Other

Here are some interview questions for Eric Williams (aka Funky Dung) at Ales Rarus.

1. Being that your pseudonym Funky Dung was chosen from a Pink Floyd track on Atom Heart Mother, what is you favorite Pink Floyd song and why?

2. What do you consider your most important turning point from agnosticism to the Catholic Church.

3. If you were a tree what kind of, oh sorry about that .. what is the PODest thing you have ever done?

4. What is your favorite quote from Venerable John Henry Newman?

5. If you could ban one hymn from existence, what would it be?

I will do four more interviews, so to be interviewed – leave the information in the comments.

His answers are available here.

Playing the interview game that has recently sprung up, Elena of My Domestic Church asks:

1. Jeff, I can’t get a take on how old you are. Are you older or younger than me (I was born in the waning months of the Eisenhower administration!)
Probably your younger since my birth occurred nearer to the start of Eisenhower’s second term 1958 (Same as Mark Shea and Dave Armstrong.)

2. Were you the class clown in school?
Now why would anyone ask that? Seriously though the answer is yes. Bad jokes in my grade school were coined "Miller jokes." Like many who are somewhat shy socially I used humor as an ability to deal socially. Being a class clown you are either immediately rewarded with laughter or a groan.

3. Who or what has inspired your wonderful sense of humor? What comedians or satirists do you enjoy?
As far as humor goes I take after my father who is very funny and extremely created. For many years he worked doing children theatre as an actor and puppeteer. The plays were loosely scripted and relied mostly on improvisation so no two shows were exactly the same, though if a joke or bit worked it would normally be in this loose script. I spent a lot of time with him at work especially during the summer and was surrounded by other very talented and funny people. Conversations often included punning wars where one tried to top the other. I remember one time being at a restaurant with my father and some of his friends where the walls were decorated in shingles. I told them I had never been in a shingles bar before. I was also involved in a lot of theater during the summer and as practice for improvisation we use to do a game called one, two, three. First one person would go on the stage to setup the situation, the second person then enters to continue what the first person started. The third person then goes on and tries to end or complete the situation. This was wonderful training since we were always trying to find ways to one up the other person or to totally change around what they had started and the results were often very humorous.

As far as comedy goes I am a traditionalist which means W.C. Fields, The Marx Brothers, and Abbott and Costello. I started doing impersonations at a young age and I believe Fields was first. I played W.C. Fields in a school play and not only have I dressed up like Groucho but I even performed Abbott and Costello’s classic "Whose on first" routine. So my humor definitely goes towards the corny. I also love the English sense of humor such as Monty Python and most anything that Rowan Atkinson does. My youth was also filled with the usual assortment of Mad Magazine, Cracked, and latter the National Lampoon (PJ O’Rourke is still a great satirist). I have also always enjoyed song parodies especially since I use to always listen to the Dr. Demento Show. I am less impressed with most modern comedies. Adam Sandler fills me with the same reaction as looking at a Thomas Kincaid painting after seeing one from Da Vinci.

4. How did you achieve the technical skills for all of the unique things you do on your blog? Are you self taught?
I have been a technical geek from childhood and am largely self-taught. I have always loved science especially growing up during the first Moon missions and have been technically adept. I liked taking things apart and tweaking them and sometimes it actually still worked when I got done. I built electronic kits at home and later wrote programs in Basic on a school computer long before the advent of Personal Computers. I joined the Navy largely because of my interest in electronics and for years worked as a technician where I got to troubleshoot and repair aircraft "black boxes" which I really enjoyed. I loved developing troubleshooting skills and then confirming it when replacing the right transistor, resistor, etc. Unfortunately when I made First Class and later Chief they took me away from what I so deeply enjoyed. By that time though the first IBM computers were out and I ended up doing a lot of programming with them. The same sense of accomplishment and intellectual troubleshooting skills I was able to apply to programming. I started doing some HTML programming back in 1996. I use to have a web site at geocities called "Rage against the Cash Machine" which was a freeware site. I maintained a database of freeware programs and I wrote code to generate the site totally from the database. I mainly did this as an exercise to prepare myself as I left the military.

