Guess I’m in good company.
Year: 2004
The Aamizng Hmuan Mnid!
Setve Ray has ntoiced an inertetsnig fcat aobut the hmuan mnid. (It’s alayws naet wehn one reliazes tihs!)
Shrinking Apologist Update
When I was bugging out of my house the other day (pun intended), I only had moments to pack, and one of the few things I grabbed as three shirts from my closet. These were virtually the only clothes, other than the ones I was wearing, that I ended up leaving the house with.
Unfortunately, these were three old-and-not-very-nice shirts, but they were among the few clean ones I had left (doing laundry being a major goal of my labor day weekend). Grabbing these was dumb. What I should have done was grab an armload of dirty laundry and then found a place to wash it once I was settled elsewhere, but there you have it.
I thus emerged from my apartment with not enough shirts to make it through the week, no extra socks or underwear, and no extra pants–a combination of circumstances that would make it remarkably difficult to do laundry in any laundromat.
I decided that a trip to Wal-Mart was in order.
I might not end up looking stylish, but I’d be able to get through the week and do laundry in public until I can get back into my apartment.
I bought a cheap polo shirt, a couple of cheap grey T-shirt/undershirts, and an inexpensive pair of jeans.
Deciding on the sizes to buy was a little dicey, as all of my old clothes sizes are out of date, but my guesses were pretty accurate.
I know that different manufacturers use different sizing schemes, but I’m pleased to report that polo-maker Puritan and T-shirt maker Fruit of the Loom both now consider me to be just a “large” (as opposed to the XXL they used to consider me).
My pants-guessing didn’t go quite as well. I assumed that I’d lost four inches off my waist, but it appears that I’ve lost six, as I still need to keep my belt snug. Also, although I no longer need Wrangler “relaxed fit” jeans, neither–it turns out–do I need “regular fit” jeans. They’re too bulky on me. I really need “slim . . .”–er–“tight . . . “–er–well, let’s just say that I need whatever is below “regular fit.”
Incidentally, interesting Wal-Mart they have here in El Cajon. It’s not laid out like any Wal-Mart I’ve ever been to. Among other things, it’s two-story, and next to the human escalators they have special escalators to take your shopping cart up and down as well.
Young + Overweight = Bad. Old + Overweight = Good?
Here’s an interesting article from JunkScience that calls into question the obesity-related death statistics that are conventionally cited.
Make no mistake, overweight and obesity are problems, but they are problems that need to be dealt with by accurate science, and there has been all too little of that in connection with diets and dieting.
The article points out that the obesity-related death statistics are unbalanced because they exclude the effect overweight has on elderly Americans. This may be a bad thing because, as the article notes, studies find that among the elderly obesity either has no correlation with mortality or it has a strong negative correlation.
In other words: Having some extra pounds available as nutritional reserves when you are old and in ill-health may be a good thing.
Having excess weight when younger is definitely bad and is correlated to all kinds of health problems, some of which can be life-threatening. But it may be that our bodies know what they’re doing when they allow extra pounds to accumulate with advancing age. We may be stocking up supplies for when the going gets tough in old age the way bears put on fat for the winter.
Much more research obviously needs to be done here, but it’s an interesting hypothesis.
In the future we might have more ideal-weight tables that include age as an axis, only this time they’ll be backed up by science instead of guesswork.
Attack of the Killer Bees!!!
This is not the Labor Day weekend I was expecting!
Around the office on Friday, people were wishing each other a good weekend and asking if they had any special plans for the holiday.
My major plan was to do laundry. Probably watch some DVDs. Maybe do some writing and studying Indonesian.
Saturday I answered my door, and as I did so, I noticed a bee buzzing under the Venetian blind, trying to get out of the glass.
“How did that get in here?” I wondered.
I killed it.
A few minutes later I was heading out the door to get what I needed for a home improvement project, when I saw another bee on the Venetian blind on my front door.
I killed it, too.
But wait: Two bees in the same exact place indoors within minutes of each others?
There could be a group.
My mind flashed back to a time when I was out for a lunchtime constitutional and ran across a whole swarm of bees buzzing around a service access duct poking up through the blacktop of a parking lot. (I marched quickly past it and then called the owners to let them know they had a bee hazard in their parking lot.)
So I went out my front door and stood in front of the house, just observing.
A bee went by.
