The Odd Ends of Odds and Ends

Yes, it's that time again.  Clearing out bunch of ends and odds.

• The Little Ironies of Life
• Life Used to be So Much Simpler
• The Music of a Generation
• Hot Enough For Ya? 
• Return of the Quanta

Bad News

The diocese of Allentown and the parish of Our Lady of Mercy have thrown in the towel on the possibility of raising the money needed to repair the main church building.  The church, formerly St. Joseph's, was closed two weeks ago and all operations were transferred to the oratory, formerly St. Bernard's.   

That the parish had two church buildings may seem odd.  However:

• St. Joseph's was the largest of the church buildings and therefore was able to accommodate the three combined parishes. 
• St. Bernard's was the oldest parish in this part of Pennsylvania, the "mother church" for all the rest, including St. Joseph's.

So there were practical and historico-sentimental reasons for keeping both in operation.  Now the large and liturgically rich church will be used only on Christmas and Easter and for Kirchweihe and the like.  Marriages and funerals will be done in it, if requested. 

A farewell to old St. Joseph

Gold Rush

Years ago at TOF's over-the-hill 40th b'day party he was given a "newspaper" full of headlines and such from the year he was born.  Included was a list of the price of several things in birth year versus then-current year, including the median wage, an ounce of gold, a new home, a new Ford automobile, a loaf of bread, a jug of wine and some thou. 

Headline of the Day

Unexpected Proof of Teleology in Saltationist Evolution

"Report: Hornets Plan to Become Pelicans"--headline, Associated Press, Jan. 23

Sometimes You Learn That You Did Something Right

Learned today that my son up at Univ. Alaska - Anchorage saw a native man attempt suicide by swallowing a bunch of pills out on the street.  He called 911 and then stayed with and encouraged the man until help came.  (While other good Samaritans diverted car traffic around them.)  

Sometimes you wonder if you were a good enough father, and then you get proof.  Well done, Dennis.  We are proud of you. 

The Shipwrecks of Time

I have ducked back a chapter to introduce some of the other characters and a new complication.  We are back with Frank Delacorte.  He has left the Institute on that first day with a list of potential lodgings that Mrs. S has given him.

     The first address on the list was an apartment building on the same block, but that was too good to be true and when Frank got there, he was told that the last remaining room had been rented the week before.  “The kids are coming in for the new semester,” the apartment manager told him, just in case he cared.  Armed with that information, Frank studied the list more carefully, compared it to his map, and crossed off all the buildings closer to the University than where he now stood.  His best chances lay in those boarding houses and apartments farther west.  He set off into the wilderness at a brisk pace. 

Continue reading.  

In the next, and possibly final installment, we will learn something of the plot problem that will confront Frank.  

Thinking with the wrong glands

Yes, he was arrested for "child endangerment."

Beginning in the 1950s, Jacques Barzun noted that the phrase "I think that..." was being replaced by "I feel that..."  You might take count for a few days how often you hear people say that.  "I feel we should eat at this restaurant."  "I feel the president is a sage (and/or fool)."  "I feel we ought to do something about Iran."  And so on.  Lost in all this are two important things: thoughts and feelings.  When everything is felt and nothing is thought, genuine feelings, the significance of feelings themselves, can be diluted like homeopathic philosophy.

In the old Aristotelian dispensation, the intellect was prior to the will.  That is, the will was regarded as the intellective appetite, a hunger for the products of the intellect.  After all, you cannot want what you do not know.  (And because the knowledge is hardly ever perfectly certain, the will is hardly ever perfectly determined, and hence is free.)

You go, Will!

But we live now in the age of the Triumph of the Will, and more often, the triumph of the appetites, and we want what we want when we want it.  What do we want?  You name it.  When do we want it?  NOW!  There are times when this is understandable, when a man who hates evil is impatient for its crushing.  But it is not uncommon to find that people desire things that are contrary to the intellect.  Adam wants to eat lots of chocolate and not get fat; but the universal verdict of the intellect is that that ain't gonna happen, no matter how much he might "love" chocolate.  And we intuit the nature of sin as a defectus boni when we say "Too much chocolate is bad for you."  (Bad?  How dare we make value judgments!)  So we have a society that eats when its hungry and is afterward shocked, shocked to discover an "epidemic" of obesity in its midst.