Seven Quick Takes, and more Cruel Beauty Giveaways!

1.

Speaking of Conversion Diary, I just had a chance to read Jen's upcoming memoir Something Other Than God: How I Passionately Sought Happiness and Accidently Found It, which I read cover to cover in one sitting, not even getting up to turn on the light in gradually-darkening living room. It goes on sale in April, so put it on your Easter list.

2.

Who else has written a book? Oh, my sister-in-law, Rosamund Hodge, author of Cruel Beauty! 

And because we don't stop being proud the week after the book release, we're giving away two Kindle copies this time. Leave a comment to enter, and we'll draw names out of the tasseled hat on Monday.

3.

Not sure if you'll like it? Let Julie D., the Happy Catholic herself, assuage your fears:

I read this book faster and faster so that by the end I knew I was heedlessly missing details. But the plot was the thing that kept me reading until midnight two nights in a row. This is a romance and it's a good one. After all it is based on Beauty and the Beast, albeit very loosely. However, the author tells it with a freshness and immediacy that makes me think of Robin Mckinley's The Blue Sword, which is some of my highest praise. 

I am amazed this is a first book. Hodge took the Beauty and the Beast story and mixed it up with Greek mythology and a few other classics that I won't mention here for fear of spoilers. The result is a completely new soup* that doesn't seem derivative in any way. It is complex, compelling, and Tolkien-esque in the way big themes and truths are woven seamlessly into the story. It is C.S. Lewis-ian (is that a term?) in the way that source materials are woven seamlessly into a completely new story a la Til We Had Faces (yet so much more understandable to a schmoe like me.). 

...Above all I was struck by the underlying themes of the masks we hide behind, the real meaning of love, the many forms selfishness can take, the value of intention in sacrifice, the price of trying to control fate, and the fact everyone has more layers than you can see at first glance.

ADDENDUM: I realized that I never mentioned Melanie's excellent review:

I’m a sucker for fairy tales retold — if they’re done well. But Cruel Beauty is not just a retelling of Beauty and the Beast– is also a retelling of the myth of Eros and Psyche. I’d never realized before that they were really two versions of the same story. More, the story’s cocktail not only borrows from Greek mythology but also from Bluebeard, the Scottish Tam Lin and other sources. I think I’m going to be unpicking fairy tale motifs for a while. Oh and there’s a good dash of influence from C.S. Lewis’ Till We Have Faces and T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets– oh the scene that draws from Eliot is a gem that had me literally gasping with delight. But nothing about Cruel Beauty feels derivative and it certainly does not seem like a patchwork quilt. Hodge develops a believable world with it’s own mythology and history that feel fresh and original and the narrative is seamless.

4.

I like to think I'm fairly mature, but certain things will make me scream like a girl. Creepy the plastic spider is one of them.

 Especially when someone puts him on the sleeping baby's head.

I hadn't seen Creepy for a while, and then when we were moving bookcases back into the library, I picked up a plastic bowl, and there was Creepy sitting underneath, large as life. And you can bet I screamed like a little girl.

Why don't I just throw Creepy away? I don't know. I hate him, and yet, I feel like I would be letting the terrorists win if I got rid of him. So he sticks around, and every so often he scares the living daylights out of me. 

5.

Speaking of the library, and its ceiling, it went from looking like this:

to this:

to this:

The new fixture, besides being more in keeping with the style of the house, actually casts some real light in the room. And we are enjoying the sensation of being secure in the knowledge that the ceiling will not collapse on our heads.

6.

NBC News anchor Brian Williams "performing" Rapper's Delight:

Look, I laughed, okay?

I never knew the name of this song, but I know the opening lines because they featured in a preview of The Wedding Singer (a movie I've never even seen), and the memory has been taking up valuable space in my brain ever since.

ADDENDUM: The other source of my knowledge of Rapper's Delight: it's the first entry in Mr. B's Chap-Hop History:

7.

Wondering if you should go see Pompeii? Ask Matthew Lickona:

Here's what you know about the Italian city of Pompeii: it was buried in ash when a nearby volcano erupted with sudden fury in 79 AD. If you're plunking down $12 to watch a volcano erupt and destroy a city - first via earthquake, then via flaming boulder bombardment, then via tidal wave, and finally via superheated ash cloud - then you'll get that. But all that meaningless, computer-generated, natural-disaster carnage gets tedious, and quickly. What's much, much more fun is what comes before. You got yer enslaved "savage" (Kit Harrington, fit and fresh as a daisy) who's more civilized than his imperial overlords, gladiating his way across the Roman Empire. You got yer forbidden love across class lines set against the backdrop of spectacular disaster. You got yer political maneuvering, dominated by a dirty Roman Senator (Kiefer Sutherland, having the time of his life) who's got his eye on the same girl as our hero. You even got yer arena combat narrated by Greek chorus! And hell if director Paul W.S. Anderson doesn't serve up some actually interesting overhead shots of the doomed city pre-destruction. With all this goodness, who needs a script or a compelling lead?

I hope you're reading Matthew Lickona's movie reviews, and all his San Diego Reader articles, for that matter.

Seven Quick Takes

1. Baby Darwin is due in eight weeks, which means that Christmas is in less than nine weeks. ARE YOU READY, PEOPLE. This due date is going to mess with my usual paradigm of heading to the store on Christmas Eve and wondering why all these crazy people are clogging the aisles when I just want to pick up a last-minute present.

2. I've been running silent lately because does the world really need one more angsty blog post about pregnancy? Suffice it to say that baby is plenty fat and wiggly, and that he's head-down, for which I'm grateful even when he rotates that little head right in my hip joint in the middle of the night, and then I try to turn over, which takes about sixty seconds (what, does that sound brief to you? How long does it take you to roll over in bed?), and then I get my pillow all fixed again under my stomach and between my legs, and then he turns his head again and kicks me in the ribs for good measure.

3. A note on etiquette for parents: when you take your children trick-or-treating at the nursing home, have them dress as something easy recognizable and not ugly. Let me tell you that when you take three ballerinas, an explorer, and an airline pilot (complete with leather jacket, captain's hat, and tie) amid a full complement of ninjas, corpse brides, and zombies, not only will you make the residents of the nursing home extremely happy, but the kids will receive handfuls of candy in recompense for the courtesy of looking appropriate for those who would like to see children look appropriate. Also a courtesy: when you do not wear a mask at the nursing home, the residents can hear you more clearly, and that also pleases them.

4. Speaking of costume dramas, here: some clips from Metropolitan, featuring the height of debutante fashion in 1990:



5. Speaking of young people: Brandon on how to disorient the youth.

Sometimes people give as the aim for liberal arts education things like "to unsettle presumptions, to defamiliarize the familiar, to reveal what is going on beneath and behind appearances, to disorient young people and to help them to find ways to re-orient themselves." I think these sorts of things are truly ridiculous things to aim for in the context of any kind of college education, as I've argued, but suppose I were to take this as my goal in a philosophy course? What would I have to teach? What is the topic that has come up in my courses so far that has most consistently and most clearly had these effects? Neoplatonism. Nothing, nothing at all that I have ever taught, generates as much controversy and distress as Neoplatonism.

