A friend sent me this on Alberta's new Creation (no scare quotes) Museum.

I have no scientific knowledge to offer in settling this question either way. My only arguments for an old universe are aesthetic. It simply delights me to contemplate that the wonder we see around us may have been created by such slow and tiny incremental steps--swirling about, not with protons and electrons or even in the murky layers of existence physicists call quantum indeterminacy, but in mystical undiscovered (and perhaps undiscoverable) layers of reality below that--that it almost seems that each particular creative act could have been an accident--a stray note on a string: out of tune and out of time. But, taken together, the trillions upon trillions of minute waves of the Conductor's baton have given us our unspeakably intricate symphony of symphonies of symphonies, which could not have arisen any other way than by His constant loving will.

As against that, "Bang! There’s a planet; Bang! There’s an amoeba; Bang! There’s a dinosaur; Bang! There’s a man," seems rather a crude way for God to have gone about things.

As for Adam and Eve, my own pet theory is that Adam was a product of evolution, but that Eve was born of an act of special creation. This implies I "believe" (that's too strong a word, actually) in evolution, but not in the mechanism of natural selection of random (undirected) gene mutations which I find ludicrous. That is to say, Adam was created from mud (if some protozoa and some proto-chimps weren't intermediate steps who can say?) and then had supernatural life breathed into him. But Eve was conceived whole, just as the Blessed Virgin was conceived holy.

New Post

This isn't about banking regs. Watch this space!

My Fruitful Email Exchange with Adolfo Continues (scroll down to the comments for the beginning)

wherein he tries to save my soul.

To my last missive Adolfo has replied:

Subject: Re: Adolfo, I think I'm in love with you.

Of course you are...it's a natural reaction to meeting me.

Trust me, I understand your posts. Some are quite funny, others miss the mark. Many times, however, they remind me of someone who's just talking to hear himself talk.

In any case, hope being a smart ass is working for you in life. I have found that the endearing quality it first engenders sours very quickly.

God bless,

Adolfo

I think this first line, "Of course you are..." is very sweet so I didn't say anything about it. But I was nastier in my email reply--I mean more an ass (ah, still a long way to go):

Adolfo, my beamish boy:

"Trust me, I understand..." Not always, apparently. The "trust me" assurance doesn't engender confidence. Do you worry about the sin of pride? I do: all the time.

"...just talking to hear himself talk..." Really! That describes almost all the commenters on Mark's blog. At least I'm terse.

"I have found..." Ah. You were once a smart ass like me. I get it. Maybe one day I'll be like you and save Mark's combox readers (and the world) from people like me.

love,
a cricket

I think A will probably be tired of it all and not respond again, but if he does, I'm still having fun. Who knows? Maybe he'll cure me.

St Joseph's Day "poetry" inspired by, among other things, this Rich Leonardi post

Lines written on March 19

The Orbs are silent, yet if one star,
alone may guess of who you are,
no man who bides in Adam's wake may know.
In darkness you arise and toil,
for Master who in darkness coil;
In darkness, home - you to darkness go.

You furnish board for those who starve,
and for the lame the step you carve,
the altar built is but for never wed
In living wood intricacies,
are wrought for but the blind to see;
In sturdy pine the ark but for the dead.

And in the night, the prayer you raise
is, like the suff'ring prophet's days,
delivered deaf and empty, dry and cold.
The lamb is lost, its love in vain,
and bitterness will now remain,
long, long as the vain limb and mind grow old.

Gnarlèd feet tread dusty sand,
with tool borne by gnarlèd hand;
now bravely face this day your blackest hour
But turn, the angel speaks: how could
your gnarlèd stick of long dead wood
burst into flower?

Don't like being a sinner?

I will forgive your sins. Just post them here in my comment box, and you'll be forgiven... by me.

I also promise not to read them... or if I do, it will be a sin which I will duly confess. In my comment box.

In the elevator.

Sandra: The maintenance guy said the elevators all over the building are down. We could be here for a while;
Peter: Ummm, I got bad news. I reeeally have to pee!
Anna: I know! Let's play the name game.
Chuck: No, thank you.

