How Not to Give Money Back to Gov't

(A Note to Self)

You get an inexplicable direct deposit from the US Treasury. What to do?

Don't try to call the agency responsible since they'll just say, "Did you talk to your bank?" (which you already did, which pointed the finger at the government agency).

They'll say that it sounds like an error was made. You'll think silently, "ya think?"

They'll recommend the time-honored method of error-correction: procrastinate and see if it'll go away on its own.

And don't spend the money in the meantime.

How to Extract Wife's Ring Size Info

(A Note to Self)

First, find proximate cause for inquiry, but mask it with leading questions.

Example: "Has the weight loss affected your ring size?" doesn't work because it's too specific.

A better method is more roundabout, requiring the patience of Job:

"Are you really still able to wear the same clothes after the weight loss?"

If yes then say, "does the wedding ring still fit?"

If yes then say, "that's good. I don't want no excuses for not wearing it!"

Then add, "Your shoe size is so small. Hey, speaking of rings, I bet you wear a small ring size."

A Strategy That Might Work

One political strategy that might work, with me at least, is for a politician to say and do absolutely nothing. At least then their favorability numbers wouldn't look like this graph:

Who Could Tire of Conversion Stories?

From Jennifer Pierce

When I decided to try on atheism, as a philosophy major at a secular college, it may have been sleep deprived induced lunacy. I had spent the whole night reading William Styron’s “Sophie’s Choice,” after having read Elie Wiesel’s “Night” the night before that, both about WWII concentration camps. I realized that Wiesel and Styron’s fictional Sophie were Jewish and Christian respectively and suddenly became aware of a world full of God’s faithful, who endure the unthinkable, all the time praying for a mercy that never comes. What does prayer mean, then, if it is answered with such a monstrous silence?

If there was a God who could abandon me, and a devil who could so easily get hold of me, despite earnest prayers for deliverance, non-belief seemed safer. Randomness was math and seemed to have the better odds. No judgment. No abandonment. If I lost the odds game and suffered, at least I wouldn’t also feel the secondary pain of being abandoned by God. It would be, then, just very, very bad luck. That seemed a lot more acceptable to me.

Despite the realization that belief doesn’t save you from suffering, however, I gradually realized that atheism was intellectually and emotionally untenable. For one thing, it’s untenable logically: “I believe there is no God” is a creed. It is kind of like saying I have no tolerance for intolerance. If we reject moral anarchy, why did any emergent, secular moral law seem to be uncannily based on the Ten Commandments? The hound of heaven still pursued my thoughts; nothing but God would make sense.

I am stubborn, though. I floated my way through non-exclusionary, Unitarian and New Age inspired beliefs. Eventually — I have a suspicion my mother’s prayers may have had a hand! — I became attracted to attending the Latin Mass at Yale University. I enjoyed it as an exotic form of charming human ritual with nostalgic value from my childhood — just as I also enjoyed going to synagogue and attending a pentecostal service. I saw them as all equivalent. I still felt relatively free to stitch together a patchwork quilt of belief based on what “felt right” and what seemed to be in agreement with and least offensive to most human beings.

That’s when I picked up a book called “Orthodoxy” by G.K. Chesterton. It read like it had been written as a letter to me in my restless “belief,” a belief I place in scare quotes because it had the odd character of seeming a lot like non-belief and the convenience of suiting whatever I felt like doing. There was one sentence that lives in my memory. I can see it on the page as if I’m reading it, any time I recall it: “I did try to found a heresy of my own; and when I had put the last touches to it, I discovered that it was orthodoxy.” That was it. My twitch.

Parody blog updated...

...with a newstory about "Obama Math" being taught in our schools and with Mitt Romney's curious defense of Romneycare.

On Patriotism

Jonah Goldberg of NRO opines, sounding a bit like Chesterton on this issue:

If I said, "There's really nothing special about my wife," you might think not only that I'm a cad, but that I don't particularly like my wife. If my wife said, "My daughter's fine, but she's really no better than any other kid," you might think she's lacking in the maternal-love department.

Now before I continue, let me say clearly and on the record that these are hypotheticals. My wife is very special. Indeed, this is an understatement of equal magnitude to "Breathing is popular" or "Jeffrey Dahmer would make a poor high-school guidance counselor." And though we might eschew a bumper sticker saying so, we both think our kid is better than your kid. But I don't want to clutter this space with too much romantic or paternal treacle.

