Working in the Rain

Working in the rain - now there's a blog post title likely to throw you off right from the start, isn't it? In the city, when I am on my way to or from work, I try to avoid rain. I hide under bus shelters, or if walking, under bridges or in building lobbies. The feeling of wet work clothes is like a sentence - you are hereby condemned to spend two hours in stiff, uncomfortable clothing that also happens to be wet!

But at the cottage, I'll happily work or play outside in just about any weather. I'm not sure why I have such a compartmentalization. But varied weather is not only a perfectly natural thing we have come to view as an opponent, it is quite beautiful. What artist can mimic the rain? There are few paintings that can equal the dappling of ripples on the water, poems whose eloquence outspeaks the thunder, or musicians who can improve on the pitter patter on the ground.

This afternoon, my brother in law hauled logs out of a friend's woodlot in the rain. The dampness pressed through my clothes, and my knees began to ache. But in no way did I mind. There's plenty of time to be dry.

Leave the Light On

Two nights ago, I began re-recording the song I wrote that named this blog. I finished it last night. If you want (and have the ability to) hear it, this is the link.

Click here, then click 'hi-fi' on the Leave the Light On line.

Just Imagine

You are standing in a meadow, and it is a bright sunny day. The meadow is full of wildflowers, and in the marshy area, there are sedges - but other than the sedges, no grass. A shadow passes overhead, and you look up - wings, a glider perhaps, passes across the sun and crosses into the nearby hills. At the forest's edge are raspberry bushes, beside the tall oaks and cedars. Over past the marsh is a meandering stream that opens up into a lake, and the bleached and gnarly stumps that stick out of the water indicate that the stream is only a few years old at most.

From the forest you hear the insistent frenzy of singing from songbirds. The songs are not the ones you know, or are used to, but they are birdsong, with all of the enthusiasm and busy-ness of the genre. Over by the lake, you see a bird on the water. Pulling out your binoculars, you look - it is a loon, you think, but not the species you are used to; it is a little smaller, and the colouration is slightly different. But it is a loon, because it lets out the shrill but open throated song you know so well. Looking back at the forest, a small group of animals walk out from the thinning woods and stop by the raspberry bushes, eating.

They are dinosaurs - Edmontosaurus to be exact, and you are standing in a meadow of the Late Cretaceous, 65 million years ago.

The planet Earth has been many different worlds in its history. Some of these worlds would be as alien to us as Mars. Others are only slightly different from ours, with much we would recognize amid strange and wonderful things we can only imagine.

I like to imagine these worlds, and stand in them. If only I literally could.

Those little cheap keyboards...

...they sell at Radio Shacks and what have you are pretty cool for kids. They have a number of built in songs that, when you play them, show the notes on the keyboard to play if you want to play them. My daughter has basically taught herself one fingered piano in a week - she only knew chopsticks and Mary Had a Little Lamb a week ago. Now she can play half the songs they keyboard has in it. I had to learn the organ out of a book when I was a kid!

'Elvis' of woodpeckers sighted after 60 years - Science - MSNBC.com

An extinct bird isn't really. I can think of no better news than to hear that an animal thought gone is not so at all!

'Elvis' of woodpeckers sighted after 60 years - Science - MSNBC.com

When I'm a Boy

On the way to the bus stop today, a woman was walking two young girls to the bus. I overheard the woman say to the one girl who was walking beside her, "You've done your good deed for the day." The little girl repeated excitedly, "I saved him! I saved him." She then ran up ahead to the other girl, and told her that she had saved two worms by scooping them off the road, and laying them in the grass.

I smiled.

As I've grown older, I observe a little less. I have a little less innocent charm. I spend a little less time in wonder at the possibilities of each new morning. I don't rush out after school to hop on my bicycle and ride down the tenth line road as far as I can go before being late for supper. But I still, whenever I see a worm on the road, pick him (or her) up and set him back on the grass.

As long as I remain in some small way a little boy, my world stays big and new.

L33T hacker nukes himself

I love it. The super l33t hAcK3r uses his g33k skills to.... delete his own hard drive.

