Something else they could use in Newtown

Patriot Guard -- USAF photo

Precision

Real-life exchange:
"How old is her mom?"
"Well, when was the uprising in Hungary? 1956? She'd have been maybe in her twenties then, so . . . you get the idea."

"Now, son . . ."

". . . a lot of people are cuckoo until you need something from them."
                                                                      -- Grandpa Simpson

Keep thinking of this as I get ready to set up Aunt Eunike's Holiday Refuge for the Desperate.

A few things to pray for

. . . in the wake of this. Not a complete list of what's needed, just a few bits of help.

For the families, the survivors, and the first responders:

• people who can be of real comfort to them
• closeness in their families
• sleep as needed
• the ability to forgive
• blessings this Christmas

Variable degrees of explicability

• Pope Benedict has over 300,000 followers and he hasn't even tweeted anything yet
• Someone apparently thought December would be a good time to tear up the road by a shopping mall
• Au Bonheur des Dames (by Zola) is about an eponymous department store that is not, in the long run, conducive to the happiness of the ladies, either those who shop there or those who work there; it just makes money for the man who owns it

Justice for Nigerian scammers at last!

You know how Nigerian scammers pose as big shots alarmingly willing to give away huge amounts of money to strangers willing to provide a tiny bit of help? Well, those days are over! The Nigerian Economic & Financial Crimes Commission has emailed me to inform me they've captured all those crooks (including the ones in other jurisdictions), recovered the money, and are using it to . . . give away to random strangers whose names appear on the scammers' computers. Like me, they say (addressing me as Dear Sir/Madam). That's right -- $5 million, and I don't even have to do a thing for them. Except hand over some basic information like my Visa number and PIN. That proves I can trust them.

"Just so cold and unfeeling"

Meghan MacIver writes about working in the notorious "poorest postal code in Canada" and a woman she knew there who had a deep effect on her -- though unfortunately, the reverse wasn't true.

The philosophy of the house where she worked was to let the residents make their own decisions -- which was handy, since the staff coudn't really do anything else. Except go on to shield the residents from the consequences of their own decisions.

This one woman, Rita, came into some money and blew it on drugs.

“She’s a big girl,” the manager said, laughing. Then she reminded us we had a lot of other things we had to deal with and that it wasn’t our place to judge her choices.

Big girl? Physically, maybe ... This came up because:

She got very sick. We all spent weeks of shifts taking care of Rita, carrying her into her room, helping her to go to the bathroom, making sure she didn’t light herself on fire with her cigarette butts.

Rita was soon in extremis, and as they were waiting for the paramedics, Meghan McIver tried to reassure her, touching her hand:

 she flinched sharply, and then her hand went limp. A deep sadness engulfed me in a surprising way. She was just so cold and unfeeling. I thought I meant something to her, but she was too far gone for that now. Maybe she always had been. 

People like that aren't just in the poorest postal codes; they're in the middle and upper ones, in the midst of the last families you'd suspect. In my own -- until they started dying off. 

"I thought I meant something to her" -- with me, the glass was half empty, it was always more "I was afraid I meant nothing to her" or "to him". Finally I found out I didn't -- not enough for them to do anything about it.

"Too far gone" is not to say that these people can't come back. People just like them do it every day. But first, those around them have to admit they're gone -- due to decisions that deserve no respect. 

 

  

Attack of the thesaurus

 Among other unlikely occupations, I write weekly shopping articles. While looking for Black Friday sales to report on, I ran across some company with an online marketing strategy apparently based on aggressive use of an automated thesaurus. Some of their ads that came up on or near the same Google page:

Elysium Black Friday #1.
Beatification Black Friday #1
Delight Black Friday
Felicitation Black Friday
Congenial Black Friday #1
Be Satisfied Black Friday #1
Pleasant Black Friday #1
Enjoyment Black Friday
Be Pleased Black Friday #1
Be Happy Black Friday Deals NoW!
Be Content Black Friday #1.

Maybe I should be offended by the misuse of "beatification" . . . or maybe I should just write to them, pretending to be offended by it. But how much attention would they pay to someone who obviously has no sense of humour?

