This artist's concept illustrates Kepler-16b, the first planet known to definitively orbit two stars -- what's called a circumbinary planet. The planet, which can be seen in the foreground, was discovered by NASA's Kepler mission.This makes me so happy. Go to NASA to see the image full size and to read more about it.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/T. Pyle
A great deal of what we know about the early English diet comes from a Latin vocabulary written by Ælfric, Archbishop of Canterbury from 995. It was written in the form of dialogues: with the baker, the ploughman, the fisherman, the shepherd. From it we know that in spring and summer women made cheese and butter from the milk of sheep or goats before smoking the cheese and salting the butter to preserve it.Father Gardner at the Catholic Herald writes a fascinating and well-rounded article that includes food history, meatless recipes and the reminder that "no flesh" does not automatically mean "substitute fish."
In gardens, people grew carrots (purple in those days), leeks, garlic and herbs like rue and fennel. Kale was a popular winter vegetable and for a time gave February its Old English name of sproutkele. Ælfric lists animals eaten for their meat (pig, goat, deer, swan, duck etc), but the fact that our modern words beef, veal and mutton are Norma, rather than Anglo-Saxon suggests these animals were mostly valued for their wool, hides, milk and working abilities rather than their flesh.
The Rule of St Benedict stipulated that only sick monks could consume the “flesh of quadrupeds” but this was quickly interpreted as excluding fish and fowl, hence the monastic tradition of maintaining dovecotes and fishponds (stews). Bede railed against the excesses of the monastic table, circumventing not only the letter but increasingly the spirit of the Rule, and St Anselm complained that the clergy dined on “chicken spiced with pepper and cumin”. But fasting and abstinence shaped not only the culinary rhythm of the week (no meat on Fridays or Wednesdays) but also of the year (Advent, Lent, Ember Days). Unless you were very young, very old or very sick, meat was absent from the table for a considerable portion of the year.
I cannot tell you how to meet Gene Wolfe. I can, however, suggest a few ways to read his work. These are useful tips, like suggesting you take a blanket, a flashlight, and some candy when planning to drive a long way in the cold, and should not be taken lightly. I hope they are of some use to you. There are nine of them. Nine is a good number.Now this is advice I can use. I picked up the link from Tamahome at Goodreads, where I love seeing what other people say about the books they are reading.
31 Prayers for Courage: Daily Scripture-Based Prayers to Access the Power of GodJoshua 1:9"Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous! Do not tremble or be dismayed, for the LORD your God is with you wherever you go."
============
Dear Lord,
How forgetful I can be! You have told me before, writ in Your Word when You spoke to the Israelites, to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, to Moses, to Joshua, Your servants: I should not be afraid because You go with me. No matter what opposition I face, You accompany me. Wherever I go, You are there; if I ascend to the heavens, or go down to the place of the dead; if I pursue the dawn in the east or the ends of the sea to the west; truly, even if I walk in the valley of the shadow of death, there You are to guide me and protect me, as you Promised Joshua and the Israelites as they entered the land which You had given over to them. Help me to remember these things, O LORD, and not to fear.
In Thy Son's Name I pray, AMEN
contains not only 31 prayers, keyed off of a piece of scripture, but also has them in different sections so that one may look for prayers based on what one needs courage for.
It was five years ago.Viper is the sequel to Bleeder, which featured Reed Stubblefield's story, but it functions well enough as a stand-alone thriller. Selena loves sexy shoes, working on cars, and Reed, although his Anglo heritage makes her worry about introducing him to the family. Abruptly, her past as a Special Agent in the DEA comes back to haunt her when she learns that La Serpiente is back. Her name's been found on a list where the only way off is when you are killed.
At that time, like every time, Selena saw right away why he called himself La Serpiente, The Snake.
For one thing, he wore rattlesnake-skin boots with the steel toes that Bragg and her Anglo colleagues at Drug Enforcement sneeringly called "Fence Climbers." When he crossed his sinewy legs and swung his foot, the tip glinted.
