What Famous Leader Are You?
personality tests by similarminds.com

Vatican Jerks Back on the Reins for Neocatechumenal Way

I haven't see this NCReporter note, by John Allen echoed anywhere else:

A new letter from the Congregation for Divine Worship demands that the Neocatechumenal Way, a program for catechetical formation launched in 1960s Spain by Kiko Arguello and Carmen Hernandez, adjust its liturgical practice to the general norms of the church.

That's a good sign.

I've dispatched some reindeer, but some of them we're a little to into the eggnog earlier and might have been slowed down a bit.

The Catholic Company is selling a Divine Mercy Chaplet, which seems unneccesary, since most instructions for the Chaplet say explicitly "on ordinary rosary beads".

My Mass notes from yesterday are here.

The Rev. Jenkins Makes A Move
Queer Film Festival is examined - News:

The February festival, which features films by gay and lesbian artists intended to stimulate dialogue, has in recent weeks been the subject of talks between members of the FTT Department and a committee on academic freedom created by University President Father John Jenkins, University spokesman Matt Storin said Monday.

I've installed Opera and it looks pretty good so far. Perhaps a bit faster than Firefox. The only problem so far seems to be with some of the Blogger menus!

Off-Topic:

A day or two later, I'm looking through the new Esquire and I see some letters to the editor referring to an illustration that accompanied an article in the previous issue on 'Good Night, and Good Luck,' the George Clooney movie about Edward R. Murrow and that Sen. McCarthy.

The Cornell Society for a Good Time: The New Secretary of the CDW::
Some more speculation fleshed out.

Who knows eh?

(and a caution on the Cornell website which is pretty radical leaning)

The World's Greatest Theologian

This is hillarious.

chiesa: "Between Venus and Mars, the Church of Rome Chooses Both"

Sandro Magister takes on Vatican foreign policy. Chris Sullivan call your office :)

Gothamist: The Economics of Splitting a Cab:

5. The Talmudic method: 'To solve the problem, you need to consider all three possible pairs of two riders from the group of three, imagine them haggling over the savings, and come up with an overall solution -- modeled after the Talmud's teaching on the divided estate -- that works for all three negotiations. The math was formalized in a Nobel Prize-winning paper by Robert Aumann and Michael Maschler 20 years

Wow...the math must be amazing...

You are Sam the Eagle.
You are patriotic and devoted. And extremely anal.

HOBBIES:
Patriotism, Being appalled at what everyone else is
doing.
FAVORITE MUSIC:
The National Anthem of America

FAVORITE MOVIE:
"An American In....America"

LAST BOOK READ:
"Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus,
Eagles are from America"

QUOTE:
"Please stop that now! It's un-American!"


What Muppet are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

Greetings to Our Australian Friends!

Who seem to be interested in my connection (lack there of actually) to Opus Dei.

They're probably interested because I wrote this and a version here.

I actually like the website.

On mediabistro: TVNewser They Quote David Bianculli:

"BBC World News is the best model out there for serious coverage in a tight TV format. The focus, for ABC and its network competitors, should be squarely on the over-the-air evening newscast. That's the flagship, the fountain from which all reputations and fortunes spring. Blogs are fun diversions, but the news - and the newscast - is what matters. Now more than ever."

But it always seemed to me that the flagship of the BBC World Service was the radio not the TV.

A Freedom Bell

Jay Nordlinger writes:

Anyway, while reading the program notes, I marked something to share with you Impromptus-ites. (By the way, if you wish to read my New York Sun review of this particular concert, please go here.) This is what I read: The new bells of the Frauenkirche

peal forth with a message that must touch the hearts of all who hear them. Yet for the members of the New York Philharmonic, the largest bell, Jesaia (Isaiah), sings an especially poignant song. Dubbed the Peace Bell, it bears an image of the World Trade Center towers collapsing on September 11, 2001, accompanied by the words from the Book of Isaiah (II, 4): "Sie werden ihre Schwerter zu Pflugscharen machen" ("They will beat their swords into plowshares").

Fine, fine, great, great. But there is some sword-wielding still to do, I'm afraid, on account of September 11 and all that motivated it and all that would trigger additional such atrocities.

