Baseball Cards I Have Known

Aye Columba!

Happy St. Columba Day!  Turns out I'm related to the 6th century saint. He's my uncle. No actually a genetic test revealed the likelihood that I (along with three million of my closest friends) am related to Irish king Niall of the Nine Hostages, and St. Columba was a great-great-grandson of Niall.

Instill Ye the Gift of Reason

When intellectuals or rich people go wrong, they go very wrong.  Lose all common sense.  So, let's say you have an extra $400 million burning a hole in your Lamborghini and want to donate it.  Help the poor?  Donate to world's richest university?  Tough call 'eh?

Malcolm Gladwell called out John Paulson on Twitter:

It came down to helping the poor or giving the world's richest university $400 mil it doesn't need. Wise choice John! 

Another example:  Let's say you remove Saddam Hussein and then look forward to Shias, Sunnis and Kurds singing Kumbaya.  Your average fourth grader would say, "Maybe they should be separated so they won't fight."

But the best and brightest in American foreign policy laughed at that, and laughed at Joe Biden when he suggested as much.  Ol' Joe may not be an intellectual, but he sure nailed it on "Iraq", a country not deserving of a label that makes it sound unified.

He was ahead of his time. "Biden got it dead right, and I still think transitioning to a federal power-sharing arrangement is the only way to stop the killing and hold Iraq together," says Leslie Gelb, former president of the Council on Foreign Relations, who wrote the op-ed with Biden.

Authenticity and the Heisenberg Effect

Jesus among the doctors

From Rabanus (Hrabanus) Maurus (say five times fast), an 8th century Fankish monk who wrote what seems as true today:

When the author says that he sought wisdom before his youth, before the opportune time to ask, he shows to have desired it prior to the errors of childhood and adolescence, and even before his youth, and to have asked insistently that God would give it to him, promising to seek it always. Adolescence and youth are fraught with dangers, because the actions of the exterior person dominate, as Solomon says in the book of Proverbs, confessing that he does not know “the way of a youth in his adolescence,” and the prophet asks the Lord, “Do not recall the sins of my youth and of my ignorance.”

For this reason philosophers, representing human life with the letter Y, assign the lefthand stroke to infancy and adolescence and the righthand stroke to the more mature age, when the intellect is more robust and rejects the earlier foolishness of the senses. In fact, this letter was first used by Pythagoras as an example of human life, in such a way that the bottom stroke, thinner than a comma, would indicate the uncertain condition of the earliest age, not yet given to either vice or virtue. The junction above it begins with adolescence, of which the right side is difficult but tends to a blessed life, and the left is easier but leads to perdition and death. On Ecclesiasticus 10.31.

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To search and find authenticity kills the very thing it seeks and finds. The authentic is a fragile flower, susceptible to exploitation and subject to observation alteration, aka the Heisenberg Principle.

This was true with country music when searchers for roots sounds ended up blowing the thing up with too much money.

And in the early '70s, commercialism killed the authenticity star with respect to rock music:

[Songs] like “Indian Reservation” appeared on first listen to be bucking the status quo but, by 1971, they were the status quo. The music industry had figured out that political integrity was a selling point for the rock audience, and the sense of purpose that had once accompanied protest music was gone. Things hadn’t always been so cynical. Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth (Stop, Hey What’s That Sound)” (1967), the Young-bloods’ “Get Together” (1969), and dozens of other protest songs had been integral to the peace movement at a time when bands still felt their music could provoke change. But the “statement” songs that opened the seventies often aimed to succeed within the system while merely creating the appearance of subversion.“ - Jeff Breithaupt

I think we see this in the gospel where Jesus said don't let your left hand know what the right is doing when it comes to giving alms.

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Fr. B. can be a little blah, but he shot and scored with his sermon yesterday.

First, he said that in the first reading not only did Tobit error when he accused his wife of having stolen a goat rather than having received it as a bonus, but his wife err'd too when she said, understandably, “Where are your good works and virtue now? Your true character has been revealed!”

I've always thought of that as truthful if hurtful but it's not even truthful because “we are not our sins” as Mark Shea often says.  I too often self-define and other-define by our weakness. And so her line about character being revealed was false, said Fr. B.