6. Today is St. Crispin's day! Get chills listening to Kenneth Branagh's beautiful voice over Patrick Doyle's stirring accompaniment.



Perhaps you would prefer Tom Hiddleston?



7. Crispin, Kenneth, and Thomas were all considered and rejected as middle names for this poor middle-nameless baby.

Seven Quick Takes for Monday

It's hot, and my big girls are out of town so it's quiet, and maybe it's pregnancy but the whole house smells like ashes despite the fact that I cleaned out the fireplace thoroughly two months ago and the window have been open ever since. I haven't had an interesting thought all day, so here's some vapidity to bring you down to my level.

1.

The Beach Boys remixed, or unmixed, or unhinged.



This is totally how it sounds when my siblings and I sing together. H/T Jen.

2.

If the world were run like airlines.

3.

Despite the less than stellar reviews, I have this urge to see The Great Gatsby on the big screen. Darwin is not necessarily pressed to do likewise, and I don't think it's worth spending babysitting capital on (a big calculation in my cinematic calculations), so what I ought to do is go see it on my own. But do you know, I don't think I've ever gone to see a movie in the theater by myself. For years I've gone, when I do go, with Darwin. Before I knew him, I went with friends. (High in the tales of ignominious movie confessions: In my youth I went with a boyfriend on his sixteenth birthday to see Waterworld, making me one of the ten people in the nation to financially support that debacle. I think I paid, too. The whole incident was a metaphor for that relationship.)

4.

Paul Giamatti is joining the cast of Downton Abbey in Season 4 as Cora's brother. The burning question: will this be enough to overcome our apathy and nudge us toward watching the last three episodes of Season 3, or are three seasons enough for any TV show?

5.

Actually, the real Downton question is: Will Season 4 show the wizards finally using their magical powers?

6.

From a list of The Ugliest Churches in the World, the very first example:

Touchdown Jesus, in front of Solid Rock Church, in Monroe, Ohio, off of I-75. I've driven past it more than once. However, this list is out of date. Touchdown Jesus was struck by lightning and burned to the  ground several years ago. Undaunted by this traditional sign of divine disapprobation, the church vowed to rebuild, but decided to tone down the camp.

Well, it's an improvement. But as we drove past it Saturday night, I was seized with pangs of nostalgia for the old statue. There's not much to look at between Dayton and Cincinnati; Touchdown Jesus was a landmark in swath of fields and flea markets.

7.

If you're looking for something a bit more substantial, check out Darwin in his radio debut, speaking about Catholicism and evolution.

Seven Quick Takes

1. Amy Welborn has been posting photos of some of her collection of vintage holy cards. Several of these are in French, basic enough that I can read them fairly easily, through the magic of context, cognates, and two years of college-level language.

2. I would like to read more French again.

3. My senior directing project for Theater was a production of No Exit, for which I translated the script to avoid any copyright issues for which I had no funds. It was not the world's most literate translation -- I liked to stay close to the original to preserve the sense of flow of a foreign language -- but one thing I noticed quickly was that of the small number of translations I could find, none of them made use of Sartre's own phrasing, so essential in creating from the very first lines the ennui of Hell and the cyclical feel of the plot.

Garcin, il entre et regard autour de lui. -- Alors voila.
Le Garçon. -- Voila.
Garcin. -- C'est comme ça...
Le Garçon. -- C'est comme ça.

Stuart Gilbert's translation starts off:

Garcin [enters, accompanied by the Room-Valet, and glances around him]: Hm! So here we are?
Valet: Yes, Mr. Garcin.
Garcin: And this is what it looks like?
Valet: Yes.

You don't have to know French to see that Gilbert is padding here.

4. Can anyone recommend a good book on prayer? I'm finding that giving up Facebook for Lent has not been difficult at all -- the hard part is in putting my extra time to good use, and in organizing that time so that it's concentrated for prayer. Turns out I'm not very good at praying in a sustained way. I go through my day, murmuring little prayers to myself or turning my thoughts to God , but although I do it frequently, I don't maintain it. Even at night, I start saying a decade of the rosary in bed, and either fall asleep or wander off mentally before I finish. I need to practice, to develop some staying power, but right now I treat prayer like I treat exercise: I think often of the treadmill in the basement, and I ponder all the benefits that I would derive from getting on it, and I could write for hours about it -- the one thing I don't do is go down consistently and use it.

5. I've been sitting on this one because Enbrethiliel has been reading her way through the Little House books, but since she's finally reached By The Shores of Silver Lake, I can post this: scarlet fever did not make Mary Ingalls go blind.  A recent study in Pediatrics (behind a firewall) concludes that the most likely culprit was viral meningoencephalitis. According to Laura's letters, she describes Mary has having had a high fever and paralysis of one half of her face, but there was no evidence of brain damage that a bacterial infection would have been likely to inflict. Other experts dispute the meningoencephalitis diagnosis, but there is general agreement that the cause could not have been scarlet fever.

6. We're all agog here about the news that the Vestal Virgins may not have been wearing wigs after all. Janet Stephens, a Baltimore hair dresser, has deconstructed the hairstyle as presented on busts and in literature, and has managed to recreate the style on a model. Julia in particular is impressed, and has been trying to braid up her hair in the same way. History comes to life!

Melanie Bettinelli links to Janet Stephens's video demonstrating the Seni Crines, the hairstyle of the Vestals.

7. Here's a joke. Look, I laughed, okay?

Seven Quick Takes

1.

Yes, the sheet music for John Cage's 4' 3". I'd like to teach this one to the kids, but I'm wondering whether I should buy five copies, or have them share one.

2.

Wikipedia on versions of the 4' 33" score:

Several versions of the score exist: The original Woodstock manuscript (August 1952): conventional notation, dedicated to David Tudor. This manuscript is currently lost. Tudor's attempt at re-creating the original score is reproduced in Fetterman 1996, 74.

The Kremen manuscript (1953): graphic, space-time notation, dedicated to Irwin Kremen. The movements of the piece are rendered as space between long vertical lines; a tempo indication is provided (60), and at the end of each movement the time is indicated in minutes and seconds. Edition Peters No. 6777a.

The so-called First Tacet Edition: a typewritten score, lists the three movements using Roman numbers, with the word "TACET" underneath each. A note by Cage describes the first performance and mentions that "the work may be performed by any instrumentalist or combination of instrumentalists and last any length of time." Edition Peters No. 6777 (out of print).

The so-called Second Tacet Edition: same as the First, except that it is printed in Cage's calligraphy, and the explanatory note mentions the Kremen manuscript. Edition Peters No. 6777 (i.e., it carries the same catalogue number as the first Tacet Edition)

Additionally, a facsimile, reduced in size, of the Kremen manuscript, appeared in July 1967 in Source 1, no. 2:46–54; the First Tacet Edition is described in Nyman 1974, 3, but it is not reproduced in that book.

