Christmas with Snoopy and the Red Baron

I hope you had a pleasant and joyful Christmas. I had the opportunity to spend mine with my brother Nathan, his wife and his relatively new in-laws, having married into a great Polish Catholic family from Queens (lots of meat and a liberal indulgence in spirits). Being a vegetarian, my wife tried her hand at making a delicious new stuffed-pastry dish with phyllo dough and brought along her prized banana bread (her own secret recipe).

The highlight of the evening, besides the 5th of Jack Daniels and two glasses from my brother, was when Father(in-law) Skibinski pulled out Snoopy vs. The Red Baron by the Royal Guardsmen (on original vinyl!) and played the entire thing -- a treasured album from my elementary school days that I had not heard in literally decades, but found myself knowing, and singing(!) every word by heart!

(Listen to "Snoopy's Christmas").

Midnight Mass was excellent as always, the choir ending with the 'Halleluah' chorus from Handel's Messiah -- and the priest's blessing a recently-refurbished tabernacle which they had discovered in the basement and installed in the center, directly behind the alter (motivated by the Holy Father's proclamation of "The Year of the Eucharist"). A move which definitely merits POD recognition.

Perhaps it is only in keeping with the spirit of the season, but for several Sundays in December our typical Eucharist hymn (which is drawn from modern fair and usually serves to bolster the premise of "Why Catholics Can't Sing") has been replaced by "Hidden God, Devoutly I Adore Thee," a translation of the famous hymn Adoro Te Devote by St. Thomas Aquinas.

I've read that there are twenty-five translations, and I'm not sure whether it's a modern or traditional musical rendering, but in any case, after being forced to sing (or sit through) the saccharine-sweet "One Bread, One Body", it's a welcome relief to sing so substantial a hymn, and to marvel at the meaning of the words -- allegedly written by the saint at the request of Pope Pius IV for the feast of Corpus Christi in 1264. I just hope it lasts, although I'm resigned to the possibility that come the transition to "normal time" we'll be returning to more contemporary works.

• Reflections on Eucharist in Light of 'Adoro Te Devote', 1st Advent Sermon of Pontifical Household Preacher, Capuchin Father Raniero Cantalamessa.

The Donald and The Troops

. . . That is when I, without any thought, piped in with "Sir, you can talk to him, he's awake." He told the soldier, named Rob, how proud he was of his service. The soldier was in a bit of disbelief, because he couldn't see with one eye patched and the other swollen shut. He said he wanted to talk to Rumsfeld. That's when I said "He's standing right to your left, Rob, that's his voice you hear. You can talk to him." The kid was nervous at that point, but sputtered out how honored he was to talk to him. Mr. Rumsfeld replied, "No, it's an honor for me to talk to you."

Then remarkably, the young soldier, who had just lost his left hand and right eye from an explosion, came to the defense of the Secretary of Defense, stating "Mr. Rumsfeld, I want you to know, that you are doing a fantastic job. I know that you are taking a lot of heat for the problems with getting armor for vehicles. I want you to know that things are vastly improved. Our vehicles are great, and I have never searched through junk piles for scrap metal." . . .

Read more of Captain Dan Mattson's eyewitness account here; via Powerline.

Dry Quicksand On Video

Reports that travelers and even whole vehicles have instantaneously vanished by sand have often been dismissed as products of fantasy. Rightly so? Our latest experiments show that such a dry quicksand may exist, and that objects can sink up to many diameters deep into very loose, fine sand.

Sand supports weight. Force chains are known to play a prominent role therein. We considerably weaken the force chain structure by letting air flow through very fine sand. Even when the air is turned off and the bed has settled, the prepared sand does not support weight: Balls sink into the sand up to five diameters deep. We call this state of sand dry quick sand. The state is not to be confused with the normal quick sand which is a mixture of sand, clay, and water. The final depth the ball reaches scales linearly with its mass and above a threshold mass, a sand jet is formed which shoots sand straight and violently into the air.

-- Dry Quicksand, an experiment of the Department of Science and Technology – University of Twente – The Netherlands. (Via OxBlog).

Earthsea

It's been ages since I've read the Earthsea books, but I recall enjoying them as a child, and so when the SciFi channel announced they were making a miniseries I honestly didn't know what to expect . . . This is bad. Not quite as bad as John Travolta's abomination of a Sci-Fi film, but . . . Ouch. Further reactions on the SciFi Message Board.