It would be better (though I'm not going to do this either) to tell them their strategy is (thank you, thesaurus.com)"brainless, dazed, deficient, dense, dim, doltish, dopey, dull, dumb, , foolish, futile, gullible, half-baked, half-witted, idiotic, ill-advised, imbecilic, inane, indiscreet, insensate, irrelevant, laughable . . ." well, you get the idea.
       

Have been disgustingly sick . . .

. . . as well as embroiled in a school issue. But I'll make up for it now in posts.

Wha?

Just as I was thinking how much I love self-publishing on Kindle Direct(I merely put up my book, and two people actually bought it! No advertising or anything) and congratulating myself because yesterday, someone stopped me in the store and asked me a computer question (and, as a bonus, didn't ask me to ask my husband to go round and try to fix the problem), I get this instead of my KDP reports:

503 Service Unavailable.  Instance draining.
Rejected 102 after 0 wave-off pings.

Instance draining? Wave-off pings?

This sounds like a tech-impaired person's idea of computer talk.  

Never mind, there are probably no new sales to report. 

Books about Thanksgiving are one of the few things people don't buy on Black Friday. 

kah-toh-leek

New French phrase book from Dover

So what year is this really?

Another shocking revelation that shakes Christianity to blah blah blah, from none other than the Holy Father: 

In "Jesus of Nazareth -- The Infancy Narratives," the pope says the Christian calendar is actually based on a blunder by a 6th century monk, who Benedict says was several years off in his calculation of Jesus' birth date.

Well! If the Church can be mistaken about what year a child was born to an obscure family in an age before birth certificates, or even family Bibles (at least the kind with blank space at the front -- papyrus was expensive), clearly it has no grounds to say what's right or wrong either.

But then, neither does CNN, which in this article gets Jesus' age at the Presentation off by 12 years.

Amy Welborn says in one of her books that in Jesus' time, most people had only the vaguest idea how old they were. When (as I understand it), John the Baptist saw his cousin walking toward him and suddenly realized the meaning of the prophesy he'd been given about the "one who came after him", he was the only one present who had any way of knowing that it was also true in that Jesus was a few months younger than him. And he'd have heard it from his parents, not seen it written down anywhere.

Anyway, the last thing Our Lord would want us to do is waste our energy re-numbering the A.D.

Some things (should) never go out of style

• Latin! There'll be a Pontifical Academy "for a more responsible use of Latin", the Pope himself says. I admit to occasional irresponsible use of Latin -- it makes me feel like something I'm not.
• Priests wearing their collars! And what's this about capes? I've never seen an ordinary priest wearing a cape. 
• Churches that look and sound like churches! Does "the post-conciliar trend of building unedifying churches" mean those churches are, literally, un-buildings? Some of them do look more thrown together . . . and that's putting it nicely.

You know it's come to the sad ending . . .

. . . when a priest's own order refers to him as "Mr."

Mr. Bourgeois, in this case. Maybe some relation to St. Marguerite? Anyway, he needs some serious intercession.

He's giving up everything, for what? Probably, he believes, the good of Catholic women. I for one never would've asked for it.

Toward a new, trust-free world!

"Why normalize infidelity?" asks the Letters page in the Post, over one from a lady who notes "Nazis despised the word 'sin'" and feels that in that way, anyway, their ideology is still alive.

Why normalize adultery? I'll tell you why: To complete the mission of eliminating trust from the world. It's already close to finished with children -- they're taught to act, even if they can't quite believe it, as if any adult with an interest in them is out to exploit them sexually. 

Now it's time for those over the age of consent -- they'll have to face the "fact" that even marriage is only going to be a commitment until one of you is drawn to someone else.

"Trust no one, it's the only way to be safe" -- and safe is all we can hope for, right?

Quick excuse for a post

by way of re-entry:

• George Will: "another example of dumb bullying by government in cahoots with powerful interests". Monks in Louisiana can't sell coffins without qualifying as undertakers.
• 100,000 Frenchmen can't be wrong
• "Petitions have been filed at least 20 times on abortion by government MPs and one Liberal MP."

Only on the Prairies

The Weather Network yesterday showed Winnipeg reacting to the huge snowfall they got Saturday night/Sunday morning -- including a lady saying she was "all dressed for church" but had to shovel out the car before she could go.