This illustrates a truth about how love works. At some basic level, if you love something, you must find it preferable to something else, perhaps everything else. Your reasons can be subjective, or indeed impossible to identify. I put it to you that men who marry women solely because they meet a checklist (Blond hair: Check! Green Bay Packers fan: Check!) aren't really in love. They may grow to love their spouse, but that happens only when they come to appreciate what makes her different from a mere manifestation of categorical bullet points.

I bring this up because I continue to be amazed by the bizarre obsession liberal intellectuals have with "American exceptionalism."

Novel Read

Homered to straight-away center in finding another wonderful lyrical novel to read: The Tragedy of Arthur by Arthur Philips.

Some of the other books strongly considered include but don't preclude: Dream of Ding Village by Yan Lianke, I Could Love You by William Nicholson, Old Town by Lin Zhe, The Phantom Tollbooth by Juster and Feiffer, Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl, and The Dream Life of Sukhanov by Olga Grushin.

I've found with fiction much research is required. Having decided to finish novels I start*, I'm much more serious about the selection process.

Snippets from the latest Arthur Philips novel:

Fact is, most people like the brand name, and the brand name helps them enjoy the product and opens them to trust other products. So being the big Dutch queen who prances around snatching off the brands—even if he’s right, which there’s no saying he is, although I do know the truth in one case, and he is right—that stops a lot of people from learning what they like. They don’t want to say they like it, because they’re afraid the Dutch guy’s going to call them a fool for liking the wrong thing.”


* * *

"I loved him without reservation until the age when reservations were required."

* * *

“In those days, you walked outside your house, or twenty minutes outside of London, and you were in an endless forest, as magical and terrifying as you can imagine. Wonders were in the grass, mysteries. Something invisible was trying to communicate with you, frighten you, charm you, maybe steal from you, or help you, lead you to riches or just laugh at you. Now, boring, boring, we know there aren’t grotesque fairies out there. We cut down those forests to prove it. We know what causes twenty varieties of discolorations of the turf. We have so many facts, and with them we can cut down anything.”

He returned to his theme as I tore into a tenderloin of pork covered in apples and cream: the world’s vanishing faith in wonder, in relation to the vanishing natural world, and in inverse proportion to its growing store of dubiously valuable scientific knowledge.

“Fairies have to travel farther to reach us nowadays,”...“All our skill at disproving things is like a wall we build between us and wonder. To jump that wall, you need a long running start.”

* - unless seriously dreadful, as The Imperfectionists was.

News....Earth-shattering and Otherwise

So, found out that a co-worker made a major national news outlet - including picture - for his warning folks about the upcoming end of the world on 5/21. It's just wild seeing someone from work get his fifteen minutes of fame.

What I don't get is how a mathematical model can be derived using the date of the Flood when no one knows exactly when the Flood occurred. Faith and reason -- it takes two wings to fly and one wing just makes the MSM love you, either because reason alone makes you reasonable in their eyes, or faith alone makes you a tempting target of ridicule.

* * *
In other news, I don't know who's more naive. Me for trusting something found on TMZ, or dear Maria Shriver, for thinking a Hollywood movie star/playboy/atheist like Arnold would be a good risk, marriage-wise. I suppose that's too snarky for a Catholic blog but I'm just sayin'.

This & That...

Liked this Heather King picture from her blog:



* * *

Stephen Moore on the rank hypocrisy of the pro-tax rich.

* * *

A site to donate for tornado relief for Alabama (diocese of Alabama).

Sunday Thoughts

A royal warmth exudeth, the likes of which rarely seen in these parts. It’s 70 degrees, full sun and no wind and it feels hot out, enough to find me scurrying around looking for the backporch sunbrella. It’s MIA, so I drink beer quickly so that it won’t get too warm too fast.

There’s a huge offensive line of clouds overhead but the sun is in the far western sky now and has avoided them all, like a successful broken-field runner. It seems odd to have so many clouds in the sky with such long-lasting full sunshine.

The hammock lay a short distance away, with those exotic white lines (rope strings) all converging on the ring that hooks to the pole. It conjures up half-remembered scenes of British colonial India, as well as the O’Connor title: “Everything That Rises Must Converge”. The stunning white ropelets sing against the light green foliage of the burning bushes. I feel a great sense of well-being in this maiden sun overlooking the sublime, reclined hammock. I have a hunger to read something Asian, such as “Old Town’ by Chi Tsu Tong (made up name since I can’t recall the author’s). It’s funny how it doesn’t take the Grand Canyon to satisfy my lust for the natural, but just a tiny corner of solitude flanked by all manner of green living things. It reminds me of that childhood space, under the stairs with a book and a candle. Needing only a book, a 25-cent candle and I was set for who knows how long. I stored books under there like semi-buried treasures.