There is some discrepancy between the lengths of individual movements specified in different versions of the score. The Woodstock printed program specifies the lengths 30″, 2′23″ and 1′40″, as does the Kremen manuscript, and presumably the original manuscript had the same indications. However, in the First Tacet Edition Cage writes that at the premiere the timings were 33″, 2′40″ and 1′20″. In the Second Tacet Edition he adds that after the premier a copy has been made for Irwin Kremen, in which the timelengths of the movements were 30″, 2′23″ and 1′40″. The causes of this discrepancy are not currently understood, the original manuscript being still lost.

3.

A friend has assured me that this is really the best version of 4' 3".

4.


I'm a tea drinker, and my brand is Twinings. I just bought a box of their Prince of Wales Tea, which is urbane and charming and not too strong. And then today I read the blurb on the side of the box: This exquisite tea was originally blended by Twinings for HRH The Prince of Wales in 1921, who later became King Edward VIII.

Great. I've been sipping Abdicator's Brew.


5.


The girls have been paging through The Laura Ingalls Wilder Songbook: Favorite Songs from the Little House Books. Our favorite song is Green Grows the Laurel, a simple, haunting melody. However, the arrangement must be very old. I can't find anyone singing the same tune under that name. The closest I've come is this lovely performance by Sandy Denny:




6.

There is no Take 6.

7.

There is nothing more soothing, when one has a headache, than being kissed on the forehead.

Seven Quick Takes

1.

After the recent discussion of fantasy, I thought we might be in the mood for something... sizzling.

None of my puns on this are fit to print, so you guys go to town.

2.

I was recently accused of "hating" for being insufficiently supportive of someone's pet project. And of course, it rankled deeply, and forced me to see the error of my ways, because I'm still in middle school and can be properly abashed by being called a big meanie.

No, no, friends. Accusations of "hating" are the last shrill defense of those unable to articulate why their particular favored institution should be above reproach. Dr. Boli knows what I'm talking about:

One of the most efficacious methods of bringing about the downfall of the establishment is to equip yourself with a large supply of stickers that say “HATING” in large white letters on a red background.What good will that do? you ask. Ah, but this is the clever part: you will affix those stickers to stop signs all over the city, neatly centered under the word “STOP,” so that the signs will now read “STOP HATING.” The entire military-industrial complex will be confounded by your apt repurposing of already-ubiquitous signage. 

3.

Are you not reading Dr. Boli? Hater. His history of the Roman Empire is everything it should be.

4.

Bearing meditates on the fallacy of homeschoolers taking Dorothy Sayers's conception of the Trivium-based school too literally.

Did you catch that bit -- that at the start of her "school" the children have already been taught to read, write, and do arithmetic?  We're on our own for that part, homeschoolers.Sayers' imaginary school is not, actually, a plan (and she takes pain to point this out).  Nor is it a reconstruction of the medieval trivium in any way -- significantly, she stresses, "It does not matter, for the moment, whether it [the trivium] was devised for small children or for older students, or how long people were supposed to take over it."No, this school she describes is a rhetorical device.  The point of the description is to create vivid pictures in the readers' minds, of children arguing, or finding Cassiopeia in the night sky, or examining portraits of the Kings of England, or carefully studying maps.  This is just an illustration to motivate readers to hear and accept her philosophy of education, which she emphasizes by making it the very last sentence of the essay:For the sole true end of education is simply this: to teach men how to learn for themselves; and whatever instruction fails to do this is effort spent in vain.This is a philosophy that appeals to me, and it is why I go around telling people that I am a "classical homeschooler."  Not because I think my homeschool should be split up into Grammar and Rhetoric and Dialectic (although I sometimes use those terms to describe the level of mental process that is engaged by a particular book or curriculum).  I tell people I am a "classical homeschooler" because I believe my job is to teach my kids how to teach themselves.

Also: Sayers never taught any children.

5.

I was driving along bobbing my head amiably to the oldies station, when I was jolted out of my complacency by the familiar opening strains of "Play That Funky Music." I mean, normally the only time I ever hear it at every wedding reception, but that's also the only time I ever hear the BlackEyed Peas, no oldsters. As soon as possible I plunked myself in front of YouTube, and sure enough, this song dates back to 1976. That wasn't a long time ago when I was young, let me tell you whippersnappers.



And now the kids have it in their ears, and beg, "Mom, can we listen to that song from two years before you were born?" Humph.

6.

Of course, my problems could be much, much worse.

7.

Well, I'm fresh out of other people's cleverness. Have a lovely weekend, all!

Seven Quick Takes

- 1 -

No clever theme this time, as I'm using the quick takes for exactly the purpose it's creator intended it for: It's been a crazy week here in DarwinLand, and I find myself at the end of the week with only one real post and an amusing video posted, and lots of fractional posts on the back burner that never got completed. The first half of the week, MrsDarwin took the kids up to visit some old friends who were spending time on a farm in Michigan. I stayed behind, which worked out well because my big project at work blew up and I found myself putting in twenty hours or so between Sunday afternoon and Monday night.

In the back half of the week, MrsD and I were both trying to catch up on rest, while the kids were responding the way kids to do indoor highs in the upper eighties (we have no A/C in the new-old house) and it not becoming fully dark until 9:30 or so.

- 2 -

Leah of Unequally Yoked, who ran the Religious Turing Test (which I still keep meaning to write about), had up a post the other day noting the spat that developed between Jennifer Fulwiler writing at National Catholic Register and PZ Myers, the atheist doyen who fills roughly the same spot in the atheist/science-blogger world as Fred Phelps does in Christianity, except that a surprising number of atheists seem to imagine he's someone worth listening to.

Leah notes that one of the primary complaints of PZ and his followers is that Jenn was clearly never a "real" atheist (and probably No True Scotsman, either) and indeed that complaints that a convert from some belief system to another "was never really a true X" are fairly common and asks, "How do you gauge the validity of someone's abandoned beliefs?"

I don't think it's possible to externally gauge the extent to which someone honestly held the beliefs that they held in the past. Even the former believer himself is usually not very good at that in retrospect. However, it is possible to gauge how well someone is able to express the beliefs which they claim to have formerly held. Thus, for example, as a Catholic if someone tells me, "I used to be a really well educated Catholic, but then I realized that if you break the Eucharist it doesn't bleed, and when you bite it it doesn't taste like flesh, so I knew that all that teaching about transubstantiation was just idiotic," I know that however sincere that person may have been in the past about his Catholic faith, he didn't have a clear understanding of what Eucharistic doctrines actually state.

- 3 -

Always eager to find another way to shape public behavior, some people are suggesting that a tax be imposed on soft drinks and other unhealthy foods, and the money used to fund a subsidy for vegetables and other healthy items. From what I know of the price elasticities involved, I'd believe that a high tax on soda (the proposal is to tax at $0.02/oz, thus adding $1.44 to the price of a six pack of 12oz cans) would drive demand down a bit -- or shift more people to diet since the proposal is to tax on the real soft drinks, not the fakes.