He also talked about the gospel today where Jesus famously asked whose image was on the coin and then said, “Give to Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's!” And Fr. B said (paraphrasing), “and if Caesar's image is on the coin, whose image is that of other people? God's image! We are made in his image and likeness. So we need to give God what is God's, namely each other, because when we serve each other we are serving God."

Found Comedy

A recent guest blogger on Catholic Bibles blog made the argument that the New American Bible Revised Edition is on the cusp of greatness. What struck me most was the end which was a humorously self-inflated self-blurb in which the author declared himself to be of high IQ and a precocious child fluent in multiple languages, apparently without irony!  So I appended to my comment this:

--- Commenter Tom is an award-winning blogger and slightly above average husband. Gifted with a high IQ, Tom began studying baseball statistics at a young age, successfully memorizing the complete roster of the '75 Cincinnati Reds.

I was pleased to see a couple commenters follow up on the meme, including this one:

Neil Short is no genious but he is the best husband he can be. He can read and write exactly one human language. In his youth he wasted a great deal of time memorizing PI to the 50th digit past the decimal point - when he could have been memorizing the Sermon on the Mount or the Book of Colossians.

and this one:

MAX was an award-winning pianist in a past life. Gifted with an IQ, he is fluent in one language, but can understand at least four more, because all Romance languages sound the same anyway. In his youth, he memorized many Beethoven sonatas, all sadly forgotten now.

Rand No More

Remember the good ol' days when the air was clean and only Damnocrats were evil?  Looks like Rand Paul just doesn't have the temperament to be president. From NRO's Jim Geraghty:

"On paper, I should be relatively easy pickings for Rand Paul. I’ve been not just critical of the NSA domestic-surveillance programs, but I came pretty close to frothing at the mouth... And I either agree or begrudgingly nod at a lot of what Paul says . . . and then he goes and says something like, “People here in town think I’m making a huge mistake. Some of them, I think, secretly want there to be an attack on the United States so they can blame it on me.”

...Paul can’t lead the Republican party when he’s accusing some members of the Republican party’s coalition of wanting to see terrorist attacks in order to prove a point.

A.J. Delgado is convinced Paul only meant John McCain and Lindsey Graham in that statement of “some” “people in town.” I don’t know how she can draw that conclusion with certainty, but even if she’s interpreting Paul’s statement correctly, that’s still a rotten thing to say. Let’s assume John McCain and Lindsey Graham are every bit the fair-weather RINOs conservatives fear they are; do you really think that as the Patriot Act expired, either of them was saying, “Come on, al-Qaeda! Let’s get moving, ISIS! I want to see bodies in the streets so I can finally prove Rand Paul wrong once and for all!”

If you do think that, you’re wrong.

Even if you think of McCain and Graham as the worst options the Republican party could possibly offer, a lot of Republicans disagree with you. These guys are deeply unpopular with conservative activists, but they’re not that unpopular with Republicans as a whole. Lindsey Graham won 56 percent in a 7-way primary in 2014. John McCain won 56 percent in a three-way primary in 2010. For better or worse, there are a lot of Republicans in states like South Carolina and Arizona who are just fine with these guys. Those aren’t blue or purple states.

Politics -- particularly presidential politics -- requires building coalitions. If Rand Paul wants to be the Republican nominee, he has to bring together his base -- those non-traditionally-GOP libertarians, the Silicon Valley crowd, the minority audiences intrigued by his arguments on mandatory sentencing and the drug war -- as well as the parts of the GOP that aren’t his base. Right now, Rand Paul isn’t just failing to win them over; he’s antagonizing them by accusing them of having bad motives.

Random Thoughts

Saw today I examined the great window at St. John's depicting Christ showing his wounds to St. Thomas, and I noticed for the first time that it looked like they were meeting just in front of a Confessional. And I thought how maybe that was appropriate in multiple senses, one Thomas was receiving absolution for his doubt, and two, Christ was showing the wound we gave him, and his presence among humans meant we were forgiven.

