April 23, 2010
Diaristic FridayThoughts
Been reading more of "Drink". It's a history of the world as much as a history of alcohol. Occasionally eye-opening, it makes the Vikings come alive since to me they were mostly caricatures or stick-figures. They're still caricatures but also now characters; their barbarism was so matter-of-fact barbaric that it's scary.
Also been reading online dispatches from the Butler County Democrat in the year of the great flood. The April 14th, 1913 issue doesn't list my great-grandfather as missing nor dead (it's said he died in the flood).
Elsewhere in the paper: "The people of South A street were the first to be affected by the flood: at 8:30am Tuesday morning the water was creeping up to their first floor in the highest houses. But that was only back water and they thought nothing of it until 9am when the water crowded them so they had to move to the 2nd floors. At 9:30, things were looking more serious as the river was up on lower South B street. Still the men on Main Street did not think they'd be affected and that is how many were caught in a trap."
There's Ever a Song Somewhere, My Dear was sung at the burial of the flood victims, a sentimental James Whitcomb Riley poem. Read recently that the sentimental goes with toughness...seems counterintuitive but then 1913 was both a lot tougher and a lot more sentimental than ours.
A Judge Belden spoke and said that "despite the present distress, Hamilton is not dead. We shall build upon the ruins a new and greater city. When our children and children's children are told about this disaster they will stand in doubting amazement, for we will build a city so great, so beautiful, that the story of the present aspect will seem like a fairy tale."
One of the things that occurred to me was how even things for which we have proof there is a need for faith if we haven't personally experienced it. I can never quite understand how a strong swimmer could die in a flood, but that is likely a failure of imagination, in being unable to imagine a current so fierce or so unexpected. And I guess that's simply because I've never experienced it even though I've been in heavy ocean surf. About 200 people died in that flood, far more than typically die in a tornado even though the latter seems far more dangerous. Why is that? I'm not sure other than wind damage is more common in our neck of the woods than flooding. And since the building of levees the Miami river looks so calm and imperturbable.
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It's always surprising to me how a long familiar Bible passage will suddenly open up in new depth. For example, "God's power is most shown in our weakness." It occurred to me that this is most obviously true in our death, after which we are at our most helpless - far more helpless than when we were infants because as infants we can cry and affect their environment. It is after our death and the end of the world that God's power is made most evident, in our resurrection. And so this should ideally lessen the fear of death.
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I think that at least 90% of the spiritual life is simply to be willing to cheerfully re-learn the lessons that you thought you'd already learned.
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I've lately been fascinated by Simeon, the one who saw the baby Jesus at the Presentation and saw in this infant the glory of his people Israel. Simeon had eyes to see so much more. What looked like just an ordinary baby to others was so thrilling to Simeon that he could call on the Lord to send him home. Even when Jesus had done nothing - no miracles, no teaching, no impressing the elders at the synagogue - Simeon was thrilled to see Him. And I thought about how true that is of the Eucharist, how the bread is something that we can easily overlook and yet is our salvation too since in both cases it is Jesus. We are all Simeons now, should we desire to be so.
Also been reading online dispatches from the Butler County Democrat in the year of the great flood. The April 14th, 1913 issue doesn't list my great-grandfather as missing nor dead (it's said he died in the flood).
Elsewhere in the paper: "The people of South A street were the first to be affected by the flood: at 8:30am Tuesday morning the water was creeping up to their first floor in the highest houses. But that was only back water and they thought nothing of it until 9am when the water crowded them so they had to move to the 2nd floors. At 9:30, things were looking more serious as the river was up on lower South B street. Still the men on Main Street did not think they'd be affected and that is how many were caught in a trap."
There's Ever a Song Somewhere, My Dear was sung at the burial of the flood victims, a sentimental James Whitcomb Riley poem. Read recently that the sentimental goes with toughness...seems counterintuitive but then 1913 was both a lot tougher and a lot more sentimental than ours.
A Judge Belden spoke and said that "despite the present distress, Hamilton is not dead. We shall build upon the ruins a new and greater city. When our children and children's children are told about this disaster they will stand in doubting amazement, for we will build a city so great, so beautiful, that the story of the present aspect will seem like a fairy tale."
