Soggy Saturday Random

Greetings, my fellow port swillers!

Well, another Saturday dawns at Port Swiller Manor and finds Robbo staring at the radar and wondering whether he has time to spritz the weeds with Round-Up before the thunderstorms move in.  Probably not.   At least I got the grass cut last evening, so that’s something.

♦   I mentioned the Gels of MASN in the post immediately below.  Now I will tell you something about my own gel of summah.  The eleven year old has inserted herself in a rotation of two or three regulars playing catcher for her softball team this season.  T’other evening I was watching her in action behind the plate when it suddenly occurred to me why she enjoys the position so much:  It’s a spotlight.  The catchers are constantly complimented by coaches and crowds for their handing of what can be quite eccentric pitching at this level.  There’s also great satisfaction in staring down a runner at third who’s thinking of stealing.  However, she especially loves dramatically sweeping off her face-mask when pursuing a pop foul.  What a ham.   (To her credit, she is good at it, too.)

♦    Speaking of ball clubs, ol’ Robbo’s beloved Nats find themselves on a little five-game winning streak and look to be settling back into their true form.  My blood pressure has dropped several points over the past week or so as a result.  Go, NATS!!

♦     I look with horror and revulsion at the information coming to light about what happened in Libya.  (Well, not just that, of course.)  But I am all the more horrified by my feeling that nothing will really come of it.  Why? Because if you ask the opinion of the average low-information voter, you’re likely to get the answer,”Ben Ghazi? Who? Isn’t he that NFL player who just came out? Or is he the one dating a Kardashian?”

Sigh.

♦     Speaking of such things, I don’t usually read much political or social science, but by happenstance two new books have seized the Robbo attention.  The first is Roger Kimball’s The Fortunes of Permanence: Culture and Anarchy in an Age of Amnesia.  Jay Nordlinger has been quoting and reviewing the book extensively over at NRO, and much of what he cites goes right to ol’ Robbo’s heart.  The other book, by another NRO writer, is Kevin Williamson’s The End Is Near and It’s Going to Be Awesome: How Going Broke Will Leave America Richer, Happier, and More Secure.  I believe that I’ve written here before of my belief that we, as a nation, are hurtling toward catastrophe.  But I also said that, however hard it’s going to be, there isn’t reason just yet to save that last round for yourself.  Williamson’s theme, from the blurbs and interviews I’ve seen, appears to follow this same line.  Anyway, I like his writing style.  (UPDATE: Here is The Czar’s review.  Makes me all the more eager to dive in.)

I’ll let you know what I think.

♦     Some might suggest that ol’ Robbo spend his valuable reading time not with works that reenforce his own world view but with those that challenge it.  To them, I respectfully reply: Get stuffed.  Through some horrid process of social evolution, I seem to have become a bona fide member of the counterculture.  I look out from the redoubt and see the “challenge” swirling around it continually.  No need to unlock the gate and let them in.

♦     Oh, since I am posting so sparsely these days, let me get this out of the way:  Happy Mother’s Day.

♦     Tomorrow is also Ascension Sunday.  Or, as Father Z rants about it, Ascension Thursday Sunday.  Go on over and enjoy if you like this sort of thing (which I do).

♦     Speaking of rants, alert friends of the decanter may have noticed the absence here of complaints about tourons, a subject which in past years has consumed so much of Robbo’s thought.  This is simply due to teh fact that I have been driving into work since last August instead of taking the metro, so just don’t have that much personal contact with them anymore.  However, this change in commuting practice has not done away with the touron menace so much as transformed it into another shape.  Yes, I’m talking about the dreaded tour busses.  As the weather warms, these behemoths are starting to seriously jam up my afternoon drive.  (And when it takes me an hour to go ten city blocks, I have every right to be cranky about it.)  As a rule, I try to be a courteous driver – giving people room to merge in, for instance; stopping to let somebody pull out of a driveway.  Not so with these busses, from which I use every method, legal or otherwise, to dodge, cut off or otherwise distance myself.  Grrrrrrr…….

♦     And may I just remark here (perhaps again) on what a wonderful city car the Jeep Wrangler really is?  Its small size, quick pickup and sweet maneuverability make it ideal for nipping in and out of traffic.

Well, I glance out the window and here’s the rain.  Too bad.   Everything was probably too wet to begin with anyway.

UPDATE:  In re the low-information voter above, I should have noted that their next sentence would have been, “Hey, when do I get all my free shite?”  ”Low-information voter” is one way to describe them, but I think “Bread-and-Circuses voter” is even more apt.

In Which Robbo Lays Down The Law On A Long-Standing Topic Of Speculation

Greetings, my fellow port swillers!

