Memes--you can't blog without 'em.

[Update II--D'Oh! I conflated celebrities and authors. Corrected.]

Dave Pawlak tags me with this one:

If you could meet and have a deep conversation with any five people on earth, living or dead, from any time period, who would they be?" (Explaining why is optional.) Name five people from each of the following categories:Saints, Those in the Process of Being Canonized, Heroes from your native country, Authors/Writers, celebrities.


The following are in no particular order.

1. Saints.

a. Teresa of Avila.

b. Thomas Aquinas.

c. Thomas More.

d. Paul.

e. Robert Bellarmine.


2. To be canonized.

a. Ven. Solanus Casey. He's a Detroiter.

b. Bl. Marco D'Aviano.

c. Bl. Giovanni Palatucci.

d. Leo XIII (not sure of his status, but doesn't get enough credit).

e. Ven. John Henry Newman.


3. American Heroes.

a. Lincoln.

b. Gen. George H. Thomas. *The* underrated general of the Civil War. Thomas was a Virginian who stayed loyal to the Union and his leadership was indispensible on numerous battlefields in the Western theatre.

c. Gen. Nathaniel Greene. One of the most underrated generals in American history, his leadership kept the Continental Army in the southern colonies together. Also had a grim case of asthma, which I can identify with.

d. Branch Rickey. The general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers and the man responsible for scouting and signing Jackie Robinson. He told Robinson that the man who broke the color barrier had to "be strong enough *not* to fight back."

e. Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. Yeah, I know--PP, moral failings, etc. To which I reply thusly: Yadda yadda yadda. His leadership and example ensured that America's struggle over racial issues would be fought with paper, not bullets. In most times and places, it hasn't worked out that way.


4. Authors/Writers.

a. Oriana Fallaci. Yes, I'd basically just sit there and let her hold forth.

b. Steve, OFA. It would, after all, be cool to speak in person. I'll even buy the first couple of rounds.

c. Philip K. Dick (is dead, alas). Now that would be a trip.

d. Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn.

e. G.K. Chesterton.


5. Celebrities.

a. Steve Yzerman. I have half a shot at this one--he's a Michigander.

b. Muhammad Ali. Without the scourge of Parkinson's, the stories he could tell.

c. Curt Schilling. The bloody sock, politics and his wargaming company. Break out the microbrews.

d. Johnny Cash.

e. Russell Crowe. Sure wouldn't be dull.


[Update I--Oh, right. You have to hit people with the meme. Okey:

My nearest and dearest

Chris Johnson

Zach

Terry

Tom Fitzpatrick

Anyone else so inclined (leave notice in the comments box).]

A Meeting At Corvallis Update.

I have it on unimpeachable authority that it is out. I haven't been able to find a copy on the shelves, as of yet. Look for a review in a week-ish. Mr. Stirling reports that Entertainment Weekly will be reviewing it, too, so keep your eyes open for that.

Please note that this piece is not datelined "United Kingdom."

Lingerie Wrestling Video Causes Queen To Resign.

Ah, yes. Those moments every father anticipates for his little girl. Starting school, getting her ears pierced, starting driver's ed, the prom, defending her kinky videos in a regional newspaper...

Though I will admit, Kim Akkerhuis proffers a most creative defense of his daughter's terpsichorean muse:

Posing with her court Aug. 12, the newly crowned Danish Festival queen looked the part: beaming, proud, holding a flower bouquet.

The reign of Carissa Akkerhuis ended less than two weeks later as word leaked she had appeared in videos clad in lingerie and fighting or wrestling with men or other women.

The 19-year-old's resignation Thursday is the first time in anyone's memory a festival queen has quit under such circumstances. The four-day festival -- Aug. 17-20 this year -- annually draws as many as 75,000 people to Greenville.

"I don't believe it has happened before," Danish Festival President Norice Rasmussen said.
Rasmussen would not comment on the reason for Akkerhuis' resignation, but noted pageant contestants sign a contract agreeing to represent the festival and community as a role model.

