Would Ringo Like Bingo Lingo?

Things they don't tell bingo workers: Circling the hall, you'll end up walking seventy-five miles over the course of an evening. (I forget to bring my wife's pedometer so I can't confirm that.)

The other thing they don't tell you is that Joe, the grand poobah of bingodom, expects freshly laundered & sorted currency when you turn in the money. Mine comes in in something of a jumble. It's the Irish in me.

Prickly. The customers were a bit prickly tonight. I think because of recent hot, humid weather. In after-bingo someone said that fisticuffs broke out five times in the new Giant Eagle grocery store, once because one guy had "touched another guy's cart".

After-bingo, by the way, often generates surprising comments, like Kim saying, "why didn't he convert her?" when it was mentioned that St. Thomas Aquinas had once drove a prostitute out of his bedroom. Good question. And how ironic to learn that Kim is allergic to literally everything except bingo! Grass, cats, pollen, air - you name it. Yet she has no doctor's excuse to escape the clutches of the bingo hall. Life is unfair.

The "give an inch, take a mile" club is always looking for new members and today we had a person who won a door prize who tried to substitute it for instant winner tickets or cash. This defeats the whole purpose of a door prize, which is basically to get rid of something nobody really wants. Doug took the microphone and put it this way: "When I get home, a lot of times I don't really want what my wife cooked for dinner. But I eat it anyway. It's the same thing with door prizes...". I was surprised because who was sitting in the bingo office? Doug's wife! That original sin exists and we are fallen can be shown by my immediate impulse to run over and get Doug's wife's reaction (and rub it in) regarding this announcement.

The boredom during bingo is existential so try to come up with ways to make it more exciting for myself by coming up with different names for the games we sell. Kim once famously misspoke and called a game "Ball Busters", which was probably the genesis for one lady referring to us as "the fun sellers".

I got a laugh tonight merely by saying, "Instants...one for a dollar, five for five dollars" - as if that's a deal when everyone knows that's the going rate. One woman found this so funny she continued laughing even when I was nearly a half a bingo parlor away, proving that she needs to get out more. Earlier I was selling "Flashboards" which I dubbed "Flashboreds" although no one could tell. I tweaked it to "Flashboard-ens" to rhyme with "Flash Gordons" but to little effect.

Watching the zest with which some players yell "Bingo!", their arm upraised while holding the precious sheet in triumph, I'm reminded by how shy I was as a child (this is where you say, "How shy were you!"). I was so shy that I didn't want to play bingo 'cuz if I won I didn't want to have to yell out "Bingo!" and be the center of attention. For similar reasons I didn't want to ever go on Bob Barker's The Price is Right. "Come on down!" he'd yell and I'd probably slip out the back, Jack...

It's Not Just the Dems

I recently pilloried Hillary for gaming the system and playing political footsies with O'Bama in order to keep her presidential aspirations alive and well.

Well, what's good for the goose is good for the gander -- apparently even those sitting at 1% in the polls feel the need to play games in order to keep presidential aspirations alive (albeit aspirations surviving on a respirator). Turns out Sam Brownback changed his vote on the immigration bill after he saw the outcome. Bad thing about being so high alphabetically.

On the flip side, McCain, like Bush, would rather be wrong than switch -- showing that the presidential candidate class of '08 is a dismal one indeed.

Our Ohio senators both switched sides when the writing was on the wall. Voinovich is a particularly interesting character because he has to balance his deep arrogance against accountability to the voters, which is why he bristled when he said that he refused to be blackmailed and threatened by those who say "vote this way or you'll be out of a job". One would think that that sort of "blackmail" comes with the territory? I mean it is an elected office after all. I recall him voting for the Bush tax cuts only after incredible consternation, the consternation of knowing that if he did not he could lose his job.

I know the senate is the imperial branch of Congress and we live in a republic and that all senators are naturally arrogant with some hiding it better than others but still... Can it be good to be so openly contemptuous? Voinovich, whose aide once shrugged off a caller with a cold, "who else are you going to vote for?", takes elitism to the nth degree. I'm not one in favor of direct democracy California-style but neither do I see treating constituents contemptuously as a hopeful sign.

