the real LA, the trucks have to take the highway every five minutes to get everywhere. There are tons of ramps and tunnels as well as surface streets, and always, the mountains rising up into the wide Californian sky.

There are a lot of tiny little shows with short segments, too, like the African art-styled show Yoko! Jakamoto! Toto! features the eponymous characters (a bird, an armadillo, and a monkey, respectively) having adventures in which the only conversation consists of saying one of the above names in various tones of voice. It's actually a lot less annoying than Pokemon or Teletubbies doing similar things, and it's clearly for the really young.

Gerald McBoing Boing is a cartoon about a kid who communicates with the rest of the world solely through making sound effects noises. (This is actually pretty cute, too.)

Little Robots looks like stop-motion, though I guess it must be really good CGI. It's about a bunch of little toy-sized robots living in a junkyard, who have built a little town out of junk and spare parts. They apparently live under a dome, and hence have a machine to switch from day to night. The details are really charming.

There's several more shows, but I'm a bit too lazy to watch or describe them all!

2005-12-18T12:05:00.000-05:00

The Candidate

My younger brother, Kevin O'Brien, threw his hat into the ring yesterday. He's running for Ohio state representative in the 70th District (Beavercreek, Fairborn, Xenia, and Bath Township), as a Democrat.

This puts him up against Kevin DeWine, the majority whip over at the statehouse. Who is also, of course, a member of the DeWine political family.

I don't live in the 70th District anymore, and I'm a registered Republican anyway, so I can't help him much in the primaries. My parents are of course conservative Republicans also, so neither can they. But whatever I can do for my brother, I'm plan to do.

To be honest, Taft's crew of Ohio Republicans aren't conservatives either, for the most part, and they've been doing a lousy job of being Republicans or state servants. It is probably unfair to paint every Republican in office with this brush, but I'm not the only Republican who feels mad. So quixotic as it all seems, there still could be a chance. If nothing else, it'll certainly be interesting to see what happens.

So I endorse my brother's candidacy to anybody out there who happens to be interested. He's a moderate Democrat, but he's a pro-military, pro-guns, and pro-life moderate Democrat!

2005-12-18T11:06:00.000-05:00

Sin-Eaters

Something that's been bothering me is an attitude I've been seeing lately. There are a lot of people in this country who, though perfectly willing to accept the good results of military action, are also unwilling either to serve in the military or to support the troops in any way (or in any way beyond lip service). The military is a job too dirty or declasse for them. When extreme pacifism is put into this package, things get worse. Soldiers are not just seen as of some lower class of people, they are also seen as having a lower standard of ethics.

It shouldn't surprise anyone that people like this can't tell the difference between "soldiers should be folks who, if need be, can hunt and kill people without being disabled by it" and "soldiers should be psychopaths".

Now, most people in the military don't let this bad attitude stop them from doing good service. Some emphasize the honor and love inherent in doing for those who wouldn't do anything for them. Some reach for continuity, as repaying the deeds of the past and building for the future. Still others see themselves as the "sheepdogs" that stand between peaceful sheep and violent wolves. But there are some who seem a little too fond of the idea that they are there to do dirty jobs, to sacrifice themselves and even their own souls for what others will not do.

This last is just buying into the idiots' point of view, albeit from the opposite side. The point of having citizen soldiers is the same point as having citizen police -- they do only those things which their fellow citizens would also do, if they had to. If a job is too declasse or dirty for you to do, it's also too dirty for you to hire anyone else to do.

I readily acknowledge that there are jobs that require more skill or physical strength or even courage than I have. I'm perfectly willing to let other people do those things. But I don't want soldiers to have lower standards of ethics or morals than mine -- I think they should have higher ones (at least where their profession is concerned), because their job is dangerous and deals with ethical problems in a very direct way.

If people have blood on their hands in self defense or just war, then they've done nothing wrong. Their souls are clean. But if people have blood on their hands from committing injustice, they're not serving their country or the military profession very well. You can't do a bad thing for a good reason and expect it to turn out well.

I don't want anyone to think their job is to commit sins to save me from dirtying my soul. If a job is too sinful for me to do, nobody should be doing it.

I realize this is a very simple point of view. But there are some things we can't let get too complicated.

2005-12-17T09:06:00.000-05:00

Laogai Delenda Est

Collagen from dead Chinese prisoners, among other types of Chinese body farming for fun and profit.

Prisoners' organs for sale, especially to foreigners. Who know the organs are from prisoners, btw.

'A cadaveric kidney comes from a dead person and in the majority of cases in China, the dead people are prisoners, which allows for us to know at least two weeks ahead of time when the kidney will be ready.'

The corpse art factory in Dalian. Gee, I wonder what happens to all those executed Chinese dissidents?

2005-12-16T15:45:00.000-05:00

Princess of Wands

When you find a book about a Christian paladin in the modern world, and it bears the name of a Tarot card and quotes from Alistair Crowley at the very beginning... it might be a little bit syncretic.

I love Baen Books. I love those folks dearly. But sometimes they are a little bit weird over there. Probably comes of having a Libertarian publisher and a Trotskyist editor.

And John Ringo, God love him, is one of the foci of current Baen weirdness. Good storyteller, odd little quirks. The extended and bizarrely inaccurate riff on menstruation in There Will Be Dragons, in the same book in which he fanboyed all over Heather Alexander. The love of seemingly pointless amounts of gore. The creepiness of even just the sample chapters of Ghost.

And yet, he does improve with every book. Noticeably. As long as people keep on him.

He's not someone I dislike. He just makes me beat my head slowly against my desk while mentally whispering, "What do you think you're doing?!"

So okay, I really wanted to read Steve White's new book. (So shoot me. I love Steve White. He's probably never going to be great, but he's consistently good.) So I bought the January 2006 Baen ebook pack, which also included Ringo's new book Princess of Wands.

It's a new take on the old urban fantasy ground covered by Bureau 13 -- a secret organization of paladins, clerics, and faith-based mages is out doing law enforcement on Evil From Beyond Our World. In a cynical yet highly successful marketing move, this organization (at least in the US) is largely made up of various stripes of neopagan. And Opus Dei.

*pause for maniacal laughter from all Third Order and Lay Apostolate folks*

In a less normal move, the paladin who's the main character is an evangelical Episcopalian soccer mom. (Of course, since this is a Ringo book, she is also trained in the use of every weapon and Special Forces tactic known to man or woman.) However, she is one of but a few Christians in the organization in the US. (Even though the Catholic Church donates a third of its operating funds.)

*pause for maniacal laughter from anyone on a parish finance committee*

The thing is, Ringo is dead right about how most neopagans and occult-types (at least in fandom) tend to behave and think, and so that part of their organization rang true. (Except the part where it hadn't actually fallen apart in several messy feuds. But we'll take self-preservation as an explanation.)

What he never actually comes right out and says, though, is that their way of thinking is precisely the sort of thing that doesn't work for any stripe of Christian. It would mess a Christian up seriously if they bought into it, or even tried to wrap their heads around it very long.

If you don't believe that God is the God, and that God's power all comes from God and not from his worshippers, then you don't worship God. You worship a minor Semitic god with a certain amount of popularity.

The other thing is that it's obviously kind of stupid to ask the opinion of pagans as to whether doing magic is permitted by God. People who don't actually worship God don't get a vote on that sort of thing. You could consult them on matters of natural law, but not on religious law. (Unless, of course, you were asking a scholar of religious history for a historical overview. Advice, no.)

I'd also like to say that St. Michael the Archangel has absolutely nothing to do with Mars, Frey, or any similar concatenation of wargods, except in that he could kick their butt any day of the week. As he will no doubt explain to certain people at the end of time.

Finally, Mr. Ringo introduces a perfect example of a scantily clad chick who tells the world she has high esteem and a devotion to Heinlein. The more the unclad women protest how high their self-esteem is, the less I tend to believe them. I've never met anybody yet who dresses like that who doesn't have even more issues than the average geeky fan; and dressing like that helps them create even more horrible events to have to deal with. This doesn't make them bad people. It makes them badly confused people. Badly confused people shouldn't be confused and enabled further by books like this.

However, I did find it psychologically true that such a woman would strive to dig deeper into berzerker anger.

I do commend this book as an excellent adventure and a great evocation of fandom, particularly in the convention scenes. But as in fandom, the Christian is left scrambling for footing and thrown back upon her own resources. She rarely gets to encounter anyone else with even roughly similar views, and is constantly forced to re-invent the wheel.

2005-12-16T08:18:00.000-05:00

Telenovela on Public TV!

I'm on vacation today, but I didn't sleep in. So I found out there's a telenovela of sorts running on our public TV station at eight in the morning. It's not a real telenovela, of course; just one designed to teach Spanish. (With the exciting name Introduction to Spanish.) But it's a pretty entertaining show, all the same. I wish I'd seen it back in 1992, when it first aired.

This show was a lot more hardcore than previous language learning ones I've seen. Today they had a mine disaster! Also, a bunch of the kids got sick, and the pater familias was in the hospital. (The show's theme was words for being sick and going to the hospital. Yeah, buddy, they did that.)

The big shock is that there's a main character who's a priest! (Not a shock on a telenovela, but a shock on PBS.) Also, they did a little explanatory feature on Our Lady of Guadalupe, with file footage. (There was a woman walking up to the basilica on her knees; and her husband, a blue-collar guy, was carefully bending down to put little pieces of cloth down in front of her and picking them up from behind her, so she wouldn't hurt her knees or her outfit too much. It was very sweet.)

2005-12-15T19:51:00.000-05:00

You Know You Live in the Future When....

You watch a video hosted on Google from the Dvinsk Clan, a group of teenagers from Daugavpils, Latvia, who play a French urban gymnastics sport called "parkour" that's a sort of course run with acrobatics.

Apparently this is the same thing that was used in the French action flick Banlieue 13, or B-13 for short. (Not to be confused with Bureau 13: Stalking the Night Fantastic.)

Some informed commentary on the Dvinsk Clan's l33t PK skillz. :)

I'm torn. Obviously this is a sport combining skill, daring, and an appreciation for pre-existing structures. It's almost a sort of speed building-hack (another sport I admire but do not emulate). Yet it also seems pretty darned dangerous, to the point of insanity. On the gripping hand, this does seem to be the sort of activity that quickly teaches you a decent respect for gravity and pain, so it's probably safer than the sort of thing stupid kids do who watch MTV's show Jackass.

But not much.

2005-12-13T14:17:00.000-05:00

The Deliverance of Ursula K. LeGuin

Ursula K. LeGuin -- all I can say is, praise the God who made you.

After the horrible mishmash-mosh last year that SciFi Channel called Earthsea, the geniuses at Ghibli are going to be adapting it as their next big film.

Gedo Senki: Tales from Earthsea (Record of the Ged War, or The Ged War Chronicle) (Look, Ged! It's your name!) will be directed by Goro Miyazaki, the son of legendary director Hayao Miyazaki. (Originally his father was not supportive of his directorial ambitions, but apparently the old man has changed his mind.)

Isn't this poster awesome?! (You can save this smaller one.)

And my most sincere congratulations to both LeGuin and Ghibli. This is going to be good.

2005-12-12T08:59:00.000-05:00

Happy Fiesta de Nuestra Senora de Guadalupe!

Patroness of all of North America, uniter of all of North America's peoples, pray for us!

2005-12-11T16:03:00.000-05:00

Torture Bad. Interrogation Good.

Torture is one of those things that's too obvious to talk about it. Obviously, it's a bad idea. It's not a good thing to do, either morally or from a practical standpoint. It doesn't produce good information. It encourages the other side to torture your side, if they weren't already, and takes away your side's moral high ground, if they were. It's bad for military discipline. It tends to bleed into everything else those people do afterward. It is, as Bujold put it, "an infection of the imagination".

On the other hand, interrogation is good. It's just that you really shouldn't be doing anything rougher than the police are allowed to do. All the American experience with interrogation has shown that tea and sympathy work a lot better than torture at getting someone to talk, which your Aunt Gladys could've told you long before the FBI found it out.

The real art of interrogation is learning to climb into someone else's head. This requires a certain amount of empathy. It's uncomfortable to empathize with Really Bad People, and it's hard work. But it's better than not empathizing with them, and becoming a Really Bad Person yourself.

To be completely honest, I suspect that a lot of those people who advocate stuff like serious sleep deprivation, disorientation, and waterboarding don't really understand what they're advocating. The reason they don't understand it is that a good number of them have undergone certain of these techniques as part of the escape and evasion training. They escape, they evade, they get captured, they get "tortured", they sign their little paper and wish they'd been tougher, like that Ranger team that broke out. It's more like Hell Week than going through hell.

But even the most detailed simulation is just a simulation. Deep down, American soldiers in training know that unless there's a training accident, it will end happily in the near future, and then everything will be all right. This is just something they have to get through.

Deep down, they know that they themselves don't really mean to hurt the Bad Guy, either. But they don't have the Bad Guy's medical records, and they don't have as much experience as the trainers did at doing this stuff safely. (And let's be honest, they don't really have as much incentive not to really hurt the Bad Guy as the trainers had not to hurt them.)

Meanwhile, the Bad Guy has no reason to believe that things will ever be all right again. (If he really believed that Americans were the Good Guys, he wouldn't be fighting them, ne?) So for them, it really is torture, not just an unpleasant and scary experience which will end in the near future.

There's a big difference between your brother twisting your arm behind your back and a scary drunk guy with a gun twisting your arm behind your back. Even if the force being exerted is the same.

(Btw, that torture legislation of McCain's was incredibly bad law, as written. Sounds like it will encourage soldiers to prefer shooting people to capturing 'em.)

UPDATE: A lot of these ideas came together after reading this post at Blackfive. I have all the respect in the world for Blackfive, needless to say, but on "coercive interrogation techniques" we clearly disagree. I freely admit this may have as much to do with my low threshold for pain and high incidence of being beat up and taunted as a child as for any kind of respect for natural law, human dignity, and the teachings of the Catholic faith. :)

However, my younger brother wished to point out that it's equally dangerous to have people around who have no idea at all how much pain, damage and death certain simple actions can cause. I agree; the kids dying from choking themselves for fun are a perfect example.

2005-12-11T12:18:00.000-05:00

Linguists in the Movies!

Obviously, there's Pygmalion and My Fair Lady. Then, after Stargate came out (Daniel always acts more like a linguist than an Egyptologist!), you got stuff like Disney's Atlantis.

But I never knew about a cute little Howard Hawks flick from 1941. In Ball of Fire, Gary Cooper is a linguist writing some kind of encyclopedia article on slang when he discovers that he's been missing out on a lot of good new slang all around him! Hijinks ensue as he invites all sorts of people back to his house (which he shares with seven other profs also working on the encyclopedia) for interviews, including a singer who's on the run from the cops and her gangster boyfriend.

The situation is silly (especially when the linguist is repeatedly confused with a cop), but the screenplay (by Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder) shows an obvious love for "the living language" that is really endearing. Also, the musical numbers are definitely better than anything in Disney!

Anyway, you gotta love a movie with lines like, "Never mind the etymology -- was she a blonde or a brunette?"

2005-12-07T12:11:00.000-05:00

Fun with Latin!

Ever since I got to see the Latin version of the current Mass on paper, I have been longing to set the words to music, because they are too cool! (Also, there's no point writing Mass parts for the current translation, since its time is almost up.)

This is not to diss the current translation, except... well... the Latin version is just so powerful, whereas the English version seems to do its level best to dam things up just when the words get on a roll. And I don't know where they hid all the parallelism and structure in the English, 'cause it's all really obvious in the Latin.

Sooo, I've made up my own Gloria melody. I'm afraid that those who think contemporary music is repetitive will really think that of this, because I love rhythms and repetition, and the whole structure of the Latin Gloria is highly rhythmic. Still, you can hardly say that it doesn't have anything for the guys to sing. (I'm singing it in my key, but obviously that would be super easy to change.)

Also, I didn't figure out until after I recorded this that it really should go:
"tu solus Sanctus (Sanctus!)
tu solus Dominus (Dominus!)"
with the last syllable of "Dominus!" kinda sliding under the rest of the choir moving along with "tu solus Altissimus".

Anyway, give it a listen and tell me what you think. (Unless you really hate it, in which case you can just pretend like this post never happened.)

Here's the Latin words with the verses arranged for this melody, for your convenience.

Gloria
in excelsis Deo
et in terra
pax hominibus
bonae voluntatis.

Laudamus te,
benedicimus te,
adoramus te,
glorificamus te,

gratias agimus tibi
propter magnam gloriam tuam,

Domine Deus,
Rex caelestis,
Deus Pater omnipotens.

Domine Fili
unigenite,
Iesu Christe,

Domine Deus,
Agnus Dei,
Filius Patris,

qui tollis peccata mundi,
miserere nobis;
qui tollis peccata mundi,
suscipe deprecationem nostram.
Qui sedes ad dexteram Patris,
miserere nobis.

Quoniam
tu solus Sanctus, (Sanctus!)
tu solus Dominus, (Domi-)
(-nus!) tu solus Altissimus,

Iesu Christe,
cum Sancto Spiritu:
in gloria Dei Patris.

Amen.

2005-12-07T07:24:00.000-05:00

Feeling Better

I'm feeling much better today, so it's back to work for me! I'm shocked to see how much I posted yesterday. They put a lot of stimulants in that cold medicine, that's all I can say.

Tonight is the vigil Mass for the Feast of the Immaculate Conception tomorrow. It's a Holy Day of Obligation here in the US, since Mary as the Immaculate Conception is the patron saint of the United States. (Ironic for a country with as much abortion as we have, ne?) The feast was only instituted in 1798, so it's very fitting to associate it with our country. It would also be fitting not to rip on France today and tomorrow. After all, when Our Lady appeared at Lourdes, she told St. Bernadette "I am the Immaculate Conception."

The idea behind the whole feast is to remind folks of the doctrines behind it. Jesus was the New Adam, as St. Paul pointed out, free from all sin including the original sin that came from Adam. To facilitate that last, Catholics believe that God chose to cleanse Mary of original sin from the very moment of her conception, thus making her a fitting New Eve.

Which only makes sense, because if you're going to use a person as the new Holy of Holies and Ark of the Covenant, it would probably be a good thing if the person was totally spotless. (Think of all the nasty things that happened in the Old Testament to priests who were deep in sin and approached the Lord, or who weren't ritually clean. You wouldn't want that stuff to happen to a pregnant lady, especially if she were your mother.)

Beyond that, it's just nice that God, through Mary, gave humanity another chance to try to live sinless, using free will to make good choices instead of bad ones. We believe that, with the help of the Father and the Holy Spirit (and of course, Her Son's death and resurrection, acting retroactively), that Mary did manage to live her life totally without sin. She was an ordinary woman living in the ordinary world, not in the Garden of Eden. Yet, she managed what Adam and Eve could not, because she loved and obeyed God.

Now, no doubt God could have done things a different way. But we don't think He did. If God wants to create a new start for humanity, He can do it any time He figures it's a good idea. And if God wants essentially to baptize someone at the moment sperm hits egg, this isn't any odder than God providing a "baptism of desire" to someone at the very moment of their death. God can work outside the normal rules for the Sacraments whenever God feels like it, because God made the rules. He has planned for such things from the beginning.