The local contest is affiliated with the Miss Michigan pageant, with the winner competing at the state level for the chance to compete in the Miss America competition.

The loss of the crown also means Akkerhuis relinquishes more than $2,000 in scholarships.
Greenville resident Kim Akkerhuis said he stands by his daughter "100 percent."

"She did absolutely nothing wrong," said Akkerhuis, who considers the videos a legitimate way to teach self-defense techniques. "If it's immoral to protect ourselves in martial arts, then where are we going with this?"

The videos are produced by a Grand Rapids company and distributed through various Web sites.

[Link via my currently non-blogging friend at Trot's Splits.]

Always call retreat.

I hate--hate--HATE introductions to the Sunday readings. The only place I have ever heard them is in--wait for it--the Diocese of Saginaw. Ham-handed displays of quasi-scholarship, none of which seems to have gotten past circa AD 1981 (see also the introductions and footnotes to the various iterations of the NAB), they are the usual histo-crit article. Heather says they invariably make her feel talked down to, as though she is unable to get anything from the reading without being sufficiently innoculated by the intro first.

My personal peeve is that they give the listener (far too many of whom are the clueless victims of the same catechetical system that gives us the Dan Brown Fan Club) every reason to tune the reading out, if not dismiss it outright.

For example: last week, the second reading was from St. Paul's Epistle to the Ephesians. So, natch, the apparatchiks at the Chancery had to assert, with the usual metaphysical certitude, that Ephesians wasn't really written by Paul, but rather by some later writer. How this unproven (not to mention unprovable and a thesis contrary to every Church father who commented on the letter)hypothesis contributes anything to the understanding of the reading and its application to the Christian life is, of course, beside the point. The really important thing is that the author of the introductions has a couple of credit hours in sacred scripture, likely from the local pastoral institute, and therefore Knows More Than You. Snockered on Jagerbultmann, he can't stop himself from demonstrating his junior college erudition to the unfortunates who compromise his captive audience. And, of course, immediately after this hokery, the audience is faced with whiplash as the lector announces "From the Letter of St. Paul to the Ephesians."

Thanks, twerp.

This week: Second verse, same as the first.

But since this week involved that worrying submission passage, the audience really, really, really needed to have the lectionary passage whited out in the worst way.

They've had documented examples of fainting episodes where women have heard the long form of Ephesians 5, you know.

So we got quite the introductory paragraph this week: "The writer" was commenting from "a culturally-conditioned viewpoint," and "the important thing is not to attempt to recreate ancient social patterns." No, "the greater point is to understand the love we are supposed to have for each other in Christ."

Oh, but that's not the really pathetic part. You see, after spending a paragraph preparing people to dismiss the passage...they used the short form--which emphasizes the husband's self-sacrificial duty to his wife.

Brilliant!

The jackass tergiversations gave the husbands in the audience the license to dump that passage, too! Wasn't that "culturally conditioned," too? Not something we are supposed to recreate for our times? Hard to interpret it any other way.

How's that 50% Catholic divorce rate working for you?

In a culture that has managed to embrace all of the hideous vices of the ancient pagans, invent a few more and refuses to embrace the old pagan virtues, we might just want to start listening to the Apostle to the Gentiles.

Instead of impatiently waving him off.

At 26P.

We are on our well-deserved and long-overdue annual vacation (typically, we take it around July 4).

Have been since 5pm, August 18.

Enjoying ourselves immensely, thank you. If you've emailed me, expect responses next week.

I finished reading Trifkovic's Sword of the Prophet Wednesday--my grim joke since has been to call it "The feel-good book of the year." Seriously--go, buy, read. Now. It will be the most important book you read in 2006. It's neither perfect nor a complete overview, but it is absolutely essential reading.

Ignorance is not bliss. Far from it.

[2008 UPDATE: I don't feel the same way about SotP these days, and cannot give it a whole-hearted recommendation. While still valuable, it is uniformly and unfairly negative about Islam as a whole--for example, I don't recall an acknowledgment of Islam's undeniably artistic and architectural achievements. Also, he doesn't handle the Islamic texts in the necessary detail (Robert Spencer is much, much better on those points.]

