Auntie Suzanne Blogs It All

In Which I Buy Cake Mix

2012-01-15T21:51:00.000-06:00

Last month Uncle Pookie saw and thought he had to have a castle-shaped bundt cake pan. (My mistake for showing it to him!) So then he wanted to show off the pan by using it to make cakes for a couple of pre-Christmas gatherings. This necessitated my coming up with something to put in the pan. Because I gave up most baking years ago, the only cake recipe I have made enough times to know it's utterly reliable is the Gingerbread Cake recipe from Home Cooking (mentioned here) and I didn't want to use that. So something easy and quick that UP could make himself if I didn't have time? Cake mix to the rescue?

I don't like cake mixes. I'd only ever bought two cake mixes in my life--one bought when I wanted chocolate cake in what was then a bachelor's kitchen (hence no basic ingredients for cake) and another years later when I saw this thread on Pattern Review about pie filling cakes and was overcome with a curious desire to try the chocolate cherry version. I couldn't deny that the pie filling cake was easy and just tasty enough to pass muster. So I picked up some mixes and the the resulting cakes were okay--cute as (moderately attractive) buttons, in fact, with maraschino cherries resting in the towers and, on one cake, the door and windows outlined in frosting; the Nordic Ware people make a good pan.

Now here's the warped part. Afterward I found myself think of this non-event a few times with embarrassment. Apparently, without realizing it, I'd gotten some sort of small charge out of being able to say I'd only ever bought two cake mixes (as if that made me better than anyone who couldn't say it!) and here I'd gone and doubled the number of cake mixes I'd bought. I'd contributed a dessert to a gathering that wasn't homemade, but a mix. Twice! I was disappointed with myself for doing something that isn't remotely a sin or even mildly unethical.; it isn't even socially unacceptable in most places.

Noticing this, I said to myself, This is stupid, and I went out and did the only thing I could think of: I bought another cake mix. I bought a spice cake one, I mixed it with caramel apple pie filling and an extra spoon of cinnamon, I dotted brown sugar on top of the batter before I baked it, and I served the resulting pieces of cake with a dollop of poor man's whipped cream (Cool Whip). It was pretty darned good. And I'm over whatever the hell was wrong with me.

What does it all mean? Damned if I know. Probably that I spend too much time on minutiae. Maybe that I'm neurotic. Maybe that I just need more going on in my life.

Anyway, for anyone who's not subscribed to Pattern Review, here's the recipe:

1 cake mix, dry [regular 2 layer size]
3 eggs
1 can pie filling [21 oz]

Combine ingredients till well blended. Put in greased and floured pan.
Bake at 350ºF. Toothpick test for doneness.

9 x 13 pan........35-40 min.
10 x 15 pan.......25-30 min. [jelly roll pan]
12 x 17 pan.......20-25 min
12 cup bundt pan.........40-50 min. [Cool in pan 25 minutes before turning over.]

It's the Stupidity

2011-09-19T19:14:00.000-05:00

The headline "PETA to launch porn site in name of animal rights" did not cause me to bat an eye: I'm too used to reports of PETA exploiting women's bodies or comparing having a chicken dinner to exterminating millions of people or doing other disgusting things to gin up some controversy. If I hadn't felt the need for a chuckle, I wouldn't even have clicked.

And I have to say, I batted an eye this time.

Not over the idea of porn. Over this: "[PETA] hopes to raise awareness of veganism through a mix of pornography and graphic footage of animal suffering."

It's the stupidity that gets me. Is PETA the only group of people who can't see the problem with this?! I can. The two other people in my house when I read the news article can.

So what's PETA's thought process here? We want to end animal suffering. Hmm, how best to go about it...ooh, I know, let's get more people to start associating animal suffering with sexual arousal!

We can't even use the term "unintended consequence" here, because there's generally an expectation that unintended consequences are things that are hard to impossible to predict. This is easy. If enough people look at your porn site and experience a sequence of "porn picture, porn picture, porn picture, animal suffering picture, porn picture", sooner or later some of them will start to be aroused by the animal suffering pictures. And maybe one or two of them will decide to act upon that by making a little more of it in the world.

I mean, if I wanted to promote Americans putting more of their money in savings, I would start posting pictures online of scantily clad women going into banks with envelopes marked "savings", maybe work my way up to some videos involving women overcome with lust in front of the teller's window as they accidentally overhear the size of the man in front of them's account. Or maybe I'd just some random photos of people making deposits interspersed with a variety of other porn pictures; why go to the work of making themed porn. The point is I'd use sex to promote something I want to happen, not something I want NOT to happen. That's basic advertising. I certainly wouldn't try to get people to associate sexual arousal with the thing I wanted them to stop doing. That's basic sense.

I'm flabbergasted.

Everyone Should Be a Bureacrat

2011-09-14T22:24:00.000-05:00

When we moved into our new place, Uncle Pookie decided to get cable. Frivolous and unnecessary, sure, but I'll admit to watching more than I should and to liking the DVR feature. Mostly having television allows us to watch stuff we would have watched on DVD or Netflix streaming anyway, such as catching Burn Notice episodes as they air instead of a season at a time on DVD, but there's a new-to-us show we like called Sons of Guns. It's a reality show set in a gun shop in Baton Rouge. It's interesting subject matter and the owner of the shop reminds us of a friend of ours who died, so we enjoy watching.

Occasionally while watching the gunsmiths at work, it will cross my mind that these men have the kind of job that modern elites sneer at.

Every episode the guys at the gun shop are presented with a problem that they need to solve. They then have to use their seemingly vast knowledge of weaponry and tools and mechanics, plus good old human brainpower to figure out how to solve the problem. Then they have to test their solution and modify it as necessary. They are clearly thinking.

But it's largely manual work, you see: blue collar. A trade. Therefore of little value. There can be no creativity in it or satisfaction. Their school guidance counselors should have encouraged them a little harder to seek white collar work, preferably in the nonprofit world.

Or not. I touched on the fallacy of manual work being mindless once before here. And I was reminded of this stuff again when I read "Why your teenager can't use a hammer" today. (Link from a Mark Steyn post, which had an interesting follow up from John Derbyshire, who has been known to describe a particular education fad as the "No American Should Have to Do Manual Work" belief.) It is very interesting reading.

I'm also reminded by it of a news article last year, which had teachers in England saying that children were arriving at school poorly prepared to do math, because they had spent nearly all their playtime indoors watching screens, instead of manipulating real world objects; a specific example was children today not having the understanding that two differently shaped objects might still have the same volume that children who'd spent time playing with containers in a sandbox would have had. Playing in the dirt or with blocks and crayons instead of handheld game systems or just playing outside the constant oversight of adults for an hour or so turns out to have benefits in muscular development, brain development, and encouragement of independence. The "cotton wool generation" is missing out on a lot of experiences.

I'm buying my soon-to-arrive nephew a toy tool bench. It goes on the list with crayons and paper and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.

Left Untried

2011-08-11T14:19:00.000-05:00

My lunchtime reading recently was Left to Tell: Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust, a memoir by Immaculée Ilibagiza. The author hid for nearly three months in a tiny bathroom with six other women. There was little food, little water, no bathing; and it was still preferable to what would have been their fate outside. These women were not criminals hiding from the law but members of the wrong tribe in a time when their country had gone mad with hatred and resentment. They were hiding from machete-wielding rapists and murderers who had the full backing of their government.

While she sat in the bathroom, Ilibagiza prayed all day. And while she prayed, she came to know that God required that she forgive the people who were slaughtering so many of her fellow countrymen and who would kill her if they found her--that the command to forgive our enemies is not just empty words, but a requirement if we are to continue to grow in holiness. By then her closeness to God was the only thing keeping her going, so somehow she did find the will to forgive them (though as you can imagine that was an act that took renewal as further news of atrocities reached.)

The mind boggles.

Really.

I can think of no better illustration of the G. K. Chesterton line, "The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried."

No human acting alone--i.e. without God's grace--could forgive such an enormity. It is hard enough for us to forgive relatively small insults from the petty-minded among our relatives and neighbors, but to forgive the utterly senseless murders of our family and countrymen, having our home burned and the whole course of our life disrupted, being forced to huddle together with strangers in fear of our life for week after week--everything natural in us recoils at this idea. But Christianity requires it.

I know enough from my own small troubles about how it can feel to rely on God in a time of stress, that I can understand something of the way she was resting in God's presence in that bathroom. No one would want to lose that closeness. So I know why she had to choose forgiveness, but that she actually succeeded at it is an enormous thing to me and I'm sure that this is one of the rare instances in my life when I'm firmly in the majority--utterly normal, fitting right in.

Forgiveness in a situation like Ilibagiza's would be impossible without God, and many of us would think God is not only cruel to allow the situation but unnatural to expect us to forgive those who caused it. But what's the alternative to forgiveness? Carrying the burden of resentment and hatred and vengeful desires all our lives? Letting the (justifiable) anger go on so long it poisons everything else we have? Letting it all build and grow in the society until it becomes another round of violence, with different names on the victims list?

So what to do? Forgive. Temper justice with mercy. Seek God. It's all easier said than done (!), and in the end it comes down to each of us in our own heart and head, deciding what to do, whether we will listen to God or to the Evil One.

Random Thoughts

2011-07-27T23:13:00.000-05:00

***

Motivation counts for a lot. Even the middle-aged and out-of-shape can move fast when someone in the same room with them looks out the window and says, "Tornado!"

***

Think twice before telling God you probably need a big kick in the pants--if it's true, he knows already and saying it in prayer is just asking for trouble.

***

Cliches get to be cliches for very good reasons. Having your family come through a dangerous experience unharmed really is the most important thing about the experience, and it really is the case that the best way to appreciate something is to realize you might have lost it. Truisms may be tired, but they're true.

***

When you have an unpleasant job to do, it works better to imagine yourself as an Asian (or other) immigrant to the US who is just glad to be here or even to put on the mantle of Christian humility than it does to adopt an attitude of "lazy, entitled, modern American".

***

We all arrive at adulthood with our own set of faults, but it seems to me there's few greater failures possible in life than to reach old age and death with all of those faults intact and unmitigated.

***

We should all occasionally ask God to help us focus on the beam in our own eye rather than the speck in our neighbor's.

***

Anyone who doubts the Eucharist imparts actual grace should compare the ease of dealing with difficult people when they're receiving the Eucharist regularly relative to the times when they weren't.

***

Some self-proclaimed Christians say "I've been praying for you" in a way that is suggestive not of actually praying for you, nor even of wanting merely to express polite concern for your well-being, but of contempt.

***

At least one of my grandmothers was a teenaged mother and no one gave her an MTV show. Probably because she did the boring, socially responsible thing of getting married first.

***

Everyone notices a nun in traditional habit. It's an eye-catching message that "here is something different", a wordless rebuke to worldliness. If they'd known what a great witness their distinctive garb is, surely no nun back in the '60s and '70s would ever have wanted to get rid of their habit.

***

Speaking of the '70s, this is my favorite song about the '70s: Tom Servo's Haunting Tribute To the Seventies.

***

Dennis Prager or someone once pointed out that marriage is the only "relationship" that creates new family.* Has anyone pointed out that this can be uncomfortable for your family? Just like with being born, we don't get to pick the people we become related to by marriage--not by the marriage of our relatives, anyway. Considering some of the people our blood relatives can, with a quick trip to a JP's office, make us related to, it's almost enough to make arranged marriages seem appealing.

* Well, I guess any male-female sexual relationship can create new family, but it does not necessarily do so.

***

Sometimes, having your principles meet reality can feel like a car hitting a concrete wall--jolting, even if everything inside is still intact.

***

The lyrics to Aretha Franklin's "A Natural Woman" could almost be the theme song for any female Christian convert.

***

Re a recent Cul-de-Sac , why DO adults feel the urge to use constructions like "l'il" in kid stuff?

***

It's surprising people continue to steal actual CDs and DVDs when it's so much easier and safer to steal the digital version of the same thing.

***

The maxi-dresses I see everywhere this summer are better-looking than shorts and are a big improvement over a**-crack and stretch mark-revealing low-rise jeans, but why do 80 or 90% of them have to be accompanied by visible bra straps under their spaghetti straps or rising above their strapless bodice? What's the thought process here: "I'm going to buy a pretty dress and, as the crowning touch when I wear it, I'm going to have my underwear hanging out!"

***

Miscellaneous Thoughts About the Last HP Film

2011-07-19T15:04:00.000-05:00

I went to see Deathly Hallows Part Two yesterday. This is, arguably, the best of the films. I've never liked the films as much as the books and went to see DH Parts One and Two mainly out of completism. I can't claim to have thought much about it or deeply, but here's some shallow thoughts.

The pacing was really good. I went to DH2 expecting action but fearing that the necessary backstory and exposition (Snape's story, wandlore, restatement of what the deathly hallows are for people who didn't see the first film) would either bring the film to a stop several times or else would be so nearly eliminated that viewers who hadn't read the books would be left confused. Instead, the movie kept up a good pace and the wandlore and Snape's memories were blended in seamlessly.

The only thing I think someone who hadn't read the books would have been confused about was the question of who that woman lying beside Remus Lupin was. Yes, filmgoers met her in The Order of the Phoenix, but very briefly and that film was the one that I thought probably was confusing to non-readers. Tonks' romance, marriage, and child with Lupin were pretty much non-existent in the films. There's one or two small things in this film that could have been made more clear (for example, how some of the resisting students were actually living in the Room of Requirement, they weren't just camped out in a hallway) but nothing important.

I was surprised we didn't see Fred die. The twins were a big enough presence in the films (unlike, say, Percy) that I'd assumed we'd see his death in battle.

The bit with the "baby" in King's Cross station was more clear than in the book.

I once remarked that the sixth book was the book where Harry became a man, but DH2 is the film where Harry became a man. From the very start of this one he no longer seems like a boy, but an adult. Presumably it happened while he was burying Dobby.

Ron seems more grown-up too. The cardboard movie stand-ees at the theater had Ron looking a bit bad-ass, instead of his all-too-frequent goofy befuddlement of the early films.

They did a good job with the blinded dragon underneath Gringott's. Other visual stuff was good too, as we've come to expect in contemporary movies, but the work on the dragon impressed me and moved me to pity the beast.

Neville gets to come into his own. We don't get to learn as much about Neville in the films as in the books, but I like Neville and am glad he gets to be a hero in both.

I wasn't entirely comfortable with McGonagall arbitrarily deciding to lock up the entirety of Slytherin house in the dungeons, rather than giving them a chance to choose their loyalty as individuals.

Were they implying an incipient romance between Neville and Luna? There was a line from Neville I didn't quite catch, so I'm honestly not sure.

Unlike some reviewers, I didn't think the job of aging the young actors to portray thirtysomethings for the film's coda was badly done.

Not everyone was a fan. Moments after the last scene faded I was thinking, well, that's the end of it, and a child piped up behind me, "Yay, it's over." I had to explain to the people I was with why I was laughing.

The MST3K guys once remarked that at some point in, I don't know, the late eighties maybe, filmmakers started crediting far more people at the end than they ever had before, making the MST3K guys' job harder. Between that and all the special effects people involved in making contemporary films, credits really are getting too long. I entertain myself by looking for interesting names among the scores of credited people; FWIW there are some in DH2's credits.

Long Quote of the Month

2011-07-13T01:48:00.000-05:00

I recently found Crisis Magazine's archived articles by John Zmirak (of the Bad Catholic guides fame) and have been enjoying them one or a few at a time. A longish bit from one of them--"Satan: A Tapeworm"--leapt off the screen and right for my brain. Zmirak was saying that it bothered him how many supposedly uplifting Christian movies "are not really “spiritual,” much less Christian; they’re simply bland and inoffensive."

The Catholic faith is neither. In fact, like really authentic Mexican food
(think habeneros and fried crickets), it is at once both pungent and offensive.
It offends me all the time, with the outrageous demands it makes of my fallen
nature and the sheer weirdness of its claims. It asserts that, behind the veil
of day-to-day schlepping, of work and laundry and television and microwaved
burritos, we live on the front lines of a savage spiritual war waged by
invisible entities (deathless malevolent demons and benevolent dead saints)
whose winners will enjoy eternal happiness with a resurrected rabbi, and whose
losers will writhe forever in unquenchable fire. Sometimes I step back and find
myself saying in Jerry Seinfeld’s voice: What’s with all the craziness? Why
can’t I just enjoy my soup?

The Church’s heroes, seen from a worldly
point of view, are a pack of self-destructive zealots who embark on crackpot
projects like lifelong celibacy, voluntary poverty, and (worst of all)
obedience; who leave perfectly serviceable chateaus in France to go preach the
Beatitudes to scalp-collecting Indians in freezing Canada; who volunteer to
sneak into Stalin’s Russia precisely because he has imprisoned so many priests,
then spend decades saying secret Masses in labor camps; who open up pro-life
pregnancy centers in crappy neighborhoods so they can talk welfare queens into
having still more babies we’ll have to pay for . . .

And so on. A
religion like this doesn’t need after-school specials; it needs science fiction
and fantasy, horror films and surrealism to convey the fundamental strangeness
that it believes lies just beneath the surface of day-to-day “reality.”

And that, my friends, goes a long way toward explaining why I am Catholic. The weirdness is palpable and the stakes are high (the highest) and the witness of those who have gone before is amazing.

Tech, Tech Everywhere ...

2011-07-08T16:28:00.002-05:00

So, the other day I was about to light a scented candle when I suddenly realized I hadn't moved the kitchen matches up from our old house. Well, no problem, I'll just--I'll just--umm...I just stood there foolishly as I realized the problem: no matches, no cigarette or fireplace lighter, electric stove so no open flame, no pilot light anywhere as far as I could tell. There I was, standing in a house filled with high-tech stuff that can cook my food, wash my clothes, help me exercise my body, communicate over long distances, and entertain me sixteen ways from Sunday, but I can't make fire.

It seemed a very Chestertonian moment somehow.

Knowledge Is/n't Power

2011-06-22T20:35:00.006-05:00

I just recently finished the sixth and final installment of Jean Auel's Earth Children series, and I've concluded it's a subversive book. No, not because it takes place on an Earth more than six thousand years old, not because it depicts goddess worship in a pre-Christian world, nor because it imagines our ancestors interbreeding with Neanderthals. Not even because the first book has multiple rapes of a very young woman and the subsequent books include numerous and often detailed sexual encounters. All of that's fairly passe these days, and part of this book is definitely (though perhaps unintentionally) hitting a very contemporary sacred cow.

As Ayla is nearing the end of what I'll call her shaman training she gets her "call" (visions) and, as part of this, receives supernatural confirmation of her long-held theory that it's sex with a man that creates new life in a woman's belly. Her superior decides they must reveal this information to their people, despite the inevitable social change it will cause. Ayla thinking about this afterward considers that the knowledge will empower women: once women know babies are made by sex, they can, when it would be inconvenient or undesirable for them to get pregnant, refrain from sex.

Now that's a subversive idea.

We've been hearing since the '80s that, while knowing about contraception is good, knowing what causes babies can in no way affect our behavior. People who know full well where babies come from can not be expected to refrain from that activity just because they can't support a baby, aren't married, have important goals that would be hindered by a baby at this time, etc. Knowledge is not power when it comes to sex and babies. That's been the message for at least half my life.

I guess Ayla, being a cave woman, was too dumb to know that.

Blog on Hiatus

2011-03-13T19:54:00.008-05:00

I know I don't blog all that frequently anyway, but I thought I'd post to say that, due to some major disruptions in our life (largely nature-induced), this blog is going to be on hiatus for several months, minimum. I feel bad mentioning my own troubles when there is so much suffering going on in Japan right now, but if anyone who reads this blog feels so inclined, I would appreciate prayers, even if I never know about them in this life. My husband and I are both alive and well (the most important thing!) and already have been on the receiving end of much kindness from friends and family, but it's going to be some months before we get things sorted.

Random Thoughts

2011-02-13T13:28:00.018-06:00

***

If the sizes above size 14 are called plus sizes, why aren't the sizes below 14 called minus sizes?

***

When I was young I had a button that said "I read banned books." Nowadays I think that message of rebellion would be better replaced with "I draw inappropriate stick figures."

***

If there's a spectrum of autism and Aspergers, then shouldn't there also be a spectrum of normality with some people who are technically "normal" (i.e. don't have Asperger's), but who aren't quite "neuro-typical" either?

***

Microwaves are a great convenience, but no microwaved spaghetti and meat sauce has ever tasted as good as skillet re-warmed spaghetti.

***

In the autumn I'm grateful to have days with a high temp in the seventies, but in the spring a high of 74 or 75 is just a harbinger of the ~~horrors~~ heat and humidity to come.

***

Isn't a "No Trespassing" sign on a fence kind of redundant?

***

My favorite typo in the world is "Viola!", frequently seen where "Voila!" was the clear intention. There's just something so wonderfully capricious about crying "Viola!" to present something with a flourish. The only way it could be bettered would be to use "Petunia!" instead.

I love pot roast!

2011-01-29T16:44:00.004-06:00

Sometimes things can be found in the strangest places.

Uncle Pookie and I recently watched Freaks and Geeks for the first time. It's a shame we missed it when it was on TV because it's easily the best TV show about high school ever (Buffy is a contender but goes past high school). Fortunately, the whole series is now available on DVD and well worth watching.

So is it just me or is there a great depiction of traditional, Christian marriage near the end of episode 10? See the scene I'm thinking of in this Youtube clip, beginning around the 3:25 mark. The setup for the scene is that, encouraged by another parent, the father and mother of our main characters secretly read their daughter's diary. They find no evidence of the kind of wrongdoing they feared, but they do learn their daughter thinks of them as boring bourgeois automatons. This upsets the mother, who starts trying to make some changes to their routine.

It's the Christian ideal of leadership--maybe a bit of chivalry too--given expression by a Midwestern, sporting goods store owner on a show with the word "freaks" (i.e. burnouts) in the title. Unexpected, but sweet.

A Story for Corpus Christi--Really Early

2011-01-28T20:07:00.005-06:00

A while back, while returning from a trip to the coast, my husband and his friend were talking geek stuff and my mind was wandering somewhere far outside the car window, when it suddenly came back inside just in time to catch the tail end of a mini-rant from our friend on comics or Transformers or something: "The main problem I have with it is they should have paid more attention to it. I mean, he basically ate God. You can't do that and not have it affect you!" My husband looked over (at least his voice sounded as if he looked over) and said, "You should become Catholic."

Quote of the Month

2011-01-28T19:59:00.005-06:00

I've been rereading Lord of the Rings, something I wish I'd done years ago (I did listen to a big chunk of the Fellowship audiobook a while back ), as it seems better than it did when I was in high school. Despite the annoying tendency of movie images to invade my mind from time to time, it's been really enjoyable so far. The Two Towers especially so, as it seemed to tear along at a surprisingly fast pace compared to the other two books. Here's my quote of the month, taken from it:

'...How shall a man judge what to do in such times?'

'As he ever has judged,' said Aragorn. 'Good and ill have not changed since yesteryear; nor are they one thing among Elves and Dwarves and another among Men. It is a man's part to discern them, as much in the Golden Wood as in his own house.'

An Easy Resolution For Us

2011-01-03T17:01:00.002-06:00

Okay, so it's January 3rd and pretty much everybody who was going to make a New Year's resolution has already made one or given up on the idea or both. But in the unlikely idea there's anyone still looking for an idea, might I suggest something: praying before meals (aka saying grace, asking the blessing), even if you're in public.

I live in the Bible Belt, a part of the country whose religiosity is apparently so intense as to offend people on the East and West Coasts, and I have hardly ever seen prayer in restaurants, cafeterias, and such. As a child I, like most of my classmates, was taught to pray before meals at home; it's often the first prayer people teach their children. But for the most part we didn't pray before meals in public areas. (Church gatherings would be an exception here.)

People who I knew were church-goers and who I'm pretty sure prayed before meals in their homes never seemed to do so in public. It's almost as if it were taboo to pray in public, but most of the people I grew up with were proponents of prayer in the public schools, so there goes that theory.

I figure skipping the before-meal prayer in public is either habit or they're too embarrassed to actually do it.

What's to be embarrassed about? I can only call recall a couple of instances where I definitely saw someone who was alone pray before a meal in a public area and both times I thought better of them, although I was not a practicing Christian myself. Once was when I was a teenager in a MacDonalds and a man who was obviously a drifter of some sort sat down with his meal and began to address his Heavenly Father so loudly that pretty much everyone turned to look. I don't recommend this, but I thought no worse of him for it.

The other was when I saw an older woman at my workplace sitting with her lunch in the employee lounge bow her head and move her lips in silent prayer before she began eating, and I thought, "Good for her". She was a nice lady and as far as I could tell she always prayed like that, whether she was eating alone or with others. I loved that she didn't compromise her beliefs just because she happened to be in public.

Gratitude is the fundamental religious instinct. Even people with no religious training--or who have rejected what they received--feel the need to give thanks at times. It's an instinct worth nurturing. "Ungrateful" is an insult in every part of society. That's the reason a before-meal prayer is often the first prayer people teach their toddlers, right along with the "please" and "thank you" they're teaching them to say to humans. Those expressions are not empty ones.

An article in a pagan magazine I saw a long time ago said that "please" and "thank you" are actually manifestations of a profound truth: noone owes you anything. Noone owes you, so when you ask for something, you acknowledge that by asking nicely. Noone owes you, so when they give you something, you express gratitude; they didn't have to give it to you, but they did.

If we say thank you to the stranger who tells us what time it is or a friend who passes us a cup of coffee, how much more should we say it to God, the one who gave us everything? If he gave you the intelligence to get yourself to the restaurant and earn the money to pay for the meal and the good fortune to live in a country where there's abundant food to buy, why not a little thank you, even if there are people around who might see and suspect what you're doing. If you're Catholic, cross yourself afterward and let 'em see. It might remind them to think about the things they're grateful for.

Random Thoughts

2010-12-19T16:33:00.008-06:00

***

Religion is not for perfect people who don't have to try, but for imperfect people who are willing to try.

***

The correct way to eat spice drops: separate out all the white and all the purple or black ones to give to me, then choose what you like from the rest.

***

Hmm...an Asian-American makes a live-action movie from a cartoon series set in a fictional world composed of people who all belong to one of "four nations" (some of whom live at the South Pole!) and to portray these fictional peoples he chooses to use actors from a variety of real-world countries and ethnicities ... yeah, that makes me assume racism all right. Hell, it's right up there with apartheid.

***

There are times I wonder if I'm out of step with my fellows (fellow women, fellow Americans, fellow contemporaries, fellow humans), then there are the times I know I am.

***

Leaving aside perhaps a few percentage points worth of people differently configured emotionally, it seems every man deep down really wants the approval of the woman in his life.

***

I don't want to take away any of the blame owing to addle-pated theorists, but maybe part of the reason substituting "gender" for "sex" caught on in middle America was that people were tired of the joke "Sex?" "Occasionally."

***

Sometimes I think if I hear one more person refer to pants and skirts that sit at the natural waist as "high-waisted", my head will explode.

***

Does any compliment other than "sexy" exist any more? Girls and women used to be pretty or beautiful, charming, sweet, smart, good. Now they're sexy. They wear sexy clothes, have sexy hair, engage in sexy pursuits (reading is sexy, knitting is sexy, etc.), and sometimes have sexy livelihoods (librarians are sexy). Nothing else exists.