If you missed out on the link to that gorgeous picture of Mary as a baby inside St. Anne that I linked to yesterday, here's Jean Bellegambe's picture of "St. Anne's Conception of Mary".

2005-12-06T22:37:00.000-05:00

Science Fiction and Fantasy News!

First off, some of you know that I'm a great fan of the (still unreleased in the US, darn it!) Russian movie Nochnoi Dozor (Night Watch). Another American fan has set up a really nice new discussion site, Into the Gloom. One clever feature is that the site is divided into two boards: Warriors of Light for those of us who've seen the flick, and Warriors of Darkness for those who are still patiently waiting until they can see it on the big screen.

The big news here is that the sequel, Dnevnoi Dozor (Day Watch) is coming out this January. Finally!! Also, amazon.ca finally has a page to preorder an official English translation of the novel on which Night Watch is based -- in fact, it claims to be a hardcover of the whole trilogy. Their release date is August 8, 2006. Nothing on amazon.com yet.

I look forward with interest to seeing how it differs from my unofficial translation.

Also, for those of us who enjoy David Drake's Royal Cinnabar Navy series (better known as the Roman/Napoleonic space adventures of Daniel and Adele)... the next book will be coming out sometime in 2006. Some Golden Harbor has a truly beautiful Steve Hickman cover that finally captures my mental picture of Adele. Scroll down a bit to see it.

(I really think Daniel's looking way too craggy and buff. Yes, I know there's such a thing as marketing. But though the guy's dashing and physical, he's also round-faced and slightly pudgy, a bit like unto a cross between NCIS' Agent McGee and Captain Kirk, and instead they make him look like unto Steven Seagal.

Daniel is a perpetual optimist, and this time it's Adele, of the perpetual dry remarks, who looks cheerful. A sign of character development, or marketing again? Also, is it me, or is it hard to make someone who's not wearing a dashing naval uniform, look like a dashing young officer? Still, a good cover.)

The title of this fifth RCN book comes from Tennyson's "Prefatory Sonnet: To the Nineteenth Century":

Those that of late had fleeted far and fast
To touch all shores, now leaving to the skill
Of others their old craft seaworthy still,
Have charter’d this; where, mindful of the past,
Our true co-mates regather round the mast;
Of diverse tongue, but with a common will
Here, in this roaring moon of daffodil
And crocus, to put forth and brave the blast;
For some, descending from the sacred peak
Of hoar high-templed Faith, have leagued again
Their lot with ours to rove the world about;
And some are wilder comrades, sworn to seek
If any golden harbour be for men
In seas of Death and sunless gulfs of Doubt.

Previous books have also taken their names from poetry. With the Lightnings and its opening quote was from Kipling's "Chant-Pagan". (Opening quote is bolded.)

"Me that ’ave followed my trade
In the place where the Lightnin’s are made,
’Twixt the Rains and the Sun and the Moon—
Me that lay down an’ got up
Three years with the sky for my roof—
That ’ave ridden my ’unger an’ thirst
Six thousand raw mile on the hoof,
With the Vaal and the Orange for cup,
An’ the Brandwater Basin for dish,—
Oh! it’s ’ard to be’ave as they wish
(Too ’ard, an’ a little too soon),
I’ll ’ave to think over it first— Me!"

Lt. Leary, Commanding began with some lines from another Kipling poem, "The Galley Slave":

"She will need no half-mast signal, minute-gun, or rocketflare,
When the cry for help goes seaward, she will find her servants there.
Battered chain-gangs of the orlop, grizzled drafts of years gone by,
To the bench that broke their manhood, they shall lash themselves and die.

Bale and crippled, young and aged, paid, deserted, shipped away—
Palace, cot, and lazaretto shall make up the tale that day,
When the skies are black above them, and the decks ablaze beneath,
And the top-men clear the raffle with their clasp-knives in their teeth.

It may be that Fate will give me life and leave to row once more—
Set some strong man free for fighting as I take awhile his oar.
But to-day I leave the galley. Shall I curse her service then?
God be thanked! Whate’er comes after, I have lived and toiled with Men!

The problem with Kipling is that Kipling often tells true things about emotions in situations that don't make a lot of sense, if taken totally literally. He's not talking about galley slaves. He's talking about people being stuck together in cruddy situations, and gaining a certain love and nostalgia even for the bad times. He's talking about being shipmates.

The Far Side of the Stars doesn't have a little poetic motto. I think it owes its title more to The Far Side of the World, since as we know, Daniel and Adele owe a great deal to the pseudonymous Patrick O'Brien's Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin.

But the fourth book, The Way to Glory, has a very nice poetic motto indeed, from Tennyson's "Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington". Here's yet another excerpt:

He, on whom from both her open hands
Lavish Honor shower’d all her stars,
And affluent Fortune emptied all her horn.
Yea, let all good things await
Him who cares not to be great
But as he saves or serves the state.
Not once or twice in our rough island-story
The path of duty was the way to glory.
He that walks it, only thirsting
For the right, and learns to deaden
Love of self, before his journey closes,
He shall find the stubborn thistle bursting
Into glossy purples, which outredden
All voluptuous garden-roses.
Not once or twice in our fair island-story
The path of duty was the way to glory.
He, that ever following her commands,
On with toil of heart and knees and hands,
Thro’ the long gorge to the far light has won
His path upward, and prevail’d,
Shall find the toppling crags of Duty scaled
Are close upon the shining table-lands
To which our God Himself is moon and sun.
Such was he: his work is done.
But while the races of mankind endure
Let his great example stand
Colossal, seen of every land,
And keep the soldier firm, the statesman pure;
Till in all lands and thro’ all human story
The path of duty be the way to glory.

Nice, huh?

You can download With the Lightnings and Lt. Leary, Commanding for free from Baen Books' Free Library. The idea is that you'll like the series so much, you'll want to read more.

2005-12-06T15:58:00.000-05:00

St. Lucy Ain't Juno Lucina.

This time of year, we always have people spreading bizarre ideas about Christmas celebrations which have no historical foundation. Since Christmas celebrations have all sorts of rich history already, one might wonder why people feel the need to pull stories out of their... out of nowhere.

Here's a particularly priceless one: that St. Lucy of Syracuse is really Juno Lucina.

Well, let's see. St. Lucia is down in Sicily, hanging out with all the Greek Italians. She's a virgin martyr. She's the patron of people with eye trouble because her own eyes got ripped out before she was killed. Her feast is celebrated on December 13. Some people fast from wheat on that day, to commemorate a famine she was credited with ending.

Juno Lucina was up in Rome, in a temple in a grove (lucus) with two ancient lotus trees decorated with Vestal Virgin hair. She was supposed to be a matron midwife goddess in charge of childbirth. Romans brought her a coin every time they had a kid who lived. Her festival, the Matronalia, was on March 1. Sheep were sacrificed to her, prayers offered for wives, slaves given the day off. All women wore totally loose clothing and hair, with no knots allowed lest the women be "bound up" during childbirth. Her other festival was on July 7, the Nones Caprotinae or Nones of the Wild Fig, when fig juice was sacrificed to her.

Gosh, all the similarities make you reel, don't they?

But wait, there's more. Some people actually claim that Juno Lucina was worshipped at the Winter Solstice, wore a red gown, and is thus obviously Mrs. Claus!

No. Because, first off, Juno Lucina wasn't worshipped at the Winter Solstice, and second, Mrs. Claus is a clear product of 19th century American writer Katherine Lee Bates. So unless you want to claim that the lady who wrote "America the Beautiful" was a secret minion of Juno, you must admit to pulling this from your nether regions. (And if you do think KLB was some kind of priestess, you have clearly drunk a little too much eggnog -- especially if you could type such a thing with a straight face.)

Now there was a goddess festival on December 13 -- but that was the Ides of Tellus Mater, goddess of the earth. On December 19, there was the winter Opalia, for Ops, goddess of plenty, and the festival of Juventas, goddess of youth, for all who had become adults (had their 14th birthday) in the previous year. Later that month, there was another festival on December 21 -- on the Winter Solstice -- but that was the Divalia, the festival of the Diva Angerona, goddess of secrecy, who also presided over heart attacks (angina). On December 23, it was Acca Larentalia, sacred to the mother of the Lares.

There were several different sorts of agricultural festivals, too (probably connected with winter wheat or the resting of the earth after harvest), so you might be able to understand someone trying to make something out of the wheat fast celebrated by St. Lucy's devotees. (Though its Renaissance date of appearance would be against you.) But instead, what people are saying is utter unsupported crap.

Look, if you think you're so pagan, you should at least know which false goddess you're worshipping. (In fact, I think that would be a safety consideration, considering the sort of stories that Romans and Greeks told about goddesses who got their prerogatives usurped.) And if you're going to take cheap shots at the credulity of Catholics, it ill behooves you to show yourself credulous enough to believe everything you read on the Internet.

Why don't we just try to enjoy the holidays we have, without trying to make them something they're not?

2005-12-06T13:56:00.000-05:00

"I'm Just Some Art Whose Intentions Are Good..."

"Oh, Lord, please don't let me be misunderstood."

Zadok also provided us with some beautiful pictures of religious art in Santa Maria Maggiore which could be easily... misunderstood. Let's face it -- if it can be done without violating good theological principles, Catholic art is going to do it, and Catholics are going to love it and keep it and annoy non-Catholics with their insensitive Catholicness.

It's not that Catholics want to freak the mundanes or the Protestants. (Though annoying Jack Chick is something of a bonus... Well, no, it's really not. But poor Jack Chick is going to be annoyed whatever we do. All we can do is pray for him to come to reason and Truth.)

Some images are just so deep in tradition that it's obviously foolish to change them around for the sake of a secular society that's changing every minute, and will soon enough be gone. Some images shock because they insist on the reality of the Incarnation, and hence of the importance of all sorts of bodily functions. Some shock to wake up consciences and minds and hearts, like a sort of koan for the eyes. But mostly, if you can make an image of some important theological truth, you should. It shows proper gratitude to God for showing you that truth, and teaches it to others.

So here's one of Zadok's examples: a carving of the Baby Jesus in Mary's arms attached to a plain cross (with purposeful resemblance to an actual crucifix). You will note that Mary is carefully leaning to the side; it is Jesus who occupies the center here. However, it really is clever how the artist replaces the little "step" common on crucifixes with the crescent moon Mary stands upon, as per the Book of Revelation. Also, Mary is crowned, though Jesus is still a baby. This isn't a crucifixion, obviously. But is it a foreshadowing? Or is it a portrayal of Mary and Jesus outside normal time, with Jesus appearing to His people from eternity with the promise of the Second Coming? Either way, it's definitely designed to make you think.

But then, the same people who might be made uncomfortable by seeing the Baby Jesus pre-crucified, or who might complain about crowning and dressing up Infants of Prague, don't have a problem with a Flash presentation accusing everyone of literally making the Baby Jesus cry. (I'd link to it if I could remember where I saw it.) The impulse is the same; it's only the picture that's different. (And the theology of images, of course.)

The Mystical Bath by Jean Bellegambe. In this triptych panel, we see people literally bathing in the blood of the Lamb -- rub-a-dub scrub and all -- in a bathtub at the foot of the Cross. Check out how fast they're running to be saved! Check out the medieval undies! (This is pretty much a true picture of what a medieval bathhouse looked like, complete with wenches to give you a boost and cakes to eat, transposed with the heart of holiness. The bathing person with the jar is probably St. Mary Magdalen with her ointment, and the boosters are probably supposed to be Mary (given the sun on her headdress) and some other female saint -- maybe the Church herself, since the ship could be the barque of Peter. Very bold. Very weird.)

Snake-Stompin' Jesus and Snake-Stompin' Mary! Or, "The Madonna with the Serpent" by Caravaggio. Yep, that's one way to deal with fuzzy readings of scripture. Not to mention a good visual summation of the Catholic "both-and" as opposed to "either-or". Also note Jesus' obvious masculinity and navel -- another nod to the importance of the Incarnation (and maybe His Jewish identity, too). I like how Mary and St. Anne look like tough Italian ladies.

Mothering God: an article on Maria Gravida, Maria Lactans, and other "shocking" images of Jesus' incarnation and Mary's part in it.

This page has two Maria Lactans pictures, though the one way down at the bottom is the cutest. St. Luke is trying to draw Mary's portrait while she nurses, but Jesus is making silly faces at him instead of paying attention to the task at hand.

A Maria Gravida example in St. Augustine, Florida.

La Virgen de la O and still more pregnant Mary's.

A very pregnant Mary on a donkey.

Of course, Our Lady of Guadalupe is the best known example of a pregnant Mary today.

Awesome picture of Mary's Immaculate Conception inside St. Anne by the same Jean Bellegambe who brought you bathtime on Calvary. I guess you could call this an example of "Anna Gravida". St. Anne is davening in the Temple, and if you look closely, apparently so is the unborn Mary.

Virtual chapel of the Unborn Jesus and a special page dedicated to Mary's holy womb. Part of an anti-abortion apostolate and memory site.

2005-12-06T12:51:00.000-05:00

My Patron Church

Teeeeechnically, I don't have a patron saint so much as a patron event. Yup, my birthday falls on the day when we celebrate (or don't; it's an optional memorial) the dedication of the basilica of St. Mary Major, one of the first Marian churches and still the biggest one dedicated to her in the world. It also commemorates the rather unique method of site selection: the Virgin Mary arranged with God for a snowfall in August in Rome in the year 358, to mark where she wanted the place to get built. (Thus the Marian title "Our Lady of the Snows", and the Spanish girl's name "Nieve", Snow.)

It was a daring place that was chosen -- cheek by jowl with the temple of Juno Lucina, appealed to for safe birthing by pagan Romans. You get a lot of people these days claiming that Christians built churches on or near temple sites to include pagan rituals in Christianity. The truth is that they were doing the equivalent of building a cathedral in Mecca next to the Kaaba, or putting a church dedicated to a correct understanding of the Trinity in Salt Lake City's Temple Square. Mary wasn't hiding pagans under her skirts; she was challenging the pagans on their own ground, terrible as an army with banners. She was showing up paganism's insufficiency and falsehood, and calling pagans to come to Her Son, the Truth. So it was especially fitting that this church became perhaps the first Marian pilgrimage church. (Hardly the last, though!)

Over the next century, the basilica got pretty run down. (This happened a lot with Roman era basilicas, both governmental and Christian. The places were huuuuuge and hard to maintain, especially with the troubles of the Western Empire.) But after the Council of Ephesus (held where Mary was said to have gone with St. John to live) upheld Mary as "Theotokos", Mother of God, in 431, Pope Sixtus III decided to rebuild the place. One of the unique features was a copy of the cave at Bethlehem where Christ was born, built to house a small piece of the Manger. This led to the place being nicknamed "St. Mary of the Crib". (See, there really is a tie-in to the season!)

St. Jerome, patron saint of bloggers and translator of the whoooooole Bible, is buried in this "cave" crypt. St. Matthew, the thirteenth Apostle, is buried under the high altar.

Now to get to the inspiration for my post. Zadok noted that Santa Maria Maggiore also houses the world's oldest Nativity scene extant. They were marble figures made about 1290 by Arnolfo di Cambio, who also did the big bronze St. Peter at St. Peter's. (Restoration has just been finished on the figures, hence the news story.) Another nickname for the place, therefore, is Santa Maria ad Praesepium -- St. Mary of the Stable. ("Culla" is manger, in case you were interested.)

St. Mary Major (or Santa Maria Maggiore, in Italian) also houses the plague-fighting, wonderworking Byzantine icon of Jesus and Mary known as "Salus Populus Romani" -- a pun that both means "Health of the Roman People" and "Salvation of the Roman People". St. Ignatius of Loyola spent a lot of time praying before it.

Now, it's not all that likely that I'll ever be getting to Rome (though all the bloggers there make it look mighty tempting!), but I'm pretty chuffed to have found out that my patron church is such a very nifty place.

More descriptions of the history and features of the church can be found here.

St Mary Major's page on a really awesome website dedicated to the many churches of Rome.

Pictures of architectural features, and more architecture pictures.

A virtual panorama of the church's interior, and a four panoramas of different parts of the church.

Interesting page comparing other late Roman art to the late Roman bits of Santa Maria Maggiore, like the mosaics.

2005-12-06T07:52:00.000-05:00

Happy St. Nicholas Day!

I hope he left you something in your stockings or your shoes.

I got a day off, which I have been spending being sick. But I feel a little better now.

2005-12-05T04:53:00.000-05:00

Absolutely Bloody Typical

I did a nice little Advent Google for "Fathers Luke" and happened to find this essay on heroes and heroines by the sf writer Elisabeth Vonarburg.

I once bought a book by Elisabeth Vonarburg, in the broadminded spirit of international fannish friendship and literary exploration. You will note that I did not seek out another. But when I read the beginning of this essay, I started to think that, gee, this writer couldn't be as bad as I remembered her. She sounds like she likes exciting books; maybe that boring and pretentious thing was a bad translation. Then the woman becomes a feminist. Instead of broadening her tastes, she gradually learns to turn her back on everything she's ever loved.

Either the girl could withstand being criticized for reading boys' books by boys and non-feminists, or none of them ever criticized her. But the peer pressure of feminists, now, that wasn't oppressive. It just made her deeply ashamed of her own instinctive likes and dislikes, that's all. It just made her chop away at her own uniqueness, in favor of some theoretical construct to which she must conform or confess herself an Uncle Tom to men. Now that's inherently liberating. That makes her stronger as a person. Oh, yes.

If you want to see why the fight for women's rights turned so very sick and twisted from the mid-twentieth century onward, you have only to look at this example of Maoist self-criticism.

My idea of women's rights is a good deal simpler. I say a woman should be able to have the same rights as a man, and vice versa. A woman should be able to make her own choices in life, no more and no less than a man. Both men and women should be happy and content with the sex they're born with, and with the opposite sex being opposite. Both sexes should bear with each other, and be as nice to each other as they can get away with. If women want to work, fine. If they want to stay home and work on their kids, fine. If the husband wants to stay home and work on their kids, fine.

But nobody should be made to feel that it's shameful to read books about heroes of the opposite sex. Girls and women like heroines, sure. But women have also always liked pondering male heroes, because duh, they are romantic and droolworthy. And though boys may at times be allergic to reading about heroines, they often grow up and discover that they enjoy reading about beautiful women with big guns. Women may have admired them, but it was men who trooped after Elizabeth I and St. Joan of Arc.

If you have to disown yourself to follow an ideal, you'd better be real sure you're following the right ideal. False gods don't give you anything real to replace what you give up.

2005-12-03T10:16:00.000-05:00

Jesse Tree Madness!

Now, you may ask yourself (or more likely, your kids may ask you) why Jesse Trees don't include all of Jesus' ancestors on them.

Without even getting into Levirate marriages and dual sonship, this is why.

For my money, I think people who get stumbling blocks over genealogy questions are sweating waaaaay too much about the small stuff. If you don't want to believe in the general historical accuracy of the Bible, why aren't you worrying about Ajalon? And if you do want to believe, why are you worrying about genealogy tables?

But I think the main problem is that ancient genealogy tables are as much a literary genre as a real source of factual information. Who you-the-writer choose to include, who you choose to leave out, and which generations you elide are pretty much the points of interest here, as well as how the generations are organized. If later readers expect a DNA chart including every Cro-Magnon and Neanderthal involved, they're bound to be sorely disappointed. But that's not the writer's fault.