Hacker deletes own hard drive

Thomas Merton's prayer

My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going.
I do not see the road ahead of me.
I cannot know for certain where it will end.
Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think that I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so.
But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you.
And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing.
I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire.
And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road though I may know nothing about it.
Therefore will I trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death.
I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.

(from Thoughts in Solitude.)

Early this morning, I am not sure exactly when, my consciousness arose enough from sleep to not truly awaken me, but enough that I have a memory of it after really getting out of bed. As I thought the kind of scattershot, disconnected things that I always think when barely conscious, I noticed the pitter patter of rain on the window. "How could I not notice that?" I asked myself.

I love rain at night in the spring. When you go six months without hearing that sound (snow falling does not really make any sound), it is a gentle, soothing sound - the renewing waters sent forth by the sky to clean winter's silt and debris away, and to gently care for baby tulips and crocuses.

The out-of-control kid

I've been watching this saga of the handcuffed five year old, in which the mother is threatening to sue the police and teachers for the incident. I'd like to know what responsibility the mother feels she should be taking for this situation.

From what CNN says, this is the second time that this girl threw a hairy fit such that the police had to be called. Now, personally, I think the culpability of a five year old is minimal. I know from my own kids that children instinctively test the boundaries of what they can get away with, and it is largely the role of the parent to firmly set those boundaries.

But that does not appear to have happened here. The educators' first reaction, quite reasonably, was not to call the police - it was to call the girl's mother. A parent should accept the responsibility of being the child's primary caretaker. But, and I don't have the details, in this case the mother was apparently unwilling to do this (I don't know if calling the father was an option, also.)

There's no question that police with handcuffs is a failure - a failure to get the situation under control in a less traumatic manner. But without access to the parent, I'm not sure what the options were - the teachers appeared to be very patient with the girl, but unwilling to stand down. And when the police did arrive, the use of handcuffs permitted the girl's restraint in a way that minimized the girl's ability to harm herself.

That's surprisingly important. From the few hyper-fits my daughters had when they were younger, I can tell you that an out of control kid is definitely a danger to themselves. If they throw a fit near stairs or in a bathtub, there is real risk that a kid can hurt his or herself. And a kid throwing a fit is incredibly strong - the police, in handcuffing this girl, used as little force as they could in my opinion. That's a lot of the reason why they handcuff adult apprehendees - to prevent them from harming themselves.

This is a very unfortunate situation. However, the parent in this case had a responsibility to act in the role of the child's primary caregiver. Her failure to meet this standard, in my opinion, should prevent her from benefiting monetarily from a frivolous lawsuit concerning a situation only she had the power to prevent.

Sunrise on the gulf of Mexico

This is a photo I took of sunrise in Panama City Beach in February. I still haven't taken all my photos off the camera. Still on their are some weird shots I took of the Detroit airport tunnels.

Slow news days

You know its a slow news day when a leading story is about how a woman who doesn't speak English botched the words to something she was singing in English.

SignOnSanDiego.com > Sports -- Anthem fell flat, then she did, too

But the good thing about slow news days, is that a day passed without a meteor hitting the Earth, terrorists attacking the moon, or the Lincoln squirrel getting shot again! :-) And any day when less bad stuff happens is a day to be grateful for.

I read today...

... that people who are bombarded by the techno-glut of information that is the modern McLuhan Global Village are suffering from drops in IQ - up to ten points - as a result of it. The study asserts that people who get to do tasks in isolation are more efficient by far than their paged, cell-phoned, and emailed colleagues.

And yet in Reaching Out, Henri Nouwen writes, "But what if our interruptions are in fact our opportunities, if they are challenges to an inner response by which growth takes place and through which we come to the fullness of being?" Nouwen would have us walk our solitude in a far more challenging way than someone like Thomas Merton, for the isolation of a monk and hermit has to make it easier? How do we find our innermost self in a world that would have us be "passive victims of a world asking for our idolizing attention"? (Nouwen's words again.)