***

A trip to the grocery store reveals prunes are now called dried plums and high fructose corn syrup is now corn sugar. If people have a problem with your product (e.g., giggle at its reputation for having mildly laxative properties or think it's a cheap and unhealthy substitute for sugar), just rename it. After all, changing the name changes the thing. Just ask KFC.

***

Maybe if older women had more grandchildren to hold there would be fewer spoiled rotten little dogs and doll collections.

If young women had babies younger, there'd definitely be fewer chihuahuas in skirts.

Maybe the main beneficiaries of delayed childbearing are small dogs.

***

Sometimes I wonder how many people around me (here in the Bible Belt, in a country where something like 89% of the population still self-identifies as Christian) have actually read the Gospels, let alone the rest of the Bible. Believer or not, you can't consider yourself an educated Westerner if you don't have at least a basic familiarity with the Bible, but I'm not sure the average American has it anymore.

***

I never seem to hear anyone say "damn" or "damn it" any more. But "f---" is everywhere.

***

Parades must be strange experiences for the two and three year-olds that get taken out to see them. At a time when you might ordinarily be getting ready for bed, you inexplicably get taken out to a public street to stand around in a crowd and wave at people going by in fancy getups. You're allowed to stand in the edge of the street, perhaps encouraged to make little dashes into it between floats. And your parents, who ordinarily tell you not to eat anything that's fallen on the floor, are picking up candy from the ground and giving it to you.

***

Are Americans collectively forgetting how to use nouns? Everywhere I look it's "bringing back sexy", "bring on the awesome", "how to create sexy", "she delivers the cute", "keep your normal off me" ...

***

Many prayers could be summed up as followed: Oh God, please don't let me experience the normal, natural, and wholly predictable consequences of my freely chosen actions!

***

A lot of Anglo-Americans find it weird that Mexicans and Americans of Mexican heritage will name their sons Jesus. But a lot of Anglos name their daughters Christi (or Christie, Christy, Kristi...). It only takes about two seconds of thought to see that is clearly weirder.

***

US to Kenya: Kill Your Offspring, Reap Rewards

2010-07-22T15:08:00.009-05:00

There was a news story this morning about the White House spending 23 million dollars of taxpayer money trying to get Kenya to legalize abortion in their new constitution. Leaving aside the fact that it's against US law to lobby for (or against, I think) abortion in other countries, what do we get out of this? Seriously, what is in it for us? I know Washingtonians don't consider $23million to be much money--not when it's other people's money, just "tax all you want, they'll make more"--but I'm still old-fashioned enough to think you should get something for your money and I want to know what we, the people, get out of this.

Kenya is a poor nation. If they have large reserves of natural resources we want to buy from them or if they are somehow strategically important to us in some way, I don't know about it. Now, there's a whole lot of things I don't know, so maybe they are important to US interests in some way that it behooves us to make friends with them via monetary gifts.

But, if so, could somebody please tell me how the #&!% do you diplomatically spin a gift like that?

US: Kenya?
Kenya: Yes?
US: We think there are too many Kenyans. If you would take steps to ensure that in the future there won't be so many of you, we could slip you some money on the quiet to show our appreciation. In fact, here's a little to get the ball rolling.
Kenya: ...

Here's a question for a WH press conference: Mr. President [or Mr. Press Secretary], does this administration have a problem with all African babies, or only Kenyan babies? Inquiring minds want to know.

Robin Hood

2010-07-21T23:02:00.005-05:00

A few weeks ago Uncle Pookie and I watched The Adventures of Robin Hood--that's the 1938 film with Errol Flynn. Despite watching Daffy Duck and Bugs Bunny in parodies of it when we were children, neither of us had seen the original. And I have to tell ya--Technicolor-look or not, lack of gritty realism or not--it beats the pants off the later Robin Hood films. Kevin Costner's Robin Hood couldn't have gotten an IT team to follow him if he offered free doughnuts, but it's easy to see why men followed Errol Flynn. Flynn's Robin Hood was charismatic, as a man leading a rebellion/guerilla movement in the woods needs to be. The whole movie is just plain fun.

My only regret is not to have seen it when I was eight. I would have loved it and spent hours afterward swashbuckling with a pretend sword. And I was a girl! Imagine how much fun a little boy who'd seen it would have. (Assuming he's not already jaded from years of video games and the cynical, crude, and oh-so-ironic programs and commercials on contemporary TV.)

Another, small thing about The Adventures of Robin Hood is that they remembered something I've been saying for years: Merrie Olde England was Catholic England. Religion is treated more respectfully here than it would be in any contemporary film. Yes, the Cardinal is in cahoots with Prince John and Friar Tuck is a hothead, but Friar Tuck is on the side of the good guys, at the beginning we see a priest or monk shown among the few willing to stand up to the oppressive Normans, and Robin Hood recruits Friar Tuck because he's out looking for a priest to tend to his men's spiritual needs. There's a few "by'r Lady"s scattered in there. More important, when the Merrie Men want to determine whether Maid Marian is really sincere, they ask her to swear by Our Lady--clearly, a serious oath to them.

No, this isn't a religious film; it's not even a serious film. It's just lighthearted fun from a time when religion was considered a normal part of life (there in the background, even if it wasn't up front) and Hollywood didn't automatically sneer at religious people, and which happened to depict a time when England was still Catholic.

If you're still with me, here's a little more Robin Hood fun from The Real Mother Goose, copyright 1916 by Rand McNally & Company:

Robin Hood and Little John

Robin Hood, Robin Hood,
Is in the mickle* wood!
Little John, Little John,
He to the town is gone.

Robin Hood, Robin Hood,
Telling his beads,
All in the greenwood
Among the green weeds.

Little John, Little John,
If he comes no more,
Robin Hood, Robin Hood,
We shall fret full sore!

* mickle = big

This rhyme was accompanied in the book I have with a fullpage illustration of Robin hood kneeling before a cross praying his rosary (i.e. "telling his beads"; "beads" refers to the physical beads of the rosary, but also to the older "bede", meaning prayer). You can see a small version of this picture online here.

Listen and Watch and Sing Along

2010-06-09T22:32:00.004-05:00

UP and I saw the clip of Gene Simmons' tribute to the US military on Big Hollywood last week, but I've found myself thinking of it several times since and I had to go back and look at it again today. It made me choke up; then I sang along and it made me feel proud and happy. If you haven't seen it, do go look.

I am not given to saying that everyone must like this given thing or feel a particular way about that given thing. Comments like that are mostly idiotic. But right at this moment I can't help thinking that if anyone does not understand why I like this video so much, that person must not be fully American somehow. Skimming a little way down the comments section I saw this comment on the video: "That's completely American... loud, proud, sloppy, ready to kick ass, and a bit off key." [Ellipses in the original.] Damn straight.

A Bumpersticker That Made Me Happy

2010-06-06T15:09:00.004-05:00

Two or three days ago Uncle Pookie and I were going to see a movie with a friend. They were talking games or comics or something when I nearly squealed, "That car has something about black Catholics!" "What?" "The bumpersticker on that van over there," [I indicated one in the next lane] "it has something about black Catholics on it." UP drove up a bit closer so I could read it:

"No matter what,
no matter when,
black Catholics respect life."

I felt really happy seeing that bumpersticker; not even the laughing comment of our friend (who is black himself), "As if they exist!" could dampen my enthusiasm at seeing it. I guess technically it was a pro-life bumpersticker, but I see those frequently (and the "Choose Life" car tags even more frequently) and I'd never before seen a bumpersticker about black Catholics.

I don't have time right now to go into why that made me so happy to see that I'm telling you about it several days later, but it did. For now, suffice it to say I have occasionally looked around at the pews in mass and, seeing only a few black faces, found myself wondering, "Where are all the black people?" Say I'm racist for even noticing the color of my fellow parishioners, fine, whatever, I'm a racist who wants more black people to have the fullness of truth available in the Caholic Church. Say instead I ought to keep myself more focused on what's going on in mass instead of looking around at my fellow parishioners, and I'll agree with you on that.

The Shame We All Live With

2010-05-30T22:01:00.004-05:00

Some people complain about parents picking their children's religion and ask if parents should have a right to do so. Given that such people typically do not regard any religion as efficacious or true, I don't see why they should care, given that we inevitably teach our children all kinds of pointless things they won't bother remembering into adulthood anyway. (Quick, what's your state flower?) But be that as it may, I think they miss a much greater cause of outrage--parents actually choosing their children's names for them.

There is no greater sign of having dominion over someone or something than that you name it. Slavemasters named their slaves. Pet owners name their pets. The owners of the rights to a creative work name it. The owners of a business choose its name. It doesn't matter what the preferences of the slaves or the people who are employed by the business are or what the pet would (if it had reason) want to be called, the owners make the decisions on names; it is a sign of being the owner.

So think how appalling it is that a parent should name his (or her) baby. One human being naming another human being, just because the one is powerful and the other is helpless and happens to share DNA with the first. The older one violating a relationship that surely should have love as its basis by committing an act that says, "I own you!" The other, small and vulnerable, having among its first moments in an unfamiliar world be the slapping upon itself of a name that it did not choose and may not like.

And does the state try to prevent this imposition of the larger person's will upon the smaller one? Ha! Not only does the state not prevent parents arbitrarily decreeing that a particular child will be known as Wilhelm or Jacob and another as Shaniqua or Emily Rose, it effectively takes the parents' part by not allowing the imposed upon party to change his name until he has reached adulthood. The child will be known by the not-chosen-by-him name on every government document upon which he is "represented" until he is an adult. And even after he becomes an adult, the government will put obstacles in the way of his desire to change his name by the imposition of such things as paperwork, filing fees, and/or a visit to a judge. (The procedure varies from state to state.) Madness!

Until such a day as the adult child finally manges to jump through the last government-mandated hoop to remove what he never asked for from his identity, he must not only use the undesired name on every government document, he must also sign it to every school paper he produces, write it on tags in his clothing, use it on his college applications, put it on his ATM cards, and even--if you will credit it--answer to it in his daily life!

Parents should not name their children! Children should get to choose their own name when they are adults, and parents should not be allowed to influence their free choice in this matter. It is not enough merely to call your Congressman or Senator. Contact the U.N.'s Human Rights Council and let's get international laws changed to protect the rights of children in this crucial matter. If enough people start working on this today, perhaps soon we will no longer have to live with the nightmare scenario of little girls having to submit to being called Jennifer even though they know they were meant to be named Sade.

Random Thoughts

2010-05-28T21:47:00.002-05:00

***

During the final years of Virginia Woolf's life, James Herriot began his career of driving around Yorkshire, treating sick animals. And you know, I reckon as a veterinarian he contributed a lot more to humanity and to human (let alone animal) happiness than Woolf ever did. And his writing about it gave a lot more pleasure too.

***

Maybe it's just me, but I think if you're not yet physically well-developed enough to fit into the big boy condoms, maybe that's a sign you ought not be having sex yet.

As opposed to a sign someone needs to make you junior-sized condoms.

***

"Mostly free" is not good enough. Not in economic freedom any more than in personal liberties.

***

Hearkening back to something I wrote some years back, I think the next time someone mentions a pregnant dog to me, I'll start yelling, "They're not puppies, they're canine fetuses!"... Then again, maybe I have enough social marks against me already.

***

I wonder if Morpheus is a blanket-hog.

***

You can butt your head up against human nature all you want, but all you'll get is a bloody head.

***

I'm considering suing John Ringo for alienation of affection. 'Cause when my husband is reading one of his books, I can't get no affection. :-P

***

A lot of people fret about oil spills (and did long before the recent and ongoing unpleasantness), but hardly anybody frets about estrogen in the water supply from hormonal contraceptive use. That sounds like selective outrage to me.

Happy Pentecost

2010-05-23T21:13:00.005-05:00

Happy Pentecost to any and all Christians reading this. To any Jewish people reading this, I hope you had a happy Shavuot. And to anyone reading this who doesn't know what Pentecost is, you can try here and here for some more information, but the short answer is that it commemorates the descent of the Holy Spirit as described in the second chapter of the biblical book of Acts.

And since the word Pentecost makes many of us think of Pentecostalism, here's as good a place as any to mention one of the many things becoming Catholic has done for me: it got rid of my culturally-absorbed prejudice against Pentecostals. I grew up among fairly mainstream Baptists and Methodists in the American South and there was a bit of a prejudice against Pentecostals (though of course, it being the South, everyone was too polite to be rude about it to anyone's face). Pentecostals and Holiness people were often called by the derogatory term "holy rollers" and were considered to have unseemly and overemotional, even tacky, religious services. People shook their heads at what they'd heard those Pentecostals got up to, with their fervent preaching and shouting and falling out on the floor and talking in tongues and--especially hard for Baptists to take--dancing. Some mainstream women might also shake their heads at the grooming restrictions many Holiness women adhered to, with their lack of makeup and their long hair.

I absorbed some of this prejudice myself, although I'm not sure if I ever realized it before I had to read The Grapes of Wrath for a class and found the Pentecostal Joads irritating to read about.

The ugly truth is that class snobbery was what was behind a lot of the head shaking, not doctrinal problems. Kathleen Norris has written about this a bit in her book Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith. Pentecostals in the past often came from the poorer, less educated parts of society, and I think that still holds true, although I've heard that in the last twenty to thirty years the average wealth and education level has gone up. I think for some people a bit of that lower class tinge remains in their perception of Pentecostals.

For me, becoming Catholic got rid of my mild prejudice. For one thing I came into the Church on the Pentecost Vigil. That kind of makes you think about the Holy Spirit, even if you don't think that deeply. I believe in the Holy Spirit; I publicly affirm it along with my fellow Catholics every time I go to mass and privately every time I pray the rosary or the Divine Mercy chaplet. I believe in the Pentecost account in Acts. I believe in the gifts of the Holy Spirit and the fruits of the Holy Spirit, even if my understanding is not good. So why should I or anyone who believes these things be bothered by people seeking the Holy Spirit?

For another, I was baptized in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. The Catholic Church teaches that everyone who is baptized thusly is part of the Body of Christ, even if they are not in full communion with Rome, and thus all other Christians are my brothers and sisters in Christ. (Yes, I know some Pentecostals baptize in the name of Jesus only, but I figure they are at least trying, so I tend to think of them as siblings in Christ too.)

For another, I was made aware of Charismatic Catholics--Catholics who pay a lot of attention to the Holy Spirit and enjoy more emotionalized or "spirit-filled" devotions outside of mass; some of them even "pray in a spirit language" (i.e. "speak in tongues".) This is not attractive to me, but the Church is both worldwide and ancient, creating room for a multiplicity of personal devotional practices, no one of which will appeal to everyone--and that is fantastic.

For another, even before I came into the Church I was very attracted to the line in Galatians about there being neither Greek nor Jew, slave nor free, male nor female in Christ Jesus. That seems to me a clear indication that we are to leave our worldy considerations, such as class consciousness or wondering if other people's cultural-acquired preferences are "tacky" or not, outside the Church door. I also did a fair amount of thinking around the idea that God's standards are not our standards. Remember that Flannery O'Conner story in which the smugly self-content Southern farm lady has a vision of all kinds of poor people and freaks going up to heaven before her, shouting and clapping and dancing on their way? It's like that. With God, the last shall be first and the first shall be last. You only have to hear "blessed are the meek" to know you are not in worldy territory; this is not how we think, but how God thinks.

For another, as a Catholic I'm now part of a religion that a lot of people look down on and consider full of tacky things. Pilgrims going in bare feet or on their knees up the steps to a shrine--how gauche. Crucifixes with blood dripping from them--a little too real to be in good taste. The Sacred Heart--what's that about? The Way of the Cross? Probably something "ethnic" people do.

And for yet another thing, Catholics receive the fullness of the Holy Spirit at confirmation. No doubt that helped.

So why am I going on at such length about my having shed what was only ever a mild prejudice? Well, for starters I'm glad it's gone; I'm glad I'm no longer bigoted against Christians in general, no longer inclined to demean myself by sneering at "fundies", and no longer prejudiced against "holy rollers". For another, in a time when any stick will do to beat the Church, I think it's good to tell some of the good we find there, even something as minor as this. American society has for forty-plus years held up prejudice as the greatest of secular sins. Well, the Catholic Church helped rid me of one subset of prejudice. That is a good thing, right? She deserves props for it, right?

Our Little Family Unit

2010-05-16T15:24:00.002-05:00

For your viewing pleasure, a family portrait:

That's Uncle Pookie, our late cat GrouchyKitty, and me.

Apparently the camera not only adds ten pounds (to me), it makes husbands shorter and turns black calico cats solid black.

Not Having to Dress Up for Church

2010-05-06T19:29:00.003-05:00

OR

Why I'm Ambivalent When I Hear Other Catholics Say We Should Dress Up for Church

Saturday I was driving home from a casual trip out and thinking about stopping at a store to browse, when a glance at the clock suggested that, if I skipped the store, I had time to get to vigil mass in time to go to confession beforehand. So I did. As it turned out I didn't go to confession because the line was too long (mass was late starting without my adding to the line), but it was good anyway: I got to be at mass, to hear the scripture readings and make a spiritual communion, and (presumably because it was May Day) to hear some Marian music I don't get to hear often. This included a lovely Ave Maria sung by a man in the choir loft and Salve Regina as the recessional; I'm no singer, but I enthusiastically joined in on the recessional.

This experience was the highlight of an already good day, and it couldn't have happened if I had had to "dress up" for church, rather than being able to go as I was. Which was in blue jeans and a pretty, new-to-me knit top and tennis shoes.

Catholics online often bemoan the way contemporary Catholics dress for church, and I agree with them that we--or at least we here in America--can and should do better. But at the same time I am really glad I have the freedom not to worry too much about how I'm dressed when I go to church. I'm glad that I had the freedom to just go Saturday, knowing that noone would turn me away or talk about me viciously behind my back.

When I was growing up (Baptist), we had to dress a certain way for church services; this seemed to be the case in all the churches around where I lived (Bible Belt). Everyone had to dress up to the best of his ability; women couldn't wear pants, however nice, to Sunday services; and blue jeans were verboten, especially for women. Shorts were only for the small children at Vacation Bible School, not older girls. The first instances of women showing up in pants suits for Wednesday night prayer meeting or, worse, a teenage girl in blue jeans for Sunday night service were occasions for talk.

My mother paid a lot of attention to dress for church. I can't say if she was representative of others or not (I hope she was not), but she placed what I consider an excessive amount of importance on dressing for church. It was more a matter of vanity and pride for her than a matter of being decently clad for worship. I'm sure that, had anyone brought such a thing up, she would have given verbal agreement that just being clean, respectable, and there was more important than being expensively dressed, but that's what it would have been--verbal agreement. In actual fact she fretted about not having clothes and shoes nice enough to make a good showing among the other women and about her daughters not being as expensively dressed as the children of some other families. She fretted about it to the point she considered not having nice enough clothes to be an excuse to stay home. What does that say to a child?

My sister absorbed just enough of this attitude that, when I once suggested she visit one of the local Catholic churches, her "considering-it" question was, "How do they dress?" I understand the desire to be approriately dressed, but somehow that didn't seem like the most pertinent question to me.

For me, church could never be about clothes. One of the things I like about mass is that it is centered around Jesus; it is not about the minister or the quality of the preaching or the socio-economic status of the worshippers or my appearance, but about Jesus. If it were about me and my appearance, it wouldn't be worth going.

Now, because it is about Jesus, it is worth dressing up, even if we don't always do it. I don't wear immodest clothes to church, nor do I wear anything dirty and torn or anything that might reasonably be distracting or offensive to others. I would insist on similar minimal standards (probably higher) if I had children I was responsible for, and I would complain if my husband said he was going to wear, say, his Viking World Tour tee-shirt. If I'm too casual too often--and I am and I admit it's largely laziness--I at least try not to be a total slob in my dress. I also make sure I am clean, hair combed, etc., because I do know I am going to meet Jesus in the Eucharist. (Also, as a matter of charity, I don't want to become a form of involuntary penance for my pew-mates, due to bad breath, body odor, or head-swimmingly thick cologne.)

An interesting thing, though, is that we meet Jesus in the Eucharist in every mass, not just Sunday mass, and people saying we should dress up are usually talking about Sunday mass. I think everyone expects people at daily mass to wear their daily clothes, whether it's formal business wear, business casual, uniforms, or the stay-at-home mom or retiree look. (Or maybe they just expect daily communicants to know how to comport themselves.) Personally, I like that expectation--that idea that worship can take place every day and is not just something that happens when you are dressed a certain way. Mass happens, whether it's Sunday or not, whether you are dressed in your best or not, whether you feel like it or not. I smell a bumpersticker: Mass Happens. ... Eh, maybe not. My "Haiku Happens" idea was a lot better.

Oh, and in the unlikely event any non-Catholics want my advice on clothes before visiting a Catholic church, here's what I told my sister when she asked: "It would be more respectful not to wear anything skin-tight or low-cut but other than that, wear whatever you want. I can pretty much guarantee that no matter what you wear to a Catholic church, there will be someone there dressed better than you and someone dressed worse than you."

The High School Motivational Speech Noone Asked Me to Make

2010-04-20T19:44:00.003-05:00

Some people like to exhort kids with, "You can be anything you want to be." This is usually followed with something like, "You can be a doctor or a lawyer, you can even be president if you want". I don't disagree with the gist of this message, but I think it might be better to take the focus off jobs and instead tell kids, "You can be anyone you want to be." In other words, "The kind of person you become is entirely up to you." That is and always will be more fully true than saying you can have any kind of career you want--the five foot two inch, slightly built boy isn't likely to make it as a defensive lineman, for example, nor the 6'3" husky man as a professional jockey. But whatever jobs may or may not be open to you in your particular society, the individual is always and everywhere the one who decides the kind of person he will become, and I think it might be more important for kids to hear that than to hear that they can become a lawyer if they want. My message would be, "You can become the sort of person who keeps his promises, or you can become the sort of person who breaks his word. You can become a man who abandons his children or one who does his best by them. You can become a woman who builds up her family or one who tears it down. You can become someone who betrays his friends or someone who shows loyalty. You can become someone who gossips maliciously and backbites or you can become someone who doesn't. It's all up to you. You determine who you become with all the choices you make every day. If you've made some bad choices in the past, today you get another choice--you get to decide if you will become the sort of person who is humble enough to admit wrong, learn from your mistakes, and correct them where possible or if you will be the sort who refuses to do any of that. Your choices, always. Who you will be is up to you."

Sewing Quote

2010-04-20T16:49:00.004-05:00

Or, Sylvia Plath as you've never seen her.

From Letters Home by Sylvia Plath, letter dated October 8, 1960:

I have a new and exciting hobby. You will laugh....I went downtown and bought three 2-yard lengths of material--one bright red Viyella (at $1.50 a yard), one bright blue linen, and one soft Wedgwood blue flannel with stylized white little flowers on it (both at about 50 cents a yard). I also bought a dress pattern and nightgown pattern (Simplicity). Yesterday I completely cut out and basted the little nightgown, in a one-year size. It is exquisite....I pinned the little nightgown together to see what it would be like, and it's a little fairytale thing....My next purchase that I'll save up for is a sewing machine! I don't know when anything has given me as much pleasure as putting together the flannel nighty for Frieda--the pieces are so little, they are very quickly done. If I practice a lot now, I'll probably be able to make most of her clothes when she goes to school. The London stores are full of marvelous fabrics... [all ellipses in original]

She goes on to say that she and her husband consider handcrafts "the most satisfying things in the world to do. I am awfully proud of making clothes for little Frieda."

Apparently the fad didn't die immediately. Nearly a year later she mentioned in a letter that she was going out to look for a second-hand sewing machine like the one she'd been borrowing.

Happy Easter

2010-04-04T21:54:00.005-05:00

Christ is risen!

I hope everyone reading this has a happy Easter season.

A Little Round-up

2010-04-02T20:22:00.010-05:00

Sometimes I wish I had a digital camera set up for easy posting of pictures to the blog. It's been good weather recently and everything is in bloom, but it's not too hot to walk in the daytime yet, so we've had some nice walks recently where we could actually see things other than streetlight-illuminated pavement. There are still lots of azaleas, both in full flower and in bud (they seemed to bloom late this year due to the cold winter), but there are also spiderwort here and there, though it is earlier than I usually see them. There are all sorts of weedy things: the little four-leaved flowers some other children and I used to call "wishing violets", but which are probably a form of bluet; henbit; wood sorrel (pink); and all sorts of other things, mostly yellow flowers, some white, a lesser amount of pink and lavendar. Best of all are the wild violets. I've seen several little patches of them on our recent walks. In addition to their beauty, they are unexpected and so easily overlooked that they seem more of a treat than the equally beautiful spiderwort I see every year in south Mississippi.

Last Sunday (Palm Sunday) Uncle Pookie and I took sandwiches to a little park and, as I said, everything is in bloom. The weather was wonderful and it was great seeing everything in bloom. We also saw our first snake of the year. It was a big one, and an ugly bastard, rough-looking and mottled brown; I think I saw a triangular head as I moved quickly backwards, but it was ugly regardless. We were surprised to see it, because it didn't seem that warm yet. We'd stopped on a little place where the road went over a large drainage ditch (there's often fish in there and we like to look at them) and the snake was sunning itself on a kind of metal pipe or support that stretched across the ditch. As we started walking away the snake flopped itself into the presumably cold water and we couldn't see it anymore. Nearby was a larger patch of wild violets than I'd yet seen and for just a moment it seemed a shame that they grow closer to the snake's home than to mine. Also that that snake, so ugly compared to, say, a little green garter snake, could crawl all over the beautiful violets. This is fanciful thinking of course, to call one bit of nature touching another unfair, because it is ugly and the other is beautiful.

Holy Thursday I actually made it to mass. I'm ashamed to say I've never been to Holy Thursday mass before; although it's not a holy day of obligation, it is still a holy day and I have often meant to go and somehow never made it. In the past I've sometimes had to resist the urge to refer to it as "foot-washin' Thursday". When I was growing up I would, rarely, hear my elders refer to "foot-washing Baptists"--fellow Baptists, perceived as perhaps a bit "backwoods" or old-fashioned, who practiced foot-washing in church. (For the record, I also heard my mother say to another relative that we should not put it down because her father, who was a respected preacher, believed in it as a potentially good thing, albeit something they did not practice.) In the Roman Catholic rite, the Holy Thursday readings all relate to the Last Supper and early in the priest emulates Jesus by washing the feet of a token number of male parishioners. My understanding of this is that it is symbolic not just of emulating Jesus in a rote way but of the Christian understanding of leadership--the one who would lead must serve; the one who would lead all must serve all. The ritual is actually rather beautiful at its heart.

Leaders humbling themselves before the people they have the privilege to serve? Reminding themselves they are servants? Some United States Congressmen might benefit from that.

Uncle Pookie and I went to see How to Train Your Dragon with a friend earlier this week. I wasn't thrilled about going because, although the trailer looked okay and there were some seriously cool promotional children's playsets for the movie in Wal-mart, I have a long-standing problem with de-monsterfying monsters, especially dragons. I like my dragons Western and dangerous and in need of slayers, not Eastern and personifying neutral forces in nature, let alone friendly and misunderstood. The "Which is cooler, Western dragons or Eastern dragons" thing is merely a matter of inidividual taste, but the rest is not. We do our children and our culture a disservice when we try to get rid of every monster out there and paint them as merely misunderstood. The world is dangerous and populated by monsters who can do more damage than dragons, who after all are easy to see coming. Children, like adults, need stories that say, yes, there are monsters, but monsters can be slain and sometimes that slayer can be a very ordinary person who reached within and summoned up the necessary bravery and faith and cunning and stamina to do what needed doing.