As far as graphics skills go I do what I am able to do despite the fact that I can’t draw. But this can be no surprise since I write almost daily even thought my writing skills are pretty week. I have played around with graphic programs for years starting on my old Commodore 64, Amiga, and later various graphic programs for the PC. I wish that I could truly draw images because I have had many ideas that I couldn’t fully flush out because of this lack. Even before my blog I use to combine humor with graphics. When I was stationed at Whidbey Island, Wa we had a CO who wanted every bodies haircut to have a tapir in the back and not blocked. I visualized the image of someone having a taper on the back of his head and related it to another sailor with actual graphic skills. He drew the image for me and we posted it on our bulletin board. I got a good laugh when I found it later duplicated throughout the base and later even at the base barber shop.

5. What do you do when you are in a quiet place or a serious situation when something strikes you as funny?
I have been known to totally reverse a serious situation. Once when attached to my first squadron I had to go to the ready room to be interviewed by my division officer and some other officers from my squadron concerning my evaluation. They asked me questions about education, going to school, taking onboard classed etc and most of my replies were in the I haven’t yet got around to it variety. One of the officers quipped "So you belong to the schools of procrastination?", I told him I had not yet got around to registering for it yet. They all started cracking up and it was very difficult to complete the interview after that.

Quiet places also lead me to humorous musing and unfortunately I have to admit coming up with some of my parody ideas when reading the Divine Office or praying in front of the Blessed Sacrament.

Christopher Blosser at Against the Grain has some further reflections on rock music and conversion in reply to my previous post. I just love how a post that includes both references to Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd and Cardinal Ratzinger. He brings up something that I have wondered myself.

So, parting question for the readers: Is there something intrinsically wrong — as Ratzinger seems to suggest — in the form of rock itself, and not just the lyrical content? Is rock capable of being "morally rehabilitated" once purged of morally objectionable lyrical content, or is there something intrinsically wrong with the form of rock itself (as religious critics like Cardinal Ratzinger, and secular critics like Alan Bloom, might suggest)? And does the validity of the Cardinal’s critique extend to other genres as well (hip-hop, techno, industrial, et al.)?

So go over there and weigh in on this question. I remember Father Rutler bringing up the subject before (definitely in the Ratzinger camp on this) quoting the views of Aristotle and Plato. This view is represented here by Fr. Basil Nortz. Though I still listen to hard rock I have found that when I am reading Catholic blogs, especially the more spiritual ones, that I have started to listen to Classical music – especially Baroque. There was a disharmony (puns always intended) between hearing Ozzy belt out "Crazy Train" and reading some of the deeper reflections on Christ and his Church. I found I could mediate better while listening to Classical music. I still like rocking out when I am busy coding at work or doing chores. I don’t have the intellectual ability to analyze the issue of syncopated rhythms and their effects on our emotions and whether rock or some other forms of music are intrinsically wrong or whether it is a more subjective matter in which we should be prudent about. I hope it is the former and not the latter because I am not quite detached enough to give up Geddy Lee or Robert Plant. Like Christopher even though I like rock and especially the guitar I also don’t want them to have anything to do with liturgy. Maybe it comes down to the same reason I now listen to Classical music when reading blogs.

Previously Don at Mixolydian Mode posted a survey about professions and the music they listened to and it nailed mine.

Good news, NRO’s finally has RSS feeds.
The Corner
TKS
David Frum
Beltway Buzz
Articles

Though they need some work. Since Clicking on "The Corner" in the feed takes you to a page not found (it contains one too many slashes.) TKS feed is still called Kerry Spot and if you click on the title it doesn’t take you to TKS but to NRO’s main page instead. Though in both cases individual article URLs are correct. Anyway it is a step in the right direction. Now if they could only do something for the formatting of TKS. There is this little known technology called "Bolding" that could be used to differentiate Jim Geraghty’s post titles from the rest of the post. For me I find it annoying to not easily tell where one post ends and one post begins.

Update: I had emailed NRO about the feed problems and they emailed me back that they fixed them.