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Chesterton wrote that peasants are the subject of poems but not businessmen and he made it sound as though that should tell us something.

But I suspect it's simply because peasants do physical, visible things while business people work in their heads doing abstract things. Money is boring to poets because it's a number. Abstractions and math aren't that romantic. No one's written a poem about computer programming either.

The Bible is a romantic shelf of books. It's not a science book as has often been said. It traffics heavily in symbols but not of the = or > or < or % variety. Whether you are saved or not saved, a binary '1' or '0', isn't romantic, so that's not given to us to know. God is a romantic, not an accountant, and nothing illustrates this quite so well as the story of leaving the 99 sheep to rescue the one.

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It strikes me as kind of funny that the role of the body during sex on the macro level often mirrors what happens on a micro. In the sex act, the male is all about movement, thrust, motion, forward ho! The female is about receptivity even passivity. And on a microscopic level, the sperm do the strenuous thing, swim -- forward, tally ho! And the egg sits in regal repose. I'm not sure it's a necessity, it seems to me, that these two things ought parallel each other so neatly. The body has purpose, that we in this gnostic age ignore to our peril.

If the outward body can mimic the inner body, why shouldn't the outward body mimic the inner soul, such as in kneeling in adoration of God, the corporal works of mercy, etc…

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I saw a little glimpse Sunday of what it means to be attracted to the Christian lifestyle. I saw it in the face and demeanor of a young girl, maybe 11 or 13, who smiled sweetly and politely thanked me as I held the church door open for her. Such a simple thing but somehow pregnant with meaning since God himself became little for our sake.

Many times it's been said that the best evangelization effort is to live in such a way that it's attractive to others, that they may long for the peace you have. But I'm not sure I've been especially drawn to devout Christians for that reason. For example, Tim Tebow seems a very legit Christian yet despite his friendliness and tranquility I'm not especially someone who thinks to himself, “I want to be like Tebow!” Similarly with even Mother Teresa, who (sadly) doesn't exactly spur emulation in me since her life seemed a constant suffering, be it from not feeling close to God or from having to give 24/7 to people in need.

But today this little girl won my cold heart. First because a polite, effusive pre-teen girl is like seeing a leprechaun or a unicorn. Pretty amazing. An outlier of untold proportions. Kids are pretty barbaric by nature, so this was like seeing a tame lion!

I am also attracted by humility, and I was humbled by the way the black Somali men next to me so reverently bowed before Christ. They even sometimes knelt when the rest of us stood. There was just something about their actions that was not in the least perfunctory or rote, a real humility before God, and that I find very charismatic and triggers a “I want to be like them” vibe.

During the homily, St. John's priest mentioned how sad it was to hear a couple people talking about the lottery and how they desperately wanted to win and be rich so they could quit work. The priest said, “is that all? You just want to be rich?”

I thought then of the sad life of pop singer Michael Jackson. Of how he was given the whole world, had pretty much unlimited money, unlimited travel, sex, food, art…And yet he was so deeply unhappy that all that money couldn't even buy him a good night's sleep. He put himself into the hands of this world's pleasures and zeitgeist and it got him only a disfigured face and a premature death. I can think of no greater example of how this world can not only not satisfy, but can actively ruin you. God has the reputation of being tough or harsh in some circles, but look at the harshness of what this world itself can do to you, even when you're on top of it.

I can say that Michael Jackson inspires me much in not wanting to be like him. And since we've all got to choose one way or another, this world or the next, I best be actively liking Mother Teresa's way!

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Humorous line from Sirius/XM host Martin Goldschmidt on his upcoming knee surgery:

I'm not particularly looking forward to the surgery. I tend to agree with Oscar Wilde when he wrote, “Lord, spare me from physical pain; I'll take care of the mental anguish.”

Ideally, I'd rather be spared from both.

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Boycotted ABC's This Week and enjoyed Meet the Press. Not a bad replacer despite Chuck Todd being not a fraction as likable as Zorba the George. But Zorba ruined it with his ridiculousness re the Clinton Foundation.