However How to Train Your Dragon won me over. The whole "the monsters aren't really monsters, just misunderstood" thing is dangerous territory and now old and tired territory, yes, but in the case of this particular movie's story, think of it as a pet-taming story and you're there. It's actually a pretty good animal-taming story. And if the "big, burly father misunderstanding his son" bit is also rather tired, at least Dad wasn't malicious or hopeless and there was a a lot of good animation and humor along the way. I liked the designs of the houses and such, the "nature" visuals were good too, some of the Vikings (especially the one Craig Ferguson voiced) were funny, and I like that the hero was a builder/engineer sort and that we saw him not get his design right the first time, but have to test and modify it. The Night Fury dragon was sometimes like an overgrown domestic cat--most delightfully when he's hiding and watching, and he can't help but give that slight butt wiggle cats sometimes can't contain when they're contemplating the joy of pouncing. The movie also has a great line near the beginning, which I expect to see in sig lines before long: "We're Vikings. We have stubborness issues." Uncle Pookie and I, who both probably have some Viking ancestry, really liked that line.

Should you shell out extra to see it in 3D? I'm not sure. I've been impressed with the quality of the new 3D in the movies I've seen it in previously, but I really only noticed the 3D effect once or twice in this movie (once was when ash was falling at the end). I'm not sure if that's because it wasn't that amazing this time or if this movie had enough story to keep the viewers focused on the story or overall experience rather than singling out special effects. By contrast, the first 3D movie I saw (the one with the giant girl) I oohed and ahhed over the 3D for a while then fell asleep right there in the theater.

A note for people who suffer from motion sickness: This is a safe movie, despite all the flying. I didn't get queasy at all. I only glanced away preventively once, for the briefest of moments, and it turned out not to be necessary.

Some Bits and Pieces to Think About

2010-04-02T20:05:00.006-05:00

Last Wednesday I talked to my sister, who is a nurse, on the phone. We only had a short time to talk, but before we rang off, I asked her what the mood on the ground was re the health care "reform" Congress had thrust upon us the previous Sunday night. "People are freaking out," she said. She repeated it for emphasis. She said that everything she hears suggests old people will just "be hung out to dry" and that she has patients asking her worriedly if they will still be able to get health care. As to health care workers, which was what I was most curious about, she said they are very worried. She said some of the doctors she knows were saying they were going to stop taking Medicare patients and that a few of the older doctors were talking about taking early retirement. Everyone was worried about hospitals having to make cutbacks, and the nurses especially were worried about having their wages cut.

I've been meaning ever since to get her on the phone for a longer talk about this, but I haven't yet. For one thing, she's overworked at the moment, and I hate to risk disturbing her rest.

But I find myself thinking of another phone conversation or two we had back in 2008. A few days before Election Day and then again after the election we talked on the phone. My sister, who was then working in Miami, has never really been interested in politics, but with all the hoopla of that election we got on the subject. On the call before the election, she told me that there was a lot of opposition to Obama. I was very surprised and told her that didn't fit in with my expectations of Miami (rich Yankees retiring there, for example). "Oh, it's mostly just the Cubans," she said. "Ah, that would explain it," I said.

It was either that conversation or the one right after the election, where she asked me, "It's not true what they keep saying about Obama being a socialist, is it?" I replied with some mealy-mouthed, wishy-washy thing to the effect that no, he wasn't a socialist, certainly not officially, probably not at all, but he seemed to maybe have some ideas that were kind of socialist-leaning, as did a lot of people in his party today, but he's not actually a socialist really.

(Yeah, not my finest hour with regard to either concision or prescience. To my credit I could be a lot more concise on why I didn't want him to be President: Obama had zero executive experience, he was so pro-abortion he couldn't find it within himself to condemn partial birth abortion or to say that would-be abortions who were born alive should be given medical care, and I had no confidence at all that he got the need for national defense. He also seemed clearly to favor big government, and I feared the kind of appointees he might make to the Supreme Court. That was more than enough to make me vote for McCain, who I was far from thrilled with but who at least seemed to get the need for defense. But I could have gone on. Right or wrong, I did not believe Obama shared my love of America, nor did I think he would be a friend of our military personnel, nor did I think he was concerned about much else in this country other than his own career--admittedly a common enough trait among politicians. I couldn't decide if he was a True Believer in progressive ideology or if he espoused it as trendy things to help his career; I hoped for the latter, but worried it might be the former.)

Anyhoo, this week I happened to listen to the archived episode of EWTN Live from the same evening I was talking to my sister. Johnette Benkovic was the guest, and I only put it on for some background noise. She happened to read aloud some quotes that struck me and, as I'm rambling anyway I might as well share them:

"First we will take eastern Europe, then the masses of Asia. We will encircle the last bastion of capitalism, the United States of America. We will not need to fight; it will fall as a ripe fruit into our hands." (Lenin)
　
"We can not expect Americans to jump from capitalism to communism. But we can assist their elected leaders in giving Americans doses of socialism until they suddenly awake to find out they have communism." (Khrueschev)
　
"The American people will never knowingly adopt socialism but under the name of liberalism they will adopt every fragment of the socialist program until one day America will be a socialist nation without knowing how it happened." (Norman Thomas, whose name I did not recognize but whom she said was a former Socialist candidate for US president)

Those are the quotes as I heard them; if you want to listen to the episode yourself go to the Audio Library search page and type "ewtn live" into the series search box. I thought of my sister's Miami comment "Oh, it's mostly just the Cubans" when Benkovic said she'd read those quotes in a recent speech and had a Cuban woman come up to her afterward and say she was glad someone was telling the truth, that she'd come to America to escape and there was nowhere else for her to go.

You know, I've heard that back in the '50s American Catholics used to pray regularly for an end to communism. (I may be mixing this up a bit with the St. Michael prayer that used to be said at the end of mass for the Church and the world in general.) I don't think it would be a bad idea for Christians of all stripes to take this up again. I know socialism is not as bad as communism, but how well did Orthodox Christians fare in the Soviet Union? Is Christianity thriving in countries with more socialist leanings than the United States has heretofore had? At any rate, I have since 3/21 made a point of remembering to pray daily for the future of America. I urge everyone, but especially practicing Christians and Jews, to do the same.

This being the Bible Belt, I sometimes see bumperstickers or yard signs that say "God Bless America", but lately what I'd like to see is "God Have Mercy on America" or just plain "Pray for America".

An Anecdote for the Beginning of Holy Week

2010-03-28T23:16:00.006-05:00

One day, a little over a year before I came into the Church, two women at my workplace were denouncing the manager of my department--a devout Pentecostal and family man--because, when all the managers had been asked to come in on Easter Sunday to catch up on some things, he'd said "no, he needed to be with his family on Easter." The matter had little or nothing to do with them, but one of them, especially, was quite exercised about it. She didn't accept his reason for not working that day and declared "Easter isn't even an important holiday, not like Christmas!"

"Actually, for Christians it's the most important holiday of the year," was on the tip of my tongue, but I bit it. (As a nice Southern girl or possibly as what Amy Welborn calls a "not nice girl", I do that a lot.) It's probably just as well I bit my tongue, because I later learned she went to church, suggesting she probably was some stripe of Christian and so my telling her what Christians do might have seemed presumptuous.

But it's an interesting attitude.

We moderns, at least here in America, seem to have let advertisers tell us which holiday is the more important, and oddly enough they picked the one that let them sell us more stuff.

I know which of the two I looked forward to as a child. I mean, hunting Easter eggs and eating a basketful of candy was nice and all, but we usually had to go to church (bor-ing!) and I was a little vague on the whole why of the thing anyway. Whereas Christmas, on the other hand, had a months long buildup, starting with the arrival of the Sears toy catalogue in early autumn and, once Thanksgiving came, special programs on TV and a visit to Santa and tree selecting and decorating, to fill the time pleasantly until that wonderful night came with all of its ritual of cookies and milk and being sent to bed early and then Christmas morning--finally--with toys from Santa and an extra-special dinner to look forward to. We usually didn't have to go to church (it not falling on Sunday most years), but I knew the Christmas story and it was relatively easy to grasp. Some years my mother would read it aloud on Christmas (starting with "And it came to pass in those days that a decree went out from Caesar Augustus..."), and it was a great story that fit in easily enough with all the warm and cosy holiday programming; the Peanuts special even quoted from it.

There weren't any beloved Easter programs that quoted from the Resurrection story, let alone the Passion. We heard the story in Sunday school of course, but it was full of stuff that was incomprehensible to little kids who didn't have as much background on the subject as the adults around us may have assumed we did. (For example, who were all these people and why were they in Jerusalem, why palms on the ground, why a crown of thorns, who was Pilate, who were the Romans, etc.) Maybe some of the adults didn't think the Passion was a terribly nice story, at least not for little kids, because I don't remember hearing much about it. (Another possibility is I wasn't paying sufficient attention.) There was a picture of the Agony in the Garden I used to see all over the place, but the story we got sometimes seemed to skip from Jesus going into Jerusalem on a donkey (another popular illustration) to the stone being found already rolled back. I didn't know why the schools let us off on Good Friday. I didn't know why Good Friday was called good. My guess is I wasn't alone in that.

It's a shame. Because while the story of the Passion, death, and resurrection of Jesus isn't going to sell as many dollars worth of merchandise as the story of his birth does, it is a very important story. Contrary to my coworker's opinion, Easter is a very important holiday. Even more important than Christmas. The Incarnation of the un-created Creator, the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End, into human form, subject to all the ills that flesh is heir to is a big story, yes, and one well worth celebrating with all the presents and feasting and strings of lights that people care to have. But that this Word made flesh then voluntarily chose to undergo terrible suffering on our behalf when he could have avoided it--that is also important to remember, is it not? And that he then rose from the dead and walked and talked with his apostles and was seen by over five hundred people--kind of a big story, too, right? And that all of this has profound implications for those who take him to heart and are willing to accept what he offers? Yeah, that's big. If none of it had happened, we might not even remember the Incarnation at Christmas.

Just something to think about this week.

The Day America Died

2010-03-21T22:49:00.003-05:00

I hope to God it's not. I have been proud and grateful to be an American ever since I was a child, but tonight America's elected representatives have chosen to deal us what may be a fatal blow by laying the groundwork for a massive power grab. Govermentalized medicine will be enormously expensive, not only in tax dollars, but in personal freedom and eventually in the degrading effect it will have on the character of our people. As the title of this Mark Steyn post from earlier today says, Happy Dependence Day. I hope to God we can turn this around, even partially, but I'm not optimistic. We've been gut-shot. This is the beginning of the long decline. (Barring immediate and forceful and clever and sustained action on the part of a whole lot of Americans.)

I now fully expect to end my life in an America that is poorer and less powerful and less free than the one I was born into.

American Pi

2010-03-14T16:00:00.002-05:00

Happy American Pi Day! (Today's 3/14 in American-style notation; watch for British Pi Day in July--22/7, to be exact.) Having no actual celebration, real-life or online, planned, I offer you a new term I learned today: Daylight Stupid Time.

I've written here at least once before about how I am no fan of Daylight Savings Time, which happened to coincide with American Pi Day this year. Well, today John J. Miller posted an email in the Corner from a reader saying that the amateur astronomy community calls it Daylight Stupid Time. That sounds about right to me.

One More Cent on the Census

2010-03-12T17:40:00.003-06:00

I'm basically just adding to what was in my previous post on this. Mark Krikorian has another Corner post on the Census, which has some interesting bits. His advice doesn't change though: 'Question 9 on your census form — check "Some other race" and write in "American." You're doing nothing wrong. And you may help set something right.'

Incidentally I, in contrast to Krikorian, do have a problem with the gov mailing out a letter saying that we will get a census form in the mail later. That strikes me as government waste. I suppose the theory is that an "it's coming" letter will result in more people filling out the census, but that's bollocks.

One Guy's Two Cents On the Census

2010-03-09T23:16:00.009-06:00

I've always been mildly suspicious of forms that ask my race. I mean, why is that the business of someone who's never seen me and is thus unable draw his own conclusions? Why is it the business of anyone? Are they going to use that information to discriminate against me or against people who check a different box than I do? I don't like either of those possibilities.

Having it be the United States government doing the asking doesn't make me less suspicious. Mark Krikorian has a suggestion for what to do with this year's census questioning of our race:

"...we should answer Question 9 by checking the last option — "Some other race"
— and writing in "American." It's a truthful answer but at the same time is a
way for ordinary citizens to express their rejection of unconstitutional racial
classification schemes."

I'm not a legal scholar, so I can't say with certainty if this questioning is technically constitutional or not. But I am a nativeborn US citizen and one who has always been happy and proud to be so. And I question why a theoretically colorblind entity like our federal government needs to know my race. Or your race. Or that of any citizen. I'll be happy to check "Some other race" and write in "American".

There's some other census weirdness (for instance, why is question 8 separate from question 9?), but I will give the census creators props for one thing: they ask for our sex, not our "gender". Sex is a more fundamental distinction than race and I have no problem with forms asking for my sex, but being a human being rather than a word, I do not have a gender.

More Food

2010-03-05T11:46:00.004-06:00

When I made my last post, I knew I was leaving out something I'd meant to add, but I couldn't remember what it was until several hours after I'd posted. It was mustard. I found a delicious new mustard. Zatarain's Creole Mustard. It is coarse and grainy in texture and has a strong mustard taste with a vinegar tang to it. So yummy I lick the knife I spread it with. (Hey, it's my kitchen.) We have never gone through mustard so quickly. I don't know why I never noticed it on the grocery shelves before, but I hope Zatarain's keeps making it for a long time.

As long as I'm on food, how about some more? I first learned how to turn old-fashioned oatmeal into microwave oatmeal from the Tightwad Gazette newsletter. Basically you just put oatmeal in a bowl with milk and sweetener overnight, although you can jazz it up some (not to mention leaving out the sweetener.) But Kayla's Thrifty Ways wrote about a variation in which she used flavored yogurt instead of milk, and I tried that this week--the yogurt part, that is. And I loved it. I think you get a better texture than with the milk method, and I liked the slight tanginess of the yogurt. The husband, who's no fan of porridge in the first place, prefers the milk method.

Here's my version:

1/2 Cup old-fashioned oats
1/2 Cup plain yogurt (I use Dannon All Natural because it's so creamy.)
approx. 1/4 Cup unsweetened applesauce
splash or two of vanilla flavoring
dash of apple pie spice
one packet of Splenda

Mix all ingredients in bowl and let sit in refrigerator overnight. In the morning, put it in the microwave for one minute. (In contrast, the milk method generally takes a minue and a half for me; not sure what the difference is.) Stir it up and Bob's your uncle. Serves one. Uncle Pookie added honey to his, but this is plenty sweet to me.

The only way to have a quicker breakfast would be to eat it cold. Okay, the old grab-a-piece-of-fruit-on-the-way-out-the-door method is faster, but this is the fastest thing I know of that lets you sit down to eat like a civilized person.

Oh, and since I mentioned the Tightwad Gazette, if any non-vegetarian Catholics reading this are looking for a different sort of fish dish, check out the Tightwad Gazette's Tuna-Cheddar Chowder recipe. (It's collected in The Tightwad Gazette II and The Complete Tightwad Gazette.) The name may sound kinda yucky, but it's actually so yummy I recommend serving it with a piece of French bread to wipe your bowl with afterward. The recipe claims it serves 4, but Uncle Pookie and I always polish it off in one sitting. (Probably why we have such big, comfy bottoms to sit upon.) It's not particulary Lenten, I guess, but it is different.

And yes, I will unashamedly wipe my bowl with a piece of French (or Italian or homeade) bread if I've been eating something creamy, at least at home. I've been willing to do so ever since I read the description of that amazing French farm meal Peter Mayle was invited to in A Year in Provence--the one where he and his wife ended up "eating for England". Read it, if you haven't.

A Little Something Food

2010-02-28T15:53:00.002-06:00

I like to point others to good things I've found. One of the most recent of those things is the crock pot split pea soup recipe at Kayla K's Thrifty Ways, which I've already cooked twice. Whenever I made split pea soup in the past, I made it on the stovetop, with indifferent to poor results. Cooking it in the crock pot makes a real difference in the quality, and there's less hands-on time than with the stovetop. I made mine with chicken broth (the real thing once, bouillion cubes the other) instead of vegetable bouillion, and I used a chopped up garlic clove for the seasoning. Yummy. With a piece of homemade bread, it makes a perfect Lenten Friday meal.* Outside of Fridays in Lent, my husband prefers a ham sandwich as accompaniment.

I've been a bit bread-happy lately, compared to recent years. In addition to several batches of Cuban bread, I've made cornbread three or four times recently. I normally buy self-rising white corn meal for cornbread and that is good, but I haven't been making much bread and I've been out for months. A few weeks ago I was given some stone ground white corn meal from a grist mill up in Laurel. Using the recipe on the bag (and the oven temperature of my usual recipe, since their recipe didn't include temp), I have made some really delicious corn bread. It has a really fresh taste, as well as being a wee bit more coarse than the usual meal I buy in the grocery store. If you can get hold of some in your area, I recommend it. A little square (or two) of the bread made from it is perfect with the crock pot split pea soup.

Also on the bread front, I recently had a decent storebought biscuit. My mother, who makes very good homemade biscuits, has taken to keeping a bag of frozen biscuits on hand for when she wants just one or two biscuits with a meal. I've tasted frozen biscuits before and, while they're considerably better than the wasp's nests that are canned biscuits, they're certainly no patch on the average homemade. But this kind my mother's using, Mary B's Tea Biscuits, is actually tasty. She cooks them in a litle toaster oven/convection oven combo with a thin smear of butter on top, and they come out tasting like real biscuits. I bought a bag and for some reason I can not get as good results in either my toaster oven or my regular oven--maybe it's the convection makes the difference?--but they are edible and certainly better than any canned biscuit. I like the size and, although I can't remember the price, it seemed reasonable enough.

I've started experimenting a bit with a George Foreman grill. I wouldn't have bought one myself, but someone who had two gave me one months back and I put it under my cabinet and promptly forgot I had it until asked how I was enjoying it. So I had to get it out and try it. It's not bad. Fairly easy to wipe clean, if nothing else. So far I've been most impressed with the fish fillets I grilled on it yesterday. The first fish I tried on it tore into pieces as I'd been warned would happen (still tasted fine), but these I didn't lift the lid to check until I was pretty sure they were done and I was super careful lifting them off the grill--with that and a little luck I had two pretty little fillets. I've never been an adventurous cooker of fish and grilled makes a welcome addition to my little repertoire. Extra welcome for Lent.

Do check out the rest of Kayla K's Thrifty Ways, which I found via Knitting Pattern Central. It's a nice little blog on thriftiness (obviously), including cooking and crafts, and the author seems like a really nice young lady.

*Re something with chicken broth being suitable for meatless Friday meals, my understanding (based on a possibly faulty memory of one of Jimmy Akins' Lent-related posts) is that soups and such cooked with animal juices are technically allowed, although not necessarily in the spirit of the thing. I probably wouldn't use real broth for a Friday meal and I hesitate at the bouillion cubes, but I figure a chicken bouillion cube is a long way from chicken and a couple of small cubes spread out over a crockpot of soup is pretty negligible. I haven't had vegetable bouillion in the house in years.

A New Pleasure and a RIP

2010-02-26T22:03:00.004-06:00

Two weeks ago today I was an hour and a half north of here and got to experience a pleasure I have never had in the whole of my life: I got to walk in the falling snow. Central and south Mississippi do have the rare snowfall and I have known several that were really notable by our standards. But every one I have ever known fell during the night, so I never got to experience more than seeing the flakes lit up in the car lights as we drove home or, if home when it started, running outside for a few minutes to see it; I could only take a walk in the snow the next day, after it had fallen. Friday before last, by contrast, much of the snowfall happened in the morning, so I got to take a walk in it and see the big, fluffy flakes fall past my face in natural light. It was beautiful.

Of course, I also discovered that snow can create a problem on glasses something like rain does and, not being at home, I didn't have a brimmed hat to wear to keep the snow off them, but nothing is perfect in this life and that walk, with the vision of snow on pines and more snow falling, was good enough for me.

Today was also the seventeenth anniversary of the World Trade Center bombing. Here is a piece from the fifteenth anniversary. Michelle Malkin notes the anniversary too. May the seven people who died that day and all of the people who have died in terrorist attacks on America and on her allies be granted eternal rest.

Well, There Goes a Perfectly Good Joke...

2010-02-07T21:02:00.004-06:00

There's an old joke that ends with Boudreaux shivering and saying, "Hot damn, the Saints done won the Super Bowl!" I guess we can't use that joke any more. But tell me now, is it a coincidence that it was such a cold weekend when they went and won it, hmm?

Not that I much care. I've never watched football and I was lucky enough to marry one of those few Southern men who couldn't care less about it. I usually don't even know when the Super Bowl is coming up, let alone who's playing, but I live in SW Mississippi. There is a lot of black and gold and a lot of fleurs de lis around here anyway, but in the past couple of weeks it multiplied. Sunday afternoon mass, whose attendance I've noticed looking a bit sparse on previous Superbowl Sundays (at least once this was my only clue there'd been a SuperBowl), looked this year as if a plague had hit the area. I guess some of the people who chose morning mass over afternoon got what they were praying for. Good for them. I'm happy for them, in a non-involved, benign, good-will-to-men-of-good-will sort of way.

Even if their win does spoil a perfectly good joke.

A Random Thought

2010-02-03T21:34:00.004-06:00

Do you ever find yourself wondering if the exact job that would have been most satisfying to you is one that no longer exists in any substantial sense, such as blacksmith, buggy whip maker, or wagon wheel maker.

Well, okay, me neither, beyond about five seconds today. Although I did used to wonder if the apple variety that would most exactly suit my personal taste buds is a variety that hasn't been grown within living memory.

Quote of the Past Month

2010-02-01T16:20:00.002-06:00

It's been a long time since I've made one of my irregularly scheduled "Quote of the Varying Time Period" posts, so here is my favorite quote from the month of January:

...I could whisper, ‘Turn,’ and 6,000 tons of aircraft carrier, four acres of
U.S. sovereign territory, thousands of people, enough aircraft to make a nice
air force for a small country, and billions of dollars of equipment and training turned.

And I traded it for a toddler who giggled and ran the
other way when I yelled, “Would you come here?!?“ [source]

It's from The Political Housewyf, whose blog I found by accident last week.

Here's An Idea for Someone Else

2010-02-01T16:13:00.005-06:00

When I saw the movie Ushpizin (mentioned a couple of posts ago), I got to experience one of those minor pleasures of life that people seldom talk about: unexpectedly hearing words you know in a stream of what are, to you, meaningless sounds. In the movie when the wife walked to the sink and started the hand-washing blessing, it took a moment for the penny to drop and me to realize, "Hey I heard that, I didn't understand it by reading subtitles". I knew the whole beginning of the blessing (Baruch atah adonai melech haolam...), because they are the beginning of other blessings and I Iearned them a long time ago. In the middle of this flow of sounds I couldn't understand was a sentence--or partial sentence--I did understand. Usually when I have this experience it's only a word: some busboys saying manana, for example, or one of the handful of Japanese words I know (oba-chan, konichiwa--words like that) coming out of an anime character's mouth. Suddenly hearing an English word in a stream of foreign language is also pretty good, but not quite as good.

Anyway, this is only preparatory to recommending a website that has some Hebrew blessings with the words in both Hebrew characters and roman letters and audio of each word being said or sung so that you can learn correct pronunciation: Learn Hebrew Prayers.com. Presumably the site will eventually be expanded to include more prayers.

And recommending that website is only preparatory to asking why some Catholic somewhere doesn't do this for Latin prayers? I've read advice to pronounce Church Latin like Italian (rather than Classical Latin), and I once somewhere saw a few Latin prayers spelled out phonetically for English speakers, but that's it. Any media-savvy speakers of Church Latin want to perform this service for us slobs who never studied Latin and are too lazy to start but would like to know a few prayers?

If I'm complaining about a lack that has already been filled, please tell me.

"An Inexplicable Cultural Phenomenon"

2010-01-31T14:04:00.005-06:00

Okay, I finally succumbed. I read Twilight. I admit it. I was weak. Earlier this month I was tired from somehow not having gotten any rest despite sleeping all night, so after I got my husband his Sunday lunch, I went to bed and curled up in a ball, thinking I just wanted to read something mindless. A friend had suggested I download the sample chapter of Twilight "just to laugh at how bad it is" and I finally had, but hadn't read it. So I did. The problem is when you finish a sample chapter the Kindle asks if you want to buy the book, and in a fit of boredom, impulse purchasing, or possibly insanity, I did.

Other than remarking that in all the time I spent reading in bed as a child, I never dreamed I'd one day be able to buy books in bed, what else is there to say?

I'm not sure I'd ever heard of Twilight before Gina R. Dalfonzo's NRO review of the series a few months before the first movie came out. I wouldn't have been interested anyway, and neither Dalfonzo's piece nor anything I heard after changed my mind. Thomas Hibbs' review of the second movie made me laugh, and so did YouTube clips of the Rifftrax for the first movie. (From memory--"You can read it, there just isn't anything there".) I think the young man playing Jacob Black is kind of hot, but beyond that I don't see the appeal.

Twilight is badly written, and I don't just mean stylistically: I never for a minute buy Edward's and Bella's sudden romance. (That's despite the fact I believe in the possibility of sudden romance.) The whole book is just blatant wish fulfillment. Bella may seem clumsy and average, but that just hides her secret specialness. She makes friends immediately. Boy after boy falls for her. The most handsome boy in school falls passionately, irrevocably in love with her the moment he lays eyes on her. He's a good boy who is also a bad boy. He smells good and sparkles in the sunlight, always dresses well, drives a luxury car, plays music for her, wants nothing more than to protect her, and will never, ever pressure her over anything unless it's for her own good. He makes her faint when he kisses her. Of course he's filthy, stinking rich too. And he just keeps on insisting on giving her presents and telling her how special she is, darn it. There may have been some wish fulfillment going on in Harry Potter books, but this...whoah.

And dear, blank Bella, who was apparently just waiting for Edward to write on her slate and give her meaning, remains pretty blank. Another case of there being no there there. Even before she knows how perfect Edward is, with the self-denial and the money and whatnot, she learns he is probably a soulless monster and she decides that it doesn't matter. Let me repeat that: her response to finding out that the boy she sits beside in science class has no soul and craves human blood is to decide that it doesn't matter. What?! Bobby McFerrin, upon learning that the soulless undead walk among us and go to our schools, would have decided to worry, but not this girl. Does she think souls are unimportant, or does she just think that having the hots for a boy overrides all other considerations, including survival? Or is she just thick?

Parents wondering if this series is wholesome reading for their daughters might want to read those two reviews I've linked above and some of Regina Doman's comments here. Personally, I wouldn't recommend giving this series to anyone, but considering all the trash out there, if your adolescent daughter really wants to read it, this may not be a hill you want to die on.

Beyond that, I don't have anything to say. I can't claim to understand why grown women have been devouring this. It remains for me what Rifftrax called it (and I quoted in the title of this post.)