Count me as one New Yorker (adoptive) who would be slightly more interested in a Self-Defense or Freedom Bell.

The obvious inscription for the Freedom bell would be:

Macht aus euren Pflugscharen Schwerter und aus euren Sicheln Spieße! der Schwache spreche: Ich bin stark! (Joel 3:10, Luther Bibel 1545)

That is:

Beat your plowshares into swords and your pruning hooks into spears. Let the weakling say, "I am strong!" (Joel 3:10, NIV)

Industrial Output and National Security

One argument for protectionist trade policies that I have found somewhat sympathetic in the past is the neccesity of maintaining sufficient domestic industrial capacity for national emergencies.

Thomas Bray, writing in the New York Sun today comments:

But the death of manufacturing in the United States is vastly overstated. While manufacturing jobs have indeed contracted 20% or so just since 1996, and by 50% subce 1970, manufacturing output itself has remained fairly steady when adjusted for prices, according to the Economist magazine.

Which puts an interesting spin on things. If domestic manufacturing capacity is constant, then labor force reductions in the US are due to productivity gains, not capacity moving overseas. Increased capacity overseas reflects increased consumption not decreased domestic capacity, which still might reflect a danger to national security in some sense, but in a different way.

It's easy when a company closes a plant in Dubuque and opens one overseas to think of it as "jobs moving overseas". It might be more accurate to say that the jobs have evaporated in productivity gains in South Bend and the company is just changing to a different business.

Did you know?

Jerry Lee Lewis and Jimmy Swaggart are cousins.

Bob Lonsberry is back on WHAM! (This may have happened a long time ago, but I just became aware of it.)

Yet another reason to be nostalgic about Rochester.

(And they have Glenn Beck now, who I also like.)

This is bad radio.

The Harry Potter pop-over advertisement currently on my AIM is really ticking me off.

JIMMY AKIN.ORG: March Of The Burn-Victim Towel Animals!:

In his autobiography Treasure in Clay Abp. Fulton Sheen recounts a funny travel story. In those days priests wore far fancier vestments than they do today. When Abp. Sheen got back to his room after a long day, he found that the hotel maid had thoughtfully laid out his pajamas on one side of his double bed. On the other side was laid out the frilly, white, lawn vestment (can't remember the name) that the maid took to be a lady's nightgown.

---Comments Mia Storm.

Bruce Reed, Domestic Policy Advisor in the Clinton Administration, writes in Slate:

As David Greenberg wrote on Monday, Hofstra University held a conference last week on "William Jefferson Clinton: The 'New Democrat' from Hope." It was like a Star Trek convention for Has-Beens.

Another activist came to the retrospective to complain that we spend too much time talking about the past. Lady, if you had to spend a whole decade listening to Fleetwood Mac's "Don't Stop Thinking About Tomorrow," you'd think about the past, too.

For those priviliged to not remember, that was the Clinton theme song.

Young, Assured and Playing Pharmacist to Friends - New York Times:

A spokeswoman for the Drug Enforcement Administration says it is illegal to give prescription medication to another person, although it is questionable whether the offense would be prosecuted.

While it may be true that the feds won't prosecute you (unless you're dealing in narcotic prescriptions), the state authorities will quite happily toss you in the clink for practicing medicine without a license.

Update: link fixed

Navy And Notre Dame Agree To 10-Year Contract Extension :: The longest intersectional college football rivalry in the country will continue:

Notre Dame and Navy, who meet Saturday in Notre Dame Stadium for the record 79th consecutive year, have agreed to play each year from 2007 through 2016 (the 2006 game is already under contract).

The Irish and Mids will meet at Notre Dame Stadium in 2007, 2009, 2011, 2013 and 2015. The two teams will play in Baltimore in 2006 - and the teams will play in Dublin, Ireland, on Sept. 1, 2012 - with the 2008, 2010, 2014 and 2016 home games for Navy at sites yet to be determined.

Hmm...a nice twenty-seven percent tax rate on my latest pay check....

Where is Jazz at Lincoln Center? Lincoln Center? Nope.

It's at the Time Warner Center at Columbus Circle. Got that?

Saw someone on the street today wearing a Gannon sweatshirt.

