Righteous indignation

Soror mea, ingrata puella et ignavus, queratur me non renovavisse blogem meam. Propterea quod hinc scripsi. Felixne tu?

Addendum: Sunt qui mussantes brevitatem meam vituperant. Portionem Iosephitatis poscent, ergo plures scribam quasi sicut ethnici in multiloquio meo exaudiar. Heu, Musam meam ad vacationem misit et naiadibus abitis fons inspirationis siccus est. Ite, puellae, ad libros.

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St. Swithin's Day if thou dost rain...

St. Swithin's day quote via Chesterton Day by Day

ONLY in our romantic country do you have the romantic thing called weather -- beautiful and changeable as a woman. The great English landscape painters (neglected now, like everything that is English) have this salient distinction, that the weather is not the atmosphere of their pictures it is the subject of their pictures. They paint portraits of the weather. The weather sat to Constable; the weather posed for Turner -- and the deuce of a pose it was. In the English painters the climate is the hero; in the case of Turner a swaggering and fighting hero, melodramatic but magnificent. The tall and terrible protagonist robed in rain, thunder, and sunlight, fills the whole canvas and the whole foreground. Rich colours actually look more luminous on a grey day, because they are seen against a dark background, and seem to be burning with a lustre of their own. Against a dim sky all flowers look like fireworks. There is something strange about them at once vivid and secret, like flowers traced in fire in the grim garden of a witch. A bright blue sky is necessarily the high light in the picture, and its brightness kills all the bright blue flowers. But on a grey day the larkspur looks like fallen heaven; the red daisies are really the lost-red eyes of day, and the sun-flower is the vice-regent of the sun. Lastly, there is this value about the colour that men call colourless that it suggests in some way the mixed and troubled average of existence, especially in its quality of strife and expectation and promise. Grey is a colour that always seems on the eve of changing to some other colour; of brightening into blue, or blanching into white or breaking into green or gold. So we may be perpetually reminded of the indefinite hope that is in doubt itself; and when there is grey weather on our hills or grey hair on our heads perhaps they may still remind us of the morning.

'Daily News.'

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Ora, Labora, Olives

Today is the feast of St. Benedict, patron saint of Europe and founder of Western monasticism.

If you've been following the prophecies of St. Malachy, the phrase gloria olivae must have leapt to mind when Cardinal Ratzinger sibi nomen imposuit Benedict XVI last April (transcript; audio via Cnytr). That's because St. Malachy reportedly attributed this motto, meaning "the glory of the olive", to the 111th Pope, counting inclusively from Celestine II (Malachy lived in the 12th century, and reserved his prophecies for future Popes, the bygone papacies generally being considered old news).

Speaking of olives, today is also the feast of my confirmation saint, the Irish martyr Oliver Plunkett (beatified by Pope Benedict XV, wouldn't you know it). But more to the point, how does Benedict XVI fit into the prophecies? Well, it so happens there's a branch (pun not intended) of the Benedictines known as the Olivetans. Chalk it up to the omniscience of hindsight? Sure, except the prophecy buffs picked up on the connection well in advance and have long predicted that the Pope in question would be from the Benedictine order.

If the election of Ratzinger (who turned out not to have been a Benedictine after all) cast a momentary shadow of uncertainty upon the hearts of St. Malachy's devotees, his choice of name must have banished all doubts that he was in fact the one prophesied to bring balance to the Force... wait, wrong prophecy. (After all, for all his ludicrous and undeserved characterization as the "Darth Vader" of the Catholic Church, Ratzinger would be the last person to fall for the sort of moral relativism that snagged Anakin Skywalker, and whatever Obi-Wan Kenobi may say, absolutes are precisely what a Sith doesn't deal in. Did anyone else notice the implications of Palpatine's characterization of the Jedi as "rigid and dogmatic" in Revenge of the Sith? But I digress.) At any rate, chalk up another one to St. Malachy, but don't make any long-range plans, because it turns out this is the end. The 112th prophecy reads:

In the final persecution of the Holy Roman Church there will reign Peter the Roman, who will feed his flock amid many tribulations; after which the seven-hilled city will be destroyed and the dreadful Judge will judge the people. The End.

And that's it, folks. Though if you still find the "olive" connection a little dubious, you're welcome to seek a second opinion.

There was something familiar about [Ratzinger] when our eyes met during that episode when he had "looked" back at me through the television. I recognized this person. The next day it dawned on me that it was Ata-i-lek, a top-ranking Green Reptilian military commander from Atasoon. I realized that he had just recently begun overshadowing Cardinal Ratzinger! ...Ata-i-lek had just "come into" the human body of Joseph Ratzinger shortly before the conclave commenced. It is no wonder that he was able to win the election so quickly.

This is just weird. But there's this strange reference to something that sounds like the Rapture!

As promised, the evacuation of the animals from Alukar Heights commenced in April 2005. Already, 15 of them have been physically picked up. More will follow, but remember, not everyone will be physically evacuated. If you are not in the physical evacuation, do not be concerned. Many will be leaving in other ways. All will be well.

I think my chances of being raptured are pretty slim in either case, but I have taken the precaution of registering with www.raptureletters.com. If and when the Rapture occurs, I will receive this letter informing me of the occurence (sent automatically in the event that the website staff are themselves "taken up") and giving me a chance to mend my erring Papist ways before it's too late.

Do I still want to bother applying to grad school?

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Hinc lucem et pocula sacra

Summer school is the sweet, sweet taste of IBC root beer, the taste that only comes from a glass bottle, like the bottle I am holding with the hand that is not holding the box of leftover pizza, strolling slowly homeward in the cool night breeze from the bay, looking for stray fireflies and whistling idly. Well, that's not strictly true, let alone grammatically coherent. IBC root beer, despite its undeniably sweet, sweet, taste, is not summer school. Summer school is faculty meeting, assembly, Newspaper class, Chamber music class, and lunch; summer school is also study hall and Tuck Shop. Tuck Shop is when I permit myself the sweet, sweet taste of IBC root beer (the taste that only comes from a glass bottle). I close up the Tuck Shop and walk home, looking for stray fireflies and whistling idly, pondering the many and divers questions attendant on one for whom the time has come to contemplate the impending reality of a post-graduate existence. To wit, having double-majored in Music and Classics, should I spend two more years pursuing an additional B.A. from the department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Celtic at Cambridge University so that I can pick up insular Latin, Old English, Old Irish, and other assorted knowledge pertaining to languages and literature of the medieval British isles (that is to say, knowledge of the sort commonly considered useless, much like my current fields of study, but more so?) To which the answer of course is, "if they'll take me!"

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"To live without faith...

...without a patrimony to defend, without a steady struggle for truth, that is not living, but existing."

-Bl. Pier Giorgio Frassati (April 6, 1901- July 4, 1925)

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