Watching COPS with the Sound Turned Down

I've found, over time, that this dialogue works for most episodes of COPS.

(Head shot of officer talking):"I've been with the [insert city name] police force for [X] years. I love being a police officer. Every day, every call is different. We get to get the bad guys off the street. The main thing is to come back home safely.”

(Pulls up behind suspect acting suspiciously): “Don't reach in your pocket! Got any ID?"

(Suspect runs and is caught):

Officer breathlessly: "Why'd you run?"

Suspect: "I was scared."

Officer: "Scared of the police? Why would you be scared of the police? Got a warant?"

Suspect: "No, no warrants."

Officer: "You sellin'?"

Suspect: "I don't do drugs. Don't have any drugs."

Officer: "What'd you toss out the window?"

Suspect: "I didn't toss anything."

(Officer picks up drugs tossed from window & then searches car, finds more drugs.)

Officer: "What's this?"

Suspect: "They ain't mine."

Officer: "Is this your car?"

Suspect: "Yes."

Officer: "Then how'd they get there?"

Suspect: "I don't know but they ain't mine."

COPS Laws

1) Oddly, cops act surprised when someone who likely just committed a crime lies to them. Police expect criminals to incriminate themselves by confessing.

2) It's been said that few in jail admit guilt. Similarly, almost no one caught admits guilt no matter how far-fetched the story (i.e. "someone just let me borrow their car - don't know their name or why"). "I didn't do nuthin'" is the most heard line on COPS.

3) Amazingly, cops are suspicious of people who act nervous when pulled over, even though being nervous is the natural reaction for someone who just got pulled over even if unaware of doing anything wrong.

4) Based on COPS, if there weren't drugs or domestic abuse they'd have little to do but drive around.

In Praise of Bad Art

If you want to make God laugh
mention "create" after a personal pronoun.
(Ex nihilo is the better trick.)

For Him everything is cloying,
mere sentiment and cliché
were he were not Simplicity and Lover
of the immature and unlovable.

Critical eyes dimiss and disparage
but the Authentic One mocks not
our derivative attempts.

Tractor Pull at the County Fair

First the pitch of engine froth
a jet black plume of smoke,
darks the edges of Old Glory
in the fumes she soaks.

"Two-hundred ninety feet!" he cries
just aft the Deere did halt,
"Two-hundred ninety feet!" was said
of the tractor that had no fault.

"Not a good place for the flag,"
I say while walking to the truck,
but tis true, I guess, that God and flags
don't mind getting in the muck.

* * *

St. Ambrose, from today's Office of Readings:

Wearing the garments given her in the rebirth by water, the Church says, in the words of the Song of Songs: I am black but beautiful, daughters of Jerusalem. Black because of the frailty of humanity, beautiful through grace; black because she is made up of sinners, beautiful through the sacrament of faith. When they see these garments the daughters of Jerusalem cry out in wonder: Who is this who comes up, all in white? She was black, how is she suddenly made white? When Christ sees his Church clothed in white – for her sake he himself had put on filthy clothing, as you may read in the prophecy of Zechariah – when he sees the soul washed clean by the waters of rebirth, he cries out: How beautiful you are, my beloved, how beautiful you are...

Interesting Post...

Too long to condense for "Span the Globe"...from Amy Welborn, a review of “In Pursuit of the Almighty’s Dollar: A History of Money and American Protestantism.“:

The questions about stewardship bounced all over the place and reemerged in different forms every generation. Should stewardship be understood as primarily being about money or about a Christian’s whole life? Were fundraising efforts that depended on entertaining the giver or from which the giver derived some benefit legitimate, or were they manipulative and ultimately spiritually destructive?

And at every stage, church people are constantly, unfailingly frustrated at low levels of giving. As Americans became more prosperous, Protestant ministers fell in both status and income level, and church leaders could not help but notice that as Americans bought more and more stuff, they never seemed to manage to give any more to church.

Some..things..never change...