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Back in 2000, I thought that given the changing demographics of the country, George W. Bush's popular vote loss to Al Gore meant he (Bush) would likely be the last Republican president of this generation, loosely defined as twenty years.

So far I was right, although it's only been eight years. This next election will be the big test. But my theory ignores the fact that presidents can be so terrible (like Jimmy Carter) that it almost forces people to vote for the other party. So Hillary could get elected and then do something so outrageous that she actually loses Democrat support. Never underestimate the ability of a political party to kill themselves – like Bush almost did in Iraq.

All My Gadgets Are Charged...

Watched last half hour of 40-Year Old Virgin because it was on TV as I was flipping channels and a more joyous ending I'd not seen since one of Kenneth Branagh's Shakespeare flicks, I think A Midsummer Night's Eve. In both movies there's a group dance scene and in this one the cast went '60s retro, singing Aquarius.  Just so well choreographed and well-played. As much as I think movies so passé now (television is king), I am a sucker for a goofy musical number like this.

Inspires me to go for a joke piece. To tune of Leaving on a Jet Plane:

All my gadgets are charged,
I'm ready to go,
I'm waitin' here on Instant Messenger,
I hate to send this text to say goodbye.
But the Keurig's brewing
It's early morn
The Uber's waitin'
He's texting my phone
Already I'm so bored
that I could die
So tweet me and facebook me
Tell me that you'll instagram me
“Like” my posts and never go offline…
'Cause I'm leavin', goin' to rehab
Don't know when I'll have wifi again
Oh babe I hate to log off….

More Top Quality Links!

Errol Morris: How Typography Shapes Our Perception Of Truth

In 2013, acclaimed filmmaker and author Errol Morris ran a bold experiment. With the collusion of the New York Times, he asked 45,000 readers to take an online test. The test allegedly measured whether or not readers were optimists or pessimists. But in reality, Morris was trying to find out if the typeface a statement was written in had any impact on a reader's willingness to agree with that statement. Simply put, are some typefaces more believable than others?

The answer is yes. Baskerville, a 250-year-old serif originally designed by John Baskerville, was statistically more likely to influence the minds of readers than Computer Modern, Georgia, Helvetica, Comic Sans or Trebuchet. The results of Morris's experiment were published online in a two-part essay called Hear, All Ye People; Hearken, O Earth!

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On the African view of the prosperity gospel: 

Behind Nwankwo's endorsement of “prosperity” was a distinctly anti-gnostic conception of the good of religion: “Lawrence says that Africa’s holistic worldview means that ‘the expectation that the experience of wholeness, that is long life, wealth, fertility, success, etc., is legitimate and that religion should contribute to its provision.' He points to the Igbo people of southwestern Nigeria as a good example of this and as an explanation of why prosperity teaching strikes a deep chord in Africa. The Igbo understand their gods to have an obligation to provide the conditions for well - being in the lives of the people in the community—life on earth is a foretaste of the fullness of life in the ‘other world.' So the prosperity gospel is really a human dream—to have enough (and maybe a little more).”

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Before Letterman sucked, he was funny, and co-writer Merrill Markoe remembers favorite bits:

“New Catch Phrases” is another idea that started with me but went on to be group written by everyone. Once again it was a take on advertising and television in our culture and the way certain frequently repeated slogans make their way into every day life. At the time everyone seemed to be quoting a commercial that starred an old lady who looked into the camera and said “Where’s the beef?” So we decided to try to start a catch phrase, all by itself and let an audience vote for their favorite. After the winning entry, “They pelted us with rocks and garbage” (contributed by Matt Wickline) was selected, the show spent the rest of the week working out ways to include it and hopefully help it gain traction. I still have a shirt and a button that someone sent us.

Every now and then, in the middle of the night, “Chinese Restaurant College Bowl” comes to me like a strange hallucination. It owns a place in my heart for its sheer labyrinthine craziness. Assembled by Tom Gammill, Max Pross and myself, it started out as an idea about staging unusual reunions. We planned to go up to random people as they stepped out of an elevator, get all of their names and phone numbers, and then reunite the whole elevator on the air. It ended up being about two Chinese restaurants that we had seen somewhere in New York City that both had names that sounded like colleges. One was called Hunan Wok University, because it was on University Avenue. The other was called Szechuan State, because it was on State street. From there it morphed into bringing customers from each of the restaurants on to the show to play College Bowl and answer questions about the respective restaurant menus. Having decided on that, we felt we needed to add a tour of the two campuses and a Chinese food delivery race between the two restaurant competitors. And so we did.

