"Shot in one leg"

This dog advertisement from Jim Curley cracked me up. You might be a Southerner if you have a dog shot in one leg :-)

On Free Will - Where Reason Fails

From Fr. Kenneth Ryan's Catholic Questions, Catholic Answers:

If we use only our reason and not revelation, it does seem impossible to see how God could grant free will to creatures of His and still not be responsible for them hurting themselves by sin, since He made them in the first place. Thousands of theologians through the centuries have argued about how to answer the problem. But answering it is like answering the question "Can God make a stone so big he can't lift it?" Whether you say Yes or No, you are denying that God can do everything.

The problem is really two questions: 1. Can God be so just He ceases to be merciful? and 2. Can God be so merciful he ceases to be just? Our answer to both questions must be first Yes, on second thought No, and on third thought, "Human reason cannot answer Yes or No." But that response does not have to mean that we reject an infinitely merciful and just God. Our human reason is only finite and unable to cope with the idea of God being infinitely just while infinitely merciful.

Prevent Defense Prevents You From Winning

Ham o' Bone has the definitive post on the debacle in the desert, complete with visual accompaniment. He gives due credit to the Gators but asks some pointed questions which, if answered last night, might've at least made the game competitive. Imagine this:

Sometime prior to January 8, in some quiet athletic bunker on the Gainesville campus, the following conversation took place between Urban Meyer (UM) and a naive booster(NB):

NB: Coach, if you could pick the kind of defense that you would face in the national championship game, what would it be?
UM: Well, offensively our team has been up and down this season. The attacking defenses of the other SEC teams have sometimes made us look pretty ineffective.
NB: Oh yeah, those blitzing Tigers of Auburn and LSU really pounded Chris Leak.
UM: Yeah, we would like to face a soft defense, a defense where they only rush three, drop 5 or 6 defensive backs into zone coverage, and give us the underneath stuff. We could protect the quarterback and control the clock that way.
NB: In other words, a "prevent" defense.
UM: Ha. That'd be great, wouldn't it?
NB: Ha. Gators would tear that kind of defense apart.
UM: Exactly. Too bad for us, though. Ohio State doesn't play that kind of defense. They attack. They'll stack the box with 7 or 8 guys and go man to man. I don't know how we can protect Leak, but we'll do our best and hope for a couple of big plays.

The joke was on us when Ohio State decided to play into Florida's strength.

So go check out Bone's post. Go for the prose but stay for the cool graphics:


I especially like that "one useless guy" verbiage.

Extraordinary mild weather again. When this blog is read in 10 yrs time, probably the comments on the weather will regarded as the most significant - either we'll be well into Global Warming by then, with England a parched dry land growing olives, or we'll be back to proper cold winters and people will be wondering what all the fuss was about.... - Joanna of "Auntie Joanna Writes"

To understand the Catholic Faith you have to understand that it is not primarily about intellect, or even morals: it is about Christ received through the sacraments, because He commanded it, and because those who love Him will do as He commands because they love Him. And He commands as He does because He loves us. Understanding may follow practice, to a greater or lesser degree. But the Catholic faith is a loving response to our King and Redeemer, not an intellectual response to a text. A Downs Syndrome Catholic who can't read the Bible is in no way lesser than a theological polymath. The Catholic faith doesn't get snagged on "what exactly is it that saves us" because the thing that saves us isn't an "it". The thing that saves us is a Who. Asking what you have to do to be saved is like asking what you have to do to make sure that your wife will still love you tomorrow (or in this context what do you have to do to make sure that you still love her tomorrow). There may be things you can do, but it isn't a mechanical process. It isn't something that you do today, making everything that you do tomorrow irrelevant. It is love. - Zippy of "Zippy Catholic"