For another, his unmoving onyx eyes fixed on her cleavage -- not all that uncommon when she met men -- but that gaze was not measuring her size. It was calculating a striking distance. She averted her eyes to the side, a demure Mexican custom she hadn't lost through acculturation. Locking eyes is also how snakes paralyze their prey. She wouldn't give him the pleasure.
This blog is for people who do not have thousands of hours to read book reviews or blurbs or first sentences. I will cut through all the cryptic crap, and give you the meat of the story in one condensed image. Now you can read the greatest literary works of all time in mere seconds!Language warning for some titles ... so beware if that is a problem for you.
I see that you have launched AttachWatch.com in an effort to fight off lies, smears, and misrepresentations of your policies. Far be it from me to mock such a noble enterprise, as some are doing.There's more and it's all funny ... though still not as funny as that AttackWatch thing.
But we know who they are, don’t we?
And if we don’t, I do.
How much is it worth to you?
I will deliver the names, addresses, email accounts, and phone numbers of several hundred thousand men, women, and children who I know for a certain fact have cast aspersions in your general direction — which, if not a crime, should at least be a misdemeanor, given that you probably just had the carpets cleaned.
Oh, what a great book for us is the cross! It is a summarization of the apologetics of our faith, a practical knowledge for our moral life, and the most tender lesson of love that the Lord has shown.
St. Gaspar del Bufalo
I've had a genealogy blog for several years called What's Past is Prologue. Recently I saw a need in the blogosphere for information on genealogy as it pertains to Catholics in particular. I rounded up a group of some of the best genealogy bloggers out there - who also happen to (happily) be Catholic. Thus, a new blog was born. May I present The Catholic Gene!Drop by and say hello ... and check out all the info!
The Catholic Gene was founded by a diverse group of friends who share two common things: a love for both genealogical research and the Roman Catholic faith. Most of the authors were “born Catholic” and some came to the faith later in life. Some aren’t actually Catholic but appreciate the faith as much as the rest of us. We hope that this blog will provide readers with useful information about the Catholic faith and genealogy.
The Catholic Gene’s mission is to present various aspects of the faith of our fathers…and mothers. But we’re genealogists at heart, so we’ll present the faith as seen through the eyes of a family historian. Whether its details about ecclesiastical archives, profiles of religious, our ancestors’ churches, vintage photographs, personal reflections, or lives of the saints in genealogical records, The Catholic Gene will offer something for everyone interested in
researching their Roman Catholic family or learning more about all things related to the Church.
Lorena leaves me with a handout titled "The Rules of Passive Dominance," which begins: "Ignoring attention-seeking behaviors is the highest form of dominance."Martin Kihn was a high-functioning alcoholic, although very few knew it. Like many alcoholics he was expert at hiding the signs. One who loved him wasn't fooled though, and that was his dog, Hola. Untrained and unruly, she exhibited increasingly bad behavior up to the point of threatening his wife.
The highest form?
Attention seeking: Grabbing shoes and making you chase her. Soft sweet cries and I say, "What's wrong, Hola, you hungry doll?" Poke and pet, roll over and rub reflexively, even yelling "Drop!" when she's got our neighbor's kid's sandal in her mouth, shaking it like a squirrel that's dead enough already.
Negative or positive--it's all attention seeking.
What she lives for.
"Her job is to train you," Lorena had said. "She's better at her job than you are because she is more focused. It's all she thinks about."
Hola's toolbox consists of annoying me until I do what she wants.
Which I always do.
Why?
Because it's annoying, that's why.
And if I don't?
Drama queen.
She'll collapse on the floor like a character in Gossip Girl tossing her Fendi bag onto the davenport.
Now I'm seeing her behaviors through a new frame. Her whining isn't an existential scripture on the brevity of life. The way she pokes her head and makes me pet her isn't a rhapsody on the mutability of love.
No, the new hermeneutics is that she's a spoiled kid throwing tantrums just to get her way. The more I look at her I see she is in a state of perpetual tantrum. She makes spoiled kids look evolved.
How can I have been so wrong for so long?
Ignorance is an expensive occupation.
