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.

Another Headcovering Issue

As some of us dither over whether chapel veils look too darn good and draw too much attention to us, defeating their purpose, some Catholic women have a different problem with the whole issue:

“Please, in view of the present security challenges, the church has urged women to stop coming to Sunday service with big headgears and bags to enable security men know when a bomb will be smuggled into the church” -- Fr. Uche Obodoechina, Nsukka, Nigeria

No Sunday purse, either, then. The article goes on to say anyone half an hour late or more for Mass is out of luck -- the doors will be locked.

Actually, these ladies may take up veils as more security conscious . . . or they may do as the rest of the world and just go uncovered.

It works on paper

This bout sponsored by Dover Publications. Kind of like Trudeau vs. Brazeau, only with a touch more WWF. Or maybe SCA.

If you're sick of both parties, though, they also sell a kit so you can  build your own White House. It'll be very small, and made of cardboard, but it only costs $10.

Church lady gone wild

Everyone's read about the old Spanish lady who "fixed" the 19th-century fresco in her village church. Some people have even formed the impression the job had been done by a commissioned artist. I might've thought so if the newspaper people hadn't run a large heading about the "well-intentioned" old lady above the before-and-after pictures.

(If she'd stuck to just touching up the hair, probably no one would have noticed.)

Not surprising that people took it as intentional. What's been misrepresented as "the spirit of Vatican II" seems to frown on anything that looks as if it was hard to make. Spain wasn't immune to it -- I heard of a Spanish gentleman who took one look at his newly built parish church in those days, said, "I'm not coming to Mass here" and made his family troop across town to the Cathedral for the rest of his life.

Still not going away

Anna Ella Carroll, 1815-1894

I've been reading a biography/hagiography of the lady on the left, but it's hard to get enthusiastic about someone who wrote a book called The Great American Battle, or, The Contest Between Christianity and Political Romanism.

Look, I'm glad she turned her talents to better things, like saving the Union. And if it's true the U.S. government promised to pay her for some of her work and didn't deliver, that was shabby.

Still, I hope at some point, some well-placed Catholic (Ellen Sherman? Or just one of Anna's own Catholic relatives) made sure to tell her "You may as well get used to us, we're not going away."

Scraps

• Drugstore customer overheard demanding respect: "I make about $3000 a day!"
• Drugstore manager assuring customer he is respected: "We're not stereotyping."
• People wonder how Chef Gordon Ramsay (of Hell's Kitchen and now Hotel Hell)can judge innkeeping. What I wonder is how he found the cure for denial: Lock the victim into the haunted top floor of a hotel, with only a handless mannequin and a camera crew for company.
• How to cancel out all the F-bombs you threw at the innkeepers: Leave with a promise to pay for the disabled teenage prep cook's education.
• How to cancel out any accusations of sentimentality caused by above: Tell the kid "God help you if you fail out of that college!"

Another anniversary

Knock Shrine

August 21st, 1879, there was a Marian apparition at Knock -- or, as one witness put it, "Our Lady is in the village."

Though it's not observed where I live now, I went to Mass today, and heard something that could be taken as a warning to Ireland:

your wealth has continued to increase,

and with this your heart has grown more arrogant . . .

and you will die a violent death

surrounded by the seas.

 But what do I know, I'm not Ezekiel.

A focus group said the imaginary lady on the new $100 bill looked Asian. So:

The bank immediately ordered the image redrawn, imposing what a spokesman called a “neutral ethnicity” for the woman scientist. . .

Neutral ethnicity?

Why don't we quit inventing fictional characters to put on our money and stick to real people? Real women scientists, for example. Even Pauline Marois would do in a pinch.

Real people don't have "neutral ethnicity".

The Anniversary Effect

Sort of a sad day for me, for anniversary reasons. No one's fault. Act of God. Many years ago. Forgetting would be worse.

Bonnes nouvelles, mauvaises nouvelles

Pauline Marois (photo by Louperivois)

 Good news: Pauline Marois "held her news conference at a historic sawmill that was run by a Catholic religious brotherhood."

Bad news: It was to present the PQ  "Charter of Secularism".

Good/bad news: It's more like a Charter of Cultural Catholicism. 

Which means they're not demanding to tear down the crucifix from the wall of the National Assembly.  Pauline says: “There is no question of touching certain traditions that make up part of our heritage . . . We do not have to apologize for being who we are.”

No, even if what you are is cultural Catholics. But is cultural Catholicism worth chartering?

It's my experience that any sort of partial Catholicism, anything less than trying to make it your life, drains your energy and gives you nothing in return. 

"Culture" is becoming a code word for exempting certain religions -- for whatever reason -- from the supposed secular ideal. Awhile back I sat on what I'll call the Benevolent Committee for Distribution of Other People's Money. Some Muslims applied for a grant, saying openly that they'd use it to share their "religious believes". Oh, and they'd serve a meal too. I questioned whether we should approve this, and someone else asked if, after all, we would give money to a Christian group for something similar. "But this is cultural," we were told. 