An adult conversion to Catholicism—or indeed to any form of orthodox Christianity—is not an everyday occurrence in the American academy. Most secular academics seem to receive any profession of Christian faith with a vague sense of embarrassment. Adherence to Judaism or Islam is another matter, although why is not immediately self–evident, since both impose stringent demands upon their faithful.... A decisive moment in my journey in faith came when, one day, seemingly out of nowhere, the thought pierced me that Jesus had died for my sins. And, immediately on its heels, came the devastating recognition that I am not worth his sacrifice. Only gradually have I come truly to understand that the determination of worth belongs not to me but to him. God’s love for us forever exceeds our control and challenges our understanding. Like faith, it is His gift, and our task is to do our best to receive it. ...The knowledge, even when partial and imperfect, that He loves us also opens us to new responsibilities and obligations. For if He loves us all, He also loves each of us. And recognition of that love imposes on us the obligation to love one another, asking no other reason than God’s injunction to do so. As fallen human creatures, we are nonetheless likely to continue to search for human reasons that justify our loving service to those in whom we find little or no obvious redeeming value. And the best human reason may be found in the faith that God has freely given us: our nonjudgmental love of the other remains the condition of God’s love for us. For, knowing how little we merit His love, our best opening to the faith that He does lies not in the hope of being better than others, but in the security that His love encompasses even the least deserving among us. - professor/scholar Elizabeth Fox–Genovese on her conversion, who died this past week

"God Rides a Yamaha" - Kathie Shaidle...the story of a woman's struggle with faith, doubt, and lupus. "May Crowning, Mass, and Merton: And Other Reasons I Love Being Catholic" - Liz Kelly...a great book where one women share's what she really loves about the Catholic tradition. "Life After God" - Douglas Coupland, an awesome book, that is really hard to describe. - three favorite books of '06 by the blogger at "Book Reviews & More"

Since Solzhenitsyn is the most important writer in the world today, this volume of "new and essential writings", edited by two leading and long-established experts, is most welcome. - Joseph Pearce on "The Solzhenitsyn Reader"

I was working on my phd in Christian spirituality while I prepared for my ordination exams...I don't remember when it was, but I think it was during a Sunday service at the Presbyterian church when a baby was being baptised. I just remember thinking that if we had children, I'd want them to be baptised Catholic...There were more strands, but it was pretty simple after these. I mean, how could I become a minister in a denomination that I wouldn't want to put my children in? So, I abandoned the quest for ordination and joined the RCIA class for the next year. my vigil was in 2003. I've thought, from time to time, how much more job security I would have had if I'd stayed on the ordination path. But the price was really nothing to pay. I am still moved to tears every mass as I watch the whole world come forward to receive the Lord. This is a beautiful church, and I thank god for calling me home. - commenter on Amy Welborn's blog

Often we are more concerned about the love we receive from others than the love we give to others. As long as we devote ourselves to looking for love, we are missing the point of Christmas. Love in all its fullness has come to us in Jesus; our task in life is to be bearers of that love, to bring love to the places where otherwise it would not be found. And experience teaches that those who bring God’s love to others always receive God’s love in their own lives. - Rev. Paul Francis C.P. on "Open Book"

The Compendium is great for easily finding and understanding Church teaching. The Adult Catechism has a highly readable format that really anchors itself in the context of our highly materialistic American lifestyle and addresses specific concerns in that climate. The CCC itself is really a masterpiece in the explanation of the faith and one that cemented for me the truth of the Church. - Jeff Miller of "Curt Jester"

Spam Poetry from Emails Received on January 8th, 2007

All lines are gathered from actual, 100% recyclable spam subject headers:

* * *

Thine to translate the earth and the water follow thee and that is I
Or undulate to molten

Dann um alle Server, die irgendwo auf der Welt stehen
und deren Inhalte Berlin in irgendeiner Weise zum Thema haben

Another: When Athena feels big and successful
she bestows upon Diana cakes and golden rings.

Seasons last bid
Go an tungstate
it humanity sweeten.

Ah Well...

..."we'll always have '02." (Say like "we'll always have Paris".) It makes the 2002 National Championship a bit sweeter by virtue of the scarcity principle.

Well, except for the defense, offense and coaching, the Bucks did well. There's no way to sugercoat the wallop. Not surprisingly, Bill Luse is happy. Florida seemed to just have a crushing defensive line and when you have that you've got a lot. Maybe not everything, but you have a lot. Their offense hit a bunch of dink passes which turned out to be extremely effective. A good strategy. Great defenses win championships, and the year of the OSU withering defense was 2002, not this year. This year's seemed good, but perhaps never got really tested until Michigan whereupon they gave up 30-something points. We found out yesterday the Bucks defense wasn't as good as advertised, and if you get behind early against a good team it makes it much harder to put points on the board.