One of the things that occurred to me was how even things for which we have proof there is a need for faith if we haven't personally experienced it. I can never quite understand how a strong swimmer could die in a flood, but that is likely a failure of imagination, in being unable to imagine a current so fierce or so unexpected. And I guess that's simply because I've never experienced it even though I've been in heavy ocean surf. About 200 people died in that flood, far more than typically die in a tornado even though the latter seems far more dangerous. Why is that? I'm not sure other than wind damage is more common in our neck of the woods than flooding. And since the building of levees the Miami river looks so calm and imperturbable.
It's always surprising to me how a long familiar Bible passage will suddenly open up in new depth. For example, "God's power is most shown in our weakness." It occurred to me that this is most obviously true in our death, after which we are at our most helpless - far more helpless than when we were infants because as infants we can cry and affect their environment. It is after our death and the end of the world that God's power is made most evident, in our resurrection. And so this should ideally lessen the fear of death.
I think that at least 90% of the spiritual life is simply to be willing to cheerfully re-learn the lessons that you thought you'd already learned.
I've lately been fascinated by Simeon, the one who saw the baby Jesus at the Presentation and saw in this infant the glory of his people Israel. Simeon had eyes to see so much more. What looked like just an ordinary baby to others was so thrilling to Simeon that he could call on the Lord to send him home. Even when Jesus had done nothing - no miracles, no teaching, no impressing the elders at the synagogue - Simeon was thrilled to see Him. And I thought about how true that is of the Eucharist, how the bread is something that we can easily overlook and yet is our salvation too since in both cases it is Jesus. We are all Simeons now, should we desire to be so.
April 21, 2010
Could You Read This One Too.
We recently received a "strategy package" from our employer that includes a Personal Objectives worksheet which says we need to deliver "persnalized" customer experience.
Turns out we're so personalized that we've personalized the spelling of personalized!
Of Human Mentorage
I've always been a tad spiritually greedy, even going back to childhood days of pretending to offer Mass for my siblings and goldfish. Sunday just wasn't enough for me. But I also remember being greedy enough for mentoring that I found secularist equivalents. (The parish priest, as it turned out, was abusing young boys so I'm glad I didn't turn to him.) Between Thoreau, Gordon, Sarton and Abbey, a lot of my early heroes were atheists or deists. What was I finding in them I didn't find in saintly mentors? Probably they tickled my ears with the music I wanted to hear.
I think it was telling now that my Confirmation name was "William", chosen after my grandfather. Of course this was 1976, I think right after the television show Roots came out, and so I was (not unlike today) into family history and tradition and liked having one of my names be from someone in my line. In retrospect that seems too "culturally Catholic," a wasted opportunity in the sense of wishing I'd formed a close relationship with a saint such that I could take their name. I like the idea of hoping to attract a saint's attention by choosing their name! But that is to ignore what I already have and treasure, including St. Thomas More whose feast day coincides with my birthday. Greedy me! Greedy I suppose, like with the original sin of Adam and Eve who wanted the assurance of care and knowledge.
I think it was telling now that my Confirmation name was "William", chosen after my grandfather. Of course this was 1976, I think right after the television show Roots came out, and so I was (not unlike today) into family history and tradition and liked having one of my names be from someone in my line. In retrospect that seems too "culturally Catholic," a wasted opportunity in the sense of wishing I'd formed a close relationship with a saint such that I could take their name. I like the idea of hoping to attract a saint's attention by choosing their name! But that is to ignore what I already have and treasure, including St. Thomas More whose feast day coincides with my birthday. Greedy me! Greedy I suppose, like with the original sin of Adam and Eve who wanted the assurance of care and knowledge.
April 20, 2010
Could You Read This Post.
Received an email forwarded from Sarah (not her real name) forwarded from one of our bigger bosses -- in terms of authority rather than girth -- which said:
And such is the way language and grammar evolve I suppose.
[And Bill White calls himself the lord of summa minutiae!]
Sarah,A question without a question mark, but then that bit of punctuation would seem too tentative for someone in leadership while apparently a "Please distribute" is too demanding-sounding.
Could you distribute.
And such is the way language and grammar evolve I suppose.
[And Bill White calls himself the lord of summa minutiae!]