However, I'm pretty skeptical that a subsidy on green vegetables would actually result in much higher consumption. While I'm told that the price of arugula at Whole Foods remains pretty rough, the price of romaine and spring mix at the average Kroger or Safeway is really not that bad. Living off fresh vegetables and fruits is arguably cheaper than living off potato ships and soft drinks. The difference is that people really like junk food (for a biologically explainable reason: once upon a time before we got really good at growing food sugars and fats were harder to come by, so our bodies are designed to crave them.) Plus, junk foods are highly portable in a way that most greens aren't. (A salad starts to look a little tired after a day or two, while chips and soda keep for months if not years if unopened.) Often convenience is at least as big a driver of behavior as price -- as shown by the fact that "universal health care" hasn't actually driven down the over-use of emergency rooms, despite their higher cost they're open when people are available to go to the doctor.

- 4 -

A few weeks ago, Ross Douthat cited the statistic that in the 70s barely over half of well-educated Americans agreed that adultery is always wrong. This got John Sides thinking, and pulling data from the General Social Survey. It turns out there has in fact been a steady trend of people who have completed grad school or college becoming more disapproving of adultery since the '70s. Razib looks at the same data and separates out male and female attitudes.

- 5 -

I've had some back-and-forth with Alex Binder of Christian Economics about the Modern Money Theory and its implications. Hopefully more discussion on that to come in the future.

- 6 -

My path in life seems to usually put me in the company of people slightly older than myself -- in great part, I imagine, because I hit a lot of life milestones (marriage, children, career, etc.) at what is considered a young age by mainstream standards. Thus, I often hear people at work talking about the creeping sense that things they had wanted to do while while young, things they'd dreamed of, may not be possible.

As we settle into the new job, income, house, milieu, etc. I find myself starting to look forward to possibilities which seem, to me at least, particularly middle aged. Maybe at some point we won't have a kid nursing and we will have enough money to take a vacation together. For several days. Somewhere nice. Maybe someday we'll go back to Europe -- and have the money to stay in hotels instead of hostels and eat at restaurants instead of subsisting on bread, cheese and wine. (Though that wasn't bad...)

I recall catching up with some friends of my parents a few years ago, whose youngest kid had just moved out, and hearing about how they'd gone to stay in Paris for a week. Somehow that seemed a revelation. My idea of progressing through life had unthinkingly been: Run around and see a few things without spending any money while in college, get a job, get married, have kids, stick to that routine till you get feeble and then die.  (Of course, that could happen too.)

- 7 -

It's a good thing our garden is a means of recreation rather than subsistence, because so far all we got out of it was a few rounds of salad before new rounds of lettuce refused to sprout any more. (too hot, perhaps) But soon, very soon, we should be absolutely buried in tomatoes. Big, heavy, tomatoes. Watching these monsters grow larger and larger is certainly a pleasing sight after years of trying to grow tomatoes in Texas and finding that with the heat we could only get one or two full size tomatoes off each plant (though we did get lots of cherry tomatoes.)

Seven Quick Takes, Linky Edition

1.

Periodically, however, someone will suggest that the Church’s teaching on usury needs to be revitalized. Recently following a link from Darwin’s wife led me to the blog Siris, whose author Brandon has written a number of posts on the subject. Brandon differs from a lot of internet anti-usury warriors I have encountered in the past in that he actually seems to know something about the Church’s teaching on the matter (as opposed to trying to reconstruct a theory of usury from scratch, or simply relying on Belloc’s erroneous treatment of the subject). Brandon’s 2009 post on the legitimate grounds for charging interest (what are called “extrinsic titles” to interest) is quite good as a primer, and my only real objection with Brandon’s treatment is that he doesn’t seem to realize some of the implications of what he writes.

Blackadder writes about usury at The American Catholic. And part of the fun is seeing Blackadder and Brandon, who (aside from Darwin) are my favorite guys on the internet, engaging in discussion.

2. Speaking of favorites coming together, Bearing reviews a new booklet: St. Benedict for Busy Families. I've always loved the Rule of St. Benedict (if not its modern reformulations by promoters of maternal organization), and Father Dwight Longenecker seems just the right man to apply Benedictine principles of an ordered life to the messy business of family.

Fr. Longenecker encourages us to be centered not on the bells but on the principles of Benedictine spirituality. Those principles are embodied in what Fr. Longenecker calls the "two holy trinities:"

• The Benedictine monastic vows:
  • obedience
  • stability
  • conversion of life
• The daily pursuits of individuals living in a Benedictine community:
  • prayer
  • work
  • study

(Note that popular culture generally associates monastic vows or even, confusing it further, priest's vows, as being "poverty, chastity, and obedience." That's the Franciscans, not the Benedictines; although it turns out that Benedictines are supposed to embrace chastity just like any Christian, and own nothing or very little as a consequence of obedience to their Rule, Benedictines do not vow poverty and chastity).

Fr. Longenecker considers each of these six principles and, without going out of his way to show us exactly how to apply them to the vocation of family life, explains their purpose, and tries to show where joy can be found in them.

3. Pentimento, with her characteristic excellence, meditates on "real men":

Many of the men in this subculture were what I can only call essentially wounded in their masculinity. It was as if their self-identification as men had been haphazardly constructed out of subersive images of masculinity refracted to them from the culture; as if, finding certain norms of masculinity repellent (not without reason, it must be said), and not having had male role models to demonstrate for them any ontological qualities of manhood, these young men had skirted around the edges of male behavior, and had finished by taking affect for essence. Their own masculinity seemed to have been forged in opposition and negation, cobbled together out of strong, oppositional attitudes to what repelled them culturally, rather than out of any positive attitudes, such as the wish to take on essential male roles -- engaging, for instance, in meaningful ways in the existential struggle to fight real enemies, and providing for and protecting the vulnerable, including women and children. In addition, some of these men seemed to have self-consciously adopted certain styles, tastes, hobbies, and mannerisms associated with other times and places than twenty-first-century New York, identifying themselves more with, say, Europe before World War I, or fin-de-siècle Paris, or the New York of the Gilded Age. One man from this set whom I dated asked me seriously once whether I considered myself American (he didn’t, in spite of the fact that, like me, he was).
emphasis added

Pentimento and I have moved in different Catholic sets, and so the young Catholic men that I know, starting with my brothers, are generally mature and grounded -- perhaps because of their strong family structures and serious paternal role models. But I'm fascinated by this glimpse into a subculture of enthusiasms and imagery and the desire to re-invent oneself through a picturesque if not fully comprehended past culture.

4.

Speaking of past elegance and modern reinventions: The WSJ profiles the restoration of the elegant Midland Hotel, now styled the St. Pancras Renaissance Hotel, in the heart of London.

Londoners have always loved this gothic monster, despite the casual treatment it received from its reluctant owners, and they liked buying their rail tickets in the paneled booking hall at St.Pancras. They appreciated the soaring towers, pointed arches, the polychromy of brick and stone decoration and the carvings of birds and beasts. Where else would you possibly choose to have as a background for boarding the Hogwarts Express (from platform 9¾), as the young magicians do in the "Harry Potter" series?

...

