Monthly Archives: July 2008

Male Pattern Bonding

Posted on by

I am approaching the end of another very busy day, our first full day here in Arizona. We are staying at the Embassy Suites, which has a nice complementary breakfast, so we started the day with that. The boys had bacon and Froot Loops (though not mixed together).

After that we went to the grocery store and visited the bookstore across the street; and then we went to mass. Flagstaff has three small Catholic churches, but they’ve evidently been combined into a single large parish named San Francisco de Asis; all Sunday masses are at the particular church called St. Pius X, and so we wended our way hither. At first glance, St. Pius X wasn’t much to look at, and I suspect the mass would have given hives to some of the liturgical purists around and about the Catholic blogosphere. Be that as it may, the sanctuary, though plain and boxlike, was clearly furnished with great love, and if the mass was of the “happy-clappy” variety it was also jammed. Both the sanctuary and the parish hall were completely full of people, and we were lucky to find a seat. Folks at the parish are involved in Knights of Columbus, Cursillo, Marriage Encounter, various Bible studies, and a variety of other activities. Oh, and the sermon (given by a deacon) was right on, dealing with the day’s readings in a clear, no-nonsense way.

This is a vibrant, living parish. And tomorrow at 6:30 PM they are breaking ground for the construction of a new (presumably larger) sanctuary. Woohoo!

After church we returned to the hotel and made a picnic lunch from the stuff we’d bought first thing in the morning, and headed northeast for Wupatki National Monument and Sunset Crater. Jane and I had visited both on our honeymoon quite a many years ago now; and the boys had seen them before on a previous vacation when David was three-and-a-half and James was in a stroller.

The weather was adequate today; it rained on us a bit, but nothing to worry about. To a certain extent, that was due to visit to Wupatki; according to Weather.com, Wupatki hasn’t gotten any rain lately despite lots of rain to the east, west, and south. One imagines that this is why the Indian ruins there have survived so long.

We didn’t play Munchkin tonight; instead, we had a long swim and an overly long dinner.

Tomorrow I think we’ll head down Oak Creek Canyon to Sedona, there not to take the art galleries too seriously, and possibly to ride in one of the famous Pink Jeeps. We’ll see.

A Nice Little Hideaway

Posted on by

As I write, my boys and I are in Flagstaff, Arizona. We flew into Phoenix this morning, cranked the tunes on the iPod in our rented Dodge Caliber, and cruised north, making brief stops at Montezuma Castle (a Sinagua cliff dwelling) and Montezuma Well (a natural well and sinkhole, with cliff dwellings in its walls). We’re now sitting in our hotel room. The boys are watching a show about Celtic bog mummies on cable TV (a rare treat for them), and I’m checking out the hotel’s wireless network. It’s raining outside (well, it is monsoon season), but catty-corner across the intersection is a big Barnes & Noble.

We’re here on vacation, and over the next week, weather permitting, we’re going to do all kinds of touristy things. We plan to visit the Grand Canyon, and the Meteor Crater, and Wupatki National Monument, and like that. Tonight we need to do a little shopping, and hit the bookstore, and we’re gonna have dinner at the Cracker Barrel.

Life is good.

Sopapillas!

Posted on by

So happens I’m off on a business trip this week, to the wilds of New Mexico, where they make sopapillas! I ought not be eating sopapillas on my diet, but you can’t get them here, and I haven’t had one since a brief sojourn in Santa Fé eight years ago. I intend to indulge.

Business trips being what they are, blogging will be pretty much non-existent here through the end of the week, the more so as I will be trying to continue working through one chapter of St. Thomas Aquinas’ Compendium Theologiae per day over at Blogging Aquinas. Hope to see you there.

MarsEdit vs. Ecto, continued

Posted on by

I’ve been using MarsEdit daily since I first wrote about it last week, and I have to say it’s working for me. It’s been absolutely bullet-proof, with no unpleasant surprises at all.

That post did get a comment from one of the Ecto maintainers, asking me to e-mail him so that we could talk about the problems I’m having with Ecto; I sent him an extensive e-mail about the specific problems I’m having with the latest version, and have not yet heard back.

Questions and Answers, by Pope Benedict XVI

Posted on by

This slim is a collection of questions asked of the Pope during various public meetings, along with the Pope’s off-the-cuff answers. The questioners range from small children just making their First Communion to youths preparing for World Youth Day to diocesan priests (by far the largest group). The answers are to the point, suited to the audience, and (as always with this Pope) loving, well-stated, gentle, and insightful. My favorite moment involves a priest who, as a seminarian, was gently chided by his spiritual director for loving football (soccer) more than Eucharistic Adoration. The Pope’s answer to the priest’s question includes the following:

I would therefore be against having to choose between either playing football or studying Sacred Scripture…. Let us do both these things!

He goes on to say,

…we cannot always live in exalted meditation; perhaps a saint on the last step of his earthly pilgrimage could reach this point, but we normally live with our feet on the ground and our eyes turned toward heaven. Both these things are given to us by the Lord and therefore loving human things, loving the beauties of this earth, is not only very human but also very Christian and truly Catholic.

Recommended.

Good Omens, by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman

Posted on by

Now, I’m a big Terry Pratchett fan. I’ve been reading Terry Pratchett since his second Discworld book, back in the early 1980’s. I have bunches of his books in hardcover. I’ve read most of them aloud to Jane. I like Terry Pratchett’s stuff.

And yet, until just this week I had never read Good Omens…well, not really. I got a copy of it in hardcover when it first came out, and began reading it to Jane, and shortly got to a scene where Hastur and Ligur, two important demons, begin a conversation with another demon by praising Satan. And I said to Jane, “I can’t read this aloud!” So we stopped. And somehow I never picked the book up again, and eventually I got rid of it. (D’oh!)