A Slate Soldier Goes to War

Slate has a series on one of their regular contributers, an Army reservist and lawyer who is going to Iraq--as a soldier, not as a reporter. It looks very promising. But this part was interesting not for that reason, but for the subtext.

Telling my family and friends about the deployment was the first and hardest thing to do. My first call went to my best friend in New York. Like me, she had been expecting this for nearly the entire time we had known each other, and we had actually been through false mobilization alerts with the National Guard. However, this time was different, and she understood that as soon as I said I had orders (instead of a mere verbal warning). My subsequent calls went to my father, then my mother, then my grandparents, and then my aunt, then my best friends, eventually closing the circle of my immediate family. The next day, I told the partner I worked for at my firm and shared the news with the other junior attorneys over lunch. That afternoon, I shotgunned an e-mail to a few dozen of my friends, former colleagues, and people I hadn't spoken to in years but I thought might want to hear.

This is very interesting...the first call goes to his "best [female] friend in New York [the author lives in San Francisco]". But he tells us later, that after he calls his family he calls his "best friends". Now maybe he is just distinguishing between "bestest friend" and "best friends", but to my ear that sounds like something more, for instance the "you'd be my girlfriend if we didn't live on opposite sides of the country". Or the "I don't write about my personal life", frustrated by the fact that he is in fact here writing about his personal life.

"Hiding in Plain Sight" by Audrey Ference in The L Magazine (III.12)

Lately everyone's been all a-chatter about secret bars. ... Bars that are only known to people that are in the know are pretty much the definition of exculsive cool. The problem is that when one is sitting in the secret bar that only the elite know about, everyone there knows about the bar.

Which is of course the appeal of the private club, which actually does hide in plain sight. Everyone knows about it and yet still can't get there. Or even more so the quasi-secret society, the one everyone knows exists, but has secrets (even if those are not interesting in and of themselves) like the Masons or Skull and Bones.

National Catholic Reporter now keeps most of their content behind a pay-wall, also preventing them from facing criticism from the blogosphere. (Same for the NYT, by the way.)

My own version of Jeanetta's Seven Things

7 Things I Plan to Do within the Next Year:
1. Pray More
2. Excercise More
3. If books are mediocre and unimportant stop reading even if I've already read part way through
4. Write some
5. Sell my car
There's two more that I'm not putting here.

7 Places I'd Like to Visit (in no particular order and only counting places I haven't been previously):
1. Jerusalem
2. Germany
3. The Black Hills of South Dakota
4. Kyoto, Japan
5. Ireland
6. Poland
7. Crown Heights

7 Places I've Already Been:
1. Rome
2. Los Angeles, CA
3. England (inc. Stonehenge, London, Bath, Oxford, Salisbury)
4. San Diego, CA
5. Maine
6. Chicago
7. Pittsburgh

7 Books I Love (not counting the Bible and happening to be all books I already own):
1. The Summa Theologica
2. The Book of Lights
3. The Rule of Benedict
4. Fire Within: St. Teresa of Avila, St. John of the Cross, and the Gospel-On Prayer
5. The Liturgy of the Hours
6. Seven Storey Mountain
7. Problems of Knowledge: a Critical Introduction to Epistemology
8. The Dilemma of Freedom and Foreknowledge
(oh come on...you thought I could limit myself to 7?)
[and Augustine's On Free Choice of the Will, the Collected Poems of Phillip Larkin, and something else I'm forgetting...]

7 Movies I Like:
1. Michael Collins
2. Das Boot
3. Stalag 17
4. Slavador
5. Casablanca
6. The Gathering Storm
7. Boiler Room

7 Websites I Love:
1. New Advent
2. National Review Online
3. Catholic Answers
4. The Heritage Foundation
5. Notre Dame Nation
6. Fox News.com
7. This American Life

Ira Glass and Philip Glass are cousins.

1998 Aquinas Lecture: "Thomism and the Future of Catholic Philosophy"

So this is useful...

...I believe it's officially reached rigamarole status.

Wow.

I like WFB's ..."Out For Myers"... sounds like a plan.

For TTLB Here We Go

I oppose the Miers nomination.

Hopefully it'll be withdrawn.

For No Particular Reason
Latin gang members and witness protection.