Today guests arrive in a new reception lobby that occupies the space where the taxis used to drop off their passengers for the train station. Echoing the station roof (at the time of its construction it was the largest single unsupported span in the world), sky-blue steel beams carry a glass roof that lights the new, large lobby. The hotel may be furnished with contemporary cream leather furniture and coolly elegant flower arrangements, but you can still sense the power of the past. The quality of now-pristine original architecture is immediately striking. You sense exactly how Scott imagined the 19th-century public realm. His station hotel is as grand and as Gothic as the Houses of Parliament and Big Ben.

The original wood-paneled booking office, which always occupied part of the ground floor of the hotel building, is now a stylish bar, its gothic windows overlooking the station concourse. GA Design, the interior designers, has struck a balance between the demands of international corporate hotel design and the reinvigoration of the past. It is when you reach the grandest of grand staircases that Scott's vision is at its most complete. A wrought-iron balustrade guides you up three flights beneath the ribbed gothic vaults where every surface is painted with heraldic devices, a star-studded firmament and red walls decorated with hundreds of hand-painted fleurs-de-lys. This is undoubtedly Scott's masterpiece, and a significant example of Victorian Gothic revival architecture.

In the revival of the building's fortunes, original carpets have been copied and deliberately faded. Murals have been carefully restored and light fittings copied. Restoration accuracy has made the original building live again, but perhaps the most difficult element has been to make a modern luxury hotel work perfectly in the old building and to unify it to the new wing. Rooms and suites have high ceilings, new bathrooms and contemporary furnishings. The Gothic corridors were originally designed to be wide enough for two Victorian ladies to promenade in their crinolines, and today their width seems wonderfully generous.

5. Speaking of Harry Potter and the WSJ, today's review of Harry Potter leads me to stifle a sob that my live-in babysitter left yesterday:

So many good films come to bad ends, but not the tales of Harry Potter. The final episode of Harry's epic journey, part 2 of "The Deathly Hallows," is the best possible end for the series that began a decade ago. In contrast to part 1, which was a ponderous exercise in stage-setting and dramatic incipience, this film, directed by David Yates and adapted by Steve Kloves, is a climax worthy of the term. It's a dark and thunderous pageant that sets its bespectacled hero in the midst of vast forces, yet never loses track of who he is—a brave boy, to borrow both parts of Dumbledore's fond phrase, on the way to becoming a wonderful man. (Daniel Radcliffe, in his turn, has grown from likeably bland at the outset to impressively—and still likeably—confident.)

6. Speaking of Daniel Radcliffe, do you know he's starring in the revival of How To Succeed in Business Without Even Trying?



Daniel Radcliffe busting a move to The Brotherhood of Man confirms the review I read a while ago that pegged him as a surprisingly nifty dancer. For my money, you don't get much better than guys in three-piece suits performing zany choreography.

7. Speaking of singing, go and listen to my sister Anna Egan's lovely operatic chops.

Seven Quick Takes, Wednesday edition

1. Everyone offer lots of prayers for Jennifer Fulwiler, who is having her fifth child today. Four girls and a boy -- it don't get much better than that, sez I.

2. While you're at it, read Jen's take on the Father Corapi mess. I've never heard Father Corapi speak, so all I know about him is the highly negative fact that he chose to announce that he's stepping away from his priestly ministry on Father's Day, but some people feel very strongly about him, and Jen provides a nicely balanced analysis and conclusion:

And so this turn of events is upsetting to the thousands of us who were led home, at least in part, by this particular shepherd. As I thought about it and followed the commentary all weekend, I felt distress at the news. But I also sensed something else, something surprising, something good:

Freedom.

The truth that Fr. Corapi led me and so many others to did not originate with him, or from any man. The Catholic Church isn’t a bunch of guys who sit around and come up with brilliant insights about Jesus; its doctrines don’t come from the pope, the bishops, the priests, Fr. Corapi, or anyone else – they come from God himself. The men who make up the Magisterium are simply the tools God uses to convey his message.

3. I haven't written much lately, despite the numerous elegant and lucid posts that are bouncing around in my head. Here's what's been eating my time:


That would be my newly refinished screen door. It took a lot of woman-hours and more than half a can of marine spar varnish to get that shine, but nothing's too good for my front porch. I've got two more doors to work on now, doors on which the finish was so old (I'm guessing they hadn't been touched up in 80 years) that it hung in flakes which brushed off with the swipe of a hand. One more summer and they might have been unsalvageable.

My tip on getting that mirror-like shine: lots of thin coats of marine spar varnish, with a light sanding in between. It takes time, but boy is it worth it.

4. Gotta get a dehumidifier for the basement before we sprout black mold on everything. When I go downstairs my hair springs out like a bush, it's just that moist. Any recommendations on brand? Talk to me about the good, the bad, and the muggly.

5. Darwin and I went to a most excellent party this past weekend, at which Midsummer Night's Dream was read aloud (casting was done via random drawings from the casting hat). I was Titania, Queen of the Fairies; Darwin drew Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons. Make of that what you will.

Why don't we have more Shakespeare reading parties? The ones I've attended have been hysterical. Maybe that's because we were reading comedies and not, say, Titus Andronicus.

6. Our ten-year anniversary is coming up, and we'd like to get a new bed. (You all will recall that a roach was the catalyst for the destruction of the last incumbent, almost exactly five years ago.) We'd like something of a higher quality than we normally buy, it being a significant anniversary and having five years to save up and all. Usually we Craigslist for our furniture needs, but we haven't found anything that we like there. Antique beds are usually full-sized, and we need a queen.

So where does one go to shop for good heirloom quality furniture? Neither Darwin nor I come from families where good furniture was purchased -- at least not in our generation. My family's mainstay was Goodwill or St. Vincent de Paul. It's possible that something fine might turn up used at one of the usual outlets, but our anniversary is next week. Time's running short.

7. MY BABY'S GOING TO BE ONE IN TWO WEEKS. Behold:

Seven Quick Takes

1. Hate you, Blogger.



2. Thanks for all the music advice. I'm going to check out Mumford and Sons and the Wailing Jennys. Bernard mentioned Dave Matthews, which took me way back to my sophomore year, when I listened to almost nothing else.



3. Here's another example of a song I liked right away:





I guess this is a cover, but the other versions didn't grab me at all. So I went to look up this band, but they've drifted off the scene. This version of this song isn't available on iTunes, and the album it's on costs about $30 used. I considered buying it, but as I Googled around, I found the band's old page on which some impassioned but silly political opinions were bandied about. Nope, I'll listen to it on youtube.


 

4. Here's a video for commenter Mandamum:





If my brothers hosted a talk show, this is how it would go.

Jimmy Fallon and Justin Timberlake can come dance in my living room any day.

 



5. Do you think the neighborhood minds that three out of four panels of the screen door are ripped and flapping? Because it's not getting fixed any time soon.


 

6. We've been talking about going on Parents' Retreat: going away just by ourselves (shut up!) for a weekend, to talk about family, about schooling, about plans, about anything. By ourselves. Without, for example, a two-year-old sitting on my lap trying to push the space bar. Of course, we've been talking about this for almost a year, but it keeps getting put off due to the demands of... the family.


 

7. This was not really the day you want to have right before The Rapture. Maybe I'll be whisked up into Purgatory, or does it work that way?



