STARTING CAPTIONS:
- You’ve Heard Of The Popemobile? Meet The Angelmobile.
- "I’m Tellin’ Ya, Bob, This Ain’t The Kind Of Flying Car Folks Are Gonna Want!"
- Design Flaw: Gold Not Best Metal For Making Flying Cars.
Month: May 2005
Burying A St. Joseph Statue
A reader writes:
I’ve been a Catholic for 26 years now. Over those years I have heard countless stories from Catholics, (usually devout) who tell about the time they were selling a house and how they buried a statue of St. Joseph (upside down at that!) in the yard in order to bring about a quick and successful sale. Those who’ve tried this swear by it! Do you know anything about this? Seems like pure unadulterated superstition to me. Correct me if I’m wrong.
You need no correction.
While it is reasonable to ask St. Joseph for his intercession in helping buy or sell a home (finding housing for the holy family being one of his duties as head of the holy family), the idea of burying a statue of him upside down has no plausible connection to any patronly interest he might have in housing.
Because an efficacy is attributed to a religious act that has no apparent rational basis, the act qualifies as superstition or a perverse excess of religion. The Catechism notes that "Superstition in some sense represents a perverse excess of religion" (CCC 2110). That’s what we’re talking about here.
Synod With Orthodox?
B16’s fellow countryman, Cardinal Kasper, is proposing a synod of reunion with the Orthodox and an alliance with Protestants against the secularism raging in Europe.
EXCERPTS:
The Vatican representative for ecumenism proposed a synod of reconciliation to the Orthodox and an alliance with the offspring of the Protestant Reformation to rediscover the Christian roots of Europe.
Cardinal Walter Kasper, president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, made the proposals Wednesday when addressing the Italian National Eucharistic Congress.
The cardinal was joined in the ceremony by Orthodox Archbishop Kirill of Yaroslavl and Rostov of the Moscow Patriarchate, and Lutheran Bishop Eero Huovinen of Helsinki, Finland.
Cardinal Kasper began his address by recalling that in Bari a synod of Greek and Latin bishops took place in 1098.
"Why not hope that here, in Bari, 1,000 years after the synod of 1098, in 2098 — and why not before? We might again celebrate a synod of Greek and Latin bishops, a synod of reconciliation," he said.
(NOTE TO SELF: Must . . . resist . . . temptation . . . to refer to . . . head of Pontificial Commission for Promoting Christian Unity . . . as . . . "Kasper the Friendly Cardinal." . . . Must . . . Reistst . . . )
You Got a Permit for That?
According to THIS CNN.COM ARTICLE, a prediction I made years ago has begun to come true. I felt fairly certain that eventually some well-meaning idiot (or group of idiots) would call for the banning of kitchen knives and other edged implements, and now three doctors in London have started the ball rolling.
See, guns are hard to find in Britain, so when you find yourself in a muderous rage you have to work with whatever is at hand. Stabbings are common.
These doctors (all emergency room docs at a London hospital) didn’t just call a press conference and whine, but actually published an article in the British Medical Journal, so they apparently have wider support in the medical community there.
Think this is too far-fetched to be of any consequence? The doctors called for "goverment action", and Tony Blair and company have obliged by proposing a new MINIMUM AGE for knife ownership (18). The anti-knife lobby are also calling for knife design to be regulated so that long, pointy models are kept out of the marketplace. Their article pointed out that such knives are totally unnecessary, and cited an exhaustive survey of 10 chefs to bolster their argument.
In the true spirit of this new movement, I have begun compiling a list of other items that should be under consideration for future government regulation:
- 1) Pillows
- 2) Baseball bats
- 3) Rope
- 4) Lamp cord
- 5) "Blunt" objects
- 6) Fireplace pokers
This is just a beginning, of course. You can add your own items to the list in the com box. It will make us all just that much safer.
Cleaning Up Carthage
The city of Carthage, in modern-day Tunisia, has a bit of an image problem that some historians would like to attribute to ancient Roman propaganda: The ancient city of Carthage was accused of infanticide and at least one archaeologist is trying to prove the tradition to be bunk:
"An expert on ancient Carthage — a city obliterated by the Romans more than 2,000 years ago — Mr. [Mhamed Hassine] Fantar is campaigning to clear his forefathers of a nasty stigma: a reputation for infanticide.
"’We didn’t do it,’ says the 69-year-old archaeologist, rejecting accusations that the ancient citizens of this North African land sacrificed babies to appease their gods."
On the other side of the academic divide over the issue, another archaeologist says the revisionist version of Carthage’s history is a "whitewash":
"Lawrence Stager, a Harvard University archaeology professor and expert on the subject, calls the revisionism a whitewash. He’s now editing a book that will include the results of long forensic analysis of charred bones he helped dig up in Carthage in the 1970s. This, says Mr. Stager, will prove beyond reasonable doubt that Mr. Fantar and his followers are wrong. Still, he isn’t expecting to win them over. ‘No one really relishes having ancestors who committed such heinous acts,’ he says."