I will not keep you long on this post.  However, I thought it appropriate to enter my two cents here on a subject of long debate.   To wit, that of Nature versus Nurture in re raising children.

Here are my empiric observations:

As regular friends of the decanter know, ol’ Robbo has three daughters, now all of whom are teens or pre-teens.

For scientific purposes, I can assure you that all of them have been exposed all their lives to what can safely be described as the Same Environment.

For all that, I find myself in charge of three wildly divergent personalities, specifically , a crank, a sweet-heart and a looney.

The bottom line I reach from my dealings with them is best expressed in nautical terms:  Their personalities are subject to the prevailing winds (i.e., the way they were born.).  As family captain, I can’t do more than trim the sails to alter their courses a few points towards where I think they should go.  Beyond that, I am fairly helpless.

I offer this observation for what it’s worth.   A calm sea and prosperous voyage to those of you dealing with the same thing!  (And, of course a glass of port!)

On Memento-ing Mori

Father Z ruminates on the theological  ramifications of a sudden death in the wake of the Marathon bombings, complete with Hobbesian pics.  (Relax – they’re pics of an owl and a mouse.)

I often have thought of this point, not just for myself but also for all the selves around me.  That is why one of the lines I always include in my own personal morning prayers is: “Lord, have mercy on those sinners who are to die today.”

You never know, after all……

On Flower Power

Greetings, my fellow port swillers!

You know, the women-folk of Port Swiller Manor have long professed to be great fans of Laura Ingalls Wilder and the spirit with which she faced frontier life.  Yet let ol’ Robbo absent-mindedly forget to turn the heat back on after a cold front comes through, making the house perhaps a tad chilly overnight, and see what kind of reaction he gets.  Hot house orchids ain’t in it.

Speaking of flowers, I was musing about what needs doing around the grounds after I get home from Mass today.  It’s actually a short and sweet list:  The annual stringing of new deer netting for the hydrangea hedge, the placement of supports for the peonies, some weeding on the garden path.

Somewhere or other I have seen an illustrated Examination of Conscience.  For the Commandment about keeping the Sabbath, one of the pictures is of somebody sweating over an old-fashioned push-mower.  Now I personally feel that mowing the lawn does come under the definition of unnecessary Sunday labor, which is why I always try to take care of it on Saturday.    But I don’t classify fooling about in the garden the same way.  To me, it’s more a sort of hands-on appreciation of God’s glory.  (At least until the weather turns beastly hot.)

UPDATE:  Speaking of Flower Power:  Legalized weed, “Earth Day” counterculture and Colorado hippie pot-heads. What could possibly go wrong?

In Which Robbo Goes Dark

Greetings, my fellow port swillers!

By the time those two or three of you together read this post, it will be time for ol’ Robbo to shut things down.

Wednesday – Tenebrae, complete with alter boys vigorously kicking the stuffing out of the pews….

Thursday – Mass of the Last Supper.  Yes, there will be washing of feet.  Problem?

Friday – Good Friday.  The Passion.  In Latin.  ’Nuff said.

Saturday – Easter Vigil (at which ol’ Robbo marks his fifth year as a member of Holy Mother Church and thanks every single blessed minute since he swam the Tiber).

Sunday – Various activities only marginally connected with Robbo’s celebration of His Resurrection but nonetheless meaningful and obligatory. To wit, hearing the Middle Gel sing at the Cathedral and then tooling out to the Shenandoah Valley to Cousin C’s for Easter din-dins.)

Monday – The aftermath of Holy Week……. and opening day at Nationals Park.  (No, we don’t have tickets.  But the truth is that I’d rather watch it on teevee than slog down to the Park after all the fuss and bother of the previous few days.  Anyhoo, it’s only the Marlins….)

In Which Robbo Palms It Off

Greetings, my fellow port swillers and happy Palm Sunday!

Yes, today we celebrate Jesus’s “triumphal” entry into Jerusalem amidst a cheering mob convinced that He was going to turn Pilate into a pumpkin and the Roman garrison into a bunch of white mice, and generally re-establish Israel as God’s Kingdom on Earth.  Less than a week from now, when He didn’t do any such thing, they were howling for his blood.   That’s why I say “triumphal”.  It’s really more tragic than anything else, as He knew perfectly well at the time.

At any rate, for all of ol’ Robbo’s supposed religiosity, today is one of those days on which he is caught out as the fraud that he really is, put to shame even by many small children in the pews.  Yes, the truth of the matter is that I have never learned how to fashion a cross out of a palm frond.

As a general rule, I am pretty clever with my hands.  But for some reason, knots and bows and things of that sort have always been hard for me.  Palm frond crosses go in that category.  Even when I look at step-by-step instructions complete with photographs, my braim tends just to seize up and my fingers go into digit-lock.