Vacation next week!

Seven Quick Takes

This is not my post in response to Darwin's submission post, needless to say. It was just something I had ready to go up.

1. I've seen the future of low-budget children's programming, and it's cheap-ass computer rendering. Sorry junk. I hate the TV right now.

2. Here's how we do school here: the girls are writing out their Christmas lists in their best cursive because Santa can't read bad handwriting.

3. Here's our other homeschooling activity right now: we sing the times tables along with this CD. Hey, it works. I remember my younger siblings singing these songs, and a dedicated homeschooling group was able to help me locate it for my own kids. I find myself wandering around singing the Sevens waltz and the Eights boogie, so you know it's catchy.

4. My grocery shopping takes twice as long now because I don't know where anything is in the new store. Before we moved I had it down to a science; now, I wander aimlessly through the aisles because everything is in the wrong place.

5. This song:



It's so bizarre, and yet I have to listen to it for the weird twangy beat and the bass progression. Upon youtubing it, I discover that it's from Paul McCartney, and now I never want to hear another Beatles song again. Curse you, Paul McCartney, for the strangest Christmas song ever.

6. Diana (who will be henceforth called Pidge, because that's what we call her) rolled off the bed last night. I had five months of baby immobility, but now it's over. I wish she wouldn't, and yet it's so cute to see her squalling and kicking on her stomach, having rolled there and not knowing how to roll back.

7. Just a heads-up: my birthday is coming up, so get your thinking caps on...

Thanks to Jen for hosting.

Friday Quick Takes

Somehow, a fractured existence seems to lead to lots of post stubs, so I'll jump on Jen's bandwagon and do a quick takes to round out the week.

-- 1 --
Last year, I was in the middle of assuming a new job within the company I worked for, and so despite an odd yearning to take National Novel Writing Month (nor NaNoWriMo) as an excuse to get back into writing, I decided, "There's no time. Next year." Well, here's this year, and I'd driving back and forth between Cincinnati and Columbus several times a week while starting a new job. Humph.

Some day...

-- 2 --
Speaking of NaNoWriMo, I'm always up for a good piece of curmudgeonry, so I had to click on this piece entitled "Better yet, DON'T write that novel". The authors contention: When many first time novels see a print run of only a few thousand and only sell a few hundred copies, it's not the production of more novels that needs to be encouraged but rather readership.

As I was reading this it was striking me that part of the problem is that the market for novels is essentially national. Novels are published nationally and all the first time writers are struggling for attention from the same limited number of reviewers at the same limited number of magazines, and hoping that people in virtually identical Borders and Barnes & Nobles across the country will happen to pick up their work. Wouldn't it be easier on authors if readership was local? If readers tended to keep up with the small pool of local novelists, and then the best novelists from outside their region?

Then it struck me this is pretty much how blogging works -- though few people blog fiction. Blogging creates virtual neighborhoods and makes it fulfilling to have a couple hundred readers interested in your own corner of the world. I know a few bloggers who post fiction, but I wonder why more writers don't take this approach. Perhaps because it's hard to monetize? (Not like novel writing leads to profit for most anyway...)

-- 3 --
It had always struck me that the single people I knew ate surprising amounts of take-out and prepared food. If there's no one jumping all over you when you get home, wouldn't you be more inclined to cook up fun dishes for your own enjoyment?

Well, trying the experiment, not so much. It's far less enticing to cook from scratch when there's no one to cook for and no one to talk to while cooking. I still mostly shun take out but I seem to have fallen into meals that work like this:

Dump frozen garlic-potato wedges and frozen green beans in a pyrex bowl. Put sausage on top. Place in oven. Open beer.

Dump frozen artichoke hearts, frozen green beans and frozen potato wedges in pyrex bowl. Put frozen battered shrimp on top. Place in oven. Open beer.

Dump half bag of salad in huge bowl. Sprinkle with dressing. Grab a piece of cheese to cut up as a "side dish". Open wine.

Open can of soup. Dump in bowl. Heat up frozen mini-baguette. Open beer.

Note the frequency of the words "dump" and "frozen" in these recipes... It's not so much that I'm short of time, nor even that baking frozen stuff like this in the oven is actually much faster to prepare than a lot of the sort of recipes we normally make at home. It's just that the idea of preparing food in solitude seems bleak rather than homey. And eating the same left-overs for the next 2-3 days looms rather darkly as well. It's hard (at least for me) too cook in small quantities.

-- 4 --
Of course, if I don't like living alone, MrsDarwin has been having the much rougher time of it all. One of the older girls explained the evening like this to me the other night.

"Jack was so bad today. He was just crazy. He got in trouble, like, twelve times. Or maybe it was fifteen. He got into markers. And he colored on himself. And he dumped a pot of peas on the floor. And he spilled lemonade. And he threw the block of cheese in the spaghetti sauce. And he would NOT take a nap."

She paused, overwhelmed by the catalog of her brother's crimes.

"Have you been a good big sister and helped Mommy keep Jack out of trouble?" I asked. "Do you stop him when you see him getting into things?"

"Welllllllllll," she drew the word out as if this would make up for lack of truth. "Sometimes I do."

-- 5 --
Watching the election results come in, I'd found myself thinking, "I sure feel validated in choosing to move to Ohio over California."

Others had, it seems, been thinking equally and oppositely. A die-hard progressive friend posted the Facebook the next day, in response to someone's post on the elections, "I sure am glad I live in Portland, OR."

I wonder to what extent this kind of ideological sorting has increased -- especially among those of the upper part of the middle class who have often go to college in parts of the country far from where they grew up and then have national options as they look for jobs. Certainly, I've felt more at home in Texas and now Ohio than I do now back in my native Los Angeles.

-- 6 --
I've had a lot of time to listen to books or lectures on tape over the last few weeks, due to large amounts of time spent on I-71 between Columbus and Cincinnati. One of the things I've revisited is the original BBC radio dramatization of The Lord of the Rings

If, like me, you've come to cringe at the dialogue in Peter Jackson's movie adaptations (even though some of the visuals remain incredible) now that the first blush has worn off the movie adaptations, these are seriously worth a try. Although at ~13 hours, there is a lot of shortening in this adaptation, it keeps a lot more of Tolkien's verbal style in the dialogue and narration. And it's got some great voice actors, including Ian Holm as Frodo. (Of course, there's nostalgia in these for me as well. I listed to these again and again on cassette tape when I was a kid.)

-- 7 --
Speaking of listening to things... Anyone out there use Audible or similar subscription audio-book services? Is it in fact a cheaper way to get audiobooks? (And if it's something popular, not subject to the vicissitudes of a city library system with an addiction to reservation lines.) Feedback?

Snow White and the Seven Quick Takes

1.I've been seeing a lot of Snow White lately, courtesy of the nice folks at Netflix. The movie is certainly lovely, like a storybook brought to life. Critics have called it a masterpiece, and I guess that's accurate in a certain sense. A cinematic masterpiece, an artistic masterpiece, yes; a dramatic masterpiece, no. Snow White is not a dramatic heroine. She undergoes no change through the course of the movie. She acts not; she is acted upon. She reacts reflexively to circumstances. (This is literal: at one point a dwarf taps at her knee with a drumstick and her foot kicks up.) The prince is a dud and the dwarves are mere comic accessories. The queen is the only dramatic figure. She acts. She chooses. She dominates, until she's run off a cliff and smashed by a big rock.