"She wasn't just a witness," Greg Hunter, her court-appointed lawyer, told NEWSWEEK. "She was like the Rain Man of witnesses."

from Newsweek via Howstuffworks.

Brian Stetler on Gail Shister on Chris Matthews on FNC

[Chris Matthews] tells Gail Shister that FNC's daytime news shows have a "nice zest." "You can almost hear the old news ticker. There's a sense of immediacy and significance when they present the news. I think they do it very well," he says.

The broadcast nets could learn a thing or two from them, he continues: "You have to sell it. You have to present it with more gusto, more zest. You have to let viewers know, 'This is important.' You don't just report every story like it's a weather forecast."

Back in New York and back to work.

The National Catholic Reporter Review of John Allen's New Book on Opus Dei:

Herewith one small example: the treatment of Josemaria Escrivá’s seminal work, The Way, which has sold 4.5 million copies worldwide. The Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar, a favorite of today’s conservative Catholics, called the book a “little manual for Scouts at the upper level,” and its spirituality “insufficient to support a worldwide organization.” By contrast, Mr. Allen quotes Thomas Merton, who wrote of The Way: “It will certainly do a great deal of good by its simplicity, which is a true medium for the Gospel message.” Mr. Allen also cites excerpts from Fr. Escrivá’s later works that are genuinely edifying and not banal.

Perhaps The Way should be looked at as a book for beginners? Then Balthazar's idea can be reconciled with Merton's and the reviewers opinions of some of Escriva's later works. The Gospel message of course is not that complicated, though it is deep, it's amplified greatly in the Epistles.

(and no, I'm really not trying to present the Opera Omnia of Escriva as the same as the Bible)

It's always interesting about those liberal favorites though...Romero was also a big fan of The Work.

ESPN.com - COLUMNIST - Wojciechowski: The Greatest Game Ever Played:

"The Trojans were ... out T-shirted (my favorite: 'New Coach. New Pope. New Era. Same Jesus')..."

Reading Synodal Tea Leaves

It has been announced that the Synodal Fathers will be participating in a previously unscheduled Holy Hour of Eucharist Adoration. One wonders if this was added to the schedule by someone in response to the deprecating comments that have been made by some about Adoration as a form of prayer.

via Open Book (interpretation mine though)

(N.B.:these are some very sketchy thoughts.)

I bought today the second volume (in the original hardcover edition) of Fr. Francis X. Murphy's original book(s) on the Second Vatican Council. Fr. Murphy's "Letters from the Vatican Council" published in the New Yorker and collected and expanded in his books framed the interpretation of the council for many or most American ecclesiastics. He popularized (or is at least blamed for popularizing) many of the ideas traditionally associated with the Council in modern American (non-traditionalist/conservative) Catholic thought particularly that of the paradigm of John XXIII's aggiornamento being as much a neccesary updating. He also framed the Council as a debate between liberals and conservatives, something I think clearly breaks down when you realize that both Ratzinger and Kueng were "liberals" at the council. That's why so many people today have to read Ratzinger as having moved to the right, because their view of him is focused on his having been a liberal peritus at the Council. If you find it hard to read Ratzinger as having moved to the right, which I do, then you can look back and say that the analysis of the council as having been a debate between liberal and conservative wings might have to be rexamined.

I'm still looking for volumes 1 and 4 of the work and have only sampled it, so I
don't have a lot more to say on it.

Another thought. John Paul II was one of the Council Fathers, and Benedict XVI was only a peritus. That makes him the first Pope since 1958 who was not a member of the council.

Pittsford Carmelites Get Reinforcements

Sadly the a Carmelite monastery (of women) in the Diocese of Albany has closed. The silver lining is that the Carmelite monastery in Pittsford (outside of Rochester) will no longer being closing/be unclosing.

Traveling through D.C. on the bus, as we went up the ramp onto the bridge over the Potomac and past the Jefferson Memorial, the Spanish-accented young man sitting next to me said: "This is a lot better than New York."

After going to St. Agnes Sunday (and headed home to St. Joseph's this weekend), I finally broke down and bought a copy of Fortescue's The Ceremonies of the Roman Rite Described (revised and corrected by a monk of Farnborough Abbey (UK), Dom Alcuin Reid and originally revised by Fr. J. B. O'Connell, M.A.).