If you really wanted to know evvvvvery gennnnnneration evvvver, there were probably people in the Jewish community before the destruction of Israel (and hence, the Christian community) in apostolic times who could have told you. Heck, there were still kinfolk of Jesus around. (Well, not the ones who were martyred, and not the ones who were killed by the Romans for being potential foci of rebellion as House of David members.) So why include such easily-obtainable but boring information in a book meant for reading out loud to the congregation?

No, anybody who's in the genealogies in the Gospels is there for a specific reason -- displaying God's plan as carried out down the ages. If we don't get the gist of that, that's our problem.

For example, this site talks about the women in Christ's genealogy, but doesn't explain why these "disreputable women" are there. First off, none of these women are disreputable -- those who sinned repented. Second, all these women represent virtues. Tamar won a son for her dead husband despite his family's unjust opposition and their maltreatment of her. Rahab, a foreigner, was brave and hospitable to strangers and helped Israel win a city, winning her place among them. Ruth, another foreigner, took care of her mother-in-law, brought her dead husband's property back to his clan, and was the classic example of a good woman and wife to Boaz. And Bathsheba, for all her problems, was a fierce and wise queen mother to her son Solomon, helping him rise to kingship and advising him once he got there.

So all these ladies of note, with their checkering of good and evil, convention and innovation, faithfulness and un-, represent Israel itself as well as the spotless Church, Jesus' bride. God helped them bring good out of evil. They also foreshadow the Virgin Mary, because all these women's good deeds and cooperation with God helped the Messiah to come.

That particular site gets pretty weird with its thoughts on Joseph's parentage, btw. Totally glides over the whole Christian tradition that Joseph was the son of a levirate marriage in favor of an explanation from one source, the Jerusalem Talmud. Totally avoids the fact that every other source says Mary is the daughter of Joachim and Anna. Totally avoids the fact that it's as likely that Mary might be the daughter-in-law "daughter of Heli" as that Joseph might be the son-in-law "son of Heli", for that matter.

However, there's some really fun thoughts about Joseph's relationship to Jehoiakim's curse. Worthy of a fantasy novel.

Here's a Greek Orthodox priest who talks about some more of these issues.

The always useful Catholic encyclopedia article has a lot of the sources summarized. This one talks about Biblical genealogy principles. If you're really interested, you can also go diving through Eusebius and learn all about Jesus' kinfolk in the Church.

2005-12-03T09:06:00.000-05:00

Shanda Fur Die Goyim

I thought Baraita had stopped blogging. But no! Yay!

In addition to many other good posts, she has just introduced me to a wonderfully useful Yiddish phrase: "shanda fur die goyim" -- which she defines as "Jewish embarrassment at a fellow Jew doing something Really Stupid in front of non-Jews".

I want this phrase. I want it in common use. Think of the applications! For Catholics, shanda fur die separated brethren and shanda fur die schismatics! For Christians, shanda fur die pagans and shanda fur die atheists! For fans, shanda fur die Mundanes! For media fans, shanda fur die actors and shanda fur die other fandoms! For those who don't like anthropomorphics, shanda fur die furries! For conservatives, shanda fur die Left! For liberals, shanda fur die Right! And for evangelical folks embarrassed by Pat Robertson, shanda fur die everyone!

I do wonder whether this has any connection with Shanda die Panda... I mean, Shanda the Panda. :)

(I realize I'm being a bit silly about this, but it is a serious concept and a very serious post. Sadly, I know that I've been an occasion of shanda for a good many of my friends and acquaintances on a good many occasions...and this may be yet another one.)

2005-12-03T07:41:00.000-05:00

My Spoiler-Free Goblet of Fire Review

I finally went to see the movie yesterday with my parents. This was pretty fun, although possibly not for those around us. You see, my mother and father have taught junior high kids, and they have not read the books! So there were numerous events in the movie which they thought either true to life (the dance, the spats, etc.) or amusing (Rita Skeeter, Snape whapping students upside the head). As a result, I heard a lot of whispers!

(My mother's insistence that Snape was acting like a nun was a bit disturbing.... Especially since I could almost see Snape's sister, Sr. Mary Severus of the Holy Whapping.)

I also found the movie unexpectedly true to life. For once, the moviemakers were less busy smirking or screaming, "Look how cool this stuff is!" than just telling the story. It's possible that this focus told the story better than the book did, creating the rare spectacle of a movie adaptation better than the original book. Certainly the message of cooperation between wizards, houses, and countries came across better. The relationship between the Crouch family problems and Harry's eternal search for a father figure also worked. The music was also great and serious.

More to the point, though, I thought the movie edited down the story to a manageable length. If only JK Rowling had done the same!

On the whole, it's hard to say whether I liked this movie or the last movie better. I think this one, by a nose. But I like both of them a lot better than the previous two.

2005-11-30T10:27:00.000-05:00

Audiobook Progress Report

As you know, I also do an audioblog or podcast of public domain audiobooks. I then archive them over at archive.org for the use of all and sundry. This provides me with download statistics (and the vast majority of my readers, truth be told).

So far, it seems that the way to go with fiction audiobooks is to do long-form poetry and short stories. As you might expect, snappy and appealing blurbs and good keywords also seem to provide results. Short Christian works are more appealing than long ones. Stories appealing to seasonal tastes (horror stories and dark fantasy put up pre-Hallowstide) seem to do well, also.

Most of the multi-part works start fairly well, but peter out. (Witness the dramatic drops on The Red Thumb-Mark and The Dialogue of St. Catherine of Siena.) This may be because people get bored or irritated; because they fail to be interested enough to read on; or most likely, because they come to archive.org or my blog by chance, read what's there, and just happen not to come back.

I am glad to see that holding up the banner of clan loyalty has also been a good thing for me. Fitz-James O'Brien is one of those great and influential American writers who has been unjustly forgotten, mostly thanks to his untimely death. (Not to mention his insistence, resented by scholarly posterity, on pointing out that Melville had become a victim of the Brain-Eater after he started putting out cruddy novels. (But they were cruddy! He was a reviewer! Pointing out bad value for the dollar was his job!) So it gives me great satisfaction to see Fitz managing once more to entertain the public, a hundred and fifty years later.

Obviously, I ought to do more in the areas and authors that are currently doing well. Still, I also mean to amuse myself, since I am the one who has to read all this stuff! However, suggestions -- particularly for entertaining and enlightening bits of the Fathers -- are earnestly solicited.

My Top Twenty Audiobooks, with Number of Downloads

1. "The Sword of Welleran" by Lord Dunsany -- 102

2. "The Blue Sequin" by R. Austin Freeman -- 93

3. "The Dragon-Fang Possessed by the Conjuror Piou-Lu" by Fitz-James O'Brien -- 79

4. Annus Mirabilis by John Dryden -- 67

5. The Red Thumb-Mark, pt 1, by R. Austin Freeman -- 59

6. "Locksley Hall"/"Locksley Hall 60 Years Later" by Alfred, Lord Tennyson -- 58

7. "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came" by Robert Browning -- 56

8. "A Message from the Deep Sea" by R. Austin Freeman -- 53

9. "Jubal the Ringer" by Fitz-James O'Brien -- 51

10. "Of the Song of Angels" by Walter Hilton -- 50

11. "The Man Without a Shadow: A New Version" by Fitz-James O'Brien -- 49

12. "The Nightmare" by G.K. Chesterton -- 46
12. "Little Orphant Annie" by James Whitcomb Riley -- 46
12. "A Terrible Night" by Fitz-James O'Brien -- 46

13. "What Was It? -- A Mystery" by Fitz-James O'Brien -- 43

14. The Red Thumb-Mark, pt 2, by R. Austin Freeman -- 37

15. Folk Tales of Napoleon -- 35

16. The Red Thumb-Mark, pt 5, by R. Austin Freeman -- 33

17. "The Didache" -- 30
17. "The Epistle of St. Ignatius of Antioch to the Romans" -- 30

18. The Bridal of Triermain by Sir Walter Scott -- 29

19. The Dialogue of St. Catherine of Siena, pt 1 -- 28

20. "Two Pioneers" by Elia W. Peattie -- 26

2005-11-29T21:32:00.000-05:00

Political Song Corner

Via Jimmy Akin, a great new song from Berkeley: "Bush Was Right".

Other great Conservative songs:
"Razom Nas Bahato" by Greenjolly. This was literally the themesong to the Orange Revolution, picking up the slogan of the demonstrators and making it dance and rock.

(In a typical postmodern twist of fate, Greenjolly and "Razom Nas Bagato" will be Ukraine's entry in the Eurovision song contest this year.)

"Democracy, Whiskey, Sexy" is Dr. Frank's tribute to that unknown Iraqi with an appreciation for democratic culture. With all that implies. (Link was no longer working when I just checked it.)

"Ronald Reagan (Please Forgive Me)" is a funny song that's absolutely true for a lot of ex-liberal guys out there! Maybe not work-safe, though.

2005-11-29T08:24:00.000-05:00

Good Stuff Early Warning System!

Those of you with kids, and those of you who just love good movies, will want to stock up on tapes in January. Turner Classic Movies is airing a Ghibli film festival, and airing movies in both their American dub and Japanese subtitled versions.

Check it out:

Thursday, January 5
8:00pm: Spirited Away (2002 - English-language version)
10:15pm: Princess Mononoke (1997 - English-language version)
1:00am: Spirited Away (2002 - Japanese-language version)
3:15am: Princess Mononoke (1997 - Japanese-language version)

Thursday, January 12
8:00pm: Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind (1984 - English-language version)
10:00pm: Castle in the Sky (1986 - English-language version)
12:15am: Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind (1984 - Japanese-language version)
2:15am: Castle in the Sky (1986 - Japanese-language version)

Thursday, January 19
8:00pm: My Neighbor Totoro (1988 - English-language version)
9:30pm: Porco Rosso (1992 - English-language version)
11:15pm: Whisper of the Heart (1995 - English-language version)
1:15am: My Neighbor Totoro (1988 - Japanese-language version)
2:45am: Porco Rosso (1992 - Japanese-language version)
4:30am: Whisper of the Heart (1995 - Japanese-language version)

Thursday, January 26
8:00pm: Only Yesterday (1991 - Japanese-language version only)
10:15pm: Pom Poko (1994 - English-language version)
12:30am: Only Yesterday (1991 - Japanese-language version)
2:45am: Pom Poko (1994 - Japanese-language version)

So why watch the Japanese version?

Well, obviously the original voice cast is closer to the original intent. But that's not the real issue. The silences are.

Although some dubs are just fine, dub producers have a tendency to want to fill silent or quiet moments with louder music or new songs or voice-over dialogue. This is unfortunate, because a good deal of the beauty and thoughtfulness of Japanese art and culture is in the spaces it leaves and the things it doesn't say. Miyazaki and his compadres at Ghibli use such devices often; so their movies have tended to suffer from the American prejudice against "dead air".

For example, Kiki's Delivery Service (not being shown) featured a witch girl flying on her broomstick, traveling alone for the first time. In the original version, Miyazaki made much of the sound of flight -- of the wind rushing past, and the sounds of the natural world around her. At one point, the silence got too much for her, so Kiki turned on one of those little transistor radios and listened to a defiant little Japanese pop song from the early sixties, complete with realistic static and tinny sound.

In the American version, the wind was replaced with loud soundtrack, and the song with a new sugary, overdidactic, self-esteem song by an American songwriter who can write better than this. Transistor sound and loneliness was not even attempted. The point of the whole scene was lost.

Spirited Away is of course the Oscar-winning story of a girl trapped in a Japanese resort in fairyland or the world of the Shinto gods. Either way, she has to work her butt off to get her name back, win back her parents, and get home. But hard work and cheerfulness will win her unexpected friends, even in this strange place....

Princess Mononoke is not a cartoon for kids. It is a Kurosawa movie, if Kurosawa worked in anime. It is a fantasy set in shogun-run Japan, about the needs of ordinary people versus the needs of nature, and how sometimes neither one is in the right. Watch it. Just realize that early on, heads will roll. Literally.

Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind is okay for kids who are old enough for Harry Potter, I'd say. It's an eco-science fiction movie of the sort we all remember from the seventies. (Post-nuclear war, check. Downfall of civilization, check. Devastated Earth, check. Chosen One, check.) Except that this time, an eco-science fiction movie is actually being made about people you'll care about. (Including the "villains".) Interesting things happen. Love and joy still exist, even in the midst of chaos. And through it all, Nausicaa flies like the fresh winds that preserve her valley. If you've only seen Warriors of the Wind, the chopped up version from the eighties, be sure to watch the uncut Nausicaa. It's a whole new movie.

Castle in the Sky is an action/fantasy/science fiction/steampunk/air pirate/men in black kind of movie. You and your kids will love it.

My Neighbor Totoro is a must-see for kids and parents alike. For once, you'll get to see a father who is capable, caring, and believes in his kids; and kids who love and trust their parents. A gentle fantasy set in 1950's rural Japan, this movie is comfort food for pretty much all ages. (And you can tell your little ones that the mother gets better. She had TB, but she comes home from the hospital during the credits.)

Porco Rosso is the story of the Crimson Pig, a World War I ace cursed to look like a pig who now fights air pirates -- for a price -- while hiding out from Mussolini's Fascist government. He's cynical about the world, women, and himself -- but is he really such a pig as he claims? Another fun film for all ages.

Whisper of the Heart is not by Miyazaki, but don't miss it for that reason. I've never seen it myself, and am dying to do so. Set in the 70's, it's the story of a young Japanese girl (living in a suburb built over the same area we saw in My Neighbor Totoro) who is trying to find her place in the world. It's not a fantasy movie. It's not science fiction. It's not action. It's just about life.

Only Yesterday is another rarely seen non-Miyazaki Ghibli movie. It's the story of a young Japanese woman who suddenly realizes that she has no home, and needs one. As she goes out to the country, she begins to remember her childhood in the sixties. She also begins working on getting herself a future that's not all work. Again, it's just a simple story about life.

Pom Poko is the last film in the festival. Also non-Miyazaki, and also set in the same place as My Neighbor Totoro, Whisper of the Heart, and bits of Spirited Away, it tells the story of what happened to the animals when the woods, mountains, and fields were destroyed and remade to provide a place for the suburb to be built. The tanuki (Japanese relatives of raccoons that look like bears, and are sometimes also called badgers) haven't used their magical shapeshifting and illusion powers for a long time. But if the humans are going to attack them with bulldozers and starvation, they figure they may as well fight back! This hilarious and heartwrenching story mixes samurai drama conventions, Japanese folklore and folksongs, and urban fantasy to make a story that everyone will love. Yes, its humor is earthy. So was Shakespeare.

I should probably also point out that all these movies include a large dose of Shinto and a small dose of Buddhism. It's not evangelistic -- just a natural part of the characters' lives. (Gosh, wouldn't it be nice if prayer and going to church could be included in American stuff? Heck, anime includes more Christian moments than American TV....) I don't think this should be a problem for anyone with well-formed religious beliefs. (Besides, Americans never seem to go for real pagan beliefs; just made up neo-pagan stuff and Buddhism.) Be prepared to answer kids' questions, that's all I'm saying. "That's how some Japanese people pray" or "They don't know the truth about God, so they don't know any better than to worship God's creatures" will probably be enough.

2005-11-29T05:58:00.000-05:00

Cartoon Update!

Ack! Nobody told me that Cartoon Network has been airing Gigantor at 5:30 in the morning on weekdays! (Eastern time, of course.) Yes, it's the original American translation of the black and white R/C giant robot show (Tetsujin 28). Yes, it's pretty bizarre. Yes, that theme song is catchy. Yes, I've got a whole November's worth of shows to catch up on.

Gigantorrrrrr... Gigantorrrrrr...

Magical Doremi, airing on the Fox network at 8 AM, is probably the feelgood show of the season. It's aimed at fairly young kids (school age or below). Three school friends have become "witchlings" (apprentice witches, with powers that only work after a really cute magical girl transformation) to learn how to help a witch they accidentally turned into a mushroom. (Apparently, calling a Japanese witch a witch is a bad thing for her.) So now after school they work in the witch's magic shop, making and selling magical items, to earn the "spelldrops" that power their wands. (And no, kids that age aren't allowed to work in Japan. There was actually an episode where they fell afoul of child labor laws, and got out of it by claiming they were just volunteering. It was a stitch.) In their copious free time, they help out people who visit the shop, and negotiate with the visiting witch who sells them spelldrops.

Over on Kids' WB at 8:30 AM, The Batman is in its third season, and is currently going strong. Batman is no longer a vigilante hiding from the police (so Detective Yin has vanished from the show). Commissioner Gordon has showed up and instituted the Batsignal, and his teenage gymnast daughter has volunteered her sidekick services as Batgirl. This was not entirely appreciated by Bruce, but he's become resigned to her presence. OTOH, Bruce knew Batgirl's secret identity from the first, but Barbara Gordon still hasn't figured out who she's really working with.

Winx Club isn't all nearly as good this year. But it's on twice a Saturday (they're trying to use the first showing of it on Fox at 8:30 AM to keep girls from changing channels to watch The Batman. Whatever). Anyway, this year the three annoying seniors from the witch high school who got expelled, took over the world, and then graduated to doing hard time, have been broken out by An Evil Force With Batwings and put to work as his servants. Over at the fairy high school, the Winx Club gained new members: a refugee fairy princess and six fugitive pixies. The Evil Force With Batwings wants the power of the pixies and their hidden village, so much anti-pixie intrigue has ensued. Furthermore, the Evil Force With Batwings is apparently the dualistic result of having Bloom, our protagonist (a red-headed fairy princess raised on Earth by adoptive parents), possess all the remaining power of her destroyed world of dragonfire fairies. (Good must be balanced by Evil, yadda yadda... what Manichee crap! Wouldn't it be better to say that Evil is scared of Bloom and is trying to take her out while she's still young?) Meanwhile, one of the prison guards (sometimes angel-winged guys called paladins) has transferred over to the fairy high school to teach, and all the girls are drooling over him; and Flora, the only Winx Club member with no romance last year, appears to have met someone over at the hero school. (Hey, how come girls can be fairies or witches, and guys are stuck just being heroes? Isn't there a mad mage school or something?)

Super Robot Monkey Team Hyperforce Go! is still one of the better cartoons on the air. It's an entirely American show aimed at younger kids, yet also includes some fairly deep themes and plotlines. For us adults, the retro stylings recall Battle of the Planets and other old anime giant robot and sentai shows. The kid and his five monkey robot buddies are still fighting the Skeleton King and defending Shoogazoom City, while drawing upon the Power Primate. Big revelation was that the monkeys were actually invented and built by the guy who later became the Skeleton King! He felt himself inexorably becoming evil, thanks to being possessed by some outside force, and so made the monkeys in a desperate bid to defeat himself. Will it work? Stay tuned!

One Piece is off the air right now. Too bad. It's good pirate fun. The current incarnation of GI Joe, OTOH, is pitiful.

2005-11-27T22:16:00.000-05:00

Take It with a Grain of Psalter

Check it out! The Paris Prose of the Paris Psalter -- 50 prose translations into Old English prose. (The other 100 psalms were translated into Old English poetry. Which I would think would also be web-suitable, but alas, I was not consulted.)