Petra Ford opens a door in my heart: she shows me that dog training is a form of art and an act of love. I've never seen two beings listen so carefully to each other or care so much. I think of Gloria. I think of Hola.I enjoyed this book for the dog training overviews, especially since that technique that worked best for Hola is the one we've had to use in our household of four dogs. I also liked the glimpses that Martin shared about his dawning realization that God ... or as he terms it "HP" for Higher Power ... is out there, reaching out to him all the time. These glimpses are few and subtle so readers who are turned off by such content don't need to worry that they will detract from the story.
Humility is not thinking less of myself. It is thinking of myself less.
That night I take an exhausted Hola on a slow walk through a darkening forest, over ruts in the track from horses and ATVs.
We look up at the clouds so close I can almost touch them, and I receive a wordless message from HP.
I need to stop wishing my dog is something else.
I need to stop wishing I was someone else.
This feels like just the first step of the first awakening.
But still, it's the first.
Never before in the history of the Church have laypeople been asked to do so much and the opportunities for spiritual fulfillment been so great. How are we doing and what effect is this having on our Church? Novak and Simon provide the answers in Living the Call.I have just begun looking through Living the Call
The first part of the book tells the personal stories of nine faithful laypeople now serving the Church in new and diverse ways. How did they find their calling? What do their roles demand of them? How do they serve their communities? To lay the groundwork for even more lay vocations, the second part of Living the Call offers practical advice and reflections. How can we enter the presence of God? What forms of prayer can best refresh our minds and deepen our souls? What readings can we turn to from Scripture and the Church Fathers to bring ourselves toward holiness?
but it looks solid. I really like the idea of giving practical examples of people involved in lay ministry and combining that with faith basics to bring us closer to God. After all, if we don't have friendship with Christ, then how are we going to recognize Him when we try to serve those around us? Great, great combination.By the rivers of Babylon,The Babylonian exile marked the Hebrew people forever. We see it in the psalms and the prophetic books. I'm not sure the U.S. has a long enough memory to be marked forever. But this close to the attacks on our innocents, we're marked, scarred, and still traumatized.
There we sat down and wept,
When we remembered Zion.
Psalm 137
O'Toole worked in the lumber yard for twenty years ...
... and all that time he'd been stealing the wood and selling it. At last his conscience began to bother him and he went to confession to repent.
"Father, it's 15 years since my last confession, and I've been stealing wood from the lumber yard all those years," he told the priest.
"I understand my son," says the priest.
"Can you make a Novena?"
O'Toole said, "Father, if you have the plans, I've got the lumber."
After maxing out his army's tech tree and throwing his enormous weight around in the Third Sacred War, Philip turned his eye toward the oiled abs of Sparta. So, in 346 B.C., he decided he would do a little smack-talking of his own to the Spartans:
"You are advised to submit without further delay, for if I bring my army on your land, I will destroy your farms, slay your people and raze your city."
The Spartans answered ...
The Quote:
"If."
As in, "That's the only relevant word in all your tough talk."
The Aftermath:
Sure enough, it never happened. Both Philip II and his son Alexander ended up spending the remainder of their military careers fighting as far away from Sparta as humanly possible.
Much to my surprise the Mass was entirely focused on Jesus Christ as the Second Person of the Trinity. I heard more Scripture read than I had ever heard in any Protestant church. I heard a 15 minute sermon on the Gospel reading. We said the Our Father together. We confessed our sins together. We prayed for the Church, the government, the needy, the lost and our selves. We remembered members of the Church who had died. We sang hymns. We kneeled. We stood. We made the sign of the Cross. We shook hands with each other and said, "Peace be with you." It was a corporate affair.From Why I'm Catholic where you'll find many more conversion stories.
The fact that the Church has always understood the New Testament idea that Baptism was incorporation into Christ's Body, the Church, had always been something I admired about the Catholic Church. It made sense of why so much of the Mass was said out aloud, and acted out together. We were the Body of Christ. It wasn't just about me.
My brother was going to take me to Mass the next day. I hadn’t been to Mass since the 3rd grade when I went to Catholic school. My friends and I would sit in the back and get in trouble for giggling and putting our feet on the kneelers. Other than that, I remember hating it. Now, I knew that I was going to go back, and I might hate it again. But if all of this was true, I would be stuck going to Mass every week. I would have to go to boring, lifeless Mass instead of the church I loved.Of course, all conversion stories are moving and Daughter of Glory's is a beautiful one about Christ speaking through the Mass. (Via The Crescat.)