Spanning the Globe to Bring You the Constant
Variety of Posts
I know parents and families whose days and weeks are filled with activities, from the end of the school day to nightfall, and all weekend. Some of them love it and flourish, and others confess such relief when a game or practice is cancelled. All I know is that my son loves karate and wants to be a black belt someday. But on the days he has nothing after school, which is 3 out of the 5 school days in a week, he is ecstatic. He’s home by 3:30, and he can just…play. He and his brother may squabble. The little boy across the street may get on his nerves some times. The two children down the street, who are younger than he is, may not be his ideal companions. But he can play. And as he plays, as he imagines, as he is free from rules and schedules, and as he can create his very own world…he is so happy...I am pretty convinced that the current activity-centered culture which demands so much of families exists only because people don’t have many children. - Amy WelbornHere’s a post over at the Long Now Foundation on the ever-interesting topic, “How to Restart Civilization From Scratch.” One thing they haven’t mentioned is the “doomsday book” that has already preserved and restarted civilization from scratch more than once in the past: the Catholic church. - Bill of Summa Minutiae
The difference between Intelligent Design Christians and Evolutionist Christians is the difference between people who think that God's causal agency is of the same sort that occurs within creation, and people who think that God's being radically transcends creation, and so can't be "fit" into it--in the way that ID arguments make it look like God fills in the gaps of an otherwise coherent naturalist process. I believe this all gets back to the question of whether Being may be univocally predicated of God and creatures. Thomas says no, some later Scholastics say yes. The problem is, once you have a conception of God according to which he is just one more entity in your ontology, then you start to have to explain how his agency works with the agency of other things in your ontology. And hence it starts to look as if God becomes more and more excluded, the more and more we can explain naturalistically. Classical theism, which holds that God's being is *not* univocal with creaturely being, does not have this problem... I guess what I'm trying to point out in the above comment is that believing that "intelligence agency" lies behind the created world does *not* in any way commit one to ID's account of that agency. - Commenter on Zippy Catholic
My husband and I did the Safety Dance at the wedding last weekend. People gathered around to watch, so we put ourselves into it, and the next morning, we were both plagued with doubt. “I’m just worried that I didn’t look as good as I thought I did doing the Safety Dance,” my husband said. It was a legitimate concern...I'm writing in long sentences, stream-of-consciousness because I'm reading Faulkner right now, and as Mrs. Darwin said in a comment stream here, "What he (Faulkner) does not repeat much is the period," and nothing is more alarming than a period that goes MIA, as evidenced by the fifty dollars worth of pregnancy tests I took this month trying to figure out where mine went--which is no where, that is, until without rhyme or reason, it decided to return, and now I want my money back. - Betty Duffy
During the height of my ambition, perhaps around age 10, I thought I might write the Great American Novel. I wasn't really clear what exactly the Great American Novel was, but I was sure it involved summer camp, and I spent a great deal of time hashing out the details of my character's names and personal appearance and the number of brothers and sisters they had -- all crucial details in such literary serials such as The Baby Sitters Club which the girls in sixth grade passed around during study hall. These were the sort of seminal works in which you learned all you needed to know about the characters by description of their personal appearance: such girl had frizzy reddish hair and braces and wore a turquoise turtleneck! This one had her ears double-pierced and wore big sweaters and leggings! 'Nuff said.... My enthusiasm to write the Great American novel waned along with my fondness for the nifty names with which I endowed my juvenile characters (but none of my actual children), and I try to avoid the kinds of novels in which the height of characterization is to describe the clothes the characters wear ("her Prada handbag brushed against her toned thigh as she strode down the hall, her Manolos clicking on the parquet floor with each step..."). Still, I miss the idealism of the days in which a vast literary potential could be unlocked if only I had the proper writing instrument and a fresh blank notebook. Then, time was on my side. - Mrs. Darwin of "Darwin Catholic"