The more I read the Fathers and other traditional stuff, the more I feel that the psalms are getting a bit slighted by modern Christians. I mean, the psalms were nearly as important to traditional Christian thinking as the Gospels or the letters of Paul. People used to learn to read from reading the Psalms. You don't get more basic than that.

Here's some other psalmy stuff:
Fragments from Bishop Hippolytus on the psalms.

Some bits of St. Athanasius' commentary on the psalms.

A severely abridged version of St. Augustine's commentary on the psalms.

Methodius' Oration on the psalms.

Hilary of Poitiers' homilies on the psalms.

A medieval commentary on the Psalms.

St. Thomas Aquinas' Commentary on the Psalms. Another version of the commentary on Psalm 1.

Countess Marie de Champagne wrote a commentary on a psalm!?! Heh! Of course it's about courtly love!

The Burnet Psalter: actually more of an all-purpose prayerbook and book of hours. Every page is scanned, and the text given alongside in modern font and explained!

The Theodore Psalter, a Byzantine psalter, explored as a sort of paper hypertext. Note the similarities to the Book of Kells.

The Luttrell Psalter for dialup and broadband. The explanations are not totally enlightening, but better than nothing. Here's more info about the psalter, along with links to similar important works you can also look through.

The Macclesfield Psalter with some nice pictures of the manuscript. You can buy the whole schemozzle all scanned in as an Adobe Acrobat file, if you wish.

The Getty will let you look at this psalter's pages with initials. This one, too.

An exhibit on Books of Hours that explains some of the psalter conventions, and another Books of Hours explanation site.

Picture of a besieged psalmist.

A modern psalter -- in tanka form! (Not even as rengas, so a tad brief.)

A parallel Latin/English psalter, suitable for decoding medieval manuscript illos!

2005-11-27T07:19:00.000-05:00

Radiator Sickness

I write this not in a bad mood, and not in a good mood. I am in a half-asleep mood, and I have to get out of the house in about ten minutes when I really don't want to move. But if I want food and coffee and a trip to church that doesn't take a half hour's walk in the cold, I must move....

Fitting that the gospel reading for this Sunday is "Stay awake!"

Alas, the ancient radiators of my building are acting up again. They just came in and worked on mine last week, and already it needs it again! So it's lucky for me that the temperature has gone up somewhat. (But fear not. Since I'm in a building with other apartments whose radiators are working, I do get more heat than what the radiator is currently providing.)

I'm also not happy with my situation at archive.org. I admit that a free service probably is going to have some hiccups, especially over Thanksgivingtide. Still, I would like my six chapters of Surtees to show up somewhere before Judgment Day. :)

2005-11-22T07:00:00.000-05:00

Churches Burned in France's Riots

Via The Anchoress. I've "translated" and added links to Alex Corvus' list of Christian churches burned and Christian cemeteries desecrated in the riots by the "youths" earlier this month.

5th Night. 31 oct-01 novembre. Mon-Tues
- La Teste-de-Buch (33260 Gironde). Cemetery desecrated.

10th Night. 05-06 novembre. Sat-Sun
- Liévin (62800 Pas-de-Calais). Church. Incendiary device. Door.

11th Night. 06-07 novembre. Sun-Mon
- Lens (62300 Pas-de-Calais). St. Edouard Church. Incendiary device. Door.
- Sète (34200 Hérault). Church in l’Ile de Thau. 2 incendiary devices. Windows.

12th Night. 07-08 novembre. Mon-Tues
- Strasbourg (67000 Bas-Rhin). St. Benoît (St. Benedict) Church. Incendiary devices. [Le Figaro - 10 nov 2005.]

15th Night. 10-11 novembre Thurs-Fri
- Houdain (62150 Pas-De-Calais). Polish Chapel. Church ransacked. (see letter by Patrick Bednarek, president of Poland)
- Rance (Belgium). St. Aldegonde Church. Church vandalized.

16th Night. 11-12 novembre. Fri-Sat
- Vesoul ( 70000 Haute-Saône). Church. Door burnt.

17th Night. 12-13 novembre. Sat-Sun
- Brignoles (83170 Var). Church. Door burnt.

18th Night. 13-14 novembre.
- Nanteuil-lès-Meaux (77100 Seine et Marne). Cemetery desecrated.

19th Night. 14-15 novembre.
- Draveil (91210 Essone) 2 chapels burnt? in the evangelical church in des Bergeries.

20e Nuit 15-16 novembre. Mardi-Mercredi
- Romans-sur-Isère (26100 Drôme). St. Jean-d’Ars Church. Arson.

All links inside the quotes are my own; they aren't Mr. Corvus' responsibility. And I'm just linking to the pictures. (I don't read French, see, and I suspect that forum site may not be a nice one.) Also, this article says that it was the "presbytère" (rectory?) of l'Ile de Thau that got burned. Here's a statement from Chirac about the church burned in Romans-sur-Isère, which apparently got a big reaction. Here's a small picture. The evangelical church in Draveil is apparently a member of the Assemblies of God.

This site has a letter to the President of France about the whole thing, as well as various other comments abou the whole Muslim violence situation from Indonesia to France. Which is sorta interesting, given that it's apparently on the official site for the Arras diocese in France. If somebody reads French or Babelfish better than I, please translate!

Finally, somebody did burn a French mosque this week. I condemn this act too.

2005-11-21T22:48:00.000-05:00

Confiteor Meme

Speculative Catholic has tagged me with a meme! So, since I won't remember in the morning if I don't fill it out now....

First of all, some folks may be wondering what a "Confiteor" is. That's the Latin word that starts the Penitential Rite at the beginning of Mass. You know, the bit where we say, "I confess to Almighty God, and to you, my brothers and sisters, that I have sinned through my own fault...."

So the idea behind this meme is that we make some embarrassing but venial confessions. Hokily dokily. I can do that. No pressure....

*thinking*

I confess that I don't read my email very often. This is the real reason I got Google's Gmail -- so that I would have a giant hole in which to throw my email. One of the trials of my life is that I have to check my work email at least once a day. I used to love getting email. I'm really sorry that I find it such a trial now. But I really dread all the spam. I don't check my surface mailbox very often, either.

I confess that even though my apartment is full of books and music, I spend so much time on the computer that I rarely read or listen to CDs anymore. (This is one reason I started the audioblog.)

I confess that I skipped reading most classic non-poetry literature because it always sounded so boring. Boring covers, boring blurbs, boring forewords, no murders -- had to be boring. I only made exceptions for classics mentioned in science fiction, fantasies, or mysteries in a convincingly interesting manner. (This is another reason I started the audioblog.)

I confess that I would never have given opera a chance if it weren't for Irene Adler. But then I found out that executions, murder, and suicide are really fun to listen to!

I confess that I have a really hard time keeping in touch with people unless I see them all the time. This includes members of my own family as well as friends. The more I forget to call or write them, the more ashamed I am that I've forgotten, so the less I call or write them. But hardly anybody ever calls or writes me unless I do it first.

I confess that I am sick and tired of my elder brother and his wife quarreling with my parents, and that they all four should just suck it up and come to terms, or at least come to visit during the holidays. I hate seeing people cry when there's absolutely nothing I can do. They should at least cry at the people who can do something.

I confess that I put the "mess" in domesticity.

I confess that I'm enjoying reading this meme on other people's blogs way too much.

So I hereby tag... Joy, Steven Riddle, and Mixolydian Mode. No pressure. :)

2005-11-20T21:02:00.000-05:00

Eucharist Means Thanksgiving

I've been thinking a lot lately about one of St. Catherine of Siena's favorite phrases: "the table of the Cross". It's a phrase that neatly combines the aspects of the Eucharist as sacrifice and as meal". It is the Cross that is our altar and our table, and Jesus is the spotless lamb we offer to God and then eat.

Here's a passage from St. Catherine's letters:

"...reflect, dearest daughter, that this food is not taken upon earth, but on high, and therefore the Son of God chose to be lifted up upon the wood of the Most Holy Cross, in order that we might receive this food upon this table on high...This is a food which while we are pilgrims in this life, draws to itself the fragrance of true and sincere virtues, which are prepared by the fire of divine charity, and received upon the table of the cross...This is the food that makes the soul angelic, and therefore it is called the food of angels; and also because the soul, separated from the body, tastes God in His essential Being. He satisfies the soul in such wise that she longs for no other thing nor can desire aught but what may help her more perfectly to keep and increase this food, so that she holds in hate what is contrary to it."

The interesting thing about Catherine's table is that she keeps very strongly in mind that it does not have to be approached only in the Mass. She is a great one for spiritual communion, and likewise for offering up her own sufferings and frustrations. She is perpetually thankful for what Jesus suffered, and perpetually aware that she is a member, a body part, of the Body of Christ. But she always returns back again to the Eucharist of the Mass, and the table of the Cross where we eat the Body of Christ and drink His Precious Blood. That is where she believed a scholar got true knowledge -- by "feeding on the food of souls at the table of the holy Cross." And those who feed on Christ on the cross must suffer with Christ on the cross.

"...hungered for souls, on the table of the most holy Cross, in company with the humble and immaculate Lamb. I do not see, Father, that this sweet food can be eaten anywhere else. Why not? Because we cannot eat it truly without enduring much; it must be eaten with the teeth of true patience and the lips of holy desire, on the Cross of many tribulations, from whatsoever side they may come -- complaints, or the scandals in the world; and we must endure all things till death. Now is the time, dearest father, to show whether we are lovers of Christ crucified and rejoice in this food or not... there do you eat this food, bathed in the Blood of Christ crucified."

"Joy, joy in the Cross with me! So may the Cross be a bed where the soul may rest: a table where may be tasted heavenly food, the fruit of patience with quietness and assurance."

"Your Father fed His sons at the table of the Cross."

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

2005-11-16T20:15:00.000-05:00

Retirees Conquer the World

This is cool. The Ignatian Lay Volunteer Corps brings together retired persons fifty years or older working with and for the poor, together with spiritual guidance and prayerful reflection. Volunteers make a one year commitment to working two days a week, with an opportunity to re-up each year. This is work for God that is also working on one's own soul -- in the best Jesuit spiritual tradition. Good stuff all around.

2005-11-16T19:41:00.000-05:00

Success Favors the Bold

Afghan women win big at the polls!

2005-11-16T19:03:00.000-05:00

Waiting to Die

I think this post says it all about the joys of nationalized healthcare in Canada. Go look at the chart of typical waits for normal procedures and be appalled. And then there's this:

In Canada, MRI's are rarely available and are underutilized.

There are a litany of horror stories of patients left in hospital hallways for days on end, or worse.

In NY State, prisoners (poorly treated by US medical standards) released on parole have to wait 45 days to get on a healthcare program. In other words, if that parolee needed heart surgery (and didn't get it in prison), he would get it faster than if he were a law abiding, Canadian citizen.

2005-11-16T17:34:00.000-05:00

The History of Telenovelas!

I have long said that telenovelas (Mexican and Latin American soap operas) rule. It appears that the rest of the world agrees with me.

Sigh. Why don't we have any Spanish language channels on the cable here (well, except the morning programming on EWTN)? Sigh.

2005-11-16T11:10:00.000-05:00

St Gertrude the Great?

Okay, so who the heck is St. Gertrude, and what makes her so great? Heck, she's the only female saint called the Great. Why?

St. Gertrude was an orphan, her family name unknown, who was raised by Benedictine nuns and brought into their community. Like most nuns at that point in medieval times, she was a scholar. Initially, she was more interested in her studies than her God, but when she was 25, she had a change of heart. From then on she became a great mystic and had the requisite visions, miracles, and so forth... but she also wrote Latin works which were helpful in spiritual life. St. Teresa de Avila, for example, chose her as her model and guide. TAN is apparently publishing some of these works under the title of The Life and Revelations of St. Gertrude the Great. She also wrote a set of Spiritual Exercises which are still used today in some communities.

Here's a short but very useful intro which also tells you why she's "the Great".

As always, we can consult the Catholic Encyclopedia.

Another good page on St. Gertrude. This one is part of a POD, do-it-yourself lay apostolate: The Mission to Empty Purgatory. Yes, they mean to empty purgatory by using St. Gertrude the Great's prayer, which allegedly releases 1000 souls per time said. Yes, they have a pledge page. Yes, they have a page to show how close they've gotten to their estimated goal: only 90 million some to go.

Dang, we American Catholics do think big, don't we? Hee! Let's do it!

(Somewhere, my poor Evangelical friend Joy is cringing and wondering what Maureen is going to advocate next....)

Also , one of our "traditional" separated brethren has created a whole webpage on just this saint! It's good info, so ignore the radtrad nonsense and use the good stuff, in the real Catholic tradition of despoiling the Egyptians. :)

Here's some information on her devotion to the Sacred Heart.

2005-11-15T19:46:00.000-05:00

Towards a Public Domain Liturgy of the Hours

Just like they did when they were Jews, the early Christians prayed at certain times of the day. This never went away, but turned into the Liturgy of the Hours (aka the Divine Office, the Office, the Daily Office, Common Prayer, Opus Dei, or the Work of God.) This is a system of psalms, prayers, and readings, varying by the weekday, season, and time of day, so people get big chunks of the Bible and don't get bored.

Most people don't do all of the Hours, but those who've been ordained are supposed to; most cloistered monastic communities also say all the hours. Some even sing or chant it. Most religious communities at least do morning and evening (Lauds and Vespers) prayer together, though they may follow their own community's usage instead of the standard breviary. However, the Council Fathers of Vatican II also recommended that all the laity make morning and evening prayer according to the Hours. (I never saw a felt banner pointing that out.)

You may ask yourself, where the heck do I get a breviary? What does one look like? Why didn't someone give me one at First Communion, if it's so honking important? (Okay, maybe that's just me.) Well, there are two major print options. One is a one volume book called Christian Prayer. (Boy, that just screams "find Liturgy of the Hours inside", doesn't it? Nothing generic about that title.) The other is a four volume set called "Liturgy of the Hours" which allows you not to waste all your time flipping back and forth, but will cost you somewhere between 100-150 dollars. (Ah, the accessibility.) Needless to say, none of these volumes have anything like the purty pictures you might recall seeing in medieval books of hours, even if the art books were very vague on what the written bits said.

The Internet has been a big boon to this devotion, making it possible not only to explain the principles of saying the Hours to clueless newbies such as myself, but also allowing them to pray along without dropping a wad of cash on hard-to-find books.

So it's kind of a big deal when Bettnet notes that www.liturgyhours.org is going off the free Net, to be replaced by a subscription service called ebreviary.com. Universalis.com is still fine, though. Also, we have Fr. Roderick's Praystation Portable.

Clearly, what we need is some sort of public domain liturgy of the hours, with the new breviary presented with its readings from the Bible and various other sources being drawn from public domain translations.

Meanwhile, one approach is that taken by Fr. Kenny, a Dominican in Nigeria who has created "the ultimate Liturgy of the Hours". The current version of the readings and prayers are all presented in the original languages, which cuts out the middleman. (Don't panic. He also made his own translations.) He also includes the chant tunes. (But the links to hymns are often to hymns in Hausa, so I hope you've boned up on your clicks and such.) Yes, this is real PODness, with a large helping of linguistic and musical geekdom on top. And no pages to flip. Awesome work!

Another liturgy of the hours resource is Pray the Psalms Daily with the Monks. It's more than just the psalms. (Oh, and Blue Cloud Abbey is a Benedictine monastery out in South Dakota. So that is a real placename.)

Here's something really interesting: a site for the Byzantine Catholic liturgy of the hours! Breathe with your other lung for a while! This site also features extensive links to Eastern Catholicism resources.

The Erie Benedictines write out some of the readings. The Yankton Benedictines provide a list of the readings, but you have to look them up yourself. There are plenty of other websites of this kind, as well as communities using their own readings and prayer schedule.

For those who'd like something shorter, there's also the modern version of The Little Office of the Blessed Virgin Mary. No pictures, alas. Here's an HTML version, but it only includes Morning and Evening prayers. An English version of the old Office is available (with illustrations!) at the Hypertext Book of Hours.

Finally, since I saw it listed on several links sites, I thought I should probably point out that MissionStClare.com is an Anglican site, although it doesn't say that right off. Their Divine Office and the Catholic Divine Office are not the same. Just so we're all clear on that.

2005-11-15T19:32:00.000-05:00

St. Albert on the Web!

Hey! Two of St. Albert the Great's over seventy works are actually up on the Web! Check out "De quindecim problematibus" (Of Fifteen Problems), written circa 1270, and now available on that wonderful collection of Latin works, Bibliotheca Augustana. And there's also a copy of "De Fato" (Of Fate).

(I gather that "On Cleaving to God" isn't really by him. Neither is this medieval commentary on the Psalms, though it's very interesting.)

Also, here's a post at Blog by the Sea about his work to make Aristotle accessible to Christian academia.

It turns out that one famous picture of St. Albert by Tommaso da Modena was part of a series decorating a Dominican convent. I like the magnifying glass!

Here's a comment by our guy on marriage:

"Nothing prevents marriage from thus being traced back to two or three divine institutions: one relative to nature precisely as nature, another relative to nature precisely as fallen, a third relative to nature precisely as redeemed by Christ. And so marriage is the sacrament of innocence, in the Old Testament and in the New."

Here's another Marian comment by our guy:

"Do not be afraid, Mary,
for you have found favour with God."

Note, Mary, that you have found grace,
not taken it as Lucifer tried to do.

You have found grace, not lost it as Adam did.

You have found favor with God
because you desired and sought it.

You have found uncreated grace --
that is, God Himself became your Son --

and with that Grace
you have found and obtained every uncreated good.

Finally, here are lots of St. Albert links from the Dominicans.

2005-11-15T12:53:00.000-05:00

Scary Reading

Via Charlotte Allen, a study of how Salafist English suicide bombers think.

You know, it sounds like these folks really need evangelization and rebirth, not to mention aggressive policing of their neighborhoods and a strict anti-truancy policy to keep girls in school. If anybody ever needed the love of Jesus, these folks do. Pray that God will help them remake their twisted souls.

(Not that I didn't kill Christ, but sheesh. Think and do all this stuff and then blow yourself up while hurting others? Not the best condition of soul to meet God in.)

2005-11-13T18:29:00.000-05:00

No, Banshee, Tell Me How You Really Feel.

It's just as well I did forget about Fr. Gearhart's nifty post on St. Albert the Great, because right above that, the good father goes into McCain compliment mode. (Boy, I hope that's tongue-in-cheek. Very.)

My opinion on McCain differs from his. But then, it differs quite a bit from that of almost everyone else I know, so hey, why not air it on my blog?

I'm sick of McCain, frankly. Yes, he was a hero when the chips were down. But apparently, when the chips are not down, he has absolutely no hesitation in following his own opinions to the exclusion of anyone else's needs. Party loyalty to him is as a breath of air pushing against bricks.

Political promises also mean nothing; he always reserves the right to change his mind and say, "Oh, well, my conscience won't let me do that now." Well, if that happened once or twice, I think I'd understand. But if your conscience is going to change its mind as frequently as McCain's, you ought not to promise anyone anything until you and your conscience have chatted fully.

So yes, McCain's candid. But when someone candidly tells you he's about to torpedo you... and he's on your own side... well, there's something to be said for showing a little shame, however hypocritically.

