Blubber King

Word to the wise: When traveling abroad, be sure to find out exactly what ingredients are used in the food you buy. Even the fast food:

"With Japan under fire for plans to expand its whaling program, a fast food chain is offering a new product aimed at using up stocks from past hunts — whale burger.

"The 380 yen ($3.50) slice of fried minke whale in a bun went on sale Thursday at Lucky Pierrot, a restaurant chain in the port city of Hakodate on Japan’s northernmost island of Hokkaido.

"’The taste and texture are somewhere between beef and fish,’ said Lucky Pierrot manager Miku Oh. ‘People in Hakodate have a long history of eating whale, so customers are looking forward to trying it.’"

GET THE STORY.

Word to the wiser: My dad, who was an extremely finicky eater when he knew what was being offered, developed an effective means of dealing with strange food offered by well-meaning friends or relatives. He would eat just about anything as long as the person serving it did not tell him what was in it. It might not work in a restaurant, but it goes a long way toward preserving friendships.

RX: Religion?

Doctors are not as religious as their patients. . . . True.

Doctors are horribly irreligious. . . . False.

A new study is out on the religiosity of doctors and it finds that the picture is . . . complex.

The study wasn’t the gold standard of research as it relied upon doctors filling out and mailing in questionnaires, though it got a surprisingly high return rate (about 2/3rds of those sent the questionnaires returned them). Still, the results showed doctors were more religious than anticipated, though not quite as religious as their patients.

76 percent said they believe in God and 59 percent said they believe
in some sort of afterlife. That compares to 83 percent and 74 percent
of the general population.

Researchers say that although more than 80 percent of patients describe
themselves as Protestant or Catholic, only 60 percent of doctors
describe themselves the same way.

5.3 percent of doctors are Hindu vs. 0.2 percent of nondoctors 14.1
percent of doctors are Jewish vs. 1.9 percent of nondoctors 1.2 percent
of doctors are Buddhist vs. 0.2 percent of nondoctors 2.7 percent of
doctors are Muslim vs. 0.5 percent of nondoctors

Surprisingly,

Although
doctors were less likely to believe in God or an afterlife, the survey
showed that 90 percent of doctors attend religious services at least
once a month compared with 81 percent of their patients.

Many doctors (particularly among Christians, Buddhists, and Mormons) said that their faith influenced their medical practice, though others (particularly among Jews and Hindus) did not.

GET THE STORY.

Announcing The Society Of St. Pius I

From their website:

Welcome to the fledgling website of the Society of St. Pius I (SSPI). Unlike other so-called “traditionalist” Roman Catholic groups, we adhere to the ORIGINAL Roman Catholic Mass of A.D. 40-200, and described by St. Justin Martyr and the Apostolic Constitutions, and used by Pope St. Pius I of happy memory.

Don’t be fooled by PHONY “Vulgate” neotraditionalists, who claim to protect tradition, and yet still defend the RADICAL and totally UNCATHOLIC reforms of the 4th century A.D.

So-called “trads” pretend to be against the modernism of the last hundred years, but where were they when the original Rite of Rome, the Greek rite USED BY ST. PETER AND THE APOSTLES was being totally gutted and revised by unknown scholars and translated into the vernacular language of Latin?

Y’gotta admire the (tongue in cheek) moxy here, but I sense a potential schism. Some members of the SSPI may well conclude that St. Peter and the apostles celebrated Mass in Aramaic, not Greek.

Till then . . .

CHECK IT OUT.

(CHT to the reader who e-mailed!)

Top 100 Movie Quotes?

Frankly_my_dearThe American Film Institute has released a list of what it considers the top 100 movie quotes of all time.

As you may guess from the image on the left, the #1 line was Gone With The Wind‘s "Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn."

To compile the list the AFI asked 1500 "leaders from the creative community, including film artists (directors,
screenwriters, actors, editors, cinematographers), critics and
historians." The "leaders" voted their favorites of a list of 400 nominated quotes.

The film with the most quotes was Casablanca, with 7 quotes, followed by The Wizard Of Oz, which had six.

I agree with most of the entries on the list (not necessarily the order they’re in, but their presence). Some, I don’t. For example, I don’t agree with Moonstruck‘s "Snap out of it!" It seems to me that for something to qualify as a movie quote, it needs to be something that people weren’t saying to each other All The Time before the movie came out. Folks have been saying "Snap out of it!" for far too long (and even in movies before Moonstruck).

GET THE LIST.

I definitely agree with Patrick over at Southern Appeal, though:

My reaction: What no quotes from The Princess Bride, the most quotable movie of all time?

No quotes from The Princess Bride????

<lisp>Inconceivable!!!!</lisp>

Southern Baptists Nix Disney Boycott

At their annual convention the nation’s Southern Baptists have voted to end their eight-year boycott of Disney.

"We believe for the boycott to be effective, it had to have a beginning and an ending," said Gene Mims, chairman of the Southern Baptist Convention committee that put the Disney resolution before some 12,000 members at the meeting.

"We felt like it was time to end it. We’re hopeful Disney will do what the resolution calls for," Mims added.