Ah, well.

We’re supposed to have a rayther nasty and raw afternoon here in the neighborhood of Port Swiller Manor, so I believe a fire later on today will be appropriate.  I will simply burn my frond (as is proper) in an untied state as I ponder the shallowness of my religious instruction.

In Robbo His Opinion

Greetings, my fellow port swillers!

After getting very excited about a rumor floating around the nets yesterday afternoon that Pope Francis had thrown the disgraced Bernard, Cardinal Law out of the Vatican on his monstrous backside, a rumor that now appears to be unfounded, ol’ Robbo came to the realization that it is time to calm down, take a deep breath and just wait to see what happens.

So instead, I give you this:  Council bans apostrophes from all street signs to avoid ‘confusion’.  

Mid-Devon District Council said its new streets had not contained apostrophes for many years but the policy was now being made official.

Residents and plain English campaigners criticised the move, but the council said apostrophes could only be found in three street names in the district.

It added that Beck’s Square and Blundell’s Avenue both in Tiverton and St George’s Well in Cullompton were all named many years ago.

Andrew Lacey, of Mid-Devon District Council, said there was no national guidance that stops apostrophes being used.

But proofreader Mary de Vere Taylor from Ashburton said the thought of apostrophes being removed made her shudder.

I shudder, too.  Indeed, the grammar aside, I find myself mystified at what possible “confusion” could result from the difference between “Beck’s” and “Becks” Square.  Would the presence of the apostrophe be enough to distract a lorry driver, causing him to careen straight through the plate-glass window of a nearby china shop?

In my misspent yoot, we lived next door to some people I will call the Smiths.  They had a little plaque on their mailbox pillar that read “the Smith’s” which the Mothe routinely mocked to our tender ears.  Indeed, these folks became known in the family vocabulary as “the Smith-apostrophe-s”.

I never forgot that.  It was, perhaps, a rayther more brutal form of grammatickal education than the Schoolhouse Rock ditties on the teevee, but it was quite effective for all that.

In fact, the rules of apostrophe usage are really quite easy.  If the Mid-Devon District Council is so concerned as to feel compelled to take O-fficial action, instead of dumbing down the street signs may I suggest that they stock the local library with copies of Lynne Truss’s The Girl’s Like Spaghetti:  Why, You CAN’T Manage Without Apostrophes!  

UPDATE:  Here’s a nifty little article on the historickal development of the possessive apostrophe, a story that has always given me a great deal of geeky pleasure.

On Il Papa Francesco

Greetings, my fellow port swillers!

I’m afraid I don’t have much to say today, except that the dynamics I identified in the post immediately below regarding Pope Francis seem to be gaining, ah, flow rate as reality sets in.  The MSM and their fellow-travellers are shocked, shocked, that this man is actually…..Catholic.  I mean, how did that happen?

What I find especially interesting in this first full day of his pontificate is that…..he may be even more Catholic than anybody actually thought.  Granted, his initial day of worship suggests at least some…… indifference to the traditional liturgy which, as I’ve noted, is so important to me.  (I’m not quite so cranked up about this as some people, largely because I’m pretty sure that my own parish will continue to celebrate the TLM on a weekly basis, come hell or high water.)  And I still fret about his lack of experience dealing with the Curia, that hive of scum and villainy Vatican bureaucracy that stonewalls anything even remotely resembling… change.

On the other hand, some of his symbolic stops and visitations, particularly those at St. Mary Major and the tomb of Pius V, suggest that Francis, despite his mild, easy-going demeanor, may be preparing to drop a serious, serious hammer on those who practice, if I may be excused for pilfering from C.S. Lewis, Catholicism-and-water.   This is physical language that suggests a plan to take names and kick asses.

(My apologies, by the way, for not providing linkies on all this, but it’s late and I’m tired.)

Anyhoo, after my initial ambiguity, I have to say that I am starting to get rayther excited.

Stay tuned….

On Pater Novus (If My Rusty Latin Is Correct)

Greetings, my fellow port swillers!

By now, I’m sure all of you have heard the news of the election of Argentinian Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, Archbishop of Buenos Aires, as Pope Francis.   

Habemus Papam, indeed.

Ol’ Robbo, still being a relative newbee to Church dynamics, has not gone through a Papal transition before, so this is all terra incognita for me.  As of yet, I don’t feel anything in particular other than an intrigue as to what is going to happen next.

Of course, as with many others, I’ve been glued to the Papal Webcam for the past couple days, eagerly awaiting the issuance of the white smoke from the gull-ridden chimney on the Sistine Chapel.  Like many others, I studied the various “Papal brackets” and articles analyzing the likely favorites and what any given candidate’s selection might mean in the Wider Scope of Things.