Then my eyes settled on a ventilation duct at the peak of my roof.
It was swarming with bees. I estimate between one and two dozen were visible.
“They must have a colony in my attic,” I realized. So I got ahold of my landlady. I had trouble at first getting her to understand the exact nature of the problem, but I brought her over to see it for herself. When she did, she instantly realized the danger the bees posed.
A colony of potentially hundreds of bees infesting a house, including its living quarters . . . that has possible anaphylactic shock and lawsuit written all over it.
From her perspective.
From my perspective it has possible anaphylactic shock and death written all over it. I don’t have a bee allergy to my knowledge, but then many people who have the allergy don’t know it, and it can develop suddenly, without warning. Also, if a swarm goes after you, you can get stung enough times to have a life-threatening reaction just from the toxicity of the venom, even if you aren’t allergic.
Further, since Africanized “killer” bees have invaded Southern California (killer bees being “killer” only in their aggressiveness, not their toxicity), every untested swarm has to be assumed to be Africanized and thus more likely to attack. Thus I have to assume that I have killer bees living in my attic.
I’m not staying in my house again until those bees are gone!
Unfortunately, it being a holiday weekend, they couldn’t reach the exterminators and probably can’t get anyone to start the (long, complicated) process of bee de-infestation till Tuesday. I estimate that I’m likely not to be able to live in my house for a week or more.
Even when I finally get back in, I won’t be comfortable for a while.
So the bees have forced me to do what the fires last November didn’t: evacuate. At one point when the fires were raging and the world outside looked totally apocalyptic, I had the truck packed and was within five minutes of evacuating, but it didn’t end up being necessary. With possible killer bees infesting my house, though, it is.
I did go back in for a few minutes to get a few essentials, but as I did so I noticed a third bee on my front door’s Venetian blind. It waggled its antennae at me menacingly, so I grabbed far fewer essentials than I originally intended and hustled out of the house as quickly as I could.
Afterward I found myself thinking: “I hope no bees are stowing away in my stuff, ready to crawl out and sting me like what happened to Agent Scully in The X-Files movie.”
Me vs. Ani-Me
A while back I used an online application to do an anime-style version of myself (Ani-Me). At the time, I didn’t have a recent picture of myself, so folks couldn’t see what I look like these days. Now that’s been rectified, so I thought y’all might like a comparison. Here ’tis:
It’s not identical (given the limitations of the progam–which didn’t even have a cowboy hat option–the style of anime, and the fact I’m not smiling in the photo), but at least folks can see I wasn’t trying to lie with the picture.
Aliens In < 20 Years?
While searching for the article on the recent SETI signal, I ran across a couple of articles in which the folks at Project SETI (the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) estimate that, with their current methodology, they’ll find an alien civilization within twenty years . . . if there is one nearby to find.
Some of the stories are pitched as “If we don’t find it within 20 years, it doesn’t exist,” but that claim seems too strong and not what the SETI folks are claiming.
Aliens In < 20 Years?
While searching for the article on the recent SETI signal, I ran across a couple of articles in which the folks at Project SETI (the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) estimate that, with their current methodology, they’ll find an alien civilization within twenty years . . . if there is one nearby to find.
Some of the stories are pitched as “If we don’t find it within 20 years, it doesn’t exist,” but that claim seems too strong and not what the SETI folks are claiming.
Star Trek: The Undiscovered Consonant
Okay, this post has nothing at all to do with Star Trek. I just wanted to play off the title of Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (arguably the best Star Trek movie thus far; it was the one where the Federation and Klingons had a warming as a sci-fi metaphor for the end of the Cold War).
This post has to do with a discussion I was having with Bill down yonder about Indonesian phonology (i.e., how Indonesians pronounce their words).
The weirdest thing I’ve noticed about Indonesian phonology so far is that K (of all letters) tends to be altered when it is word-final (i.e., at the end of a word). It isn’t simply dropped (like my Gs in “-ing”) but is replaced with a distinct glottal stop, so the word “bapak” (masculine “you”) is pronounced /bapa’/ and the word “tidak” (“no, not”) is pronounced /tida’/.
For folks who aren’t familiar with the term, a glottal stop is when, as you speak, you interrupt the airflow by closing the glottis, or the hole between your vocal chords. You can hear a glottal stop very distinctly when it’s substituted for the Ts in the Cockney pronounciation of “a little bottle” as “a li’le bo’le.”