The biggest surprise to me was how Coach Tressel, in a move that seemed to communicate panic, went for a 4th & 1. Maybe he knew he didn't have a big quiver of halftime adjustments so he needed to take chances. From the Dispatch:

But late in the first half...the Ohio State coach turned into the reincarnation of Yortuk Festruna, one of Saturday Night Live’s wild and crazy guys.

Tressel, always the definition of calculated cool, turned into a riverboat gambler.

Florida was leading 24-14 in the waning minutes of the first half when Festruna, er, Tressel decided to go for it on fourth-and-1 from his 29-yard line. Chris Wells was stopped short — isn’t the punt still the most important play in football? — and four plays later, a field goal by Chris Hetland gave the Gators a 27-14 lead...Whether it gave Florida momentum is debatable, but on Ohio State’s first play after the kickoff, Troy Smith lost a fumble at his 14 and the Gators quickly scored on a Tim Tebow pass to Andre Caldwell to take a 34-14 lead.

Episcopalians and Rome

Link here:

Let me be blunt: their belief is that they do not need the Church of the lower-class Irish, Italians and Slavic immigrants to instruct them on righteousness; that their collective religious endeavors will lead to a preservation of what Jesus wants for the modern world. Turning to Rome would mean abandoning the church that was central to the lives of the men and women of their stock who built not just the businesses, grand homes and country clubs of upper class America, but also the museums, universities, libraries and hospitals that represent the best of the American experience.

Alternatively, perhaps it's merely that they lack free will. Teehee. Seriously, it might also be that in Western society the great god is Choice. To have more choices, more options, is perceived as a very good thing, and I imagine some think that swimming the Tiber will decrease the amount of choice they have in doctrinal matters (for example: the licitness of birth control). But, after reading Status Anxiety, one can never ever underestimate the effect of status on any given decision so the author of the above might well be spot on.

Best Books of 2006

...as recommended by Ignatius Press staff and authors, via TDE.

My own list of favorite '06 reads is limited by the fact that I try to read dozens at once. Limiting to those I finished this past year ("The Two Towers" by Meehan was an '05 book):

The Last Voyage of Columbus – Martin Dugard
In the Heart of the Sea – Nathaniel Philbrick
Understanding Medjugorje – Donal Foley
The Last Good Woman – William Luse
Helena – Evelyn Waugh
Mayflower – Nathaniel Philbrick

An Oral History of Hanna, of Hanna-Barbera Animation

Link here:

Bill Hanna, Remembered
Excerpts from an Oral History
(The Washington Post | March 24, 2001)
By Hank Stuever

Saturday morning cartoon king William Hanna, 90, died at his North Hollywood home Thursday. What follows are excerpts from a never-finished British television documentary, an oral-history account of the glory days of Hanna-Barbera animation studios . . .

WILMA FLINTSTONE: I said to him one day, "Bill, you really oughta patent this stuff." I mean, the little woolly mammoth who vacuumed the carpet? I would have bought six of them to give as wedding presents or something! People don't know this, but Bill was king of the modern Stone Age household gadgets. The decor, the look -- that was him. Those houses were solid. He did let me keep one of the boulder sofas. I think he could have been another Rock Lloyd Wright, but he was so brilliant already at the cartoons...

Week in Review

Went to the library and picked up John Ashcroft’s Never Again, by which I think he means 9/11 but I think also means his shrapnel-catching term as Attorney General. It's almost hilarious how much crap he caught for so little reason. The book so far seems much a self-hagiography, a bit too thick with self-awareness of his own goodness. But then, as an uncle once said, if it's true then it ain't braggin'. I'm not expert enough to know if'n it's true. I hope to read his explanation of covering up the bare breasts of a statue of Lady Justice but have not been rewarded in various page scans. I mostly look forward to his take on the inexplicable Hanssen spy case. I wish Hanssen would write a book although it would be futile for me to read, as if I'd then be able to explain the mystery of inquity.