Still, seeing as how he fights for causes he believes in and how he is loyal to those he believes to be his own, I can only assume that Mr. McCain no longer considers himself a Republican, a conservative, or anything else but a McCainite. Which is fine, but if that's what he is, he should run as such, and not take money from those he has come to despise. That would be candor.

I suspect that I feel so strongly on this subject because I have been subjected to a false friend. One of my less lovely childhood memories of parochial school in my old parish was getting taunted by a whole big ring of boys, which turned into fighting with them. (Fortunately, I had brothers, and they were apparently unaware that girls could punch hard. I enlightened them.) All the while, I kept expecting my best friend (a girl who was the biggest and strongest kid in my class) to wade in, bring the adults to save me, or at least yell support. Nothing happened. The adults maintained their usual observation of that Catholic value, the Prime Directive. The boys only broke it up when one of the teachers happened to look outside and see what was going on, and came out to deal with it.

Well, I expected constant harassment from the other kids and constant negligence from the adults. But if my brothers' classes had been out on the playground with us, I knew they would have waded in. Yet my friend, who was even taller than my elder brother, had stood there watching and pretending not to know me. Now, that upset me. I inquired the reason for this action.

She told me, without any shame, with perfect self-righteousness, that I couldn't possibly have expected her to fight all those boys. (Did I mention that she was very proud of her strength?) I had set them off, after all, by being alive. And besides, telling the adults wouldn't have done anything. The whole thing was my problem. I should be glad that she hung out with me at all.

False friends and allies have their uses. But really, they are worse associates than outright enemies. At least you know where your enemies stand. You have a decent hope that they will see the light or have a shift in self-interest. But a false friend is a false friend forever.

2005-11-13T06:08:00.000-05:00

Happy St. Albert's Day!

My parish being dedicated to the Universal Doctor, we celebrate his feast two days ahead of time this year (to get it onto a Sunday). Our new organ will be officially blessed for use in giving God worship at the 9:30. Our choir is going to sing something special at that Mass. And I'm cantoring this morning at the 8:00! Yay!

UPDATE: Since I was half asleep this morning when I posted, I totally forgot to mention the nifty post on St. Albert by Fr. Gearhart on his blog. Also, don't miss this post on tribalism, globalism, and trying to get the truths of the Church into people's skulls (my wording!). In fact, there's tons of excellently cool stuff here!

If you happen to be close enough to Ohio Dominican University's main campus over in Columbus, they're going to have a lecture in honor of St. Albert on November 16 (a day late) at 10:30 AM.

A good article from earlier this month about St. Albert and the "conflict" between faith and science. Which he exposed as bogus. A loooooong time ago.

St. Albert's Canadian connection. New to me!

Here's an incunabulus (early printed book, often colored by hand) of his "De Mysterio Missae" (Of the Mystery of the Mass). The third and fourth images begin the text of the book, which the Latin scholars among you can read if you call up the (much!) larger image. There's some nice imagery right at the beginning.

Finally, I think I should note the interesting fact that he was very dedicated in his private devotions to praying the Hail Mary. (Or to be technical, just the Angelic Salutation part. That was all there was to an Ave in his time.) "A hundred times a day he bent his knees, and fifty times he prostrated himself raising his body again by his fingers and toes, while he repeated at every genuflexion: 'Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee, blessed art thou amongst women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb'." (150 times for the 150 psalms, just like the pre-Luminous Mysteries rosary.) Talk about spiritual exercise!

I also picked up a cool new (to me) St. Albert quote about Mary's pregnancy:

"Magis Deo conjungi, nisi fieret Deus, non potuit."

(She could not have been more united to God except by becoming God herself.)

2005-11-11T23:04:00.000-05:00

Staying on the Road

Mark Shea quoted C.S. Lewis today:

The use of fashions in thought is to distract the attention of men from their real dangers. We direct the fashionable outcry of each generation against those vices of which it is least in danger and fix its approval on the virtue nearest to that vice which we are trying to make endemic. The game is to have them all running about with fire extinguishers whenever there is a flood, and all crowding to that side of the boat which is already nearly gunwale under. Thus we make it fashionable to expose the dangers of enthusiasm at the very moment when they are all really becoming worldly and lukewarm; a century later, when we are really making them all Byronic and drunk with emotion, the fashionable outcry is directed against the dangers of the mere "understanding." Cruel ages are put on their guard against sentimentality, feckless and idle ones against respectability, lecherous ones against Puritanism; and whenever all men are really hastening to be slaves or tyrants we make liberalism the prime bogey.

Well, I was freaking out quite a bit about that pants thing, I agree. But is the above really the case? Yes, we are a society of skimpy outfits. But we are also a society of folks who think every woman must be covered from head to foot. Yet, even then....

I have a friend who lives in Chicago, and likes to dress in all sorts of kicky little fashions. She got hold of a beautiful silk scarf, used it in various ways, and eventually decided (solely for fashion and wind reasons) that she liked wearing it as a head covering. Since she has dark hair, dark eyes, lives in a very diverse neighborhood, and will cheerfully toss back "Aleikum salaam!" to darn near anybody, a lot of her Muslim neighbors assume she's a Muslim when she wears the scarf on her head.

Now, she has gotten the vaunted effect of respectfully being greeted as "sister" by Muslims far and near. But she has also learned that wearing a head covering doesn't protect you from Muslim men's advances; it exposes you to them. Pretty crude come-ons, too. She was shocked, because she felt that if she were Muslim and devout, they should know she wouldn't be interested. But they didn't know that. They live in a society where women are trapped and demeaned so much that they don't know what a woman might think. Hey, worth a try, right?

Now, our society has gone downhill, and sure, there are meatmarkets out there and drunken fratboys and just plain crime. But on the whole, wherever I go in the US or in a Christian country, I can walk around in normal clothes and pretty much never be molested. Certainly people in my neighborhood are not going to come up to me and make advances as crude as my friend advised. If I don't get that respect, people wouldn't be really shocked if I hauled off or called the police. Have you ever heard of a Muslim woman defending her virtue that way? No, and they seem to assume that authority will assume they were inviting the attack, and doing anything will make matters worse. (From what I've seen, anyway. And of course Fatima swung a notorious sword; but I'm not talking about battle here.)

And I have to say that any time the tide of fashion turns to austerity and covering nearly every bit of a woman from sight, the ordinary rights and respect given to women seems to be swept away by that tide.

So how do you tell people to pull their pants up and put on some clothes without allying yourself with the Burqas R Us crowd of any persuasion? Well, I saw some nuns from Egypt tonight on EWTN, and they seemed to be managing it. They wore a habit and a veil -- but the veil was pulled back just far enough to expose a good-sized hank of hair. It seemed to say, "I'm doing this for God, and I'm not doing it for the Koran."
I liked that. They weren't giving up their Catholic heritage, but they weren't letting themselves be dhimmified, either.

So I think that's what was behind my rage -- being treated like a pushmi pullyu by this wonderful society of ours, and not even being able to live an unharassed life among my brothers and sisters of St. Blog's -- too nunny for some, too much of a hussy for others. (Well, actually that part makes me laugh.) I'm not a happy warrior. I reacted exactly the same way during that memorable conversation when I was told both that Catholics were too full of guilt and that Confession made Catholics too free of guilt. (Well, okay, I didn't scream at anybody this time and demand they pick their accusation and stick with it.)

But I really need to get used to this sort of thing. As the good Chesterton says in Orthodoxy:

And then in a quiet hour a strange thought struck me like a still thunderbolt. There had suddenly come into my mind another explanation. Suppose we heard an unknown man spoken of by many men. Suppose we were puzzled to hear that some men said he was too tall and some too short; some objected to his fatness, some lamented his leanness; some thought him too dark, and some too fair. One explanation (as has been already admitted) would be that he might be an odd shape. But there is another explanation. He might be the right shape. Outrageously tall men might feel him to be short. Very short men might feel him to be tall. Old bucks who are growing stout might consider him insufficiently filled out; old beaux who were growing thin might feel that he expanded beyond the narrow lines of elegance.
Perhaps Swedes (who have pale hair like tow) called him a dark man, while negroes considered him distinctly blonde. Perhaps (in short) this extraordinary thing is really the ordinary thing; at least the normal thing, the centre. Perhaps, after all, it is Christianity that is sane and all its critics that are mad--in various ways.

The necessary thing is not for the Christian woman to defend herself from charges of being a skank by dressing with ultra-modesty, or from charges of looking sexless by wearing dental floss to the beach. The necessary thing is to stay on the road that is Christ, not falling off either to the right or the left. If Christ's road itself leads us right or left, then that's the way to go.

That doesn't mean that we have no standards. It means we don't take on the standards of people with no rightful authority over us. It means that we don't throw the prudence that God gave us back into His Face.

Chesterton also says:

Paganism declared that virtue was in a balance; Christianity declared it was in a conflict: the collision of two passions apparently opposite....

The Greek had spoken of men creeping on the earth, as if clinging to it. Now Man was to tread on the earth as if to subdue it. Christianity thus held a thought of the dignity of man that could only be expressed in crowns rayed like the sun and fans of peacock plumage. Yet at the same time it could hold a thought about the abject smallness of man that could only be expressed in fasting and fantastic submission, in the gray ashes of St. Dominic and the white snows of St. Bernard.

This means that those who sincerely feel themselves called to ultra-modesty shouldn't be so much demanding from their sisters as practicing it themselves as much as they can, for the love of God. They should regard it as a strenuous form of devotion and self-mortification, and maybe they shouldn't ask it of their kids until they're old enough to decide for themselves. Similarly, those who feel themselves called to peace shouldn't go telling soldiers that God has nothing to do with war and all those psalms are a typo, though they should do their best to live as peaceful people themselves.

There are a lot of ways to love and serve God. As long as those ways stay obedient to Church teaching, and don't claim to supersede all other ways, I don't see why we shouldn't pursue what suits us. In fact, to do otherwise would be to get in the way of the Holy Spirit. And if anybody says otherwise, some of us are called to fight him to death and some of us are called to love and pray him to death; but either way, the unlawful restriction has to go. (And if some of us were smarter about their own gifts, certain persons like myself would know better than to freak out unhelpfully.)

But restricting yourself is a lawful and laudable gift, just as every other form of doing more than what's required is. It is the lawful gift of ourselves to God and each other that sets us free, and the taking away of others' lawful freedom that makes us sad prisoners.

More Chesterton and Orthodoxy:

And the more I considered Christianity, the more I found that while it had established a rule and order, the chief aim of that order was to give room for good things to run wild.

...St. Francis, in praising all good, could be a more shouting optimist than Walt Whitman. St. Jerome, in denouncing all evil, could paint the world blacker than Schopenhauer. Both passions were free because both were kept in their place... By defining its main doctrine, the Church not only kept seemingly inconsistent things side by side, but, what was more, allowed them to break out in a sort of artistic violence otherwise possible only to anarchists. Meekness grew more dramatic than madness.

...All that I am urging here can be expressed by saying that Christianity sought in most of these cases to keep two colours coexistent but pure. It is not a mixture like russet or purple; it is rather like a shot silk, for a shot silk is always at right angles, and is in the pattern of the cross.

...Can the lion lie down with the lamb and still retain his royal ferocity? THAT is the problem the Church attempted; THAT is the miracle she achieved.

...the balance was often distributed over the whole body of Christendom. Because a man prayed and fasted on the Northern snows, flowers could be flung at his festival in the Southern cities; and because fanatics drank water on the sands of Syria, men could still drink cider in the orchards of England.

...Last and most important, it is exactly this which explains what is so inexplicable to all the modern critics of the history of Christianity. I mean the monstrous wars about small points of theology, the earthquakes of emotion about a gesture or a word. It was only a matter of an inch; but an inch is everything when you are balancing. The Church could not afford to swerve a hair's breadth on some things if she was to continue her great and daring experiment of the irregular equilibrium. Once let one idea become less powerful and some other idea would become too powerful. It was no flock of sheep the Christian shepherd was leading, but a herd of bulls and tigers, of terrible ideals and devouring doctrines, each one of them strong enough to turn to a false religion and lay waste the world.

...Here it is enough to notice that if some small mistake were made in doctrine, huge blunders might be made in human happiness. A sentence phrased wrong about the nature of symbolism would have broken all the best statues in Europe. A slip in the definitions might stop all the dances; might wither all the Christmas trees or break all the Easter eggs. Doctrines had to be defined within strict limits, even in order that man might enjoy general human liberties. The Church had to be careful, if only that the world might be careless.

This is the thrilling romance of Orthodoxy. People have fallen into a foolish habit of speaking of orthodoxy as something heavy, humdrum, and safe. There never was anything so perilous or so exciting as orthodoxy. It was sanity: and to be sane is more dramatic than to be mad. It was the equilibrium of a man behind madly rushing horses, seeming to stoop this way and to sway that, yet in every attitude having the grace of statuary and the accuracy of arithmetic... The orthodox Church never took the tame course or accepted the conventions; the orthodox Church was never respectable... It is easy to be a madman: it is easy to be a heretic... It is always simple to fall; there are an infinity of angles at which one falls, only one at which one stands. To have fallen into any one of the fads from Gnosticism to Christian Science would indeed have been obvious and tame. But to have avoided them all has been one whirling adventure; and in my vision the heavenly chariot flies thundering through the ages, the dull heresies sprawling and prostrate, the wild truth reeling but erect.

2005-11-11T21:31:00.000-05:00

Assessment of the Week

It's been a weird week, full of ups and downs. I've had good news and met good people. I've had discouraging news and discouraging run-ins with people. I've been happy and felt on the right path, and I've been disappointed in myself. I've gotten lots done and I've totally wasted my time. And then, there were those nights when the heat wasn't working....

The freaky thing was that God seemed to be in a particularly pointed mood, as stuff kept coming up that I'd just read advice about in The Imitation of Christ. Talk about relevant books!

All in all, though, I suppose I feel pretty blessed. Inconveniently blessed, maybe, and weirdly blessed, always. But blessed all the same.

I actually remembered to watch the EWTN show on Clare Asquith and her book Shadowplay, which I now wish I'd taped. Then I actually remembered to watch the Fulton Sheen show, which has been really neat the two or three times I've actually remembered it.

He told the amazing story of Charles de Foucauld, a playboy French viscount who ended up a martyred hermit in the Sahara. He also mentioned that some orders had been founded after his death by those who were touched by a biography written about his life and inspired to live by the Rule he wrote for himself -- living among the desert people in utter poverty, but as Christians and helpers.

Meet the Little Brothers of Jesus, and the Little Sisters of Jesus. Meet the Little Brothers of Jesus Caritas, who live the same way but in Italy.

And it turns out that this Charles de Foucauld... is the same Charles de Foucauld who's getting beatified this Sunday on November 13! Gotta love EWTN!

2005-11-11T07:10:00.000-05:00

11/11

Today is Armistice Day, of course. We call it Veteran's Day in America now, and it's Remembrance Day in the UK and its sphere.

But originally, of course, this day was better known as Martinmas, the Feast of St. Martin of Tours. St. Martin was a Roman soldier who became a Christian. Legend says that he was riding on some mission when he met up with a shivering beggar along the road. Since he could not follow the Biblical injunction to give one of your cloaks to the man who has none, Martin promptly cut his great red military cloak in two with his sword, and gave one of the halves to the beggar. Later, Christ came to visit Martin -- wearing that half a cloak.

Sober fact records that Martin trained under St. Hilary of Poitiers, founded a monastery, and preached the gospel among the people. After the bishop of Tours died, Martin apparently became one of a long line of bishops who had to be dragged into accepting the job. (Legend says he was told that a woman in Tours was dying, and as soon as he unwarily stepped through the city gates, the ambushing people of Tours acclaimed him and started getting him consecrated.) Known both for charity and for organizing genius, St. Martin of Tours was one of the great forces holding back total chaos in Gaul as the Roman Empire drew back in upon itself. He was one of the most popular saints during the Middle Ages, and the French always attributed Charles Martel's victory against the Muslims at Poitiers to St. Martin's intercession.

Martinmas was also one of the great harvest festivals (and slaughtering time, since the grass was dying). It provided a convenient end to the All Saints'/All Souls' celebrations of those who have gone before us. Also, in the northern parts of England and in Scotland, it was the real beginning of winter cold. Martinmas was also the ending day for a Scottish hired man's summer employment by a farmer; the two hiring fairs were on Whitsunday and Martinmas. Thanks to the change to the Gregorian calendar, however, Martinmas picked up one more function. For those who stubbornly refused to change, Martinmas was a sort of Old Halloween, as Epiphany was Old Christmas.

Anyway, listen to what the ballads say:

"It fell aboot the Martinmas
When nichts are lang and mirk
That the wife's three sons cam hame
And their hats were o the birk."
-- "The Wife of Usher's Well"

"It was in and about the Martinmas time,
When the green leaves were a-falling,
That Sir John Graeme, in the West country,
Fell in love with Barbara Allen."
-- "Barbara Allen"

"It fell upon a Martinmas time,
When the nobles were a' drinking wine,
That Little Mushiegrove to the kirk he did go,
For to see the ladies come in."
-- one of the innumerable versions of "Matty Groves"

"O Martinmas wind, when wilt thou blaw,
And shake the green leaves off the tree!
O gentle Death, when wilt thou come?
For of my life I am wearie!"
-- "Waly, Waly"

"It fell about the Martinmas,
When the wind blew shrill and cauld,
Said Edom o' Gordon to his men,
We maun draw to a hald."
-- "Edom o' Gordon"

"It fell about the Martinmas tyde,
When our Border steeds get corn and hay,
The Captain of Bewcastle bound him to ryde,
And he ’s ower to Tividale to drive a prey."
-- "Jamie Telfer"

"It fell upon the Martinmas time,
When the snow lay on the border
There came a troop of soldiers here
To take up their winter quarters."
--- "Martinmas Time"

"It fell aboot the Martinmas time,
And a fine time it was then O.
That oor gudewife got puddens to mak'
And she boiled them in a pan O."
--- "Get Up and Bar the Door"

"T’was in the merry month of May
When flowers had clad the landscape gay
To Ellon Fair I bent my way
With hopes to find amusement.

"A scrankie chiel to me cam near
And quickly he began to spier
If I wid for the neist half year
Engage to be his servant.

"'I’ll need you as my orra loon
Four poun’ ten I will lay doon
To you, when Martinmas comes roon
To close out your engagement.'"
--- "Ellon Fair"

"Sae I fell tae my wark, an' I pleased richt weel,
A word or a wave and I plied hand and heel;
But my troubles cam" on, for the fences were bad,
An' the midsummer fleas made the cattle rin mad,
And in cauld blasty weather sair drenched wi' the rain,
Whiles wee thochts o' leavin' wad steal o'er my brain;
But with courage I dashed aye the tear fae my e'e
When I thocht o' my shoon an' my five shilling fee.

"An' Martinmas brought me my lang wished-for store,
And proudly I counted it twenty times o'er,
Noo years hae fled by in a joyful train,
But I never experienced sic raptures again.
The sailor just safe through the wild breakers steered,
Proud Waterloo's victor when Blucher appeared,
Ne'er felt as I felt when I placed on the knee
Of a fond-hearted mother my five shilling fee."
-- "The Five Shilling Fee"

Merry Martinmas, everybody!

2005-11-10T12:03:00.000-05:00

Flying High....

After a zillion years as a reptile, amphibian, and even lower forms of life, I have somehow become a Flappy Bird in The Truth Laid Bear's ecosystem. Apparently, the work of defending pants is an important and link-worthy one.