I am not much of a TV watcher anymore and no I am not going to say I only watch the History and Discovery channel (channels added to networks so people could admit to watching TV). I mainly watch things such as Cartoon Network, Sci-Fi’s channel series, Monk, House and a few others. I did start watching Fox’s 24 this year figuring that it would be good escapist-adventure fair that I could relax to. Unfortunately now you just can’t seem to escape the glory of euthanasia as increasingly preached by Hollywood. Last night’s episode had a mother who was sick and within range of a possible meltdown of a nuclear reactor. She tells her son how much better it would be for her to basically kill herself rather than to suffer through radiation sickness. Now this was no real plot point and the planned suicide to avoid suffering could have been eliminated and still left the plot tension of the son wanting to save the mother. It is bad enough when ole Dirty Harry starts making message movies advocating how heroic it is to kill people who are suffering. The gospel of utility has been preached in Hollywood increasingly over the years. That pulling the plug is shown as a heroic act that sadly must be hidden. I watched an old Peter O’Toole movie the other day called Lord Jim. In it one of the helpers of a group of men raiding a village for a treasure gets injured. They then discussed what they called an act of compassion by shooting the man and said that this "Compassion was bad for him, but good for us." This reminded me of a survey a couple years back where family members were much more open to euthanasia then people who are terminally ill. I am not sure how it is heroic to putting an end to someone’s life and not having to be present or to visit that person anymore. To me it seems much more heroic to spend time with your loved ones as they die. I know how difficult it was for me to see my mother ravaged by cancer and spending time with her just before she died. As myself and many others have mentioned is that the word compassion actually means suffering with not the end of suffering.

The gospel of utility has been working for quite a while to attack both the start and end of life and whatever in-between it deems as not useful anymore. Where we are not defined by our dignity as given us by our creator in his image and likeness. We are instead seen by more of a ‘what are you doing for me now" attitude. They declare that the developing child in the womb as not yet having a fully developed intellect can thus can be killed. The terminally ill person with either declining physical or mental abilities can also be killed. Anybody not fully functional in this utilitarian view can be dispensed with.

Terry Schaivo can have court after court decide that she can be simply starved to death because here husband says that is what she would have wanted. In the last week there was a case of a woman who woke up after twenty years in a coma. These examples of people coming out of a coma have been used as reasons why Terry Schaivo should not be killed. Yet I say even if Terry Schaivo never becomes fully conscience there is still not reason why her life should be ended. Her dignity as a human person is not based on her current medical state.

In a post-Christian society it is no surprise that the message of redemptive suffering seems to be either lost or ignored. The surprise is that it also has been lost by many Christians. The name it and claim it view of theology sees no purpose in suffering. Too many see suffering as either punishment or a sign or prayers not answered. Now as Catholics we might hear the phrase "offer it up", but do we really understand what this means? This is one of the reasons I so love the Holy Father’s witness to the world. Catholic truths are always needed though at this time the message of redemptive suffering seems to be needed all the more. The Pope and his witness is the necessary corrective to the disposable view of the sick and the elderly that our culture engenders. I remember a story that Blessed Mother Teresa told of going into hospitals and telling those within about redemptive suffering. That they could offer their pain as a prayer for others. The people she spoke to were so happy that their suffering was not useless and in fact could be useful. This is the true heroism to go beyond your own pain and to think of others who are in need.

The beginning of the Pope’s apostolic letterSalvifici Doloris starts with:

1. Declaring the power of salvific suffering, the Apostle Paul says: "In my flesh I complete what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the Church"(1).

These words seem to be found at the end af the long road that winds through the suffering which forms part of the history of man and which is illuminated by the Word of God. These words have as it were the value of a final discovery, which is accompanied by joy. For this reason Saint Paul writes: "Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake"(2). The joy comes from the discovery of the meaning of suffering, and this discovery, even if it is most personally shared in by Paul of Tarsus who wrote these words, is at the same time valid for others. The Apostle shares his own discovery and rejoices in it because of all those whom it can help—just as it helped him—to understand the salvific meaning of suffering.

The Pope has moved from writing about redemptive suffering to living it.

LRS of Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam let me know about an article at Catholic Citizens called "Get your sash on! We’re goin’ to Mass!" This article is actually a compilations of ideas from my reader Bruce C and my own sash suggestion from a previous post.