On the topic of individual versus collective in earlier, it strikes me that one of the important things to understand here is that the groups within which we live out our lives (families ties, church ties, associative ties, etc.) may not be capable of committing sins as a group, but that the necessary reparation for sin does often carry through a group. This is because sin is not merely the violation of a legal code, but is destructive to the relationships that bind us together into communities...Imagine a situation in which it becomes known that the father of a family abused one of the children over a period of years. This is clearly a sin of the father .. bBut the relationship between the mother and the abused child, and the other siblings and the abused child will have been changed by the father's sin. They can't just ignore the fact that the sin occurred, and indeed they will need to make special efforts to heal their relationships with the abused member of the family... In our family of the Church, we now face a similar situation. Few of us shared any knowledge or culpability in the abuse which a small percentage of priests perpetrated, and yet our relationships with those abused, with each other, and with our priests have been changed by the fact that this abuse occurred within our family. That is why healing will require work towards reparation on the part of all Catholics (in different ways depending on our places within the Church) even though most of us hold no personal culpability in the sins themselves. - Darwin Catholic
In a two-country race to kill as many foreign babies as possible: " The head of the World Health Organization signaled Wednesday the United States -- not Canada -- was on the right track over the question of supporting access to abortion services amid an international bid to improve child and maternal health. Dr. Margaret Chan ... added: "I am very pleased to see the change in President Obama -- this is really wonderful; sometimes ... it is not easy for outside people to tell them what to do."... Let me make note of the fact that the World Health Organization is the kind of organization that has a director general who considers killing babies "really wonderful." - Tom of Disputations
In Roe v. Wade, the keen-eyed Justice Harry Blackmun secured the right to procure and commit abortion by discerning a sacred and inviolable right to privacy hidden among the penumbral emanations of the Constitution. Obamacare will force Americans to buy health insurance, which involves disclosing private medical history to an insurance company. Not that the Constitution means anything anymore, but wouldn't it be sweet irony if Roe v. Wade made Obamacare unconstitutional on privacy grounds? - Bill of "Summa Minutiae"
Often poetry is taught in school as though each poem were some sort of rebus or puzzle that needs to be deconstructed, analyzed, and reconstructed to the specifications of whatever the present school of criticism is teaching about poetry. Most people approach a poem as though it were some sort of exotic and potential deadly animal ready to unleash its fury at the slightest provocation. I think we have Eliot and Pound to blame for that--purposeful obscurity and the creation of the rebus/puzzle poem. But most poetry before the twentieth century, and a good deal during and after is not at all like that. A poem is an invitation to take a break, to share a moment with the poet, to see as he or she does. In that seeing you'll sometimes get a message, but if you don't, it is the seeing that is the thing after all. - Steven at "Momentary Bliss"
April 19, 2010
This and That
The readings from Revelations this time of year are both daunting and humbling in that they, in true Holy Spirit fashion, both "cause our soul to fear and our fears relieve." Matthew Henry writes that fear of the Lord is the Christian's best friend in that it helps keep us from stumbling.
From today's Office of Readings:
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Caught a bit of a YouTube interview with Fr. Richard Neuhaus, and he explained how love after 40 years of marriage is different from married love early in a marriage. In the beginning there is still anxiety and "what ifs" while at the end there's more a sense of thankfulness and appreciation. He said that couples come to the conclusion that the love of God can be trusted - a money quote if ever I heard one: "...the discovery that love, which is ultimately the love of God, can be trusted - and that's the discovery they've made..."
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Read the verse in Acts how the apostles after being flogged "rejoiced that they had been found worthy to suffer dishonor for the sake of the name." That mindset never fails to startle me and is profoundly humbling. But I can tell that I have hope by the fact that I have breath within me. "Tomorrow is another day," is a famous line from "Gone With the Wind" but today is another day too, this very moment another "day".
The other moment of Lichtenstein was a small revelation of the mercy of God spoken by the priest in the Communion Antiphon: "...and He rose again to make us worthy of life." I've tended to think of Christ's resurrection solely as proof of the Father's approbation, but it as, like Christ's death, also for us.
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Julian of Norwich quote:
From today's Office of Readings:
In the unity of the person of the Word, his human nature was the instrument of our salvation. Thus in Christ there has come to be the perfect atonement that reconciles us with God, and we have been given the power to offer the fullness of divine worship.So it's also because Christ is exalted that, paradoxically, we are given power to offer the fullness of divine worship, that we are counted as worthy, that we are sons of God.
Caught a bit of a YouTube interview with Fr. Richard Neuhaus, and he explained how love after 40 years of marriage is different from married love early in a marriage. In the beginning there is still anxiety and "what ifs" while at the end there's more a sense of thankfulness and appreciation. He said that couples come to the conclusion that the love of God can be trusted - a money quote if ever I heard one: "...the discovery that love, which is ultimately the love of God, can be trusted - and that's the discovery they've made..."