Another Book Recommendation Bleg.

As Heather winces and wonders where we'll put them...

I'm looking for solid works on Islam--history and theology. I'd like something that is neither soft-pedalling nor polemical, and preferably well-sourced and footnoted.

I have Geisler's Answering Islam (which is fine as far as it goes, but is mostly theological) and Trifkovic's Sword of the Prophet (which seems good but very uneven, and the footnoting is causing serious teeth-grinding).

Thanks in advance.

A near-instant cure for depression?

Michael Fumento indicates that clinical trials offer real hope.

I know some people who suffered from major depression, too--it's as grim as it gets. One person said they had an insight into perdition afterward: "Hell is a place where the only sound you can hear is your own voice."

Churchill had dark bouts his entire life, calling it his "black dog" and confiding that he stayed back toward the wall at train stations for fear he might throw himself on the tracks.

Anyway, back to the good news:

This is what’s so exciting about a treatment conducted by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). It’s an injection, not a pill (No, that’s not the exciting part) of a substance called ketamine. Since 1970, ketamine has been used as a general anesthetic for both humans and animals. Given in doses too low to cause anesthesia, it relieved depression in as little as two hours.

The study, appearing in the August Archives of General Psychiatry, comprised 17 depressed patients randomly assigned to receive either an injection of ketamine or a placebo. For 71% of those receiving the real deal, depression improved within a single day. Indeed, 29% became nearly free symptom free. Thirty-five percent of patients who received ketamine were still feeling better a week later. Patients receiving the placebo reported no improvement. No patients had serious side effects.

A week later, in a cross-over study, participants were given the opposite treatment unless they were still benefiting from the ketamine. Those with no benefit from the placebo were now helped while those who had received the real thing the first time but the fake stuff this time had no improvement.

More spectacularly, these were all treatment-resistant patients. They had tried an average of six medicines each without relief.

Quiet bombshell in archeology.

The site where the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered was likely a pottery factory, not an Essene monastery.

[Link via Titusonenine.]

Anathema Sit!

That describes my view of the new planet-counting proposal offered at the International Astronomy Union's General Assembly this week.

If it passes, I hereby declare I will become an Old Solarist, and acknowledge nine--and only nine--planets.

Twelve is right out.

Henceforth, anyone who tries to call Ceres a planet or makes reference to "plutons" will be cast into the outer darkness (a/k/a the Oort Cloud).

So let it be written, so let it be done.

[H/t to Todd for the link].

Care for more scorpions, Tommy?

Tastes like chicken.

Uncle Di gives us an example of the assured result of modern biblical criticism: namely, agnosticism.

The arid wasteland that is Catholic biblical scholarship at the beginning of the 21st Century is nothing short of astounding. Far from opening the book to the faithful (as called for by the Second Vatican Council), this sort of thing slams it shut, essentially telling the reader he can't trust his lying eyes.

Moreover, it puts a gnostic elite between the lay reader and the Bible: the scholars are the ones who know what it really means, you poor benighted ignoramus. You need to run through the gauntlet, get swatted on the fanny with Bultmann, Wellhausen, et al and genuflect before the altar of form criticism before you can understand it. Preferably by spending lots of kaysh and writing a hardwood-smiting otiose dissertation that only the Ph.D committee will ever have the displeasure to read. But taking a formation program that feeds the results to the unfortunates in Alpo chunks will do just as well.

Either way, you're a fundy if you dare disagree with it.

I've always liked Diogenes' challenge to the scholar: "All right, fine. Then tell me how it would read differently if it had actually happened."

It's a nice way of telling His Imperial Majesty that he should at least consider a mansiere.

From the Some Men Are Strictly a Pleasure to Hang file.

They have arrested a suspect for the Ramsey murder.

In Bangkok. No doubt there for the chess.

He is also facing a child p**n charge. Odd, that.

He knew details not available to the public.

Yes, innocent until proven guilty.