We use glottal stops all the time in English (even those of us who aren’t Cockneys), we just don’t recognize it because we don’t have a letter for it in our alphabet. (The Arabic alphabet does have a letter for the glottal stop, however. It’s called a hamza.)
You yourself use a glottal stop whenever you pronounce distinctly a word that begins with a vowel. For example, if you aren’t talking and then say the word “apple,” you’ll have a glottal stop before the A because your vocal cords are tensed up.
You also say it in the middle of every time you say “Uh-oh!”
Betcha didn’t know that there’s a consonant in English that we all use but that is completely unnoticed by most of us!
Two Questions On Exposition
A reader writes:
I am trying to find the answers about having a Eucharistic service without a priest. Our local parish provides Eucharistic Adoration but lay people bring out the host and set it up in the Monstrance. Then they knee and go through the songs and prayers as if it were a Benediction. Then, they sit and pray. 12+ hours later the same is repeated to put the Eucharist back into the tabernacle for evenings when the church closes.
The second situation is for a lay person to take the large Eucharist (with priest permission again) from Mass to another church for a lay Adoration for the day during a silent retreat. Again the entire Benediction prayers are said at the beginning and again at the end of the afternoon.
I am very uncomfortable with this process as it seems that the lay ministers are going beyond the role of Eucharistic Minister. Isn’t that supposed to be Extraordinary Minister?
It doesn’t sound to me like there is an intrinsic problem here based on what you’ve said. I’ll explain why, but first a clarification: The practices you are describing are better described as Eucharistic exposition rather than only adoration. Adoration is something that individuals can do even if the Eucharist is reposed in the Tabernacle. It is simply the act of adoring Christ in the Eucharist. When the Eucharist is exposed for the adoration of the faithful (what you are talking about), it is Eucharistic exposition, and it is Eucharistic benediction when the priest or deacon blesses the people by making the sign of the Cross over them with the Eucharist.
Also, the term “Eucharistic Minister” without qualification does not exist in the Church’s documents. Lay persons distributing or exposing the Eucharist are always acting in an extraordinary capacity, though they may or may not be formally installed as extraordinary ministers.
Terminology quibbles aside, here is what the rite of Eucharistic Worship Outside Mass says about who can perform Eucharistic exposition:
The ordinary minister for exposition of the Eucharist is a priest or deacon. At the end of the period of adoration, before the reposition, he blesses the congregation with the sacrament.
In the absence of a priest or deacon or if they are lawfully impeded, an acolyte, another extraordinary minister of Communion, or another person appointed by the local Ordinary may publicly expose and later repose the Eucharist for the adoration of the faithful.
Such ministers may open the Tabernacle and also, as required, place the ciborium on the altar or place the host in the monstrance. At the end of the period of adoration, they replace the blessed Sacrament in the Tabernacle. It is not lawful, however, for them to give the blessing with the sacrament [no. 91].
I would assume that the people who are doing this in your parish, even if they are not extraordinary ministers, have been appointed to do this by one of the local ordinaries (each diocese usually has several) unless you have reason to think otherwise.
As the text indicates, such individuals are authorized to do everything provided in the rite of exposition aside from giving the blessing (benediction). Turning to the rite itself, one finds that in the section on adoration (preceding benediction), the rite provides:
During the exposition there should be prayers, songs, and readings to direct the attention of the faithful to the worship of Christ the Lord.
To encourage a prayerful spirit, there should be readings from Scripture with a homily or brief exhortations to develop a better understanding of the Eucharistic mystery. It is also desirable for the people to respond to the word of God by singing and to spend some periods of time in religious silence [no. 95].
It doesn’t sound to me that your parish is doing any activities during exposition that are prohibited, and by not having lay faithful perform benediction, they are thus in compliance with the law.
The only issue raised that goes beyond what is in the text of the rite is the transportation of a Host from one place to another for purposes of adoration. The relevant law on this point is found not in the rite of exposition but in the Code of Canon Law, which provides:
Canon 935
No one is permitted to keep the Eucharist on one’s person or to carry it around, unless pastoral necessity urges it and the prescripts of the diocesan bishop are observed.
If, therefore, the diocesan bishop has authorized the transportation of the Eucharist in the case you describe, it is permitted, the diocesan bishop being the arbiter of whether pastoral necessity urges its transportation in this case.