But if you admit that culture and religion are inextricable, the secular ideal collapses. Nothing left to charter . . . but, of course, secularism isn't really what the PQ is trying to charter here. Just some remnant of their Catholic identity that won't ask anything of them but will help them rally against those disturbing other people.

(Photo: Louperivois)

Since I have to write SOMETHING about Paul Ryan

I see he supposedly starts his day with P90X, "extreme home fitness" as created by the indescribable Tony Horton.

I'll just post a sample.

Tarkington's mothers

Alice Adams, like Seventeen, centers on someone very young who forfeits a lot of our sympathy by madly pursuing goals that are worthless and unattainable. William loves a severely vapid girl. Alice is desperately seeking a place -- and a husband -- among her city's upper crust, which seems to consist of a few cliquish rich families who barely tolerate her.

A few things make Alice's story much less funny, though it has its moments. 

She's older (22) and her life, unlike William's when his summer madness hits, is really stalled. Her family's not so well off as William's, and not nearly so well off as they pretend to be.

And her mother's just as silly as she is.

William's mother is calmly detached, except when his inamorata babbles baby talk to her and when he tries to buy a tux with a checkered past to wear to the big dance. (It was worn by a murderer at the time of the crime, his little sister reports, but the secondhand dealer got the bloodstains out.) When Dad's tux comes back from the tailor too small, she indirectly lets William know he can borrow it after all. Not that it solves all his problems . . .

Alice's mother, on the other hand, ramps up to the big dance by spending the whole day remaking one of Alice's dresses. Our heroine, meanwhile, is out raiding a public park for violets because she can't afford a corsage. (She gives her mother more sewing time by washing the dishes, and when she breaks a saucer she just sweeps the pieces under the stove.)

Mrs. Adams really believes her daughter belongs up there at the mansion, not in their own boring old lower middle class milieu. The other girls are just jealous of her. The rich girl Alice pushes herself on really is her best friend. If Mr. Adams had only taken some initiative . . . etc., etc.

William's mother asks Miss PRATT, as he calls her, over for iced tea and cupcakes. The only concession she makes to keeping up appearances is to send the yardman around back so he's not the first sight visible on the premises. Alice's mother asks gentleman caller Mr. Russell to an overambitious dinner party featuring "fashionable" Brussels sprouts and a temp waitress whom she tries to pass off as "our housemaid". This falls through when Alice's father has to ask his wife what the girl's name is. And of course, this all takes place on the hottest night of the year.

William's mother stands back and sees him through; Alice's mother tries to help, but just hurries her down the road to disaster.

It's not always fun being the sane one. But often it's Ma's job.

"Ryan Paul"?

That's what one of the Canadian papers called him in a sub-headline evidently caught by no one. But up here, no one got in trouble when Obama was labeled "Osama".

Every man and woman over fifty ought to read Seventeen . . . No mature person who reads this novel will ever seriously regret his lost youth or wish he were young again....

-- William Lyon Phelps

 Among other things, it would mean thinking the way Our Hero does when he "can't" go to the big dance because he's  no longer able to swipe his father's tux and pass it off as his own:

It did not once enter his mind that he could go to the dance in his "best suit," or that possibly the other young people at the party would be too busy with their own affairs to notice particularly what he wore. It was the unquestionable and granite fact, to his mind, that the whole derisive World would know the truth about his earlier appearances in his father's clothes. And that was a form of ruin not to be faced.

There's nothing I want to touch today

So here's just another little Jewish story.

Moses is up on Mount Sinai with God, watching all the other Jews below. He sees a man go to a stream for water and lose his purse without noticing, then go away. A second man comes, picks up the purse and goes off with it. A third comes -- and then the first comes back and asks the third if he's seen a stray purse. The third man, of course, says no. But the first doesn't believe him and kills him.

Moses asks God how he can let such things happen.

God explains: The first man had stolen the purse. The second was the real owner. The third, who seemed just an innocent bystander, had in fact killed the thief's father -- so while the thief was wrong to kill him, he was only getting what he had coming to him.

God only knows . . .

Bad news, good news on children of mixed marriages

1. The bad news is: They may form the impression that Catholicism is not their proper heritage, but just some whim of their Catholic parent's.
2. The good news is: They may actually be reconciled to their upbringing merely by being told: "Hey, kid, I signed a paper saying I'd raise you Catholic."

The prophet Haggai/Aggeus spends most of his book telling the governor and the high priest that yes, they will manage to rebuild the Temple. Then, over three weeks later, he gets a second, rather mysterious message to pass on (all prophecies are messages to pass on):

Speak to Zorobabel the governor of Juda, saying: I will move both heaven and earth. [23] And I will overthrow the throne of kingdoms, and will destroy the strength of the kingdom of the Gentiles: and I will overthrow the chariot, and him that rideth therein: and the horses and their riders shall come down, every one by the sword of his brother. [24] In that day, saith the Lord of hosts, I will take thee, O Zorobabel the son of Salathiel, my servant, saith the Lord, and will make thee as a signet, for I have chosen thee, saith the Lord of hosts.