The same city that was wondering if it could cut down crime with prayer.

The "pious rhetoric" Jonas is talking about ...

is all on the pro-abort side. 

Taking the other side (for this column, anyway -- I don't think he considers himself actually on it), he comes up with some impious rhetoric: Alan Borovoy is out "presumably to stem the tide of fetal menace threatening to engulf us all".

 And this:

Hmm. Should we legalize holdups, too? People keep robbing banks anyway.
Well, robbing banks is wrong.
Ah, and killing unborn babies isn’t.

This too:

Indeed, Borovoy argues that “even if we assumed that personhood begins at conception, why should that ‘person’ have sanctuary in the body of someone who doesn’t want it there?”
Well, ahem, because she put it there in the first place, Alan, wouldn’t you say? But Borovoy raises the point only to make clear he doesn’t want to hear about it . . .

This column by Faye Soniera few days ago put it more poignantly:

Borovoy’s comparison is not morally relevant. He takes a stranger-to-stranger relationship to rationalize lethal force in a mother-to-child relationship. A child is not a stranger, trespassing onto a foreign property, to seek sanctuary from another stranger.

Someone in the letters today said in response to that that religious arguments were, by definition, irrational, and we must ignore "irrational, religious arguments".

What about irrational secular arguments? 

Oh, those must be gone to the wall for -- and no one can ever admit they are irrational. 




 

Better stay used to it, I guess

Now, maybe if it were a WINE bar . . .

The dead tree ("nonline"??) version of Financial Post Magazine today has a short last-page article on the restaurant that's covered here -- a Spanish-themed place in Calgary that has a largish statue of the BVM behind the bar, because it "kind of wanted to cause some controversy". Just kind of, you see; if they'd definitely wanted to cause some controversy, they could've named it Mohammed's in honour of the people who taught Spain so much of what it knows.

Also, they say, religious images are "not unusual" in such places in Spain and South America. Well, I've been to Spain, and while I didn't do a lot of hanging around bars (not a wise thing for a foreign woman, especially a young one as I was then, to do), I saw the insides of several of them -- and the only statue I remember is one of a girl wearing a mantilla and nothing else.

From a past President

We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of Earth.

Just a little flutter now and again

Aw, isn't that cute! A nun gambling at the casino. Taking time out from the Lord's work to have a little harmless fun dropping a few carefully saved quarters into a slot machine . . . to the tune of $128,000.

Yes, that's an extra-large picture in the last post

The reason is that I want to show what I saw when I first looked at a Giotto painting: At first glance, the people seem to be smiling.

It's their doll-like faces with the plump cheeks, I realized later, and they and their creator grew on me slightly.

(Not to the point that he did on Miss Jean Brodie, who asked her students to name Italy's greatest ever painter and got "Michelangelo" or some nobody like that, and told them "That is wrong. It is Giotto. He is my favourite.")

In honour of Friday

Giotto's Lamentation

 

 

 

 

 

Catholic power

A U.S. district judge in Michigan has -- temporarily -- gotten an outdoor power equipment company out of buying its staff health insurance that covers birth control, because the owner is a Catholic.

(How many women typically work in a place like that, anyway?)

Government lawyers said it would interfere with the implementation of Obamacare. Judge Cleland wrote:

"The harm in delaying the implementation of a statute that may later be deemed constitutional must yield to the risk presented here of substantially infringing the sincere exercise of religious beliefs." 

("May later be deemed constitutional" -- well, that's a ringing endorsement.)

 
Some days, it comes out right.

Major Luther? He was a military chaplain?

All kidding aside, Reuters tells us "Germany Catholics wary about major Luther festivities". 2017 will be the 500th anniversary of the Reformation, and the party is already in the works. Catholics are invited, but for some reason feel a little hesitant.

(RCIA inquirer: "Luther had some . . . interesting ideas." Me: "Well, we're a little biased about him here.")

And this:

Margot Kaessmann, a former Lutheran bishop who heads the preparations for the 2017 events, has said she wants Catholics to join in but turned down a Vatican suggestion both sides work out a common admission of guilt for the separation.