I think I'm beginning to understand Nouwen's solitude - finding a way to make our inner voice accessible more frequently helps us reach out in a better way. And for it to be a practical aid, this solitude must be available in everyday life. But I am finding myself so distracted by life and its constant demand for my focus even as it changes its demands at an increasing pace, that I can't seem to give this inner voice more than passing attention amid the disruptions. Merton may have had it right to some extent - getting time away, just to catch up with one's own thinking may be the only realistic way to make any sense of it all.

There is a facility in Ottawa run by nuns called "The Upper Room" - it is a place where you can check yourself in for a period of time such as a weekend, and spend the period of time reflecting, meditating, or simply being quiet. I find the idea very appealing. I think my wife could benefit greatly from it too. Perhaps someday...

My wife starts a new job tonight

My wife got a job working at Timmy's. (For non-Canadians, Tim Horton's is a donut chain founded by a hockey player of the same name who once played for the Buffalo Sabres and the Maple Leafs. It has the same cachet and affection in Canada that Krispy Kreme has down south.) She's working the graveyard shift, just part time.

When I told my co-workers about this, they looked at each other and said, "Insider!" (As though the ticket to free coffee had just been found!)

Spaz Attack!

My niece - a walking accident - is a logger. Specifically a tree marker, someone who goes through the forest and identifies the right trees to drop. She has also worked as a firefighter, brush cutter, and forestry desk jockey.

She's done the latter only because she is a complete spaz. I worry, actually, because she finds trouble like nobody I know! Her latest incident, and I don't know if I can bring myself to even believe this - a grouse (yes, basically a small chicken of the woods) came out of the forest, attacked her, and took off with her snowshoe. When she chased after it, she tripped over the bird and broke her ankle, which she has had to have rebuilt with pins. What next - rabid squirrels, killer woodpeckers?

Happy Passover Irina

to you and your family.

Leave Silver Hitched

One of the differences between men and women is in how they listen in conversations. that, at least, is an assertion I read in some magazine article devoted to this endless topic. They had a theory about the way conversations work. The writer asserted that when men converse, if one of them raises a problem, men treat this as a call to action - the problem must be solved! And she asserted that when women raise a problem in conversation, they raise it in order to be listened to.

I don't know that I accept such a generalization point blank, because if my wife mentions the garbage, I am pretty sure that is a problem she wants solved, right to the curb. :-) But I think there is a kernel of truth to it, for as I read the article, I looked at how I reacted to some of conversations I had with my wife. She's kind of an angel of mercy, rescuing her friends from their troubles. But she finds it frustrating in the same way television angels probably never do - they don't always want to be rescued, or if so, they have conditions about how they'd like to be rescued. Whenever she would try to tell me about these problems in the car, I'd always propose solutions, she'd get frustrated with my ideas, and go silent. I was always perplexed.

Since reading that, whenever she talks about these things, I listen, echo back what she's saying, and don't try to saddle up to the rescue. Angels already know what they need to do. They just need someone to listen from time to time.

Way, Truth, Life

"When its your time, its your time." This is a favourite saying of my brother in law. People mistake this thought for despondency, but it isn't. He simply means by it that there are specific things we are each supposed to accomplish in life. Those who are called away from it early are those who, in however short or long a time they had, accomplished it.

I mull the idea over in my head from time to time, wondering how this applies in cases where someone's life is cut short by another, or in war or natural destruction. But therein lies a difference - my brother in law trusts it to be true, whereas I have to put my fingers in its wrists and side. I struggle to trust in providence all the time. But I think... I think, despite my difficulties, on balance, I do.

I go to prepare a place for you and Where I am going, you cannot follow sound like incongruous statements. But they are written on the same page. As difficult as it may appear, it will all work out wonderfully - for no reason other than that it is meant to.

Silver linings

Today is a gloomy and grey day, but there is something to be said for gloomy and grey days. We saw a big old harlequin duck out on the lake this morning. Later, two seagulls picked away at a huge fish on the rock in the bay. An otter swam by, and then swam under the dock. I tried to lure him out, but he wouldn't budge. This afternoon, we saw the season's first loon.

My brother in law checked the water temperature - forty degrees. Needless to say, the year's first swim will not be happening today - not with me, anyway!

'Seinfeld' inspiration offers soup line

Picture this - you walk to the frozen food section, bow your head, respectfully shuffle up to the fridge, pick up a container labeled "crab bisque" and, without hestitating, shuffle down to the cash register.