Two Movies You May Not Have Heard Of

2010-01-31T13:59:00.002-06:00

Ushpizin, available from Netflix for either DVD rental or instant viewing, is an interesting movie about a married couple trying to be religious and not always succeeding. It is the festival of Sukkot, and Moshe and his wife are so broke they barely have any food in the house, let alone supplies for celebrating the holiday. They begin to pray very hard and two things happen, they receive an unexpected sum of money and two guests from Moshe's not-so-religious past show up. They attempt to provide hospitality to the men, but things do not go smoothly.

I saw this small independent movie back in November, but I still remember it and would like to see it again; that's better than some big budget movies I've seen. I liked it not only because it gives a glimpse inside a world I will never be a part of, but because it shows religious people sincerely trying to follow God, failing to live up to their ideals, yet continuing to try. Religion is not shown as a contemptible thing, fit only for mockery. This makes Ushpizin an unusual movie by contemporary standards. It's also a good story.

Arranged (also available from Netflix) is another low-budget, seemingly small movie. It concerns Rochel and Nasira, two young schoolteachers in a NYC elementary school, who do not fit in with the other teachers. Both dress modestly and have expectations of an arranged marriage. Did I mention they don't fit in? They become friends through the shared bonds of looking for love in a now non-standard way and of enduring their principal's attempts to save them from oppression.

Ushpizin is the better film, but I like this movie too. How often do we get to see a young woman stand up in a movie and say that "traditional" isn't necessarily bad? Aren't all modern films supposed to be about young women defying authority and tradition? This is a different movie--refreshingly so.

As to family viewing, I don't think little kids would like these movies, but older girls might like Arranged and there's no acres of naked flesh, sex scenes, violence, or noticeable swearing in either movie. There's also no car chases and special effects, for family members who require them, and Ushpizin has subtitles, which I've learned is an issue for some people. (I'm sympathetic to illiteracy; I'm not sympathetic to whines of "I don't want to read" coming from literate people.)

A Cheap "Luxury"

2010-01-30T13:49:00.005-06:00

Saturday before last I did something I hadn't done in a long time: I made bread--"proper" bread, with hand kneading and everything. Back in the years when I was a relatively young married I made yeast bread fairly often, from different recipes, but a couple of things happened that stopped it. First Uncle Pookie found a clearance bread machine for only $20 or $24, which left my "bread machines are too expensive" reason not to have one in the dust, and brought it to me for a gift. I quickly discovered that, while it was true that the bread bread machines make is not as good as the best hand-kneaded bread, it was easily the equal of my hand-kneaded bread and I didn't have to do any work for it. So I made a fair bit of bread machine bread, until the second thing happened, which was my realizing how sugar and flour products were negatively affecting me (unstable blood sugar, excessive appetite, mood swings), and I ate very little bread for a couple of years, let alone made it. Then when I started up again on the bread, I was long out of any kind of habit of making even quick breads (biscuits, cornbread), let alone yeast bread.

But having tried out a beer bread recipe the week before Christmas as a possible dish to carry to a family gathering, I kind of had bread on the mind and getting out one old recipe ended too poorly to get it wholly out of my mind, so faced with a dull, cold evening I pulled out the bread recipe I used more than any other back then: the "Cuban Bread" recipe that ran in the old Tightwad Gazette newsletter. (Now available in the big Tightwad Gazette book.)

If you've never tried it, you really should. It's easy and, as far as I can tell, failsafe. There's only one rising period before you put it in the oven, so it's pretty fast, and my poor kneading skills have never spoiled the quality of the bread yet. Moreover, the other week when I made this, I was working with seriously old yeast; I'd proofed some beforehand, so I knew it was still alive, just really sluggish, so I had to let the dough rise longer than usual, but rise it did. I cut my crosses and sprinkled some oatmeal on top, because I didn't have any of the sesame seeds I used to keep on hand for breadmaking, and put it in the oven. Result: two of the most beautiful boules I've ever seen. Tasty, too. I don't think anybody could mess this recipe up without trying.

We can think of home baked bread as a sort of a cheap luxury. To get storebought bread that's equivalent in taste to homemade, you have to spring for the artisan breads, which cost several times more than the ubiquitous sandwich breads. Even then, they aren't always as good as homemade, you can't have a slice hot from the oven, and they never fill your home with the smell of baking bread. Which is a bonus you can't buy in the store.

A word about the name, Cuban Bread. I always suspected back when I used to make this that it might not necessarily be truly Cuban, because, after all, no self-respecting French person would eat what we call French dressing, right? I wouldn't venture to say it definitely is not, but a quick Google search while I was making it suggested it isn't. It does, however, sound like Puerto Rican bread, in that it's put into a cold oven with a pan of boiling water on the rack underneath it.

That quickie Google search had a side benefit, in that it informed me of the existence of the Cuban sandwich. Two kinds of pig flesh in one sandwich? Add some bacon and UP would be in heaven. Makes me sorry I never visited Miami.

Away from Your Desk and Out of School

2010-01-24T15:41:00.003-06:00

For some reason I was a little more impressed this morning with a line in Mark Steyn's weekend column than I should be. It was his advice to aspiring writers: "Don't just write there, do something."

It put me in mind of somewhere in Sylvia Plath's journals, I think, where she observed that she had spent all her time on literature, whereas her husband, although he knew English language poetry very well, had also studied anthropology, read lots of myths, and, most important of all, spent a lot of time outdoors, fishing, hunting, and observing the natural world. It gave him more to draw on when he wrote.

I've always had a great regard for writing and for writers (as a group, not necessarily for every individual), and I don't think the world is best served when writers spend all their time in literature classes, in school generally, or, heaven help us, in creative writing programs. I noticed a decade ago that whenever I picked up an interesting looking fiction book and read the inside flaps, if the author's bio said he was from a graduate of a creative writing program, I almost invariably put the book back on the shelf; the book had to be exceptionally intriguing for me to break that pattern. I had gained a new bias without intending to or noticing myself acquring it. But when I noticed I had it, it wasn't hard to know why I had it: I had come to expect from books by people whose bio consisted mainly of getting a creative writing degree that their writing would be technically smooth, yes, but that all too often I would be left wondering why they bothered to write it. Like Gertrude Stein's hometown, there was no there there. There might be a story, but when there was, there often didn't seem to be a point. I may be a plebeian and a philistine, but I know worthwhile writing doesn't leave you wondering why the author bothered.

Steyn wasn't necessarily talking about fiction writers, of course, or those with "literary" ambitions, but I think his advice to do something is good for any stripe of writer who wants to avoid becoming someone "for whom words are props and codes and metaphors but no longer expressive of anything real." As someone else put it, the writer who never leaves his desk ends up writing odes to his desk lamp. Go out and raise dogs, as one of Steyn's suggestions had it, or grow vegetables, spend your summer break working construction or waiting tables in a truck stop, or even just spend a lot of time talking to people who don't have much in common with the people in your creative writing program. (Key point on that last bit would be to listen more than you talk.) Those of us humble readers who are in love with stories or who love to read nonfiction with some there there and who may be your future readers will thank you for it.

Another Grooming Post: OR Why I've Not Bothered to Go No 'Poo

2010-01-23T14:10:00.008-06:00

Over the past several years, I've come across a number of people online who have stopped using shampoo. What used to be the province of a tiny number of usually SCA people with very long hair seems to going more mainstream. More power to them. But they mostly seem to be using a tedious system of baking soda rinses alternated with vinegar rinses which makes me tired to think about, so I don't know why they didn't first try an easier way: just use a small amount of shampoo, applied only on the scalp. And unless your hair is very short, don't wash it every day.

Unless you've fallen in a mud puddle or have applied something like oil or a henna pack to your hair, you don't need to put shampoo on your hair. The point of "washing your hair" isn't to wash your hair, so much as to wash your scalp. Your scalp is what produces the oil. That oil, which both moisturizes the hair and can make it look dirty, has to travel down the hair; the hair isn't making new oil all down its length. This is why the longer your hair gets the more likely it is to get split ends and why people with long hair will notice their hair starts to look a little dirty or oily near the roots when most of their hair looks perfectly fine.

Applying shampoo only to the scalp is apparently a bizarre and "not true" idea to some people, even hair stylists; I once had one gush at me when she was cutting my bra-length hair off to shoulder-length, "You are going to save so much money on shampoo!" But this isn't some crazy idea I came up with on my own. In my early to mid teens I read an article in a women's magazine about two or three models who had kept their long hair, against the pressure to cut it shorter. One of these models had very lush hair. She said she washed it every three days and applied shampoo only to the scalp, then applied a conditioner to the ends only. I've used shampoo only on my scalp ever since, except for the exceptions mentioned earlier.

What's more, I use cheap shampoo, I use more of it on my scalp than the minimum needed, I wear my hair long, and beyond a handful of homemade hot oil treatments over the years (mostly cuz I was bored), I used no conditioners until recently. I don't even have one of those chlorine filtering shower heads that I used to see in Real Goods catalogue. But my hair is healthy and when I wear it loose in public I often have women stop me and say how pretty it is, although that may be largely the color (long red hair has novelty value).

Washing my hair this way about twice a week and never using conditioner let me have bra-length hair (i.e. hair that covered the bottom of my bra strap) for years without any split ends. In my mid-thirties, after a while with hair so short I didn't have to comb it, just run my fingers through it, I decided to see just how long my hair could get. Somewhere around waist-length I transitioned to washing my hair about once a week (more in summer than winter) and eventually it reached to the top of my hips. I'm forty now and it seems everything on me is falling apart or drying up, but I've discovered that if I apply conditioner to the ends occasionally, I can have waist-length or longer hair with only minimal split ends. (That's split ends I can see looking close up, not something you can see across the room, like the straw piles my sister used to get so vocal about that appear on some women's heads after a permanent.) Maybe if I spent more time on it, I would have no split ends even at hip length. But what I'm doing works well enough for me and requires only the smallest outlay of time and money.

I don't doubt the "no 'poo" folks get good results, but for me it would take more effort than what I do now. It wouldn't save me much money (an inexpensive bottle of shampoo lasts me a year or more, despite the fact I use a bit more than I strictly need), and my hair is healthy enough with this treatment to get compliments.

Everyone's hair is different, of course, but I think some of the women who are contemplating going the no 'poo route would be well-served if they just started using less shampoo less often and applying it only to the scalp, rather than to the whole length of the hair.

Women's Deodorant

2010-01-23T12:47:00.004-06:00

Does anyone know why there don't seem to be many--or any?-- deodorants for women? I live in a hot, humid climate and I've never been one of those rare people who look fresh and cool as a morning flower even when working outside, so in the summer I use the strongest antiperspirant I can find: Mitchum. Mitchum's old slogan saying it was so strong you could skip a day was no joke and a couple of years back they strengthened the formula even more. It would be overkill in winter, so when the weather cools down in fall, I switch over to something cheaper and less powerful. (Suave is the cheapest brand here, so it's usually that.)

But I'm the sort of person who won't take anything to bring down a fever (unless it's dangerously high) because I figure that fever is there for a reason and I should let it do its job. I hate getting all sweaty, I don't want to stain my clothes with perspiration, and I have enough social strikes against me without adding the great American taboo of stinking, so I'm okay with stopping my armpit perspiration in summer. But there's not much of it in winter. So a couple of months ago I was thinking maybe I should just use a deodorant, rather than an antiperspirant, in winter.

But women's deodorant is missing in action. Men's deodorant is everywhere. Male-marketed deodorants are more common, or so it seems, than male-targeted anti-perspirants and anti-perspirant/deodorant combos. This is despite the fact male deodorants must be harder to make than female deodorants. Males are the stinkier of the species--of this species and every other species I have any familiarity with. Male deodorants must cover up the powerful male armpit sweat smell without stopping the sweat--and they do, and very well at that! So I know it's possible to make deodorants that cover up the lighter female sweat smell without stopping the perspiration, but going by the shelves in local stores, no one does any more. (For the record, I didn't check any health food stores in this little local search.)

Most women aren't going to use male deodorants because they smell like male cologne and the smell is strong (it has to be). There are some unisex anti-perspirants (like Mitchum), but I could only find one deodorant that seemed to be unisex: Tom's of Maine sat at the intersection of the men's and women's underarm products and was not noticeably targeted to either. It also claimed to be unscented, which means it only has the scent of the essential oils used in it. Pleasant enough, no doubt, but it was also nearly five times the cost of the Suave anti-perspirant. I bought the Suave. I also experimented a little with a homemade concoction, but my solution so far is just to use less of the Suave.

But the question here is why no (or so few) women's deodorant? Why do the manufactureres think there's less of a market for it? Uncle Pookie and I discussed this and our best guess is that women just don't like to sweat. Uncle Pookie also had a theory about these sort of products coming on the market back when many men still labored outside in the sun all day, so they needed to sweat, but I'm skeptical of that explaining it, because at that time few people had air conditioning yet and most people didn't eat out mucy, so most women spent hours over a hot stove every day. I don't remember what other ideas we came up with, only that our best guess was that women just don't like to get sweaty, so with women choosing anti-perspirants, the market for women's deodorants dried up. (Hardy har har.)

Happy New Year

2010-01-01T19:11:00.003-06:00

Here's wishing everyone reading this a happy and blessed 2010.

Here at Chez Pookie et Suzanne, our New Year's celebrations began and ended with the eating of the traditional Southern New Year's food: black-eyed peas and cabbage. For anyone not from here, it's an old custom to eat black-eyed peas on New Year's Day for luck in the coming year. Grocery stores put out displays of black-eyed peas right after Christmas. Some restaurants put them on the menu for the day. When I was a child, even my baby sister, who could usually get away with her picky eating, would be required to choke down a spoonful. (Okay, some years she negotiated that down to only one or two peas.)

I was grown before I heard of eating cabbage on New Year's Day. Uncle Pookie's family ate both, saying the peas were so you'd have plenty of change (coins) in the coming year and the cabbage so you'd have plenty of paper money. I've since encountered others who eat both and say the peas are for general luck and the cabbage for money.

I don't actually believe in good luck tokens and such, but I do believe in customs. Harmless traditional practices like this ought to be kept up. They add flavor to life. A sense of texture to the year and continuity to a string of years. And when they're regional or local, they help prevent every part of America looking exactly like every other part.

Practicing Advent

2009-12-13T15:11:00.004-06:00

Today is the third Sunday of Advent. Perhaps now, only two weeks after I installed it, is the time to thank the Curt Jester for the very nice Advent wreath graphic and counter he provided free to anyone. It's nicer to open someone's blog and see "12 praying days till Christmas" than to look at a newspaper and see "12 shopping days till Christmas".

When I was a child, I didn't know anything about Advent. The only time I ever heard of it was to see, once or twice, Advent calendars in this little mail order catalogue we got a few times. There was a little "letter from our customers" type testimonial from someone thanking them for carrying them, saying she'd fondly remembered Advent calendars from her youth but had been unable to find them for years. So I knew that this "new", Christmas-related thing I'd never heard of before had been around for a while, but I still didn't know what it was. (In recent years, I've come across a few articles saying that some evangelical Christians are starting to incorporate the liturgical calendar into their religious life, so between that and the Internet, maybe little children today won't be as ignorant as I was.)

Now, as an adult and a convert to Catholicism, I know what Advent is and participate in it to some extent (translation: in my own lazy, half-arsed way.) I had some notion back in the summer about making a Jesse tree or two (one to give away), but I never got around to it. I really like the idea of Jesse trees for helping to teach children about salvation history, and there are some good resources online for making them. I like the Domestic Church's pages here and here, but you can easily find more elsewhere: try here, here, and here for starters. But like festive Christmas decorations, it just seems kind of sad and pointless to do this only for myself.

Advent is generally considered the start of the liturgical year, when we sort of mentally put ourselves back into the time when the Messiah was still expected and not yet come. So it seems to me (maybe not to anyone else) that it might be a good time to make spiritual new year's resolutions. But I'm pretty used to the Christmas Day to New Year's Day thinking-about-resolutions thing, so I never got around to that either.

A couple of other ideas fell through as well, so Advent celebration for me so far has pretty much come down to a little extra reading and using a little purple on my blog. :-/ I've many times heard of Catholics selecting some spiritual books for "Lenten reading", so why not Advent reading? The Advent reading I decided on was Isaiah and Lee Strobel's The Case for Christ. The book of Isaiah is an obvious scriptural choice, and The Case for Christ, which I first heard of from Jen at Conversion Diary, is a pretty good choice too; it'd make a fine Christmas gift.

Maybe the rest of Advent will hold a little more prayer and meditation on the Messiah, and a sacrifice or two. Or maybe I'll just dig out a purple scarf to wear to church.

Random Thoughts

2009-11-25T07:41:00.003-06:00

A bumpersticker I'd like to see: Honk if you're not paying attention.

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When a hypocrite blasts you for the bad behavior he himself blithely commits, his hypocrisy doesn't make his criticism of your behavior any less deserved.

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I wonder if people whose names begin with an F are statistically less likely to buy clothing emblazoned with their initial than people whose names begin with an A. Someone should do a study.

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The correct term for "pro-choice Catholic" is Protestant.

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Is it any wonder American public school students can't do math or read very well, when American teachers in recent decades have spent so much time fretting about whether the effect of crayon color names like Indian Red and Prussian Blue.

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I believe in freedom for individuals, families, and private businesses, so I don't hold with intrusive, pettifogging rules. But if I did and if I could make these rules myself, I assure you "no Christmas decorations or sales displays in October" would be on the list.

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I think if the government really cared about reducing energy use there'd be a public service campaign every autumn encouraging people to gain weight for winter. At least outside the Deep South.

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Babies are born without habits. Since every habit we have is acquired, any habit can be changed or eliminated.

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Re the Gap's "Dowhateveryouwannakah" ad, urging us "you 86 the rules, you do what just feels right": What feels right to me is not to shop at the Gap.

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If I were marketing a dictionary, I'd put wrapping on the outside that says "Find meaning(s) within."

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We live in a society that has replaced Advent with "X shopping until Christmas". Does anyone actually think we're better off for having done this?

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A Representative of the Kingdom

2009-09-21T17:43:00.013-05:00

I heard an anecdote from my mother a while back. A preacher she knows said he went out of his house in an especially good mood one morning, and while he was on the way wherever he was going, he got behind a car that had a bumpersticker that said "Honk If You Love Jesus!" Being in a good mood and, as a minister, loving Jesus, he honked. Whereupon everyone in the car--the woman driving and her small children--all turned around and flipped him off.

He said it flattened his mood so much he turned around and went home.

People, this isn't the way to represent the body of Christ. When you identify yourself in public as a Christian,you become a representative of Christianity and thus of Christ. Flipping people off is bad PR.

When you slap a Jesus bumpersticker on your car, wear a tee-shirt with Christian slogans or graphics, or hang a big cross around your neck, you are proclaiming yourself a Christian, just the same as if you loudly announced, "I am a Christian" to all and sundry. Some of the people who see or hear your proclamation may not be familiar with Christianity or with the particular subgroup of Christianity you are a part of (if your announcement was, say, an XYZ Church Annual Picnic tee-shirt). Other of the people who see your proclamation may have a prior inclination to think negatively of Christians. So here you come saying "Honk If You Love Jesus" or "Follow Me to Church" and you proceed to act like a jackass. Which gives people in the former category a negative impression of Christians (or Christians of XYZ branch) and gives people in the latter group confirmation of their tendency to think badly of all Christians. Was that really what you wanted to do when you bought the bumpersticker?

Here's why I think this is going to become even more important than it used to be.

When you go somewhere you and your kin or kind are not much known, you become a representative of your group, like it or not. People in minority groups know this. Natalie Goldberg once wrote of going into a rural, Midwestern classroom and telling the kids she was Jewish; none of them knew anyone Jewish, so she figured that now she represented Jewish people to them--she was eating an apple, therefore all Jews eat apples sort of thing. Christians in America and perhaps especially in the Bible Belt have had the luxury of being in the majority for a long time. Even now something like 89 percent or more Americans self-identify as being at least nominally Christian. But that's going to change and do so sooner and faster than we are going to find comfortable. I'm not referring to immigrants from historically non-Christian parts of the world changing the demographics of our country. Already a lot of citizens who tick Christian subgroup XYZ or ABC on forms that ask religion could be more accurate by checking "other" and writing in "secularist who sometimes uses XYZ facilities for weddings and funerals and may bring out a manger scene tree ornament at Christmas". Throw in a little mild persecution and a great many of those people will fall away. And some of the people who remain will be people committed to redefining Christianity as something historically unrecognizable.

This means that practicing Christians will more and more often run into people who have never met a practicing Christian and have formed their view of the faith based almost wholly on the mockery of contemporary comedians and the vilification of our enemies. What you, as a known practicing Christian, do and say before such a person will either reinforce the negative opinion they've taken from pop culture or will be a witness against the caricature. Given that we're supposed to evangelize, which is better?

My point here is not to point fingers, but to point out the responsibility we take on when we display symbols that identify us as Christians. I've never worn any of those smarmy Christian tee-shirts that some people wear because I don't like them, but if I ever found one I liked, I would be reluctant to wear it in public, because it would make me feel under a greater obligation to mind myself. I do frequently wear a modest-sized Marian medal and I would hate it if I ever spoke nastily to someone or hit my shin and let out a stream of profanity and then had the people who witnessed this notice my medal; their seeing my behavior and thinking I am a jerk is one thing, their seeing my behavior and thinking Christians are jerks is another thing. I know I would hate this scenario because I let something like it happen once. (So if there were a finger pointing, it would have to point at me as well.)

Some years back I noticed myself getting angry while driving more and more often and I didn't like it. So, although I've never liked things dangling from rearview mirrors, when I got a free plastic rosary in the mail, I decided to hang it from my rearview mirror as a reminder to remember Jesus and not get angry and mutter bad things about other drivers. And it worked pretty well for weeks. Then I lost my temper worse than I ever had while driving.

I had to go pick up some medicine or something at Wal-mart and, unfortunately this was on the day before a hurricane might or might not hit us, and it was afternoon. Leaving the store after having suffered through the crowd inside, I ended up in the most godawful snarl of parking lot traffic likely to be seen in a small town. After what seemed like ages of this and escape to a less congested area seemed nigh, I witnessed a bit of what I took to be insane driving and someone nearly hit me, and I flipped out and did something I'd never before done while driving: angrily thrust two upturned fingers toward my window, while shouting the air blue.

But there's Jesus. Before I had even calmed down, I was overcome with remorse: Suppose they saw the rosary dangling from my mirror and thought all Catholics act like this? I felt horrible about it. Now, maybe it would be a finer thing to say I thought only of the wrongness of the act itself or of how sin hurts Jesus, rather than how I might have created a negative impression of my group of Christians. But if I were pure of heart, I probably wouldn't have snapped like that in the first place, and the results were good: my little bout of road rage ended, I became a much calmer driver for years after, and I found myself glancing over at my little plastic depiction of Jesus quite often.

And that's the good part of displaying symbols of our faith on or about our person: they make us think of God more often. The "bad" part of course is that they require we take on a responsibility to act as representatives of our faith; it's harder to hide when we're wearing a sign. And maybe that's a good part too.

A Little Round-Up

2009-09-20T20:53:00.003-05:00

In my last post I mentioned that I occasionally peek at John C. Wright's blog, which I found a few months back. I am not a regular reader and I haven't read back into his archives, but every time I visit his blog I find something interesting. Mr. Wright is a convert to Catholicism from atheism, as well as a writer of sf, and he writes about religious and moral issues, philosophy, sf/fantasy, with frequent mentions of his wife, She Who Must Be Obeyed. (Their "wedding photos" moved me deeply. From this and other posts, I now know that where I went wrong as a bride was in allowing misbegotten notions of male equality to prevent me from building a Pit O' Doom in front of my throne--in fact, I confess with head hung down that I even neglected to build an awe-inspiring throne. Result? One uppity husband. Listen and learn, ye maidens that have ears to hear.) His posts have made me think, made me laugh, or at least provided mild entertainment. Would that every blogger could provide half as much bang per visit.

Maybe if I were bigger on philosophy, I might visit more often, but I pretty much gave up on voluntary reading of philosophy in my mid-teens, when I decided it was all "mental masturbation", then decided that term was fun to say, and didn't miss a chance to say it for five or six years.

Another blog I like to look at sometimes these days is also written by an atheist convert to Catholicism: Jennifer Fulwiler's Conversion Diary. Mrs. Fulwiler blogs about religion, especially trying to put religious principles into practice in our everyday lives, and about young mother type stuff. Also scorpions. I mostly read the religion stuff.

I actually first saw Conversion Diary last winter when I saw an article by Fulwiler on how she became pro-life and clicked on the link to her blog at the end for a very brief visit. I didn't visit again until this summer. I can't remember where I saw that article, but I think it was pretty much the same as this blog post. If you've ever wondered how an intelligent, free-thinking, normal human female could possibly go so far wrong as to align herself with the pro-life crowd, read this post.

That first Cul de Sac collection I mentioned recently, Cul de Sac: This Exit, I got and read this past week. Good stuff, although not as good as Calvin & Hobbes. (That's called praising with faint damnation, BTW.) Uncle Pookie liked it less well. He expressed annoyance that Alice's parents don't explain things often enough, leaving her confused about many things. I argued that confusion is a pretty normal state for a four year old, even ones who don't have parents like mine who hold that children shouldn't ask questions because "children should be seen and not heard"; because there's just so very much seemingly basic stuff left to learn when you are four. Uncle Pookie also called Miss Bliss an idiot and asserted that "Alice deserves better". I didn't exactly argue against that, but I'll leave my comments on that for another time; I don't need hate mail from people in early education right now.

I finally got around to watching The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Excellent movie. It's a cliche to say this, but there's something for everyone--John Wayne, romance, action, political drama, a man trying to live up to his ideals, some good minor characters, and thought-provoking stuff about what it takes to settle a frontier and how we get and keep law and order. As to the question of which character is more attractive as a romantic partner, John Wayne's or Jimmy Stewart's, I have to say it is very, very close, but Tom Doniphon (John Wayne's character) nudges out Ransome Stoddard (Jimmy Stewart's) for me. It's a slight thing. They are both attractive characters. Tom Doniphon is tough and well-suited to frontier life. He's tall and manly. Plus he's played by John Wayne. Ransome Stoddard is a man of integrity, committed to his ideals, willing to stand up for law and order when it is awfully hard to do so, honest, and learned. Whereas Tom Doniphon is unafraid of Liberty Valance because he knows himself to be as tough or tougher, Ransome Stoddard (like most of us would be) is terrified of Liberty Valance when he goes out into that street to face him and yet he never backs down. That is very attractive in a man. (Or anyone else.) What puts Tom Doniphon slightly ahead for me is the way he puts his love interest's happiness ahead of his own when he lets Ransome take credit for killing Liberty Valance. It may not be the most noble thing ever done, but I think it is noble.

Question for anyone who's seen this movie: Do you think Liberty Valance was really dead already when the doctor declared him dead? Valance was scum and the doctor clearly knew that as well as anyone in town. When they turned Valance over for the doctor to look at, he barely looked at him. I think there may have been a little life fast draining away within him, and the doctor just didn't want to spend time on futile treatment of a man most people would agree needed killing.

Remembering 9/11 and "Psychological Comfort"

2009-09-11T18:38:00.006-05:00

Today is the day we all remember (I hope) the Islamofascist terrorist attacks on the United States of America on 9/11/01. I will never willingly forget, although remembering is very unpleasant.