I do think, if there’s anyone out there involved in stewardship, in any Christian denomination, it’s worth it to take a look at this book. So often, we tend to look at the past through those blasted rose-colored glasses, thinking that in the past, Christians were so generous, while today, they’re so cheap. We also tend to look at the models we have for these things - what a church is and how its members should financially support it - as something that just is. Examining and thinking about how and why these models developed, and realizing that the conversations we’re having now and the concerns and frustrations are not at all new, it seems to me, is very important. Especially for Catholics who not only suffer from historical blindness, but from deep Protestant envy when it comes to giving and stewardship.

Links I Haven't Read

This is a new feature in which I link to things I haven't actually read...hopefully I'll remember to but in the meantime...

First off, here's an old TIME magazine piece in praise of uselessness.

This is a Zenit article that I cut & pasted in but can't recall what it was.

Here's a recommendation for one of E. Michael Jones's books.

And finally, Bill of Summa points us to a Nigerian email writing class that I'd likewise envisioned.

Making the World Safe for Memeology

Fred has done me the honor of meme'ing me with a quirky one: name six of your quirks.

Hhmmm.... how about:

I sometimes make up words in journal entries and posts.

I will likely develop back/shoulder troubles from foolishly carrying books with me everywhere I go. (Kindle should help.)

I named my cat "Motorboat Jones" after a Reds phenom but it was too long so I began calling him "Sam".

My wife and I add "-age" to many words in order to create our own language-age.

I used to think elite rhymed with "light".

I eat cereal while driving (I used to read while driving, but now I'm (hopefully) wiser.

By the power invested in me by the state of Blogdom, I hereby meme six people who want to play. You know who you are.

[Hitler's] degraded ethics were all too well-suited to modern man. If you don’t believe me, think about this: How many retarded children have you seen on the street lately? They used to be rather common—before the free, Christian peoples of the West discovered amniocentesis. Which side really won World War II? - Zmirak, via Eric Scheske

He never lived in Texas. - Mama T of "Summa Mamas" regarding Chekhov's quote that "People don't notice whether it's winter or summer when they're happy." [Note: Mama T's mother died a couple days ago. Please offer a prayer for her and Terry.]

Jesus' public mission was to reveal His Father...What would have happened if, long before the Holy Spirit came upon the Apostles ("and Mary the mother of Jesus") at Pentecost, long before the Apostles even knew that Jesus was the Messiah?...It seems to me that would have only muddled His revelation and confused His disciples. The honor due to the Mother of God is a direct corollary of Jesus' self-revelation; to bring up the corollary before the primary lesson is known ill-befits the wise teacher. So it's not just that Jesus didn't happen to respond in these situations in a manner that makes it easy to demonstrate the scriptural basis for veneration of Mary. It's that He shouldn't have responded that way. He wasn't composing a catechism. He was revealing His Father, and He left it to those to whom He revealed the Father to discover that the light of the Father reveals the light of the mother. Catholics shouldn't try to paper over the development of Marian doctrine that can be found even within the New Testament...We should recognize that the very development that has occurred -- which I'd say Catholics must admit was intended by God to occur over time and not simply be given by Jesus as an explicit teaching -- teaches us important lessons about both the place of Mary (i.e., both logically and historically, distinctly after Jesus) and the nature of Jesus' revelation (i.e., completed but unfolding in time). - Tom of Disputations

We seem to aim at so little today, to have such small interests in mind. No wonder the biotech visionaries have gained a hearing: They claim to be going somewhere. Where they want to go is the destruction of human nature, but at least they are calling us to something beyond ourselves. To be a religious believer is to know that the hungers of the human heart will not find fulfillment without God, but even religious believers benefit from goals short of the ecstatic vision of the divine. A people without any temporal horizons—without any historical purpose or vision of the future—grow enervated and decadent, and they begin to follow strange gods, who promise them meaning. The science-fiction writers had it better: Space is the obvious next horizon for human beings. Want to diminish the biotech revolution to its proper role as a curer of disease? Offer a more exciting goal. Build a rocket ship, and fly it to Mars. - Jody Bottum of "First Things"