'Seinfeld' inspiration offers soup line - Apr. 22, 2005

That's how I plan to buy them! :-)

My brother

My brother managed to come down with appendicitis a day after arriving in the Bahamas, and had to have his appendix removed. Man that he is, he did not want to go see the doctor, my sister in law had to force him to go. Thank God for travel insurance! Anyone who can spare a prayer for my brother, well, I'm much obliged. :-)

In happier news, My Dad had his book published. I have an autographed copy sitting on my desk. This book was a long and involved project for me too. Two years ago, I turned the manuscript into a typeset paperback and gave it to my Dad for Christmas. Between my Mom and I, we helped convince my Dad to live out his dream, and become an author, and now he is one!

Information junkie

From my last post, from all the news articles I link to, I think I probably don't have to point out to any great extent that I am an information junkie. I've got to have a book, a newspaper, or a magazine with me at all times. I actually feel a kind of burning discomfort if I go into a fast food restaurant to eat without a newspaper to read.

To some extent, the modern age has turned us all into information junkies. My daughter is always looking up pictures and information about whales. My elder daughter spends a lot of time reading about certain art forms that she is interested in. My wife has a healthy disdain for information gluttony, but even she got caught up in all the Papal funeral coverage of a few weeks ago. Anyone with the Internet has at their fingertips access to more information than was contained in the entire library of Alexandria. Heck, just check out WikiPedia!

So what did people do before all of this recorded and written knowledge was available?My guess is they spent more time learning it for themselves. When we go camping in the summer, I can't help but notice how unskilled some campers are. They don't know how to keep raccoons out of their garbage, how to start a proper fire, or even much about how to set up their campsite (other than the tents, which come with instructions.)

We've become very disconnected from practical experience. Even though apprenticeship is still a part of many college educations, a lot of work these days is done on the computer.

I notice that in the business I am in. Printing was one of the last things to modernize. Even though I am a computer programmer, I joined the industry just as the revolution took hold. I learned how to burn metal plates, blueprints, shoot PMTs, and make rubies. These techniques had been how printing had been done for a century - Henry Luce would recognize it. I knew, as programs like PageMaker took hold, why they did things the way they did - the angles that the hatching of line screens took, because I'd worked with the analog technology PageMaker mimicked.

Now the print business is full of people who know all about line screens, can tell you the math behind the line screen angles in a PostScript or PDF file - but don't have any clue, would not have a clue - how to operate the equipment on which these concepts were invented. When I go to Upper Canada village and see the pretend-19th century woman in the print shop, I understand the letterpress she uses to print posters and the town newspaper.

I wonder how many of today's newer people would? Have we given up all our practical knowledge for a universe of book knowledge?

Free newspapers

In this city in the last three weeks, a furious newspaper war has emerged, between free newspapers. I kid you not.  The first entry was called  Metro, and it has been around in European cities for a while, and was introduced to Toronto last year. Arriving about four days later was something called Dose, a cross between a tabloid and an alternative paper (featuring the politics of the former crossed with the hip factor of the latter.) Dose is, in fact, so hip, that the paper meshes with a website where you can start a blog, a blog that the paper may quote the next day. The interactivity between the printed version and the online content is what makes it stand out.

Of course, the local tabloid, the Ottawa Sun, is peeved. They point out, quite correctly, that CanWest is behind both of the free dailies. But the Sun dropped their price down to a quarter anyway. The free newspaper war has been a plus for me, however. I always have something to read on the bus, whether I happen to have a quarter on me or not!

I hate losing posts!

Stupid blogger.

Last night, I was at an event where some guy with just a guitar was singing, and.... I am not sure how to characterize my reaction. He was a good and confident singer, had picked really good songs, and played his guitar using interesting chords, and a stylish rhythm that made the one instrument sound like a whole band was going at it. He sang with great emotion at times. But at times he seemed excessively overwrought, singing breathily and huskily at times where the song just didn't seem to call for it.