Blackfive on "The President you never hear about"

The San Diego Union Tribune reports that "President Bush came to the Camp Pendleton Marine Corps base today on the 63rd anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and vowed the United States would triumph over its current enemies." That was probably all you heard about the event -- I heard about it only because John Stewart made light of the President's remarks in his daily television show on the Comedy Channel.

But what you probably didn't know was the fact that our President took the time to meet individually with 170 family members mourning the loss of a loved one. BlackFive posts a stirring eyewitness account of "the President you never hear about".

"The DNA of Literature"

Welcome to the DNA of literature -- over 50 years of literary wisdom rolled up in 300+ Writers-at-Work interviews, now available online -- free. Founder and former Editor George Plimpton dreamed of a day when anyone—a struggling writer in Texas, an English teacher in Amsterdam, even a subscriber in Central Asia—could easily access this vast literary resource; with the establishment of this online archive that day has finally come.

-- The Paris Review

How very cool of them.

Arthur Chrenkoff "loses his innocence"

. . . I was sixteen and a half years old when I arrived in Australia in November 1988. I had so many other things to do with my time (like learn the language, for starters) that the political reality did not hit me straight away. It dawned on me slowly over time: my old Polish world-view was a sham. Or at least half of it was. The part about the overwhelming majority of my fellow residents of the Evil Empire wanting freedom and democracy was still right. The part about the West being full of... well, Westerners, wasn't.

You can imagine my shock and disappointment upon discovering that only a minority of the inhabitants of the Free World were truly committed to the ideas of liberal democracy, capitalism and anti-communism. Another minority was in various shades and degrees opposed to, or critical of, one or more of these concepts, and the group in the middle was largely indifferent and disinterested - not quite alienated from their own society, but too busy or too bored to fight against its enemies.

My innocence was truly lost.

Why are so few truly appreciative of the bounty of freedom and prosperity they're sharing in? I thought to myself. Why are so many hostile to their own society and so open to the visions of the enemies of democracy and liberty? Why do so many think that the West is worse or at least no better than the "prison of the nations" that most of my fellow prisoners wanted to escape from?

Read the further reflections of Arthur Chrenkoff.

Jacques Derrida - "bad reader par excellence"

. . . a primary reason for skepticism about Derrida is that overwhelmingly those who engage in philosophical scholarship on figures like Plato and Nietzsche and Husserl find that Derrida misreads the texts, in careless and often intentionally flippant ways, inventing meanings, lifting passages out of context, misunderstanding philosophical arguments, and on and on. Derrida was the bad reader par excellence, who had the gall to conceal his scholarly recklessness within a theoretical framework. He was the figure who did more violence than any other to what Nietzsche had aptly called "the great, the incomparable art of reading well," "of reading facts without falsifying them by interpretation, without losing caution, patience, delicacy, in the desire to understand" (The Antichrist, sections 59 and 52).

Source: "The Derrida Industry" (www.butterfliesandwheels.com) -- Brian Leiter's fisking of Mark C. Taylor's ode to Derrida (New York Times Oct. 14, 2004).

Nietzsche: Not a delusional kook -- just a kook on an ego-trip.

. . . After explaining that syphilis is a syndrome caused by the ravages of the spirochete Treponema pallidum (the lively, corkscrew-shaped bacterium), Margulis elaborates on her own recent research into spirochetes by weighing in on the long-running debate over Nietzsche's brain. Yes, Nietzsche's madness was undoubtedly caused by paresis, she writes -- but he most likely went crazy quite suddenly, as opposed to over the course of weeks and months. "Nietzsche's brain on January 3, 1889 experienced a transformation," she states -- which means that his books of 1888 weren't written by a delusional kook.

Source: "Bugs in the belfry", by Joshua Glenn. Boston Globe, Nov. 28, 2004.

Iranian bloggers jailed in government crackdown.

We really take our freedom for granted here in the U.S. -- five Iranian webloggers were jailed in a government crackdown. Meanwhile, the blog RegimeChangeIran is requesting assistance for an Iranian Freeper (poster to the Free Republic bulletin board) who was forced to "go underground" and has recently escaped Iran. They are currently seeking a way to get him asylum.