I just finished reading Steven Greydanus' fine review of Disney/Pixar's WALL-E, and it reminded me of this post about futurist David Zach. It reminded me specifically of the fascinating talk he gave at the recent annual G.K. Chesterton Conference, because it sounds like in the WALL-E movie, the writers make a common mistake that people make when thinking about the future; that is, they look at recent trends and follow them into the future in a straight line...Now, I call this a "mistake" on the part of the creators of WALL-E, but I don't think it was, really. If they were seriously presenting their ideas of what the future will be like, then it might be a mistake, but what they are doing is actually fine and good for storytellers. They are just exploring recent trends in our society and are using the future to pull them apart and show them to us... using the future as a kind of mirror on our lives. - Tim Jones on Jimmy Akins' blog

Gramm is right when he talks about the psychological toll of relentless recession talk. I have a steady job and I still freak when I see the price of everything go up. But calling people who have lost their jobs or foreclosed on a shoddy motrgage — even one they kinda knew they could not afford — is not the time to call them “whiners.” - Phil Albinus; though if not now, when?

Alcohol may be man's worst enemy, but the Bible says love your enemy. - Frank Sinatra, via Forbes.com

There is no future for e-books because they are not books...E-books smell like burned fuel. - author Ray Bradbury via "Blog Kindle"

"Look! Aretha Franklin, when she sings 'I Say a Little Prayer', you can sense the power, the range she has available to her, but she keeps it all tightly controlled, in service of the SONG. If she sang in service of her SELF, you'd hear all kinds of crazy flourishes and crescendos and huge long sustained notes; she'd gyrate and bellow and distort the song to suit her own purpose.'

'That is the essence of my argument, that the artist serves the the song.'

'Celebrity is secondary, it is of no importance. It is a matter of integrity."

...."I think that you got no balls, is what...and I think you can appreciate a song without caring what it is 'about'. You have the classic, very classic, North American attitiude toward art, that it's only there for our consumption. You are also cursed, I think, with seeking the meaning to life through art."

"What's wrong with that?"

"Your own experience comes first." - blogger at "A Fortnight at SevenOaks"

You may have read by now the official lie about this treatment, which is that it “simulates” the feeling of drowning. This is not the case. You feel that you are drowning because you are drowning—or, rather, being drowned, albeit slowly and under controlled conditions and at the mercy (or otherwise) of those who are applying the pressure.... I apply the Abraham Lincoln test for moral casuistry: “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.” Well, then, if waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture. - Christopher Hitchens, after being waterboarded (he voluneteered)

As a person who battles despairing, intrusive thoughts during many of her alert (caffeinated and non-caffeinated) hours, I found great consolation in the personal writings of Mother Teresa included in a compilation entitled "Come Be My Light," edited by Brian Kolodiejchuk, M.C. And I wept many times throughout the book, mostly at her graciousness toward God in her suffering. "I want to smile even at Jesus and so hide if possible the pain and the darkness of my soul even from Him," she wrote. I spent a week with Mother Teresa and her Sisters the winter of 1994. I stood beside her for about two hours as we distributed Christmas gifts to orphaned children. I sensed a sadness in her. But her light overshadowed it. Unlike a person wrapped in severe depression, wearing the expression of despair, she exuded light and hope. When she prayed, her deep love for God was visible, even contagious. This saint of darkness has much to teach me about how to live with inner anguish. - Therese Borchard on "Beliefnet"

Usually, I think, sinners are said to be those who aren't on the paths of the LORD at all, [but] we might infer from Hosea one reason sinners usually avoid the paths of the LORD: When they're on them, they stumble. Walking along the constricted road is painful and humiliating. Who wants that? No one, really, but if you have an idea of where the path leads, then you're willing to put up with falling seven times, because you can rise again and not stumble to ruin. - Tom of Disputations

Christian publishers are adding thousands of new titles for Kindle e-books

Yet another example of how evangelical publishing companies are much quicker than Catholics to adapt to new technologies...I didn't see any Catholic publishers in that group.

Thoughts After a Wedding

I have no memories of this church, so different from its precursor at which I served. This one feels more like a funeral or massage parlor, what with the comfort-sound of tumbling water (the Baptismal font) and colored windows so content-free that they could appeal simultaneously to either the grieving of any religious persuasion or the stressed housewife. It’s certainly a church desiring not to give offense, quietly whispering either “I’m sorry for your loss” or “your quads are so tight!”.