In a nutshell it's the problem with politics since day one - either you have an arrogant king who misrules or you have an unruly mob who misrules. Choose your poison.

Review

Gilbert magazine reviews Dulles' A History of Apologetics. Interesting.

Gilbert is one of those magazines that I've been on the cusp of subscribing to for years, without being able to pull the trigger. The other is St. Austin Review, which I believe Joseph Pearce edits.

Update: The Flannery O'Connor blog has been updated.

Update II: Found poem, written by Dan Hawkins:

The Eucharist

We pour addiction like a libation.
The ground, thirstier than we, sucks it dry.
While we have out drunk sand on occasion,
Our thirst is greater than we, which is why
Addiction is the gift we offer.
Our used rag righteousness ain’t enough,
so we give you our emptiness instead,
figuring you hold the bottle. You said,
“I’ll neither leave, nor forsake nor rebuff
The penitent thief or drunkard or whore”
So we lift our glasses in a toast
To the twice struck rock from which water flows.
Drink to the health of one whose blood is wine
That chokes as it quenches, burns going down

Hmmmm....


"Private dollars lead recovery efforts" goes the headline.

From the article:

Charities, foundations, and private individuals have promised at least $50 million toward renovating and building schools, libraries, and senior centers in New Orleans since the hurricane, much of it in middle-class communities such as Uptown and St. Roch.

In contrast, the US has spent or allotted some $4.6 billion on activities ranging from helicopter rescues, levee repairs, housing assistance, and Superdome restoration.

$50 million is about 1% of 4.6 billion... That's "leading"?

Beach Pictures...

...of a previous era have a kind of grainy, elegiac feel.

Links & Controversies



I wanted to use this space to write a parody regarding she-whose-name-will-not-grace-this-blog (hint: a debutante jailed). But that seemed a waste of time. Instead I'd rather talk about something really important - the decline in the integrity of country song lyrics as occasioned by my disappointment in an Ohio State Buckeye non-mention.

Oh sure I realize country songs have been as commoditized as soap and laundry detergent. But you can imagine my dismay when I heard Montgomery Gentry's song, "Lucky Man" with the lyric about a "Buckeye loss". Well, it turns out that that's the lyric for the Central Ohio audience. The rest of the country hears: "Last Sunday when the Bengals lost". Now the latter is more believable but still this sort of tailoring to geographic region is like films where you choose the ending. The ending is the writer's job; I don't want to be catered to like that.

Yes, that was much more important than writing about she-whose-name-will-not-grace-this-blog.

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Elsewhere a Cornerite talks about beer and theology. Here too.

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Save the Indian Mound!

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One of the joys of commenting on other blogs is going where the writer wanted to go but felt constrained. Karen Hall understandably didn't want to use the line "baby we were born to pun!" however irresistable (and it proved so for me) in this Sprinsteen-ian post but professed it had occurred to her.

Fictional Wednesday

The moon that Mardi Gras was gauzed by clouds, as if trying to costume itself in the spirit of the occasion. Was it trying to hide in order to observe, or fit in so that it may join the revelers? No one knew for sure but that it had the wide-eyed innocence of a young Olivia Hussey.

One of the revelers was a young man with a mathematical background. The certainty in the life of the Casari family was the need for certainty. Uncertainties were tolerated to the extent they could be assigned probabilities. Joan, Ron Casari’s mother, had delegated weekly household chores based on a complex algorithm that took into account the child’s strengths, weaknesses, biorhythm chart and phase of the moon. She said that with her system chores were 83% more likely to get done.

Ron did well in school though teachers said he approached his classes in a rote, mechanical fashion. In English Lit class he asked his teacher, a Mr. Siddle, why the books laden with symbols carefully hidden even though the insights revealed tended towards common sense. He studied to the test and the test asked: what does the whale in Moby Dick symbolize? It was like a math problem with multiple correct answers.

