RequiesCAT in Pace

Our condolences to the family of the Opinionated Homeschooler on the death of their cat, Big Dave.

He soon had a neighborhood reputation as scourge of the canines. Once, a woman let her leashed toy dog wander up well onto our lawn to do its doggy business. I was just opening the door to ask her not to do that, when a large gray blur streaked out of the bushes and went for the dog. Big Dave was all over that dog like a cheap suit. The woman stared, uncomprehending, while I grabbed for what looked like the midsection of the cat and pulled him off the poor trembling creature. I apologized--"He doesn't like dogs in his yard"--she apologized, we removed our respective animals from the scene; I'm guessing she probably curbed the dog properly from then on.

I hope they say that of me when I'm gone

Review: Guests of the Sheik

Taking advantage of my long weekend, I just finished reading Guests of the Sheik, An Ethnography of an Iraqi Village by Elizabeth Warnock Fernea. Not nearly as dry as its subtitle suggests, the book is the story of the author's 'honeymoon' in a Shiite tribal settlement circa 1958, or as the intro describes is:

I spent the first two years of my married life in a tribal settlement on the edge of a village, in southern Iraq. My husband, a social anthropologist, was doing research for his doctorate from the University of Chicago. This book is a personal narrative of these years... The village, the tribe and all of the people... are real as are the incidents. However, I have changed the names so that no one may be embarrassed, although I doubt that any of my women friends in the village will ever read my book.

The writing is quite transparent, and you come away knowing little about the author and her husband's opinions (you briefly hear about her husband arguing with some of the men in the village who are convinced Marxism represents the ideal future for Iraq, and there are some friends of theirs who are missionaries whom she visits several times), which in some ways simply serves to make it seem more as if you yourself are immersed in the tribal world in which she lived for two years. In this sense, it's a very good way to get a feeling for what tribal Islamic society was like in Iraq fifty year ago, without the layers of editorializing that most authors seem to feel is necessary in such exercises. Though the author clearly prefers her own culture to that she is immersed in, this is not a book about the suffering of Islamic women, or the possible liberation of Islamic women, or how Islamic women are really better off than their western peers. It's simply about what these particular women's lives were like, a life which is in many ways very alien to Westerners, and yet which clearly is set within the same universal human nature which we all share.

If you have an interest in everyday Islamic culture, this book is well worth reading. My only two frustrations with it are that a) it's fifty years old, and I very much wish I could find something similar written within the last ten or better yet within the last two years and b) a more detailed follow-up chapter would have been really interesting. The author's husband, at least, returned to the village for a time ten years later, and the author remained in correspondence with several of the women in the village. Given some of the ways in which Iraqi culture and politics changed over the ensuing fifty years, I've be really curious to know how those changes played out at the ground level, in this particular Shiite village.

Two things particularly struck me. One was that alien customs often aren't as much so as they seem. The author is surprised at the how strongly the women she meets feel about only marrying men within their own tribe. However the reason gradually becomes clear, in her descriptions of the verious engagements that take place. Since in traditional Islamic culture (at least as played out in that time and place) a man and woman were not supposed to meet face to face until their wedding day, marrying a man from your own tribe gave a woman a back-door way of selecting her own husband. Since boys and girls of the tribe all played together until age 11 or 12, a woman would know all the men close to her own age fairly well. A number of the women in the tribe had specific men among their set of old playmates that they had picked out as a hoped-for future spouse, an arrangment which could then be made by the woman's family.

The other insight that struck me was the extent to which it is very hard to overcome cultural barriers. Near the end, when the author and her husband have moved to Bagdad to do some library research before leaving Iraq, the sheik whose guest they have been comes to visit Bagdad and invites them out to a Western nightclub. The sheik vacations in Lebanon in the summers and considers himself able to appreciate Western ways. Yet he sees them through his own lens of interpretation. Seeing the couples dancing to American music, he remarks of the shamelessness of the tarts cavorting with their clients. The author is on the point of explaining that these are just ordinary people, many of them married couples that the author know from the embassy and various engineering firms, when she realizes this would really do very little good. The sheik already has set very clearly in his mind what constitutes a tart, and claiming these women as acquintances will only diminish them in his eyes, not exonerate the dancing couples. By living according to tribal custom for eighteen months, they have shown themselves to be respectable people in the eyes of the village, but that hasn't served to make the villagers think any better of western culture, merely convince them that a few westerners are decent because they follow tribal customs.

