I'd Never Heard....

...of "Spy Wednesday" until reading about it today not once, but twice.

Parody is Therapy blog...

...updated regarding how quaint it is that the MSM has just discovered hate, and how a recent study shows the money spent on corporate diversity training isn't too effective.

Travel writer Tom Swick....

....writes:

Those first few hours are always the most vivid, as everything stands out in its immense originality: buildings, people, cars, mannequins. In a few days these props will pass in a near-familiar blur, but now—right now—the world crackles with high-definition details.

Spanning the Globe to Bring You the Constant Variety of Posts

That NYT article on the Pope made me lose my faith, faith that the NYT  could do a reasonable article at all. --Curt Jester tweet

Don't fear the e-reader...I've used some version for 10 years now. I never abandoned print books. I did not dry up and fly away. Metal parts have not (so far as I am aware) significantly replaced important body parts. Indeed, I have found it liberating to get on a plain, train, or other conveyance with the calm assurance of carrying five-thousand books with me, lest I should get bored or need to consult the 1919 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica or the Catholic Encyclopedia at the spur of the moment. Being able to find any word in any book with a simple search--lovely--better processor speed would make this lovelier. So, it's a brave new world that has such creatures in it, and it is with us to stay. You do not have to become one with the collective, but "turn off your mind, relax and float downstream. . . it is not dying, it is not dying."--Steven of Momentary Taste

I really do feel detached from any expectations of what my spiritual life is supposed to look like. I’d like to be a spiritual success story, where my past really is my past, upon which I have never looked back. Iron and Wine sings: “No Christian wants to pick at the scab but they all want the scar.” Well, I have no problem picking the scab. Or maybe I don’t want it to heal because I’m afraid of having nothing to do without it. --Betty Duffy

I’m always reading Winesburg, Ohio — even when I’m not. When I chit-chat books with literature buffs, I can scarcely contain my excitement when the town of Winesburg swings gracefully into view, its buildings and streets and people. Its lonesome mournfulness. Maybe I love the book for strictly personal reasons. After all, Anderson crafted this lovely little gem just for me. Every word, every sentence, every story reads like an envelope stuffed with a personal letter kindly penned by Anderson to say something about a pastoral world, going, going, gone. ”Hands,” the first vignette, reads with great simplicity and throat-tightening poignancy. Even its memory moves me to emotion. What a gorgeous book!--Blogger at "Interpolations" via Steven Riddle

We've passed a health care plan written by a committee whose chairman says he doesn't understand it, passed by a Congress that hasn't read it but exempts themselves from it, with funding administered by a treasury chief who didn't pay his taxes, and the whole thing to be financed by a country that's going broke. What could possibly go wrong? --forwarded email

"The apostles had never seen someone tread water before, so when they saw Jesus doing it, they thought that he was walking on water and assumed it was a miracle." - Darwin Catholic, parodying the current fashion of watering down Christ's miracles

I can't be the only one who, as a child, thought it would be great to win a donkey. --Tom of Disputations on one of Monty Hall's less appreciated door prizes

W. Jackson Bate, Samuel Johnson. It was this modern exemplar of the biographer's art, not Boswell's Life, that introduced me to the man who became and remained my hero. Not only did Dr. Johnson's clear-eyed, cant-free view of human nature help me to see the world as it is, but I found his lifelong struggle against his own inborn defects of temperament to be powerfully inspiring. I still do, and probably always will. - Terry Teachout on ten self-influential books meme

Overall, the great joy of this book for me was all the one-liners I got to write down in my journal. "The goal of the discipline is not victory but submission" for example. It really was a sort of spiritual reading, a little homily on almost every page--but I never felt like I was receiving a homily. - Betty Duffy reviewing "House of Brede"

I expressed some of the opinions derived from [James] Joyce to a professor who commented to me, "Ah then, but we haven't seen the end of it all yet, have we?" I pondered those words for a long time and realized what he was saying to me--it fired the motion toward Catholicism…We must remember the sermon on hell [in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man] and the other things popular at the time that tend to do one of two things--create Saints, like Therese, and agnostics like Joyce.  Had I been exposed to that Church and some of what was considered de rigeur at the time, I suspect I would have felt the same.  - Steven Riddle

Monitoring Global Warming So You Don't Have To

                                   Actual Kentucky surface station

Was amused by this comment:

"You really have to go to Surfacestations.org and look at the pictures of what they charitably designate as ‘Odd and irregular observing Sites’ to believe it. Personal favorite: the one in Hopkinsville, KY, where the monitor is mounted on a brick chimney, over an asphalt driveway, directly above a Weber grill."