I remember what I was doing that morning when I found out, and all the rest of the day to boot. I remember what I did the night before: I went to my first RCIA meeting; when we walked into the next Monday's meeting, it felt as if the whole world had changed.

This year I once again prayed for the souls of the victims of those murderous attacks. I do not recall if I ever prayed for the souls of their murderers--I guess I figured they chose hell when they deliberately targeted innocent civilians for murder and were willing to die with that sin on their heads--but I did and have prayed for the souls of living terrorists and would-be terrorists. I do this because the religion I was moving toward at the time of the 9/11 attacks and am now part of requires it.
　
Today John C. Wright (whose blog I peek at occasionally, after having found it a few months ago), commenting on someone who sneeringly dismissed Christian faith as "psychologically comforting", says that

"...I would hesitate to call the conversion experience psychologically
comforting. Indeed, very much the opposite is the case: unlike my atheist self
of yore, I am now beholden to a higher authority, who pins me to a standard of
thought and deed very much against my nature and inclination."

Just so. I find nothing comforting or comfortable about praying for my enemies--whether terrorists who murder my countrymen or an arrogant coworker or someone who's threatened my family. I find nothing comfortable in reading a newspaper article about some disgusting child molester and being forced to consider that that person (someone even the very murders, thieves, and rapists in prison revile!) is a fellow child of God, whom Jesus died to save no less than he died to save me, and that I should pray for the person's repentance and reform. It is against my nature and my inclination. I don't like it and I don't want to do it.

Mr. Wright talks about trying to "obey the call to be charitable, loving, longsuffering, meek". I don't want to do any of that, except to be loving to my husband, and I probably fail at that as much as I do all the other stuff that I don't even want to try in the first place. But it's required, so I make my sporadic, grudging attempts at Christian virtue. And I don't find it comfortable to have to go into a confessional and name my failures aloud to another human being (much easier somehow to say in the privacy of my mind "God, I'm sorry I messed up" and leave it at that!), but it's required of me, so I do it, albeit less frequently than I should.

And I don't do these things just because I voluntarily joined this religion and my personal integrity demands that I follow its rules. I do it because I will have to answer to a higher authority than myself.

The part of the Narnia books that I keep coming back to is one that I think the books themselves repeated: Aslan is not a tame lion. I think that the real One whom Aslan is a fictionalized version of is also not a tame One. I think that He is not only "gentle Jesus, meek and mild", but the One who chased the moneylenders out of the temple with a whip, who came to bring not peace but a sword, who came to set a son against his father and a daughter against her mother. Demons feared him, and He defeated Satan with the shedding of his holy blood. One day I will have to stand before him. If you have less cause to tremble in that circumstance, then I am glad for you now, but I doubt I'll have room to give it a thought then. I have reason to tremble. Even leaving aside the thought of His fearsome justice, I don't know how I could ever raise my eyes to the presence of so much goodness.

Fortunately, my religion also teaches that He is merciful to those who seek his mercy. I hope that my nation turns from immorality and seeks his mercy. I hope that all of the victims of terrorist attacks around the world have found his mercy. I also hope--though it comes far less naturally for me--that would-be terrorists will seek his mercy before they die, expecting a reward for their murders. There is a prayer for enemies in a little Catholic prayerbook I have that desires of God that we may be saved souls together in heaven with our enemies; considering some of the jerks I've known in my own unadventurous life, let alone terrorists, that is a line hard not to choke over, but such is my faith.

Cul de Sac

2009-09-07T20:33:00.005-05:00

In the movie The Iron Giant, there's a scene where the young boy, staying up late to eat junk food and watch scary scifi movies on TV, hears a large crash and thinks aliens have landed. He excitedly equips himself with supplies--a toy gun and a flashlight featured largely in this--and bounded out of the house to investigate. At this point, Uncle Pookie leaned over in the dark of the movie theater to whisper to me, "That's OUR child!"

Earlier this summer, I discovered the fairly new comic strip Cul de Sac and made it part of my morning read. Soon after I found it there was a strip in which four year-old Alice, who enjoys dancing on the manhole cover near her house, begs a scarf of her mother so she can run around waving it. Final panel has her, scarf tied around her face like someone in a Western, holding up her little friend Dill, who insists there's "no such thing as a bandit ballerina." Alice: "Then I'm the first! Stop and admire my dancing or I'll blow out your tires!" At which I exclaimed, "That's OUR daughter!"

Since then I've seen the YouTube video called "The Talking Stick", which gave me a similar reaction and seen a few other strips that reinforced the idea that Alice Otterloop is a fairly good approximation of what Uncle Pookie's and my DNA mixed together into a female child might look like, especially if said child took a bit more after Daddy than Mommy. It's not perfect, of course--neither of us were tantrum-throwing types, for instance, which is lucky as neither of us had mothers who would have put up with it, and I for one was a disgustingly obedient child and well-behaved, unless you count occasional grouchiness as misbehavior. (Yes, thank goodness you grew out of that, I hear someone murmuring.) But it's fairly close, and the strip overall is a good one.

Bill Watterson (creater of Calvin & Hobbes, for which blessings be upon him) wrote years ago that, while there'd been a lot of strips about little boys and childhood as seen by little boys, it still remained for us to have a strip on childhood as lived by a little girl. Reading Cul de Sac made me think this might be the one Watterson was talking about, or pretty close, so I was all the more pleasantly surprised to learn Watterson had written the introduction to the first Cul de Sac collection. I haven't bought it yet, but I think it's going to be in my next Amazon purchase.

It's a very good strip. Thompson has an interesting drawing style, a good sense of humor, and an eye for great little details, like how odd it is for small children when they notice their parents called by other names for the first time or how impressed little kids can be by things teenagers and adults ignore, like a shopping cart in a drainage ditch or the awesome responsibilities held by a teenager with a cool job like cart pusher. Thompson also has some non-cookie cutter characters too--for instance, how many eight-year old neurotics (Alice's older brother Petey) are there in comics? Petey encounters some weird kids his own age. And adorable little Dill, who's a bit eccentric himself, has a pack of never-seen older brothers whose exploits lend excitement to the strip.

You really want to give this strip a try.

As long as we're near the subject, my favorite little girl character in comic strips before Alice Otterloop and aside from the supporting character of Susie Derkins in Calvin & Hobbes, was Carmen in Prickly City. Carmen is a cute-as-a-button, little libertarian Republican who hangs out with a coyote called Winslow, but the strip's not in the running to be one of the ones Watterson was talking about, as it is a political strip, rather than being about childhood. It fell out of my small morning comic read about the time of the Democratic National Convention last year, victim of the election fatigue I was feeling pretty keenly by then, but it's a fun little strip. You can read it here.

Smart Kids, Depictions of

2009-09-05T18:36:00.004-05:00

I have a near lifelong grievance with television depictions of intellectually gifted children. Leaving aside the frequent assumption that such children are always desperate to be "normal", what really galls me is the lazy, unthinking depiction of such children and teenagers as loving school. No exceptions--they all love it, just LOVE it! I guess that's why these hyper-intelligent TV children all do loads and loads of studying so that they can get their good grades! (Yeah, right; as a bumpersticker I once saw says, "My dog was student of the year at the local government school.")

In real life intellectually gifted children often despise school, because they are bored there. Hideously, hideously bored. A topic is introduced, said child grasps it, and then has to sit through days of having it expounded upon. Child's reading level is twelfth grade, child still has to suffer through the same fourth grade reading materials as everyone else. Child is ready for deeper explanations of causes behind historical events, child gets the same simplistic summing-up and "memorize this date" as the other children. Elementary school vocabulary tests give him words he picked up on his own a year or two before, and high school literature class has him read books he read on his own several years before. Result? Child spends the better part of twelve years bored out of his skull.

But for some reason smart children on TV always love going to school and have to do lots of studying, else how would they get those As.

I always used to think I wanted to see a depiction of just one highly intelligent child who didn't like school--just one. Still hasn't happened as far as television goes (the closest would be Malcolm in the Middle, but I never got the sense the eponymous character hated school, only hated being put into the gifted program--filled, needless to say, with kids who love school, just LOVE it), but last year it finally happened in another category of popular media--comic strips.

The new-to-me strip Frazz (launch date 2001) is named for a janitor-songwriter character who looks suspiciously like a grown-up Calvin (of Calvin & Hobbes) and features a highly intelligent child character who looks suspiciously like an eight year-old, black Calvin. Caulfield is refreshing because, as any thinking person who isn't a sitcom writer would expect of such a child, he is bored in school. He whiles away the time with drawing the Mona Lisa in his standardized test score capsules and pulling stunts on people, such as giving his race as "Callipygian", something I swear I'm going to start doing! Luckily for him, he has Frazz to talk to and play with.

Glad as I was finally to see a character like Caulfield, I find I just don't like the strip much. I put it on my daily read list (morning means news headlines and two to three comic strips) but soon took it off. There's too much about Frazz's exercise hobbies (he's a cyclist, like Calvin's dad) and it sometimes seems as if there's a moral superiority vibe coming off the strip, directed downward to people who don't exercise. I don't think I'm imagining it, but even if I am, in my non-exercising (yet still callipygian!) inferiority, deluded, the fact still remains that I'd rather be reading about Caulfield than Frazz's exercise routine. Still, I give the author, Jeff Mallett, credit for doing something new with his strip.

More later about another new (once again, only new to me) comic strip I like.

Our Days Are Numbered (Arbitrarily)

2009-09-04T20:40:00.002-05:00

Numerology claims that days have numbers which give them vibrational energy that can affect things in certain ways. But the numbers that days are assigned are based on our calendar and calendars are (mostly) arbitrary. When you give the day's numerology number any credence, you are privileging our calendar above other calendars--a grossly imperialistic act, to be sure! Moreover, as it's all arbitrary anyway, why not just assign your own personal numbers to the day? Let every day have your lucky number, or assign days particular numbers as you think you need them. To those who would claim that the beliefs of millions who use that calendar give strength to the assigning of date numbers derived from that calendar, I would say that surely your beliefs about the day's number have more effect on your day than the beliefs of anyone else.

Random Thoughts

2009-08-30T15:49:00.002-05:00

***

I think some American Christians would be surprised to learn the message of Christianity is not "Love thyself".

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If we knew that we had only X number of times to go to mass and receive the Eucharist before we are prevented by physical infirmity, an oppressive political regime, or what have you, we would never want to miss mass and its chance of receiving grace in that way.

***

I don't think it's not a good sign for our society that the word "lover" has become quaint.

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Maybe there would be less taking of God's name in vain if, every time someone used "Jesus Christ" as a swear word around Christians, they responded with "Blessed be his name forever!"

***

I think DYI stands for Do Yourself In, which is either the term for DIYing things that shouldn't be DIYed or the socialized medicine promoters' advice to old people. You know, either one of those or it's just a typo for DIY.

***

It would be well if more Americans devoted less time to seeking to have the most prestigious logos on their consumer goods and more time seeking the Logos.

(Just because that sounds like my contribution to the smarmy Christian tee-shirt industry--"Less concern about logos, more about the Logos"; "Fewer logos, more Logos"--doesn't make it any less true.)

***

Uncle Pookie: "Should we think it's strange that the demons of sloth and laziness are very active?"

Quote of the Past Week

2009-08-29T10:07:00.006-05:00

Last weekend I was finishing up The Return of Don Quixote and found this:

It seems to be a sign of education first to take a thing for granted and then to
forget to see if it is still there. Weapons are a very good working example. The
man says he won't go on wearing a sword because it is no longer any good against
a gun. Then he throws away all the guns as relics of barbarism; and then he is
surprised when a barbarian sticks him through with a sword.

The whole rest of the paragraph this is taken from is interesting, but I'll stop there.

Religion would be another good working example of what the character I've quoted was saying. The educated modern long ago threw out religion as a relic of a superstitious past, and he is now surprised when people within his own culture still claim to hold to it and when people in other cultures do things that seem actually to be motivated by it. (Including running him through with a sword.) The idea of there really being such a thing as good and evil is something else some of our more enlightened moderns have thrown out, along with sexual morality and notions of honor, sexual chivalry, and reserve.

Oh, and let's not forget the idea of there being differences in the sexes: the educated modern has for a generation taken it for granted that the only sex differences are ones inculcated by oppressive cultures and so they must be falling away rapidly as we all grow more educated. Then is surprised when the little boys around him like knocking over block towers as much as building them, the college girls are more likely to respond poorly to binge drinking and one-night stands than their male counterparts, and the women he knows often wish they could stay home to raise their babies while the men he knows may not take paternity leave even if their employers offer it. What on earth could be going on?

But back to the book. The Return of Don Quixote is a short novel with an interesting premise: Some young people on an English estate are putting on a play set in the Middle Ages and come up one actor short. They ask the slightly obsessive, otherworldly librarian, an expert on some obscure Hittite subgroup, to fill in. He sets to by first researching the Middle Ages with scholarly zeal, then plays the part, and afterward refuses to take his costume off, because he's realized how much better medieval clothes were, in many respects, to modern ones. It all leads improbably to a return of the Middle Ages movement in England, which clashes with a trades union uprising (or sitting down), and to both the creation of romantic interests and their entanglements. I don't think I'm giving away too much if I say that all the Jacks shall have their Jills and, even if things do go ill in some wise, all shall be well.

It's all very Chestertonian and the only problem is I kind of wish someone else had written it, even though I don't know who else could have. Much as I love Chesterton's sprightly essays, I just don't like his fiction much. I know Father Brown is much beloved and for a writer to make any character that is still around after a century is an achievement not to be sniffed at, but I'm still not a fan. Father Brown makes good points in his stories, but I don't enjoy the stories. Innocent Smith (Manalive) is a great idea for a character, yet he remains more idea than character. The Flying Inn is a good idea for a story and I am sometimes reminded of part of it while reading the newspaper, but it never really came alive for me. The fictional work of his I like the best, The Napoleon of Notting Hill, has a proto-gamer as a minor character, a good idea for a book at its heart, and actually made me laugh out loud once--and yet I wouldn't call it a great novel. All of his fiction seems to suffer from a carelessness about details, and the characters often don't seem to live.

Somewhere in her Misanthrope's Corner columns, Florence King said she finally realized she couldn't write fiction because she cared more about what her characters thought than what they did. Reading The Return of Don Quixote, I found myself wondering if that was Chesterton's problem. He cared very much about what people think and spent a lot of time arguing in his essays and newspaper columns that what people think about the big subjects--God, life, death, love, war, sex, marriage, family, religion--is important and can't be dismissed with a bland, "Oh, well, it doesn't really matter, we all think the same" or never talked about because it's both vulgar and not really of as much consequence as having the correct opinion of "lawn art" or Andrew Lloyd Webber. This mindset may have helped his delightful essays, but I don't think it helped his fiction.

Most good fiction has a moral component so what a character thinks about the big things does matter and of course it goes without saying that, in even the most frivolous fiction, what the character thinks about other characters or the silly mess he's gotten himself into matters, but we don't go to fiction for philosophy, we go for a story. Things have to happen, it's better if they happen to well-rounded people we can remember afterward, and the things should mostly make sense. If an author is more interested in his characters' philosophies than in anything else about them, he's probably not going to flesh them out as much for the reader. If an author is mostly interested in contrasting how different characters think or in the interesting idea he had about a social situation or some such, he may get careless about details in his rush to get to the parts that interest him. In that flesh-out and in some of those details lie much of the appeal of the story we came for; in other of the details are the shots of realism necessary for us to buy the improbable bits. You can't use hand-wavium to explain away a major social revolution happening in a matter of a few weeks; it's not even a good way to go from no romance to romance.

But I'm just thinking out loud here. I don't really know why I find Chesterton's fiction less satisfying than you'd think I would. He had some good ideas, but the execution left something to be desired, which I can't pin down.

Never mind, I still have his nonfiction to love and, having joined the Church he loved, I can picture him in Heaven (or speeding his way through purgatory to get there, but I like to think he's St. Gilbert, however unofficially), and ready to pray for me or you if we ask. And if any Chesterton fans want to defend his fiction to me by pointing to the endurance of Father Brown or saying that The Man Who Was Thursday has never been out of print (as I think I heard was the case) or even demanding whether I can do better, I shall only take off my hat to that person and bow with a flourish. Or so I would do if I were male. Ladies do not remove their hats for such reason; perhaps I'll curtsy and say "touch'e", which sexually confused response [sings "I'm a happy fella-girly"] should give the speaker enough pause that I can wander off and find a book to read.

Incidentally, if this notion that caring more about what characters think than what they do causes trouble in fiction-writing is correct and if that was a problem of Chesterton's, then the Chesterton book I'm currently reading, The Ball and the Cross, may prove an exception. The two main characters are a committed atheist and a believing Catholic who keep trying to have a duel and keep getting interrupted. I'm not far in, but I think caring more about what the characters think than what they do may work for him in this one, since the whole point of the story is the clash of genuine beliefs.

Reflections on the Psalms

2009-08-27T21:20:00.002-05:00

The Psalms have been called the prayer book of the Church and a nice little introduction to them is Reflections on the Psalms by C. S. Lewis, which I read a month or so ago. Lewis does a good job of talking to the reader about things in the Psalms that might seem odd to modern Gentiles--cursings and anger (in a holy work?!) or the idea of God's law being sweet.

The most notable chapter, to my mind, was the chapter on praising. Lewis said that when he was on the cusp of Christianity the repeated exhortations of some Christians to praise God was one of the more hard to understand things for him. Why praise? Why would an omnipotent being care if he were praised or not? After a couple of brief bits on this, he shares the realization that came to him: that the everyday world is full of praise and that, in a sense, our enjoyment is not complete until we praise. When we see a movie we love, what do we do as soon as it's over? We turn to the people we saw it with and say, "That was great! Didn't you love that part where X happened?" If we talk to a friend or coworker who hasn't seen it, we say, "It was great, you have to go see it." If we have a good meal, it almost isn't complete until we express our enjoyment verbally. Most of us love the chance to praise a family member, even if it's only to outsiders and not to the person himself. And people who are healthy in mind and spirit are even more apt to praise than others; they will not stint their praise of something good in parts because it was not perfect in all.

But Lewis says all of this better than I do. Check it out. I found this book at my public library, but it's available inexpensively at Amazon in a paperback with a pretty cover, as well as in an audiobook download. I would recommend this book as a gift for nearly anyone. Being composed of short, more or less stand-alone type chapters, I should think it would suit people who don't read much, and it might be a good corrective to anyone who, never having read much of it, assume the Bible is full of Precious Moments moments.

Emboldening Our Enemies

2009-08-20T21:57:00.004-05:00

Earlier today, when I mentioned to Uncle Pookie that Scotland has freed the man convicted of the Lockerbie bombing because he has prostate cancer (see here), UP remarked that, "It would be funny if he came back as a suicide bomber. What does he have to lose?" Good question. A dying man has less to fear from a suicide mission than a healthy man, and any man might prefer going out in a blaze of what he considers glory to lingering in a hospital bed. Even John Wayne, playing an old gunfighter in The Shootist, preferred provoking a gunfight and dying in it to dying of prostate cancer.

And if he should get caught before he could carry out his suicide bombing, what of that? He would know that the last time he was convicted of terrorism by a Western nation he only had to serve less than three months per person for the people he killed (not to mention nothing for the property damage he caused), and that in the relatively cushy confines of a British prison. Why worry about that?

We in the West should worry. We've just sent the message that we consider the lives of our civilian populations to be of so little worth, that we see no reason for outsiders who murder us to get a full three months per murder in prison. I sure feel safer knowing that.
　

Ever Notice...?

2009-08-19T16:24:00.005-05:00

It is a truth almost universally acknowledged among contemporary people that some groups--teenagers, college students, poor people, Africans--simply can not be expected to have the kind of self-control necessary to refrain from sex. They are simply not capable of it. Everyone knows that. And yet, when we bring our attention down from groups to individuals, suddenly everyone is capable of it, especially if they're individuals with whom we are romantically involved. No woman says of her husband, when she finds out he's had an affair, "Oh, well, I guess it was unrealistic of me to expect him to keep his pants zipped." No young man seeing his girlfriend off on a weekend trip reminds her to take along some condoms in case she meets someone and just can't control herself.

We feel perfectly free to expect self-control from the individuals around us, but we deem it naive to expect self-control from certain groups.

Last time I checked, groups were made up of individuals.

Leading Men--A Sad Progression?

2009-08-15T04:47:00.004-05:00

Last year I found myself remembering a fluff piece from one of those women's magazines I read back in the eighties, in which the author pointed out that the previous generation or two's manly leading men, like Clark Gable, had given away to perpetually boyish leading men, like Matthew Broderick. And I wondered if she'd been onto something and there really was a progression--from manly men to boyish men, and now from boyish men to Topher Grace and that kid from Juno.

Don't get me wrong, I like Topher Grace (he was great in That Seventies Show, he was fine in In Good Company, and it wasn't his fault Spiderman III was a flop) and if I were a very young girl, I might very well want to cosy up to that supremely non-threatening boy in Juno. But, let's be honest, neither of these actors have very manly onscreen personas. Both are physically scrawny, Topher Grace plays awkwardness like a fiddle, and the central fact of that Juno boy is that he is non-threatening. Heck, the girl's father's response to finding out who was the father of his daughter's baby was to say in surprise that he never would have thought the boy had had it in him. How many teenage boys can you say that about? And did you notice how I instinctively switched to a more passive voice when I referred to the pregnancy? This is not a kid you say "got someonely pregnant" or "knocked a girl up"; he's too passive for that. Superhero and action movies aside, it almost seems as if the passive male is the new ideal.
　
This morning, unable to sleep, I check The Corner and what do I see, but Kathryn Lopez posting that "Jay Marini, who watches [The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance] with groups frequently, explaining that young women increasingly like the Jimmy Stewart character, Ransom Stoddard, whereas women used to go for the Wayne character, Tom Doniphon." Jimmy Stewart normally played good guys, but preferring him to John Wayne--well, that doesn't sound right. Not in general, or based on what I've heard about the movie. Jonah Goldberg came in with a suggestion that it might be understandable for women to prefer Stewart's character to Wayne's: "Ransom Stoddard (Stewart) is honest, heroic, compassionate and principled. No, he's not as well-suited to frontier life as John Wayne, but John Wayne is not as well-suited to the rule of law and civilization. "

Well, now I have to watch The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. I've actually been meaning to watch it for a long time, but like that big westerns-viewing marathon I keep saying I'm going to do, I've been fairly content in my ongoing procrastination. But now I have to know which Liberty Valance character is more attractive, so I'm going to be driven to getting off my duff to procure a DVD and getting on my duff to watch it. I hope they're happy with what inconvenience they've wrought upon me. [grumble, grumble]

The weird thing here is that I don't know which character I will find more attractive. Jimmy Stewart did play good and decent characters generally, but he's too lanky for me to find him sexually appealing. And like most Americans, I love John Wayne--indeed, even if I hadn't liked him before, I might be afraid not to now, considering that Uncle Pookie once advised a friend to call off his wedding upon finding that his intended did not like Wayne--but somehow I've never thought of John Wayne as the romantic lead type, even though he did sometimes have love interests in his movies. He's tall and non-scrawny (two of my big requirements) and he's definitely manly, so I don't know what it is. Perhaps it's that he's almost too much of an institution to be erotically appealing; nobody wants to do the Washington Monument.

Of course, this is John Wayne in the movies. Perhaps if I'd met him in real life, I would have done a Maude and melted like butter on a biscuit before him.

A New Favorite Feste

2009-08-14T18:49:00.005-05:00

My favorite Twelfth Night and my favorite Shakespeare movie in general has for years been Trevor Nunn's 1996 Twelfth Night movie. I'd seen at least a couple of other Twelfth Night productions, not counting the charming half-hour Shakespeare: The Animated Tales version, but that movie was the best. Maybe it still is, but I have a new favorite Feste.

Unless I prove fickle and go back to Ben Kingsley, my new favorite Feste is Trevor Peacock.

I recently finally got around to watching the BBC Complete Shakespeare Plays' 1980 version of Twelfth Night. These productions weren't all good, but I'm more easily pleased than a lot of people when it comes to filmed plays, and I like a lot of them. Their Twelfth Night turns out to be one of the ones I like. I like the Elizabethan costumes and interiors. Felicity Kendal is, as always, cute as a button as Viola. Duke Orsino is much more palatable than he usually is. Sir Toby Belch (Robert Hardy) is good, Sir Andrew Aguecheek is good, and so is Maria (Annette Crosbie, perhaps best known as Victor Meldrew's long-suffering wife, in One Foot in the Grave) . The attractive Robert Lindsay, whom I've mentioned before, is also in this as Fabian and he's good too.

But as you might guess from the title, my favorite here is Trevor Peacock as Feste. Remembering him only from his somewhat less than coherent or pleasant comic character in The Vicar of Dibley, I was surprised the first time he turned up in one of the Complete Shakespeare Plays history plays. He seemed an odd choice. Physically, if for no other reason. But he's actually a good actor and his short, stubby appearance is no impediment to playing a jester. I really like him as Feste. His interplay with Olivia (Sinead Cusack) works very well; I totally buy their relationship--I see why she welcomes him back into her home and why, other than the obvious patronage, he comes back.

But what I especially love are his songs. You can hear them in clips from the YouTube user ShakespeareAndMore. I love best the "sweet and twenty" song from the rowdy three's overnight carousing scene; it is so poignant, it pulls at my heartstrings, corroded with cynicism though they may be. But he's no slouch in the "wind and rain" song, either, which was the part I liked best in Ben Kingsley's performance.

I really, really wish the owners of the rights to these old TV Complete Plays programs would get with the program and make them available individually to viewers at a reasonable price. I would love to own this DVD, but I can only rent it from Netflix. Word to whoever out there is in charge of this: There is an audience, guys. Make your product available to us, somewhere we can actually find it, and at a price that doesn't make us gasp, and we will buy it and you will make a little money from each one we buy. Overprice it and make it hard to find at any price and you might make more per each DVD you manage to sell, but you won't make as much overall.

Only tangentially related to any of this, is an experience that YouTube user gave me. Months ago I found an old (1960) version of The Tempest from American television and starring Maurice Evans (Bewitched) that he'd shared. Remember I've mentioned how I've often been known to "channel" Homer Simpson and at least once channelled Foamy the Squirrel? Well, upon seeing the male playing Ferdinand walk toward the camera in his pantsless costume, I--for the first time ever (and after disagreeing many times with my husband and his bachelor friends about the supposedly always baleful presence of male "parts" in movies)--channelled the bots from MST3K and yelped out an "aaaargh", followed by a "Men should not have 'areas'!" Sorry to any guys who enjoy dancing around the French Quarter in similar costumes on Mardi Gras, but it was a spontaneous reaction.

My Daily Catholic Bible

2009-08-05T20:44:00.003-05:00

It may seem odd, but I wanted to put in a plug for something I don't use myself.

In late 2007, I bought a copy of My Daily Catholic Bible: 20-minute Daily Readings. (Available from Amazon.) This is a fairly nice-looking paperback Bible--easy-to-read print in two columns per page, well-laid out, on decent paper. Each day (except Leap Day) has a short quote from a saint or other holy person, a reading from the Old Testament, then a reading from the New Testament. The Old Testament readings are in order, right through, but the New Testament books have been rearranged, presumably to spread the Gospels out through the year. (I say presumably, because the editor's introduction does not explain his method of dividing the texts up, except to say that it is similar to the method used in Carmen Rojas' How to Read the Bible Every Day.) There is no commentary or notes on the Scripture. The translation used is the Revised Standard Version, Catholic Edition, so all of the OT books are there. All in all, it is a good choice for anyone wanting a daily Bible.