Now of course this is all taste, right? But it is hard to listen to music through any veil other than one's own tastes. Mine were definitely developed in the pre-Mariah era. I wish I were not so critical. Being critical helps me with my own music, but I often worry that it gets in the way of just being able to enjoy music. How nice it would be to listen to a singer without over-analyzing everything!

USATODAY.com - Pope Benedict XVI gets e-mail address

USATODAY.com - Pope Benedict XVI gets e-mail address

So I wonder how many offers for Rollexes, free laptops, and home mortgages his Holiness has received? ;-)

The men who risked Canada

A former cabinet member, MP, and ambassador, Alphonse Gagliano is quoted as saying that Paul Martin is "risking Canada" by having the nerve to have justice Gomery investigate the hijinks of Martin's predecessors in government, the Chretien cabinet.

National Post

Frankly, this accusation takes some nerve.

Brief background: Chretien nearly lost Canada in a 1995 referendum in which Quebec narrowly avoided separating from Canada. Chretien, frightened by the near-cataclysm, introduced a program to spend money on advertising Canada in the province of Quebec, to boost the Federal government's profile. An investigation called the Gomery inquiry is looking into charges that all this money was spent on friends, hacks, and Liberal party sponsors.

If Gagliano and other members of government had more scrupulously overseen the public's own money as it was being spent, the separatists wouldn't even have an issue to trumpet. By making Canada look like a corrupt banana Republic instead of an open, transparent society, the previous government has given the separatists all the ammunition they'd ever need. The current government would not have to hide anything (presumably what Gagliano wants them to do ??), if the Chretien government had not had something to hide in the first place!

Pope Benedict

Faith is exactly what the word implies - faith that life will unfold in the way it is meant to, even at those times when it does not seem as though that is what is happening.

I cannot say that Pope Benedict is exactly what I was hoping for, or that my heart fluttered with joy when I saw the CBC news in the airport with the white smoke, and the smiling Bavarian.

But I sincerely believe that what God wants cannot be easily thwarted, nor are we always privileged to know what it is that God wants, or how God's will may be served. Perhaps my next challenge in faith is to live under the oversight of a chief pastor with whom I have a certain unease. I had hoped that John Paul II's successor would be, like him, a man of pastoral inclinations, a warm and generous hearted man.

But perhaps the office's own charisms work their way on the men who hold the office. Perhaps Benedict XVI has other qualities than simply being "God's Rottweiler", and that these will now come to the fore. Perhaps it is no small coincidence that it is a German Pope who will be presiding over World Youth Day 2005 in Cologne, Germany this summer, just as John Paul II's first international excursion just so happened to be Poland. Perhaps Germany needs a Pope.

As for me, humility is a treasure to be nurtered and cared for like a garden. Perhaps this Pope's papacy will be like minerals for that garden for me - how to accept what God wants, even when His will differs so greatly from my own. And who knows? After all, his Holiness took the name Benedict XVI, and not Pius XIII.

I am flying to Toronto today...

...for work. I don't get home until sometime after nine tonight.
That's a long enough day that I am going to have to remember to bring
something to read!

and the spirit of God moved over the waters (Genesis 1:2)

In the beginning was ... a perfect liquid? - Science - MSNBC.com

Wild horses could not drag DNA

Betterhumans > Cloned Racehorse Theoretically a Thoroughbred

The technique, apparently, provides a way to let breeders continue a horse's lineage even after they've neutered him. Given the known damage to Dolly's DNA, such a thing strikes me as rather half-baked...

ABC News: Black Smoke from Vatican Signals No Pope Chosen

ABC News: Black Smoke from Vatican Signals No Pope Chosen

I guess I didn't get enough support in the first round of voting. ;-)

Abstraction, Loneliness, Solitude

In the latest edition of Discover, a woman named Temple Grandin, an expert in the design of animal holding pens for cattle processing facilities, describes the differences between the way ordinary people think and the way animals think. She has a particular insight into this, because she is autistic, and according to her, the visual and pictorial nature of autistic thinking, the lack of abstraction, has a great resemblance to the way animals think.