Diaristic Weekend Thoughts

Oh how delicious that Poet Oatmeal stout was Thursday, on the heels of the more acidic Magic Hat ale. The first pint was preparatory, the second remarkable, the third satisfying. I sudden-see the wisdom in my grandparents beer before bedtime. Beer "makes me feel mellow" in the words of poet/singer Tom T. Hall and was especially nice post-bingo. The trick is: how not to get a beer belly. Thursday's ales took the wind out of Friday's drinking sails, even when the latter was under the auspices of the Friday Night Opry.

On Saturday my brother & his children visited from Cincy. We made tracks for a kids-friendly movie titled How to Train Your Dragon after a visit to the local pet shop where the kids met Norbert, the ageless turtle. How to Train Your Dragon was a 3-D Viking movie, which pretty much says it all. Very cool. Big forearms and big Scottish brogues and the extra "D" in 3D really makes a difference even in little things like the waves lapping against the boat. The atmospherics were splendid even if the message and plot were predictable, especially given Hollywood's equation that fear = hate = war. Eliminate all fear and there'd be no war, or at least it'd be a one-sided war and would thus be over quickly I suppose. When Lisa Kudrow saw the graves of victims of the Holocaust in a recent documentary-style network show, she said that "this is what fear does." But seems to me that is what hate does. But surely they are linked since perfect love casts out all fear. Still, I attribute Hollywood's fear of fear, fairly or unfairly, to their paranoia that someday, somewhere, someone in the U.S. will hate Muslims due to terrorism.

Sunday went to Palm Sunday Mass ("the marathon," brother calls it; his wife"the play"). Then after lunch we hit COSI. I decided to go too and it was pleasant to see the kids so enjoying themselves. Aaron twice got lost and cried briefly and that was touching. In a few years, the teen years, he'll probably want to get lost!

Spent the eve reclining under the watchful gaze of the novel Shadow Country. I reveled in the physicality of the book, it's fine smell and the smallish print which made me feel like I was getting more for my money. None of this 212-pages-with-big-print-making-it-effectively-145-pages stuff. Bill Simmons, Dan Simmons and Peter Matthiessen: you can tell they write for the "love of the game."

I also inhaled a large portion of The Big Short by the author whose name I'm always forgetting (Michael Lewis). Even after all this time I'm still fascinated by how we got there from here, meaning the cusp of the world's greatest fiscal crisis. It's a fascinating read if only yet another reminder, *sigh*, of how dumb the "best and brightest" are. The old saw is that it takes the government to really screw something up, but that applies to businesses and industries too, especially lately (Enron, et al.). The cause of the crisis looks like a race between greed, ignorance, malfeasance, good intentions (i.e. lending to the poor), etc.... Of course they're not all mutually exclusive.

Fr. Cantalamessa's Book

Read deeply over the weekend from something deep: Cantalamessa's pleasingly oxymoronically titled book The Sober Intoxication of the Spirit. Much to take in, much to ponder in it. A different way of seeing things and I'll be unable to explain the uniqueness of his vision or do it justice in a small post, but the book was worth it to me just in providing a way to reconcile the Scripture passage "the Spirit blows where it wills" and the sacraments, the latter which promise no doubt about where the Spirit blows.  A couple excerpts:

God has established two distinct channels to sanctify the Church or, one could say, two different directions from which the Spirit blows. There is the Spirit who comes from above, so to speak, and who is transmitted through the pope, the bishops and the priests...especially through the sacraments...The Spirit also blows from the opposite direction, "from below," that is, from the foundation or cells of the body, which is the Church. This is truly the wind that Jesus said "blows where it chooses" (John 3:8).

* * *

After the Second Vatican Council everyone acknowledged that in the past there had been a certain diminishment of the sanctifying organism of the Church, especially with regard to the charisms. Everythign was flowing only through the so-called vertical channels constituted by the hierarchy and entrusted to it...It was inevitable that this would cause some kind of inertia among the laity. At the root of this doctrinal impoverishment was a certain conception of the Church that was formed in the modern age and is called, by analogy, the "deist" conception of the Church...It negates, on a practical level, Providence and the actual, ongoing governance of God over the world...In practice this deist conception severely diminished the space in which the charisms are found. With the Second Vatican Council this somewhat static and mechanical image of the Church was changed. The Church came to recognize that it could not do without the immense richness of the grace that is spread through the capillaries of the body of the Church - in all of its members - and that manifests itself in the gifts, the charisms, of each person...The dual movement of the Spirit is reestablished.