* * *
You’ve heard of “lake effect snow”? Well we have lake effect rain. It occurs when it rains so much our back yard is dotted with small reservoirs of water. Ducks come a callin’, mistaking the large puddles for Lakes Ontario & Erie. It’s amusing, until our dog chases them away. Their quacking sound reminds him of the stuffed toys he gets, toys that squeak until he surgically removes the squeakers with his teeth.

* * *
Been on the cusp of -- and well-nigh into the rim of -- a cold. I suspect a bit of Rasputin Stout is in order. (For medicinal purposes only, rimshot.) For a short work week it was suitably brutal. Four-day weeks often are, for reasons I’ve never quite figured out. I think it’s partially due to malformed expectations. Deep down you think it’s going to be easy even if you tell yourself otherwise. This one was weighed down by computer runs that died in mid-stream twice. I found a work-around but I’m bound and determined next week to track down what exactly went wrong. It's like a murder mystery, like my own personal CSI, and I have to wait till Monday to do the forensics. Well I could go into work today but that ain't bloody likely.

In other news, Alzheimer's has replaced cancer as my greatest heath fear. Heart disease seems the result of the reckless & self-assured, cancer the disease of the worryworts. Always been my impression anyway. Death itself seems slightly less fearful given that everyone undergoes it; if everyone died of the same thing would that thing then be less fearful even if it was a horrible way to go? It's like how the poor often say "we didn't know we were poor!" and live generally happy lives until they found out they were poor. Everyone has the same general sort of birth (they differ somewhat of course, but not as much as deaths do - our body is younger and healthier at the time of birth than death), and the knowledge of that individuality makes us more fearful for being alone in it, even though we know that we’re never alone since we suffer with and in Christ.

* * *
So Jeff Culbreath has shut down his blog and someone up and took his blog over for him. Is this some sort of planned obsolescence? I suppose we’re all replaceable but the body wasn’t even cold yet. Blogging is the best anti-utilitarian activity known to man -- “write like no one’s watching” might be the catchphrase of blogging because it’s most likely true, but it would also mean you wouldn’t shut down your blog. Speaking of blogging, I’m mildly amused that Erik of ‘Erik’s Rants’ burnt a post pointing out a mistake I made in ascribing Ohio citizenship to Patrick of California. For those wishing attention, I’ve always found mistakes garner more of it than anything else. You might want to plant a few felix culpas. :-)

* * *
T-shirt at an airport shop: “Columbus Doesn’t Have a Drinking Problem, It Has a Football Problem”. I think that was it.

* * *
P.J. O’Rourke has been to some seventy countries. He surprised me on C-Span’s IN DEPTH today by saying that the culture most foreign to the American is France's, specifically Paris.

Only the Good Die Get Voted Out Young?

Dispatch story on Mike Dewine's last days as a U.S. Senator.

To Be or Not to Be... on O'Reilly's Show

Bill O'Reilly can sell books. He's not Oprah, but he can sell books.

Journalists often write books. And most journalists today are liberal. So the interesting test is to see whether a given journalist will go on the O'Reilly Factor since the entrance fee is to endure a lecture by Mr. Bill. And since Fox News is a joke among the elite media, to go before O'Reilly requires an act of supreme humility. It's like the star quarterback agreeing to be seen in public with the nerd because the nerd helps him with his homework.

These authors have an interesting choice: do I sell more books by enduring an act of public mortification? It's one of the ways we can get to know who these people are. And yet it's sort of a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't. If you don't go on then it seems like you're too proud. If you do go on then you're too greedy.

The recent show with Andrea Mitchell was a classic. Bill tried to convince Andrea of NBC's liberal bias in the two-minute segment. Not gonna work. It's not quite like trying to convince Stalin that Communism wouldn't work in two-minute segment, because Mitchell seems unusually fair in her reportage, but she's obviously going to defend NBC like Americans defend the flag.