What does she object to, "common" or "guilt"? Or does she just not want to spoil the festive atmosphere?

Facilities

Plan Canada says:

Did you know that a lack of girls-only washrooms is one of the main reasons adolescent girls in the developing world stop attending school?

 Well, I never would've thought of it. But yes, I can believe that such a small thing can throw children's lives off course.

That said . . . Is it the girls themselves who want the separate washrooms, or their parents who are using it as justification to keep them out of school? Girls-only washrooms can be bad enough in their own way; I seldom went into the ones at my schools once I got into junior high as they tended to be de facto clubs for the girls who were skipping class to smoke. As I didn't indulge in either, I wasn't really entitled to relieve myself.

Still -- it comes back to things like this making a difference.

I'm way ahead of the SSPX

A few weeks ago, among the cassettes going spare from the parish library, I found some recording of Bishop Williamson's, and after consultation with the two other people present, threw it into the trash just hoping no one would fish it out.

Somewhere, I suppose, some rad-trad ladies are doing the same.

This is/was your life

A Catholics Come Home ad.
I like the way the people's lives are set before them as faded vintage home movies, only with sound. I love the intent and the presentation, but -- what exactly is supposed to be happening?

The first man's age and confusion suggest that he might be dying or newly dead when he wanders into the hangar (or is it a barn?) and sits down in the armchair to watch himself yelling at his wife back in the 60s. But many of the other people (well,  not the girl who sees herself shooting up) are statistically unlikely to find themselves dying.

So -- are they all just looking back on their lives, before it's too late, to ask Jesus to "edit" them and "give them the ideal ending"? What is the hangar and how did they all get there, one by one?

Not the most important thing about the ad, but it distracts.

Anyway, I still like it.

Can prayer save this town?

Looking for something else, I found this poll in the Winnipeg Free Press: "Could the collective power of prayer help combat violent crime in Winnipeg?"

Plain "Yes" is in second place as of now, just behind "I find this suggestion inappropriate or offensive".

The city's motto is Unum Cum Virtute Multorum, One with the Strength of Many. Ut unum sint, Deo gratias.

St. Kateri

by Claude Chauchetiere, SJ

Saint as of yesterday. Her latter miracle was curing a child of another tribe.











(This is late, I know, but I spent most of the morning in one of Mrs. Clinton's waiting rooms.)

Yes, but

Being in the first group takes up much more of your time.

Two admissions

from Dover

1. This is just for the sake of posting something today.
2. Dinotopia (TV version) used to be a guilty pleasure of mine.

It's official

"Calling Catholic groups ‘cult-like’ does not amount to discrimination: Ontario Human Rights Tribunal".

They determined the defendant's "anti-Catholic comments were offensive, but not akin to discrimination". Because . . . anti-Catholic comments offend everyone?

I don't know a thing about the student voluntourist program that was hit with the comments (their site is under construction, and seemingly has been for a couple of years) or the "Catholic groups connected to the program". For all I know, the "connected groups" may be cohorts of the Legion of Christ, which would make "cult-like" a very mild descriptor.

But look at this:

Although the complainant was treated differently due to his religious beliefs, the tribunal wrote: “I cannot see how the respondent’s comments about him were vexatious, or known or ought reasonably to be known to be unwelcome, no matter how personally offensive and hurtful he found them to be. Accordingly, the respondent’s comments did not amount to substantive discrimination.”

No vexation here or discrimination here, no, just plain talk, friendly constructive criticism. The sort the defendant would just shrug off if someone made them about her favourite subjects, feminist thought and environmental justice.

Right?

 

Bleak retrospective

In Bleak House, our heroine/part-time narrator Esther Summerson catches smallpox. Not that Dickens ever names it; apparently naming diseases in those days was like mentioning the outhouse. (And speaking of names, you know Esther's not going to marry Mr. Guppy, because she's got a more or less realistic name and he's got a joke name. You know that even before you figure out who her parents are.)

Anyway, after Esther sickens:

. . .everything else seemed to have retired into a remote distance where there was little or no separation between the various stages of my life . . .I had never known before how short life really was and into how small a space the mind could put it.