I throw caution to the winds, my belly to the wolves, by drinking another beer. A day like today, after the long parade of Soviet-issued grey days, deserves a bit of celebration. The week impends also, a sobering deluge of routine and requests and so I drink now under the tree-spackled sun and pretend the workweek is done.

* * *

Brother-in-law Bud is the most likable guy on the planet. Really. I can’t help but think the hard worker in him is part of what makes him so likable. A hard-worker is humble, and the humble are likable. Now of course there is the nakedly ambitious worker who isn’t humble, but I’m thinking of one good at his job not for the reasons of advancement or credit. Sort of like the Christian who isn’t in it for Heaven, but for He who lives in Heaven.

* * *

My lust for object de technologie still rears its head, ugly or otherwise. What I’m really looking for is a word processor I can use in the sun (they call this pencil and paper in the olden times) but now I find I’m hungry for an expensive alternative. I’m guessing it has to be a 9 inch tablet with e-ink, something that doesn’t exist yet. Amazon is said to be working on a 6-inch tablet that can be used in the sun but I think that’s going to be too small a keyboard. I am to gadgets what Bud is to movies and camping.

Your Daily Weather Report

Downright cold today. “March, what have you done with fair May?” Locked her up in a closet somewhere south of here apparently. My slogan about never having to wear a coat in May seemed somewhat tested by the 53 degrees plus wind. And the rain? Omni-present in a way heretofore scarcely imagined. It’s rained so much and so long that now we’re seeing the grand-raindrops and great-grandraindrops of earlier rains.Not since the days of Noah has the phrase, “Not since the days of Noah” been so oft used. Suburbanites have been racing to cut the grass in the ten minute increments of non-rain. The sky has been so full of stationary clouds that a screensaver has been activated to prevent sky phosphor burn-in.

So the “two-month rule” has certainly applied. This is the general rule that on any given day the temperature is not likely to deviate more than the characteristic weather two months prior to two months later. What’s weird here is the consecutive day streak in which the weather is more characteristic of March or early April.

* * *

Immensely enjoyed the morning half-hour read, this time the beginning of a biography of Chesterton by William Oddie. Few things give me as much pleasure as reading something compelling in the utter silence and comfort of the bookroom light. For one thing, there’s the scarcity principle: I have a limited number of minutes which therefore makes them precious. Then too I love learning something interesting, and it’s very interesting to me that his “Wild Knight” poetry collection was thought by some to be “too dark” such that one reviewer said he needed to read Walt Whitman and let his lightness lift him. And he eventually did.

* * *

Been considering the great issues of our time - such as how many tickets to purchase in a “Win an iPad!” contest at work. The great piece of missing data is how many people have bought tickets but it seems likely that at least thirty people have purchased an average of 2 tickets each. That’s 60 tickets outstanding. How many tickets do I need to buy to give myself a decent chance to win, while not paying more than 50% of the actual cost of an iPad? I think it’d be cool to have a 40% chance (that’s better than you get in some Vegas games). That would mean 40 tickets (then I’d hold 40 of 100 outstanding). It’s 3 for $10, so that means $130-ish. Too pricey but relative to the price of an iPad not terrible. But 40% is no guarantee at all.

* * * *

Some pragrant (prayer + fragrant) insights yesterday. In the gospel Philip says, "Master, show us the Father, and that will be enough for us." How similar to the lament, "Jesus, show me yourself, and that will be enough for me." But Jesus refused to show Philip the Father, saying that "if you've seen me, you've seen the Father." And likewise if we've seen the saints, the poor, the wretched, we've seen something of Christ.

Then a line from Morning Prayer goes, "So I gaze on you in the sanctuary / to see your strength and your glory." And I thought the strength was well-represented by the crucifix in every sanctuary, by his dying for us and having the courage and strength to endure it. And I thought his glory represented by the Eucharist in every tabernacle, which is not his human body but the Resurrected body.

Okay, Okay...

Okay POTUS, you've proven your military bona fides. Now can we declare victory and get the hell out of Afghanistan?

Beautiful Pics...

...of the recent beatification...