One of the milder surprises of Ron Casari’s life was discovering that foreign languages were never fully accessible. He’d considered language little different from mathematics: A=B, where “B” was the foreign word for “A”. But a book that bore the imprint of the soul of a foreign culture would throw him off-balance, off-kilter. He was uncomfortable with mystery, or at least uncomfortable with not knowing what he didn’t know. Mysteries, by definition, didn’t have the answers in the back of the book. That languages were essentially unsolvable was an anathema in a culture in which choice was worshipped. He couldn’t get over the fact that his native tongue had been chosen for him and he couldn’t choose another.

He naturally wasn't sure how close his approximation of the foreigner's tongue was, and the native born wouldn't tell him for reasons mysterious. What was humorous was that even when he mickmicked the accents of foreigners speaking English he couldn't tell if that made him more intelligible or less. On overseas trips he felt like he was playacting and yet the exaggerated syllables might sound "natural" to the Venetian, no matter how unnatural it sounded to his ears.

After graduating from Ole Miss he moved to Louisiana. Every Mardi Gras thereafter he donned a costume inspired by a character from a Franco Zeffirelli film and marched in the Krewe of St. Anne. Afterwards he’d get lost in the byways of the Quarter, drunk on mimosas and bourbon.

He knew the exhilarating feeling of dissolving into a crowd of foreigners and of the sheer joy of invisibility, but language offered no such invisibility: on any street in Venice or Berlin or Moscow everyone who spoke the language knew - from his accent - it was not his native tongue. He wished he could fit in so he could join them. Or maybe just so he could observe. Or perhaps to have the choice.

Let us make mercy our patroness now, and she will free us in the world to come. - St. Caesarius of Arles

The actual problem with Galileo was not merely that the the heliocentric theory contradicted "what the Bible said." The problem was that Galileo insisted that the theory was a *fact*, and he did so without any conclusive proof. This "proof," the tides, had been debunked by many other scientists of his day. The principle of Scriptural interpretation was/is that a biblical way of speaking cannot be ruled merely "according to appearances" unless the contradictory alternative is scientifically proved, not merely a theory. The heliocentric theory was not actually proved until the observation of the Solar Parallax in 1761. After that, the monitum on Galileo was removed without fuss and the heliocentric theory could be taught as a fact, not just a theory--biblical language not withstanding. - commenter Fr. Augustine Thompson on "Ten Reasons

The Catechism...tells us that "The education of conscience is indispensable for human beings who are subjected to negative influences and tempted by sin to prefer their own judgment and to reject authoritative teachings" (#1783). It was precisely to guard and guide Catholic children that the Third Plenary Council of Baltimore met in 1884 to declare that every parish was obligated to establish a parochial school. Mr. Kellmeyer argues that, for many reasons, this decision--however well intended--was bound to fail. The chief reason for failure, he contends, is that such schools violate the concept of subsidiarity... - amazon.com review of Steven L Kellmeyer's "Designed to Fail"

The cultural prerequisites of democratic capitalism are given life by real human beings. So when you bring new people into your society, you’re potentially working a root transformation in what that society is–and in how (and whether) democratic capitalism works there. Immigration uniquely reveals the underlying dependence of markets themselves on cultural foundations. - Stan Kurtz of NRO's "Corner"

Should a man look at a beautiful woman? Yes. Not to appreciate the beauty and goodness that God has endowed her would be a sign of ingratitude on our part. For a man, one of the most beautiful things to see is a beautiful woman, and I think it works the same way for women with regard to men. The problem is not in the first look. - from ewtn Q&A