"We have cost them (Disney) hundreds of millions of dollars," said Wiley Gray, an SBC member from Florida, who spoke in favor of lifting the boycott because Disney had made corporate changes, including the March announcement that longtime Disney Chief Executive Michael Eisner would leave the company in October.

On the other hand:

A spokesman for The Human Rights Campaign, a Washington-based gay rights advocacy group, said Disney continues to be one of more than 8,200 companies that offer domestic partner benefits to gay employees.

GET THE STORY.

(CHT: Southern Appeal.)

Personally, I’m rather ambivalent about this announcement.

There is potentially wisdom, even if you don’t get all of what you want, to waiting until the enemy does something for which you can claim victory (like booting Michael Eisner over low corporate earnings) and then end the boycott. That way you show (a) that you are capable of costing them large amounts of money (as should become more obvious to them once people who were participating in the boycott start throwing business their way again), (b) that you are capable of being reasonable, and (c) that you are capable of hurting them again the same way in the future–thus strengthening your hand to go after more of what you want (like getting rid of "gay days" at Disneyland).

I don’t know if these were their motives. I’d like to see more of what the Baptist leadership had to say on the matter (rather than just what the AP reported).

I also don’t know how many folks will give up the boycott in the absence of unconditional surrender on the part of Disney. Boycotts can take on a life of their own, and the Southern Baptists could even take a P.R. hit if they are perceived as calling off the boycott in the absence of real progress.

Maybe the Donatists will even go into schism over it.

MP3 (Etc.) Tests!

Ho-okay, folks!

Gotcha some files of last Thursday’s Catholic Answers Live to test and see what works best for y’all.

The first three are .mp3 files, and the last is a Windows Media (.wma) file. NOTE: We’re definitely planning on doing .mp3 for the show; the .wma file is just thrown in here to see what folks think of it.

Please use the combox to let us know which format you prefer (taking file size, audio quality, and other factors into account). Please also let us know if you find any of them simply unacceptable (and why).

To make referring to them easier, I’ve labelled them all "Link 1," "Link 2," etc., so you don’t have to remember the technical specs on each one, though I’ve printed those here too.

Thanks for your feedback!

Miracle@Vatican.va

Jpiicomp

The Diocese of Rome is collecting accounts of miracles attributed to the intercession of the late Pope John Paul II:

"The Vatican is urging Roman Catholics to contribute to the late Pope’s beatification by sending e-mails about miracles performed after his death.

"The website for the Diocese of Rome will soon start publishing the readers’ messages under several categories.

"John Paul II, who died in April, encouraged the use of the internet."

GET THE STORY.

How cool is that? Modern technology at the service of a cause of canonization. Near as I can tell, here is the web site of the Diocese of Rome.  (Note: Link updated.) The post title is, of course, just my attempt to be clever. It is not the address to which you should send reports of miracles.

John Paul II, pray for us.

Our Friend, The Virus

Not just any virus, of course, a very special little virus that goes by the abbreviation AAV-2.

What’s so special about it?

"Our results suggest that adeno-associated virus type 2, which infects the majority of the population but has no known ill effects, kills multiple types of cancer cells yet has no effect on healthy cells," said Craig Meyers, a professor of microbiology and immunology at the Penn State College of Medicine in Pennsylvania.

"We believe that AAV-2 recognizes that the cancer cells are abnormal and destroys them. This suggests that AAV-2 has great potential to be developed as an anti-cancer agent," Meyers said in a statement.

It wipes out HPV or Human Pappiloma Virus cells, HPV being a leading cause of cervical cancer.

The same thing happened with cervical, breast, prostate and squamous cell tumor cells.

GET THE STORY.

Politics In Our Genes?

In the Gilbert & Sullivan operetta Iolanthe, a British Grenadier Guardsman named Sgt. Willis spends a lot of time on sentry duty thinking about the oddities of the universe. During the course of the opera he sings a song in which he shares some of his musings with us and remarks on how tickled he is by the fact

That Nature always does contrive
That every boy and every gal
                   
That’s born into the world alive
               
Is either a little Liberal
                   
Or else a little Conservative!

Politics is in our genes, Sgt. Willis suggests. It’s inborn.

But that’s just Gilbert being silly, right?

Maybe not.

A new study published in the American Political Science Review argues that, while party affiliation is more determined by the environment in which we are raised, our basic political instincts–conservative or liberal–are influenced by our genes.

The study relies on comparing the view of identical twins raised together to fraternal twins raised together. The results of such a study are suggestive, but not the gold standard of such research. The study was based on comparing twins raised together, but I’d like to see the study controlled by comparison to twins raised apart. If you’ve got two identical twins raised together, there may be additional forces at play that steer the twins toward sharing common opinions on thing besides just their genes. To remove these potential factors from the equation, one would want to look at the views of identical (and fraternal) twins not reared together.

Still, the evidence at hand is worth following up with further study.

The article concludes:

The researchers are not optimistic about the future of bipartisan cooperation or national unity. Because men and women tend to seek mates with a similar ideology, they say, the two gene pools are becoming, if anything, more concentrated, not less.

Okay, so we get culture wars . . . until the Roe effect runs its course and the anti-baby folks breed themselves into cultural obscurity.

GET THE STORY.