Blog Lite?

Darwin has today and tomorrow off, so posting may be light until Wednesday as we do some family-ish stuff together. Such as lying around wondering how all our energy managed to transfer itself to the girls, watching our Netflix stuff so we can finally send it back, bottling beer, and some home improvement. Perhaps we'll put up something of substance soon, but I give no guarantees.

Until then, I'll leave you with Eleanor's favorite joke.

A duck walks into a bar and asks, "You got any grapes?" The bartender looks up from drying glasses and says, "No, and we don't serve ducks here. Get out."

The next day, the duck comes back and says, "Got any grapes?" The bartender says, "No, we don't got any grapes, and I told you we don't serve your kind here. Get out!"

The next day the duck shows up again and asks, "Got any grapes?" The bartender starts to get mad. "No!" he shouts. "And I don't serve ducks! If you come in and ask for grapes again, I'm going to nail your webbed feet to the bar!" And he throws the duck out.

The next day the duck walks in and asks, "Got any nails?"
"No," says the bartender shortly.
"Good," says the duck. "Got any grapes?"

Calculated to crack up a four-year-old!

To Breed or Not to Breed

We're enjoying a quiet holiday weekend here in the Darwin household, but so that ye may know we (or at least our tireless source of leads) are not slacking, here's an interesting article from Commentary Magazine about the trend towards childlessness among married couples in the developed world.

Though you've doubtless seen such things here before, this one is interesting (among other things) in that it provides some primary source material quotes from ancient sources during the Greek and Roman demographic collapses, when the elites lost the will to reproduce.

Ours, moreover, is hardly the only age or civilization to experience a demographic crisis. “In our own time,” wrote Polybius in roughly 150 B.C.E., “the whole of Greece has been subject to a low birthrate and a general decrease of the population, owing to which cities have become deserted and the land has ceased to yield fruit.” The reason for this decline, he believed, was decadence. “For as men had fallen into such a state of pretentiousness, avarice, and indolence that they did not wish to marry, or if they married to rear children born to them, or at most as a rule one or two of them, . . . the evil rapidly and insensibly grew.”

A Happy Return

Well, after a full week, that which was lost is now found. The girls discovered MrsDarwin's wedding ring in one of their little backpacks. How did it get there, I wonder...

Hard to say if this is indeed a matter of St. Anthony squeeking in by the anniversary deadline I gave him in order to score the promised win for Food For The Poor, but it doesn't do well to question his work in these things. You never know when you need to be on his good side.

On this day in 2001...

We got married!

When I first met Darwin, I thought he was perfect. It was a great mystery to me why women weren't falling over themselves to move in his orbit. Now that we've been married for five years, I still think he's perfect -- not generically perfect, as in the heady days of freshman year, but the perfect complement for me.

Here's to many more years as happy as the last five have been!

You ain't from these here parts

Hello to all Curt Jester readers! Thanks for stopping by. And thanks to Jeff for nearly giving me a heart attack when I checked the site meter this morning...

Pro-Kid; Anti-Gay Marriage

Old friend and mentor Dr. Curp forwarded an interesting interview with Margaret Somerville, an ethicist who stirred up a hornet's nest by coming out publically against gay marriage for a straightforward reason that few outside of strongly religious circles accept: She believes that same sex marriages (specifically the likelihood that their approval would increase pressure to provide artificial reproductive services to same sex couples) would violate the right of every child to have and live with his or her own biological mother and father.

Prayers requested for Jack

Please keep Jack in your prayers:

We just received word that Jay and Suzy had to take Jack back to the hospital. He is running a fever of 105 degrees and his blood pressure is low. They put him in the Intensive Care Unit as a precaution. Any prayers you could send his way would be greatly appreciated!