I confess that over the course of the last few days, I don’t recall ever hearing of Cardinal Bergoglio’s name, despite the fact that he was the alleged second choice behind both JPII and BXVI.  I suspect I was not alone in this, because as word of his election flashed out over the intertoobs, I got a very distinct sensation that the immediate collective response was, “Huh?”

(An aside here.  When I got the news that the white smoke had appeared, I started hunting around on the intertoobs for a live feed to find out the name of the elected.   For whatever technical reason, the only one that I could whistle up on my computer down to the shop was that of CNN.  I watched for about fifteen seconds and then clicked it off in disgust.  I knew that this was an historic occasion and that it would be wonderful to sit in, even electronically, but I decided I was damned if I was going to listen to Anderson Cooper, about whose opinions I could not give a rancid cow-paddy, telling me What It All Means.  Nor could I listen for more than a few seconds to the pair of gals he roped in to tell us that they really hoped the new Pope would be more open to “modern” needs and values.  Meaning that Holy Mother Church should throw overboard revealed Truth and 2000 years’ worth of discernment, just so they could carry on as they see fit without feeling guilty about it.)

Anyhoo, after the initial Huh, I started flipping around to see which way the winds of online opinion might start blowing.  Initially, I think, there was enthusiasm from, well, folks with whom I would not consider myself necessarily to be an ally.  I think their first quick scans of Bergoglio’s resume were behind this:  Latin American, champion of the poor, Jesuit, (one former neighbor of mine in fact Facebooked, “A Jesuit.  Now there is hope.”).  I believe the thinking was that here we had somebody whose combination of egalitarianism and intellectualism would cause him to champion a kind of Christian Marxism while letting slide those icky and arbitrary questions about sex and the family which are the hot-button items of the Western secular cultural pogram.

Then, having apparently read further, reaction started setting in.  Upon the discovery that Bergoglio has, in fact, specifically rejected liberation theology and defended traditional and orthodox Catholic social teachings, the initial enthusiasts seem to have recoiled in horror, collectively stating, “Yikes! This guy’s actually Catholic!  We’re shocked, shocked!”

Our new Pope Francis  seems to be a truly humble and holy man.  I’m guessing, however, that the media honeymoon doesn’t last all that particularly long.

As for my own opinion? Well, for what it’s worth, from what I gather, there’s nothing objectionable to his general philosophy and orthodoxy.  Alas, he doesn’t seem to be any great champion of Liturgical Reform, which is a pet cause of mine (and of B-16′s), but I don’t believe he’s going to tear up the Summorum Pontificum  and kybosh the Latin Mass, either.  The only thing that troubles me, as I’ve said before, is that I was hoping for somebody with some real hammer qualities who could clean house in the Curia and generally reform the bureaucracy.  From what I gather, Francis has neither the experience nor the temperament to tackle such a task.   As they say, we shall see.

At any rate, to borrow another Latin tag, alia iacta est.

 

What’s In A Name?

Greetings, my fellow port swillers!

Courtesy of the Bovina Bloviator, ol’ Robbo became aware of this neat-o on-line thingy: the Pope Name Predictor.  As its moniker suggests, it is a little contest to guess the name taken by the next Pope, whose identity, with any luck, we may find out as early as in the next day or two.  I couldn’t resist playing myself.

My prediction?  Well, it was really more of a hope than a guess, although not completely outside the bounds of plausibility.  In fact, I plonked for the name Pope Martellus I.

And why?

Friends of the decanter will know that ol’ Robbo believes it is critical at this time that the Conclave of Cardinals (of course guided by the Holy Ghost) select a new pontiff who carries within him the spirit of Charles Martel (that is, in English, “The Hammer”), a fellah with his back to the wall who nonetheless summoned the courage and strength to beat the holy bejaysus out of Christianity’s enemies, thus turning the tide.  What we need is a Champion of Orthodoxy who will smite not only the external enemies of HMC (here I’m thinking not only of rival religions around the world but more specifically of the secularist hedonism that has poisoned the West), but the internal ones as well.

In short, in these dark times we need a strong leader.

“But Tom,” you say, “Isn’t a reference to an 8th Century Frank kinda, you know, obscure?”

To which I would reply, “No, not if you had paid attention in your Medieval History class like you were supposed to.  Besides, the interconnectedness of the Present with the Past is a feature in my world view, not a bug.”

Besides, I want at least a plausible shot at winning the iThingy the meme is promising to whoever choses wisely, and “Chucknorristus I” and “Jackbaurius I” just didn’t seem like plausible options to me.