Probably I will soon return to reptilian life, but I felt I must document my day in the sun.

2005-11-10T11:46:00.000-05:00

St. Bennen's Summer

We in America didn't have Indian summer this year. Indian summer is in September or October. No, this year we've had St. Martin's Summer, which is generally an English thing. (It's also the title of a Rafael Sabatini book.) However, the heat spell seems to have ended last night (two days early for Martinmas), which I guess would make it St. Bennen's Summer.

St. Bennen (or Benignus, as the boring calendar calls him) was St. Patrick's Jimmy Olsen, according to legend. He was the youngest and chirpiest of his disciples, and also the one who insisted on getting shut into a burning house with a druid while both prayed for rain as a trial of their gods' power. (Archaeologists' experiments have shown that houses of the type used by the Irish at the time would burn fiercely, quickly, and chokingly. Staying inside one on fire was a death sentence.) Also, when St. Patrick prayed the prayer known as "The Deer's Cry" (or the Lorica, but there are a ton of other Loricas; it's a genre name), God made Patrick and his group look like a herd of deer to their enemies, while Bennen looked like a fawn following behind them. In sober fact, Bennen eventually succeeded Patrick as bishop of Ireland. But the legend's too neat to ignore.

2005-11-07T07:17:00.000-05:00

The Moral of the Pants Story

There is one, of course. "Honi soit qui mal y pants."

And forthwith, I award the office of Knight or Lady Companion of the Most Noble Order of the Pants to all who fought in this combox combat for the honor of ladies and their chosen garb. Wear it with pride.

2005-11-05T22:16:00.000-05:00

Revealing My True Identity

Via Holy Fool, I have found a way to reveal my true identity and function.

2005-11-04T20:49:00.000-05:00

Canon, Tradition, Fanfic, and St. Jane of Austen

I haven't been over to Enbrethiliel's blog for an Elf's age, so I was delighted to find Zadok linking to her posts on "Scripture and Tradition in Jane Austen" and "The Value of Reading Fan Fiction". Good stuff. Especially the link to a G.I. Joe alternate world epic. Mmm, Eighties goodness....

2005-11-04T18:42:00.000-05:00

Thomas a Kempis, Political Philosopher

I've been reading The Imitation of Christ for my audioblog, as I mentioned below. This little quote caught my eye. It seems to explain perfectly the state of politics in America, in a perfectly bipartisan way.

If you cannot make yourself what you would wish to be, how can you bend others to your will? We want them to be perfect, yet we do not correct our own faults. We wish them to be severely corrected, yet we will not correct ourselves. Their great liberty displeases us, yet we would not be denied what we ask. We would have them bound by laws, yet we will allow ourselves to be restrained in nothing. Hence, it is clear how seldom we think of others as we do of ourselves.

2005-11-04T07:22:00.000-05:00

Zeal for Thy House Consumes Me

Postings like the one below seem perfectly appropriate the day I post them. The next morning make me feel like I'm kicking a puppy. I mean, here's poor Quoque, just trying to do his best, all excited about the vision of Christian life presented by Dressing with Dignity... and here I am, raining on his parade. How mean and nasty I am.

(Well, this is no news to the good Lord, actually. More time in the Cell of Self-Knowledge for me.)

But when I point out that there are plenty of people out there who would tell the traditional ladies that their mantillas are immodest head coverings, I'm not joking. It's something that people I know well might indeed be forced to say, at least for themselves. They have chosen to practice Orthodox Judaism in all seriousness, and thus are busy hiding their hair from everyone but their husbands. I wouldn't do it myself, and certainly I would prefer them to practice the fullness of the Covenant over here across the Tiber. But I honor their dedication.

But then, I can honor them because they're not sitting around telling me that I must cover my hair, my wrists and my ankles. They're not even saying that to other Jews or Orthodox Jews. They're practicing it for God and their own good. They aren't condemning me for not taking on the same burden. Similarly, you can be a nun without insisting that everyone wear a habit, or a Florida-people pantsuit, just like you. In fact, that's kinda the point of being a nun.

Telling all women that all pants are all immodest is putting an unjust burden on other people. I have no objection if someone chooses not to wear skirts, or not ever cut her hair, because she feels it's a better or deeper way to live her Christian faith. I do have an objection to being told, even by implication, that I'm a hussy if I don't do likewise.

I am living well within divine, human, and canon law where clothing modesty is concerned, and I know my rights and duties as well as any Christian alive. If you try to tell me otherwise, I will laugh in your face. If you call me to live my faith more deeply through the clothes I wear, I will be more likely to listen. But frankly, modesty is not an issue that concerns me, because clothes and dating don't concern me much. Dressing plainly is already second nature to me. If I bought myself a whole new wardrobe of determinedly modest clothes, that's when I'd be flaunting myself.

I'm a lot more worried about my intellectual lack of modesty. I'm reading The Imitation of Christ for the next few Saturdays over on my audioblog, and hooboy, is it topical for me.

If men used as much care in uprooting vices and implanting virtues as they do in discussing problems, there would not be so much evil and scandal in the world, or such laxity in religious organizations. On the day of judgment, surely, we shall not be asked what we have read but what we have done; not how well we have spoken but how well we have lived.

So I think I'll shut up now.

2005-11-02T11:36:00.000-05:00

What's Pants for the Goose....

You know, it would be really nice if people behaved with common decency. It would be nice if ordinary modesty came back. It would be really nice if Christians advocating modesty weren't so often huge and officious twits.

For example, let us click on over to the humbly named Nobis Quoque Peccatoribus and observe the blogger's discussion of "The Problem of Pants". (Thanks, Speculative Catholic.) It seems that it is vital to the world to point out that the cut of pants into legs creates a sort of arrow pointing upward at the female private package.

And yet, on the principle of the splinter and the GREAT HONKIN' OAKEN BEAM, it doesn't occur to this pure-minded blogger that the cut of pants inevitably points still more directly at the male package. Which is external, and outlined for all to see, by the cut of pants. I mean any pants, guys, not just tight ones.

It always astonishes me that men don't think about these things. For some reason, the burden of modesty always is supposed to rest upon the women, while men are apparently considering themselves sexless creatures lured to wrong by women flaunting all they own. I hate to break it to these men, but what's sauce for the goose is definitely sauce for the gander, and always was. Sorry your mommy never filled you in.

Pants were counted immodest in Jesus' time -- something worn only by wild horse-riding barbarians. Legionnaires' leather skirts were counted immodest by the Jews, who wore full-length robes. The necessity to ride horses and the utility of the clothing brought pants back again and again, but what a pain to sew until modern times! So pants kept going right back where they came from, until the last few centuries.

But even when pants came to stay, men who were not fashion-forward guarded their modesty. History is full of elaborately modest male underwear. Jackets and coats were long and covered the rear and front of pants from view. Until the last few decades, no decent man would sit around the house even in his undershirt; and going out into the front yard required undershirt, shirt, jacket, and snappy hat as well as pants. Somehow, I don't see a lot of traditional men taking care to hide their musculature or cover their bare arms; but that was the way it used to be.

In the end, a good deal of modesty is in the eye of the beholder as well as the wearer. And if the beholder of female pants is a gentleman, he will politely fail to look at the exact same areas that ladies fail to see on men. It's called chivalry. It's called a social contract. It's called risking a punch or slap if you look at my pants in any less respectful way.

And if you non-hypocritical male advocates of modesty go to kilts, be sure to wear a sporran and learn how to sit right. It'll help protect you from the world being able to see up your skirts as far as I was able to see up NQP's argument.

2005-11-01T11:49:00.000-05:00

Whited Sepulchres R Us

Apparently, Loretto High School in California believes in teaching its students the good old fashioned values of "sit down, shut up, and pay to be oppressed". Why, it's a good thing to have a Catholic teacher at a Catholic high school support abortion on the side, and escort children to their entirely legal executions. It's a bad thing to blow the whistle. And if your mother blew the whistle and the local paper revealed your name and lack of shame at your mother's horrid behavior, you must of course be expelled over the weekend. By Fed Ex, yet.

If this place were a real Catholic school, and a real preparatory academy, this is what our young lady would have received:

This rose is awarded in Mary Ward’s name to a young woman whose Christian commitment is expressed by her positive influence on others, which leads them to a deeper understanding and expression of their own faith. This outstanding student is active in countless service activities and defines leadership in every sense of the word.

Never mind, Katelyn. I'm sure Mary Ward herself will send you a rose, even if she has to go through the St. Therese version of Fed Ex to do it. :)

The Holy House had an open door.
When Mary came there, pregnant, poor,
Joseph did not turn her away.
He let her in. He told her, "Stay."

When Mary walked with a pregnant girl,
She told her hope was in the world,
To keep the child who waits within.
Hers saved the world, and her, from sin.

The Holy House held a Boy who spoke
To the Temple elders, to all the folk.
He had to teach them, so He spoke out.
It's His Father's business he was about.

The Holy House held a family of three
That never would sit and let evil be.

It's a great disgrace to the Bridegroom's Spouse
To expel such folk from the Holy House.

(I suggest that the student and her family would be far more comfortable over in this parish, St. Luke's of Brookfield, WI, which has traded a big money fundraiser for the assurance that they're not inadvertently supporting a very distasteful group called Girls Inc. The pastor's quote: "It's a bargain we'll just have to pass up. The cost is too high. Our integrity isn't for sale.")

2005-10-24T18:39:00.000-04:00

St. Simon the Zealot

Today we remember St. Jude Thaddaeus, who is known for being the saint of the impossible. But St. Simon was an even more lost cause -- a Zealot. Either he was the kind of Zealot determined to prove he was more pious than thou, or he was the sort of Zealot freedom-fighter that isn't realllll far off from terrorism. (Their Latin name was Sicarius, daggerman, because the assassins among them would carry daggers under their clothes, slip up to their victim, and stab him the midst of a crowd, then slip away again.) Yep, it wasn't glamorous Judas who was into all that. He was mainstream. Simon was the moonbat. (And him and Matthew together in the same band... ouch.)

If Simon's the same guy who was second bishop of Jerusalem, then he was also one of Our Lord's cousins. And he lived long enough to have to flee Jerusalem for Pella on the strength of Jesus' prophecy, and then watch as Jerusalem was slowly starved into submission -- a time of horror you can read in Josephus. It wasn't a happy thing for a former moonbat like Simon to have to watch. If Jesus hadn't called him, he would have died with them.

2005-10-24T18:13:00.000-04:00

Weekend Report

Well, after all the sound and fury, I had a really good time at OVFF. I think all that letting off a little steam beforehand helped, so thank you, dear readers, for your patience! But it seems that everybody had a better time than they'd expected. Maybe I'm not the only one who's been a bit stressed by recent conventions. Almost everybody seemed in the mood to hang out and chat about anything but politics, to which I say YAY!

As expected, my song didn't win for "Best Space Opera Song". How to describe the equivalent? Hmm. How's about being up against Carmen, Norma, Madame Butterfly, and Tosca? Not exactly a big surprise not to win, is what I'm saying. Heck, I didn't vote for me.

(I really couldn't, since it's not really a "space opera song". Okay, so it takes place in space and sounds sorta kinda like a lied, but that's not the same thing.... Also, given the competition....)

All the same, I enjoyed the chance to be broadcast on "filk radio" and to go to the banquet. I am deeply grateful for the support of all the voters, and very humbled, too.

The final jam was, as always, nifty. I was also visited by the sudden realization that all cowboy songs could easily be turned into surfer songs simply by the application of the correct riffs. Others concurred, and the name "Emperor Norton and His Imperial Surf Rangers" was invented. Spiked helmets and baggies.

The only dim spot on the weekend was that Greyhound didn't get me home in time to go to Mass. Sigh. Honestly, I need a car. If I had a car, I could just stay up until dawn and then go to Mass. Also, car seats are a lot wider than bus seats. Of course, first I have to get my license. And learn to drive on the highway without killing anyone.

All nice ideas. Too bad I still have no hand-eye coordination to speak of.

2005-10-20T07:06:00.000-04:00

Ranty Ranty Rant Rant

Don't worry, folks. As my poor long-suffering friend Joy there could tell you, I am all about the rants and the frustration. I could go on for hours and hours; that's why I decided to write these things up on a blog instead. For some reason, though, I usually don't go off on rants on the blog itself. (I tend to save that for unsuspecting comment boxes.) This was an exception, probably caused by stress.

So I apologize for going off like that, especially since the vast majority of my readers probably don't have a clue as to what I'm talking about. I haven't talked about filk much on this blog at all.

Over on my other blog, I assure you that your regularly scheduled audiobooks will continue while I'm incommunicado.

2005-10-18T11:36:00.000-04:00

Is the Glass Half-Filked or Half-Empty?

This Friday, my regularly scheduled blogging will be interrupted so
that I can attend the world's premier filk convention, OVFF (the Ohio Valley Filk Festival). I will mingle with my peers from around the world, hearing hundreds of songs and hanging out with old friends. And on Saturday night, I will go to the banquet and find out whether my song "Barrayaran Roses", nominated by people spanning the globe, has won a Pegasus Award for Best Space Opera Song.

I should be in hog heaven. But I'm not.

It's not that I'm nervous about the award. I literally don't care whether I win. I didn't expect to be nominated; I felt very honored when I was. That kind recognition is indeed more than I ever wanted.

The problem is that I just don't like filk much anymore.

I'm supposed to be working on an album. I've been supposed to working on it for almost five years now, and there was another project in the works for two years before that. But I don't really believe in most of my songs anymore. If I'd been able to record them quickly and be done with it, I would gladly have signed up for another two or three quick albums, and been flooded with inspiration for new songs. But quite frankly, I cannot stand the hurry-up-and-wait process of recording only two or three songs in a whole weekend, but doing those songs perfectly. They're never perfect, you see. They can't be. I'm always going to hear what's wrong with them and be unhappy with my performance, and trying to perfect the inherently imperfect is enough to make me cut my throat.

Getting songs done quickly keeps the momentum up, and prevents me from focusing on just how horrible my voice and songwriting really is. But speed is not desired. So instead, I get to hurt my voice with repeated takes, and confuse myself with headphones, and watch my blood sugar drop while feeling ever worse about my music. I also get to get engaged outside of recording in discussions and situations that distress me, but which I have to be polite about; while I'm sure my tactlessness is trying to all concerned. (I assure you, the longer this drags on, the less bearable I'm going to get. I come from a long line of bitchy, ornery people who don't bide their time gladly.)

I know everyone involved means well, but the truth is that I no longer want anything to do with recording. I want to die, or kill myself, or kill everyone else, or I want to get the dang album off my back and onto a shelf, but I don't want to be doing it. I want to be done already.

(It should probably be pointed out that I write songs all at once, and clean my place all at once, and write twenty-page papers in one night with one draft and one final copy; and I record audiobook chapters in a single session. I do not do this part-to-whole crud. That is just wrong. You can go back and make corrections once you're all done.)

At choir, they say music hits me like caffeine. I'm in a manic state. I'm obscenely cheerful and horribly jokey. This is how I used to be at filk circles. I don't feel that way now.

It's not the music, per se. I still believe in the artistic value of being able to share any kind of song, and of exploring the nerdy topics which mainstream songwriters never touch. I feel confident that there are wonderful new songs and tunes and lyrics being written. I'm certain that the rising filk generation is a good deal better at performance than mine. We now attract more professional musicians to join our ranks as well as well-meaning amateurs like myself. The market is such that filkers can actually make money on albums. We even had an article on filk published in Wired in September, which was reported from Conchord (at which I was Interfilk guest in 2001) and mentioned both OVFF and a special guest filker who plays guitar for Courtney Love and dates a writer for Rolling Stone.

And I didn't hear about it until today, which tells you just how far away I've floated from filk circles. (In both senses.) The only filkers I hear from regularly are my best friend Joy (well, duh) and Avram Gruner, who posts often in the comment boxes at Get Religion. Most filkers and members of fandom don't like blogs, for some reason. They're too attached to their Livejournals, the very design of which I dislike even to look at, much less read. I try to keep up with them, but the ugly appearance soon encourages me to break off. (So, though I don't mind if other filkers read this, it's pretty darned unlikely. I'm off their radar as much as they're off mine.)

What's worse, I don't like much of the sf and fantasy being published today. I was afraid I'd fallen out of love with the genre entirely, until I started reading public domain stories on my other blog. I'm not particularly thrilled with the TV and movies, either, and even the things I like (like Serenity) don't make me want to sing about them. But most of all, I don't believe in fandom these days: the skankiness, the politics, the suicidally stupid behavior, the unconcern with truth and reason as opposed to logic-chopping, the lack of true empathy for anyone if individual wants conflict with others' needs, and the cliquey elitism of people who have no reason to feel elite. Somewhere along the way, fandom decided it had become the cool kids, and didn't have to care about those who got trampled. It's not a road I choose to follow.

I'll admit that I did enjoy Millennicon back in March. I'll also admit that I've enjoyed getting back into gaming this year, and going to Origins. But my gaming group is remarkably free of the kind of people who annoy me, and so was Origins. The most fun I had at Marcon was outside the convention, I'm sorry to say; the rest of the con I don't even remember.

What I do remember, every morning when I wake up and my feet ache, every time when my muscles tense, is the miserable time I had during most of Worldcon 2004. Not only did I get talked to nastily because of my politics, not only did I get to hear folks I knew getting insulted, not only did I have a generally unfun time, but I also gave myself plantar fascitis for life. (That's pretty much overwritten all the fun that I did have.) I will grant you that this was mostly my fault (bad shoes, obsessive walking and sightseeing to escape the con). But it's still a constant reminder that large chunks of fandom are not nice or fun to be with, and that a good many of them were long-time personal acquaintances from whom I expected better.

But that's the thing. I expected better. Maybe I shouldn't have. Maybe I'm being too hard on them, and too whiny about my their non-achievement of my stupid standards. Maybe they never were better, and I was blinded by my regard for people who didn't deserve any. Maybe I should be more blase when people break rules of civilized conduct or morality; after all, it's entirely likely that they never were taught them in the first place. But all the songs said we were essentially one -- family, community, likeminded people with a single pure heart and a gaze resolutely fixed on the stars above.

Well. That sure worked out.

So I have a little trouble going back to join in the songs, because they have been proved to be lies by the singers themselves. This is just what you'd expect from a fallen world, of course. But even a fallen world is more bearable if people realize when they've done wrong, and try to make things right. That's not something that's in fashion now, either among Mundanes or in fandom. People keep the bit between their teeth as they head for the edge of the cliff.

I find no enjoyment in watching them go.

So I'm going to OVFF this weekend, to feast and to be feted (to a modest extent). And I wish like anything that I were staying home this weekend, and if I had a car I would have been seriously tempted to come back and cantor on Sunday morning. It's three days until OVFF, the secular highlight of my year in days gone by. There are thousands of places I would rather be.

Oh, well. Maybe I can hang out in downtown Columbus and have fun in the afternoon, before I have to go drag myself in and paste a smile on my face. There are some wonderful people whom I do want to see, and I'm sure there will be fun moments. I certainly intend to fulfill my obligations to those nice people who wrote in my song. But even with the good folks, I just don't fit in anymore; and I dearly long to gafiate. I've done it in spirit; and how my body longs to follow! There is nothing more confining than staying in a hobby because you have to.