Jack and all his family are truly encouraged by all the prayers offered for them. Feel free to leave comments and notes of support for them here, and Barb (our faithful correspondant) will pass them along to the family.

Venerable Louis and Zelie Martin, Servants of God,
You offered many prayers for your own sick children.
We unite our prayers with yours for Jack's healing.
May God look favorably on your intercession and, in His Mercy, grant us our request.
May His will be done in all things.

Venerable Louis and Zelie, pray for us!

Religion, Science & Humanity

Dr. PZ Myers is to science blogging what Michael Savage is to conservative talk radio. He runs a blog called Pharyngula: Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal and though his science is often sound, his thinking seldom is. Case in point, his recent manifesto titled I'm Proud to be non-human.

What worked Dr. Myers into a foaming lather was that science historian Dr. Ronald Numbers (who wrote a fascinating and fair history of creationism) had done an interview on PBS in which he suggested not merely that science and religion need not be enemies, but also that while science may gain us knowledge, religion is what makes us human. Numbers had quoted Einstein as saying "Science without religion is lame; religion without science is blind." In response to which Myers shouts:

Albert Einstein could be such an asshole. Why should I, or anybody, accept such a silly assertion? Religion adds nothing to science, let alone sight....

Of course, Einstein's arrogance has nothing on the author's, who believes that religion is the source of our humanity, and that we need absolute certainty to find satisfaction in life. If that's the case, I gladly renounce humanity, if humanity means ignorance and the dumb acceptance of superstition. I'll happily embrace uncertainty, provisional truth, and a method that guarantees a lifelong search for new knowledge over the false certainty given by the liars for gods.

Queue the Alberich theme as background for this renunciation -- though I doubt Valhalla will burn because of Myers renouncing humanity.

Sadly, there are all too many people who follow Myer's credo, and believe that the only true knowledge is to be had through science. Though Einstein's own ideas on religion were hardly in the mainstream of Judeo-Christian thought, he understood that there was more to the world than can be found through the telescope and microscope. Myers (and many of his commenters) seem quite unaware of this, with many pointing out: "Yeah, and where did Einstein's beliefs get him? Late to the QM game, that's where."

Perhaps is the sheer breadth of knowledge out there in this day and age, but it seems that fewer and fewer people have anything like a wide ranging education. A great number of science writers (even those with greater mental and educational maturity than PZ Myers) have only the most basic notions about history and philosophy, much less religion. And few who have made it their lives work to study theology, philosophy or history have a clear understanding of modern science. I suppose one approach would simply be to throw up one's arms and say that the modern world does not admit to the renaissance man model. Or perhaps we just need to try harder. If people would just show a little basic interest we'd get farther.

Modern science is indeed a powerful and fascinating tool, and I think far to many people either don't understand it or simply have no interest in it. And yet the idea that the only things worth knowing about the world can be discerned by science is so misguided as to be scarcely comprehensible to me.

Check your Fictional Gullibility

Here's a neat quiz: How Gullible are you? What kind of anti-catholic novel would reel you in?

How gullible are you? What kind of anti-Catholic novel would be most likely to reel you in?

You are most gullible when it comes to GOTHIC NOVELS and anything else horrifying and sensational enough. The thought that the Catholic Church is hiding secrets sparks your imagination; and both fictional and real-life stories of scandals and intrigues only confirm your suspicions. In true Gothic style, all such pieces put forward a psychological explanation for Catholic corruption: during the Victorian era, they blamed the what they saw as superstition, while today they blame celibacy and the whole Catholic attitude towards sex. Yet the only real psychological insight they have is into the attraction sordid stories have for the best of us. Don't put up with these cheap shots any longer! In novels they mean flat characters and predictable plots; everywhere else, they are irrational, over-emotional smears.
Take this quiz!








Quizilla |
Join

| Make A Quiz | More Quizzes | Grab Code

Created by Enbrethiliel, h/t Julie D.

Thinking Personhood Through

I found a very thoughtful post by Dru of Ep1staut0logy about the question of personhood and abortion. The comments are very worth reading as well -- some of the most thoughtful I've seen as far as wrestling with the basic ethical issues.