Except for a fine rendition of “Ave Maria” the music at the service was often uninspiring or unsingable and, in the case of one song in particular, cloying to the point of nails-on-chalkboard. But don’t believe me: four out of five Protestants will agree that music isn’t American Catholicism’s strong point these days.

But I digress. The priest is likable and enthusiastic and confident. And the purpose is prayer for the couple, and it feels like such a necessary prayer as they'll surely need it, as all couples do...

* * *
Wedding receptions with family I hadn’t seen in awhile can seem almost like high school reunions in which the preoccupation can be to be observing the varying effects of age on the human body. Unfortunately.

It’s July in Ohio and so therefore hot and humid (I hear them laughing in Texas), but this day not unbearably so. A mosquito bites me on the arm and I wonder if it’s West Nile.

There were people I hadn't seen before, specifically the Brahmins from Boston. One was originally named Bill who had renamed himself Will. But have you really successfully renamed yourself if other people (like Mom & Mark) mention that you were originally X and now you’re Y?

It’s funny but I never thought of renaming yourself an option. It would have to be a pain for future family genealogists. Like Will (I mean Bill) O’Reilly, I’m pro-parental rights, which includes the right to name their offspring whatever they want. Worse, it seemed changing his name was superfluous from a superficial point of view since he was the sort of handsome leading man who would've made Cary Grant envious. Slim and silver-haired and the brother of my now departed aunt. Mom told me about how aunt's eyes, in her last days, were so different, so cold and dead. It was because she was so warm in life that the eyes that the disparity was so startling. It reminds me of the vulnerability sickness incurs, and how I used to fear that on my death bed I would in a feverish haze uncontrollably say curse words and x-rated words, like those with Tourette’s syndrome. Now I fear different things. Given enough time you move on I suppose.

A family member succinctly described the dilemma alcohol presents when she got up to speak to someone she didn’t know well – saying you don’t want to approach them given how much wine you’ve had, but at the same time it’s the wine that gives you the impetus to approach them. Life is full of catch-22’s…

Stream o' Consciousness



An undiscovered trailhead we sift
abutted by wheat or field grassses disguised
by space a happy castle in the far
or so I imagine in Quixotic fashion
(La Mancha was a dump you know).

Oh glorious winding path
can't see 'round the Next
ez to suspend disbelief
believe it goes forever
the mind's love for infinity
glimpsed in this rare
privacy with a long view.

I reach for Heat Moon,
while Proustian songs
go off in my head:
"And so I wrote this down for Matthew...
And hey it's good to be back home again."

Work days I exit the house
startled by beauty
by brill sun on black 'sphalt
the grass multi-hued,
light-green where sun sits
elsewhere hunter.

By Sunday I'm suspectible to beauty,
hungry for words I can't write
like the itch you can't scratch,
like the irreplaceable feel
of another's hand on your skin.

I miss her now
up here on this little house prairie
or Bald's Knob
for in the books there's always a wife
a partner to save from the Injuns
as Heat Moon sings in the background:
"What truer children of Kansas
than those taken aloft by the South Wind?"

Afterwards the book room sits like the sacred room
in some ancient Newgrange where
the equinox lights up
here promptly at 7
alit by west-by-northwest windows.

NPR Sings the Blues Happily

(Warning: not for the easily offended.) Bad economic news = gleeful liberal anchors? Parody is Therapy updated here. I tease our liberal friends.

There's also a tongue-in-cheek parody of Amazon Kindle mania.

Excerptable

I'm greatly enjoying Reid Buckley's memoir of his family. It's a very tasty read:

A press agent approached him. "Mr. Buckley, for a fee of three hundred dollars a month I'll guarantee that you and your wife and children will appear once a week in society columns and at least monthly in social magazines."

I pity that man. I pity his having exposed himself to the ice-blue fullness of contempt in eyes of uncompromising candor. "I'll pay you the same amount to keep me and my family out of the papers."