I bought mine because I wanted to foster a daily Scripture-reading habit and thought that having each day's portion already laid out for me would be easier than the various "read-the-Bible-in-a-year" plans I've seen online. (Easier than anything other than the uber-simple, "read four chapters a day" advice, that is.) And it is easy and convenient, if you want to do it this way. What I discovered, though, is that I don't like reading the Bible in this way. I like reading all of a Bible book I'm interested in--either straight through or in big chunks--and, if I'm really interested, going back and re-reading that book soon after. I don't like pre-planned menus, where I can only have so much OT and so much NT today and so much tomorrow. With the daily Bible, I found myself reading ahead, on either the OT or NT reading, but not usually both, so I had trouble remembering where I was. I felt lazy when I eventually gave up on it last summer, but now I've admitted the method just doesn't work for me, I don't mind my failure to last the whole year.

I'm happily back to my undisciplined, "read as my mood and interest take me" method. What I'm not happy about is the days with no Scripture reading I intersperse with the Scripture reading days. I'm having some good effect with, on some of those days, either reading a few psalms in a prayerful sort of way or saying prayers (mostly psalms and canticles) from the Divine Office at the Universalis site. Using the Psalms in this way, besides being a lovely way to pray, ensures some Scripture each day, but each psalm feels complete in itself, so I'm not caught up in the "must read more, more" mood.

For people who prefer the daily dose to the fits and starts--or feast and famine--method of Bible reading and for people who are so short on time they have trouble fitting scripture in any other way, I recommend My Daily Catholic Bible. The daily readings really can be done in twenty minutes or less. And one upside of having both a NT and an OT reading each day is that seriously time-constrained people could read the NT portion in the morning and the OT in the evening, or vice versa.

Apropos of Nothing

2009-07-22T20:56:00.002-05:00

Here's a quote from that loveable old atheist, Florence King:

Now, a word to Catholics who would follow the dictates of their consciences instead of the dictates of the Vatican.
Congratulations, you're Protestant.

She remarks elsewhere that she's been irritable ever since Vatican II.

Random Thoughts

2009-06-15T20:55:00.006-05:00

***

Many Americans today seem to have forgotten the old bit of wisdom that used to be expressed as "You can't get something for nothing" or "There's no such thing as a free lunch".

***

You know what would be really new in television or film? An American Indian policeman who solves a crime, not because of his knowledge of tribal customs, but because he uses his intelligence, police experience, and investigative skills.

***

Ever wonder if those reality shows where some humans are humiliated for the entertainment of other humans are paving the way for a return of the Roman games?

***

Stupid Marketing Decisions: Giving a product which will be sold in the USA a name whose acronym is KKK, especially if you had to change the spelling to get that acronym. Unsurprisingly, Lily's Kountry Kabled Kotton is no longer on the market. At least not under that name. [See here for what may be the same product.]

***

Something I've been wondering for years: You know those bumperstickers and such that tell us to "Question Authority", well, why do we never see an addendum pointing out that sometimes when we question authority we realize the authority was right all along?

***

I fully expect that before much longer we will be hearing the words, "If you don't want to kill people, you shouldn't become a doctor."

***

Q: How is a woodpecker like Peter O'Toole?
A: They both have a double phallic name.

Up, Up, Up

2009-06-04T06:53:00.006-05:00

Okay, I do not cry at movies, let's get that out of the way right up front. As I have pointed out many times, I have a shrivelled, little black heart, three sizes too small. There isn't a splinter of ice in it, but the contents of a whole ice tray. This may not be a "truth universally acknowledged"--I don't know that many people--but I'm pretty everyone who knows me, knows it. I've never seen Old Yeller, but I'm confident I'd escape dry-eyed.

Uncle Pookie, on the other hand, cries in movies. Like a baby. Cries more, as they would say in Get Fuzzy, than a French soccer player. Except for one notable instance when we went to see Ghost and Demi Moore's interminable bawling failed utterly to move either of us and all the people we went to see it with told us we were shallow or unfeeling or some such nonsense, I've pretty much always been able to expect him to cry at the affecting (affecting to other people, not me) bits. Still, if we are to be married we must learn to accept little flaws--like having a kind and tender heart--in our spouses.

Enter Up. We went to see this new Pixar film Tuesday evening, and the first twenty minutes of the film are almost unbearably sad. I had tears rolling down my face and my sides were quivering from the effort of trying to hold them back, and Uncle Pookie was unashamedly crying beside me in the darkness. I've never seen anything quite like it. It was sad the way life is sad. Not anything big and dramatic, no tragic heroes, just a quiet depiction of a couple of ordinary lives. Very little dialogue. Just a visual spanning of decades in the lives of very ordinary, non-exciting people who probably wouldn't be able to pass some contemporary people's test of "quality of life": unskilled jobs, continual struggle to pay bills, repeated delaying of dreams, a major disappointment or two, and the inevitable onset of age-related decay. And it all seemed beautiful as well as sad, every bit of it.

Fortunately for me the film moved on to its adventure tale. That part has lots of episodic peril and a good many funny bits as well. I may not have loved every bit--some parts were predictable and I wasn't keen on Dug's voice characterization and it seemed weird the bird would leave her chicks for so long--but I was well pleased over all. I liked the grouchy old man and the chubby little boy and the dogs with their special collars and the whimsy of the floating house and the wealth of details to notice and the heart of the film. It returned to the sadness again near the end of the story, but it was briefer and easier to bear the second time (still provoked tears, I'm afraid) and after a bit more action the story ended happily (and, in our over-regulated and dirty-minded world, improbably) in an ordinary happiness kind of way. Be sure to sit through the credits to see the charming little graphics and the usual list of Pixar babies.

On the way home Uncle Pookie said he didn't know if he would buy this Pixar DVD, as it's too sad, but I'll bet he does.

In case it's not blindingly obvious, this post is a recommendation. Go see it while it's still at theaters. I really can't be sure how well it will play to small children. I think you may have to be middle-aged and married to fully get what's going on in the grumpy old main character. Of course, there's nothing wrong with partial appreciation and I'm sure older kids would understand something of the sad parts, but little kids might just be bored until the doggies and the giant bird and the balloons come on. (Except for the cute pre-movie short.) If you do carry children to see it, at least you don't have to worry about any vulgarity in the film--there is absolutely none and the film's message is wholesome. And if it does turn out little ones don't like it, maybe it will be the mainstream film that finally changes the minds of those (mostly older) Americans who STILL think animated films are solely for children.

06/15/09 UPDATE: I'm feeling a bit better about my own reaction to Up now that Uncle Pookie reports a coworker told him she and her husband sat in the movie theater and "bawled" all through the sad bit. Maybe you really do have to be married? I know Dickens said somewhere we should never be ashamed of our tears, but I'm glad to know we weren't the only married couple who cried at this.

A Few Craft Plugs

2009-05-28T17:21:00.003-05:00

I wanted to put in a plug for the knitting magazine, Creative Knitting. I subscribed to this last year and I've found this magazine fun to look at and worth the subscription cost. Here's the good points.

The clothing patterns are not high fashion garments but things average people might actually wear.

The magazine is plus-size friendly. I don't think I've ever seen a women's pattern in CK that did not go up to XL, most seem to have XXL sizing, and I've seen some that went up to 5X.

There is usually an article teaching a new technique--typically with accompanying project that uses the technique--and, of course, a basics how-to section at the back of each magazine.

A year's subscription is inexpensive (US$19.97 for six issues), and the patterns' sample garments often use less expensive yarns.

They follow the practice of telling you what weight the suggested yarn is and what the yardage is, as opposed to just saying "5 skeins of Brand XYZ yarn".

If there's a correction to a pattern, you can find it on the magazine's easily-navigated website.

I've decided not to renew my subscription because I have too many craft-related books and magazines already, but if you're looking to subscribe to a knitting magazine, this is the one I would recommend to most people.

***

My acknowledgement of having too much craft-related material about did not prevent me from picking up a small stack of back issue craft magazines (including a few CK mags) at a library book sale recently. Among those were three issues of an early '80s magazine from Lark Communications called handmade. This was a general craft magazine--sewing, knitting, crochet, needlepoint, etc--that had a good quality feel to it. If it were still around, I would subscribe. (There is an Australian magazine with the same name still publishing, but as far as I can tell, they seem to be a different entity.) If you ever come across an issue at a yard sale or wherever, I don't think you'll regret picking it up.

***

I'm not big on crocheted or knit flowers as a rule, but the ones Lion Brand has been featuring in its email newsletter recently have sometimes been pretty cute. Still, I wouldn't be mentioning it if they hadn't included a photo an awfully familiar-looking flower they called Tradescantia. It turned out to be the official name for my favorite weed, spiderwort. (There's also a nice close-up picture here.) As most people don't seem to know the name of this flower when I mention it, I say kudos to LB for showing a relatively obscure flower.

***

I sometimes hear people saying they don't know how to do basic hand stitching. There are some videos showing some hand-sewing techniques here. I didn't watch all of the videos, but the ones I watched were pretty well done. The presenter's slip stitch method was different from what I learned as a kid, and it is much better, so I'm glad I saw that video.

Warning: They seem to have added annoying advertisements at the beginning of the videos since I first saw the site.

***

Two weeks ago I saw this Daily Mail article about a group of women who knit a replica of their village. That's both really fun and a bigger feat than many people would realize. I think it falls into the"you ask why and I ask why not" category of pursuits, which I consider to be a generally good category.

Less happily, the ladies touch on people not knitting much anymore because people prefer storebought items to handmade. One says, "I used to knit such complicated stuff, but now I watch television instead." I know some people would say that whatever consumers want is right and good so therefore I shouldn't say this, but still I find it rather sad that handcrafts are dying out as people buy great quantities of whatever the advertisers are telling us we should like this month and that a skilled knitter is increasingly watching television instead of knitting because no one is interested in her stuff.

***

The By Hand, With Heart blogger, who is also the author of the interesting-looking knitting book Great Yarns for the Close-knit Family, suggests a possible unofficial patron saint of knitters, St. Rafqa. I've heard a couple of other possibilities floated, but this sounds good to me.

***

I was pretty struck by the customer pictures that accompanied this page for the out-of-print book Hard Crochet by Mark Dittrick on Amazon. The book is supposed to have a new technique for really stiff crochet that lets you make firm brimmed hats, bowls, and even briefcases. I'm not going to buy it because I don't crochet much, but I'm passing the link along for any crocheters who may not have heard of it.

***

And that's about it for today.

The Girls Only Society

2009-05-23T18:45:00.005-05:00

I have sometimes seen instances of parents buying or crafting their daughters items that read, "Girls Rule, Boys Drool". I'm as sympathetic as anyone to people in that stage of childhood in which the opposite sex is presumed to have cooties, but having attained adolescence myself I know we grow out of it. And as I doubt very much that the mothers buying or crafting these anti-boy slogan items would permit their sons to wear "Girls Are Stupid" tee-shirts, their allowing their daughters to do the same sort of thing has always seemed fundamentally unfair to me.

However, I'm going to look, if not a little more kindly, then a little less unkindly on the practice from now on.

See, Knitting Pattern Central (a great site that serves as a clearinghouse for free knitting patterns) currently has in its newly added section a link to a dishcloth emblazoned with the charming legend:

MOMS

RULE

DADS

DROOL

What a delightful message for the kiddies! Just think: every time Junior goes through the kitchen he can read a message proclaiming not only the stupidity of his own personal father, but of all fathers everywhere. Personally, I can't wait for this slogan to catch on in the broader society, in the form of bumperstickers and adult clothing. I'm particularly looking forward to the line of maternity wear. What could be better for family life and the promotion of a humane, livable society than mothers constantly proclaiming their contempt for the men who gave their children half their DNA? If they could do it with sparkly lettering stretched across their pregnant bellies, so much the better, but meanwhile I'll settle for a dishcloth.

And if there might be some slight effect on Junior's developing self-image from seeing this sort of anti-dad and, by extension, anti-male message day in and day out, so what? Little boys (and their sisters) are never too young to learn about the general drooling idiocy of men and the uselessness of fathers. And if , for some unfathomable reason, Junior should harbor any belief that he won't become a drooling idiot until he is grown up, he can always consult his sister's tee-shirt for re-education.

It Droppeth as the Gentle Rain

2009-05-22T17:01:00.009-05:00

I recently found myself becoming attracted to the Divine Mercy prayer. I never used to be. In fact, I once described this chaplet to my husband as "not a beautiful prayer, like the rosary". Two to three months ago I suddenly began to be drawn to it; looking back, I realize I'd found myself noticing the image back even before Christmas, but my recent attraction to the prayer itself seemed out of the blue.

The chaplet of Divine Mercy is usually spoken, of course, but there is a lovely sung version that has been featured on EWTN and which you can hear multiple places. It is available on YouTube here: The Chaplet of Divine Mercy in Song, Part 1 of 3, Part 2, and Part 3. It is available as an audio file here. (I am not necessarily endorsing that site, BTW; this prayer is the only thing I have seen there and I know nothing about the site otherwise.) The CD is available from Amazon, and I heartily recommend it for praying in your car; not only is it lovely to hear, but as a prayer, it is easier to focus on while driving than the rosary is. If you'd like to pray along with others in real-time, EWTN television and radio airs the Divine Mercy prayer daily at 3PM Central Time, though it may not always be this same version.

I have never really gotten into praying this at the hour it is often prayed, 3PM, but I have sometimes wondered if would be good for more people to pray a mini mercy prayer then. Most people are busy with (secular) jobs or school at three in the afternoon. But if, when someone notices it's three o-clock (or a few minutes after), that person were to think of Jesus on the cross and offer a quick internal prayer for mercy, he could be in union with everyone else in his time zone praying for mercy. Just a fast "Lord have mercy", "God have mercy on us", "For the sake of Your Son's suffering, have mercy on us", or something similar. Anyway, it's just a thought. I figure the more people praying for mercy, the better.

Of course, my own recent attraction to this prayer was not really some happenstance out of the blue. Long story short, I needed to go to Confession and was, I'm ashamed to say, putting it off. My attraction to this devotion was in part a manifestation of my own largely subconscious need for mercy. I got it. I felt it. God's mercy is great.

Please pray for divine mercy for yourself, for your loved ones, for America, for the world. If not this particular prayer for mercy, then one you make up yourself. Or perhaps the Jesus Prayer, from Orthodox practice. (Salinger readers, you know it already! If not, you can learn about it from this book; I'm not qualified to comment on the translation, but it seemed a good book to me when I read it last November or December.) I did not realize at the time of my sudden inexplicable attraction that when I said "have mercy on us and on the whole world" I was praying for myself, except in a general way--in fact, the most urgent of my prayers were for someone else entirely--but I was blessed anyway. We all need mercy. And with God, if not always with our fellow humans, it is there for our asking.

I'm a Fellagirly

2009-03-26T19:50:00.005-05:00

You Are 40% Feminine, 60% Masculine

You are in touch with your masculine side.
You are not overly sensitive and not easily moved.
Occasionally, though, something will get through and touch your heart!

Are You Masculine or Feminine?

That's probably close enough to accuracy for a pop psych quiz. I've never felt I wholly fit in with other women, and sometimes it seems to go beyond the way I've never fit in in other areas to be about my not fitting in as a woman. I'm just not keen on being in all-female groups. Assuming they're men who can carry on a conversation and that I have some point of commonality with, I much prefer the company of men to that of all-female groups. I am really uncomfortable in social situations where all the men start going off in one group and the women in another. I have been known to complain that "most women never want to talk about anything but diets, makeup, and hairstyles!" Of course, that is unfair, and not just because you'd have to add recipes and desserts to the list; it's not true either, but I think there is a certain amount of truth hidden in its incompleteness. What really bugs me about all female groups is the compulsion to agree: everyone is supposed to agree about everything, otherwise you're not being nice, and scholars of male-female speech differences will tell you this is because women like to build community when they talk, blah blah blah, but I just find it damned annoying. Goodness knows there are some men who can't argue without getting angry and a lot of men who can't argue well, but in general men are better about sometimes disagreeing chat and for this and possibly other reasons are more fun to talk with.

I also think women try to get too involved emotionally and personally with me; I am reserved and do not rush to share personal matters with people I hardly know. Women are more apt to be nosy than men and to invade my space. I also don't like the way most women tend to say "I feel" instead of "I think". Or the way they're so big on Hallmark-invented holidays and...okay, I'm getting a little negative here.

I was happy enough with being a girl in the eww, boys are yucky phase and before, but I found the onset of puberty upsetting. It's probable most people do to some extent, but I don't know if some quirk of personality made it more upsetting than average to me or not; I do know it coincided with my growing awareness of a gulf between me and my classmates--or a growing gulf--due to differing intelligence levels, and that may have exacerbated things. Unlike the girls around me, I saw no point in taking any interest in boys until I got to the point where I was experiencing sexual desire regularly, at age fifteen. (Even then my interest had to remain largely theoretical for a while!) In early adulthood, I was told on several occasions that my sexual attitudes and responses were male. In separate instances I also took some criticism for a particular sexual attitude that is more associated with men. I've also been given to understand that I'm cold and unfeeling, which is apparently a more male sort of thing;

On the other hand, I'm married; my sexual desires have always been for men; I have a number of pasttimes that are considered traditionally feminine in our society; I love, love, love puppies; I understand the appeal of small things (like baby clothes); I sometimes inexplicably want to mother the vulnerable, especially the small and vulnerable (like injured or frightened puppies, shy children, Ralph Wiggum); and I go soft and syrupy inside when I see babies--only in my innards, I try to keep my outards dignified--and I have many times felt that irrational or perhaps extra-rational yearning for a baby that women sometimes get. I'm also feminine enough that my marriage has sometimes had a little of that friction that is supposedly caused by male-female differences. I call my husband to deal with the mice and lizards that occasionally slip into our house and I would call him to deal with snakes; this is utterly unreasonable, but I do it shamelessly. It does not bother me to cry in front of him. He has sometimes indicated he finds me overly emotional and irrational. And, although he's several times yelled out "You're a MAN, baby", he once said--in the tone of a man who knows he's going to regret saying it!--that I was "acting like, I hate to say it, a woman".

Sooo...what does all this mean? Damned if I know. Humans are complicated.

Something Lovely for a Grey Day

2009-02-28T15:17:00.005-06:00

I am a truly unmusical person. This is why I tend to prefer comical songs: I can appreciate interesting words (lyrics) better than I can the music itself. But everyone can be moved by some music at some time. I can remember being invigorated by some rousing bits of classical music when I was an adolescent and touched by an instrumental piece called "Vincent" I heard on the radio as a teen, the pleasant near-nostalgia I had as an adult non-believer hearing some of the hymns I'd heard sung in church as a child, the pleasure it always is to get to sing Christmas carols in a group. But nothing is as moving to this non-musical person as hearing someone who's good at it sing Ave Maria--no, not even hearing Amazing Grace, the one hymn that I liked even as an adult non-believer and that gives me a little shiver all down my body even when I sing it to myself in a voice that can't be made good at singing even inside my head. Amazing Grace, lovely though it is, is about the person or people singing--their downtroddeness and transformation through grace. The Ave Maria reaches above and beyond the person singing; it is lofty and inspiring, like a cathedral.

I can't sing it myself, but I love to hear other people sing it. I've often listened to Aaron Neville sing it in my car, through the gift of modern technology; buy a copy of his CD Believe and you can too. Here's a few links so you can listen right now:

The lyrics in Latin, English, German, and Slavic plus a few music clips.

Bobby McFerrin and audience doing an interesting version.

A site that has lyrics and music clips of a number of Catholic hymns (check out the Salve Regina; that is the only song other than the annual Christmas carols that I've enjoyed singing in church since I became Catholic).

And, saving the best for last, Luciano Pavarotti singing Ave Maria.

A Religious Craft Done Right

2009-02-06T16:21:00.002-06:00

I just wanted to share this link to a pattern for a shadow (or illusion) knit depiction of the Chinese characters for Jesus Christ. I urge you to click on it and read the author's explanation of why shadow knitting is an especially apt way to show Jesus' name. Too often, religious crafts are hokey or twee. It is nice to see a religiously themed craft item that is both attractive to look at and has some thought behind it.

In addition to what the pattern author said, I think there's another reason why shadow knitting is appropriate for the name of Jesus, at least in Chinese characters: to me it speaks of the fact that faithful Catholics and other Christians must be largely underground in communist China.

If I were the creator of this project, I wouldn't use it as a blanket, but figure out a way to hang it on the wall so everyone who visits can see it.

My Crisp Recipe, Such As It Is

2009-02-06T16:07:00.004-06:00

I pretty much gave up baking sweets while I was still a bride. I discovered that my husband, Philistine that he is, prefers storebought candy to homemade desserts. Something about having to throw out half or more of a cake that had gone stale was too disheartening. (Pies, I'm ashamed to say, I would likely finish off myself.) My baking has been pretty limited ever since.

One thing I have made a lot of times over the years is fruit crisps. Or maybe, since they're not always the same, I should say "things I've made a lot of times over the years are fruit crisps". It's one of those non-recipes that you can throw together at the drop of a hat; it's not actually any easier, now I think about it, than the cobblers I ate growing up, but somehow I'm far more likely to make it and, with the extra fiber in the oatmeal, I can almost persuade myself it's healthy--you know, if I'm feeling delusional.

Fruit Crisp

Chop fresh fruit into a baking dish.

For the topping, combine equal amounts of

old-fashioned oatmeal;
flour;
white sugar;
melted butter or margarine.

Mix those four ingredients together and you have your topping. Pat it onto the fruit. Put it into the oven at 350 degrees or a bit higher and bake until the topping is done.

Notes:

What kind of fruit? Pretty much anything you like. I usually use apples, but pears are yummy like this and I've done many mixed fruit combos. Berries, if used alone, can be a bit too juicy. The most delicious fruit crisp I ever had was a post-Christmas concoction I made to use up some rapidly over-softening pears. I chopped the pears together with some apples, added some raisins I'd soaked in brandy, threw in some leftover cranberry sauce (yes, really), and added vanilla to the mixture. The result was a surprisingly elegant taste to this usually utilitarian sort of dessert. (If desserts can ever be utilitarian.)

What kind of flour? Plain, unbleached, or even whole wheat. I never buy self-rising, as plain is more versatile, and you wouldn't want the leavening in this, in any case.

Why not brown sugar? Brown sugar tastes good in the topping, but makes for a softer texture.

Why no measurements? Because saying equal amounts of every topping ingredient is easier to remember and more flexible as to size. If you're making a fairly small dessert, use a wee casserole dish for the fruit and use about a half-cup of each topping ingredient. If you want a larger dessert, layer your fruit into a big dish and use a cup (or however much it takes) of each topping ingredient.

Isn't that a lot of butter? Yes. If I'm making a big, cup and a half of each ingredient crisp, I'll usually reduce the amount of butter. Something in me just recoils at the idea of putting three sticks of butter into one dish--it's mostly a Scrooge thing.

Don't I use any spices? With apples, I usually dust the fruit with cinnamon or with a combo of things that I might like in apple pie. With other fruits I might or might not add spices, as the whim takes me. I do not normally use any liquid flavorings.

Anything else? Yes, for years I've been meaning to try this with nuts--probably slivered almonds--added to the topping mixture. I'm sure that would make it extra yummy. Though the nuts might take this out of the strictly cheap, super-easy, always-have-the-ingredients-on-hand category. Also, to give credit where credit is due, I first got the idea for this in one of Amy Dacyzyn's essays, in a passing comment about something she made in the microwave for her toddler.

Random Thoughts

2009-02-06T15:31:00.002-06:00

***

How long before the anti-smoking zealots crack down on those old-fashioned pictures of Santa Claus holding a pipe? And will they expurgate Twas the Night Before Christmas or just burn all the copies?

***

You know who would make a good Nanny Ogg? Patsy Byrne, who played Nursie in Blackadder.

***

A good name for a purveyor of modest clothing would be Modest Modiste.

***

Some men seem to have a greater than average desire to protect people and save lives, and I suspect there's a higher proportion of such men in the emergency response jobs--firemen, policemen, EMTs--than in the general population.

I find I prefer the people who want to save lives to the people who want to run other people's lives.

***

I (almost) never remember the names of voice actors, but it's absurd the little moment of pleasure I get when I recognize in an anime the voice of one who did a character I enjoyed in some other anime.

***

It seems the older I get, the more annoying the "trash the conventional", "sneer at the mundanes", "show contempt for the bourgeoisie" schtick becomes. Even though I did my share of it when I was young.

***

Our popular culture is so steeped in the story of the hero who suffers persecution, or at least opposition, for holding an unpopular view that some contemporary people seem to have drawn the unwarranted conclustion that if a viewpoint is opposed it must therefore be the correct viewpoint.

***

Since the 1950s the size of the average American household has substantially decreased, but the size of our dessert recipes are still the same.

***
Should crochet figures that don't partake at least a little of a Japanese pop culture aesthetic still be called amigurumi? If they'd be just as at home in Lady's Home Crochet Weekly, circa 1980, why not just call them crochet toys?

***

I recently came across a woman saying that she was thinking of crafting a womb to celebrate the Roe v. Wade decision. I do hope she remembers to add a removable partially developed human.

***

Well, That Didn't Take Long

2009-01-23T16:10:00.003-06:00

Checking the news at lunchtime today, I learned that President Obama would today lift the ban on giving federal funding to groups that promote abortion in other countries. Leaving aside the question of morality, there's another very big question American citizens should be asking themselves: What's in it for us?

Really. Why should we pay for them? Individual Americans can do whatever they like with their own money, but it seems to me that a country's government money should go toward projects that benefit the people of that country. How does it benefit the American guy/gal on the street to finance abortions in foreign nations? If individual women in other countries want abortions, why should the US government--which, let's not forget, takes its money from individual people's pocketbooks and paychecks--pay for them?

Sometimes it can be in our national interest to provide aid to other nations, of course, so it may be there is some benefit to you, me, and that guy ahead of us in line at the Quik-e-Mart that I'm just not seeing. Perhaps the idea is that if we help foreigners have abortions, there will be less of them, and that will be in our national interest? I guess that could be it, but I'm not convinced.

Would it be too much to ask that President Obama explain how it serves the United States' interests to pay for foreign abortions? And if he can't give a reason, to reinstate the ban until he can? Until then, Americans who worry about foreign people going un-aborted could start private charities to donate funds to pay for those abortions.

A Snatch of Conversation

2008-12-26T19:41:00.004-06:00

A few weeks ago, Uncle Pookie and I were driving home one night. I was saying something about our general spiritual lameness, when suddenly I was struck by it more forcefully and exclaimed, "It's a good thing we don't have to live under oppression!"

"What do you mean?"

"You know, religious oppression, having to receive the sacraments in secret, things like that. We'd never make it."

"Oh, I don't know, we might rise to the occasion."

I thought about that for a few moments. "Well, yeah, I guess times like that can sometimes bring out the best in people."

The husband: "No, I meant our stubbornness might kick in."

And the next few fits and starts of sentences I tried to utter, I couldn't get out for my laughter. He knows us.