Still, maybe I'll have my faith and my love renewed this year.

But since the movie last year didn't work out, maybe I should bring a deck of cards, so I can play solitaire. Or crossword puzzles. Crossword puzzles are good.

2005-10-15T12:28:00.000-04:00

The fight is over, the victory won....

I'm one of the folks who've been following the saga of Kobayashi Maru's brother. His fight is over now.

As you probably know from my other blog, I've been reading St. Catherine of Siena lately.

"...the peace of the just man’s death is greater or less according to the perfection of his soul... Wherefore when they come to the point of death, they die peacefully, because they have vanquished their enemies during their life. The world cannot accuse such a man, because he saw through its deceptions...the virtue of a just and perfect man transcends nature, extinguishing his natural fear and overcoming it with...desire of arriving at his last end... his conscience remains in peace, for during his life his conscience kept a good guard, warning him when enemies were coming to attack the city of his soul, like a watch-dog which stands at the door...

"The just man does not turn his head to admire his past virtues, because he neither can nor will hope in his own virtues, but only in the Blood in which he has found mercy; and as he lived in the memory of that Blood, so in death he is inebriated and drowned in the same...that soul, who already is beginning to taste eternal life... with the eye of the intellect illuminated by the pupil of the holy faith... sees Me, the Infinite and Eternal Good...

"Wherefore, opening the arms of hope and seizing Him with the hands of love, [the soul] seems to enter into His possession before she actually does so, in the way which I have narrated to you in another place. Passing suddenly, drowned in the Blood, by the narrow door of the Word she reaches Me, the Sea Pacific. For Sea and Door are united together, I and the Truth, My only-begotten Son, being one and the same thing.

"What joy such a soul receives who sees herself so sweetly arrived at this pass, for in Truth she tastes the happiness of the angels! This joy is received by all those who pass in this sweet manner...."

Please pray for Kobayashi Maru, his family, and all their friends, and for the soul of this just man whom we have come to love, too.

2005-10-10T22:56:00.000-04:00

Ecu-fun-ical

In case nobody has pointed you to it (hey, I came in late, too!), you owe it to yourself to read some AnglicaNoir. Great blogger in-jokes and Leibowitzing abound.

Start with The Adventures of Chris Johnson, Anglican Investigator.

Then it's on to the terrifying saga of The Hound of the Inghamvilles.

Finally, we find ourselves attending a little Reunion. (Clip on "Chapter One" to get to the beginning of the story.)

Enjoy!

2005-10-10T22:15:00.000-04:00

Hollywood, Meet a Grownup.

Today, fire destroyed Aardman's warehouse containing priceless props and memories of the company.

Wallace and Gromit's creator, Nick Park, said the earthquake in South Asia helped put the loss into perspective.

"Even though it is a precious and nostalgic collection and valuable to the company, in light of other tragedies, today isn't a big deal," he said.

Thank you for reminding us that not all artists are whiners.

In other news, not everything was lost, because not everything was in the warehouse.

2005-10-07T23:24:00.000-04:00

Free Opera on Archive.org

Once upon a time, Mr. Edison had a recording company. Then Mr. Edison left the rights to his company's recordings to the National Park Service, and they put those recordings into the public domain. So go over to archive. org's oldtime section and enjoy!

Cilea:
"Io son l'umile ancella" from Adriana Lecouvreur by Francesco Cilea. Sung by Claudia Muzio. 1921.

Handel:
"Hallelujah Chorus" from The Messiah by Handel. 1916.
Excerpt from Israel in Egypt by Handel. 1888. (The earliest known recorded music in existence.)

Herbert:
"Star Light, Star Bright" from Wizard of the Nile by Victor Herbert. Sung by J.W. Myers. 1896.

Leoncavallo:
"Mattinata" by Ruggiero Leoncavallo, the first song composed especially for the gramophone. Sung by Caruso and accompanied by Leoncavallo.

Meyerbeer:
"Gnadigenarie" from Robert le Diable by Giacomo Meyerbeer. Sung by Frau Emilie Herzog. 1902.

Mozart:
"Serenade" from Don Giovanni by Mozart. Sung by Edouard de Reszke. 1903.

Ponchielli:
Duet ("Ah! o cuor, dono funesto"?) from La Gioconda by Amilcare Ponchielli. Sung by Paola Koraleck and Preste Benedetti. 1911.

Puccini:
"Vissi d'arte" from Tosca by Puccini. Sung by Adelina Agostinelli. 1913.

"Sono un poeta" from La Boheme by Puccini. Sung by Florencio Constantino. 1908.

(Constantino died in a hospital for the destitute in Mexico City, after apparently having drunk and quarrelled his way out of a career. Great voice in these recordings, though.)

Tchaikovsky:
"Sei forse l'angelo fedele" from Eugene Onegin by Tchaikovsky, out of Pushkin. Sung by Claudia Muzio (in Italian, not Russian). 1920.

Verdi:
"Ah! fors' e lui" from La Traviata by Verdi. Sung by Lucrezia Bori. 1910.

"Ah, Si Ben Mio" from Il Trovatore by Verdi. Sung by R. Martin. 1912.

"Caro Nome" from Rigoletto by Verdi. Sung by Selma Kurz. 1912.

"Celeste Aida" from Aida by Verdi. Sung by Florencio Constantino. 1911.

"Niun Mi Tema" from Othello by Verdi. Sung by Francesco Tamagno. 1905.

"Quand'ero Paggio" from Falstaff by Verdi. Sung by Victor Maurel. 1907.

Von Flatow:
"M'appari"
from Martha by Friedrich von Flatow. Sung by Alessandro Bonci. 1914.

Wagner:
"Hochstes vertrauen" from Lohengrin by Wagner. Sung by Heinrich Knote.

Misc:
"Du Susse" from the operetta Schuetzenliesl. Sung by Ludwig Arno. 1908.

"Over There" Song by George M. Cohan. Sung by Enrico Caruso in English and French.

"Tu non mi vuoi piu bene" Song by Antonio Pini-Corsi. Sung by Enrico Caruso.

"The Last Rose of Summer" Song by Thomas Moore. Sung by Adelina Patti. 1905.

Instrumentals:
"Ride of the Valkyries" from Die Walkure by Wagner. Performed by the American Symphony Orchestra. 1921.

"William Tell Overture" (part 2) from William Tell by Rossini. Performed by Sodero's Band.

2005-10-05T15:35:00.000-04:00

Pigs Is Pigs!

Where do tribbles come from? Or flatcats? Or any of the other excessively multiplying animal jokes in sf and fantasy?

"Pigs Is Pigs" by Ellis Parker Butler!

Listen to the story over at Mister Ron's Basement. It's podcast #149.

(I can't tell you how relieved I am to have finally read, or heard, this sucker....)

2005-09-30T07:04:00.000-04:00

Happy Feast of the Bloggers!

Since my proffering of St. Brigid's cook St. Blath (pronounced Blah) didn't pass muster, today we celebrate the man whom Catholic bloggers everywhere have acclaimed as their patron saint!

He was a great scholar. He knew many languages. He fact-checked against original sources. He supported and was supported by fearless, scholarly and religious women. He successfully fought against the world, the flesh and the Devil.

And dang, did he understand flamewars.

St. Jerome -- we who are about to blog, salute you! Pray for us now, and in the hour of our thinking it's a good idea at the time. Give us your blessing, and drop a clue-by-four on our heads whenever we need it. Like you, saint and curmudgeon, may all our combativeness and words help us fight our way through to the Word made flesh, and may all our wandering and pilgrimages lead us to the Way. We ask also for the prayers of your patient friends, St. Paula and St. Eustochium, that we may be both patient friends ourselves and patiently befriended.

Patron saint of translators, pray for all of us crazy people who try to translate things, whether for a living or for fun, that our work may draw people together and teach them something of the truth. Pray also for the writers of translation programs, especially Babelfish, because they really are a help to folks.

In Christ our Lord, Amen.

St. Jerome, aka St. Hieronymus.

2005-09-30T07:00:00.000-04:00

Since You Were Asking...

...down in the comment box, I'll answer. No, I don't live in the Dakotas. However, we have a lot of phonebooks where I work, and I come into contact with those phonebooks on a fairly regular basis. I have to tell you, it does wonders for your geography. (Not to mention your respect for pronunciation gazetteers.)

2005-09-28T12:57:00.000-04:00

Speculative Catholic

How did I not run into Speculative Catholic before?

2005-09-28T10:44:00.000-04:00

The Unbearable Coolness of Last Names

It's always instructive to read phonebooks. Especially ones from North and South Dakota, with all those little towns' itsy-bitsy white pages.

Aadnes, American Horse, Antelope, Ayutapi, Azure.

Bad Heart Bull, Basaraba, Baumstarck, Bear Catches, Beitelspacher, Berreth, Big Bear, Big Eagle, Binfet, Bjerkness, Black Cloud, Black Fox, Black Moon, Blackhoop, Blue Earth, Blue Thunder, Bobtail Bear, Bonogofsky, Bovkoon, Brave Bull, Brekke, Brown Otter, Bubbers, Buchfinck, Buffalo Boy, Bullhead.

Carry Moccasin, Charging Cloud, Chase Alone, Chasing Bear, Chasing Hawk, Cheauma, Chiapputi, Crow Ghost, Crowshoe, Czapiewski.

Dammel, Dog Eagle, Dogskin, Dralle, Droog, Dumdie.

Eagleshield, Ebach, Eisenbraun, End Of Horn, Enzminger.

Fallgatter, Fast Horse, Flying By, Flying Horse, Follows The Road, Fool Bear, Four, Four Swords, Fourbear.

Gabbard, Gangl, Gazette, Glerup, Goldsack, Good Iron, Good Left, Grindstone, Guggolz.

Hairychin, Haraseth, Has Horns, Hatzenbuehler, Hetletved, High Elk, Hillius, Hilsendager, Hoisington, Holy Elk Face, Hosie.

Incognita, Iron Boulder, Iron Cloud, Ironroad, Ironshield, Iszler.

Jochim, Jutila.

Kadlec, Kaffar, Keepseagle, Kills Pretty Enemy, Klindworth, Klundt, Knispel, Kooker.

Lafromboise, Lamsters, Left Hand, Limesand, Long Feather, Looking Back, Looking Horse, Lukesh.

Mad Bear, Makes Him First, Many Horses, Manywounds, Marlenee, Mauai, Mayforth, Molash, Morlock, Muggli, Myllykangas.

Naasz, Nodak.

One Feather, Ongstad, Opoien.

Peerboom, Peyerl, Pipe Bear, Plenty Chief, Pulst.

Rainsberry, Red Tomahawk, Redlegs, Rising, Rising Sun, Rosebud, Rough Surface, Round Tree.

Schurhamer, See Walker, Sees The Elk, Shoestring, Situpiska, Skwarok, Soete, Spotted Horse, Szczur.

Taken Alive, Three Legs, Thunder Hawk, Treesoul, Treetop, Turgeon, Turning Heart, Two Shields.

Uhde, Uses Arrow, Uses Many.

Vaaler, Vachal, Valandra, Vavra, Vilhauer.

Wakole, Weispfening, White Lightning, White Mountain, White Temple, White Twin, Wingire, Wise Spirit, Wruck.

Yarlott, Yellow Bird, Yellow Earrings, Yellow Fat, Yellow Hammer, Yellow Lodge, Yineman, Ylitalo, Younker.

Zbasnick, Zeeb, Zimbro, Zinke, Zuther.

2005-09-26T08:41:00.000-04:00

Song: The Fast Food of Love

I should probably explain that this song doesn't come from firsthand experience. However, it does come from personally watching too many of my friends do their best to mess up their lives and futures. And for what? If their boss treated them like this, they'd never have stayed a week!

The Fast Food of Love
Lyrics & Music: Maureen O'Brien

I remember working fast food --
The schedule always changin',
The busy pace derangin'
I remember working fast food
You lived your life around their plans.
You had to work like crazy,
And you never got all you need
And you know what that reminds me of?
Polyamory!

CH: Polyamory
Way too much work for something free
If you really wanted sex that bad
Plenty easier ways to be had.
Polyamory
All your life's just a string of dates
Eating hamburger 'stead of steak --
The fast food of love.

I remember working fast food
You never got the hours
Though it was in their power
I remember working fast food
You had to work two jobs to eat.
You had to work like crazy,
And you got burned constantly.
And you know what that reminds me of?
Polyamory!

I remember working fast food --
The days stretched on before you
They'd stress you and they'd bore you
I remember working fast food
'S why I don't work there anymore.
Even getting a promotion
Was really not that good
It meant you'd work your life away
Managing fast food!

Let's see if Blogger will let me put this song up this time....

2005-09-25T22:31:00.000-04:00

Mwahahaha....

Richard Purtill is one of those fantasy writers whose books are very hard to find, but very good reads once you do. He's also one of the Tolkien scholars who don't cause me to talk back to the book in a loud and frustrated voice. (Not often, anyway!) That's one reason why I've always been disappointed that nobody else ever seemed to have heard of him, except for the hardcore old school Tolkien folks. (I guess I should have mentioned him to the folks from Washington state fandom.)

But now here's a nice little article on him. (He's still alive! Yay!) More importantly, here's his website, with reprints of some of his old novels and a good few new ones. (Even more yay!) I'm not sure if this JRR Tolkien: Myth, Morality and Religion is the same as Lord of the Elves and Eldils or not. (And you really don't want to know how many years of looking through used bookstores it took me to get a copy of that one.) I imagine it must be much expanded, if not wholly different.

And if anybody needs a DAW copy of The Parallel Man, I've got two.

2005-09-23T10:39:00.000-04:00

Discretion

I've been reading The Dialog of St. Catherine of Siena from CCEL for a public domain audiobook (for Maria Lectrix and archive.org's Open Source Audio/Spoken Word section).

It's pretty interesting. (And with those run-on sentences, it's a lot easier to read out loud than by eye.) But I've also been learning a lot. For some reason, I really liked the explanation of how all sins are against the neighbor (yourself being your chief neighbor), either by commission or by omission of gaining grace, which would let you help your neighbor more. Also, it's strangely relaxing it is for someone as nitpicky as me to get reminded that other people, and God, are even nitpickier about sin -- and yet we get delivered from our sins. Finally, I'm pretty sure St. C is the ultimate source of Mark Shea's "Sin makes you stupid", since she pretty much says that about the "eye of the intellect" in a more lengthy way. I'm not sure what else to say about the book, though. It's got a lot of meat in it that I'm still chewing on.

I'm currently in the middle of "The Book of Discretion", and boy, do I need it.

For example, I probably should just accept seeing a tiger in the middle of a display of African animals. And I did manage not to freak out like a flame war in Mark Shea's comment box, or anything like that. I told the proper people; the proper people refused to change the display; and I guess I just have to accept it with as much love and grace as I can muster. Nobody is going to budge on this, so making more fuss would just make things worse. After all, it's just a silly little display, and it's coming down very soon.

E pur si muova. Dang it.

Still, there's a difference between concern for the truth and intellectual pride, and I've got enough of the latter that I can't really assume I've got the former.

2005-09-21T17:30:00.000-04:00

Golden Age Catholic Comics

First of all, I'd like to thank Opinionated Homeschooler for bringing the phenomenon of Catholic comics for parochial school kids to my attention. These are just too cool! (Michigan State has a lot more issues, but they didn't digitize 'em.)

There's a lot more information about Treasure Chest of Fun and Fact at Toonopedia, which notes that this monthly comic was all part of Pflaum's publishing line of church bulletins, religious magazines, and a Weekly Reader-like weekly newspaper for parochial school kids (kindly recalled by my mother).

Now, what I noticed was that Pflaum was from Dayton (which is why I asked my mother about the comics -- she didn't remember them). What I didn't realize is that I was about to receive an answer to a long-standing question in my mind.

The late Lloyd Ostendorf was a Lincoln expert and collector of Lincolniana. He also was the guy who came up with the infamous Lincoln-Kennedy parallels. (He was a total Lincoln geek. Of course he would make the connections. He said he wrote the thing up just for filler, and in a very short time. He didn't take them seriously at all.) For proof, he had a copy of the parallels' publication as part of a comic. But I never got to ask him which comic. I had assumed he'd lived in New York if he was working in comics at all; and yet later, I found out he lived in Dayton all his life. So how had he worked in comics at all?

Treasure Chest of Fun and Fact, my friends. Check out his work on this story: "Passports to Paradise: Extreme Unction".

Unfortunately, CUA's collection of Treasure Chest only goes up to 1960, whereas Toonopedia says it survived until 1972. Mr. Ostendorf's Kennedy parallels couldn't have appeared until 1964, at least. But now I think we know.

Internet info about Mr. Ostendorf:
-- His last appearance before the Surveyors Historical Society, and a sketch of Washington and Lincoln as young surveyors
-- His painting of George Rogers Clark
-- An old picture of him
-- A story about his Lincoln collection
-- An explanation of Ostendorf's catalog system for Lincoln photographs
-- OTOH, experts can be fooled. (I regard Mariah Vance/Adah Sutton as a fanficky sort of history source.)
-- A nice plug from him for a sculptor.
-- A student and friend's reminiscences and Ostendorf sketches.
-- Article containing a spooky Ostendorf daguerreotype-like sketch of Nancy Hanks Lincoln.
-- A guy who wants a giant Lincoln statue made from an Ostendorf painting, with an Ostendorf gallery inside the giant barrel behind him.

2005-09-21T12:32:00.000-04:00

New Audiobook Blog

I've started a new blog called Maria Lectrix Audiobook Club, inspired by the Public Domain Podcast and other audiobook and short story podcasts. This will give me a way to point out to all of you the audiobooks I'd like to make and stick up on archive.org's Spoken Word section of Open Source Audio. If I can do stuff weekly, then it becomes more like a real continuing project.

Also, nobody but CCEL seems to be doing Catholic religious books (except Verbum Domini doing the Bible readings!), which is a shame. Remember that it's only in the last few centuries that reading became more of a visual than an audio experience.

(I'd do a podcast, but I fail to understand what makes it different from an audiolink blog. Also, I have no iPod or iTunes, so obviously iAin't doing a podcast per se. I've got an RSS feed. That ought to be enough.)

If anybody else would like to read public domain stuff for Maria Lectrix, let me know and I'll link to it. Archive.org is open to everybody, after all!

2005-09-18T14:55:00.000-04:00

To Diet to Oneself

1. I have never been particularly good at the whole weight loss thing, mostly because:

A) I love sedentary pursuits
B) I love to eat
C) I'm really bad at making new habits
D) I live in a fallen world
E) I blame society

2. I snack a lot on Gaming Day because:

A) The snacks are in reach
B) I love to eat
C) I can't chew my dice or they'll be ruined
D) That is the canonical custom of gamers
E) I blame society

3. I will improve matters by:

A) Putting all the snacks out of reach
B) Stuffing myself with high fiber, low calorie snacks
C) Drinking a gallon of water instead
D) Doing a novena to the Baptist and starting the Locust and Honey Diet
E) Suing society

Yes, I was bad yesterday. I did a three mile walk yesterday morning for charity, and by Saturday night I had managed to bloat myself so much on gaming snacks that I could hardly eat any dinner. If worst comes to worst, I will have to start drinking more caffeine on weekends, as that's an appetite depressant. But I've been trying to avoid caffeine. Sigh.

