Flying Family Fun

Flsquirrel Hey, Tim Jones, here. I have said before that our family has a thing for aviation, but this post isn’t about that kind of flying. This post concerns the flying squirrel, at left.

A little background; We have animals. As of this past Christmas, we have a domestic mammal to human ratio of exactly 1:1. Living with, and sponging off the four of us, we have 2 cats and 2 dogs. The dogs don’t really come into this story.

Our latest arrival is my daughter’s prim, slender and graceful grey tabby. Being new, she has been kept mostly inside. Our other cat, Ozzie (named for the character Ozymandias, of the Tripods trilogy) is an outdoor veteran, and comes and goes as he pleases. He’s also huge. This Maine Coon cat has actually been mistaken for a real racoon on more than one occasion. One thing I like about him is that he doesn’t seem to need us, but hangs around, anyway. I figure he must like us.

He likes us so much, in fact, that he sometimes brings us "presents". He most often leaves these presents on the front doorstep, and they are most often dead.

Most often.

Occasionally, they are "only mostly dead", and rarely (when he wants something to play with, I guess) Ozzie brings us an animal that is apparently not even injured. Not even a little. This has led to a few memorable episodes, one of which involved a huge field rat, a pair of weenie tongs, and a Big Gulp cup.

This last week, Ozzie brought us, at 5:00 in the morning, the above pictured living, healthy flying squirrel, in full vigor. He promptly let it loose. Now, flying squirrels are really cute, as well as fast, and they are jumpy. I’m just here to say, that unless your whole family have chased a flying squirrel aound the house in your pajamas, you have just never had any fun. We were all nearly in tears of laughter by the time the little dickens was succesfully captured (first we had to hustle our domestic furries into various bedrooms, in order to prevent them tearing Francis to bits… that’s what we named it – a fine unisex name, could be "Francis" or "Frances", and, you know, invoking a saint in these situations can never hurt).

The whole point, of course, was to capture Francis without injury. In the end, I managed to pop a Tupperware tub over him, and shortly we all gathered outside in the dark to watch him scamper off. I couldn’t help but think that it was a lot like an alien abduction story, and wondered if he had a family to whom he would have to explain the whole episode. I expect that coming in with the strong scent of cat on your fur would be a little unusual in squirrel society.

Anyway, the operation was successful. We rescued from a grisly end a creature of a species we were not even aware lived in the neighborhood. I always thought flying squirrels were kind of exotic. It turns out they are pretty common, but rarely seen, because they are nocturnal. Nocturnal animals are cool.

FIND OUT MORE ABOUT THESE AMAZING CREATIONS OF GOD.

Lent Resources From The Holy See Itself

The Holy See’s web site has really improvedin recent years. They still need to get rid of that text-obscuring background, and it’s still poorly organized and hard to navigate, but at least they’re starting to get a lot of useful resources on the site.

Take, for example,

THESE EXCELLENT RESOURCES FOR LENT.

I wish I’d known about these at the beginning of Lent, ’cause I would have advertised them then, but they’re still really cool and could add a bunch to your celebration of Lent.

One thing I’d especially like to compliment is their inclusion of a whole series of mp3 files of Lenten music that you can listen to online or–via a simple right-click–download and listen to on your computer or mp3 player. Even if they are all in Italian, music can touch the heart across the langauge barrier.

THEY ALSO HAVE MP3S IN LATIN HERE.

(It’s after writing sentences like that that I find myself contemplating explaining to a medieval ecclesiastic the concept of downloading a Latin mp3 from the Vatican web site. They’d never have guessed that the Holy See would be doing this one day.)

Enjoy!

Discovery Moves To Bury Tomb

Well, the Discovery Channel, seems to be waking up to the blunder it made in getting behind James Cameron’s titanic fiasco about Jesus’ family tomb.

EXCERPTS:

Discovery Channel’s controversial James Cameron-produced documentary "The Lost Tomb of Jesus" drew the largest audience for the network in more than a year on Sunday night, but the network has taken several recent steps to downplay the project.

Departing from normal procedures, the cable network didn’t tout its big
ratings win. The network also scheduled a last-minute special that
harshly criticized its own documentary, and has yanked a planned repeat
of "Tomb."

"This is not one where you necessarily beat the
drum, from a business perspective," said David Leavy, executive VP of
corporate communications at Discovery. "It’s not necessarily about
making money, or making ratings, or shouting from the highest office
building. Sometimes having some maturity and perspective is more
important than getting picked up in all the ratings highlights."

Although Mr. Leavy said the network stands by the documentary "100
percent," the company took several unusual steps in the wake of the
controversy that could be seen as distancing itself from the content.

