There Are Liturgical Mistakes...
...and hillarious liturgical mistakes.

Rich Leonardi's son was accidently baptized "Benedict Arnold Leonardi."

Point Break, Best and Worst in a Genre:

If Big Wednesday is the most serious surf film ever made, Katherine Bigelow's Point Break (1991) is surf cinema's biggest missed opportunity. Roughly based on Tapping the Source, Kem Nunn's acclaimed "surf-noir" novel, Point Break—with a studio budget and an able director—could have nailed the visual splendor of surf and surfing in the same way it nails its sky diving sequences. (Point Break, weirdly, is the best sky diving movie ever.)

From Slate

How To Read the NYT Fast
The Jack Shafer method, from Slate:

When time allows only a quick lap of the news, I navigate my broadsheets thusly: I read the hed, the lede, and the first couple of paragraphs of every story that appeals to me with the same care the reporters and editors assembled them, which is to say with high concentration. I then read the piece through to the first quoted source and scan the rest until I encounter a paragraph whose topic sentence promises additional novel information. The longer the article, the more likely I am to shorten the scanning process by jumping to the three-quarters mark, where I often find something close to the beginning of a brand-new—but related—story. Then I speed-read to the finish.

Catholic Films:

This Cornell Society for a Good Time post inspires me to post about another excellent movie with Catholic elements in the theaters, at least here in New York.

"Strike" or "Strajk" or "Die Heldin von Danzig" is a film about the founding of Solidarity in Poland.

The film, in Polish with English subtitles, is a German and Polish co-production.

It's a fictionalized version of the story of Anna Walentynowicz whose firing sparked a Lenin Shipyard strike that led to the founding of the Solidarity movement.

It makes much of the inspirational power of His Holiness John Paul II for Polish Catholics.

A review is here.

Our Pastor's New Book:
I haven't read it yet, but I really liked one of his earlier books, The Cure D'Ars Today: St John Vianney.

(And of course I go to Our Saviour most Sundays and often during the week to hear his sermons and participate in the Mass he celebrates.)

From The Brothers Karamazov:
"Some will say, perhaps, that Alyosha was slow, undeveloped, had not finished his studies and so on. That he had not finished his studies is true, but to say that he was slow or stupid would be a great injustice. I will simply repeat what I have already said above: he set out upon this path only because at the time it alone struck him and presented him all at once with the whole ideal way out for his soul struggling from darkness to light. Add to this that he was partly a young man of our time--that is, honest by nature demanding the truth seeking it and believing in it, and in that belief demanding immediate deed, with an unfailing desire to sacrifice everything for this deed, even life. Although unfortunately, these young men do not understand that the sacrifice of life is, perhaps, the easiest of all sacrifices in many cases, while to sacrifice, for example, five or six years of their ebulliently youthful life to hard, difficult studies, to learning, in order to increase tenfold our strength to serve the very truth and the very deed that they loved and set out to accomplish--such sacrifice is quite often almost beyond the strength of many of them."
pg. 26, trans. by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky

Rhode Island Bishop slams Rudy
The article is politically and theologically informed and also well written.

Is there anything Google can't buy?

Google buys Feedburner.

File this under "Missing the point"
Un-fried "Latka Crisps".

Gotta Watch Out For Those Baseball Questions:

But perhaps nothing was so tortured during the show as its ending, when the governor was asked how he could be both a Red Sox and Yankees fan. This has no real political import, but fans engaged in the famous rivalry are so passionate in their hatred for their opponents that it's impossible that anyone could be true booster of both teams. Richardson's answer (too lengthy and unwieldy to replicate here) was a triple threat: implausible, shifty, and likely to please no one.

From Slate

The New French Foreign Minister
Christopher Hitchens says he'll vouch for this socialist's neo-conservative bona fides

Had the Socialist Party won the election, it is highly unlikely that such a distinguished socialist would ever have been allowed through the doors of the Quai d'Orsay. (Yes, comrades, history actually is dialectical and paradoxical.) In the present climate of the United States, a man like Kouchner would be regarded as a neoconservative. He was a prominent figure in the leftist rebellion of 1968, before breaking with some of his earlier illusions and opposing the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan—the true and original source of many of our woes in the Islamic world. The group he co-founded—Doctors Without Borders, or Médecins Sans Frontières—was a pioneer in the highly necessary proclamation that left politics should always be anti-totalitarian.

from Slate

Richard Posner likes Century Schoolbook.

And why one artist likes Palatino (Paltino Linotype is the font for this page, but only if your computer has it installed...)

From Slate.

Hermits Alive!

The Camaldolese Hermits of Monte Corona in Ohio now have a website!

Obviously there's some cleaning up to be done here, but on a time when I can investigate the css/html more...

Posting this so I can link to it for the new banner....

The Hapsburgs

A leftist critic, A.J. P. Taylor, has described the family that had once ruled over much of Central Europe (and for a while the Spanish empire) as follows: “While other dynasties are episodes in the histories of nations, for the Habsburgs nations are episodes in a family history.”

(Via Taki's Top Drawer)

This had me chuckling:

These young folks from Cornell are at their marriage preparation class (emphasis mine):

This whole while I was simply watching the spectacle unfold with a polite and attentive face, while the Doctor scribbled furiously on his note pad. I was quite taken with the general hilarity of this situation, in which my poor fiancé, himself a trained moral philosopher, was forced into being “instructed” in philosophy by this thoroughly confused, thoroughly modernist little man. He couldn’t stay silent forever, though, because we were eventually prodded for input. What were our “values?”

The Doctor explained, in a somewhat strained tone, that the concept of a “value” was itself a modernist (and thoroughly unCatholic) idea. I couldn’t faithfully capture the whole of his brief lecture, but my description of the session thus far should be sufficient to illustrate just how wrongheaded (in a truly pernicious way, though these poor souls obviously could not be accused of any deliberate malice) their presentation really was. They were advising us to go through life juggling weighing the pros and cons of every decision according to the guiding question, “What is important to me?” They wouldn’t presume to tell us the right way to live; rather, they wanted to help us break down the different possibilities, so that we could ponder what sort of life might suit us best. Their closest attempt at Catholicity was to ask, “What were Jesus’ values?” Of course they gave the sorts of soft, fuzzy answers that one would expect out of weak-minded liberals. It seems to me more correct to say: Jesus didn’t have any “values.” He simply lived his life in perfect obedience to the will of the Father.

Of course the couple understood the Doctor’s speech not at all. The only thing they managed to surmise was that he didn’t believe in values, from which they seemed to conclude that he was some sort of nihilist. With every subsequent activity the woman would begin, regretfully, with, “Well, this will be difficult for people who don’t believe in values…” and she’d glace at the Doctor.

The Pope (via John Allen) On Reforming the Church:

In São Paulo Friday morning, Benedict insisted that the saints of our epoch are the "true reformers," quoting his own homily during his first foreign trip in Cologne, Germany: "Only from the saints, only from God does true revolution come."

Yes, the graphics have dissapeared. I'll get around to fixing that.