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.