Modern Troubles

My partner and and I were invited to my office holiday party. So we went. I was a little bit disappointed though: a) I would've preferred to have brought my wife, and b) now everybody at my office thinks I'm gay.

Passion for words

I just learned the difference between impassible and impassable. As in:

Heavy snow had rendered the road impassable; luckily, heavy drink had rendered me impassible.

From Now we are six.

Some weeks it runs around my brain almost constantly, but A.A Milne's classic couplet of nonsense poetry,

But now I am Six, I'm as clever as clever.
So I think I'll be six now for ever and ever.


is just that--nonsense...

Unless you change six to twenty. Then it makes sense.

R.I.P. Milton Friedman

This is brilliant:

'Given our monstrous, overgrown government structure, any three letters chosen at random would probably designate an agency or part of a department that could be profitably abolished.'

My Name's not Dave

but often my mom wishes that, when I was born,
she had named me Bodkin Van Horn.

Voltaire's aphorism

Voltaire is attributed with the aphorism, "I don't agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." If he said this, of course it was a lie.

The truth of the matter is that the length to which one will go to defend your right to say what you say is roughly proportional to the product of the extent one agrees with what you say and one's estimation of its importance, which is the sum of importance to oneself weighted by one's self-centredness coefficient, m*, and its cosmic importance weighted by (1 - m).


* For me, m = 0.98; for most, m = something above 0.9.

Capitalism (My comment in Mark Shea's combox on this post)

True, man was not made for the market, but neither was the market made for man. In fact the market was not "made" at all.

Capitalism is not a system that's imposed on anyone. Rather "the market" is simply the epi-phenomenon resulting from people pursuing their own economic interests. It seems to be a fact that you can, by political means, impose constraints into the market for purely economic reasons (I say this to distinguish this act from what may be the perfectly laudable suppression of markets in, say, recreational narcotics or pornography), when some one complains that the rich are getting too rich. But once the market corrects itself, blindly, by the individual actions of the multitude of economic actors, you simply end up with the the rich still just fine, poor a little poorer, and nobody happy.

Go ahead. Raise the minimum wage high enough so that everyone's rich. In the short run the poor will be out of work and products will be scarce until their prices rise enough for businesses to hire workers again. In the long run the purchasing power of the raised minimum wage will be no more than the power of the old minimum.

The thing about selfishness is that Capitalism is the one system that selfishness does not break. No one is saying you have to be selfish otherwise capitalism won't work. We should encourage unselfishness. We should encourage people to make wise use of their money to raise themselves and their children to be close to God. But this is all outside of economics and no amount of your mucking about to ensure that the wealth of the poorest subtracted from the wealth of the richest ends up being the smallest number possible is going to help that. I have no idea why that's a sensible goal anyway.

If you want, you can impose communism (There's a system that must be imposed). Then everybody's poor....

(except the rich).

The Secret.

As I am relatively certain that no one is reading my blog, I feel safe in revealing The Secret. None will be the wiser if I explain the proper way to eat World's Finest Continental Almonds. These are the chocolate covered almonds sold at exorbitant prices by children raising funds for their schools or sports teams.

The method is this:

The almonds must be eaten in threes, so take three almonds at once. If there are only one or two left in the box, leave them for some poor, benighted soul who knows not The Secret.

Now, put the first almond in your mouth, and, gently with your teeth, and, vigourously with your tongue, work all the chocolate off the nut. Chew and swallow this chocolate, taking extreme care not to bite down on the nut itself. Keep the nut in your mouth, gently sucking on it as if it were a piece of hard candy. You'll know when it's time to proceed to the next step, when all memory of the chocolate taste has faded.

Next, with your tongue, tuck the nut into a corner of your mouth where it will not be disturbed; I prefer the space high up between the cheek and the the top right second and third molars. Now you may slip the second morsel into your mouth. Repeat the same procedure as for the first piece, this time ensuring that you bite on neither the first nor the second nut. You may now bring the first almond, out of hiding, sucking on both of them until, as before, any recollection of the savour of chocolate has dissipated. It is at least five minutes, and preferably more, since first you removed the trio from the box or plastic carousel, and comes now, as they say, "the payoff".