Gawker

• Did Jon Stewart kill magazines? Would anyone notice? If he didn’t, would he consider killing Vogue, please?

Marcus via Harper's via The Observer on the Novel

In the October Harper's, Ben Marcus offers a lengthy state-of-the-novel essay, subtly titled Why Experimental Fiction Threatens to Destroy Publishing, Jonathan Franzen, and Life as We Know It: A Correction, in which he spends 13 pages beating up Jonathan Franzen--snubber of Oprah and William Gaddis alike--and the middlebrow fiction establishment he represents.

I paged through this essay at the newsstand (a Lost Illusions scene). My conclusion... Who has time for all this contemporary fiction wrangling? There's such a backlog, so many other things to do. The best I feel I can hope for is to grab some occasional choice bit by chance, like Gilead.

Catholic Howl

Check out Gen X Revert's rewrite of Howl:

I saw the best Catholics of my generation destroyed by
madness, starving
hysterical naked
dragging themselves through the streets at dawn looking
for beautiful Liturgy
...
who threw potato salad at Jesuit lecturers on Dogma and subsequently
presented themselves on the granite steps of Groeschel’s
Friary with
shaven heads demanding true religious life.
...

(the whole thing)

(there's probably a technical poetics term for this kind of thing, but I don't know it)

He's on the sidebar now too...

Richard John Nehaus on his new blog:

"Andrew Sullivan – who could be a much nicer and more sensible person if he really tried..."

Saw Capote Sunday afternoon. Was solid, a bit too disturbing to be called a straight up entertainment. But not displacing enough to fully embody its (internal somewhat) billing as a "problem [movie]". Eh...a solid movie, but not a classic. A character actor of a movie.

Upcoming Vacation

I'm off work at 12:30AM on October 13. I'm back at 1AM on Oct. 22, but may try to get it changed to coming back at 12:30AM on Oct. 21.

Travel plans to be worked on later today.

Borders - Feature - Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto

Borders has excerpted the most important part of Chuck Klosterman's book, Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs, on their website.

In Re: Ty Willingham:

The Rock 9/26:

"As Stephen A. Smith said (and I paraphrase:) 'I wish someone would disrespect me by paying me 12-million dollars for three years work.'"

From the Oct. 3 Observer column "The Eight Day Week":

September is the new August! Or so it would seem, as every frilly girl or fruity boy is insisting on continuing to wear flip-flops and tank tops and flaunting their tattoos, which often just look like some toddler puked on their ankle--look, folks, this isn't Miami, grow up and be a New Yorker, or move the hell out. We've had enough of your sunny, brainless disposition--New York is for dark, angry people, O.K.?! When was the last time you saw Patti Smith in flip-flops, for god's sake!

On Gore Vidal

Duncan Fallowell writing in Prospect (UK):

In fact, if you believe his autobiography, not much has happened to him since he fell in love with a schoolmate at the age of 16. The adored one was exceptionally beautiful but killed, alas, in the second world war. Vidal, on his own admission, never again knew love. Instead he had gone to parties in the evenings and during the days has sat at a typewriter getting his own back on reality or on Norman Mailer or Truman Capote or whoever the enemy of the moment might be. Since he has never known love as an adult, he cannot exist without an enemy.

Not wanting to get hopes up, but still...

Things are looking up for the '62 missal.

(And put that way, how strange is it that traditional Catholics have become huge boosters for something from the '60's.)

Continuing the European film kick, I'm planning to go see Elevator to the Gallows this weekend or Monday, depending on how tired I am and when. It's french New Wave noir. Score by Miles Davis!

(I actually went to see The Conformist a second time, but I was so tired that it was a struggle to stay awake and I didn't enjoy it at all.)

Saintos wonders when The Conformist might come to where he lives.

It may already be available in it's dubbed version on VHS somewhere near him. It was also apparently released on LaserDisc (rememeber those?).

People are still begging for a DVD release.

THE CONFORMIST at Film Forum in New York City:

This film has revived my faith in movies, I had almost decided to give up on them. Everyone in New York should go see it. It's playing through August 23.

Yesterday's Metro section of the Times had the great punning headline "A Burgermeister No More" about the changing diet of our burgomaster, Mayor Bloomberg (especially so when you consider the Dutch origins of the word and the city).