Grandin is continually surprised at how much ordinary people do not see. Humans do not see the whole picture, but rather filter images and sounds through a layer of abstraction – taking the world in through a layer of meaning and symbolic thinking, and not directly observing the world. “Normal human beings are blind to anything they are not paying attention to,” She says.

But human urbanization has made it worse. Our urban world is already an abstract concept (that foundational act of civilization, farming - is the result of abstract thinking that conceptualized more efficient ways of gathering food.) As a result, our abstractions are perceiving only earlier abstractions. We are becoming further removed from practical experience with the world that we emerged in.

This, in a funny way, ties in with someone else I’ve been reading – Henri J. M. Nouwen, the renowned spirituality writer. He writes that there are two poles that one movement of our life keeps revolving between – loneliness and solitude.

He notes the irony that most of us suffer from loneliness at some point in our lives, but also crave solitude. And as I read this, I reflected on what Grandin had said about practical experience with the world.

When do I tend to feel the solitude I seek in my life? When I am in nature, bonding with the world that is (rather than the world I filter out.) Perhaps by cutting through the abstractions that make us truly alone in our heads, and meeting nature and its maker out where it truly can be found, I achieve aloneness… without loneliness.

Here at the Sandbanks on Lake Ontario (where I am visiting my parents this weekend), sitting by the rocks, watching the fish ducks out in the water, I meet my God in solitude.

A Giant Smorgasbord of possibility

It bears pointing out two things about my Blog. I am sure my readers know it, but I feel better putting it on the record.

1. The Blog’s point is not proselytism. I am not trying to make Catholics out of readers. I am simply trying to reflect my experience as I live it. My religion is not what I call a path per se – it is simply the evolutionary product of an inordinate amount of thinking and reflecting. My road could only have led me to the place and time I am at. That’s the wonderful thing about individual lives – they are so varied in so many tiny details, that meeting people is like viewing a giant smorgasbord of possibility. Who knows where the road goes?

2. I am not out to put down Baptists. My apologetic of Friday regarded a comment made by this specific pastor. I would never respond to one man’s invalidation of my faith with the invalidation of another. I have always hoped to inspire anyone reading to see in my life some echo of their own life, and reinforce any right suspicions they have about the decency of the one painting the canvas of the universe. I could never do that by wrapping an entire denomination in a blanket of bigotry, and I hope I do not leave that impression.

Conroy pit sunrise

Conroy pit sunrise
Posted by: leavethelighton.

This is the park where my daughter and I walked the other day. This is actually a sunrise, and not a sunset, but you get the idea. :-)

Who would hack these guys?

w.bloggar is the best thing to
ever happen to blogging. It is a tool that you could use to blog from
your desktop, offline, without having to log into the blogging
websites, open up a web form, and type laboriously into some web page
(whose onscreen keystrokes are a mile behind yours, yes, A, I hate
that too!) One of the coolest features of w.Bloggar is that it let you
post the same post all at once to multiple blogs on different blogging
hosts - that way, if you were indecisive about what host you wanted to
be your final resting place, you could dither on it and post to all of
them with one mouse click!

Well, today their site says they got hacked. Who would do such a thing
to someone doing a public service like providing a free blogging tool.
All that cool free stuff on the Internet will go away if people don't
start playing nicer...

Baptist pastor disputes need for papacy

This particular anti-Catholic Baptist pastor says, "We're all priests if we're saved" as an argument as to why people should convert from Catholicism to... well, I suppose his denomination.

Baptist pastor disputes need for papacy

Now why would I even care what some bigot says, or get defensive about it, you might ask? I think the answer lies in the amusement factor.

The funny thing in is that his comment, "We're all priests if we're saved", is actually an important part of Catholic theology. In Vatican II's Lumen Gentium, the laity (ordinary people) are called the "common priesthood", and the council states, "The apostolate of the laity is a sharing in the salvific mission of the Church. Through Baptism and Confirmation all are appointed to this apostolate by the Lord himself."

Now if I'm not very much mistaken, that's just a hoity-toity way of saying the exact same thing as Rev. Franklin, no? :-)

Overwhelming proof...