In difficult ethical waters, it's often best to go from what you are sure of to what you're not sure of. It seems pretty clear to most of us (with the exception of the most extreme euthanasia and eugenics advocates) that all people we see around us are worthy of equal care and dignity, despite any differences in degree of function or ability. A person with Down syndrome, or autism, or indeed a three week old baby all have levels of self awareness and cognition below the 'normal', and yet we rightly (at least so I believe) recoil from the idea that they are in some sense less human. Humanity thus seems to be a function of identity rather than degree. And if that's so, then how can abortion not be deeply, deeply problematic?

The Ring

The ring was lost, there was no question about it.

"I just don't know, hon," she said in the hall after the girls had finally lost their battle with bedtime. "I've been through the bathroom several times since last night."

"So have I," he said. "I can't find it anywhere."

"I took it off to wash the girls' hair, and I put it on the counter -- right here -- next to the sink. I'm sure I had it on while I washed baby," she said, shaking out a baby towel.

"And I took baby right from you, so we know that it didn't get caught up in her things."

"Then I trimmed Eleanor's hair (why do I do these things myself?) and while I was doing that Julia ran around and jumped off the stool in front of the sink But I didn't hear anything fall, and I don't even remember if it was there when I was brushing their teeth."

"Well," he said, "it's not on the floor, and I looked in all the cabinets and put away everything on the counter. Were the girls in the office?"

They surveyed the mountain of laundry on the futon in the office.

"It's not the loss of the ring itself that bothers me, though I'm fond of it," he said as he took a stack of small pastel shirts from her and placed them in the basket along with the pile of dresses. "It just seems to symbolize the lack of control we have over our daily life."

"Like we're still just treading water, even after five years," she agreed. "I don't want it to be lost -- we picked it out together, and it's a nice ring. But what's more frustrating than losing it is the chaos around here." She turned over the last few clothes, then sighed. "You know, I suppose it's possible that the girls were in here and brought the ring in with them, but it's unlikely with a capital UN. It's not like them to run off with my ring -- I'd expect them to bring it to me. They've done that before."

"I had been thinking about buying one of those anniversary bands," he remarked, "but I don't think the finances are going to allow for that before Friday."

"No, no, of course," she replied. "You know, it's silly -- I used to never take it off even when I if I had to get it wet, remember, and then the pearl started falling off. So I considered the risk of losing the pearl greater than the risk of losing the ring itself."

"That doesn't hold up financially," he murmured from under the sink, "if you think about the cost of the ring compared to the cost of replacing the pearl. Nothing in the trap here -- I don't think it could even fit down the drain anyway."

"And nothing in the other side, so it's definitely not in the bathroom."

"I don't even remember if I was wearing it when I put away the leftovers down here," she said, scanning the island again. "And I've already cleaned off the counter here,"

"Jeans pockets?"

"Already checked."

"Ring holder in our bathroom?

"Already checked. And I put away the clean clothes in the laundry basket -- one of them anyway -- and put all the dirty laundry on our bedroom floor in the basket one item at a time."

She shook the trashcan in the girls' bathroom, and something glinted and clanked. Underneath the empty toilet paper holder and the wet diaper and the various wads of tissue she found the metal flower broken from a zipper on Julia's shirt.

"Yeah, I found that earlier," he called from the bedroom.

"I'm so sorry," she said. "I just don't know what happened to it. I can't even promise that I'd never take if off again if we do find it."

"No, of course, I wouldn't expect you to do that," he said. "Actually, that's kind of disgusting, if you think about it. What about grease? What about dirt?"

"And the irritating thing is that it could be lost forever, or it could turn up tomorrow or the next day. I even checked the ring box in your drawer on the off-chance that it might have found its way home."

"Like the dog in the end." They smiled.

"Well, good night, hon. Love you."

"Love you. Good night."

Suggest Life Drawing -- Lose Your Job

Chad of On The Silent Planet recently recommended to me the Art Renewal Center website, which I've since added to the sidebar.