Kathleen Ankers, who appeared on the show as the Bookmobile lady, ran the art department and would patiently find a way to manufacture a decent working version of whatever it was we requested. Of the hundreds of crazy things I saw her make, some of the ones that have stayed with me were by the always brilliant George Meyer. A few times a year, I think fondly of “The Giant Doorknob,” George’s take on what is for sale in “joke catalogs.” The copy George wrote for it still makes me laugh.

“In Mexico it’s El Knob Grande. Here in the U.S. we call it the giant phony doorknob and it’s a panic. This over-sized jumbo knob is much larger than it oughta be. In fact, its just plain big! Simply attach it to an ordinary door and then wait for the fireworks. Your friends will flip when they see for themselves how truly big a doorknob can be.”

I also think frequently of Andy Breckman’s “Perpetual Birthday Card” which read “Happy Birthday today and on this day every year for the rest of your life.”

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Improving your drinking is a New Year's resolution I could get behind:

Drinking is a skill that requires practice and strategy. That's right, eaters and drinkers -- you have to drink more to drink better.

"It's not about getting wasted. Drink more so that you know how to do it," Matthew told me. "I want people to be like race car drivers. You speed up, you slow down, you're in tune with your highly honed drinking machine -- which is you and your body."

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"Children basically act drunk all the time so I need to have a little bit of alcohol just to get in their rhythm," Matthew said. "It's like a slow drip -- like an I.V. drip of alcohol. You're feeling a little more jovial but you could also still speak in church."

As someone who has long endorsed moderate alcohol consumption as one route to more effective parenting, I couldn't agree more.

Plus Sarah introduced me to a brilliant new beverage innovation: caffeinated beer. That's right, you can mix cold-brewed coffee with beer (she recommends a dark porter).

"It's revolutionized my life," Sarah told me. And now mine, too! (Thank you, Sarah, for introducing me to this breakfast of champions.)

But there are other areas where the three of us disagreed, especially on the topic of light beer.

I like light beer. I believe there's a time and place for every beer on earth, and light beer is no exception. When I'm drinking all afternoon at a barbecue or the beach, I don't want to feel like I have a bowling ball in my stomach. I want a beer that tastes like it's 25% water. Light beer fits the bill.

Couple o' Links

Are Mormons Christians?:

So after all that, are Mormons Christian? In all my experience, I’ve concluded that the answer to that question is: it depends on who’s asking and who’s answering. They vigorously claim to be Christians, and if one considers “Christian” to mean “one who loves and serves God the Father and Christ His Son,” without concern for right doctrine, LDS definitely fall into that category. But if one considers “Christian” to include following the teachings of God as revealed through Christ and handed on through the Church, then they are definitely not.

The problem is that in one sense or another, anyone can be called non-Christian, both in the sense of right faith and of right moral living. I was non-Christian today when I broke the speed limit. I could claim that anyone who doesn’t fully submit to the Magisterium is non-Christian. This would encompass everything from paganism to the Orthodox churches. While most would agree with me on the former, few would on the latter. The fact is, for any given person, the meaning of the name “Christian” depends on what that person believes.

So here’s my point. I strongly urge readers never to waste their time trying to convince an LDS that he is not Christian. Nor is it a fruitful question to discuss with a member of any faith regarding any other faith. And for the love of all that is holy, don’t ever tell an LDS that he is a member of a non-Christian cult. Regardless of whether such assertions are right or wrong, the subject of who can be called “Christian” is not a fruitful subject of debate with members of any other communion. Therefore, my answer to the question “Are Mormons Christian?” is not “yes” or “no,” because the question is not as simple as that. My answer is, “They believe in Christ, but they believe some very different things about Him than most Christians do.”