...that birds descend from dinosaurs. Ornithologists famously resisted the idea for decades, despite certain paleontologists' (like John Ostrom) insistence on the matter from the fossil evidence. I think perhaps pride got in the way - if you like and are interested in birds, you don't want these... newcomers, these bone-diggers having insight into your turf, nor do you want your feathered friends playing second banana to some monster from a Spielberg movie.

Nonetheless, the evidence has pointed this way for a long time, and the case began to get nearly irrefutable when find after find in China happened to be small theropod dinosaurs covered in what could only be described as feathers!

Now word comes that dinosaurs produced eggs in exactly the way birds do, and in a way that no living reptiles (even the related archosaurs, the crocodilians) do.

The Globe and Mail: Reproductive riddle unscrambled

Cyberpope (Part ii)

• September 2, 2005 In the interests of building on the legacy of John Paul ii and fostering amity between Catholics and Jews (and because she was the first announced supporter of my Papacy), I override the authority of the local Jesuit ordinary and appoint Irina dean of Fordham. From this point forward, she would be free to call the profs into the office and call them on the carpet for any marks below... well, I'm not a micromanaging Pope. That's up to her...
• September 11, 2005 My second encyclical Bin Laden Grossi Idiota Lardum Est (Bin Laden is a Big Fat Idiot) is meant to be a crowd pleaser over in the US, because I am advised I have to loosen the Peter's Purse-strings. Some of my Cardinals complain that my papacy thus far has been lacking in its spiritual dimension. I promise to hit one out of the park on my next encyclical. Cardinal Ortega sighs, mumbling, 'they were never this strange when we only picked Italians...'
• October 2, 2005 I release my inspirational autobiography, Crossing the Threshold of Pope, in which I go on for two hundred pages about how prepared a dozen years of computer programming has left me for sheperding a billion sheep in the Catholic fold. I suspect my audience to be a little underwhelmed, but I get to see Cleveland on the book tour.
• November 12, 2005 I decide to have Neil Young beatified for his birthday. My auxilliary bishop explains to me that he has to have been credited with a miracle in order for me to do this. I point out one - he actually sings on key and has his guitar in tune for 'Harvest Moon.' So they canonized him instead.
• November 24, 2005 Deciding to one-up President Bush's annual Thanksgiving pardoning of a would-be Butterball, I try to have Joaquin Navarro announce that I am going to administer the Sacrament of Reconciliation to a turkey. The Curia talk me out of it. How was I to know they didn't baptize the turkeys?
• December 2, 2005 I wake up. What is Bobby Ewing doing in my shower?

Cyberpope

In 1059, Pope Nicholas II decreed that any baptized male could be elected Pope by a conclave. That means there is a theoretical (and I mean theoretical in the way one might hypothesize about real blue flying monkeys) that the coming conclave might elect me to be the next Pope.

Now, since you are not likely to ever witness this in your lifetimes, here is a record of my papacy.

• April 20, 2005:My election as Pope. I don the vestments, take the name Fredus Flinstonum I... no scratch that, I must be somewhat more reverent... Augustine I in honour of my favourite theologian.


• July 25, 2005: I preside over my first World Youth Day as Pontiff, with the distinction of being the first Pope to play his guitar with the choir instead of celebrating Mass. All the kids buy my first album release as Pontiff, entitled "The Pope Kicks Amy Grant's Butt."


• August 14, 2005: My first encyclical, Veni, Vidi, Vici. Its actually an encyclical about the ethics of golfing, but because my latin is so weak, I decide to quote Caesar.
• August 25, 2005: Using my new powers of speaking infallibly Ex Cathedra from the chair of St. Peter, I proclaim that my elder daughter is required, on pain of excommunication, to babysit while I take my wife out for our anniversary to a nice Chinese restaurant.

Here's something scary....

Not an ISO 9002 organization, I'd wager. This gem comes from All Blogged Up.

all blogged up: Drum Roll Please...

Famous ancestors

Do you have ancestors that are reknowned? Take for instance Tom Jones - I heard on the radio once that tests done on the DNA of Otzi, the neolithic iceman found frozen in the Alps showed that Tom was one of his descendants.

In my case, I have a connection to the Beach Boys song, "Sloop John B." The ship in question was called the "John B" because its captain was a Welshman named John Bethell. That man is my ancestor.