My roomate found a big turtle outside our apartment.

Amazon.com: Music: Music from Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus [SOUNDTRACK]:

"And all the while, a strange southern Jesus looms in the background. "

No....it's a statue of the Sacred Heart. There's nothing particularly southern and very little strange about it.

This movie is so obviously made by Europeans. Such strange "southern things" as coal-mining (ever been to Pennsylvania?), dive bars, and old cars. Lots of plainly American stuff is passed off as "southern". Lots of Baptist churches appear in the film, but only exteriors and drive-bys. All the interiors, discussion, and services are of Pentecostal/charismatic churches. Presumably because of their exoticism.

In the movie they say the south is the only place you can get off the interstate and drive a couple of miles and it's like going back a hundred years. They should check out some of the small towns in NH, ME, etc.

Man, there's so much wrong with this movie.

I tried to go see Searching for the Wrong Eyed Jesus today (also at the IFC Center). The movie was at 9:30PM, or so I thought. I got there at 9:30, but it turned out it had started at 9:15. So I'll have to try again on another day.

Ramesh Ponnuru on The Corner:

...my own top two picks are Michael McConnell (although I'd want him for chief) and John Roberts. I know, they're white men, but they have some virtues. If there are too many white men on the Court, maybe we ask John Paul Stevens to retire?

There was more to say, but I'm tired and have forgotten it.

I went to see... Me and You and Everyone You Know at the IFC Center theater. It was interesting, amusing, and somewhat juvenile. I wouldn't bother if I were you. The theater itself, however, is awesome. (With the exception of the popcorn, they serve what is described as organic popcorn. The only difference seems to be that the kernels are not as big and fluffy.)

The other day I saw a man wearing a Roman legionnaire costume pedaling a pedicab down the street. I suppose it was a gimmick to get up business, but really...

Rode a bus today. I had previously done this when we visited New York. This was the first time I had done it since I moved to New York though. It wasn't a crosstown and it ran straight up Sixth Avenue just like the train there did, so it was probably pointless, it just happened to be there right as I was coming out of a store and heading uptown (though the train station was right there too.

So really, there're multiple posts because I feel like it.

OK, a bunch of things to say. Will be broken up into multiple posts to allow people to comment individually. OK, not like there's gonna be tons of commenting or anything.

That end-of-mass hymn at Our Saviour is the Justinian Hymn. It is also in the Byzantine liturgy, but is not the same as the cherubic hymn.

Obviously a busy morning here at work.

I walked by the NYC Opus Dei building on Lexington today between buying some pants and going to church. There was a black man walking in and out of the building. Apparently the Work brooks no middle ground on the melanin issue... no albino assasin monks in evidence though.

Salon.com News | Police, G8 protesters clash in Scotland:

"One man stripped off his clothes and walked naked down the street, pursued by reporters."

A Battle-Tested Beginner:

Were it not for the silver-dollar-size scar on the inside of his elbow, the legacy of an AK-47 round, [Lance Corporal] Jeffery Walker would look like any other freshman trying to survive the wrenching induction into the U.S. Naval Academy.

The wiry 20-year-old from Conover, N.C., calmly complied, following the yellow line taped to the floor of Alumni Hall on Tuesday. It marked the path to his new uniforms, to doctors' needles, to instructions on a proper salute and, ultimately, to becoming an officer.

Walker knows that no matter how exacting the next four years may be, no one will be shooting at him. Nor will he watch his fellow Marines spill blood on the streets of Fallujah.

"It won't be Iraq," he said.

Walker is part of a small but growing demographic of incoming cadets and midshipmen at the nation's service academies: combat veterans. He has the scar and the Purple Heart to prove it.

The Naval Academy has long accepted midshipmen from the enlisted ranks [has it ever not?]; it took 76 this year. But combat veterans have rarely been seen at the Annapolis institution since the Vietnam era. Walker is one of two sworn in yesterday, both Marines, both of whom fought in Iraq. [Well, we haven't had that many combat vets since then.] Academy officials expect more.