Another commenter pointed out an appauling case referred to on the ARC website, where a high school art teacher of 25 years has been suspended from his job and may be fired for the crime of recommending that some of his advanced students who intended to go on to art school take life drawing classes. Mr. Panse apparently suggested that the students could enroll in a class at a local art school or community college, and said he was considering trying to arrange a special topic class through the high school.

Apparently the school considers these "comments that students could construe as being of a sexual or personal nature...or using [his] position as a teacher to put students into any situation reasonably likely to make them feel uncomfortable because of the injection of sexuality into...the substance of [his] comments."

Modesty may be a virtue, but this sounds like straight idiocy.

More Global Warming

My last global warming post was so much fun, that I felt like I had to so a followup.

The National Academy of Sciences recently released a 150 page report on global temperature change over the last 2000 years. It's available free online here. This kind of reconstruction is, of course, tricky, in that we only have decent human temperature measurement records for the last 400 years or so, and near the beginning of that period the measurements weren't as accurate and weren't taken at widely dispersed enough locations. To fill the gap, scientists have tried to use data from tree rings, ice cores, coral, and so forth. Here's one of the resulting charts:

As you can see, the last hundred years are highlighted in red and show an upward trend, though not an unbroken one. However, there are a couple apparently problems. One, as noted by the blue "?LIA?" bar, is that this modeling fails to detect the 'little ice age' of the might nineteenth century, when for a while the Thames regularly froze over in London, and record cold winters were recorded world-wide. Also, they weren't able to project these method back far enough to compare the current warming trend with the one during the early middle ages (approx 800-1100) . Although that warming tend was clearly the result of natural processes while this one is at least in part the result of human greenhouse gas emissions, seeing the relative scale would be of immense use in getting a sense of perspective on current trends. Some hint is provided by this graph of Greenland's average temperature over the last 2500 years:

The vertical axis if a little confusing, since it shows the number of years ago. Thus, we are currently at 0. The height of the medieval warm period was around 900 AD, which ties well with Norse sagas, which describe Greenland as much more hospitable when it was first settled around that time. Current temperatures in Greenland aren't even half-way to the medieval high point yet, though the rate of ascent is steeper.

Back in March there was a lot of excitement about a study in Science which estimated that the sea level would rise 20ft by 2600 AD due to global warming:

Prof Bill McGuire, of the Benfield Hazard Research Centre, University College London, said: "Last year a six metre [20ft] rise was thought to be at least 1,000 years away. This year it is 500 as the Greenland ice sheet continues to fall apart at an accelerating rate."....

The studies show that greenhouse gas increases over the next century could warm the Arctic by between three and five degrees Celsius in summer. This would make the Arctic free of sea ice by 2100. The process will become irreversible some time in the second half of this century.

"We need to start serious measures to reduce greenhouse gases within the next decade," said Prof Overpeck. "If we don't do something soon, we're committed to four to six metres of sea level rise in the future."

I must admit I'm a little fuzzy on the claim that one hears quite a bit that at some specific point the "process will become irreversible". All climate trends in the Earth's past have reversed at one point or another. CO2 can be precipitated out as limestone in the ocean, and can also be consumed by plants. So it's not like once we get the stuff in the air we can never get it out again. I'll agree that having the sea level rise 20ft would pose problems, but if it happens over the course of 500 years, I think those problems would be pretty small. We'd have plenty of time to adjust, and our technology will be so different just 100 years from now, forget 500, that making straight-line judgments seems a little silly. Picture someone in 1500 trying to plan a strategy to deal with a crisis occurring by 2000, but assuming that technology and political trends would remain roughly the same.

What sort of things might we do about it? Firstly, using fossil fuels will become increasingly costly during the next few hundred years, so there will be additional (and unavoidable) pressure to move to alternate energy sources. But assuming that we get some critical level of CO2 into the atmosphere over the next 50 years, there are some pretty interesting things we could try to do to deal with that if it was clearly causing major problems. One would be oxygen farming on a massive scale. One of the obvious ways to get rid of CO2 is to have plants consume it and turn it into oxygen. Forestation is pretty, but about 50% of the CO2 consumption on Earth (and 45% of the oxygen production) is performed by algae. Massive algae farming could help reduce CO2, and some genetic modification might even help to produce specialized algae which would be even more efficient at it.