* * *
These signs - the laying on of hands, brotherly love and prayer - all point to simplicity...Tertullian writes of baptism: "There is nothing which leaves the minds of men so amazed as the simplicity of the divine actions which they see performed and the magnificence of the effects that follow...Simplicity and power are the prerogatives of God." This is the opposite of what the world does. In the world, the bigger the objectives are, the more complicated are the means. When people wanted to get to the moon, the necessary apparatus was gigantic.

* * *
In its very origin the baptism in the Spirit has an ecumenical value, which is necessary to preserve at all costs. It is a promise and an instrument of unity among Christians, helping us to avoid an excessive "catholicizing" of this shared experience.

Fr. Cantalamessa also dicusses the synergy between grace and free will and how as infants we had no free will with regard to Baptism, so the seeds of faith, hope, love are just that - seeds that will be brought forth only with an active adult faith. (Although Fr. Cantalamessa mercifully mentions that not even our faith is completely independent, for God aids us in that.) Are we rich or poor? Rich in gifts, via our Baptism, but poor in our unsealing of them.

Ten Books Meme

Steven Riddle posted a meme concerning the "Ten Books That Most Influenced You". What books most influenced me? Sometimes just titles: The Mysteries of Pittsburgh had that sort of The-Man-Who-Knew-Too-Little cache for me as a collector of paradoxes and oxymorons. Then too the sweet tang of auld lang syne in Reveries of a Bachelor. I read Mysteries only, but both have titles that linger in my imagination and become larger.



Fujikama's anthology A Child's Book of Poems also immediately comes to mind, a tall folio full of color and imagination and delight. To open the book is to open a different world with poems full of extraordinary words such as Tennyson's 'azure' instead of blue, words that made me hungry for pyrotechnic at perhaps the cost of missing God in the whisper.

The Bible of course, with its endless mystery and great sea of wisdom, unwarranted consolations, dare-we-believe-it promises, well-deserved rebukes and preternatural knowledge of the human condition.

Thoreau's Walden was an influence for its scandalous claim that God loves all of his creation, including trees and lakes, fish and fowl, chipmonks and adders.

The Secret of the Rosary was a book so redolent of Catholic piety that it was practically my "bible" back in early adolescence.

Dinesen's Out of Africa because I've always been attracted to the elegiac, to the romanticism of past eras.

John Paul II's Crossing the Threshold of Hope simply for the humble act of the vicar of Christ answering the questions of a seeker, and answering them with such felicity.

Thoughts on the Crisis du Jour

Faith, ultimately, simply cannot rest on the actions of the Church. It never could, not in the days of Corinth in the first century AD when Paul was chewing them out for their great sins. Not during the Sack of Constantinople. Not during the Middle Ages when Popes were great sinners. Not during these times. That the Church is composed of sinners is as old as Judas's and Peter's betrayals. Faith cannot rest on the foundation of looking at the sins of the Body of Christ. If it does, then it's clearly not faith, because faith is something that is not verifiable by evidence.

And for Catholics all of this ought to be easier to take, because we believe in Hell & Purgatory. For child-abusers there is a reckoning - God is the judge. "Let vengeance be mine," says the Lord. Do we believe that? For those of us who thirst for others to pay for their mistakes we can look to the Scripture and recall Christ's words about how "every penny will be paid," as far as the debt goes. Personally, more sinning then sinned against, I shudder at that Scripture. But for those tempted to leave the Church because of scandal then they should take heart in it.

What bothers me about the media is the selective outrage.  There are a million children in the womb dying each year. Why is that not an issue? Perhaps because we all have been children, remember being children, and know the vulnerability and credulousness that comes with that.  But even though we've been babies in the womb we can't remember it so there is no empathy.  Trusting your own life experiences to judge the morality of something is an unreliable moral guide.  If anyone survived being aborted and remembered it and told his story to the Oprah, don't you think abortion would be outlawed? It's because no one can relate to having experienced being in the womb that people sanction it.

Premature Reunion-ation

Our high school class is having its 30th reunion on the anniversary of our 29th year out of high school because, quote, "you know our class was not known to follow the rules."

I fall right into that spirit of rebellion since it's part of my own rebellion to rebel against rebellion. I like the idea of reunions on the scheduled year and I like Ascension Thursday on a Thursday.

I think I know the mindset that went into this decision. Some of my classmates have recently bonded at informal get-togethers and they're hungry for the full monty, so to speak. Why wait? What's in a number? But doesn't that sentiment cheapen round numbers, when reached?