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Rather harsh if understandable assessment of Irishdom from a McClarey no less. With the gay marriage vote it looks like Catholic Ireland has pretty much given up the ghost and could be a cautionary tale on when your religion is too tied up with the state, where nationalism/patriotism is mixed with your religion. Or perhaps it's simply a case where the Devotional Revolution, a result of the famine, has run its course.  Or maybe a case demonstrating faith is very tenuous, in the way American Catholicism was so robust and healthy in the 1940s and '50s and is now so weak.  From McClarey:

The Irish have always found scapegoats useful as an explanation for Irish failings. Britain long played this role and the Church is now filling this role. This vote, for many of the voters, was a joyous opportunity to give a one finger salute to the faith of their ancestors.

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One of the thrills of blogging is surely the taking on of roles we wouldn't necessarily be privileged to have in "real life".   Like writing for an audience beyond one's family.  A less common variety is to become arbiter of a blogging award (or, in my case, Spanning the Globe perhaps).

The barrier to entry is nothing - just developing a gif of an award. It's good clean fun, of course, but when one blogger breathlessly offered: “It has been a daunting choice..” (for his award) I admit to being amused.  I think I may have to give him a chutzpah award for his starting his own award!  (I do agree with his pick of the wonderful Jeff Miller however.)

Quick Takes

The early Church fathers, who obviously lived and taught centuries before Protestantism came about, are represented in a customized "Protestant" edition on Logos.  Sad that our divisions are represented even retroactively and anachronistically like that.

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The world soccer association FIFA is being prosecuted for corruption. As is so often the case, corruption goes unchecked until it gets so carried away and becomes so full of greed that it becomes stupid and draws attention to itself, like awarding Qatar a bid for the World Cup despite it being a zillion degrees there in summer.  Another case of sin making you stupid, as Mark Shea says. For the sake of the country one can only hope that Bill and Hillary have self-corrupted enough not to become president and first dude.

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Saw an ad for CVS Pharmacy that said in big, bold letters: “Because Health is Everything”. Despite the fact that the mortality rate is 100%?

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Read an interesting article on wanting versus liking that the part of the brain manufacturing want/anticipation is far more strong and dependable than the pleasure-giving part.

Proving, perhaps, we were engineered with this life not being the goal but the means to a Goal.

I have to constantly remind myself that giving up legitimate pleasure is part of being a Christian.  To put God first.  Interestingly, the article said that higher pleasures like music and altruism trigger the same pleasure sensor as food and sex.  So I guess the project on earth is to subordinate the baser pleasures in favor of the highest one, i.e. love of God and neighbor.  To value what God values and love what he loves and pleasure in what He pleasures in. Easier said than done.

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It seems that men in general are lazier than women. Women are ahead of men in nearly every category: they do better in college, are more likely to graduate college, do more housework at home than men, are being promoted into management at a higher rate than men currently, and are less likely to be unemployed. The fairer sex will rule us all one day?

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Heather King said on her blog that:

I'm generally very careful not to be “busy” in the sense of hardly a free moment (as opposed to intensely focused, in the sense of a conscious, intentional use of time that nonetheless allows for many hours that are not strictly scheduled or “owed” to others).

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As events led up to St Thomas More's imprisonment, he feared greatly not death but torture and whether he could keep the faith under that duress. Similarly many moderns don't fear death as much as the torture that can precede it in a lingering catastrophic illness. Fortunately Thomas More's prayer was answered and he wasn't tested in that way, was not tortured, I understand.

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The homilist at St J's today mentioned that Arius spread his heretical teaching with the help of a song, and I couldn't help wondering if  pop culture was a pernicious influence even 1700 years ago!

It's interesting to me that humans are reluctant to accept good news. Bad news surely, but good news perhaps even more so. Thomas the Apostle accepted Christ's death (“Let us go to Jerusalem and die with him.”) but refused to believe Christ was risen when told so by the others, even after Jesus himself said he would rise in three days.