What has so bedeviled, so to speak, this debate on limbo and the unbaptized is how little consideration has been given to St. Paul’s insistence that in baptism we are baptized into the Body of Christ. To hear some people’s reaction to the Vatican’s Statement on Limbo, one would think that baptism is a kind of celestial life-insurance policy, of relevance for the recipient alone but of no consequence to the body of the cosmos whatever (and certainly worthless tender when debased by the non-baptized getting into heaven, too!). But that is scarcely Paul’s view: “We know that the whole creation has been groaning as if in the pangs of childbirth right up to the present day. Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we await eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies” (Rom. 8:22–23). If the ITC Report on Limbo leads to a reappropriation of Paul’s theology of baptism, I will not be at all disappointed. - Fr. Oakes S.J. in First Things

We who live beneath a sky still stained with the smoke of crematoria, have paid a high price to learn that evil is really evil. -Francois Mauriac via "Just Another Day of Catholic Pondering"

He would only join the agrarian movement if he could drive a huge air-conditioned, satellite-navigated tractor. -self-description of Julian O'Dea, on Catholic Restoration blog

I am an abstract and very modern thinker by nature, training, and personal history. Paul Cella's thought has a rootedness to it, a foundation in concrete history and real people, a connection to blood and soil, that I simply cannot self-generate as the modern person I am. Paul doesn't just make me think, he plants my thoughts in the soil of history. - Zippy of Zippy Catholic

I ought to get out of this habit of posting when I don't have anything to say, but it hasn't stopped anyone else. Isn't that the definition of blog? A place to say what doesn't need saying? Maybe that needed saying...Old Culbreath tagged me for a meme he made up, one of those my-memes I guess. Thirty things that don't bother him. Everything bothers me even when it shouldn't, so I can't do it. Besides, he tags me then disappears on one of those fasts in which he refuses to eat blogs for a while. - William of Apologia

Seeds of Germany's Path

I've been interested for awhile why Germany became the primary instigator of the great wars of the twentieth century. Belloc (in "Europe and the Faith") seems to locates the blame with Prussia and the fact that Prussia was insufficiently evangelized given its geographical location (too north and too east).

What else could've caused the nationalism that ran amuck in Germany? It seems sentimentalism and religion of the heart rather than the head had a role; Germany's Pietism movement was a counter to those espousing a universal humanity. (In a way this isn't too surprising. Islam is a religion with more fervency than rationality and has proven itself very adept at hatred of outsiders.)

Michael Burleigh in Earthly Powers writes of this (although he says it isn't of itself explanatory; there were many other factors):

Seventeenth-century German Pietism influenced the Romantic cults of the self and of God being present in nature. Pietism meant a faith based on love of Christ rather than intellectual subscription to a creed...Pietism involved not just the individual's direct experience of God, but acknowledgement of God's presence in wider fellowships and communities. These included the family, church and nation, the units within which it was really possible for human beings to know each other. A sermon delivered in 1815 sentimentalized this intense feeling of belonging:

When a man speaks of the fatherland, he includes in this idea everything he loves on earth: the bosom of his parents, his circle of brothers and sisters, the family altar, his childhood playgrounds, the dreams of his youth, the places of his education, his field of work, and those thousand bonds that link him with his fellow citizens, the same language, the same customs, the same nationality, the same common life, common names, common possessions, common renown, common welfare, common sorrows...

Pietism contributed to a spiritual climate in which such collectives as the nation became vehicles of intensified worship...

Sympathy for the Communists

It's hard to be surprised by near treasonous behavior anymore, but I was startled by the following, which I'd read in O'Sullivan's book and meant to write about. Fortunately this Crisis article saves me the trouble:

Near the end of his story, O’Sullivan gives us an amazing little interlude. In February of 1986, Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Massachusetts) visited the Soviet Union to meet with Gorbachev for the first time. The thrust of his mission to Moscow was to work with Gorbachev to derail Reagan and the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). As O’Sullivan puts it, “Kennedy and the Soviets saw eye-to-eye on several important matters.” Together, they would outmaneuver Reagan, especially if Gorbachev would take Kennedy’s advice and put “more pressure, and firmer pressure, on Reagan.”