So that night, I locked myself in the bathroom (the only place to be alone in a college dorm), and prayed. I asked God to either show me where the Catholic schema broke down, or else to show me why Catholicism was beautiful. I told him I was terrified of it being true because it still seemed so dark, ugly, and lifeless to me. I prayed: “God, if this is from you it has to be beautiful… so please, if it is from you, show me how it is beautiful.”
I wasn’t really that hopeful.
A year later, my father’s job took our family to Wales, where I attended, for a few months, a large school in a mid-size industrial city. There, students brought ingredients from home and learned to follow recipes, some simple and some not-so-simple, eventually making vegetable soups and meat and potato pies from scratch. It was the first time I had ever really cooked anything. I remember that it was fun, and with an instructor standing by, it wasn’t hard. Those were deeply empowering lessons, ones that stuck with me when I first started cooking for myself in earnest after college.I knew a lot about cooking when I took Home Ec back in the 9th grade. But I didn't know anything about sewing, budgeting, planning a project, or the many other things that I learned in that class. I look at my children's friends and almost all of them don't know a thing about cooking. Or a lot of those other things.
But now that scientists know that parrots have signature calls, a few questions come up, like: Who gets to decide the signature call that's given to each parrot chick? Is it the parrots themselves who decide what they should be called, thus making it an innate characteristic? Is some sort of alpha parrot handing out identifying sounds? In order to answer all these questions, researchers at Cornell University filmed parrots in the wild of Venezuela, along with their newborn chicks, to see exactly when and how a parrot got its name.Cracked.com (obligatory language warning) delivers six astounding examples of behavior that you thought was limited to human beings. I'm hard pressed for a favorite since all of them are so incredible that I bored our household by going on and on about them. I'm torn between the whales' pop songs and the little chimps playing with dolls. Go read it yourself.
What the scientists found was that it was not the parrot newborns who got to choose their signature calls. Instead, it was the proud parrot parents who gave each chick its name. Much like a human, the adult parrot will choose a name for its young soon after it's born. Each parrot, though, may tweak its own signature call as it grows older, elongating a whistle here or shortening a chirp there, essentially giving itself a nickname.
When Juliana [St. Juliana of Cornillon] was sixteen she had her first vision which recurred subsequently several times during her Eucharistic adoration. Her vision presented the moon in its full splendor, crossed diametrically by a dark stripe. The Lord made her understand the meaning of what had appeared to her. The moon symbolized the life of the Church on earth, the opaque line, on the other hand, represented the absence of a liturgical feast for whose institution Juliana was asked to plead effectively: namely, a feast in which believers would be able to adore the Eucharist so as to increase in faith, to advance in the practice of the virtues and to make reparation for offenses to the Most Holy Sacrament.This eventually became the Solemnity of Corpus Christi.
Elizabeth's marriage was profoundly happy: she helped her husband to raise his human qualities to a supernatural level and he, in exchange, stood up for his wife's generosity tothe poor and for her religious practices. Increasingly admired for his wife's great faith, Ludwig said to her, referring to her attention to the poor, "Dear Elizabeth, it is Christ whom you have cleansed, nourished, and cared for" — a clear witness to how faith and love of God and neighbor strengthen family life and deepen ever more the matrimonial union.Recommended reading for every person who says that the Church keeps women down.
There is a very interesting debate raging at the moment about the nature of sin, for example,” said Oats.The Anchoress takes one of my favorite quotes from a Terry Pratchett book and reflects on Pratchett's atheism, early onset Alzheimer's and support for assisted suicide.
“And what do they think? Against it, are they?” said Granny Weatherwax.
“It’s not as simple as that. It’s not a black and white issue. There are so many shades of gray.”
“Nope.”
“Pardon?”
“There’s no grays, only white that’s got grubby. I’m surprised you don’t know that. And sin, young man, is when you treat people as things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is.
