Trivia that matter
Tribulus terrestris, a.k.a. puncture weed. One of the pleasures of bicycling in summer.
Close-up, showing the developing seed heads.
Public enemy #2 is the idiot who chatters on a cell phone while driving. #1 is the jerk who doesn’t look, doesn’t think and doesn’t care. All three are common in Wichita, particularly the last.
Right now I’m playing loud music to drown out today’s treat: a bunch of no-longer-young drag queens lipsyncing to mediocre music down at the corner. No pictures; I want to forget the images, not share them with unwary visitors. There’s also an ice cream vendor playing tinny banjo recordings of teevee themes in the parking lot across the alley.
You would like me to submit my tax return electronically. I would myself prefer to do my taxes online. Every year I visit your website and try to log on, and every year I end up yelling at the computer monitor. This time, I got this message after filling out several screens of forms:
You are not currently logged in. Please go to the WebFile Home page to login.
On the next screen, I get this:
You appear to be already logged in.
It’s been at least four years now, and you still can’t tell if I’m logged in. The hell with it. You’re getting a paper return yet again, and you will always get a paper return from me until you fix your !@#$ %^&* web site.
When the phone rings these days, I awkwardly rise out of my chair, lumber across the room with the walker and, struggling to not lose my balance, pick up the phone. It is a nuisance. I don’t mind making the efforts for friends and colleagues. However, when I put the receiver to my ear and hear a recording of a politician, I regret that I don’t know more maledictions. If you want to guarantee that I’ll never vote for you or any of your causes again, this is the way to do it.
Let’s take a break from ballet and look at some other kinds of dance. Via Mark Sullivan comes this example of dance as a martial art:
Bonus points if you can identify the pianist.
Via Robert the LLama Butcher, an outstanding canine performer.
And there’s the dancing stormtrooper of Akihabara.
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One more reason why I intend to remain the last person in North America without a cell phone.
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If three women together mean “mischief,” what would, say, three geeks mean?
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An epic win for the Japanese: the Gurren-Lagaan Jack.
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Let’s get into the Olympic spirit:
It’s like having to go through rehab without having a drinking problem.
(I’d explain why I’m quoting TSO today, but who knows who might read this.)
Am I the last person in North America who doesn’t have, and doesn’t want, a cell phone?
I returned home a few minutes ago from renewing my driver’s license. During the time that I spent at the license bureau, at least two hundred people stood in line waiting their turns. Not a single person (other than me) brought a book to read.
No fair. It’s August, dammit.
Did anyone win the Tour de France this year, or was every single rider disqualified?
I rode out to the gigantic shopping mall on the east side of town for the first time in over a year this afternoon. There used to be two bookstores there. Today I found none. There were plenty of shoe stores, though. One of my ideas of Hell is a huge, crowded, noisy mall without a bookstore, and there it is. I doubt that I’ll ever go there again. (There is a Barnes & Noble nearby, but because of road destruction it is inaccessible to bicycles.)
Last spring, Gilles de Robien, France’s Education Minister, declared that schools in suburban Paris would teach more grammar and vocabulary to integrate immigrants and prevent future riots. The British Minister of State for Schools, Jim Knight, immediately called this Frenchie rot. He insisted that grammar and vocabulary are elitist, and therefore are what cause youth riots.
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Scintillate, scintillate, globule vivivic
Would I could fathom thy matter specific
Lustily proud in the ether capacious
Strongly resembling a gem carbonaceous.
(Via a pretentious windbag.)
… but no last non-judgementalism.”
This is not to say that great art and writing requires Christianity. Far from it. But I think that art beyond a certain level requires belief in something beyond the everyday material reality. Homer wrote great poetry because he wrote of the struggles of men against fate and the caprices of the gods. Virgil dealt with the conflicting moral claims that resulted from an emerging sense of objective, philosophically-based morality vs. a lingering conviction that it was necessary to do the will of the gods. Norse mythology dealt with a pantheon which was itself doomed, and yet that sense of looming destruction also held out hope for a world reborn without the pain and conflict of the present one. All of these can inspire great art.
Perhaps because it is such a modern, urban, middle-class phenomenon, the current round of strident atheist writers project instead a sense of inward-looking self satisfaction. A smallness. How could someone produce much interesting in the way of art who adhered to Richard Dawkins’ “secular commandments” which include things like “Do not indoctrinate your children” and “Enjoy your own sex life (so long as it damages nobody else)”?
These journalists – and many of their sources – show absolutely no evidence of ever having read anything Benedict has written – whether we’re talking about his books as Joseph Ratzinger or, more criminally, the homilies he preached, you know, last week.
This constant refusal to just report on what the Pope says (unless it is a phrase containing the words “Iraq,” “abortion” or “politician”) is getting more than tiresome. How many journalists reporting on Benedict in the secular English-speaking mainstream media are even making an effort to listen to and understand Benedict on his own terms?
And from the comments:
The MSM are part of the demographic mix of elites that is now 2 generations detached from religious connectivity. The idea of a spiritual or interior life is alien to them. It’s not that Benedict’s theological/philosophical reasoning is different than their own. They generally never reason about a theological or philosophical framework at all. Given that, they can only write about Benedict from a pedestrian context because that’s the only context in which they live. When the MSM reports on Benedict, think the depth of the Seinfeld characters without the laughs.