I once read of a man who almost drowned escaping from a wrecked submarine, who felt he relived every moment of his life as he struggled up to the surface. Bad enough, though he was only 19. When the body seems to be saying life is ending, the mind for some reason gives it a quick once-over and packs it into a small space.

Another time, I dreamt I'd found out that in Purgatory, we have to undergo this for the life of everyone we've ever known. I was trying to look on the bright side and see it as time travel and figure out how far back it would take me -- the 1880's, I figured, for my great-grandmother's childhood.

Now sometimes I think, it's so sternly fitting, I may just find out someday that it's true. 

Slacking off, I know

Too many late nights and early mornings. And my last post was awfully slapdash, and I was afraid the next wouldn't be any better.

But just to tie in with both Mrs. Jellyby and myself: I think the whole let's-get-Mom-a-job trend of my childhood and ever since was based on the faulty premise that convenience food was healthy and delicious. When that idea was given up, it was too late: most mothers were frequently too tired to cook. So families turned to eating out instead, restaurant food presumably being freshly cooked, and if not, what they didn't know wouldn't hurt them. Of course, restaurant food is much more expensive than at-home convenience food . . . but there was no help for it, it was too late.

I speak in gross generalizations, of course. Still, if the cookbooks and my own memory are any guide, home cooks between about 1965 and 1980 relied heavily, trustingly, and with great savings of time and effort, on packaged mixes and frozen everything. Bland, laden with chemicals, but hey -- quick and easy. And of course it would always be that way, as far as anyone knew . . .

Bleaker House

I started out reading what Chesterton didn't like about David Copperfield (at the end, all the fascinatingly weird people take off for Australia, leaving just Dave and his boring second wife) and found myself reading Bleak House and hoping I wasn't really like Mrs. Jellyby.

She's the one pursuing a plan to resettle "the surplus population" in Africa and get them to teach the natives to make piano legs. Meanwhile, her house is in chaos, the kids are in actual danger, the food isn't cooked, her eldest has never learned to do anything but take dictation, and a houseguest has to wash his hands in a pie plate.

Yes, being middle class, she has servants who are supposed to do the housework. But they're the kind who won't unless they're checked up on. It's all Mrs. Jellyby's fault, of course -- and the fault of the people who praise her for her "good works", which seem to be still  at the letter-dictating and flyer-mailing stage.

West of the Canaries

Another free sample from Dover

Someone who bothered to watch the debate ...

namely Jonathan Kay, says  "Romney sounded like a normal human being who cares about real flesh-and-blood people".

Where I wondered whether Romney was being his real self and inadvertently showing how out of touch he was, Kay thinks he both showed his real self ("Real-life Romney’s destruction of Cardboard Romney") and proved that real self was "humane".

You don't quite pick that up from the transcript. 

I really don't know this

Because I didn't watch the debate (didn't remember it was on and not sure I would've given it the time anyway), just read a bit of the transcript.

But when Romney said, "And I'd bring that pipeline in from Canada. And I like coal" -- was he trying to be funny? Or is he so out of touch that he didn't know how he was living up to his stereotype? Or was he just being unapologetically himself? There's something to be said for someone who does that last one, though on its own it's not enough to make me vote for anyone. Real selves can be pretty bad, after all. 

Credit where it's due -- that was a U.S. Army photo before I started messing with it. 

Coffee, not poison

Licia Corbella starts out by denouncing people who say there's no euthanasian "slippery slope":

The people who say that are, inarguably, bald-faced liars, ill informed or delusional. There are no other options.

Good for her -- she's going to get ripped to shreds over it -- but what I really want to highlight is something later on in her column:
 

 Maybe instead of killing lonely people, the staff in these mobile [euthanasia] units should go around and visit them, give them a hug and take them for coffee rather than hand them a lethal prescription so they can die in lonely desperation.

Yes yes yes, and I say that even as a non-coffee drinker. Help them do something that has the stamp of ordinary life, that normal people do with other people. That may not be all they want. But it's part of what they're missing, almost surely.

Befriending people has always been lots of work. But until recently, society didn't have the alternative of helping them do away with themselves -- because that was wrong. Not wrong anymore, so what the hey, bye-bye.