The number of veterans has grown sharply at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, where 30 combat veterans were inducted this week, including a Purple Heart recipient, said West Point spokesman Frank DeMaro. Last year, there were 22. The year before that, eight.
...
"Their respect within the brigade will be high, especially when the other midshipmen see their combat ribbons on their chest," [Vice Adm. Rodney P.] Rempt[, the academy superintendent,] said. "What we do is encourage them to share their stories and their experiences and to help their classmates. But they still have to achieve all the same goals."

And this is kinda lazy:

And like all first-year midshipmen, he was instructed on the five basic responses all plebes need to know:

"Yes, sir." "No, sir." "Aye, aye." "No excuse." "I'll find out."

There should be a sir (or ma'am) after each of those.

The formatting is fixed!

Publius gets almost all of the credit (he'd get it all, but he didn't log in and paste in the code). He's also got a great blog, that link you see above and now also on the blogroll.

Strangely, it's the "weekends" that are making this overnight schedule hard. Not wanting to give up the daytime of my time off, I'm only getting two nights of somewhat extended sleep rather than three nights in my two days off.

The blog formatting is screwed up. I don't know why. I didn't change anything.

Christopher Caldwell in the The Weekly Standard:

"People often use the word 'culture' as a synonym for 'cuisine.' When they clim to adore the 'diverse and vibrant culture' of the city they live in, what they're actually trying to say, nine times out of ten, is that they like kung pao chicken. Those of us who grew up in Massachusetts often here strangers extol our culture. But it is seldom our accents or our well-earned sanctimony that so beguile them. They generally mean that they like fried clams."

Comcast Message Center:

"Good Day Sir, It is my pleasure reaching you through this means, I am in need of a trust worthy foreign person that can assist me have my fund(s) worth 8Million English Pounds Stirling transferred out of the non operational bank account that my late Uncle, Chief. Honesty RJ. Brown deposited "

His uncle's name is "Honesty"! Well then he must be "trust worthy [sic]".

open book: Are you a Papist?:

Rod Dreher: "Jay Nordlinger's a Christian Scientist"

Things you'd never have guessed...

I've tied a Windsor knot in my tie this morning, well actually I tied it at night, but it is now morning. It's oddly semetrical.

Insanely, with that I should go to bed at near 8AM, since I have to be to work at 12AM (ie 16 hours from now). This overnights thing is going to just be wierd! Though I do get paid a bit more.

Total Number of Books I Own/ Have Owned: I probably own 300 currently, which doesn't sound like a lot except that I move a lot and like to move them with me. Sadly, here in NY I only have a couple dozen. The total I've owned is probably around 1,000, I've been pretty good about selling them.

Last Book I Bought:

Three actually:

Happiness and Contemplation by Josef Peiper
Christian State in Life by Adrienne von Speyr
American Prometheus: the Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin

Books I'm Reading Now:
American Prometheus and Relativity by Einstein

Five Books That Have Meant A Lot to Me:

I can't limit myself to five.

Catholicism and Fundamentalism by Karl Keating
The 1662 Book of Common Prayer (substantially by Cramner)
The Book of Lights by Chiam Potok
Orthodoxy by G.K. Chesterton
The Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas (and the Summa Contra Gentiles as well, but for a completely different reason)
On Free Choice of the Will by St. Augustine (though that was probably just a matter of timing)
The Roman Missal
The Rule of St. Benedict (guess who wrote that)

I find that there's a group of historical fiction/non-fiction that's important to me, informed by my ancestry and personal history:

The Killer Angels (the Civil War) by Michael Shaara
The Caine Mutiny, The Winds of War, and War and Rememberance (World War Two and the Holocaust) all by Herman Wouk
The Headmaster by John McPhee
Trinity by Leon Uris (though another novel or a straight history of Ireland could probably stand in here just as easily)
Good-Bye To All That by Robert Graves

Tag Five Other Bloggers to Do This - If they Wish
I don't know five bloggers...

It's interesting, but while I love books, my religion, politics, etc. have been influenced very much by other things. Beyond my upbringing, intellectual epiphanies were largely shaped by a radio show Catholic Answers Live (which I always listened to over the internet and have never actually heard on the radio) and my politics were shaped by reading The Freeman and as I think about it, the Wall Street Journal. Though religious and political books solidified the things I learned there. In becoming a philosopher, being taught to philosophize was more important than reading philosophy.