Groeschel's Latest

Been reading Fr. Benedict Groeschel's I Am With You Always*, a frank study of devotion to Christ in Protestant, Catholic and Orthodox circles that turns out to be devotional in its own right. In the chapter on the particulars of Russian spirituality there is St. Tikhon:

St. Tikhon spent endless hours with the poor...but he was not unrealistic. He counseled against giving money to drunks. He spoke in defense of women, who were much abused in Russia at that time, and he did the same for the serfs. He confronted the rich in the name of Christ.

St. Tikhon often focused on the Passion of Christ, and Bouyer says that he had representations of Christ's sufferings in his cell, something almost unique in the history of Orthodoxy. He advises others to do the same. 'Keep in your house a picture of the passion of Christ, look at it ofen and with reverence: it will be to your a substitute for continual reading and visible history.'

No adequate Christian spirituality ends with the Passion, and for St. Tikhon, Christ's Passion always points to the Resurrection. Tikhon urged the Christian to look forward with great hope to what awaiits him...St. Tikhon, so human and so profoundly spiritual, so genuinely Orthhodox and yet open to the spirituality of Western Christianity, offers us a marvelous bridge.

* - Disclosure: Did not receive this as a review copy. I've only gotten two review copies in all my bloggin' days. (Sent whine off.)

Hitchens & Rushdie & O'Reilly

I've been imbibing too much news coverage which, of course, is all bin Laden, all the time, hence concerning this blog bin Laden in, bin Laden out. The surprising thing, to me at least, was that he was found in a compound with 12-foot walls. Seems like that might stick out on satellite photos like Prince Fielder at the royal wedding.

Christopher Hitchens, who no doubt feels glad that he lived to see Osama killed, writes of our "ally":

If you tell me that you are staying in a rather nice walled compound in Abbottabad, I can tell you in return that you are the honored guest of a military establishment that annually consumes several billion dollars of American aid. It's the sheer blatancy of it that catches the breath.

There's perhaps some slight satisfaction to be gained from this smoking-gun proof of official Pakistani complicity with al-Qaida, but in general it only underlines the sense of anticlimax. After all, who did not know that the United States was lavishly feeding the same hands that fed Bin Laden? There's some minor triumph, also, in the confirmation that our old enemy was not a heroic guerrilla fighter but the pampered client of a corrupt and vicious oligarchy that runs a failed and rogue state.

If we were played for a fool there's the fact that we played them in crossing into their territory to get him. Salman Rushdie chimes in:

Many of us didn’t believe in the image of bin Laden as a wandering Old Man of the Mountains, living on plants and insects in an inhospitable cave somewhere on the porous Pakistan-Afghan border. An extremely big man, 6-foot 4-inches tall in a country where the average male height is around 5-foot 8, wandering around unnoticed for ten years while half the satellites above the earth were looking for him? It didn’t make sense. Bin Laden was born filthy rich and died in a rich man’s house, which he had painstakingly built to the highest specifications. The U.S. administration confesses it was “shocked” by the elaborate nature of the compound.

We had heard—I certainly had, from more than one Pakistani journalist—that Mullah Omar was (is) being protected in a safe house run by the powerful and feared Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) somewhere in the vicinity of the city of Quetta in Baluchistan, and it seemed likely that bin Laden, too, would acquire a home of his own.

In the aftermath of the raid on Abbottabad, the old flim-flam (“Who, us? We knew nothing!”) just isn’t going to wash.

Bill O'Reilly points out the Muslim problem:

Yet [bin Laden] still gets some sympathy in the Muslim world, and that's what I mean when I tell you there is a Muslim problem. A few countries like Saudi Arabia have applauded the U.S. action, but most Muslim countries are silent. If there was not a Muslim problem in the world, every responsible Muslim leader would have called to congratulate President Obama. Would they not? "Talking Points" would like to know exactly how many calls the president has received from Muslim leaders worldwide.

Indeed, there's an acid test for you. If you can't be pleased about removing the threat of bin Laden, then...?

Meanwhile libertarian Lew Rockwell has a snarky piece on Osama. He sounds too conspiratorial/cynical for my taste (did the moon-landing happen?) He's also a bit disingenuous in stating the whole operation was about getting Osama; we've also killed countless Al Quaeda operational types along the way and have mostly disabled them (hence the lack of attacks on US soil). I think if any war is justified, then the war on Al Quaeda and Osama is/was, but Afghanistan is a joke (there are only a couple dozen Al Qaeda there now) and Iraq a tragic boondoggle. On the making of enemies, history teaches that powerful countries make enemies just by being powerful. Envy is alive and well. Concerning bin Laden, unless pacifism is true, then justice seems a reasonably noble venture in its own right.