Month: June 2009

Proverbs 18:17

Proverbs 18:17 is a verse that every apologist ought to know by heart, because it describes a phenomenon that often occurs in apologetics. Here is how it goes:

"He who states his case first seems right,

until the other comes and examines him."

It's another way of saying that first impressions aren't always accurate. There can be more to a situation.

This principle also applies in other areas, like politics.

Take the current situation in Honduras, for example. The Miami Herald has a very interesting piece on the subject.

EXCERPT:

The greatest tourist attraction in Central America has always been politics. Diplomats stop by every few years, take a couple of snapshots of what's going on at the presidential palace, and then profoundly declare their opinions, devoid of context or history. This week's favorite diplotourism destination is Honduras, where the army Sunday arrested President Manuel Zelaya and booted him across the border to Costa Rica. In the Polaroid analysis, it's pretty clear what happened: ''A return to barbarism in our hemisphere,'' as Argentina's president Cristina Fernández put it.

She had plenty of company. ''The action taken against Honduran President Mel Zelaya violates the precepts of the Inter-American Democratic Charter, and thus should be condemned by all,'' said Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. “We call on all parties in Honduras to respect the constitutional order and the rule of law.''

The OAS Permanent Council voted ''to condemn vehemently the coup d'etat staged this morning against the constitutionally established government of Honduras.'' U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon demanded “the reinstatement of the democratically elected representatives of the country and full respect for human rights.''

Here's a question for all these new-found defenders of Honduran democracy: Where were you last week?

GET THE STORY.

Queen Mary in the Mists

Queen_mary

Perhaps there is some odd synchronicity with Tim J's haunting post, but this is a picture I was moved to take from my hotel hallway early Sunday morning as I was getting reach to leave the Long Beach National Square Dance Convention for the drive back to San Diego.

That drive should be only two hours, but with traffic it can be four five (and has been!), so I wanted to get an early start, and I happened to get up early enough that there was a lot of fog in the area.

The fog was so bad that when I got on the toll road to bypass a bunch of early traffic, I could not read the signs announcing the oncoming toll booths, making me wonder about traffic safety. Nevertheless I got home fine, despite all the fog.

The kind of fog you could hit an iceberg in. 

This post isn't about that, though. It's about the ship that you can see between the palm trees in the center of the picture (look for the black and red smokestacks; click to enlarge). 

The ship is the Queen Mary, which sailed as part of the Cunard-White Star Line in the mid-20th century before being retired and permanently anchored in Long Beach as a tourist spot.

I've never been aboard the Queen Mary. That'll have to wait for another trip (traffic and all, y'know). But I have encountered it in various ways.

For example, its gorgeous interiors were used as the setting of the outstanding and cinematically dazzling X-Files episode Triangle (one of the very best of the whole series).

Beyond the way the X-Files treated the ship, it's also reputed to be haunted, with various reports of ghostly happenings since it was permanently moored in Long Beach, with past guests supposedly making posthumous appearances, including soldiers who were housed on the vessel when it was used as a troop ship during World War II. (Bunks, apparently, were stacked in the central ballroom, with some bunks reaching almost to the ceiling.)

On that basis, it's also the location of the climax of Tim Powers' novel Expiration Date, which is one of my most favorite Tim Powers novels. It's simply marvellous–chocked full of audacious inventiveness, action, and humor. I love it!

It also mentions the billeting of troops that took place on the ship during World War II.

And the ship has a connection (believe it or not) to my square dancing life.

One of the past presidents of my square dance club was named Vic. He passed away a couple of years ago, when I was president of the club (before I was its caller), and I spent time with Vic during his final illness, trying to provide companionship and making whatever conversation he felt up to.

One of the things he talked about was the fact that he had been housed on the Queen Mary during World War II. He was one of the soldiers billeted in the ball room. 

Of course, I told him about Tim Powers' novel as part of passing the time.

And so, though I haven't yet been aboard the Queen Mary, it still has a special status for me. I look forward to going aboard and seeing it for myself.

This weekend, though, I couldn't resist snapping a picture of it through the morning mists.

Oh . . . and what's that ghostly ring of light around the ship in the picture? An electronic image artifact? A reflection in the hotel hall's window of the iPhone's circular camera, caused by holding it close enough to the window that the hall lights wouldn't get in the picture? A spectral manifestation of Koot Hoomie Parganas, Thomas Edison, Sherman Oaks, or (shudder) Loretta deLarava?

You decide.


Startling Pattern Emerges

Cemetery
It's like they're all just waiting for us…

Hey, Tim Jones, here.

I
think my grandfather's death was the first that really affected me as
it happened, though I understood the concept of death, having seen a
lot of T.V. westerns, along with media coverage of the Vietnam War, the
Kennedy assassination, the Munich Olympics and other deadly events.

I've
seen a number of deaths, since, and taken note of many more, but the
tight grouping of celebrity deaths in the last week has made me look
back over my experiences of death, and I have begun to sense a pattern.

Stay with me, here. I'm no conspiracy nut, but it begins to appear that no one
is safe, and that the chances of death for any one of us – by my rough
figures – approaches 100%. For instance, the older I get, the more
people in my general age group pop up on the news, having died in one
way or another and it is most often treated as a surprise, if not a
shock.

But the shock, to me, may be unjustified. I don't want to start a panic, but it looks to me like we may all be headed for the cemetery.

"Teach us to number our days aright,
that we may gain a heart of wisdom."
Psalm 90:12

Last
week we heard first, of course, of Ed McMahon, then Farrah Fawcett,
then Michael Jackson… next, Billy Mays and this morning I read that
Fred Travalena and Gale Storm passed away.