Zorobabel/Zerubbabel intrigues me. He may have wondered, on and off for the rest of his life, how he was going to be an instrument to move the cosmos and conquer the Gentiles when he was having trouble just getting the Temple rebuilt. It must have seemed to him that his family was in an irreversible decline; his grandfather had been king, but he himself was extremely lucky to have been made governor of Judea. Jewish legends say he had worked security in the palace at Babylon, rising higher after he, essentially, won an essay contest.

They also say he's an ancestor of the Messiah. Matthew and Luke, of course, say he's an ancestor of Jesus.

Rabbi Ginzberg's Legends of the Jews further says:

. . . the archangel Metatron dealt kindly with him. Besides revealing to him the time at which the Messiah would appear, he brought about an interview between the Messiah and Zerubabbel.

Much like the one between Jesus, Moses and Elijah, but, as I've said, more of a family gathering, which is probably why -- if it happened at all -- there's no record of it.

But I don't want to get all pious-fictional. 

Anyway, maybe Zerubabbel didn't spend his life puzzling over the prophecy after all, but came to know, in whatever way, that long after he was dead and the family's decline seemed complete, one of his descendants would conquer the world in a way no one could imagine.

And one for . . .

The Transfiguration may not have been the only time Jesus broke the barrier and met with someone from the Old Testament -- but the other meeting would've been more of a family occasion.

I'll post about that tomorrow -- I thought I had already, but Blogger got confused.

David Frum: "Once upon a time, victim status was the reserved property of a few minority groups. No longer! Americans have opened the doors of self-pity to all."

(The article's about Chick-fil-A, but this post isn't.)

Once I thought of writing something about someone who was having a hard time getting to know her neighbors. She imagined how they'd react if she suddenly died, and their dialogue  went something like this:

"None of us actually wanted her to die -- so in  a way, we're all victims."
"I don't self-identify as a victim."
"Hey -- maybe you don't know when you're being victimized, but I know when I'm being victimized."
"When?"

"Whenever anything happens that I don't like."

Then, I think, somebody else was going to suggest starting a support group and the first guy was going to say "Nah, let's party" and music would come from nowhere and they'd all start dancing. That's why I'm writing blog posts instead of great fiction . . .  but yes, the perception is that unhappy = victim. The meaning of victimhood is being diluted, along with the meaning of marriage and maybe even the meaning of homosexuality, if Obama can be called the first that-kind-of President.

It reminds me also of a bored voice coming from behind me in the lineup at the dollar store once. It was directed at the cashier: "Can you call the police? I'm being threatened. She said if my daughter wasn't with me she'd kick my @ss."

(No, I was not the "she" mentioned -- in the unlikely event that I were going to kick someone's butt, I'd just go ahead and do it.)

Unimaginative junior-high boasting of hypothetical catfight = threat.

Unhappy = victim.  
Moderate desire to be publicly acknowledged as a couple -- for now = marriage.

Legally forbidden leakage

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Religion, politics, and "Walking in Memphis"

If Union Army = boys in blue, Grant = "blue as a boy can be"

When Memphis fell to the Union Army, they took over one of the Protestant churches as a chapel for the soldiers. The congregation wasn't thrown out -- but the preacher was, and it was made clear that Army chaplains would be conducting the services from then on.

A deacon of the church went to General Grant saying that the congregation couldn't be expected to listen to Northern preachers who disagreed with them politically. Grant said his soldiers couldn't be expected to listen to Southern preachers who were disloyal to the Union. 

(Grant prevailed, and the deacon went on to another subject of interest to him -- the money he had seized on behalf of the Confederate government from Union people in Memphis, only to have it re-seized by the Union Provost Marshall. He said he was afraid the CSA would get after him for the money, and Grant just said he didn't think that would happen while the man stayed in Memphis.)

Apparently North and South had split not only into two countries, but multiple denominations. Was Grant as a non-practicing Methodist aware of this, or did he just learn it on the fly as the war went on?

What about the Catholic soldiers (and there were plenty, with the Irish immigrants and some of the Germans from St. Louis)? Did they have to listen to Southern priests, or were these tossed out of their parishes by the Catholic chaplains? I find it harder to imagine that happening among Catholics than among Protestants -- but I may be way off. Civil wars are strange times.

Constructive Criticism

To the articulate person who commented that one of my (professional, real-name, at-work) published posts was "A ***ing useless article" -- you're wrong. I got paid for it. 


However, your comment, which will most likely never make it out of the comments queue because it contains an obscenity, is an utter waste of whatever time you took to compose it -- which, I suspect, comprises the entire three and a half months since the post was published.


That is, if you're not just a spambot.