This was interestingly hopeful in another way, thinking about books and other places that I've learned from makes me realize how much I've learned and grown in understanding even relatively recently. Makes me more hopeful about the future of the enterprise.

If this means what I think it does, it's pretty funny.

One of the public television stations (not 13, but I think 21) here in NYC is showing Witness to Hope during pledge week. I find this kind of shameless. They're not exactly promoters of Catholic values the rest of the year. with things like Now. Perhaps they'll be improving though, with the new guy in charge at CPB. He's certainly been getting rough treatment in the liberal media.

Today is some sort of Puerto Rican festival here in Midtown. It seems like we have a festival/parade every week. Last week was "Salute to Israel".

Salon.com News | Everything you always wanted to know about the stem cell debate:

"There are also philosophical reasons to question the embryo's status. Does the embryo have a 'soul'? Bioethicists note that if it does, it's not an individual soul, since an embryo at this stage has not yet reached the point where it might split in two to become twins. An embryo can't be thought of as an individual person, some ethicists say, since it may actually become two different people."

I've seen this argument repeated over and over again and it is simply not a very good argument. This is akin to arguing that an adult can't have a soul because a child comes from biological material from it's parents. And it's parents recombined into three people.

The obvious reply is that when the embryo splits the soul that was there before is linked with one part and the new part gets a new soul. Just think of it as human reproduction being a bit more complicated.

I was just looking at the blog and realized that posts I had just posted had times on them that looked like an hour ago. The blog was still on East Indiana time!

It's fixed now.

I'd also add that there's been a lot more posting here than there has been someplace else.

Jeanetta is complaining that there aren't enough funny things she said on the blog anymore. The reason for this is most likely that she's not saying funny things to me. I think I'm the one who should complain. Harumph.

The New York Times Style section reports today, "The tie-front bolero sweaters seen everywhere provide today's uniform of T-shirt and jeans with an elegant high-waisted Empire silhouette."

I swear that I had the exact same thought yesterday. The Times beat me into print. (Not that I usually publish fashion criticism anywhere.)

People might want to know that I have next Monday and Tuesday off and the following Monday and Tuesday.

I just got my renewal notice for National Review. I subscribe/d to the online version. I'm not going to renew. Instead of decided to subscribe to the (British) Prospect (in the online option for 1/5 the price). Which seems to resemble nothing as much as Michael Kelly's Atlantic. While I continue to subscribe to the Atlantic, I'm just not as happy with it as I used to be. As for National Review, between NRO (sorry guys, but it does take away from the NR craving for me), which I don't even read as much as I used to, and the Weekly Standard, which I get free at work, it seems less essential, not to mention that they reprint Bill Buckley's syndicated columns that are run in the New York Sun.

Roger Clegg writes, also in NRO:

You can read the Fourteenth Amendment all day and not find anything in it about the legality of gay sex, which was the issue in Lawrence v. Texas.

There's also an offhand bit in Frum's blog there from Sally Satel and Christina Sommers: "A modernized stoicism turns out to be a very effective life philosophy." We can add that mention to Don't Sweat the Small Stuff in the catalogue of modern stoics.

Warren Bell in an NRO article "Condumb?":

In 1856, Gustave Flaubert wrote Madame Bovary in part as a indictment of the promulgation of lending libraries, which were causing Emma-types to read the mass-culture novels of the day, and thereafter dream of romance and lovers. So, too, Sex and the City 140 years later, with the additional pernicious effect of promoting the Cosmopolitan as a suitable cocktail for people who are not holding poodles or smoking through a long black cigarette holder.

Here's an interesting bit of perspective. Recounted in this week's Weekly Standard:

After a series of academic succeses at Harvard College, [Robert Oppenheimer] went to England's Cambridge University in 1925 to study physics, but suffered a breakdown. Its most serious manifestation was poisoning his tutor's apple, an act that almost got him charged with attempted murder. Oppenheimer recovered, transferred to the University of Göttingen in Germany, and quickly became a star in the new and burgeoning field of quantum mechanics. Just two years after getting his bachelor's degree, he had a Ph.D. and a reputation as one of the leading young theoretical physicists in the world.