There are no Mitchell horror stories of bias as with Rather or Couric and so many others. She's also married to Alan Greenspan, a former disciple of the libertarian Ayn Rand and an appointee of many a Republican administration. But to have a conversation with Mitchell about bias was going to go nowhere. It was amusing to see O'Reilly trying to argue the obvious to the oblivious. A short recap:

BILL: The grass is green.
ANDREA: Grass comes in many forms and varieties and many types of grass are not green.
BILL: Can you name one non-green colored grass currently on the market?
ANDREA: Uh, grass is not green or brown or any other color. It isn't perceived by the viewer.
BILL: What? Then there's no reality.

Okay, that wasn't the real exchange. What really happened is that O'Reilly said that NBC news is biased. Andrea said NBC news is a huge organization including cable shows, TODAY show, Nightly News, etc... O'Reilly asked if she could name one conservative at NBC. Mitchell could not name one conservative or one liberal. They are Journalists! [mighty warriors of truth and justice and objectivity]. O'Reilly pointed to a study done by a nonpartisan group that showed NBC was the network that most favored Kerry over Bush in the last election. Mitchell said that that study was highly subjective, that you couldn't assign ratings to words or phrases taken out of context. O'Reilly said that then there was no reality, that words have no meaning. [We're always back to Clinton's prescient "depends on what the definition of is is".]

Black 'n Tan as the Hypostatic Union of Christ

Whoda thunk it? Alive & Young explains. (HT Korrektiv.)

From Adam Gopnik's Paris to the Moon

Popular memory may be short, but it is nothing compared with the amnesia of experts.

* * *
What truly makes Paris beautiful is the intermingling of the monumental and the personal, the abstract and the footsore particular, it and you...The passage from the big to the little is what makes Paris beautiful, and you have to be prepared to be small - to live, to trudge, to have your head down in melancholy and then lift it up, sideways - to get it.

Oh Du Bist zu Schon

In München steht ein Hofbräuhaus:
Eins, zwei, g'suffa . . .
Da läuft so manches Fäßchen aus:
Eins, zwei, g'suffa . . .
Da hat so manche braver Mann:
Eins, zwei, g'suffa . . .
Gezeigt was er so vertragen kann
Schon früh am Morgen fing er an
Und spät am Abend kam er heraus
So schön ist's im Hofbräuhaus.

Okay so I shouldn't be quoting German bier drinking songs when I'm about to praise an American brew with a Russian name, but after watching the ever effusive Samantha Brown of Passport to Europe last night I feel in the mood. She hoisted more than a few in a Munich episode. (Which brings up my own dilemma. My wife wants me to visit her in Spain on her bidness trip. Found a $440 fare that leaves 1/11 & arrives back in Ohio 1/15. With layovers, about 11 hours there and 14 hours back. Sounds exhausting. But how many times can you see Barcelona for $440, since the hotel is obviously paid for by her company? But I digress...)

This gen-X, 43-year old blogger (can you be 43 & be a GenX'r? I thought GenX started around 1965) posts on Ol' Rasputin (found via Eric Scheske):

Old Rasputin Russian Imperial Stout: from Fort Bragg, California. Very nicely balanced for a 8.9% beer. Lots and lots of roasty-toasty roast barley imparting a garnet hue to the inky ale, its tan head quickly dissipating. The hops are not minty and the nose is actually floral with a fair bit of black rum Christmas cake dry fruitiness as well. There is a lot of heat with hoppy spicy over the roasted black malt and roast barley and with a creamy heart. A very nice example of a well layered beer - like a big red wine lots and lots of flavours that open up over time.

I posted about that same beer here.

Maestro!...

Da trinkt man Bier nicht aus dem Glas,
Da gibt's nur "die große Maß!"
Und wenn der erste Maßkrug leer,
Bringt dir die Reserl bald mehr.
Oft kriegt zu Haus die Frau 'nen Schreck,
Bleibt der Mann mal länger weg.
Aber die braven Nachbarsleut',
Die wissen besser Bescheid!
In München steht ein . . . . .

Dark beers: feature or bug? I say the former, but beginning in the mid-to-late 19th century Americans favored pilsners to the heavier beers because, according to Maureen Ogle, we've always had a culture of abundance here and so the desire for "beer as food" was limited. In the old country dark beers were sipped and treasured as "liquid bread". Americans had all the food we could want and so we looked at beer as something to be drunk in quantity, something lighter on the stomach.