But I keep hearing from other readers I trust (notably Julie at Happy Catholic) about how fun the book is, so the other day I got a copy. And I’m afraid I was underwhelmed.

This undoubtedly says more about me than it does about the book. At the lines of prose level it was funny, and there were lots of bits I had to read aloud to Jane. The problem is the subject matter: the authors are dealing with real supernatural material, stuff that matters, and getting it wrong. Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files? Set in the real world, but clearly imaginary. The Discworld? Heck, the Discworld is so imaginary that it’s held together only by vast quantities of magic. But Good Omens, alas, it edges a little too close to home. I kept finding myself saying, “But it isn’t like that.”

Earth to Will: Pratchett and Gaiman were trying to be funny. The book isn’t meant to be taken completely seriously. Yeah, I know. The problem is, the book has a point. And the point is tied into a theology that’s completely screwy. And theologically-unsophisticated readers (which is nearly everyone) are all too liable to read it and agree with P&G’s point and walk away thinking they’ve learned something, when all they’ve really done is to reject an absurd strawman. This bugs me. (You might think I exaggerate, but I remember being 15, when Harry Harrison’s Deathworld Trilogy threw me into a atheistic tail spin. Granted, I was kind of looking for reasons not to believe at that point.)

But your mileage may vary; I’m just explaining why I’m having trouble giving the book an even break. Oh, well.

Ecto vs. MarsEdit

Posted on by

I’m trying some new blogging software, a package called MarsEdit. For a long time now I’ve been moving back and forth between the built-in WordPress interface and a Mac app called Ecto. I like Ecto; it gives me a WYSIWYG view of the post, and lets me edit and save a local copy of the post. But it’s buggy. The WYSIWYG editor has some annoying quirks; and every once in a while the app simply shuts down, usually when I’ve asked it to post a draft to the weblog. If I had previously saved a local copy of the post, that’s only annoying; but usually I discover that I had neglected to do so.

Since the most important thing I want from using a standalone blog client is reliability (keeping all of my drafts on the server scares me), this means that Ecto is, for all its nice features, less useful than the WordPress web interface. So yesterday I went looking for other possibilities, and the only one that really looked like it might do is the aforementioned MarsEdit.

On the face of it, MarsEdit is very similar to Ecto, but lacks a few features. It doesn’t have WYSIWYG editing; you edit in HTML. On the other hand, that also means it doesn’t have Ecto’s weird editing quirks, and I’m pretty comfortable with HTML. Also, it doesn’t have Ecto’s “Amazon” tool, which makes it really easy to create nice links to book pages on Amazon’s web site, a feature I only started using a week or so ago. It does have a reasonably nice “Preview” feature, though; and it has nice HTML editing, with syntax-highlighting and customizable key commands; and so far it’s been rock solid.

I’ve already paid for Ecto; and the latest Beta (though still buggy and quirker) is much nicer than the previous version I’d been using. MarsEdit is more expensive (about $30). I’m going to continue to use it through the 30-day trial period, and then we’ll see.

The Life of Saint Dominic, by Augusta Theodosia Drane

Posted on by

This life of St. Dominic was first published in 1857 in England; apparently it remains one of the best lives of St. Dominic in the English language, though it has its blind spots. In 1857, it was understood by everyone that the Rosary was given to St. Dominic by the Blessed Virgin Mary herself, and promulgated widely by him; more recent research has shown that the first mention of the Rosary in any text follows Dominic’s death by quite a long time, and that the origin of the Rosary is correspondingly more recent. There are likely other similar errors. But I gather that there aren’t that many biographies of Dominic in English; and one of the reasons, which is hinted at in the book, is that Protestant England has generally looked on Dominic without fondness.

Protestant England, as everyone knows, was frequently at war with Catholic Spain. The Elizabethans were skilled propagandists, and one of their favorite topics was the Spanish Inquisition, which consequently everyone expected. I wouldn’t want to whitewash the Inquisition, but a lot of what we English speakers think we know about it goes back to British propaganda. Now, as everyone knows, St. Dominic preached against the Albigensian heresy; and in fact the Inquisition was founded to combat the Albigensian heresy, and many of the early inquisitors were Dominicans. Dominic, in fact had nothing to do with the founding of the Inquistion (and it wasn’t the Spanish Inquisition in any event), and though there were excesses in the crusade against the Albigensians, so far as I can tell the inquisitors weren’t responsible for them. But be that as it may; Dominic was Catholic, and Spanish, and was around when the Inquisition was founded, and so, three centuries and more later, England used him as a symbol of everything she hated. Drane says remarkably little about all this, under the circumstances, but she takes some slight pains to clear the good names of St. Dominic and his early followers.

I found the book both interesting and frustrating. We are told quite a bit about the saintliness of Dominic’s life, and about his travels, and about various miracles that took place in his vicinity, all of which are interesting and about which I am glad to be informed. But Dominic founded the Order of Preachers, and I was really hoping to know just what he preached about, and how he preached it. Alas, his sermons generally weren’t preserved. Part of being a saint is the possession of the virtues in heroic measure, and that includes humility; where we know a lot about a saint’s life from the saint’s own hand, it’s generally because the saint was ordered to write about themselves by some superior. So Dominic wasn’t inclined to preserve his own words in writing, and apparently nobody else was either, alas, whether out of deference to him or out of a sort of corporate humility.

So. I enjoyed reading it; and I was left wanting much, much more.