That said, there are a couple basic things that it's surprising environmental advocates aren't a lot more interested in. The number one thing is nuclear power. Currently only 20% of the US's electricity production comes from our 100 nuclear plants. And yet, nuclear power is by far the best solution to reducing the 40% of our annual CO2 productions which comes from fossil-fuel-burning power plants. Significantly reducing the regulatory and PR hurdles to building more nuclear plants could make a major difference in US greenhouse gas production. An additional 200-300 US nuclear plants would make a world of difference. We would want US and European nuclear power production to be as high as possible. The greatest per capita increases in CO2 production over the coming century will be in the developing world, where people are just getting electricity and transportation -- and many of those areas are unstable enough we don't necessarily want them running nuclear reactors yet.

The other place we could make a difference is in the 40% of US CO2 production which comes from transportation. Usually this leads people to start shouting about gas taxes and penalizing SUV buyers. However, there's something that would help at least as much (perhaps more) that no one seems to talk about: diesel. We think of diesel engines and nasty, smokey, low powered things from the 70s and 80s, but modern efficient diesel engines produced in Europe and Asia frequently offer significantly better mpg than US gasoline engines. Horse power is often slightly lower, but the torque is often higher. The VW Jetta TDI gets 44 miles per gallon, on a par with most hybrid cars, and built around a simpler, more powerful engine which can be expected to last waaaay longer than the complex systems that make a hybrid work. (The basic design of the diesel engine is simpler and less subject to mechanical failure than the gasoline engine design.) Yet the government puts major disincentives and restrictions on diesel cares in the US, keeping them to a tiny market share compared to the 30-40 percent of the road they own in Europe and Asia.

It's all very well to go around your house turning off extra lights as Roger Ebert said he did after watching Al Gore's movie (though if you make less than Roger Ebert you're probably already doing that to try to save money) but nuclear power and diesel vehicles (which would probably be a better sell to the tough-car-buying American public than hybrids) are far more likely to actually make a difference in the long run. And even if the pessimistic scenarios are correct, 500 years is a very, very long time to watch the tide come in. Pick up your copy of Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy and remember: Don't Panic!

No Strings

Apparently a number of scientists are beginning to feel it's well past time that String Theory passed on. Which is either awkward or convenient for me, as I haven't even got around to reading the intro book on it that I've had on my must-read-one-of-these-days list for a while now.

But just in case anyone was wondering, scientists can be very dismissive of and rude to each other on topics having nothing to do with ID and creationism.

Art in Austin

I had a business lunch in near UT yesterday, and since Thursday is the day admission to the new Blanton Museum of Art is free, we dropped in afterwards to look around. Austin has previously been without a good art museum, so it's good to see one open in town now.

The Blanton is kind of small, and is pretty much evenly split between 'contemporary art' and 'European art' -- or as tiresome people like me think of it: modern art and real art. I started out downstairs, which turned out to be all modern. It'd been quite a while since I'd wandered through a modern art gallery (our frequent stops back in Los Angeles were the Getty and the Huntington, neither of which had much modern stuff) and I'd forgot what bosh modern art is. Some of it very clever bosh, and some of it just foolish.

This one called Light Pink Octagon is one of your standard "I've managed to get them to pay me for not doing terribly much" kind of works. Or as the website describes it "challenges notions of what a work of art can be... [and] commands attention, embodying the artist's unique sense of possibility and play." Yeah. Whatever.

Another was rather clever, though I'm not sure I'd call it 'art'. (Unfortunately they don't have it on their website.) At first glance, it appeared to be a large pile of mulch on the floor, with a smaller pile of mulch on a shelf on the wall three feet above. As you looked closer, you realized that a tiny toy man with a shovel has been set up to look like he was shovelling mulch from the small pile and dropping it down to the pile on the floor. The title was "Forced Labor". Now, that's mildly clever, though I think the main way it was striking was in the defiance of expectation, where you first thought "this is just a stupid pile of mulch" and then you realized it was supposed to be an immense workload dwarfing the tiny toy worker. So someone put some thought into it. But it struck me as more parlor-game clever than having any artistic merit.