Last
week, Discovery abruptly scheduled a panel debate to air after the
documentary, moderated by Discovery newsman Ted Koppel. Discovery’s
announcement of the panel emphasized that Mr. Koppel "has no connection
to the production of ‘The Lost Tomb of Jesus’" and that "the panel will
explore the filmmakers’ profound assertions and challenge their
assumptions and suggested conclusions."

When the panel discussion aired, guests criticized the documentary as "archaeo-porn" that played fast and loose with the facts.

The
day after the March 4 airing, Discovery yanked a planned repeat of
"Tomb" from its more hard-news-branded Discovery Times Channel.

When
the Nielsen ratings revealed that "Tomb" averaged 4.1 million viewers –
Discovery’s largest audience since September 2005 – the network
declined to put out a press release touting the numbers, as would be
standard practice for a highly successful premiere. The second-season
premiere of Discovery Channel’s "Future Weapons," for instance, earned
a media announcement for its audience of 2.5 million. A network
representative, however, insisted Discovery was not trying to bury
"Tomb."

The Discovery official issues a lot of spin trying to save face for the network, and they still haven’t done all they need to to distance themselves from this stinkburger, but the overall message is clear: They screwed up and they know it. Now they’re trying to avoid getting more egg on their collective face.

GET THE STORY.

OH, AND I WONDER IF THIS HAS ANYTHING TO DO WITH IT.

They just got a new CEO two months ago, and the Jesus tomb thing was certainly in motion before then. If his new broom is sweeping clean, some of the execs who signed off on Cameron’s nonsense may want not to be swept away along with it.

And Then There Were Five!

This man definitely deserves his props for trying to top Chris Bliss!

Jason Garfield’s performance is very impressive! So much so that it raised in my mind the question of which of the two was better, and I thought I’d throw the question open to y’all for debate.

Here are some of the considerations that occurred to me:

1) The addition of more balls or higher energy performing does not automatically make the performance better or more beautiful. Sometimes less is more, as they say.

2) Bliss also deserves credit for the originality of coming up with the idea of using Golden Slumbers/Carry That Weight/The End (assuming it was his idea), and Garfield’s performance at times seems to be derivative of Bliss’s (particular in The End).

3) On the other hand, his performance is really impressive and he pulls off some surprising moves that Bliss doesn’t attempt.

It could be that one performance could be judged the better according to one standard and the other the better according to a different standard (e.g, which is the more beautiful, the more original, the more dazzling, the more energetic).

So whadda y’all think? You know what they say: De gustibus disputandum est!

Oh, and once again, we have further proof of the amazing difference between homo sapiens and every other species on earth.

WE’RE #1! . . . WE’RE #1! . . . WE’RE #1!

CHT  to the reader who e-mailed (e-mail being yet another human accomplishment).

And Then There Were Two

Nametag2Recently I did a post about square dance "dangles" and how I had just received my first one.

For those who may not have seen that post, dangles are small items hung from a dancer’s nametag that signify various things, such as offices the person holds or has held, special dances that the person has attended, or just things that the person finds fun. The latter are known as "fun dangles."

Sometimes pins are used for the same purpose, and I recently received a pin (pictured), which now also adorns the vest I wear when I’m dancing.

The occasion on which I received it was a recent International Friendship Dance that was held here in San Diego between local American dancers and a group of dancers from Japan.

Some of the Japanese dancers were giving out pins to commemorate the event, and I was lucky enough to receive one. The pin has two flags on it, one of which says (in Japanese) "Nippon," which is the Japanese word for Japan, and the other of which is the Japanese national flag.

It was a very well attended dance. We had almost fifty squares (a square is eight people) crammed into the auditorium. The room was so packed that squares were jammed right up against each other, and there were even squares dancing in the foyer to relieve a bit of the pressure.

Most of the dancers, of course, were Americans, but at least three squares were visitors from Japan. The local Japanese dancers who live in San Diego (there are several) were also there, and it was nice seeing them serving as a bridge between the two dance communities.

Most of the dancers didn’t speak each others’ languages, but some did, and I got a chance to practice a little of my Japanese (which is very rudimentary), saying "Kon ban wa" ("Good evening") and "Sumimasen" ("Excuse me") and things like that, to the delight of the Japanese folks I was dancing with.

There were three callers at the event, all of them with international reputations: Ken Bower of California, Bob Baier of Texas, and Mac O’Jima of Japan.

Before the dance I was curious to see how well the two groups would be able to dance together. I knew that when Modern Western Square Dancing is done in other countries (and it’s done in quite a number of them!) it’s always called in English, so in theory the two groups should be able to dance together, but one can never be certain.