A lot of the heresies of the church seem centered on a refusal of news that sounds too good to be true: many Christians don't accept Mary as their mother and intercessor, or that Jesus comes to us in reality in the Eucharist. The fourth century priest Arius couldn't accept the good news that Jesus was God and not just some sort of messenger from God. Christians often have trouble truly believing their worst sins are forgiven, or that God loves even serial killers and other heinous sinners. We all seem slow to believe good news, most clearly exemplified by the apostles who were slow to believe.

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The other day I imagined the Luminous Mysteries for the first time through the prism of Jesus the Bridegroom, of the Maker marrying his creation:

1st mystery is John baptizing Jesus, the ministry of the best man that prepares the way for us to be marital material by Jesus lowering ourselves to our level despite his not being a sinner like the others baptized by John.

2nd mystery is the Wedding at Cana, the pluperfect symbol of another marriage taking place, a higher one, a spiritual one. Jesus changes the water into wine as the celebration of his marriage as his public ministry begins.

3rd mystery is Jesus communicating with his bride intimately, instructing and edifying, preparing her for greater intimacies to come.

4th mystery is Jesus taking his three closest apostles with him and letting them in on the ecstasy to come. It's no wonder Peter wanted to build a tent and camp there;it reminds me of how I longed to prolong the sexual act indefinitely. Here Jesus goes farther than just talking to his disciples but communicating to them non-verbally in his splendor, much as between a man and a woman the sexual act communicates non-verbally in ecstasy and naked splendor.

5th mystery is how Jesus communicates his love not just to Peter, James and John but on-going, forever while there's an earth, the carnal commingling of God and man under the appearance of humble ingredients.

Bright Things

The indomitable brightness of a grandson's smile

A network of converging smile lines on the bridge of the nose, the joyous overbite...

and...

My view pond side on Sunday

The water's clear and surface dimpled like a golf ball. I always picture this as a similar size to Thoreau's pond although likely that one's much, much bigger. Amid the wet-loving cattails - “bulrush” in British English - and under a still giving 6pm sun. I thought at this hour, suppertime, there'd be nobody here but everybody and their brother is death-sick of chill temps and wants to spend every minute outdoors, preferably pond, pool, lake, or sea-side, depending on availability. There's something about water. So there are fish catchers and hikers just around the corner.

Later in my own back yard it's seven awe-thirty and the light cascades off the high bark of the tower-pine. Majestic in its inaccessibility, at least to mortals without Jack Beanstalk ladders. It sways in the wind, to and fro, and it looks Hilton Headish, or maybe that's just the headiness of three days off work talking. Long-lit days with time off work usually means Hilton Head.

Looking at those fifty+ foot pines I see parts of creation in my own backyard that I cannot examine closely without the renting of heavy equipment. I can touch or minutely explore maybe  ten percent (the base of the tree only) of something I “own”, at least technically speaking. I'm not sure how much I feel the owner of a plant so tall that I really can only experience a small bit of it. But I have the pleasure of its inaccessibility, much as I feel when I relish the ocean.

White Clouds & White Whales

Nice day outside the office

A mint julep of an eve yesterday; a temperate temperature with a gentilic breeze. Fresh rained-upon trees and bush frond a perfect front porch. Our dog Maris, a tropical storm when she's energized, has calmed. And I am reading a book by David Maranis about the Viet Nam war written about people and geography, not battles and statistics. I may not be an extrovert, but I sure am one when it comes to war books - give me stories of people rather than shrapnel and body counts. The places alone read as fictitious as the locations of Middle Earth: Cu Chi, Lai Khe, Chon Thanh and Nui Ba Den. It's a surprisingly readable account about something I never had much interest in before but I picked it up only because it was the Kindle Deal of the Day and at $1.99 it seemed too good to pass on.

Am also slowly lushing through Moby Dick.  I find it a guilty pleasure in that I feel a vulture, feeding off the entrails of a troubled soul. From a review of a Melville biography:

Early biographies touched on the question of madness but did so lightly, noting, for instance, that at one point Melville’s family had him examined by a doctor on psychological grounds. Biographers also tiptoed around the children: Melville’s oldest son committed suicide at 18, his next son died a drifter, one daughter was a spinster, and the last daughter reportedly did not want to hear her father’s name, regarding him as a beast.