Read the verse in Acts how the apostles after being flogged "rejoiced that they had been found worthy to suffer dishonor for the sake of the name." That mindset never fails to startle me and is profoundly humbling. But I can tell that I have hope by the fact that I have breath within me. "Tomorrow is another day," is a famous line from "Gone With the Wind" but today is another day too, this very moment another "day".
The other moment of Lichtenstein was a small revelation of the mercy of God spoken by the priest in the Communion Antiphon: "...and He rose again to make us worthy of life." I've tended to think of Christ's resurrection solely as proof of the Father's approbation, but it as, like Christ's death, also for us.
Julian of Norwich quote:
God showed two manners of sickness that we have; the one is impatience or sloth, for we bear our travail and our pains heavily. The other is despair or doubtful dread...And these two are they that most travail and trouble us, as by that which Our Lord shewed me...It is God's will that they be known, for then we shall refuse them as we do other sins.
And for help against this, full meekly Our Lord showed the patience that he had in his hard Passion; and also the joy and the liking that he hat of that Passion, for love. And this he shewed in example, that we should gladly and easily bear our pains, for that is great pleasing to him and endless profit to us. And the cause why we are travailed with them is for unknowing of love.
For some of us believe that God is All Mighty, and may do all, and that he is All-Wisdom, and can do all; but that he is All-Love and will do all, there we fail. And this unknowing it is, that most [hinders] God's lovers, as to my sight.
April 15, 2010
An Outsider's View of Benedict
It's interesting to see my decades-long lapsed Catholic father-in-law's evolution on Pope Benedict. He didn't much care for this pope until he (the Pope) came to America. When my father-in-law saw and heard him, it completely changed his opinion of the pontiff, saying how kind and gentle and holy the man seemed. Interesting the power of television in forming opinions.
Kindle v. iPad & Future of Reading
Provocative article about the future of reading in the e-reader age:
Even for those who love books enough to persevere with reading without e-ink will soon face another problem with the awesomeness of the iPad. The device does so many different things so well that there’s a constant urge when you’re using one to do something else. Two or three pages into a book, you’re already wondering whether you’ve got new mail, or whether anyone has atted you on Twitter. One of the joys of reading is to be able to shut yourself away from distractions and lose yourself in a book. When the book itself is packed with distractions, the whole experience is compromised.
April 14, 2010
April 13, 2010
Spanning the Globe to Bring You the Constant Variety of Posts
In addition to the novena, I've spent some time each day reading from St. Faustina's Diary in which the visionary wrote about her visits from the Lord, as well as her own thoughts, reflections and experiences. In it one encounters Jesus in a unique way as He opens His merciful heart for this young saint and for us, patiently explaining the depth of His mercy and how our God expects us, as Christians, to respond. I could probably spend pages and pages writing about some of these messages from our Lord, but one in particular struck a significant chord today: “You are to show mercy to your neighbors always and everywhere. You must not shrink from this or try to absolve yourself from it" [Diary, 742]. - Deacon D. at "Being is Good"
I learned the Chaplet of Divine Mercy from the Sisters of Life back in 2004, and few days have passed since then that I haven't said it. It has been a good fit for me as a devotion: it's short, it goes by quickly, and it hammers home relentlessly the point that God's mercy trumps his righteous justice, which is, I suppose, why some Traddies shun it. After all, it's human nature to insist that those pathetic stragglers who showed up on the job at the eleventh hour not be paid a full day's wages. It's human nature to reel in horror when you see your father having a huge party for your wastrel brother who spent down his fortune on booze and whores. But if God were only a God of justice, we would fear Him, but we would not love Him. And God wants our love, and wants it freely given. And who could not love so good a God as He, who looks at us, as He revealed to Saint Faustina, through the wounds of His Son, with compassion for our fallenness, our brokenness, our sin? - Blogger at Pentimento