“It’s a lot more complicated than that –”
“No. It ain’t. When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they’re getting worried that they won’t like the truth. People as things, that’s where it starts.”
“Oh, I’m sure there are worse crimes –”
“But they starts with thinking about people as things …”
Anticipating his own end, Pratchett has said, ‘I intend, before the endgame looms, to die sitting in a chair in my own garden with a glass of brandy in my hand and Thomas Tallis on the iPod.”Pratchett might be surprised at what she finds in the light of Granny Weatherwax's philosophy. Read it at First Things.
which gave people insight into Cardinal Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict) many years ago.
by Tim Powers for A Good Story is Hard to Find podcast. It is rather heavy and dark, though better than I remember it from when I stopped reading about a third of the way through a few years ago. (That's the great thing about being "assigned" to read a book ... it forces you to power past the discouraging parts and find that it is a great book despite your early misgivings.) Anyway, when I can't take it any more, I pick up A People of Hope. Even though many of the topics under discussion are contentious ones, Dolan's optimism is refreshing and a picker-upper for me.Anglican priest to his wife who’d just spent a fortune on a dress – ”Why did you spend so much, I’ve told you that whenever you feel tempted you should say “Get behind me Satan”
“I did” said his wife.
“What happened then?” said the priest?
“He told me it looked lovely from the back.”
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Saint Paul by Pope Benedict XVI
A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson BurnettThe river sang to itself. It sang its summer song, of fish below, reeds waving in the current, the dip of a bird’s bill as it flashed down and skimmed over the surface. The song kept time against the shore and against the raft as it floated down the MississippiYou get the idea ... it goes on from there and is simultaneously hilarious and sad (as we suspect this is a reflection of all too real Hollywood thinking). Read it at McSweeneys. Via Heather at CraftLit.
- Must it be the Mississippi? Why not someplace more exotic—the Nile or Ganges, perhaps?
- Could run up the costs, but we’ll check it out.
Huck dangled his feet into the water. He lay on his back, watching the last lace filigree of cloud pull aside to reveal a night full of stars. Jim stood at the stern, pole in hand, watching the dark surface of the river rise and move in its slow dance.
“What do you think, Jim?” said Huck. “Were the stars born or just made?”
- Which one is black?
- Jim.
- Okay, is he more a Morgan, or a Denzel?
- The focus group suggested Will.
- Will! Yes. Very bankable. And Huck is a woman, right?
- Um… we didn’t test that possibility.
Read all about brains at Cracked.#3. "I'm Getting Older, so My Mind Isn't What It Used to Be."
What you heard: It's common knowledge that the brain deteriorates with age. That's why your grandpa keeps forgetting things, referring to the television as "the wireless" and calling you by your father's name. It's also why he's cranky all the time, and complains when anyone is making too much noise -- he's just getting on, and his old deteriorating brain can't handle the hectic modern world.
The truth: Discounting the ones who actually develop mental disorders like dementia or Alzheimer's, old people actually have better brains than the rest of us. Ironically, that's kind of what makes them seem so stupid -- their seasoned brains are taking in a whole lot of information that your comparatively idiotic brain just doesn't notice.
As it turns out, although your body tends to deteriorate as the years go on, your brain only gets sharper. Research has shown that, the older you get, the more information you take in from your environment. As a result, older people are actually better at problem solving, even though they become curmudgeonly and easily distracted at the same time due to the sheer amount of information their superior brains are taking in. ...
Girls, even if you aren’t super gorgeous, guys are THAT interested in you, just because you are a girl. You! Yes, you! You don’t need to “sell” yourself. You don’t need to put your every asset on display. Be a kind, friendly person who cares about others. That’s what real men are looking for in a wife.A great, practical piece on modesty, real attractiveness, and finding a guy who loves you from Jennifer Fitz.
I know well the plans I have in mind for you, says the Lord, plans for your welfare, not for woe! Plans to give you a future full of hope.Indeed, I have found it to be so.
G.K. Chesterton once wrote, “There never was anything so perilous or so exciting as orthodoxy.”The Catholic Answer kicks off the Anchoress' new column by making it available to all ... so go by and read it.