I have no great
observations to make, except to say that the only genuine shock for me
would have been if Michael Jackson had somehow lived to a ripe old age.
I did not see how he could manage much longer. Over the past few years
he appeared to be a shell.

I have good memories of Fred Travalena, who often appeared on Johnny Carson's Tonight Show, was all over the variety show circuit, and also starred with Rich Little, Frank Gorshin and other master impressionists on The Kopycats
– a comedy show (which I never missed if I could help it) built around
impressions. He was also an extremely prolific and successful voice
actor.

Most people may not know anything much about Gale Storm, but my wife will remember My Little Margie (which was old already when we watched it) from our days as college students, when we could count our TV channels on one hand.

For
a long time, when driving by a cemetery, I have had the distinct
and unshakable sense that those dwelling under the tombstones are
watching and waiting and maybe chuckling a little… laughing at the
living and their frantic and petty preoccupations. Sometimes, I can't
help but laugh, too.

This idea of the connectedness of the living
and the dead runs deep in the human heart, and is confirmed in the
doctrine of the Communion of Saints… which is just the Church
expounding on the teaching of the Lord that "He is not the God of the
dead, but of the living, for to him all are alive."  (Luke 20:38).

(This post has been carefully cross-posted by hand at Tim Jones' blog Old World Swine, for double your blogging pleasure)

Political humor

This cartoon reminds me of something from the Team America movie that someone told me about (I didn’t see it myself), a satiric pro-American song that I can’t even repeat the title of here. (The cartoon below also has an objectionable word in it.)

Or, at least, that’s how many Americans would view the rest of the world, if they had even that much geographical awareness.

In reality, I think many Americans see the world through the same sort of lens (though not of course from the same perspective) as Saul Steinberg’s famous New Yorker cover map of the world cartoon:

Oh, and JibJab is at it again!

Try JibJab Sendables® eCards today!

The Great Chain of Being Goes To Heaven

CHT to the reader who sent in the following church sign debate. It's currently being circulated around the Internet in the form of an e-mail that suggests it's real, but it's not (note that the leaves of the plants don't move from one picture to another). That doesn't stop it from being hilarious–if you don't take it (or its theology) too seriously.




















Decent Films doings, 6/2009

Latest reviews, both about thoughtful films for adults in limited release:

Moon, a science fiction throwback to the philosophical sci-fi of the late 1960s and early 1970s (2001: A Space Odyssey and its ilk), starring Sam Rockwell and directed by first-time filmmaker Duncan Jones. (Yes, he’s the son of David Bowie.)

Summer Hours, French director Olivier Assayas’s extraordinary family-drama meditation on legacy and loss, the meaning of art and the relentless march of time, and the fragmentation of families and erosion of culture in an age of globalization.

Although both films are philosophically freighted, both engage the world of ideas in a way organic to the spare, small-scale stories they have to tell — stories about the personal dilemmas of a small number of characters (in the case of Moon, a very small number). Both well worth tracking down.

Up to Heaven

SDG here with a heart-rending yet uplifting real-life story about life imitating art in a beautiful act of kindness from Pixar, makers of Up.

HUNTINGTON BEACH – Colby Curtin, a 10-year-old with a rare form of cancer, was staying alive for one thing – a movie.

From the minute Colby saw the previews to the Disney-Pixar movie Up, she was desperate to see it. Colby had been diagnosed with vascular cancer about three years ago, said her mother, Lisa Curtin, and at the beginning of this month it became apparent that she would die soon and was too ill to be moved to a theater to see the film.

After a family friend made frantic calls to Pixar to help grant Colby her dying wish, Pixar came to the rescue.

The company flew an employee with a DVD of Up, which is only in theaters, to the Curtins’ Huntington Beach home on June 10 for a private viewing of the movie.

Colby died only seven hours after experiencing Up.

Up‘s story of bereavement and hoped-for adventures that would never be must have had shattering poignancy to that dying girl and her family. The story reports that Colby’s mother later said she had no idea how close the film would hit to home: “I just know that word ‘Up’ and all of the balloons and I swear to you, for me it meant that (Colby) was going to go up. Up to heaven.” (Colby’s funeral was held at Our Lady of Mt. Carmel Catholic Church.)

The overlap of the film’s themes and Colby’s circumstances was especially brought home by one of the bits of Up memorabilia the Pixar employee brought to the family: an “Adventure Book” much like the one Ellie leaves Carl with, with its blank pages. “I’ll have to fill those adventures in for her,” Colby’s mom said. (Another point of contact: Colby’s parents are divorced, like Russell’s parents. But where Russell’s dad seems to have dropped out of his son’s life, Colby’s dad came to the house after the screening and was with his daughter when she died.)

A family friend reported that the Pixar employee “couldn’t have been nicer … His eyes were just welled up.”

A heartbreaking detail: A few days earlier, Colby’s mother had asked a hospice company to bring a wheelchair so that Colby could see the film in the theater. But the wheelchair never arrived, and Colby quickly became too sick to get out to a theater, necessitating Pixar’s supererogatory intervention. (By the time the movie came to Colby, she was in too much pain to open her eyes and look at it, so her mother gave her scene-by-scene commentary. She did, however, respond to a query about whether she enjoyed the film by nodding her head yes.)

By the way: “Pixar officials declined to comment on the story or name the employees involved.” Beyond class. That’s all I can say.

READ THE (HEART-RENDING, UPLIFTING) STORY.