Aside from a possible treason charge, Kennedy also had little or no grasp of the weak hand that the Soviet leadership was forced to play at this point in the game. Instead, the senator blithely and blindly assumed that the USSR was a superpower equal to the United States in economic and military strength. Apparently, Kennedy also assumed that it was his charge to give Gorbachev advice as to how to deal with their mutual rival, President Reagan.

Interview with Ancient Man

Although life for Cro Magnum man was short and brutal, they didn't worry about putting on SPF before going outside or checking themselves for tics after hiking. Here is an exclusive interview with a Cro Magnum man visiting 21st century America:

Cro: Let's go outside. Don't like four walls unless it's freezin'.
Me: I'll grab my sunglasses...
Cro: What you need those for?
Me: I wear contacts which make your eyes more susceptible to glare and...
Cro: What are contacts?
Me: I don't see too well and they correct my vision.
Cro: I used to know folks with bad vision. They got eaten by coyotes. Didn't see 'em comin'.
Me: That happens. Well, not anymore I guess. I gotta put some SPF on too.
Cro: What's SPF?
Me: It's to protect from sun damage. They say in the '70s people used aerosol anti-perspirants and it eroded the ozone layer, which is an invisible layer of sky that prevents bad rays of the sun from entering.
Cro: Whatever man. You 21st century types worry too much. What's "anti-perspirant"?
Me: Well it goes along with deodorant. It keeps you from smelling and sweating.
Cro: What's wrong with smelling and sweating?
Me: Sweating leaves dark rings under your arms so when you raise them you look like dictator Hugo Chavez. No one in America wants to look like him. And smelling is embarrassing in business settings.
Cro: I see. What's that you are spraying?
Me: It's Cutter, keeps the mosquitoes away. Want some?
Cro: Sure -- that's one thing I could've used back in my day!

Various

EWTN guy Marcus Grodi recently told the story about the automobile accident that inspired him to go to seminary and give his life completely to God. He was falling asleep while driving a car, very, very tired, but he had to make it to work on time. He asked God to help keep him awake, but he fell asleep anyway and hit a semi-truck going 70mph. Remarkably, he lived through it. And it was as though he had a new life, as if he should have, by all rights, died and so he felt free to give this new life to God. And the interesting line from Grodi was this – he said that he could’ve just said, “Man I was lucky! How lucky am I? I gotta go to Vegas and see if my luck holds.” No, he saw it as from God. And *that* was God working in him – that he was able to see what other people could easily attribute to dumb luck but he saw it through the eyes of faith.

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Interesting commentary on 2 Cor 12:1-10 from A Catholic Commentary on Holy Scripture, on Paul's "other" vision:

We get the impression that he had never mentioned this before, that it was different from other visions and that he had approached as nearly as a living man can to the direct contemplation of God. He was not especially reserved about all visions. He had already told the Corinthians about the one on the road to Damascus. Four others are mentioned in Acts. But here all the signs, especially the strangely ambiguous language, show that he was claiming something far beyond the other visions, an overwhleming experience... In verse 2 'a man': there can be no doubt that he means himself. The date (13 yrs past) would be A.D. 41 or 44, not long after the escape from Damascus.

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St. Pio's prayers were answered early and often and it's hard to think of anyone more deserving given his willingness to suffer and given his true desire to please God. Perhaps in his closeness to God he understood what to pray for. Sometimes it seems a sort of catch-22 to the typical sinner: the answers of prayers feed a desire to please God, but the desire to please God is what triggers the answers to prayers.

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Met a bearded guy my age yesterday who showed me his driver's license when I asked for the spelling of his extremely unusual name. I could see that he carried in his wallet a picture of the Eucharist host. Touching; we might have a picture of our wife or mother or father and he put His best friend, Jesus. Soon to be ordained a deacon in the Ukrainian Catholic church, he spoke with an uncommon wisdom and his evident peacefulness was not always so; years ago he wanted to commit suicide but realized it would crush his mother. He spoke prophetically I thought (since my pastor Fr. Lane has hinted at the same) when he said that he thinks “God is preparing those who take Him seriously for a time of great upheaval”. He said we are in a testing phase where God is strengthening us before the trial to come. I think we live in an age that is far more fragile than we think, and the whole financial house of cards upon which the West depends is as likely as not to fall.