... trusting too much in the feeling of being on the correct side of anything can be very dangerous.The visuals accompanying this section boiled down to what Tom and I remembered this morning at breakfast.
This internal sense of rightness that we all experience so often is not a reliable guide to what is actually going on in the external world. And when we act like it is, and we stop entertaining the possibility that we could be wrong, well that's when we end up doing things like dumping 200 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, or torpedoing the global economy. So this is a huge practical problem. But it's also a huge social problem.
Think for a moment about what it means to feel right. It means that you think that your beliefs just perfectly reflect reality. And when you feel that way, you've got a problem to solve, which is, how are you going to explain all of those people who disagree with you? It turns out, most of us explain those people the same way, by resorting to a series of unfortunate assumptions. The first thing we usually do when someone disagrees with us is we just assume they're ignorant. They don't have access to the same information that we do, and when we generously share that information with them, they're going to see the light and come on over to our team. When that doesn't work, when it turns out those people have all the same facts that we do and they still disagree with us, then we move on to a second assumption, which is that they're idiots. They have all the right pieces of the puzzle, and they are too moronic to put them together correctly. And when that doesn't work, when it turns out that people who disagree with us have all the same facts we do and are actually pretty smart, then we move on to a third assumption: they know the truth, and they are deliberately distorting it for their own malevolent purposes. So this is a catastrophe.
This attachment to our own rightness keeps us from preventing mistakes when we absolutely need to and causes us to treat each other terribly. But to me, what's most baffling and most tragic about this is that it misses the whole point of being human. It's like we want to imagine that our minds are just these perfectly translucent windows and we just gaze out of them and describe the world as it unfolds. And we want everybody else to gaze out of the same window and see the exact same thing. That is not true, and if it were, life would be incredibly boring. The miracle of your mind isn't that you can see the world as it is. It's that you can see the world as it isn't. We can remember the past, and we can think about the future, and we can imagine what it's like to be some other person in some other place. And we all do this a little differently, which is why we can all look up at the same night sky and see this and also this and also this. And yeah, it is also why we get things wrong.
Assumptions made about people who disagree with us:In my experience, in American culture at least, this is practically universal.
- They're stupid. If not that, then ...
- They're ignorant. If not that, then ...
- They're evil.
It is beyond all of our knowing, which is why—no matter how tempted we are in our increasingly polarized church to stand with the Pharisees—we cannot. We must, ultimately err on the side of mercy, because mercy is what we all seek, and leave justice to the One who may be trusted to know what that is.She's always worth reading, but never more than in this piece at First Things which I recommend to all.
Smallworld by Dominic GreenA strangely captivating novel from Hugo-nominated author Dominic Green. Mount Ararat, a world the size of an asteroid yet having Earth-standard gravity, plays host to an eccentric farming community protected by the Devil, a mechanical killing machine, from such passers-by as Mr von Trapp (an escapee from a penal colony), the Made (manufactured humans being hunted by the State), and the super-rich clients of a gravitational health spa established at Mount Ararat's South Pole.The children's names are laugh-out-loud hilarious, but surprisingly you get so used to them that after a while you know exactly who is being spoken about.
I think that positive emotion trumps negative emotion every time.The question of diversity in the Church, especially in our parish, was a topic of conversation around our house after the Sunday Mass.
Cobb, Inception
If I speak in human and angelic tongues but do not have love, I am a resounding gong or a clashing cymbal.However, this particular deacon is rarely seen around the parish as he has a full-time job as a teacher and must be out of town a great deal when school is out. He's a nice enough guy, but the only time he has to show us any love is during his homilies. Needless to say, we weren't feeling the love on Sunday.
And if I have the gift of prophecy and comprehend all mysteries and all knowledge; if I have all faith so as to move mountains but do not have love, I am nothing.
If I give away everything I own, and if I hand my body over so that I may boast but do not have love, I gain nothing.
Love is patient, love is kind. It is not jealous, (love) is not pompous, it is not inflated,
it is not rude, it does not seek its own interests, it is not quick-tempered, it does not brood over injury, it does not rejoice over wrongdoing but rejoices with the Truth.
It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
1 Corinthians 13:1-7