In the late 1970’s, a religious scholar named Walter Kring discovered two letters concerning Melville’s marriage. The letters, written by Melville’s wife Elizabeth and her brother, Sam Shaw, were addressed to a leading New York pastor, H.W. Bellows, in 1867, when Melville was 47.

Shaw’s letter was shocking. It rejected a plan by Bellows to end the marriage by having relatives appear to abduct Lizzie to Boston.

Shaw wrote, “I think that the safest course is to let her real position become apparent from the first, namely that of a wife, who, being convinced that her husband is insane, acts as if she were so convinced and applies for aid and assistance to her friends and acts with them. I think she would have done this long ago were it not for imaginary and groundless apprehensions of the censures of the world upon her conduct …. ”

I  find a kind of witchcraft in words, in the artistry of word play. I want to fall at the feet of the author without seeing the Author.  It's said that Melville was surely manic-depressive and the preponderance of evidence suggests he was physically violent towards his wife. The hero on the page had feet of clay. The enjoyment I feel reading his prose makes me feel that I have somehow profited from his torture, since it's unlikely he would've produced such gold without the furnace of despair. Do you get the genius without the angst? Sometimes? (Mozart?)

But perhaps that's the way of earthly life - we work for living, which means someone profits from our sweat equity, however small in comparison. And, of course, Jesus was the ultimate exemplar of a giving profit to us in his suffering and death.

Ah, Now I Get It...

It's power worship!  That's the appeal behind Hillary.  I mused the other day about the surrealness of seeing Hillary in '16 stickers, but today on Morning Joe I heard Mark Halperin talk to Hillary supporters in Iowa and the gist is: she's strong, she won't back down, she'll play hard and dirty but that's what we need against Republican S.O.B.S and Islamic jihadist S.O.B.s.  These supporters were at a loss when asked to name any of her actual accomplishments.

I should've known.  People adore power figures.

The Two Lettermans

Saw a New Yorker article on David Letterman;  he's an establishment figure now but...

  "…back when I was sixteen, trapped in the snoozy early eighties and desperate for something rude and wild, Letterman seemed like an anarchist. His manner suggested that TV could puncture the culture, rather than prop it up. My friends, particularly the guys, became his acolytes, quoting his catchphrases (“They pelted us with rocks and garbage”) and copying his deadpan affect."

I think now about how Letterman was appealing to me partially because he was the opposite of boring ol' local host Bob Braun and his 50-50 Clubbiness. I didn't appreciate Braun then and am likely being unfair to him now, but Letterman seemed a breath of fresh air:

 [Letterman and his head writer] shared an ironic mind-set, a suspicion of show-biz sycophancy, and a desire to break formulas, during a period when the medium had hardened, and taken on a Vegas-y, old-Hollywood heaviness.

The irony is, unbeknownst to me, I was only re-experiencing and sharing in my grandfather's taste (who liked Ernie Kovacks) proving there's nothing new under the sun:

 In 1980, Letterman pulled from earlier experimentalists, like Ernie Kovacs and Steve Allen, they built a daytime talk show on NBC, full of oddball pranks…

Letterman, the article says, had a “distaste for back-patting and schmoozing”, which mirrored my own sensibilities. There was something in the early Letterman that seemed faintly radical, that of not wanting to go the well-trod way of Hollywood celeb:

And yet, even in 1982, when “Late Night with David Letterman” premièred, he presaged something else, an obsession with what was authentic, the kind of preoccupation that would dominate the nineties, inflecting figures like David Foster Wallace and Kurt Cobain, famous men who were desperate for rock-star fame and then flamboyantly and publicly hated the stuff once they got it. Like Holden Caulfield, Letterman was on the defense against looking like (or being) a phony, looking like (or being) a sellout, and curdling into a Hollywood jerk…Already, Letterman had a melancholy vision of what fame could turn you into, if you let your guard down: “I hate the notion that celebrities deserve to be treated with some kind of deference.”

That was certainly a lot of the appeal to me, the authenticity. Much like Bruce Springsteen in that regard, who vowed not to go the way of fat, Vegas Elvis.