That is certainly the spirit of the age. Why call Lent a "season of grace" when God can come to us in any season? Why call the sacraments the conduit of grace when grace can come to us anytime?

But I'm haunted by the fact that God loves humility, including the humility of seeking Him in His time and way rather than my own.

Bingo Redux

Twas the night before Bingo and all through the car,
not a cellphone not stirring, all the way to the bar...

...but then Dave C. called and asked me to volunteer for him and I had a hard time saying "No". I had a hard time saying "yes" too. But when my wife called to say she'd be babysitting it seemed a sign to help out for a couple hours.

So I arrived on a cold Thursday eve with the rain bleating like Irish sheep. I dodged the dagger'd drops like a broken-field runner, without benefit of coat or pads until I reached the familiar smell of cigarette smoke just outside the warm interior confines. (Why don't we ever see cigar smokers out congregating outside a door?)

I was immediately drafted into service at the lottery ticket window, side-by-side with a guy counting out instant winners like a card shark. By comparison my fingers were slow as sloe gin, which I immediately blamed on iPoditis.

A look of gloom crossed my visage when I argued with my co-worker concerning whether we were truly short of crew. It was fake; I had the ineluctable thrill of knowing I wouldn't be there forever (or all night, whichever came first) but I didn't let on. It feels, in hindsight, vaguely dishonest to withhold that sort of info, the sort that he's going to find out eventually anyway when I was scarce. I told Carmen and Matthew and figured that was good enough.

I enjoyed the subterfuge of how I'd plan my escape, like something out of The Shawshank Redemption. The hour closed in on eight and the NCAAs were already on when I dropped trou (i.e. the money apron) and split into the night, feeling guilty only over my giddy reaction.

Ulysses

Steven Riddle has an interesting post about books that influenced him including this (for Ham of Bone):

Ulysses--Life as mystery, life as engagement, life as joyous, life as encounter, life as it is meant to be lived aware not only of yourself but of the mysterious conjunction of events that make up a day. Reality captured in all of its myriad shades. Ulysses is an education in how to view life--rollicking, comic, harsh, and sad--but ultimately--"Yes because he never did a thing like that before as ask to get his breakfast in bed with a couple of eggs since the City Arms hotel when he used to be pretending to be laid up with a sick voice doing his highness to make himself interesting. . .then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

And that is what Joyce leaves us to take away.

Clever, he

Krauthammer makes an interesting point with regard to Obama's strategy:

Obama set out to be a consequential president, one on the order of Ronald Reagan. With the VAT, Obama’s triumph will be complete. He will have succeeded in reversing Reaganism. Liberals have long complained that Reagan’s strategy was to starve the (governmental) beast in order to shrink it: First, cut taxes; then, ultimately, you have to reduce government spending.

Obama’s strategy is exactly the opposite: Expand the beast, and then feed it. Spend first — which then forces taxation.

The Day Democrats Stopped Protesting the War (i.e. Inauguration Day)

As Gomer Pyle used to say, sur-prise, sur-prise.

My take on political hypocrisy is that it's generally more common on the liberal side of the aisle not because of any inherent conservative goodness but simply because the lame stream media is much more tolerant of liberal hypocrisy.

This all reminds me of how the problem of homelessness, a great "scandal" during the Reagan years, was magically dropped as a media fixation the day Clinton was elected. To use a film analogy, with politics it's always Groundhog Day.

The New Health Care Plan...

...for Ham of Bone is to simply wait 'till somebody gets sick and then get some insurance. I see the Corner has linked to someone who has picked up on that too:

Over at EconLog, George Mason University economist Bryan Caplan has a very good blog post, in which he argues that individual health insurance will soon be a better deal than employer-provided health insurance.

"In the individual market, you can now wait until you're really sick to buy insurance: 'Heads I win, tails I break even.' Firms won't have that gimme - and it seems more valuable than premiums' tax deductibility. Admittedly, Obamacare imposes a small penalty on individuals who don't buy insurance, and a moderate penalty on firms that don't provide it. But it still seems like it will be in the financial self-interest of many firms and their workers to get rid of insurance, and split the (cash savings minus penalties)."

Meanwhile, Charles Krauthammer predicts that we're going to end up with a national sales tax:

“I think ultimately Obama understands that he has just added an unbelievably large entitlement on to a country drowning in debt. He is not stupid. I think he is anticipated this, and I think he is, from the beginning, had a plan and the plan is he is going to use the Deficit Reduction Commission, which will report only after November, and I'm absolutely sure it will recommend something new in American history, a national sales tax which is called a VAT in Europe.”