2.


I had always found Snow White's voice to be extremely annoying until I saw this video of Adriana Caselotti, the singer who recorded Snow White. The woman has a sweet bubbly personality that makes her voice seem real. If anything, the animation fails to capture the individuality of the voice.

3. I had always heard that J.R.R. Tolkien was so appalled by Snow White that he put it in his will that Disney could never make a movie of any of his books. Google isn't giving me much help in verifying that, though. Anyway, in The Two Towers, the song of farewell that Galadriel sings to the Fellowship begins, "O Snow-White!"

4. Of the prince, all I can say is, "Dude looks like a lady!"

5. The dwarves: weird, sexless little men. I love the interior of the dwarves' cottage, though it beggars belief that such bumbling fools could have produced such intricate carvings and artistic flourishes.

6. Want to see a real little princess with hair as dark as ebony, lips as red as the rose, and skin as white as snow?

7. The DVD goes back to Netflix today.

Seven Quick Takes -- Clearing Out Stuff That I've Meant To Post About Edition

With thanks to the hostess...

1) There's a paper out in the current issue of Current Biology about chimps fighting "war" for territory. Good popular press articles about it here and here. We've known for a long time that chimps can be violent, and that groups fight against each other, but what's interesting about this case is that a larger group consistently over a period of a couple years wiped out the males of a neighboring group and then annexed their territory. From the Times article:

A band of males, up to 20 or so, will assemble in single file and move to the edge of their territory. They fall into unusual silence as they penetrate deep into the area controlled by the neighboring group. They tensely scan the treetops and startle at every noise. “It’s quite clear that they are looking for individuals of the other community,” Dr. Mitani says.

When the enemy is encountered, the patrol’s reaction depends on its assessment of the opposing force. If they seem to be outnumbered, members of the patrol will break file and bolt back to home territory. But if a single chimp has wandered into their path, they will attack. Enemy males will be held down, then bitten and battered to death. Females are usually let go, but their babies will be eaten.

These killings have a purpose, but one that did not emerge until after Ngogo chimps’ patrols had been tracked and cataloged for 10 years. The Ngogo group has about 150 chimps and is particularly large, about three times the usual size. And its size makes it unusually aggressive. Its males directed most of their patrols against a chimp group that lived in a region to the northeast of their territory. Last year, the Ngogo chimps stopped patrolling the region and annexed it outright, increasing their home territory by 22 percent, Dr. Mitani said.

2) Economist Bryan Caplan has a book coming out entitled Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids which he's blogged about frequently over at EconLog. Last weekend he had an article in the WSJ laying out part of his thesis. I think he makes some good points about how people overestimate what is "necessary" in raising kids: love, attention and affection, yes; organized sports and lessons four nights a week, not so much. And also draws attention to the point that people often make decisions about whether to have more children while going through the most difficult part (the first few years) or raising their first one or two. However, I tend to think he'd do well by refocusing the way he makes those points a bit -- in that this sounds a little like he's saying, "Your kids' success is pretty much genetically determined, so you might as well crank out a few extras and spend less time on them, because you'll really enjoy having adult children and grand kids." Also, it strikes me (as a parent dealing with the work and joys of having the fifth on the way) that "selfish reasons" for having more kids will not really get people there. Unless you have strong philosophical and moral reasons for having a pro-large-family approach to life, most people won't get past the standard 1-2.

3) The Washington Post offers a story about the last ironing board factory in the US. It employs 200 people and pays it's line workers $15/hr (about 30k/yr). It's kept in business by US tariffs on imported ironing boards from China ranging from 70% to 150%. Matt Yglesias of Think Progress sees the economic dead loss but doesn't see how one can vote to take away people's jobs in a recession. These ironing boards sell for $15-20 at places like Wal Mart, Target and K-Mart, so it's easy to say that the savings if the wholesale cost of ironing boards were not being doubled by tariffs would be small. Is your life that different if you pay $20 for an ironing board instead of $10? Is that worth someone's job? Yglesias's comments are furious that he would even suggest it might be beneficial not to prop up prices to "protect US jobs".

The numbers, however, are interesting. Take an average ironing board price of $16.99. According to the article, there are 7 million ironing boards sold in the US per year. On average, the tariff doubles the cost of an ironing board. This means the total money spent on ironing boards is being artificially increased by $59.5 million per year. If you divide that money by the 200 workers, that gives you $297k/yr as the cost of every $30k/yr job waved. Even if retailers didn't pass through all cost savings, or the Chinese increased their prices, we'd clearly be seeing a net overall savings if we weren't pumping up the annual expenditures on ironing boards by $59mil. Where that money would go is hard to say. With such a small percentage of any one household's income going to ironing boards, it is literally impossible to know where this money would go if it didn't go to slightly more expensive ironing boards, but it would go somewhere (produce, services or savings) and would work it's way around to providing some people with jobs. Not those 200 particular jobs, but definitely jobs.

Though most people prefer to assume that if a system is too complex for them to understand (indeed, for anyone to understand) that it must therefore be only theoretical, or "not be that way in the real world."



4) Failed States: If you need your daily dose of realizing how privileged you are, try this slideshow of life in failed states from Foreign Policy magazine.

5) Nestle is attempting to reach customers in remote small cities and large towns in Brazil by sending a floating snack supermarket out on Brazil's river system. Apparently, however, a number of people in the US are outraged at the idea that the world's largest food company (and thus "Big Food") is bringing candy bars and ice cream treats to people who would otherwise be eating the delicious "whole" or "raw" or "sustainable" foods of rural Brazil.

6) I was struck by these two pieces by William Deresiewicz on The Disadvantages of an Elite Education and on Solitude and Leadership. As with any strongly made point, I think parts of his argument go too far, but his talk about how often the elite are not a meritocracy but rather an entitled mediocricy strike me as pretty dead on at the moment. It also struck me that this might shed some light on the roots of the quiet background strife between those from Ivy League universities and those not here in Fortune 50 land.

7) Bruce Charlton thinks that human ability peaked with the moon landings and that we're actually able to do less now than we were then.

I suspect that human capability reached its peak or plateau around 1965-75 – at the time of the Apollo moon landings – and has been declining ever since.

This may sound bizarre or just plain false, but the argument is simple. That landing of men on the moon and bringing them back alive was the supreme achievement of human capability, the most difficult problem ever solved by humans. 40 years ago we could do it – repeatedly – but since then we have *not* been to the moon, and I suggest the real reason we have not been to the moon since 1972 is that we cannot any longer do it. Humans have lost the capability.
...
It was around the 1970s that the human spirit began to be overwhelmed by bureaucracy (although the trend had been growing for many decades).
...
The fact is that human no longer do - *can* no longer do many things we used to be able to do: land on the moon, swiftly win wars against weak opposition and then control the defeated nation, secure national borders, discover ‘breakthrough’ medical treatments, prevent crime, design and build to a tight deadline, educate people so they are ready to work before the age of 22, block an undersea oil leak...