So I walked to church this morning and got back on my exercises. I really am noticing a difference with my muscle tone and endurance. I'm just not losing any weight, and then I'm gaining more on Saturdays. Sigh.

2005-09-18T07:33:00.000-04:00

Catholic Radio

First off, I have to admit that originally I shied off from the very idea of Catholic radio. As with EWTN, I was disgusted by exposure to decades of annoying media preachers and couldn't picture Catholic media being any better or more interesting. In fact, I assumed it was going to be worse -- some kind of rad trad empire -- and the 'cable access' look and feel of EWTN back in the day confirmed me in my prejudices.

(But let's remember that I was of a generation that had never seen Bishop Fulton Sheen, but got to hear all about Father Coughlin in history class.)

But Catholic radio, like Catholic TV, has turned out to be a great blessing. I don't think I'm particularly ignorant, but Catholic radio is constantly teaching me more about the richness of the Faith, and the uses of the gifts God had given us. I'm not alone, either. A huge number of the spiritually hungry people out there are finding their faith, rediscovering it, or having their most troubling questions answered. Catholic radio isn't about hate or using God as a cover for speechifying and greed; it's about peace and grace and service. I like that very much.

Ironically, I now find Catholic radio even easier to digest than EWTN. A good number of the new Catholic media folks have better voice presence than physical. (For example, Marcus Grodi kinda has the big-hair preacher thing on TV, but his voice is very reassuring.) There's also a lot of Biblical apologetics on the radio, which I have come to love. Nice juicy scholarly answers -- mm, mm! Also, the direct confrontation with real world problems -- whether it's kids who won't behave or a caller who thinks priests are servants of the Antichrist -- is very enlightening. You also get news of truly interesting Catholic activities. This is good, because the diocesan newspaper seems simultaneously to favor boredom and dissent from Catholic teaching as a means to salvation, and I'm not sure what's worse. :)

I will admit that there are still some folks on the radio who scare me. Teresa Tomeo is a sweet and knowledgeable lady, but waaaaaay too fond of spiritual warfare and apparitions. Not that I don't believe in devotions or mystical visions, but...you really shouldn't believe in all of them all the time, ne? It starts to remind me of people who believe herbs can cure everything all the time, too. (This is not to say anything against the lady herself or to accuse her of going so far as to be unfaithful. Just that there's an unhealthy tone to some of her healthy belief in prayer's power, and I hope she'll keep an eye on that. Especially since some listeners need guidance about such things, based on what I've heard on the air.)

But of course radio and TV both come with a channel changer and an on/off switch. So I don't have to listen to what I don't like.

There is one more problem I have with Catholic radio. It's good that a lot of stations have a "Listen" button on their webpages. (Especially since I couldn't tune in the nearest Catholic radio station without some kind of Huge Antenna Array of Doooom.)

But some require you to use the latest version of Windows Media Player to do so. This is bad -- not to mention a huge waste of bandwidth. (And in violation of the principles of subsidiarity!) However, many radio stations do work with older versions, so just ignore warnings and try clicking anyway.

Here are some links to Catholic radio:

EWTN streaming radio and TV
Ave Maria Radio: EWTN, syndicated, and Detroit-local programming. Probably the best mix.
Relevant Radio: another mix of their own network shows with EWTN and syndicated.
Features "The Right Questions", a news analysis show hosted by a lady trained by the old school at Dayton's Journal Herald and WHIO. I can't wait to hear it.
Immaculate Heart Radio
Covenant Network

By contrast, there's not outwardly a lot of difference between the campus radio stations at Catholic UD and secular Wright State, except that Wright State's station includes more annoying Flash on their website. UD has a two hour show of Christian music, and Wright State has a one hour show of Gospel music instead. Big flippin' deal.

I'm not saying everything has to be different, or that a Catholic institution has to be REALLY CATHOLIC ALL THE TIME -- LOOK HOW CATHOLIC I'M BEING! LOOK! LOOK! I mean, that's all show, too, and encourages being a whited sepulchre. But there ought to be some kind of discernable difference, ne? Otherwise, what's the point of being Catholic instead of being First Church of Christ Monosodium Glutamate?

2005-09-16T10:41:00.000-04:00

One More, One Less

A seminarian named Matty Molnar died yesterday in a car crash. I'm sorry I didn't read his blog before, because his last post was a pretty good set of last words.

It's always particularly sad to lose someone online, because you don't have the usual comfort of going to the funeral or the grave. It's even more discouraging to lose bright young seminarians who are on fire for the Church, because we need them more than ever. But a real community, a real parish is a place where people live and die. We are sad because we are separated from them here; but in reality, we are still in communion with them, surrounded by a cloud of witnesses and angels, through our oneness in Christ. I have no doubt that this gentleman Matty Molnar will be doing us even more good from where he is now.

2005-09-15T19:28:00.000-04:00

Recipes Tried and True

Recipes Tried and True was a cookbook "Compiled by the Ladies' Aid Society of the First Presbyterian Church, Marion, Ohio, 1894", and now on the Web somewhere in Canada. Makes you think, don't it?

This is an amazing cookbook, somewhere halfway between Mrs. Beeton and today, and looking it. Yes, there's recipes using both sour and sweet milk, and differentiating between teacups and coffeecups as measurements. You use butter the size of a walnut or a hen's egg. But there's also icebox recipes, including one for making jello...er, gelatine molds with fruit in them. Did you ever wonder what "Milk Toast" or "Fig Pudding" was? Here you go.

Some things are familiar stuff, others odd beyond recognition, and some look like they're familiar stuff under different names. "Queen Pudding" sounds like lemon meringue pie. "Spanish Fritters" look like French toast without crusts to me. But who'd've thought of eating "French Bread Pancakes", which apparently are what you get if you leave bread in your French toast batter overnight? But what got me was the "coffee cake". Coffeecake was what it was. I would never have guessed that the ladies of Marion were so gung ho for coffeecake in 1894, would you?

You can definitely tell the region, social status and ethnic groups from the names. Yet there's no sauerkraut and wurst for the Presbyterian ladies, though there is a recipe for "Schmier Kase". Maybe nobody needed to know your sausage recipe. There's cornmeal mush, though, which is just one of those Midwestern things, I guess. Check out all the different preserves -- even an egg one! And don't miss the distinction between "Summer Mince Meat" and "Mince Meat". (Hint: only one of them includes 4 pounds of beef, though one beef tongue is even better.)

Finally, there's this poem that must have been common wisdom about cakes:

With weights and measures just and true,
Oven of even heat,
Well-buttered tins and quiet nerves,
Success will be complete."

But don't take my word for it. Go take a look at Central Ohio cooking from back in the day. You might even decide to bake a raisin pie.

2005-09-15T07:34:00.000-04:00

The Hacker's Diet

I'm trying to lose weight with the help of the famous Hacker's Diet. I'm not sure how well the calorie-counting is working, but that's mostly because I have been having trouble remembering to eat more than a thousand calories a day, so I have to get used to not starving myself inadvertently.

I have also discovered the amazing power of pickles, as they are delicious, filling, nutritious, and only about five calories each. I suspect am going to have to invest in Vlasic to deal with my nightly snack needs. (I only want to snack at night when I'm not inadvertently starving myself...figures.)

The exercise portion is going much better. The secret seems to be doing the situps while I'm still in bed, because that's the part I least want to get out of bed and do. (And I have that nice soft memory foam to do them on.) Then I get up and turn on the computer to one of the anime stations on live365.com, and voila! Energy!

2005-09-15T05:43:00.000-04:00

A Horse of a Different Color Gene

I happened to run across this interesting page about the "cremello" and equine genetics -- ie, why it's not proper to call these horses albino even though they look it. I always wondered about this thing with white and black points in horses. They also have a handy color chart of what happens with "dilution" by the cream color gene. (Silver and dun apparently act similarly, but are different colors in their own right.)

All this is in aid of a group supporting pink-skinned, blue-eyed cream-colored horses. I'm not sure I'd be into breeding such horses, but certainly the horses themselves are worthy of support. It shouldn't surprise anyone, either, given all the other coloring-based organizations, like the ones supporting palominos and paints, or this one I've never run across looking for champagne horses.

That "champagne" site includes some fascinating info on newly discovered color genes which mimick the one they're looking for. This site charts the "Pearl" gene found in at least one lineage of Andalusians, as well as other "new" (ie, previously unrecognized) genetic horse color weirdnesses. So far, it looks as if the vast majority of these weird genes are not necessarily new, and may all go back to Spain's Andalusians and through them from Arabian horses. This would not be any great surprise to people who know horse history.

Here's a whole site dedicated to equine coat colors, including the common color changes between foal and adult. Fascinating stuff.

But all this is making me feel very worried about the science behind the imaginary horse breeding program I carried out in third grade. I tried to be careful about realistic color consequences, but I have the uneasy feeling that all the Arabs and Akhal-Tekes I was using would have skewed my results considerably.

(And that, btw, is yet another example of "stuff kids are interested in which adults don't or can't openly support". Any girl who's really interested in horses ends up learning a vast amount about breeding, but somehow I doubt the Barbie Horse Farm software has anything about breeding or genetics at all.)

Apparently there's now an Akhal-Teke breeder not far away from one of my grandmas. (Siiiiiigh!) The owners were having trouble maintaining the typical metallic "shine" of their coats in the non-Swedish sun of Florida. But the comment box knows and tells all....

Over on the other owner's blog, there's a sad post about a noted breeder currently imprisoned in Turkmenistan.

2005-09-14T15:13:00.000-04:00

Happy Triumph of the Cross Day!

Of the 6,525 BellSouth employees living in the path of Hurricane Katrina, every single one has been found alive and well.

"With age-old love I have loved you; so I have kept my mercy toward you. Again I will restore you, and you shall be rebuilt...proclaim your praise and say: The LORD has delivered his people...Behold, I will bring them back from the land of the north; I will gather them from the ends of the world...They departed in tears, but I will console them and guide them...proclaim it on distant coasts, and say: He who scattered...now gathers them together, he guards them as a shepherd his flock...I will turn their mourning into joy, I will console and gladden them after their sorrows...Thus says the LORD: Cease your cries of mourning, wipe the tears from your eyes. The sorrow you have shown shall have its reward, says the LORD, they shall return...There is hope for your future, says the LORD...Set up road markers, put up guideposts; Turn your attention to the highway, the road by which you went. Turn back...to these your cities...For I will refresh the weary soul; every soul that languishes I will replenish." (Jeremiah 31, various verses.)

Holy Cross Day, the feast of the Exaltation of the Cross, and the feast of the Triumph of the Cross are all names for the same celebration -- the rediscovery of the True Cross by St. Helena. All different sorts of Christians still celebrate this feast, thanking Jesus for His great sacrifice through our wonder at the poor inanimate piece of God's creation that became so intimate a part of God's plan for salvation. Much as we Catholics venerate an image of the Cross on Good Friday with genuflections and caresses, so do the Orthodox on this day lie prostrate on the floor while the Cross is raised before the congregation and the following song is sung:

Come, O faithful, let us bow before the life-giving Cross
on which Christ, the King of glory, freely stretched out His hands.
By this He raised us up to our former happiness,
which we had lost because of the ancient Enemy
and the bitter pleasure that exiled us from God.
Come, O faithful, let us bow before the Wood
which lets us crush the head of the invisible enemy.
Come, all you families of the nations,
let us venerate the Cross of the Lord with our hymns:
Rejoice, O perfect redemption of the fall of Adam;
Rejoice, O venerable Cross.
Filled with fear and awe, we embrace you; we glorify God, and we say:
O Lord, You were nailed on the Cross;
in Your goodness and love, have mercy on us.

Come, O people, let us contemplate the marvelous wonder;
let us bow before the power of the Cross.
For the tree of Paradise gave rise to the reign of death,
and now a Tree has made our life blossom forth,
when the sinless Saviour was nailed upon it.
And now, all the nations that are nourished
by this incorruptible food sing praises:
You destroyed death by Your Cross and set us free.
O Lord, glory to You!

The word of Your prophets Isaiah and David is now fulfilled,
for they spoke of You, O Lord, and said:
All the nations shall come to You and bow before You.
Behold the people who are now filled with Your grace
in Your sanctuary in the temple of Jerusalem.
O God of goodness who suffered on the Cross for us
and gives us life through Your holy resurrection,
protect us with Your care, O Lord, and save us.

Rising from the depths of the earth on this day,
the Tree of Life strengthens our faith
in the resurrection of Christ who nailed on it.
His raised hands announce His ascension into heaven,
which permitted Him to dwell in our nature in this fallen world.
We also cry out in thanksgiving:
O Lord who was raised on the Cross and raises us with You,
grant heavenly joy to those who praise Your name.

The four corners of the earth are sanctified today, O Christ our God,
by the four ends of Your exalted Cross.
With it, exalt your faithful Christians
who destroy the power of the enemy through your Cross.
You are great, O Lord, and wondrous in Your works; glory to You!

The words of the prophets have told of the most holy wood
by which Adam was delivered from the ancient curse and from death.
On this day of its exaltation, creation raises its voice
to beg God for the abundance of his mercy.
O Lord, your compassion is beyond measure;
spare us, O God, and save our souls!

Glory…
Now…

Behold the words of the prophet Moses are fulfilled, O Lord;
for he said: You shall see your life suspended before your eyes.
Today the Cross is exalted, and the world is freed from error.
Today the Resurrection of Christ is renewed;
the ends of the earth exalt with joy.
At the sound of the cymbals of David,
they offer a hymn of praise and say:
In your goodness and love for all,
You have brought about our salvation in the middle of the earth, O our God.
Through your Cross and Resurrection You save us.
O Lord all-powerful, glory to You!

2005-09-11T20:46:00.000-04:00

The Saddest Day of the Year

I avoided watching cable again today. I didn't want to watch Katrina coverage, and I didn't want to watch 9/11 coverage.

I don't need to remember. I need to find some way to forget.

So today I did chores and read a Daisy Dalrymple and watched The Band Wagon, and tried to pretend that things were normal again when really, they never were. They hadn't been for years before that day. We forgot, that's all.

So then I watched Walter Huston in Abraham Lincoln, and now I'm watching 49th Parallel. There's a surprising amount of comfort in watching movies that know a war's a war.

But the homily today still needed to be about forgiveness, and the sky today was still that same September blue. And it still hurts.

2005-09-10T06:23:00.000-04:00

Happy Nameday to Tonks....

This post may be too geeky even for Harry Potter fans.

Variant spellings are the bane of my Googling. However, I think we can all see why a parent might decide against naming a daughter "Nymphodora"....

St. Menodora
Feastday: September 10
306

Martyr with her sisters, Metrodora and Nymphodora. They were orphans of Bithynia, in Asia Minor, who were denounced as Christians and taken before the local Roman governor, named Fronto. They refused to worship the pagan gods, and Menodora was beaten to death, as was Nymphodora. Metrodora was tortured, burned, and beheaded.

If you read this Australian Greek Orthodox info, you'll see that the sisters were notably stubborn and have a nice icon. I wonder if the stubbornness and the three good sisters were a sort of backhanded tribute to Narcissa and Bellatrix?

Probably a literal translation from the Greek acta, by some Russian Orthodox. We are told that in exchange for their monastic life, "God adorned them with the gift of wonderworking", and that they looked very young and beautiful in spite of being old nuns. So there's the morph.

Menodora means something like "passion's gift", Metrodora is "measure's gift", and Nymphodora is...well, "numpha" has a _lot_ of meanings. The primary one actually isn't nymph, but maiden/bride. Another meaning is a certain four-letter female bodypart, which probably was just loads of fun in Ancient Runes class. Go look it up on the Perseus online dictionary.

I still think Metrodora sounds like a good name for a girl born on a subway. :)

There's also an 1836 Russian crime novel called Nymphodora Ivanovna which Rowling may have run across, given her interest in literature and mysteries. Unfortunately, however, the heroine is described by the author as "a silly goose", which has to be even more delightful for an ambitious young Auror.

Here's the Orthodox feast, with slightly different info.

A poetic September saints' calendar, with a verse for our three:

(September 10)
Menodora, Metrodora thought,
Like Nymphodora, torments of the flesh gifts [dora].
Smitten and died on the tenth were the three whose name has the meaning gifts [dora].

There's also this verse:

(September 8)
On the same day, Saint Severos met his end by the sword.

‘Ready I am all torment to endure’,
Severos said, ‘And is the sword for me?’

2005-09-08T09:31:00.000-04:00

Infodump Repetition

There's an BBC radio gameshow called "Just a Minute", which makes celebrities talk for one minute on a given subject without hesitation, deviation, or repetition. (Except of the name of the topic assigned, grammatical variants on a word, or common words like "is" and "the".) It's a fiendishly difficult game, especially with people listening and ready to pounce on any mistake.

Well, I know at least two authors who would stink like dead fish on this program. David Weber and Anne Perry. God love 'em both. They're good storytellers, but they will keep saying the same thing over and over, often in the exact words they used before. Admittedly, it's said that a bestseller needs to do this for the benefit of readers who can't remember what they first read two weeks back. But if you can't remember it that far back, it must not be all that important or interesting.

David Weber usually repeats himself with explanations of a technology in his universe, or of a political situation. Now, I admit that it's nice to be told or reminded about these things at the beginning. But when he cut-and-pastes this boilerplate several times in a single book, I begin to want to call him at two in the morning and leave the same message until the memory's used up. (Yes, that would be wrong. So is what he's doing. Fortunately, I have the artistic integrity not to try to bore the nice man to death, and I wish he had the same respect for me.)

Anne Perry, on the other hand, believes in restating the same information about forty times per novel. Now, I'll agree that in a mystery novel, you probably should repeatedly recap the facts of the case, in order to underline the detective's thought process and perplexity, and to make sure the reader is walking down the desired garden path. But you don't have to repeat the facts of the case onscreen to every single person the detective interviews. Honestly, it makes me want to scream. Beyond that, we have the POV problem. Perry realllllly likes third person omniscient, which is of course a handy but underused POV. But she also likes describing every single thing a character is thinking and feeling about what he or she is saying, and about what the other person is saying. She also likes to describe every tiny muscular movement of the face and hands in excruciating detail. Needless to say, questioning a suspect takes a bloody long time. Beyond that, if one character can't instantly perceive every thought and feeling of another character, the other character is obviously suspicious. Emotion is all. It's enough to make you hate the most likeable characters.

It drives me nuts. I can't read Weber anymore, unless I take him at a breakneck pace. I never could read Perry. I listen to her audiobooks, though, because an actor does give them more life, I know they take forever (a good thing when you're listening over headphones at work), and the mystery puzzles are good if you can actually wade your way through them.

If they must summarize, I wish they'd also present new information, or give a different angle on the data each time it's presented. Better yet, I wish they'd string it through the book instead of infodumping at all.

Now maybe I'm being oversensitive. Perhaps certain people enjoyed learning the same information over and over at school. Me, I tuned out instantly and started reading a volume of science fiction or mystery under my desk until I heard something new. I used to skim the same way. Now I have less patience, and just stop reading. After all, there are a lot of other things I could be doing with my time.

Still, there's no reason a good editor couldn't save us all a lot of suffering by chopping out a sentence here and there and replacing it with "Once everything was explained, they got down to business." It would certainly be easier on trees, shelf capacity, and my sanity.