Part of the problem of growing up in a well-read family is that we all knew that some books were better than others...None of my reading counted. Meanwhile, in our living-room, my older sister had curled her body into a pretzel and was squinting her eyes into the minuscule print of Gone With the Wind which she finished in all of two weeks. Her concentration was unbreakable. I was invisible to her, though I crawled up behind the wing-back chair in which she sat and put my finger in her ear, or whispered words like “suburban” and “couperf” and “satchel” because I knew she hated those words. Her friends would ride their bikes over to play, find her reading, and have to be satisfied with my company. And I would be playing Barbies, no doubt, making the dolls do naughty things, and then saying, “It’s ok, they’re married,” even though in my head, they were not. - Betty Duffy
Every day, I can wake up and have the newspaper already sitting on my desk in the form of a piece of “paper” that changes on a daily basis or whenever I happen to need it for something. I carry around the better part of a library in my pocket, and when I find I’m lacking something it’s the matter of a few moments while it is beamed to me from far off locales to prevent me the inconvenience of getting up and driving to the store. In moments of curiosity, this wonderful device [the Kindle] can get me answers to most any question by accessing one of the largest knowledge bases in existence from nearly anywhere in the world at no charge with no questions asked. It’s so mundane right now, too. That’s quite possibly the most surreal point of all. We have devices like the Kindle and nook and a dozen others to choose from, the main difference between them often being aesthetics and level of convenience, and nobody even realizes what they mean! - blogger at a Kindle blog
How discuss verity with cynics, cynicism being a plant with no fruit or interesting seed? - - Marianne Moore via Dylan of "dark harp"
Most Republicans spent the first two-thirds of 2009 underestimating how big a problem pro-life resistance would be for the Democrats. If they had run ad campaigns based on the issue in the districts of pro-life Democrats, it would have made it harder for those Democrats to back the bill in the end. Those Democrats could well have been the decisive holdouts. Here, again, Republicans were on the popular side of an issue — even many supporters of legal abortion don’t want government funding — but failed to press their advantage. - Ramesh Ponnuru of "National Review"
This morning's paper mentioned in passing that today is James Joyce's birthday.. I remember was a quote from a friend of his who recalled that he, Joyce, loved to drink and loved to dance: "Ah, the drink went straight to his feet." I never read Ulysses..but did have a go at Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man... And I am grateful to it for two things. The first is one of the great hell-fire and brimstone sermons in print. Short, but a powerful piece of work and worthy of the Jesuits of the turn of the last century. The second is a permanent love for the Little Office of Our Lady. It's not dwelt on in the book but the mention of it in the "Portrait" fascinated me. I got a copy immediately. (They were still available in those days, but disappearing fast.) I have a small collection now of various versions. - John at "The Inn at the End of the World"
The word of the Lord has not come to me, as far as I know. But I don't think it requires any new divine revelation to see that an alliance with the world against the Pope will not end well for the Church. - Tom of Disputations
April 10, 2010
April 09, 2010
My Favorite iPod Touch Apps....
I've so far successfully stiff-armed the impulse to buy an iPad and though I can't rule that out I do appreciate my iPod. My favorite apps? Glad you asked.
1) iBreviary - it has the Daily Office as well as the Mass readings.
2) Olive Tree Bible Reader - while the Jerusalem translation isn't available, it's pretty fantastic how they integrated the app so that while you're reading a given Bible passage you can see the New English Translation notes, or read the Matthew Henry commentary. I have three translations available: Douay-Rheims (free), the NRSV ($14) and the NET (free).
3) Rate Beer - the name pretty much says it all. Beer Universe is good too.
4) Score Mobile - I can not only check the scores of professional and collegiate games but also the individual statistics of the players involved. Pretty schweet app. Baseball Statistics 2009 contains lifetime statistics of every major league baseball player.
5) Twitterific - very attractive interface for Twitter. Sometimes even makes my tweets look good.
6) Fluent News - a fine news aggregator; Start Up! is also good.
7) Instapaper - allows you to read anything on the web on the iPod/iPhone in a decent font.
8) Audio Books - can listen to public domain books for free! Been lately enjoying Albert Payson Terhune's "His Dog".
1) iBreviary - it has the Daily Office as well as the Mass readings. 2) Olive Tree Bible Reader - while the Jerusalem translation isn't available, it's pretty fantastic how they integrated the app so that while you're reading a given Bible passage you can see the New English Translation notes, or read the Matthew Henry commentary. I have three translations available: Douay-Rheims (free), the NRSV ($14) and the NET (free).
3) Rate Beer - the name pretty much says it all. Beer Universe is good too.