Father was next to broke. It was going to take him 18 years to come back. But hunger for personal publicity, Father felt, showed that a person was unable to approve of himself on his own terms, lacking in the strength and certitude of his own worth.* That's poverty. Where he was reared, plain survival tended to prove a person and tended to translate into prosperity. Economic class distinctions were rare. Success was like a fine quarter-horse stallion: to be admired or envied, not, should one happen to possess it, to be ashamed of. Money was good to have; it was for building beautiful horses and raising packs of children and giving them the best education. But the worth of a man as a person was what counted. As children, we were taught neither to fear material poverty nor to despite riches.

* - In this and in so much else (including integrity), he was the diametric opposite of old Joe Kennedy, determining the very different stars that his children chased.

Wow. Everything in that excerpt feels so counter-cultural. From the loathing of publicity, to the certitude of one's own worth, to the lack of fear of material poverty - it feels like something from a very different era.

Eulogy for a Book Shop

Being from the hinterlands means never having to say you're sorry for being the last to know. Hence I just found out, a year out, that Gotham Books of "Wise-Men-Fish-Here" fame went the way of all flesh.

I'd found out the old-fashioned way: with shoe leather. I'd hoofed up & down 47th street looking for it in vain. Turns out it had moved to 46th street in an effort to stiff-arm the Reaper.

So now it can be told: the Village Voice from last year tells the sad tale:

Could it have been just a Sherlockian "death" over the Reichenbach Falls? Was it a Tom Sawyer funeral after all? Did the renowned Gotham Book Mart never actually die? "Something's cooking," said one former employee, reached by phone last week, while another central source spoke optimistically of "important things happening"—implying the possibility of a settlement that would resurrect the store and erase its ugly end.

The obituary was ignominious. In the back of the Business section of May 13's Times, under an announcement for a clearance sale of bras and panties, appeared the notice for a "Marshal's Auction," with tiny print and the wrong name:

>>Tremendous Inventory Books, Furniture, & Memorabilia >> Of The World Famous Literary Landmark Gotham Book Store

If the notice seemed a little crass—with "furniture" jammed in like a barker's bait..

Elsewhere on the web, another obit:

Goodbye, Gotham Book Mart
Another brief post, marking what is truly the end of an epoch.

The Gotham Book Mart has been evicted, its merchandise snapped up by its landlord at auction for $400,000, its new premises to be rented to someone who can pay more.

Why is this a big deal?

The Gotham Book Mart ([Photo via Rollerboogie]), in its former home and incarnation, was widely considered one of New York's greatest bookstores. Founded in 1920, it was one of the finest repositories of original and rare literature in the city, and, during the long tenure of former proprietor Frances Steloff, a major haunt for many notable American and foreign writers of the 20th century...

I always loved going in there because of the pleasant, attentive, knowledgeable staff members, a rarity at bookstores these days, and because I'd often find obscure poetry books--sometimes published 20 or 40 years before--still sitting behind other books (because they practiced double-packing the books!) on the shelves, waiting to be extracted, explored and purchased rather than returned to moulder a publisher's or distributor's warehouse.

Many writers I know, and especially those of previous generations, have a Gotham Book Mart visit story or three. It was one of the City's longtime literary beacons, outlasting many of this larger competitors, like Scribner's, Doubleday, and Brentano, and outliving peers like Eeyore and Shakespeare and Company, only to fall prey the rent monster...

At any rate, sic transit gloriae urbis....

The Faults of the Left & Right

The Right likes its charities
tempered by worthiness:
the unborn a natural fit
having no sin but the Original.

The Left wants justice now
Amen and without limit
though doomed to terminal disatisfaction
for God created nerve-endings.

Hot Mic Misdventures: Blogger Edition

*psssst!*

"I don't much like the way Tom of Disputations talks down to Catlick bloggers, talkin' about the call to holiness and personal virtue. I'm going to cut his [bleeped] off!"

Doh! I didn't realize I was on a live blogophone!

PS: Seems Jesse wasn't too happy with Obama last year either. I wonder if there's jealousy involved. Pure speculation of course. Am I jealous of Tom? Damn strait! *grin*