Position the two dry almonds between top and bottom molars, one on each side, and slide the third and final almond onto your tongue. Crunch down and being a lusty mastication of all three forbidden fruits. Savour this moment with all your concentration for it is, as you will see, an all too brief glimpse, just for your mouth, of some hint of a shade of that future Glory to which we're all called. You may thank God, at this point. Wait ten minutes before daring to approach the box again for another trinity of mandolinite delectibles.

But how, you nonexistent reader may ask, do I know The Secret is true? This follows unmistakably from the fact that the old 85 gram box of WFCA always contained a number of almonds divisible by three (I think it was twenty one, but I may be corrected). With my heart in my throat, I do vouchsafe that this is not the case with the new 75 gram (same price) box. This only proves that The Secret is now in graver danger than ever of being lost to posterity, as has been my great fear for a number of years.

Do not betray my trust, dear absent reader.

Terri Schiavo

I like to start a new blog every coupla months. Today, I repost an important entry from an earlier blog.

Re: Terri Schiavo.
My greatest fear is to end up like Terri.
And so, my living will:

I (insert your--I mean my--name), declare that:

1) should my greatest pleasure in life--namely, to lie or semi-recline in bed and stare out into space in an unconscious or semi-conscious and preferably drugged state--ever be denied me, and

2) should I be unable, through misadventure or dis-ease, to communicate my wishes to my life-insurance beneficiaries and underpaid Canadian doctors impatiently waiting for my hospital bed in an impoverished fourth rate hospital, whose only consolation for West African levels of healthcare is that it's a d---d sight better than the Americans' system,

I direct that I be slowly tortured to death by methods including, but not limited to starvation and dehydration resulting in the gradual painful failure of my organs one at a time.

Leaving Las Vegas

Virginia may be for lovers; I'd say it's a matter of opinion. And while some may disagree, I say what's not to about NY? Yea, if anyone (smaller than me) says that Meadow Lake, Saskatchewan isn't the "Gateway to Pure Air and Water", I'll drop 'em.

Nope, the only city that hangs it's tourism hat on a pure bare-faced lie is Las Vegas. Their slogan "What happens here, stays here", though more than six years old now, has reappeared in recent TV commercials, and with the blossoming of that Amorphophallus titanum known as the World Wide Web (www for short), it has never been less true.

Other commentators have bemoaned the way the slogan seems to promote naughty behavior. I take issue with its sheer mendacity. The ways in which what happens in Las Vegas leaves Las Vegas are legion. What doesn't leave on video flash memory or on Internet accessible court documents, might nonetheless leave in a deep shame burning behind the eyes when it pokes up out of the unconscious in the minutes between sleep and waking some early mornings. And what doesn't leave Las Vegas in the form of tiny malevolent bacteria living in the soft moist tissues around the genitals, will most assuredly leave on the soul, for better or worse.

The final and weakest beat of the the wing of the tiniest butterfly dying in the gutter next to the service entrance of the Bellagio...

leaves Las Vegas.

Rabbis to curse Jerusalem gay parade organizers

Heh! This is wicked.

In a ceremony known as “Pulsa D’nura” (blows of fire), rabbis of the anti-Zionist Edah Haredit rabbinic court will convene sometime before the march to conduct the ceremony to unleash unearthly powers against specified sinners

I think you have to be a 15th level cleric to cast a Pulsa D'nura! Man, I wish I could do that. Anything less that a +7 Cloak of Protection is useless. If I were a gay Jew, I'd be lookin' for an Amulet of Life Protection, PDQ.

(linked via Kathy Shaidle)

FPOD

So they two went until they came to Bethlehem. And it came to pass, when they were come to Bethlehem, that all the city was moved about them, and they said, Is this Naomi? And she said unto them, Call me not Naomi, call me Mara: for the Almighty hath dealt very bitterly with me. Ruth 1:19-20