Note to archaeologists two thousand years from now who may be arguing over whether Western societies of the twenty-first century committed infanticide to appease their "gods":
It’s true. We really did do it.
JIMMY ADDS: Carthago delenda est!
Having A Damaged Angular Gyrus Is Like Having A . . . Uh . . . Hm.
Scientists here in S.D. have found an area of the brain–known as the angular gyrus–that if damaged impairs a person’s ability to understand figurative speech such as metaphors.
EXCERPT:
After being pressed by the interviewers to provide deeper meaning [for metaphorical phrases they encountered], "the patients often came up with elaborate, even ingenious interpretations, that were completely off the mark," Ramachandran remarks. For example, patient SJ expounded on "all that glitters is not gold" by noting that you should be careful when buying jewelry because the sellers could rob you of your money.
GET THE STORY.
Those with damaged angular gyruses presumably would make great "straight men" in comedy acts.
(P.S. Yes, I know the title of this blog post is an incomplete similie rather than a metaphor.)
B16 Appeals For Union With Orthodox
AP Makes "Slight" Correction
TEXT OF CORRECTION:
ROME – In a May 26 story about Pope Benedict XVI’s visit to a Rome
basilica, The Associated Press erroneously reported that Catholics
believe the Eucharist represents the body and blood of Christ. Instead,
Catholics believe the Eucharist is the body and blood of Christ.
Oops!
Guess they started hearing from folks.
(CHT to the reader who e-mailed.)
AP Makes “Slight” Correction
TEXT OF CORRECTION:
ROME – In a May 26 story about Pope Benedict XVI’s visit to a Rome
basilica, The Associated Press erroneously reported that Catholics
believe the Eucharist represents the body and blood of Christ. Instead,
Catholics believe the Eucharist is the body and blood of Christ.
Oops!
Guess they started hearing from folks.
(CHT to the reader who e-mailed.)
The Age Of Google
I research things for a living. Knowing where and how to get information–at least within my chosen field–is the warp and woof of my trade.
This has an impact on how I read and watch fiction. F’rinstance: I like the movie All The President’s Men about the Woodward-Bernstein investigation of Watergate. Set in the early 1970s, I’m fascinated by the way the two reporters go about piecing together the story that’s in front of them. It’s fascinating because they have to go to great lengths to get certain pieces of information that you could get in five seconds today (e.g., by doing a search on Switchboard.Com). They also manage to get their mitts on certain info that would be incredibly hard or impossible to get today due to their being subject now to much greater privacy and confidentiality requirements.
If you wrote a story about a similar investigation today, you’d have to change the ways that the reporters go about putting the story together.
Technology has changed the flow of information in society dramatically, and it has and will continue to force changes in how the flow of information is depicted in drama.
Take the episode "Passing Through Gethsemane" of Babylon 5, which I was watching last night. This episode has a lot going for it:
- It features the Dominican monks who were recurring characters on the series.
- It lets one of the Domincans get in a really good poke at those who claim to be "openminded" as a cover for refusing to find a definite belief system.
- It features the only on-screen (or off-screen) administration of the last rites I know of in any mainstream sci-fi TV show.
- It has extensive discussion of religious belief including the strain Jesus was under in the Garden of Gethsemane.
- It has ethical discussion of the death penalty and the sci-fi alternatives there might be for it.
- It focuses heavily on themes of sin and guilt and atonement and forgiveness, including making the point that God can forgive your sins even if you don’t remember them.
- Part of the soundtrack is Gregorian chant.
- It shows monks living up to ideals that are harder than humanly imaginable, but clearly worthwhile.
- And it features Capt. Sheridan and Garibaldi doing something flagrantly illegal that you’d never see Picard and Riker doing in a million years. (Sticking a bag over the head of an alien telepath so he can’t identify a human telepath as she rips a crucial, potentially life-saving piece of information out of his head against his will.)
And all this written by an atheist!
But despite all these great elements, it’s obvious that the episode was written before Google.
Why’s that?
Because one of the Dominicans in the episode–Brother Edward (played by Brad Dourif)–beguns to have a number of really weird and sinister things happen to him. Among them are the appearance of a black rose and the words "Death Walks Among You" apparently written in blood on a wall.
Br. Edward reports this to Security Chief Garibaldi, but despite this fact, the first thing Garibaldi doesn’t do is search Google (or the 23rd century equivalent of Google) for the words "black rose" and "Death Walks Among You."
Any kind of ritualistic clues like that immediately call out for a cyber-search to see if there are any parallels to them.
Had Garibaldi searched on these items sooner, he would have found out what was at the basis of the mystery much sooner, and possibly prevented a crime and saved a life.
Heck, if you search Google today for those items, you’ll find out what was at the bottom of all this.
In the future, expect a lot more cyber-searches in detective stories.
Art imitates life. (At least to some degree.)
Still a great episode, tho.