4) Score Mobile - I can not only check the scores of professional and collegiate games but also the individual statistics of the players involved. Pretty schweet app. Baseball Statistics 2009 contains lifetime statistics of every major league baseball player.
5) Twitterific - very attractive interface for Twitter. Sometimes even makes my tweets look good.
6) Fluent News - a fine news aggregator; Start Up! is also good.
7) Instapaper - allows you to read anything on the web on the iPod/iPhone in a decent font.
8) Audio Books - can listen to public domain books for free! Been lately enjoying Albert Payson Terhune's "His Dog".
Live from Friday, it's Columbus Night!
I've been lately interested in what we put in our bodies and how they came to be discovered and how previous generations and cultures dealt with the good and bad of things like alcohol and sugar and coffee.
Ancient history isn't a keen interest of mine, but I'd like to know who invented beer and give them a shout/props. Also like to read "Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History." It examines how refined cane sugar went from no part of our diet to an almost a third within a short space of time. Finally I'd like to read about the development of coffee in A History of the World in Six Glasses.
* * *
Been reading random snippets of Joyce; the good thing about Ulysses is it doesn't have to be read in any particular order since it's equally opaque whether read forward or backward. But the sentences are a stream of precious trout.
* * *
Growing up watching television shows like Little House on the Prairie and The Waltons led me to believe that neighbors were present only in cases of emergency, like to help rebuild your barn if it burns down. In real life I learned it was more the opposite - they are omnipresent in times of non-emergency and scarce when you could really use them. I jest! Though I am blessed/cursed with very visible neighbors. 'Tain't no Betty Duffy-type acreage at our house.
* * *
A four-day work week it 'twas but it felt longer as is paradoxically typical in the case of 4-day weeks. A single day off, as opposed to a week off, just makes me lazy. Did mow down a few sniping errands, like doing the city taxes and paying the bills and cutting the grass. Sometimes mowing down errands is literal.
So what else? Confession with the good Dominican priest. He came to the parish so inspired and fresh and full of inspiration that I try to stiff-arm cynical thoughts that he'll burn out on the parish. These folks are high maintenance what with the omnipresent Confession lines (Lord, St. Pat's must be the sinning-est church since Corinth) plus many tend to bog down in the typical traditionalist minutiae, like scruples over mantilla-wearing and the proper fulfillment of the Fatima revelations. I confessed the lameness of my motivations given that even now, this Confession, was prompted by the promises of Mercy Sunday. He called my confession a good diagnosis and said that all of our motives are mixed and even if only 5% is for God then we're on the right side.
Ancient history isn't a keen interest of mine, but I'd like to know who invented beer and give them a shout/props. Also like to read "Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History." It examines how refined cane sugar went from no part of our diet to an almost a third within a short space of time. Finally I'd like to read about the development of coffee in A History of the World in Six Glasses.
Been reading random snippets of Joyce; the good thing about Ulysses is it doesn't have to be read in any particular order since it's equally opaque whether read forward or backward. But the sentences are a stream of precious trout.
Growing up watching television shows like Little House on the Prairie and The Waltons led me to believe that neighbors were present only in cases of emergency, like to help rebuild your barn if it burns down. In real life I learned it was more the opposite - they are omnipresent in times of non-emergency and scarce when you could really use them. I jest! Though I am blessed/cursed with very visible neighbors. 'Tain't no Betty Duffy-type acreage at our house.
A four-day work week it 'twas but it felt longer as is paradoxically typical in the case of 4-day weeks. A single day off, as opposed to a week off, just makes me lazy. Did mow down a few sniping errands, like doing the city taxes and paying the bills and cutting the grass. Sometimes mowing down errands is literal.
So what else? Confession with the good Dominican priest. He came to the parish so inspired and fresh and full of inspiration that I try to stiff-arm cynical thoughts that he'll burn out on the parish. These folks are high maintenance what with the omnipresent Confession lines (Lord, St. Pat's must be the sinning-est church since Corinth) plus many tend to bog down in the typical traditionalist minutiae, like scruples over mantilla-wearing and the proper fulfillment of the Fatima revelations. I confessed the lameness of my motivations given that even now, this Confession, was prompted by the promises of Mercy Sunday. He called my confession a good diagnosis and said that all of our motives are mixed and even if only 5% is for God then we're on the right side.
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