Oh, how he knows us! I am rather pliant until something hits up against my sense of personal integrity and then I become rooted and unyielding--more so than most people would consider good for me; and it can be triggered by things other people consider insignificant. As for Uncle Pookie, I've been known to call him The Immovable Object; we'll leave it at that. God forbid we should ever be faced with the prospect of martyrdom, either regular or "white" (bloodless), but if we are and we pass that test, stubbornness will surely play a big part in it.

Which I guess would just go to show that 1.) flaws often have a flip side that can be a strength, and 2.) God can even use our flaws.

So why did I choose to post this today, during the festive Christmas season? December 26th is the feast day of St. Stephen,the first Christian martyr. (See the book of Acts.) He wasn't the last. Whatever the number currently stands at, it's safe to say it will get bigger. The twentieth century saw a surprisingly large amount of persecution of Christians in general and Catholics in particular. This happened below the radar of most Americans (as does today's persecution of Christians in, for example, China), partly because we were insulated from it here. And we still are.

But we in the West live in societies where the Bible is rapidly being redefined as hate speech, where ignorance of Scriptures and Christian tradition are vast and spreading, where families are breaking down and all norms of morality and civilized behavior are suspect. Here in the US fairly large numbers of the population are indignant if religious believers involve themselves in the political process like citizens and the job of Supreme Court Justice now seems to be one with a "No Catholics Need Apply" in the job description. And the way the wind is blowing, a lot more jobs may be coming with that notice before long.

God forbid it should be so. I can not see the future any more than anyone else and I certainly hope that Christian persecution does not happen in the USA or in the rest of the Anglosphere or anywhere else it is not already going on. But in a society where a person can be jailed for quoting passages of the Bible that someone else does not like or be hounded out of his or her job for holding to traditional Christian teaching, it is time Christians have to begin to ask themselves what they will do if they are faced with martyrdom, red or white. And this goes extra for Catholic Christians, because if you'll notice, people who hate Christianity in general usually hate the Catholic Church extra hard.

Something to think about as 2008 ends.

One Conversion Story For You

2008-12-18T18:44:00.003-06:00

I enjoy reading and hearing the stories of people's conversion to the Catholic Church, and I have enjoyed it since before I became a Catholic myself. It is nice, in a world filled with pop culture trivialities, to turn on the TV or radio and hear someone talking about how he wrestled with some of life's deeper meanings and came to a place where he had to make a decision and he made it. You can find these sorts of stories on EWTN, especially their Journey Home program (check their audio archive library for back episodes), some websites like Catholic Answers, and even books. Maybe this enjoyment might seem a little odd since I never liked the "testimony giving" at the Baptist churches I had to attend as a young person--it, like all of churchgoing then, was tedious to me and I cynically noted that all of these testimonies seemed to hinge on the person realizing he would die and being afraid of that. Adolescents can be harsh in their assessment of others, and I think it's glaringly obvious I was not above that. But in a (partial) defense of myself, I truly can not remember anyone ever giving a reason for why they were where they were. Anyway. Here's a conversion story I stumbled across by accident, read, and thought others might like to read: "From Church of Christ to Christ's Church."

You Can (Sometimes) Go Back Again

2008-12-18T18:18:00.005-06:00

It can be dangerous to revisit books or movies and TV we loved as a child; there is always the possibility that what seemed so very good back then will be revealed as pretty poor stuff. I can't remember the first time this happened to me, but I do remember that by age 16 or 17 I was afraid to reread any of the Katherine Mansfield stories I'd thought were so great at age 13.

This year I've had two good re-visits though. One book and one TV movie.

The Book

When I was in second grade I fell in very great like with the Five Dolls books by Helen Clare. My elementary school library had three of the five books: Five Dolls in the Snow, Five Dolls and the Duke, and Five Dolls and Their Friends. (The other two books are Five Dolls in a House and Five Dolls and the Monkey.) These books were about an English girl named Elizabeth Small, who had learned the trick of turning herself small so she could visit with the dolls who lived in her dollhouse. Each chapter of the books covered one visit.

I'm not entirely sure what about these books appealed to me so much back then; they are not great books and I did not mistake them as such even then. The dolls and the monkey were fun, as were the black-and-white illustrations, and it was all a bit silly--the dolls' behavior, I mean--and maybe that was enough. Or maybe it was the Englishness, that had me reading new words I'd never seen before--words like pillar box, tam-o-shanter, vicar, hundreds and thousands. Whatever it was, I checked these books out more than once. In fact, I wanted to own them so much that I thought about copying one of them, Five Dolls in the Snow, out longhand. (Cultural note to those under thirty-five or so: This was the late seventies, before the days when everyone had easy access to photocopy machines, not to mention home scanners and printers. In school our pre-copied worksheets or tests came in mimeographed form--purple ink on paper that would still be faintly damp from the machine and redolent of ink when we got them.) I decided that would take too long, though, and settled on copying out one chapter, the one where Elizabeth brought the dolls a truckload of groceries. (Foreign terms there included lorry and treacle.) I did not regret the time spent.

Off and on since the '90s I've tried to find copies of these books from online sellers. (Looking in my local libraries proved fruitless.) I looked under all the titles and under Helen Clare's other pseudonym of Pauline Clarke, and I could usually find some copies, but they were always priced outrageously. Seriously. Until last year I don't think I'd ever seen one under fifty dollars; they usually started higher than that and were frequently over a hundred dollars. Which seems pretty high for children's books that were printed in the USA in the late '60s by a non-obscure publisher (reprints of British books from the '50s and early '60s) and which are not particularly collectible. Especially considering they were often discarded library copies.

So, earlier this year when I finally found one of these listed as a good condition book with somewhat worn dust jacket for under twenty dollars, even after adding on the shipping, I didn't have to think too hard. I figured satisfying a long-felt nostalgic desire was worth that much.

And it was.

The book was Five Dolls and the Monkey, which I'd never read before. You can see the cover art here. I liked the cover as soon as I opened the package and when I opened the book I saw to my pleasure that there was a chapter called "Dressmaking". I read the whole book with pleasure. As an adult with many years of watching British TV shows and reading British books behind me, there was no novelty of terms to be had, but there was an almost eerie strangeness to the little scene where a butterfly--huge and strange to doll-sized Elizabeth--lands among the dolls in their garden. And the whole thing felt like revisiting one of the pleasanter bits of my childhood, except it was a book I hadn't actually had the opportunity to read then. I made up for that by rereading it a couple of times. I think I got my eighteen or so dollars worth of pleasure.

Since then I've found a cheaper still, ex-library copy of Five Dolls and the Duke, which was my least preferred of the three I read as a child. (I had some trouble visualizing part of the theater scene.) I think I was right then, and it is not as good as the others, but it was still nice. I would not mind having the rest of these books, or at least getting the opportunity to reread them some day. Or in the case of the first book, reading it for the first time; I'd especially like to know how Elizabeth's acquiring of the turning small trick was handled.

The TV Show

When I was, I think, fourteen, I turned on the PBS one evening to find something starting called Much Ado About Nothing. Beatrice and then Beatrice and Benedick together had me hooked within minutes, and I watched the whole thing with increasing pleasure. When the TV play was over, I went to bed and pulled out the complete volume of Shakespeare that had come from a box of old books my mother had bought me at a garage sale. (With its limp red cover, two columns of text on each page, thin paper, and annoying practice of abbreviating the names of the speaker it is, bizaarely perhaps, a volume I miss in my pruned down library.) I turned to MAAN and read it straight through before I went to sleep.

And that was the beginning of my love of Shakespeare.

It wasn't my introduction. I had seen Zeferelli's justly famous Romeo and Juliet when it was on television near Valentine's Day, even read the play, and had perhaps seen Laurence Olivier's As You Like It by this time. I may even have read a little more than R&J by then, but I don't remember. What I do remember is that that was the first time I fell in love with anything from Shakespeare, and it was the play that ensured I read all the rest (except Troilus and Cressida--I've never managed that) and watched as many live action and filmed versions of the plays as I could. I am not a scholar nor an actor or theater buff, just a lowly audience member and reader. In other words one of the people who help keep Shakepeare alive outside the literary journals (circulation 200) and give the actors someone to perform to. But back to the production in question.

In later years I carried the memory of this with me, but I did not know what production it was--the names of any of the actors or the director or anything. I thought it likely it was part of The Complete Shakespeare Plays, the BBC project (in conjunction with some American group) to film all of the plays, because the time period was right, but it could not be sure. For all that they were put on television for free viewing in the late '70s and early '80s, these plays have not been easy to get hold of since. In the late '90s the VHS were priced at $99 a piece, if you could run down the place to order them from; buying the whole set was something like $2500--a savings, but still expensive. Overpriced, I'd say, especially considering the quality was uneven over the series. For most people, if their library didn't have them, they weren't going to get to see them. But things have improved. They came out on DVD with some mini boxed collections of selected plays--not necessarily the most desirable choices, though--and a couple of years ago Netflix added a few of the more popular titles--the ones high school kids are likely to have to read for school--from the series. And now Netflix seems to have all the titles from this series and this year I have watched many of them I did not get to see on PBS or later from a library I had access to; watching the history cycles in order was especially nice.

A couple of weeks ago that series' MAAN came in the post and I watched it and it was the one I saw back then and, though I had feared it would be otherwise, I enjoyed it all over again. It was not new as it was then, but it had the pleasure of familiarity in the well-worn words and the pleasure of remembering the production as I saw it again. The Beatrice of Cherie Lunghi had a slight edge of bitterness that I was oblivious to when I was a girl (not unsupportable from the text), but all the actors were good, especially Robert Lindsay as Benedick. Okay, Graham Crowden's friar looks a bit crazy and it was hard for me not to think of him in Waiting for God when I saw him, but I'm not sure that actor can help looking a bit crazy in any part--something about his eyes; I had no such problem with Clive Dunn from Dad's Army as Dogberry's doddering assistant. Otherwise I just enjoyed my nostalgic trip ("Oh, there's the orange trees, oh there's Beatrice sneaking behind the trees, just like I remember, oh there's Benedick looking somewhat hangdog and foolish without his beard") and Robert Lindsay's Benedick and the beautifully made costumes. I even kept the disc another couple of days so I could watch it again, all cosy and warm in my chair, working on an afghan. Do I know how to have fun or do I know how to have fun?! The answer to that is yes. And you can have fun too if you add this to your Netflix queue.

The Family Creative Workshop

2008-11-23T15:18:00.005-06:00

This summer Uncle Pookie came home one morning from the library book sale with a truly amazing number of books, among them a complete set of The Family Creative Workshop (twenty-three volumes plus index). Bringing out my usual objections about lack of space and not buying something just because it's on sale, I honed in on The Family Creative Workshop because it "didn't even look like something he'd usually be interested in" and I already had a general needlework reference. He pointed out that it was dollar-a-foot day (i.e. "it was on sale, therefore I had to buy it") and, besides, it looked good. Well, whatever points it costs me in the game of moral one-upmanship that is marriage (according to Marge Simpson), I've long since conceded he was right and it was a good purchase. (Heck, I'm so bad at this game I'll even admit that my concern over limited space did not prevent me, later in the day, from going to the library myself for a little dollar-a-foot action; books have always been my gazingus pin.)

The Family Creative Workshop really is a fun set of books. It set out to be, according to the introduction, an encyclopedia of traditional and contemporary crafts, and I think it succeeded at least as well as could reasonably be expected. No multi-reference an be exhaustive on any one subject, but this series tells you quite a bit about a lot of subjects, including some you may never have heard of before. They have defined "craft" very loosely. Don't think that it is just the expected crafts. The section on granny squares, which are maligned by some as the hokiest of "old lady" craft items, is sandwiched between gold panning and greenhouse construction. There are also entries on things like cryptography, maps, and old-fashioned street games.

And if some of the craft items are a little seventies-esque (which I tend to like) and not to your taste (fantasy in children's stuffed animals is great, but when making a blue-maned lion, I think it's overkill to use a gaudy patchwork print fabric for the body), just turn the page and read about something else. These books were made for browsing.

Each entry was written by an expert in that area; a few contributed more than one entry. I don't recognize any of these names except that of Isaac Asimov, who did the astronomy section, but they all seem to be knowledgeable. To keep good standards up across such a large number of authors, I suspect there were some good editors working on this project.

There are lots of illustrations throughout the books, and the covers of the books are especially nice: various crafts or craft materials made the artistic focus of glossy photos. You can see a lot of pictures from the books at this link.

The index is good. If you are collecting these books one by one, do not be tempted to forgo the index, because it includes extras. It is divided into four parts: "Basic Reference Guide"; "Materials Reference Guide"; a section of patterns you might want want to use in various crafts; and the index proper, which also includes a second index of projects from the books grouped by evaluation of cost, time required, or suitability by age and skill level.

In short, I highly recommend this series for purchase. I wish I had had it as a child. Just be careful of opening a volume when you're dusting or just want to look up one thing--I've lost "lost" hours that way.

Yet More Mary Frances

2008-11-23T15:01:00.002-06:00

Just as an FYI for anyone interested in Mary Frances, if you search for Jane Eayre Fryer at the Internet Archive, three Mary Frances books turn up, the housekeeping one, the gardening one, and the first aid one. I don't actually like reading online books all that much myself and have mostly limited myself to plain text books from the Gutenberg site when I have read them, but some of you might enjoy these.

And of course for those interested in sewing, no trip to the Internet Archive is complete without a peek at Pattern for Smartness. If you've never seen it, it's a late-forties promotional film from the Simplicity Pattern Company, which people like to laugh at for a few ripe-for-MST3K-treatment bits, but which actually has some good sewing advice in it.

Some Things You're Allowed to Say and Something You're Not

2008-10-30T10:18:00.003-05:00

In the contemporary US, there are things you're (still) allowed to say and things you're not allowed to say.

You're allowed to say that, if you have fair skin and a disinclination to get skin cancer, you ought not sunbathe. It's okay to say that if you have trouble stopping at one or two drinks, you ought not drink at all. It's okay to say that, if you have a family history of diabetes and heart disease, you ought not eat lots of sweets and other junk foods. And, while there's no shortage of people who want to sell the notion "you can eat whatever you want, whenever you want, and still lose weight" and no shortage of people wanting to buy that notion, it is still okay to say that people who do not want to become fat should avoid the couch potato lifestyle in favor of a more physically active one.

But it is not okay to say that, if you are in such a situation in your life that a pregnancy (yours or your girlfriend's) would ruin your life--i.e. cause all sorts of problems for you and wreck your plans--then maybe you should not engage in the activity that creates pregnancy until your life is in a more stable state. You're not allowed to say that.

Mary Frances Sewing and Amazing Dollhouses

2008-10-16T19:35:00.009-05:00

A couple of years ago I reviewed The Mary Frances Sewing Book. I've just recently found a site that shows the whole Mary Frances wardrobe sewn up. This person--I'll play the odds and assume it's a woman--did a great job. If I'm partial to anything it is the little red rain cape, but all the garments are lovely. It almost motivates me to make up the wardrobe. First I'd want to make an appropriate doll, though, and as there are more reasons not to bother than to bother, it begins to seem like too much effort. Although this Mary Marie doll shown made up by a talented young lady on her blog is cute enough to tempt even the lazy, I'm going to resist. (Lacis and some other sites, including this one, sell two different doll patterns designed for the Mary Frances books; I assume that sewn up one is from the Making Memories pattern, but I don't know for sure.)

For a different kind of crafting from books, look at these dollhouse photos on the Dollhouse Minis blog. It's the Leaky Cauldron and Hogwarts in dollhouse form. What could be better? Seriously, all I can come up with is adding photos of a dollhouse Burrow as well. That Leaky Cauldron is especially nice looking. I've long known that if I had loads of space for a dollhouse to be on permanent display, I would have a big ole Tudor-style timbered one--it would beat out even the Victorian Monstrosity style I like--but now I've seen dollhouse Hogwartses, maybe I should dream big and go for a castle? ... Eh, maybe not. Dollhouses are all about fantasy, but I might have trouble convincing myself a castle was the warm, cosy haven I'd want my dollhouse world to be.

Random Thoughts

2008-10-16T19:29:00.001-05:00

***
Considering what a complex and still little understood thing language is, I find it appalling--simply appalling!--that unlicensed amateurs are allowed to teach it to their children.

***

If you're going to be a knitting snob, wouldn't it make more sense to be snobbish about the advanced skills you've mastered than about the tools and yarn you use?

***

Some people say "People's beliefs don't matter" out of one side of their mouths and "It is necessary to believe in ourselves" and "Self-esteem is so important" out of the other side.

***

Why does "homemade" usually have good connotations when we're talking about food and bad connotations when we're talking about clothing? What--did millions of Americans grow up around women who were great cooks and lousy seamstresses?

***

Anyone who mocks the old-fashioned virtues of showing some reserve, controlling the emotions, considering the neighbors, and not airing dirty laundry in public ought to be required to go along with policemen on a few domestic disturbance calls.

***

Maybe I'll feel better about people referring to "a Down's Syndrome child" (or, worse, "a Downs child") when I start hearing people say "Oh, s/he has a cancer child."

***

Why do some people admire the "quaint", traditional architecture and clothing of peasants and peons in other cultures, while complaining about the dreadfully "uncreative" people in their own culture who insist on doing things the way they've always been done?

***

If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing well. If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly. Both are true because if a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing. Period.

***

To live in Key West it seems you must either be rich enough to afford two houses (one well away from Key West) or have a lot of family and friends you can stay with every time the Keys are evacuated.

***

Sometimes hurricane weather reports make me feel a bit like a parent who's heard on the radio that a child at his child's school has been killed and then, when he's located his own still living child, feels a huge rush of relief, only to realize a few moments later that he's relieved it's some other parent going through the worst day of any parent's life, not him.

***

Possible new word--Conflusion. The result of drawing an asinine, confused conclusion from data presented.

***

A Laid-back Introduction to Sewing

2008-10-05T14:16:00.012-05:00

Every pasttime, whether hobby, craft, or profession, has its jargon. Gamers have their GST, d20s, roll-to-hits, dex, and eps. Knitters have their SSKs and M1s. Poets must learn to recognize enjambment, iambs, dactyls, and assonance. Carpenters talk about butt joints and dovetail joints and medical personnel about rolling veins and coding. Even gardening, a relatively jargon-free pasttime, has the delightful "pricking out".

Sewing, unlike gardening, is a jargon-heavy pasttime. The young person who thinks she will learn to sew clothing, innocently thinking this will be a smooth process (after all, you just sit down and stitch fabric together, she's seen people do it, maybe even done a little of it for her teddy bear or something when she was younger), may be overwhelmed when she visits the sewing department in or, worse, a fabric store. There's row after row of things she's never heard of before and doesn't know how to use. Back home, she turns on PBS or a cable channel to a sewing program, thinking she will learn something, only to find the host is showing a more efficient way to do X, which might be helpful, only she doesn't know what X is and what it's used for, much less the old process which it is replacing. If our would-be sewer doesn't let herself be deterred by this and seeks a book on garment sewing from the library, odds are it's the TV sewing show problem all over again--the author assumes the reader has all sorts of basic information already and is just looking for intermediate level help.

And every one of these forays into the world of sewing blasts her over the head with new words. There's [deep breath here] single-fold bias tape, double-fold bias tape, hem tape, hem facing, seam binding, flexi-lace seam binding or hem tape, quilt binding, satin blanket binding, gimp, fold-over braid, fold over elastic, elastic thread, elastic cord, knitted elastic, braided elastic, plushback elastic, picot elastic, interfacing, fusible interfacing, sew-in interfacing, non-woven interfacing, tricot interfacing, facings, stay stitch, hem stitch, blind hem stitch, topstitch, understitch, stitch in the ditch, French seam, flat felled seam, Hong Kong finish, clean-finished, French dart, "rotate the dart", high bust, full bust, "make a muslin", "bag the lining", blanket stitch, buttonhole stitch, 1-step buttonhole, 4-step button hole, bobbin case, placket, fusible webbing, slipstitch... You get the idea.

Sewing books generally seem to suffer from the opposite problem to that knitting books currently have: they all seem to assume the reader knows lots of stuff already. Garment sewing needs its own version of Stitch and Bitch--i.e. something that will address the needs of the complete novice, by showing how to do things (and why), explaining the jargon when it's introduced, and giving some cheerleading along the way. As far as I know, that book is not yet out there, although I've heard good things about Wendy Mullins' Sew U.

The closest I've seen to what I envision is The Illustrated Hassle-free Make Your Own Clothes Book, by Sharon Rosenberg and Joan Wiener. This delightful little book was published in the early 1970s, in hardcover and later in Bantam paperback. (The paperback may have been abridged.)It is very much a product of its time (and therein lies much of its charm), but it is more notable for speaking to complete novices.

Here is the beginning of the introduction:

"About three years ago I decided to start making my own clothes. It
took me another half a year before I actually did it. Each day the goal would
loom in my head--a hodgepodge of scary patterns and intricate machinery,
technical stuff like seam-binding, new and freaky terms like selvage or darts.
Many days I lurked in Sharon's little sewing room, watching as she quickly
turned out pants and skirts, ponchos and shirts. My determination would
strengthen and I'd dash off to the sewing store, only to be confronted with the
old fears again. I asked Sharon to show me how to do it the way she did--without
patterns. And sure enough, after a brief indoctrination period, I became the
envy of my friends...."

Ms Wiener goes on to explain the authors' philosophy: "Sharon and I think clothes should feel good--comfortable, sensual; [w]e also think they should be easy to make within a relatively short period of time, fairly inexpensive and groovy to look at." Now that's a clothing philosophy I can get on board with; as much as there was to dislike about the hippies and overlapping movements of the time, that little sentence seems to me to sum up much of what was best about them.

In their easy-going, jargon-free way the authors divide up all fabric into Softs, Mediums, and Stiffs. I love it! Isn't this how most of us choose fabric?

Wiener and Rosenberg are good at explaining practical stuff too. Take a look at this, which begins the section on facings:

'Don't be scared by the word "facing". It is merely an easy way to
get a smooth turned edge at garment openings like necks and armholes. The facing
is a 2" or 3" piece of fabric that follows the shape of the opening.'

These few sentences impress me because most sewing book authors would have jumped right into how to sew the facing without explaining what it actually is or (as Rosenberg and Wiener go on to do) how to design your own facings for the clothes you will make.

What kind of clothing do they teach you to make? Well, that's probably the rub for most people. These are definitely hippie clothes. I happen to like most hippie clothes, but there's a further problem. The authors explain that they do not sew darts into their tops, because they do not wear bras (bras "give your clothes a funny shape"); they do explain how to make darts in pants and skirts, but the clothes shown are generally shapeless. Shapeless clothes don't work very well on fat people, especially fat women, and there are way, way more fat people in American now than there were when this book was published. Non-thin women who want to make hassle-free patternless clothes may want to pair this book with Pattern-free Fashions by Mary Lee Trees Cole, which has advice for controlling excess fullness easily and, I guess you could say, somewhat intuitively. (More intuitively than in conventional dressmaking, anyway.)

Are there any other problems with the book? I wanted it to be longer because I was enjoying it so much, but it is possible some might wish it were longer because they would like a little more discussion of, say, fabric choice or deciding what size to make their scarves. Additionally, there are a few spots where the book could have been organized a bit better: the Add-On Sleeves subsection should really have been put either right after the Basic Top/Dress or after all the dresses and just before the set-in sleeves, rather than sandwiched in the middle of all the dresses/tops; I think the men's and the AC/DC (unisex) clothing sections could have been combined, especially given the author's views on the swapability of clothing styles; and the skirt fabric suggestions are in the tops and dresses section with no rhyme nor reason. The other (very small) potential problem I see is that the authors use the term selvage when referring to seam allowances. I 've never seen that usage before, and I think it could be a little confusing to the complete novice, although it shouldn't faze anyone else.

And there are two potential non-problem problems relating to the book's age and nature. There is no discussion of special considerations in sewing knits or stretchy wovens. For the reason, check the publishing date: 1971, which I figure means the book was likely written in 1970, maybe '69. There were fewer knits around, synthetics in general were so new many home sewers weren't using them yet, and some of fabrics we have today hadn't been invented yet; moreover, a lot of the synthetic fabric that was around in the early '70s was polyester double knit which was so stable it could, I think, be sewn like wovens and was so aggressively synthetic and unpleasant to the touch that it was not very hippie-like. As to the other non-problem, I've noticed some people react badly to books which use drawings instead of photos or black-and-white photos instead of color. I figure anybody like that wouldn't bother with this book in the first place, so it's definitely a non-problem.

The rest of us, who don't expect a book to be what it is not and who can dig a little of that early-'70s, hippie feel now and again, can enjoy this book. You don't even have to look for a secondhand source, as I did, as Skyhorse Publishing has just re-issued the book and it is available inexpensively from Amazon and other online bookstores. I haven't seen the re-issue and so can't tell you if it was given any additions or other changes, but I can point you to a website with scans of a few pages of the '70s paperback and to a site with a picture of that first paperback's cover--very different from the new cover!

Even people who aren't keen on creating a peasant or hippie vibe in their daily life might enjoy this book for creating costumes or as a non-intimidating introduction to sewing. One, perhaps unexpected, group who might benefit from this book are Harry Potter fans who want to make wizard robes. Although the films put the characters in Muggle clothing much of the time (understandably--it increases audience identification with the characters and allows the Hogwarts scenes to be more visually appealing than a sea of black robes and hats would be), the books make it clear that wizards wear robes most of the time, and a close reading shows that these robes have more in common with some of the dress styles in The Illustrated Hassle-free Make Your Own Clothes Book than with the Oxbridge-like school robes of the films--though you could use the book to help you make those too.

So light up some patchouli incense (or grab a handful of Bertie Botts Every Flavour Beans, if that's your thing), lie back on some floor-pillows, and read happily.

A Lesser Kind of Independence Day

2008-07-04T20:12:00.003-05:00

This past Christmas we were doing the drive-to-relatives-we'd-just-as-soon-not-visit thing and, as it was Christmas (I usually prefer silence for better conversation), I popped in my Aaron Neville Christmas CD. Uncle Pookie remarked that he didn't really like Aaron Neville's music, that he felt as if he ought to but he didn't.

Most of us have things like that, things we think we ought to like or ought to dislike. Uncle Pookie is less prone to such notions than anyone I've ever know, but there he was saying he thought he ought to like something. Weird.

I've never been much prone to feeling I had to conform to other people's expectations for my preferences--and that used to drive my mother wild, I can tell you: "But all the girls your age like this/wear this/ think that!"--yet I have some of these "I oughta"s. Several I can think of right off the top of my head.

Like Inspector Morse. Apparently I'm supposed to like Inspector Morse. The TV shows were very popular on both sides of the pond, the books were successful, and apparently loads of people like the character. I like lots of British shows, I like mystery series, I'm not necessarily opposed to "elitist" or snobbish characters, so I ought to like Morse. Well, I don't. Morse is a jerk. I feel sorry for his sergeant, just for his having to work with him. Morse also seems a bit of a sexist, albeit in a mild, forgiveable way. Morse doesn't even seem that great of a detective to me; and if you're going to have a prickly detective, he really ought to amaze you with his detecting or intuiting skills, and Morse doesn't. I've watched some of the shows, I've listened to an audiobook and a couple of radio platlys, and I'll concede they have decent writing. But I still don't like Morse; I found him less annoying on the radio, but I didn't like him even then.