It turned out that everything worked just fine. The Japanese dancers had no problem following calls from the American callers, and Mr. O’Jima’s English was exceptionally good. He had a little L/R blur in his accent (to be expected since Japanese doesn’t have the distinction, just like English doesn’t distinguish between two P sounds that–say–Hindi does), and I noticed he had a little singular/plural issue since Japanese doesn’t inflect words for this either (thus he’d say "Join all your hand and circle to the left" instead of "Join all your hands and circle to the left"), but his English–including his accent–was really, really good. At times, his accent sounded a bit Scottish to me, and I wondered if his English teacher was from Scotland or somewhere in the British commonwealth.

Mr. O’Jima also complimented my pronunciation of Japanese, FWIW.

All three of three of the callers were outstanding. Ken Bower and Bob Baier related a story about when the two of them had visited Japan for a friendship dance over there, and some confusion had arisen over Ken’s name. At one point (if I have this right), someone said "Kon ban wa" to Bob Baier, who misheard and replied, "Ken Bower? Oh, he’s not here right now." (I got a real kick out of that since I’d been saying kon ban wa to people all evening, and the similarity had never occurred to me.)

BTW, here’s a YouTube with Ken Bower (who is a super nice guy) being interviewed about the dance:

So that’s the story of how I got my second square dance dangle/pin/thingie.

(Incidentally, the hearts you see on the vest were temporary stickers from a recent Valentines Day dance around the same time, where there was a "king of hearts" competition in which the lady dancers awarded them to the male dancers of their choice. I got four. The winner got six, if I’m not mistaken.)

Showmanship!

It’s not the number of balls the juggler uses; it’s the way he uses them.

Just goes to show what you can do with three tennis balls and probably the best music the Beatles ever wrote.

It also goes to show the difference between humans and every other life form on earth. Only we could do anything even remotely like this.

CHT to the reader who e-mailed!

Model Citizens

Hey, Tim Jones, here.

X1model1 I had the pleasure, lately, of spending a little time with some family who came to visit us from Germany, including a young nephew. I was looking after him for a few hours, and in my increasingly desperate quest to keep his active mind occupied, I discovered that he was interested in model building.

In paroxysms of geeky rapture, I dug out from our junk room a collection of dusty model projects, in various stages of completion. I had begun them with my son, and had worked on them mostly during holiday breaks, but found that he was not such a big fan of model building… at least not the patient assembling, painting, and following directions part. His participation in the actual building process quickly settled into a routine of checking in every half-hour or so to see how things were progressing.

Yeager Because I was partly motivated by dreams of bonding with my son over the smell of model cement and enamel paint, I put the projects aside, time being at something of a premium for me.

Now, in my five-year-old nephew, I saw another potential victim model-building buddy on whom I could hang my pathetic hopes with whom I could share my enthusiasm.

In the end, he did help me glue a couple of pieces, but the most fun was just watching his obvious fascination with the idea of models, and with the finished products.

Rockets While he was here, I managed to complete one project (the X-1) and get started on another that had been in mothballs for years (the U.S. Moon Shot series). I hope to complete a model of every aircraft or spacecraft featured in the movie The Right Stuff, which is one of our family’s favorite films. Both my son and I are aviation buffs. His childhood hero was Chuck Yeager. We have a lot of happy memories tied up in these particular models.

Getting back into my model building was a great deal of fun, brought back some memories for my son and me, and made me feel like a kid again. It also got me to wondering what exactly was the appeal of spending so many precious hours, so much money and frustration on some plastic reproductions that could much more simply be bought on E-bay, or some such.

It occurred to me that in the act of building the models, one gets to know the subject much more thoroughly than before, and becomes more appreciative of the aspects of the project that the builder found attractive to begin with. It also struck me that my admiration for the people involved in the history of these machines – Chuck Yeager, Alan Shepard, John Glenn, all the the Mercury Seven and the Apollo astronauts – was analogous to the way Catholics take the saints as role models… with love and respect for the attributes that made them saints (and that helped them shape history) while remembering that they are human beings. We don’t need to approve of every aspect of a saint’s (or a hero’s) personality in order to give proper recognition to those traits that made them superlative examples from whom we can take inspiration.

Apollobits Having these models around brings to mind the courage, tenacity and brilliance of the men associated with them, just as having images of the saints around helps us to remember the heroes of the faith who came before us. Of course, for Catholics, the Communion of Saints carries the additional dimension of family affection. The saints are our kin. We can call on them for prayers and help, in addition to finding inspiration from their example. Sort of a big spiritual two-fer. In addition, we will one day get to meet the saints in heaven, if we persevere.

