Humor

There seems to be some confusion about what certain emoji actually mean. Gawker brings us word that a TV station in Philadelphia described the emoji pictured above as being for a “high-five” of two hands slapping together, although it’s clearly supposed to be two hands held together in prayer.

How do we know this? Well, look at it: The angle at which the arms are bent suggests a medi tative position while the sun rays surrounding the hands suggest some sort of divine power at work and not a mere hand slap.

And most tellingly, Gawker points out that both of the thumbs on the hands are on the same side, which is usually not something you see with high fives where people slap hands using their dominant hand — in other words, if two right-handed people are likely to use their right hands to give one another a high five, then their thumbs will be on opposite sides when their hands come together.

We bring you this announcement because if you mention to a friend that your mother is sick in the hospital and they send you this emoji, you shouldn’t interpret it as a high five but as a prayer for her health. Knowing this might save a lot of friendships in the coming years, people.

source

These originally Japanese ideograms have been incorporated into the Unicode character set. The interesting thing is that they have descriptions, but no unified pictograph to go with them. Thus how they are rendered will vary.

The praying hands is called “Person with Folded Hands”

Leave it to Google to render it “Jabba the Hutt at Prayer” or whatever the heck that is.

In the First Book of Samuel, in the very famous scene between King Saul, the (dead) Prophet Samuel, and the Witch of Endor, the lesson to be learned is, poking about with things that are dead and buried is never a good idea. Unfortunately, I couldn’t help but be reminded of this story in checking out the Vatican’s new web site today. If you thought it was a mess before – and oh, it was – you ain’t seen nothing yet. I don’t know why the tech department at The Holy See is trying to conjure up the spirits of web designers from 15 years ago, but they’ve succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.

Funny and unfortunately dead-on commentary on the Vatican’s new site design.

William Newton of Blog of the Courtier goes on to describe just some of the unfortunate design decisions which you [should read][newton

Unfortunately things have not changed since I wrote the Lost in the Holy See parody post back in 2005.

Lovers of parchment wallpaper will be thrilled that they have kept this in their design. Those who enjoy scrolling marquees will also be thrilled with the Pope’s tweet’s been scrolled across the screen.

Those nostalgic for 90’s web design will find much to like. For example documents still use table elements instead of CSS for layout. The only thing missing is a footer saying “This site optimized for Internet Explorer and screen size of 1024 X 768.” and perhaps an animated gif (encyclicals going in-and-out of a mailbox).

Take a look at the icons they use all over the Vatican’s site for social sharing. First off they actually spaced the icons using an underscore character. Plus the icons used have very poor resolution and the Google Plus icon is really bad looking. The Catholic Church has been doing icons for more than a millennium, surely they could do a better job with the modern icon. There really is no excuse for the icons used across the site such as the video icon they use.

The up arrow appearing at the top of documents on the Vatican site is really amazing. When you click on it, it goes to the top of the page. The fact that this arrow appears at the top of the page makes it super useful!

If you had selected English and on a page in English, doing a search with no results gives you this helpful message.

Suggestions:

Assicurarsi che tutte le parole siano state digitate correttamente.

Provare con parole chiave diverse.

Provare con parole chiave piu generiche.

Hopefully this year on Pentecost I will get the gift of tongues!

As Billy noted:

Language: The default language setting for the site is “Italian”, and fair enough, since the people who maintain it are in Italy. However, virtually any site can be coded to detect the browser’s country of origin when a visitor lands there, and will adjust the language setting automatically. Why isn’t this possible here?

Why indeed?

Now if you were a normal person and saw a hyperlink that said (video) you just might think clicking it would display the video. What actually happens is that a video in wmv format will start to download to your computer. This is a format developed by Microsoft that will not play in any browser including Internet Explorer without downloading a plugin. I guess my only surprise is that their videos weren’t in RealPlayer format. Even if you were saddled by bad video format decisions in the past transcoding, even on a large scale, is just not that hard.

What is so exasperating is that there is really no good reason for this state of affairs. The Vatican run site news.va is fairly decent design-wise and their icons are much better. Sure a serious redesign of the Vatican site is certainly an intensive task. Yet even the minor refresh they did is simply amateurish. Unfortunately the state of many official Catholic sites from the Vatican on down to diocese and parishes shows the same amateurishness. Although I have seen great improvement of diocesan sites over the years.

Note: “This site optimized for Internet Explorer and screen size of 1024 X 768.” is still used on the web site for a parish close to me. Their web site is embarrassing.

So what does the non-photogenic book lover do to have their own fad? Well I suggest they post a #shelfie. This really should be a thing and the world would be a better place.

I was thumbing through one of those catalogs targeted towards Catholics that has everything from books to furniture for parishes.

These catalogs can be fun to look through depending on just how much kitsch they contain. This catalog had a little bit of everything and I ran across this item.

So is the message “I Thank God For You” intended for the phone?

Besides making Steve Jobs cry by using a stylus on an iPhone it made me think of something. About the fact that there is hardly any Catholic tech kitsch. For example I can’t think I ever have seen a specific Catholic themed case for a phone or a tablet. Looking for something in this category I did find items at cafepress.com and zazzle.com. These services provides items such as t-shirts, cups, and some phone/tablet accessories where people can setup a store with their own designs that get imprinted.

Now I wouldn’t mind having a super-pious case for my phone or iPad. The lock screen on my iPad has an image of Saint Isidore of Seville. Some lists describe one of his patronages as being for programmers. So I wouldn’t mind having a case with his image at all. Having holy images is a nice reminder and for us moderns obsessed with tech a good place is on the very devices we are so often looking at.

Still there is a difference between holy reminders and more badly designed junk.

The Divine Mercy image where Jesus is holding your camera lens.

This Galaxy S4 cover is even more unfortunate unless the new iconography for the The Eye of Providence is a camera lens. The LED flash as a semi-Hindu touch.

First off not exactly the best depiction of St. Therese along with the missing corpus. In this case the camera and flash make for an interesting attachment for a veil, but the Trinitarian aspect is heretical.

This one is at least kind of interesting with its anime styling.