Up a striking set of wide, white stone steps, you are released into the upper floor. Here you find Western Art, some plaster casts of classical sculpture, some more modern art, and some real art.

Among the modern art, is a piece of conceptual art that rather annoyed me called How To Build Cathedrals. The museum site describes it this way:

In Missão/Missões he makes reference to the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Jesuit missions in southern Brazil, Paraguay, and northern Argentina. The missions were established as communities to convert the indigenous Tupi-Guaraní people to Catholicism, and many of the Jesuit and Franciscan churches remain among the jewels of Latin American Baroque architecture. Meireles's evocative contemporary "cathedral" exposes the hidden agenda behind these missions, highlighting in particular the relationship between wealth (600,000 coins on the ground), agricultural exploitation (200 suspended cattle bones), and religion (a column of communion wafers connecting the "land" and the "heavens"). The installation draws attention to the fact that the conquest of the Americas was as much about economics as it was about religion or saving souls.

Now some might say I'm just annoyed by the critique of the Church (which I am) but again it seems to me that this kind of thing may be too clever by half, but is not particularly artistic.

There is small collection of medieval liturgical art, though it seemed to me that the pieces were mostly not of equal quality to those at the Getty, which has a really wonderful collection of medieval religious art. There was a very good smatemperaora on panel of St. Bernard, which unfortunately isn't shown on the website.

The Blanton does have a pretty good collection of sketches and etchings, including one of the many Rembrandt self portraits.

There are also a number of interesting prints, including this Goya which quite caught my eye. The style is moving very much more into the modern, but there's still very much a continuity between this and the art that came before it, while works like the pink octagon strike me as coming from a totally separate and far inferior discipline.

Perhaps the trouble with 'contemporary art' is that it is so caught up in the its cleverness, enthralledled with the human capacity for cognition, that it doesn't feel the necessity to depict anything. Instead, we get these wordy little signs explaining to us why the piece is terribly clever. Yet cleverness is not the deepest of human qualities. We all think (at least occasionally) and much of what we think is original in some sense. Thoughts themselves are great things to the extent they help us to connect to reality, either the physical world around us, the emotional world of human relations, the spiritual world above, or the ideal world of forms and perfection.

I assume there must be out there still many artists who are more interested in, to use the loaded term, 'real art' than all this foolishness. Do they ever make it into museums?

Now I know

I'm gearing up to paint my living room, so I've been busy caulking, spackling, priming over crayon scribbles (this is a separate step from priming the whole room prior to putting on the top coat), sanding, and eyeing my two test patches of color to see if I like how they look on the room. And I do.

Here's some color advice I'll offer free of charge to anyone who's considering painting: if you're going to put up Tender Rose as your main color, Golden Glow is NOT the right yellow to go with it. Just want to be clear on that. Thank goodness that paint comes in quarts so you can experiment first!

When I'm finished with this project (don't hold your breath out there) I'll put up before and after pix.

A Novel Way To Publish

John Farrell has been podcasting his SF novel Doctor Janeway’s Plague and the Boston Herald describes the effort in an article today. The podcasts are available here.

More about Jack

You'll recall that Jack is the eight-year-old nephew of BarbfromCincy, and that he's battling cancer. Barb sends an update:

Jack's chemo got delayed last week because his counts were too low. However, he had a great week being a somewhat normal kid. Monday he went back to the hospital to start chemo again...he had a terrible day with reactions to the medication and having his feeding tube put back in. Yesterday was a bit better.
He will have to be in the hospital at least a week. Thank you again for all of your prayers...our family greatly appreciates it!

Please keep praying for him.

Venerable Louis and Zelie Martin, Servants of God,
You offered many prayers for your own sick children.
We unite our prayers with yours for Jack's healing.
May God look favorably on your intercession and, in His Mercy, grant us our request.
May His will be done in all things.

Venerable Louis and Zelie, pray for us!