Casual Friday, Casual Vacancy, Casual Labour, But Not Casual Sex

Got indefinitely detained in the dentist's waiting room this morning, dragging into this afternoon. (When I was finally ushered in to see him, he greeted me with "Are you still speaking to me?")

Anyway, in a magazine I'd never have read otherwise, I found an interview with Tracy McMillan, author of this book, which apparently doesn't mince words.(Chapters entitled You're a Liar, You're Selfish, and it gets into namecalling.)

The article I read isn't online anywhere I can find it, so I'll have to paraphrase freely. In the Amazon interview, she says, "We wish we could just date and have sex casually, but many many of us just can't. It has nothing to do with morality, we just don't seem to be able to. And there's nothing wrong with that." In the other article, she more or less said it was impossible for sex to be casual -- we think it can be because we've found a way to keep it from leading to babies, but we can't even manage that much of the time. And it can still make people kill each other and "abdicate the throne". And, as she says at Amazon, "I will be drunk-dialing you for sure about three weeks after I start having sex with you."

Babies, death, The King's Speech, drunken phone calls in the middle of the night -- these things are not brought on by a harmless pastime.

 

Memento

In less than a week, I've visited a dental office, a hospital, and a funeral home, and I think it was okay that I didn't have the energy to do anything about the disoriented man walking along the other side of the street swearing loudly as I went home from Mass yesterday. I was worn out and agitated from all those reminders that an essential part of us can and does get wrecked and used up.

Get yours today!

By the numbers

Number of headlines on front page of Google News that say "Romney's slipping with Catholic voters": One. (From a Utah paper!) Number of headlines in same place that say (more or less) "Obama's surging with Catholic voters": Three.

Number of places I can be at one time: One. Number of places I would have to be tonight to satisfy everyone's expectations: Three.

Number of articles I had to edit today: Nine. Number that came in after I drove home from the hospital in rush hour traffic: One.

Number of Tory MPs who broke with the PM and voted to reconsider when human life begins: 88.

More thoughts on separation of contempt and state

Most people, religious or not, believe in some kind of God. If you don't, you're not going to win them over to your side by constantly saying this makes you smarter than them.

If you don't want to win them over, if you like the idea of being one of a tiny band of True Believers while everyone else rushes to ruin, you're just as bad as the smallest-minded of the religious believers you hold in such contempt.

Can't we all just cook along?

Got immobilized today with nothing to do but watch one of those chef tournament shows. While it was nice to watch a batch of pros, for once, not knowing quite what they were doing,  not getting everything right, finding their breaded fish didn't stay breaded and their reductions weren't reducing and they'd have to stick the dish under the broiler if they wanted it to brown -- it was also disheartening to watch all those people who really loved cooking set at odds with each other, tearing each other to shreds over something so important to all of them.

Why don't I feel the same about Catholics at odds over the Church?

Spare thoughts on . . .

• Editing.I can't always tell whether I'm taking out mistakes -- or attempts at originality. Also, I do a lot of replacing "we" with "a" -- that is, turning "were" into "are". I like movie reviews to take place in the present tense.
•  God's mercy. How is it different from just getting out of something you had coming to you? For one thing, you're required to pass it on.
• "Personal matters". If religion is one, then contempt for religion ought to be one too -- not to be tossed around casually among people who might not be on board with it, and certainly not to be allowed to influence public policy. We'll call it separation of contempt and state.

No patience today for anything more than this

Papyrus Fragment of Mr. Moore

Most of the Wife-o-Jesus articles don't include these parts

The only places I've seen them are the dead tree edition of one of the papers we get, and, strangely enough, the online NYT.

So, partly out of sympathy for Ms. King, here are some of the things that got dropped along the way:

In an interview, Ms. King repeatedly cautioned the fragment should not be taken as proof Jesus, the historical person, was actually married . . . Ms. King said she wants nothing to do with the [Da Vinci] Code or its author: "At least, don't say this proves Dan Brown was right."

I also like the descriptions of this extensive document:

[T]he faded papyrus fragment is smaller than a business card . . . The piece is torn into a rough rectangle, so the document is missing its adjoining text on the left, right, top, and bottom.

Much of the context, therefore, is missing.