I have a stronger feeling I ought to like Lord Peter Wimsey. And I did like him pretty well in that Gaudy Night television show. But the fact remains that, while I'm convinced I ought to have more respect for Sayers' ability, the only of those novels I like much at all are the three with Harriet Vane before she and Peter married. I don't dislike Peter, but I just don't like him the way other people like him and;, despite there being some good bits, I am quite content with missing the rest of his books and stories.

I have a pretty healthy understanding that this kind of "I ought to like--"" thinking is bunk and do not give it much attention. Doing so would be like splitting my mental tastebuds into Elaine Benes parts and surrounding people who keep telling Elaine she ought to like The English Patient parts. Why, that would just be silly.

I'm ready to declare my (further) independence from my own and other people's notions of what I ought to like. Not to mention from what I ought not like. And I'd like other people to join me. Maybe you think you ought to like modern jazz, but you just can't make yourself. Maybe you think you ought to like praying the the Divine Mercy chaplet, when really you'd rather practice just about any other kind of devotion. Maybe you think you ought to prefer gourmet coffee, when secretly you don't think it's any better than the economy-size store brand you've used for years. Maybe you do like shopping at Wal-mart, even though you think you shouldn't. Maybe you think you ought to like Tolstoy, when you'd much rather read Dickens. Maybe you think you ought to like Dickens, when you'd really rather read romance novels. Why not just accept it?

Paying too much attention to these kind of implanted notions about preferences is ridiculous. If something does not violate decency, who cares? We can and should expect ourselves to live up to our moral codes and to perform our personal and societal duties to a reasonable level. It is reasonable, for example, to expect that we and others obey the traffic laws that allow people to travel from one place to another safely or to expect young people to get married before they start having babies. But expecting yourself--or worse, others--to adopt the tastes you think you (or they) ought to have is just ridiculous. If you've given something people think you should like, like Inspector Morse, a fair chance and you still don't like it, just accept it, admit it, and move on.

Yeah, maybe this is a pointless complaining and borderline whinging sort of post on a tiny, unimportant subject and I know it's badly worded, but it's been on my mind lately.

Random Thoughts

2008-06-22T19:19:00.004-05:00

***
If you were to get a tattoo on your abdomen of Gene Simmons with wings, would that be a Belly-kiss-angel?

***

Ever notice that the only people who assert loudly that they are "good Catholics" are people who are dissenting from Church teaching?

***

Anyone who goes on about the great dignity and mysteriousness of cats is not picturing Mr. Tiddles sitting on the back end of his spine, hind legs akimbo, while he grooms his nethers. Especially not if he's slurping.

***

You know, when you read a news item about teenagers playing with blowtorches they've made from spray cans, you don't actually need the article to specifiy the sex of those teenagers.

***

There's always a market for action movies and apparently for nudity as well, so my multimillion dollar idea for today is [drumroll, please]--make a movie about an action hero who is also an ancient Celt. Everytime there's a battle, he'll strip off, so they'll be plenty of warrior nudity and it will all be integral (or integral-ish) to the plot.

***

How do vampires feel about those odorless garlic capsules? Sure vampires can avoid those of us who reek of garlic, but some old geezer who swallows several capsules of the odorless stuff for heart health everyday...?

***

I was glad when Mrs. Clinton conceded, because in the weeks before that I'd begun to think someone had passed a rule that a minimum 95% of all headlines must be about the Democratic primary or natural disasters.

***

Is part of the tiredness of middle-age that some days you just can't summon the energy to think about doing the right thing health-wise, and only barely the energy to hope you do the almost right thing.

***

If you learn that some unmarried girls in your school or community are deliberately getting pregnant, how is "We must provide more free contraceptives!" a solution to that?

***

When you find yourself ogling the aliens on Doctor Who to check if the blue aliens doing the heavy lifting are a darker blue than the blue aliens aliens holding the clipboards, it is time to admit you're not so much concerned about racial justice as you are looking for things to be offended about.

Better Than Snot Green

2008-06-22T18:24:00.004-05:00

you are seagreen
#2E8B57

Your dominant hues are cyan and green. Although you definately strive to be logical you care about people and know there's a time and place for thinking emotionally. Your head rules most things but your heart rules others, and getting them to meet in the middle takes a lot of your energy some days.

Your saturation level is higher than average - You know what you want, but sometimes know not to tell everyone. You value accomplishments and know you can get the job done, so don't be afraid to run out and make things happen.

Your outlook on life can be bright or dark, depending on the situation. You are flexible and see things objectively.

the spacefem.com html color quiz

May Day

2008-05-01T19:54:00.006-05:00

Hooray, Hooray, for the first of May,
outdoor ____ing* starts today!

*Ask your parents, kiddies.

Today is May Day. First day of summer, if you require a calendar date to determine summer, rather than relying on what's going on in nature where you live. Don't give me any of that nonsense about the summer solstice marking the beginning of summer; even in England, which is far cooler on May Day than where I live, the summer solstice was always called Midsummer, not Summer's Beginning.

Anyway, just a brief check-in. Monday, when I found that message asking about Hogwarts scarves I just googled for a site that would have pictures of the process in question. The first site that came up was Deep Fried Kudzu. I liked the name well enough--really, isn't that one of the best blog names you've ever heard?--that I later went back to browse it a bit. I can not claim to have explored it thoroughly, but I want to recommend it anyway. It looks like a pretty darn good blog. There's a list of restaurants the author has enjoyed, recipes, pretty photos of home-y (home to me, anyway) places, and I saw links to several interesting things. Including this article about a North Alabama woman called Aunt Jenny.

...Aunt Jenny walked outside, pointed at her husband's killers and said to them that she knew every one of their faces and they would get what was coming to them. She then called her surviving sons to her side and made them place their hands on the lifeless bodies of their father and brother. She made them swear eternal vengeance for their deaths. Legend has it that all the men responsible for the death of Willis and John were sent to their graves by a Brooks boy. Some legends state that Aunt Jenny herself even killed a few of the men.

I enjoyed reading that passage more than a Christian woman probably ought to. It is rather fine drama, and I think you can make an argument that the behavior described is pragmatic, in that the best way to avoid being messed with in the future is to make people very, very sorry for having messed with you in the past; frankly, I would prefer for my country's leaders to adopt the tactic of making people very, very afraid to attack us.

As a hater of impertinent questions, I also liked the anecdote about Aunt Jenny on another site (sorry, I didn't save that link and I'm not looking for it now) that has her, upon being asked how she came by a roll of money she was carrying, saying she paid herself twenty dollars a week just to mind her own business.

Florence King said that there's nothing wrong with Women's Studies that studying the right women won't set right. Aunt Jenny sounds like one of those women.

Fringe--Anyone Tried This?

2008-04-28T20:46:00.003-05:00

The recent message from Erin Eddington about fringe on the Hogwarts scarves reminds me of something I thought of a few days ago. I have never been much of a fringe person, so I'll likely never try this, but it occurred to me that it would be possible to make fringe in a way I've never seen done.

Take a crochet hook and slip stitch yarn to the edge of a shawl (or whatever) and make a chain twice as long as you want each piece of fringe to be. Then slip stitch to the edge of the shawl, right by where you began. Slip stitch over one or two stitches or spaces, then repeat the whole process.

I'm sure this would work, and I think it would be less likely to get ratty-looking, the way fringe on older items sometimes gets. There is nothing new under the sun, so no doubt someone out there has done this or seen it done. How did it work?

This Could Be Inspirational

2008-04-26T18:13:00.003-05:00

...if I let it.

Thursday I saw a name on NRO that surprised me a good deal: Ursula K. LeGuin. I stopped reading her work back in the mid-'90s, because the increasing PC-ish content got on my nerves--and I was still a self-proclaimed liberal at the time, who would have agreed with much of it! Mrs. LeGuin's name was there because she was being interviewed about her new novel, Lavinia. In it she said that, not having touched Latin since she studied it in high school, she decided, in her seventies, to take it up again. And she did and she was able, "with difficulty", to read the Aeneid in the original.

Now that is awesome. And I mean that in the older sense of inspiring awe, not in some early mid-'80s slang way. Mrs. LeGuin impressed the heck out of me when she said that. The ability to learn second languages--something any child who isn't actually in the sub-basement of human intelligence levels can do without apparent effort--famously gets harder as we get older. And our memory gets less retentive in middle age, so that we have to work much harder to hold onto something new than we did in our youth. Not many people take up language study after they get old. Especially not a "dead" language with a reputation of being rather difficult.

Lately I've been focusing much too much on things I supposedly can't do or that are getting more difficult to do because I am old. At thirty-eight. Mrs. LeGuin makes me feel like a bit of a whinger (mental variety only; I have at least avoided annoying others with it.)

You'd think I would have learned my lesson from something that happened a few years ago: I came across something I'd written when I was twenty-nine, explaining that I could not start something that late in life because I would be at least thirty-two by the time I finished. Oh, the horror! I was thirty-four or thirty-five when I came across that and, guess what, I'd reached (and passed) the advanced old age of thirty-two even without doing that thing. The only choice had been between becoming a thirty-two year-old who had done that thing and becoming a thirty-two year old who had not done that thing.

Something to think about as I grow closer to what I think of as Shirley Valentine age (forty-two).

Tax Freedom Day Song

2008-04-24T14:55:00.004-05:00

This year I thought of April 23rd not just as Shakespeare's (probable) birthday and as England's St. George's Day , but as Tax Freedom Day. That is thanks to this song , which I found via The Corner Tuesday. I had heard of Tax Freedom Day, the day most Americans have earned enough money to pay their taxes for the year, before, but having a funny song about it makes it much more memorable. Checking back today, I was surprised at how few views this video has. It deserves to be more widely seen and talked about. Watch it and if you find it amusing or at least agree with me that it brings up a point worth talking about, pass the link on.

After that, you may want to read this article on some of the results of one of the things the U.S. government is choosing to do with the money it takes from you. (Incidentally, it is not the first time the author has written on this subject-- I remember this from early last year, when the situation was less bad than now--and, although I am only an occasional reader of his columns, I don't doubt you could find more examples of questionable government spending in his archive, if you are so inclined.) With government results like these, maybe more of us should be asking ourselves if we aren't better judges of what we ought to spend our money on than the government is.

Random Thoughts

2008-04-24T14:49:00.002-05:00

***

Everyone is unique. Ergo being unique doesn't make you special.

***

Choosing a leader named Hostilius is probably just asking for trouble.

***

Is it just me or is there something the teensiest bit ironic about concluding an online post in which you rant about the evils of capitalism with a sig that links your Etsy shop?

***

Don't cats and dogs ever get venereal diseases? I've never heard that it can happen, but it would be odd if it doesn't.

***

There are few bad situations that government intervention can't make worse.

***

To the women who complain about not being able to find a gentleman: Have you tried acting like a lady?

To the women who complain their husband "never" does anything special for them: When was the last time you did anything special for him?

***

I'm trying hard to think of something more stupid than deliberately humiliating (a la Nero) someone upon whose protection your safety depends, but I'm not coming up with anything.

***

You know, most people would be satisfied with being a bad president. Not Carter, though; he has to be a bad ex-president as well.

***

Names just don't come any better than Eric Bloodaxe.

***

What ever happened to the word "envy"? For most of my lifetime, everyone is "jealous" of everything and no one is envious of anything.

***

Note to would-be rioters: Damaging grocery stores is not the best way to lower costs in those stores. Riots and the fear of riots may have their place in the political arena--history evidences that--but adding to your local grocer's expenses won't help him lower prices.

***

Am I the only one with a desire to scratch out "gender" on forms so impertinent as to ask me mine and write in "sex" instead?

***

There seems to be an long list of things Americans today aren't supposed to say or to discuss. For all that some people (mostly conservatives and libertarians) complain about this, I haven't noticed the list getting any shorter.

***

If we can have all our "I wonder"s satisfied in an afterlife, then one interesting question is how many innovations have we lost due to the litigiousness of contemporary society.

***

You know, there is just no better way to show how vastly superior a person you are than to mock the purchasing power of those poorer than you. If you believe that, please go on doing it: the rest of us find it highly informative.

***

Isn't it funny how when you give something away for free, people--however grateful they may have been to begin with--soon start to regard it as their due and demand it as a right if it is cut off?

A Little Learning

2008-04-06T15:11:00.006-05:00

There has never been a better time to be an auto-didact. Or to be into dilettantish dabbling. A few weeks ago I decided I ought to learn a little about Roman history. It has been almost too easy. So far I've watched some DVDs, done some reading online and off, and listened to some online audio.

I highly recommend The Roman Empire in the First Century, a PBS documentary from 2002, readily available on DVD from Netflix. This is an excellent introduction to its subject. It gives you the emperors and some stuff going on in Rome and its empire (including those pesky people in Judea), in enough detail to be interesting but not so much you feel as if you're being buffetted over the head with information. After watching this you will remember all the emperors covered, the order of their reign, and a little something about them. What more can you ask from a documentary?

There are a lot of other documentaries on various aspects of Roman history. There's no way I can watch them all, but I enjoyed Colosseum: A Gladiator's Story as light viewing. This 2003 BBC program takes the novel tack of inventing a fictional, but typical gladiator to follow as it teaches a bit about gladiator life and the building of the colosseum. (Mostly fictional, anyway; they imagine the life that might have existed for an actual fighter whose fight at the Colosseum's inaugural games was described in detail by a witness.) This works pretty well, although I found I wanted more information, especially about weapons and fighting. I did learn a couple of things, though--did you know that gladiators usually survived arena combats, because the sponsor had to reimburse the gladiators' master if any were killed due to a thumbs-down?--and the eye candy was nice. As a bonus feature, the DVD included another story-style documentary on The Last Days of Pompeii; nothing too new on it, but it did have some interesting information along the lines of boiling blood and brains and such. I've a couple more documentaries in my Netflix queue but I don't think I'll find anything better than The Roman Empire in the First Century. Something more than cursory on Roman battle tactics would be great, though.

Along the fiction side of the DVD aisle, Netflix has the Complete Shakespeare Plays version of Julius Caesar available for instant download viewing, as well as rental. I watched this (admittedly while doing something else that took up too much of my attention) and found it a competent production. I may watch it again and dig out my old VHS of the Brando version and maybe another version of this play. I also plan to re-watch the 1974 television version of Antony & Cleopatra which I enjoyed a couple of years ago, and maybe rent another version for comparison. (Attention Star Trek fans: the 1974 one has Patrick Stewart as Enobarbus, or as my husband puts it in these situations, "Captain Picard is playing in the Holodeck again".) I think it goes without saying that Shakespeare, like other dramatists, never let historical fact get in the way of a good story, and that's assuming he had good information to start with; as with any Shakespeare history play, I recommend checking what Asimov's Guide to Shakespeare has to say if you find yourself wondering about something historical--Asimov's work has the advantages of being easily available and having the information you want all in one place.

As for other fiction DVDs, I've heard nothing but praise for it, so I'm planning to give HBO's Rome a go before long. Also in my queue is Shakespeare's Coriolanus, which I've never before seen, only read. For anyone who hasn't seen it already, I again recommend I, Claudius.

An increasing number of universities have lectures available online; there is a list available here. I am currently listening to a Berkeley course on the Roman Empire; I would be further along, but I paused to catch up my reading up to where the course is. I also just started listening to a BBC 4 history program called The Roman Way. (I don't know how much longer this program will be left up, so if you're interested you should try it now.)

As for reading, aside from a few webpages and a small account in a Penguin world history book, I've stuck to Will Durant's Caesar and Christ. And I can not recommend it highly enough. Why didn't I find this when I was a teenager? I know Durant is not without his critics, but the man can write--something that can not be said about every writer of history. The history just flows along, and reading it in bed at night, just before sleep and already sleepy, I've found myself so interested at the end of a section that I've said, "just one more section" and kept reading for another two or three sections. I picked this up thinking I'd only read the Caesar half, not the Christian half, but now I think I'll read it all; I had to force myself to stop near the end of the first century a couple of nights ago so that I can now catch up on my audio lectures. (I want to stagger the two, for memory reinforcement--never an issue when I was young, but alas age makes fools of us all.)

I am now sorry I did not decide to start my little history program with the Greeks so I could have enjoyed Durant's The Life of Greece first. Well, there's always later; and actually, I did back up in historical time and insert a couple of pre-Roman documentaries into my DVD viewing, because I found a couple that looked really good--The True Story of Alexander the Great and Last Stand of the 300; I recommend both, but especially the latter. But for now I'm sticking with the Romans, as they were only supposed to be a few weeks of dabbling before I finally started my long thought about episode of focused reading on the Middle Ages.

I am not sure what non-fiction reading other than Durant I'll do on the Romans. There is a great deal of Roman writing available online, either free for the googling or free if you happen to have university library access, but I'm a dabbler. I'll probably dip into a few library books and call it done. (For now; this could be a lifelong interest.)

As for fiction, I may pull out my Ovid. I have a thrift store paperback called Gods and Legions I haven't read yet. From the local library, I'll probably try Colleen McCullough's Masters of Rome series. Some years back I read a couple of Steven Saylor's Gordianus the Finder novels, which are set in Cicero's day. (This was on the recommendation of Orson Scott Card, whose book recommendations have never steered me wrong; I strongly recommend his recommendations.) I note that Saylor has a new novel called Roma available at the local library that seems to be a sort of history of Rome herself, and, as the Gordianus novels proved enjoyable enough, I plan to try Roma.

My point here, other than to provide a few recommendations of enjoyable things, is that we in the industrialised world have tons of resources available. And so readily, easily, and cheaply available that it requires almost no effort at all to acquire a smattering of knowledge about subjects that are far removed from us in time and space. We take it for granted, but it is a wonderful thing. We did not have these resources in such abundance twenty years ago. Twenty-five years ago I was a teenager who would have given anything to have access to the internet, audio of foreign radio history programs and lectures at universities I could never afford to attend, DVD documentaries, the History Channel. I would have killed just to have had access to a good, let alone great, public library. A thrift store book section would have thrilled me. I had to make do with Mississippi public television and whatever books I happened across at garage sales. A teenager in my area fifteen or twenty years before didn't have that much. But a rural teenager today has the whole of the internet at his disposal. What a shame it would be to waste it on nothing but MySpace pranks and porn.

Random Thoughts

2008-02-23T18:08:00.001-06:00

***

If I'm already "pre-approved", why do I have to fill out an application?

***

Carter may have pardoned the draft dodgers, but I haven't.

***

"And if everyone else wanted to jump off a cliff, would you want to do it too?" is the stereotypical mother saying. With my mother it was more like, "Everyone else your age wants to jump off a cliff. Why don't you want to jump off a cliff? What's wrong with you?"

***

Shouldn't knockoffs of Dockers pants be called Knockers?

***

"You can't argue with results." Unless, of course, you are a Catholic theologian, in which case the results don't much matter if the intention or the method of achieving the results was bad.

***

A great bumpersticker would be "What have YOU done for Western civilization today?"

***

Every little girl should be told by her parents at least once that she's pretty, whether it is, strictly speaking, true or not.

***

We still use a traditional nurse's cap and white uniform when we want to convey the idea of "nurse" in a cartoony drawing or a Halloween costume, but most nurses haven't dressed like that for twenty years; regular cap use was on the wane even earlier. Soon we will have young people who do not understand why we have this convention of depicting nurses that way; maybe we do already.

***

In the whole of the history of English language usage, I don't think anyone has ever said, "I hope you're happy with yourself!" and meant it.

***

Is It Like the Turtles?

2007-11-04T21:18:00.001-06:00

You know how some people say no one has free will, that everything we do is just the product of our upbringing and societal influences. And that the people who brought us up aren't responsible for their behavior either, because they also are the products of their upbringing. And the people who brought them up are just the products of their upbringing, and so on. Well, does it just keep on going and going, all the way back to the first recognizable human? Is there any point at which someone was responsible for his behavior, or is it just upbringing all the way down?

Ranma 1/2 Clerihews

2007-11-02T22:06:00.003-05:00

WARNING: "Vogon Clerihews" would have made an equally apprpriate title.

I mentioned Ranma clerihews from when I had clerihews on the brain last week. I would have liked to go back and make one for all the major characters, but the mood is gone and as trying would only inflict more torturous attempts at English rhymes for Japanese names there seems little point and much cruelty. So here they are in all their incomplete "glory".

Saotome Ranma
Had to con Ma;
He found to avoid seppuku
There was little he wouldn't do.

Hibiki Ryoga
Seldom wore a toga.
Wandering around Japan
Left him a lonely man.

Tendo Soun
Is really quite prone
To nervous attacks
And needs to relax.

The life of Tendo Kasumi
May not be your cup o' tea,
But in the house of Soun
She's the sine qua non.

Tendo Nabiki
Could be a bit sneaky.
She had a million and ten
Ways to get yen.

Happosai
Is quite a guy;
He's filled several shanties
With schoolgirl's panties.

Grandmother Cologne
Seems hardly half-grown,
But her mighty fighting technique
Bests all but the old freak.*

*Yes, I know Ranma once beat her, but he could only do it by--I'm trying to avoid spoilers--doing something drastic that took her completely by surprise. He won't be able to get away with that again, and I think it'll be a few years before he can best her otherwise. Ranma will surely reach that point, but in the meantime, age and treachery (not to mention three hundred years of training) beat youth and enthusiasm, and Cologne remains second only to Happosai. But if you disagree, here's alternate lines for you: "...But her fighting skills/Can give you the chills." Oh, and I'm going by the anime here; I've not read all of the manga.

11/4 ETA: While I was typing this up the other day, I had another spasm which I'm now including to show what letting clerihews enter your mind even for a moment can do to you.

Omar Khayyam
Refused to try yams,
But he professed a great like
For properly grilled pike.

Somebody please stop me.

Overdue Random Thoughts (and a Neologism!)

2007-11-02T22:03:00.001-05:00

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The National Abortion Rights Action League changing its name to NARAL Pro-choice America was like Kentucky Fried Chicken changing its name to KFC so noone would know it serves fried food.

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Just once in a movie I'd like the token female scientist to be a middle-aged, non-hot woman. You know, someone who looks as if she might actually be old enough to have had time to earn all those degrees and do all the research the film claims she has.

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If you're whinging about it all the time, you're not really "leading a life of quiet desperation."

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Why do so many people refer to "two twins"? I'm not aware of any naturally occurring sets of three twins, so until the geneticists give us that much longed for item of engineered humanity, you might as well save a syllable.

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Getting bored watching the trailer is second only to their having changed directors twice on the list of bad signs about an upcoming movie.

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Word of warning to the young folk: Whoever said "Life is one long lesson in humility" was really, REALLY not kidding.

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Of all the questions that were answered in Deathly Hallows, one question was only made more, ah, questionable: What is the deal with Aberforth and goats?

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Better Pickwickian than Pecksniffian.

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I wonder if a human who had never heard wolf sounds would, when hearing them at night out in the wilderness, find them frightening. How much is real eeriness and how much is our conditioned expectation?

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Think about the line about there coming a time when people will no longer tolerate sound doctrine, preferring instead teachers who tickle their ears, the next time you hear someone saying they can't believe the Church still teaches all that old-fashioned stuff.

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Your neologism for the day: "dexternormative". Damn all those right-handed people acting as if it's normal to be right-handed!

Take That, Yankees

2007-10-27T14:55:00.001-05:00

A while back I saw a meme asking for five foods you're embarrassed you like to eat. I thought and thought and could only come up with three foods that sorta, kinda met that definition. But I can come up with all kinds of foods that other people seem to think I should be embarrassed to eat, and that list is made possible just by looking to people who live in other regions of the US, not by selecting for vegans or health nuts or local foodists or what-have-yous. Well, here's a small bit of vindication for one of those food items:

"A new study by a group of Huntsville researchers found that boiled peanuts
bring out up to four times more chemicals that help protect against disease than
raw, dry or oil-roasted nuts."

Auntie Suzanne was once informed--by some Yankee, no doubt--on irc that it is "wrong" to eat peanuts boiled. The only acceptable method for peanut preparation, according to this person who'd never heard of such a thing before I mentioned it to him, was roasting. I can't tell you how glad we Southerners are to have our ignorant, backward ways corrected by the more enlightened folk who dwell in the the only parts of the country that understand tolerance and the value of diversity. How glad I am to have been saved from the degrading and terrible experience of driving along on a cool autumn day, spotting a farmer beside the road with a large pot and a hand-lettered sign that says "BOILED PEANUTS", stopping and buying a bag (or two) of hot, wet peanuts, and continuing along our way, cracking open the shells with my fingers or teeth, tilting back the shell to drink the warm, salty liquid within, and eating the tender, delicious flesh of each peanut contained within the shell, savoring the taste, then doing it again and yet again, marvelling how each peanut is slightly different in shape, size, or number of nuts and how the shell is so soft, thick, and plushy when the peanut was immature and the nuts must be teased out with a pointed tongue or exploring finger , yet hard, thin, and easily cracked open to reveal its treasure when it is fully mature, and how such a dirty-looking, unpromising outside can hold such sweet delights inside and...Well, just thank goodness I've been saved from all that. That half-eaten bag of boiled peanuts currently sitting in my refrigerator? That's Uncle Pookie's. He's the one who refuses to learn.

Auntie Suzanne Blogs It All

In Which I Buy Cake Mix

It's the Stupidity

Everyone Should Be a Bureacrat

Left Untried

Random Thoughts

Miscellaneous Thoughts About the Last HP Film

Long Quote of the Month

Tech, Tech Everywhere ...

Knowledge Is/n't Power

Blog on Hiatus

Random Thoughts

I *love* pot roast!

A Story for Corpus Christi--Really Early

Quote of the Month

An Easy Resolution For Us

Random Thoughts

US to Kenya: Kill Your Offspring, Reap Rewards

Robin Hood

Listen and Watch and Sing Along

A Bumpersticker That Made Me Happy

The Shame We All Live With

Random Thoughts

Happy Pentecost

Our Little Family Unit

Not Having to Dress Up for Church

The High School Motivational Speech Noone Asked Me to Make

Sewing Quote

Happy Easter

A Little Round-up

Some Bits and Pieces to Think About

An Anecdote for the Beginning of Holy Week

The Day America Died

American Pi

One More Cent on the Census

One Guy's Two Cents On the Census

More Food

A Little Something Food

A New Pleasure and a RIP

Well, There Goes a Perfectly Good Joke...

A Random Thought

Quote of the Past Month

Here's An Idea for Someone Else

"An Inexplicable Cultural Phenomenon"

Two Movies You May Not Have Heard Of

A Cheap "Luxury"

Away from Your Desk and Out of School

Another Grooming Post: OR Why I've Not Bothered to Go No 'Poo

Women's Deodorant

Happy New Year

Practicing Advent

Random Thoughts

A Representative of the Kingdom

A Little Round-Up

Remembering 9/11 and "Psychological Comfort"

Cul de Sac

Smart Kids, Depictions of

Our Days Are Numbered (Arbitrarily)

Random Thoughts

Quote of the Past Week

Reflections on the Psalms

Emboldening Our Enemies

Ever Notice...?

Leading Men--A Sad Progression?

A New Favorite Feste

My Daily Catholic Bible

Apropos of Nothing

Random Thoughts

Up, Up, Up

A Few Craft Plugs

The Girls Only Society

It Droppeth as the Gentle Rain

I'm a Fellagirly

Something Lovely for a Grey Day

A Religious Craft Done Right

My Crisp Recipe, Such As It Is

Random Thoughts

Well, That Didn't Take Long

A Snatch of Conversation

One Conversion Story For You

I love pot roast!