Fiction for a Monday

John Manifold had an instinctive distrust of wealth not because he didn’t like the idea of having lots of money but because he knew how it would play with people who didn’t have money. He’d hadn’t any for years and that had caused him to divide the world into haves and have-nots, and all his sympathy was for the have-nots. To be rich seemed a implicit betrayal of his poor friends.

He wondered, naturally, if he was merely jealous. The poor were often jealous and just because someone wasn’t wealthy didn’t mean they couldn’t be happy for those who were. Manifold accepted this on an intellectual level but the loser and underdog held his affection and he couldn’t help but judge things by the way the underdog would view things. It felt somehow wrong if he should acquire money and they not.

He feared that with wealth he would no longer be able to relate to his poor brethren and thus no longer, in some sense, be able relate to himself. He’d always been poor. But he almost tried to avoid getting rich since his greatest fear is that after becoming so he would become one of those insisting how easy it was and thus annoying those who were still poor. How many times he’d heard that when he was poor! The haves always told the have-nots how easy it was to acquire money.

The rich sometimes flaunted their wealth almost accidentally - not out of hubris but only because they saw their wealth as coming from outside themselves, as something they hadn't earned. But the poor scarcely understood that concept and the rich said that it was because they didn't understand that they remained poor.

So how could one become rich and still appreciate the situation of the poor?

Mary as Model

Jacob wrestled with God and I think we get glimpses of the right way to "wrestle with God" when we examine Mary's life. She dealt with mystery and uncertainty well. There was the cryptic, if ominous, warning from Simeon ("a sword shall pierce your heart") that she lived with her whole life. Jesus allowed the anxiety of missing Him for three days when he was at the temple in Jerusalem. There was a "tough love" aspect to it all. When Jesus was told that Mary and others were waiting outside Jesus redefined family as those who do the will of God. She also watched her Son die on the cross, and there is no biblical record of her experiencing Christ in his glorified Body.

But her questioning of Jesus - and therefore of God - was always of a spirit of obedience that seemed neither of an indifferent, robotic nature nor at the other extreme.

It seems Mary became, in a sense, like the eldest in the story of the Prodigal Son, in role though not behavior or attitude. Like the elder son, she never left the Father, having never sinned. She might've lacked some of the immediate gratifications and consolations that other saints received, but she didn't ask for her inheritance in this life and now enjoys eternity as Queen of Heaven.

June 22 - Feast of St. Thomas More

One of my favorite lines in A Man for All Seasons was one I didn't really notice the first or second time I viewed the film. But the third time it got me: when St. Thomas More said he would miss his somewhat vulgar manservant. The manservant at first shrugged him off in a "you've got to be kidding manner", much as one of us might say to a saint who said that to us, and yet St. Thomas meant it. We can share in the incredulity of that manservant when we see that Christ and his saints care about us. Love is a miracle more shocking than the raising the dead.

(Image via Jim Curley)

Somehow it seems that in the past I missed the Requiem Press book about Cardinal John Fisher and Sir Thomas More and other English martyrs. It's a steal these days:

Starting tonight and through the 4th of July, Requiem Press is offering "Witnesses to the Holy Mass and other sermons" (see short reviews below) at an unprecedented discount of $4.00 plus $1.50 S&H (which by the way, doesn't cover the S&H). This book is about Cardinal John Fisher and Sir Thomas More and other martyrs for the Mass, for Papal supremacy, and the Faith of our fathers.

Ending of one of St. Thomas More's books:

"And in the meane tyme, I besech our lord to breth of his holy spirite into the readers brest, which inwardly may tech hym in hart, without whome {259} litle availeth all that all the mowthes of the world were able to tech in mens eares / And thus good Cosyn fare well, till god bryng vs together agayne, eyther here or in hevyn / Amen."(CW 12, 320/23--28)