Yeah, I guess it would be. But who needs context?

 

My Amazon review of The Telmaj by Erin Manning

Saving myself a little time today by cross-posting. Check out the author's blogs here and here.

What's a Telmaj? We're not told till a third of the way through this book, but by then we're caught up in the story, which starts with just a boy hiding behind a garbage can.

Smijj, like Harry Potter (and this'll occur to anybody who's read HP), is an orphan living in a harsh world, who sometimes finds himself able to do things that should be physically impossible. Like Harry, he's about to find out what he is. This will lead to both joy and danger.

Smijj's home is a rundown space station, thousands of years in our future. His talent is teleportation, the ability to move himself and other people and objects by thought. He can't control it very well, or he wouldn't be hiding from the staff of a store he's just stolen something from. His people, the Telmaj, are needed in an economy that depends on space travel, but they're also exploited. When he escapes onto a well-run cargo ship, it's literally a wish come true. But it's also the beginning of new troubles for him.

One thing that keeps Smijj going is the kindness he finds here and there -- in neighbours, other crew members, and even slaves. He always tries to return it, instead of letting his harsh life make him selfish.

Mrs. Manning doesn't go overboard with gruesome details. Smijj's life is unpleasant, not unbearable. The slaves in the story aren't beaten or starved -- they just have to spend their days doing things like mending dishes with futuristic Krazy Glue. Likewise, the love story of two adult characters is told with next to no mushiness.

I would've liked to see more physical description, especially of the Telmaj homeworld, but we can hope for that in the second book. It also seemed to me that the plot wound up a little too quickly. But, again, the story's not really over yet.

Seriatim

That's the word ("in a series; one after another") I learned last night while reading a 19th-century novel, and which also jumped out at me from today's paper.

References to Burberry also seem to be following me around, but I don't think I'm meant to "request an appointment to visit the Burberry Regent Street Store in London", as their site invites me to.

Vintage tackiness

Nothing is sacred

Unemployed professors are selling term papers to students.

Archie Bunker's little goil is up for drunk driving.

And I have inside information that Ernest and Julio Gallo are selling wine before its time.

Adnonsense

Selling ads for the sites I edit is not my job at all -- I'd be no good at it -- but if it were, I wouldn't find ads on them for things like introductions to women "desperate for a BF", complete with the caution "these girls will persue you". Wonder if the girls can spell any better than their organizer?

As I read the food section in the paper today, I was reflecting that I'd read pretty much anything with a recipe in it -- even an ad. Which got me wondering if it's possible to put a recipe in a Google ad . . . The house is being painted, so I may be hallucinating from the fumes.

Catching up

Right, no post yesterday, so here's stuff from yesterday's paper -- and earlier:

The Kielburgers document three development projects in  Kenya that never got off the ground, fallout from:

the Field of Dreams syndrome: the naive belief that if you build a hospital, school or well, somehow, magically, doctors and teachers and maintenance workers will just appear to make the project a success.

That reminded me of something I'd thought of after reading Three Cups of Deceit, about the man who got famous for building schools in Afghanistan -- except building them was just the first step, and many of them never got past it. The trouble was, again, getting professionals to work in remote areas. If he wanted the kids to learn, why didn't he also raise money to pay (as much as was necessary) teachers? Or, I don't know, stay and teach the kids himself? Obscure teachers don't get famous, of course, and neither do donors who quietly cover their expenses, but if all that mattered was that the kids got taught . . .

Not your Grandma's paper doll clothes

More like Grandma's own clothes from back then. Oh, I've seen the photos.

I love Dover.

Not an exorcism, just a cleansing

Daily Mail:

A terrified widow called for a priest to cleanse her ‘evil’ house after she claims to have seen her dead husband appear on her bedroom wall.

Whatever appeared on the wall, it's still there, as you can see in the photo.

Our last priest said, at least half the time he was asked to do a house blessing, it was because the people thought the house was haunted. He inclined toward the theory of restless souls.

I'm going to lay off Pauline

A man was killed (R.I.P.) in the hall where she was speaking on what was supposed to be her big night; she's had enough for now. 

