More Than 20 Years Ago...

Mark Steyn in The Irish Times, 25 July 2005:

...[O]ne notices a subtle evolution in multicultural pieties since the Islamists came along. It was most explicitly addressed by the eminent British lawyer Baroness Kennedy of the Shaws, QC, who thought that it was too easy to disparage "Islamic fundamentalists".

"We as western liberals too often are fundamentalist ourselves," she complained, "We don't look at our own fundamentalisms."

And what exactly would those western liberal fundamentalisms be?

"One of the things that we are too ready to insist upon is that we are the tolerant people and that the intolerance is something that belongs to other countries like Islam. And I'm not sure that's true." Hmm.

Lady Kennedy appears to be arguing that our tolerance of our own tolerance is making us intolerant of other people's intolerance, which is intolerable. Thus the lopsided valse macabre of our times: the more the Islamists step on our toes, the more we waltz them gaily round the room.

       (Link to full article is here)

Our tolerance of our own tolerance is making us intolerant of other people's intolerance...

Seems to be a lot of that mind virus going around these days. But maybe what the Normals need is more intolerance.

Recreation? Or Therapy?

I play one-suit Spider Solitaire. On my phone.

I can click on "Statistics" in the app and get things like percentage of games won, total games played, average number of moves per game, average time per game. I check this tab because I like to see that I am slowly improving my average time; I am a lot faster now than when I first learned the game.

You can reset your stats. I don't know when I last did a reset; it was back when I believed I was past the clueless newbie phase. I multiplied the total number of games played by the average time per game (which I do not recommend because it might be rather embarrassing) I get a Number, which being reduced to days, hours, and minutes, works out to, well, to a Chunk of Time.

I am not going to let myself feel ashamed of this Chunk of Time, for two reasons. Or perhaps rationalizations. 

First, if it is recreation, how does it compare to other forms of recreation that I engage in, and that take up even more of my time? Like sleep, for instance. The older I get the more sleep feels like a waste of time. (Morning aches and stiffness, anyone?)

Second, I prefer to think of this chunk of time as therapy, mental exercise, "One quick trick  for Seniors to improve brain function". After all, I consider walking, running, and working out enjoyable recreation, but my doctor and cardiologist encourage me to consider them medically necessary interventions. 

So I will continue doing my mental exercise: Spider, Freecell, Crosswords. Maybe I can strengthen myself for the challenges approaching on the horizon -- like staying calm through The Holidays!

Crying Wolf?

Tsunami warning! OMG!!!  Where?? When??!!

You have to click through to see...

Why do they keep doing this???

Sometimes When I Think of You...

...My heart skips a beat.

Okay sometimes it skips a beat for no reason other than premature ventricular contraction.

But I don't remember that happening before I met you. So there.

But PVCs are common in older people. And I'm one of those older people. I even got a discount on my haircut yesterday because, you know, Senior Discount day.

But anyway. 

I love you. And sometimes my heart skips a beat. 

(Boy, this has been the most public private note ever, or something!)

Indian Summer Tanka

Free after dinner 

(The grownups want us outside)

Till Dad calls us in:

Hide and seek on the whole block,

Red light green light, dodgeball, tag.

Tinfoil Hat Grammarians

Deacons

Now in these days when the disciples were increasing in number, the Hellenists murmured against the Hebrews because their widows were neglected in the daily distribution. And the twelve summoned the body of the disciples and said, “It is not right that we should give up preaching the word of God to serve tables. Therefore, brethren, pick out from among you seven men of good repute, full of the Spirit and of wisdom, whom we may appoint to this duty. But we will devote ourselves to prayer and to the ministry of the word.”  (Acts 6:1–4, RSVCE)

It doesn't say anything there about deacons giving homilies. In fact, the deacons were ordained so that those whose work was preaching and ministry of the word could concentrate on their primary work without getting lost in more mundane tasks. 

Today I had to suffer through another of our parish deacon's twenty minute homilies. Nice guy. Does great work ("prison ministry" -- better him than me!). Terrible voice. Every clause inflected on the same two tones, up down, up down, up down. No variation in tempo. Twenty minutes.  

Given that Catholic deacons are cleared to preach nowadays, I might excuse him getting "tasked" with preaching if I figured he was just accepting in humility and trying to make the best of it. Like by trying to get it over with as quickly as possible. Like maybe seven minutes?  A brief and to-the-point  monotonous drone would not be as sleep- or headache-inducing. But twenty minutes? Twenty minutes speaks to a certain level of taking yourself too seriously combined with a certain lack of self-reflection. Rush Limbaugh used to call it the liberal combination of ignorance and arrogance. 

But really. From a scriptural point of view, why are we asking deacons go give homilies? Why do that to such a nice guy?