I certainly hope to meet these astronauts and pilots in heaven, too. It would be a shame, after spending so much time exploring the heavens, for any of them to miss out on the real thing.

“Vell, He’s Just Zis Guy, You Know?”

Br_guy
I’m sure that’s what his private brain care specialist would say about Br. Guy Consolmagno, who’s part of the Vatican’s crack astronomy team or "Astro Force."

CHT to the reader who e-mailed THIS STORY from the Concord Monitor about Br. Guy.

EXCERPTS:

"Science is a way of praising God," he said in an interview yesterday afternoon.

As the Vatican’s curator of meteorites, Consolmagno sends meteorites where requested for exhibits or experiments. The crown jewel, he said, is a fist-sized meteorite that landed on and killed a dog in Nakhla, Egypt, in 1911. It was once a part of Mars. [FLASH! MARS ATTACKES EARTH DOG!] He also conducts his own research, has traversed Antarctica collecting meteorites and takes daily walks in the [Castel Gandolfo] palace gardens. [MARS ATTACKS ANTARCTICA! ARE PALACE GARDENS NEXT?]

Consolmagno said every physical scientist starts with three inherently "religious assumptions": The universe exists and is not a figment of the imagination. The universe is dictated by discoverable rules. And discovering those rules is something that’s worth doing.

That third tenant is tied to intuition. When a scientist, even without data, pursues a hypothesis based on intuition, he blends faith and science.

"You say, ‘That is so elegant that I’m willing to bet two years of my life following this up,’ " he said. "That is something that comes from the soul. That’s not something that a computer can work out."

The second tenant may be a statement of fact today. But hundreds of years ago, the basic laws of science had not yet been discovered.

"It’s interesting to note that those people, the first scientists, were all monks, they were all clerics," he said. "And their sense that the universe makes sense came from, first of all, their belief that God created the universe in a logical way."

Consolmagno said many Catholics have been taught that Catholicism and science don’t mix, though they always have. The Big Bang theory that the Earthuniverse originated in an extremely dense and hot space and expanded was developed by a Belgian priest. Though many people believe that Galileo was shunned by the Church for saying the sun was the center of the universe, he was close to many church leaders. Consolmagno said church officials don’t advocate for a strict interpretation of the book of Genesis, which includes the Christian creation story.

"The cosmology of Genesis is not only not the cosmology of the 21st century. It wasn’t even the cosmology of the second century," he said. "The Romans knew that the world looked different from a flat plane with a bowl over it and water above and below. And that didn’t seem to bother them."

The conflict between evolutionary science and creationism in the United States comes from the Protestant tradition, not the Catholic one, he said.

"American Catholicism is in a Protestant culture," he said. "We borrow a lot of our attitudes, along with a lot of our hymns, and not always the best of either."

"The Heavens proclaim the greatness of God," he said. "That’s why we study the heavens."

GET THE STORY.

Apostolic Exhortation Next Tuesday?

Catholic News Agency is reporting:

After over a year of work, the Holy See will release the post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation on the Eucharist, titled “Sacramentum Caritatis,” on Tuesday, March 13th.  The document, which flows from the 11th Ordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops, held in October of 2005, has been highly anticipated in ecclesiastical circles.

A press conference for the document’s release will be held in the Press Office of the Holy See, led by Cardinal Angelo Scola, patriarch of Venice and relator general of the 11th Ordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops, and Archbishop Nikola Eterovic, secretary general of the Synod of Bishops.

The document is rumored to be a profound reflection on the Sacrament of the Eucharist and may call for a proposal and plan for liturgical reforms, including a greater use of the Latin language, Gregorian chant, classical polyphonic music.  According to one source, the document may also call for “more decorum and liturgical sobriety in the celebration of the Eucharist, excluding dance and, as much as possible, applause.”

SOURCE.

All I can say is, "It’s about time! The apostolic exhortation from the Synod on the Eucharist has been inexcusably delayed." (And not through B16’s fault; the holdup has been on the part of others, and even B16 has obliquely complained about it.)

Actually, that’s not all I can say. I can also say that I’ll be very interested to read it, and I would not be at all surprised if the items highlighted in blue turn out to be in the document, though we’ll have to see.

Also note that, if the title dof the document is correct, Pope Benedict is continuing his theme of love. The title translates as "The Sacrament of Love" or "The Sacrament of Charity."

UPDATE: Catholic News Service is reporting:

Meeting pastors from the Diocese of Rome Feb. 22, Pope Benedict said he was about to sign the document, which he hoped would "help in liturgical celebrations, in personal reflection, in preparing homilies and in the celebration of the Eucharist."

He also said he hoped it would "serve to guide, enlighten and revitalize popular piety," especially eucharistic adoration.