But the shooter, a "a disturbed-looking heavy-set middle-aged man wearing a bathrobe . . . saying something about the English waking up" is fair game. It seems the English may be waking up, but they haven't managed to get dressed yet.

Unnumbered list

• Pauline is in. Now everyone in Quebec will be issued a crucifix inscribed, not INRI or IHS, but ADFCS for "a des fins culturelles seulement" -- for cultural purposes only.
• An imam in Bahrain's been transferred for saying "anyone who believes that a church is a true place of worship is someone who has broken in their faith in God." Has broken? Does he think everyone is born Muslim and, if they're not lucky, corrupted by their infidel parents?
• Not again.

Three, four, whatever

"Is this the worst lie Paul Ryan has told yet?" 

So what if it is? What bothers me is that already he's acquired a name for never letting the truth spoil a good story. Like Mulroney; like Michael Moore.

Chesterton said the English party system was founded on the principle that half a truth was better than no politics. In this one instance, the Irish seem to agree. Half a truth is more than enough. No politics would be unthinkable.

Paisleys, nice and nasty

There was a Monty Python sketch where a guy walked through a department store, past "The Paisley Counter" where a menacing man was holding forth about "the iron boot of the Protestant empire".

I'm sorry such beauty shares an association in my mind with a man who once made me spit at my own TV.

There he was, calling for "internment on both sides of the Border". When I calmed down, I thought, "Fine -- they can lock him up on both sides of the Border."

Unedited

A writer's sent me something that needs a lot of editing. The trouble is, she sent it not to be edited but to be reviewed.

It's her self-published novel, which I heard about from her PR firm. The announcement came with the notice that anyone who wanted a review copy or an interview should ask the author herself -- IOW, she's only got the cheap PR package, one step up from DIY.

If I let our reviewers at it, they'll be . . . harsh. 

Offering to edit it myself would be a bit opportunistic, or a conflict of interest or something. Besides, she probably can't afford any editor, even me.

Praying for wisdom on this one.

Prosecuted, maybe, but not persecuted

Being ordered to Iraq doesn't qualify you for refugee status:

Rivera, the first female U.S. war resister, fled to Canada in 2007 to avoid further military service.

She had initially arrived while on leave but then applied for refugee status . . . A spokeswoman for Immigration Minister Jason Kenney said in an email that the federal government does not believe the U.S. subjects its soldiers to persecution.

Lots of downright unfairness, true, but it's what they signed up for. What I once signed up for. 

Bits

• They'll have a designated (if unpaid) bundler for the controversial envelopes, so that'll keep the parishes on the right side of the law. There's some simplistic stuff at the link, but you can take it.
• Comment somewhere on the Republican convention: "It's good to be Canadian."
• "Turnaround, not runaround!"  makes a good chant. Coincidence, I'm sure.
• Day late etc, but anyway: "Forget the ‘war on women.’ The real women’s issue this election is the economy."

Can and can't do

"Catholic churches can't collect donations to overturn gay marriage law, Washington state rules".

But it's all about who gathers up the envelopes, of course! Someone from the state government:

says the church can hand out envelopes, but either a member of Preserve Washington has to be on hand to collect them or parishioners must send them in individually . . . "We just want to make sure they understand what they can and can't do."

Here's something a Catholic institution can do:

As the Gulf Coast prepares for the impact of "Hurricane Isaac," Catholic Charities USA (CCUSA), as a leading national disaster response organization, stands ready to provide support and assistance to our local Catholic Charities agencies in Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas.

No objections over technicalities there.

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/2012/08/27/4761887/catholic-charities-usa-and-its.html#storylink=cpy

 

 

Well, at least he's apologized.

AP:

The Rev. Salvatore Cordileone said in a statement issued by his office Monday that he was driving home from a dinner with friends in San Diego with his mother early Saturday when he was pulled over at a DUI checkpoint. He said a sobriety test showed his blood alcohol level to be above the legal limit . . . He says he is ashamed of what he termed an "error in judgment" and plans to pay his debt to society.

And at least he was in respectable company, and he says he made a mistake. Still -- ashamed is just what he should be feeling.

Installation in SF on October 4th -- if he doesn't decide he should resign, I suppose. His court date is five days later and that's definitely going to happen.