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. (AP) – Links to places of worship are on the Web site of the Super Bowl Host Committee. Religious literature is being passed on streets to football fans. Several NFL players, instead of partying with Playboy bunnies and hitting nightclubs, are professing their faith at churches.

In a town often said to be the buckle on the Bible belt, churches are taking unprecedented opportunities to get the gospel out to the 100,000 people who are in Jacksonville for Sunday’s Super Bowl.

Just a year after Janet Jackson shocked the world with her halftime wardrobe malfunction, religion has moved into locker rooms and the NFL is giving its blessing to faith-based celebrations, such as concerts featuring Patti LaBelle and other events organized by various ministries.

"You are in town for the Super Bowl," Pittsburgh Steelers receiver Antwaan Randle El told the crowd at Friday night’s Super Bowl Gospel Celebration concert, "but you are here because of God."

The marriage of football and faith is creating a religious fervor unmatched in the River City since a four-day Billy Graham Crusade stop brought a quarter-million people to Alltel Stadium, site of this Super Bowl.

And while football’s biggest weekend is about the scene for some players, it’s about the spirit for others.

"Football gives me a platform," said Patriots tight end Ben Watson, who played in one game this season before a knee injury ended his rookie campaign. "There are people who would listen to me because I play the game of football. It gives me an incredible platform to influence people good or bad."

Added Oakland Raiders tight end Roland Williams: "Football is just something I do. I am definitely focused on a personal relationship with God."

NFL spokesman Brian McCarthy said the Jacksonville Host Committee proposed faith-based activities "to reflect the spirit of the community" and noted it is the most religiously oriented Super Bowl venue ever.

The Host Committee’s Web page lists the church services and addresses for hundreds of area churches, many of which have built events around the big game. The NFL, however, has been strict in deciding which activities to endorse. [Source]

I had to go to an alternate location for Mass today since the church I normally go to is downtown and I definitely did not want to mess with the difficulties of parking downtown today. They have Park and Ride to get to the stadium but not to the church. Seems ironic since it is suppose to be Mass transit. The church I went to normally has solid homilies and the music is a mix of both traditional hymns and OCP standard fair. The only real caveat to going to Mass there is suffering through the asking about people’s birthdays, anniversaries and those who are from out of town. At the end of this he asked for those who had tickets and were attending the Super Bowl to stand up and about ten people did so. He then said that anybody who gave him a ticket would go to heaven, and if not – well you know.

Here was a suggestion I had after last years Super Bowl for Janet Jackson’s malfunction-free wardrobe.

To St. Blog’s Dominican bloggers.

The Smiling Friar
MONIALES OP
Disputations

I trace the beginning of my own conversion to first hearing the proofs for the existence of God (strangely on talk radio) based on what St. Thomas Aquinas wrote. Hearing this didn’t make me go running to sign up at the nearest church, but it certainly knocked the wind out of my atheistic sails and sent me to scramble to retain my faith in nothing.

G.K. Chesterton’s wonderful biography of St. Thomas Aquinas is available online here.

Here is a really good article on Archbishop Burke of St. Louis. Here are some excerpts:

t is that sense of confidence that some perceive as dictatorial.

"He is compelled by the Gospel in his religious convictions," said Monsignor Vernon E. Gardin, archdiocesan vicar general and a clinical psychologist. "Unfortunately, people sometimes confuse religious conviction with emotional rigidity. He is a man of moral integrity and he can’t equivocate on the teachings of the church."

…"You have to pray a lot and be courageous," he said last week. "The fact of the matter is that the church is in the world."

Burke sees his role as protecting the church and his flock.

Like a dog who doesn’t bark when a thief approaches, he said, "a shepherd who doesn’t shepherd is useless."

"Sometimes I bark," he said.

Because of comment spam multiple search engines have developed a net tag to be used. Spammers send comment and trackback spam because the number of references to a web site increases the value of their link. The new rel="nofollow" tag tells search engines to ignore the the link.

If you are a Movable Type user there is a simple plugin that implements this tag automatically into the links from user comments and trackbacks. There definition of simple coincided with mine in this case. Only two files are needed to be copied and no initialization script is required to install them.

Here is a Google article on this.