While as a conservative I'm sympathetic to "golden age" thinking (though if you can't put the peak of human ahievement before 1900, you're really not trying) this line of thinking strikes me as deeply silly. Some problems are more amenable to brute force solution than others (finding a "cure for cancer" is a far more complex problem then building a rocket capable of sending people to the moon and back) and there's also much of this that is the result of changing political and social mores, not to mention backwards forgetfullness.

Did, for instance, the British Empire at its height actually do that great a job of "swiftly win[ning] wars against weak opposition and then control[ing] the defeated nation"? Not to our modern standards, really. The Boer War was incredibly messy, and cost far more casualties on the British side (and brutality against the enemy) than a modern nation like the US would tolerate in our "little wars" such as Iraq and Afghanistan. Nor were the Brits ever that great at keeping Afghanistan pacified themselves. However, there was a willingness of the Brits at that time to sustain fairly heavy deployements and casualties on a constant basis throughout the Empire in order to keep things more or less moving along -- while in the US this is the sort of thing which loses presidents elections.

Similarly, it's hard to see how the US public would support pouring 5% or more of total federal spending into the space program these days, when we'd all be so much happier granting ourselves a right to cable television or some such.

Seven Quick Takes

(Joint Post Edition)

1. Tycho Brahe was one of the great astronomers of the 16th century, a contemporary of Galileo and Kepler, and an all-around colorful character. He lost part of his nose in a duel, and had a metal prosthetic made (reportedly embellished with gold and silver) which he wore in its place. He is also reported to have had a tippling pet moose:

Lantgrave Wilhelm of Kassel in Germany, with whom Tycho Brahe had an extensive mail correspondence and astronomical discussions, asked Tycho in a letter 1591 about an animal he had heard about called "Rix", which was faster than a deer, but with smaller horns. Tycho replied that such an animal did not exist, but maybe he meant the norwegian animal called reindeer. Tycho wrote that he would check further details about such animals and if he could perhaps send one. He wrote that he had a young moose, that he could send if the Lantgrave would like. The Lantgrave replied that he had owned reindeers before but they had died of the heat, he also had a moose, which was tame and followed him like a dog. He would gladly accept a tame moose from Tycho, and would in such case reward Tycho with a riding horse for the trouble.

Tycho replies that he would order additional moose, and he would have sent his tame one, had it not died shortly before. It had been transported to the castle of Landskrona, a city close to Hven, to entertain a nobleman there. But it had happened that during the dinner, the moose had ascended the castle stairs and drunk of the beer in such amounts, that it had fallen down the stairs, and broken a leg. Despite the best care, the moose had died shortly thereafter. [source]

However, the most famous story about Tycho regards his death, and comes to us from his friend and fellow astronomy Kepler: Tycho had attended a banquet in Prague for the emperor Rudolph II, whom he served as imperial mathematician. The etiquette of the day required that none of the guests rise until the emperor did -- a stricture which Tycho followed despite having drunk deeply and suffering acutely from the call of nature. When he got home, he found he couldn't urinate, though he was in great pain. Nor was he able to for several days. When at last he was able to urinate a bit, it was tinged with blood. He died of a fever (with severe lower abdominal pain) several days later.

This would make Tycho the perfect warning to children reluctant to go to the bathroom before leaving for car trips, except that modern autopsies suggest that he may actually have died from mercury poisoning, perhaps from a medicine that he took to help his bladder ailment. (Darwin)

2. We had a chance to go see the movie Babies last week, and it was just good. Though the focus is mainly on the babies (natch), I couldn't help but observe what glimpses you got of the parents as seen through the eyes of a baby. I was struck by the unstudied beauty of the Mongolian and African mother, and, in the case of the Japanese mother, how meaningless trendy strollers and artfully tousled hair and hipper-than-thou clothes are to a baby. I thought the American parents a bit silly, but I suppose in Mongolia there are plenty of mothers who might protest that their babies aren't allowed to wander around farm animals unsupervised. Or, plenty of African families who would object that it's inaccurate to portray African life as a primitive Bronze-Age existence, and that their children aren't raised in the dirt, thank you very much.

But who cares? The point is the babies, and they're worth watching. As a parent, I recognized every moment of this movie. (MrsDarwin)

3. One of the odd sensations of having written a blog for so long is that every so often I'll go look up a post that I remember as being recent and fairly clever, and find to my shock that it was written 3-4 years ago. I had this sensation this week when looking up a post I'd written in praise of amateurs. (Darwin)

4. Darwin and I often encounter situations that leave us shaking our heads and saying, "I'm glad we're us." And here's a fine example of other couples being silly, from a WSJ article about married couples who spat about driving:

Beverly Floyd will never forget the worst argument she ever had with her husband—a fight that saw the couple screaming at each other and hurling insults of "crazy" and "psycho."

A spat about finances? The kids? Work? Nope. It was about which one of them should gas up the car.

The fireworks started when the couple pulled into a service station while on a return leg of a road trip. Already silently fuming that he hadn't offered to do his share of the driving, Ms. Floyd was astounded when her then-boyfriend didn't lift a finger to pump the gas. So she did it herself and paid for it. As she got back into the car, he handed her a $20 bill.

Bad idea. She threw it at him. He tossed it back at her. She ripped it up. He shredded the cash she kept in the ashtray. She ripped up the money in his wallet. All told, they destroyed about $200 in a matter of minutes. (They spent their evening trying to match serial numbers and tape the shredded pieces of money together.)

Well then. Darwin and I aren't given to fighting anyway, but we're both essentially serious enough that I can't see us ripping up legal tender to make a point about the psychological issues underlying who pumps the gas.

5. We all have our strange little hang-ups. One of mine is that I absolutely cannot rest when there is a fly in the house. This is awkward, because one of the favorite activities of my many offspring is standing with the door open trying to decide whether to go in or out. On reaching a decision, they go in the chosen direction, leaving the door open. (On my gravestone it will say, "Shut the door!") Thus, when I get home in the evening, the first thing I have to do (even if dinner is on the table) is take up the fly swatter and hunt down all the interlopers. Time is of the essence, if the sun goes down they don't congregate on the window anymore. (Darwin)

6. If you want to see a master actor at work, catch Alec Guiness playing eight very different roles in the classic Kind Hearts and Coronets. Here he is as three characters in rapid succession.

I really only looked up this clip because we've been cracking ourselves up all night by rasping out, "The enemy emerged from behind the kopje..." I post it for your amusement (except that I find it won't embed -- grr).

NOTE: YouTube and Google are not going to win themselves any fans with this new Google Ads deal clogging up videos.(MrsDarwin)

7. Young master Darwin (21 months) has learned, in rapid succession, how to climb out of his crib and how to open doors. Nothing is safe. There is, however, one approach to getting him down to bed that often works. Give him a doll to protect and his toy lightsaber, and he will often settle down with one under each arm. (Darwin)