I remember excitedly telling a friend of mine about this, only to discover that her ancestors were slaves. Possibly ones brought over by MY ancestors! To this day, she continues to insist I owe her money. :-)

Delete

This is an improvement on the usual treatment of spam, the delete key. I kind of like the idea of the "FR33 V1AG8A N0W!!!" emails landing the perpetrator a free trip to the rock-busting farm. :-)

CNN.com - Judge: Prison time for spammer - Apr 8, 2005

Purpose

If God is easy to find in the quiet and silence, He is not so easily found in the chaotic and noisy. I have been incredibly shorthanded at work this week, and I have struggled to keep up with the workload.

But God is there. I do not confuse my inability to sense His presence with His actual absence. During busy weeks, it simply means having to make the extra effort to go out and find Him.

One of the ways that I do this (and I am blessed to be able to do this) is to go out into the forest - we live near the Greenbelt forest of Conroy Pit. Tonight my daughter and I walked out there to the glow of the setting sun. We wandered through the crabapple trees and my daughter climbed them as the sun began to cast itsorange glow about. Then we wandered into a field as the sun went down and the sky was daubed with orange and pink. In the afterglow we wandered into the pines, and she climbed one of those, too.

As we walked home in the dusk, she asked me, "What's my purpose?"

"I don't know," I answered as truthfully as I could, "but one day, you'll surely know."

"Does everyone have a purpose, one that's the same?"

"To live," I answered. "That's everyone's purpose. Not the whole of your purpose, but a large chunk of it. it is an incredible thing to live... to hear, to see, to touch, to smell... but above all, to be able to do those things and make sense of it."

We walked quietly home.

It is a wonderful thing to go out looking for God, and to find Him. Not just in the sunset and woods, but also in the seeking meditations of a daughter and her father.

Ouch!

I am sore. Very sore. I've spent most of the day splitting a pine my brother in law downed. This is a huge, huge tree we're talking about here. I split about two chords of wood. And splitting pine is not like splitting hardwood, such as maple, oak, or birch. This is more like splitting a very dense sponge. It takes a lot of work.

My back, my shoulders, my spine... they're all killing me. I spent time in the hot tub earlier. That helped for a while. But now I am sore again. And I have to do all of this again tomorrow!

I put up a new music site, at SoundClick.com. It is the same tunes I have over at mp3.com.au, but SoundClick gets more people tuning in and listening. I'm hoping to get some of the people there to provide feedback. I am terribly insecure about making music; I just can't judge for myself whether I've done a good job or not...

More evil than Satan himself!

I have been using Google ever since it brilliantly hatched the brilliant ploy in late 1998 to hook up the words “More evil than Satan himself” with the search result “Microsoft.”

In the years since, Google has only gotten better and better. They added image and news searching. They bought DejaNews and converted their huge Usenet database into “Google Groups”, and then found other stores of data such that now the entire history of one of the oldest pieces of the Internet can be searched.

I've posted to Usenet. In fact, I began posting to Usenet ten years ago, and as I've alluded to before, I'm not terribly proud of my history there. I got into angry discussions in a number of technology groups, and posted things I wish I'd never said. It is not that I believe I was on the wrong side of the issues (I was one of the lumber cartel spam fighters of NANAE, tinc), but I have come to accept, if imperfectly, that discretion is the better part of valour, and that having good character is more important than making good points.)

Thanks to Google, all of this stuff that no longer reflects who I am is there for all the world to see, at no more than a click of a button. And who doesn't like to click buttons? This leads me to my topic – Google stalking.

Google stalking, like vanity searching, has become a common phenomenon, and hard to resist doing – when you meet interesting people, especially interesting people who have interesting activities, you look them up on Google to see just how interesting that might be. I remember the first time I did it, and I certainly didn't think I was stalking. A friend of mine told me he published a full glossy magazine as a hobby. Some hobby! I thought. So I looked up the magazine, saw that he'd done press interviews, and looked those up too. A few mouse clicks later and before I really knew it, I was looking at Usenet posts. As a result, I now know a lot more about this fellow than he probably realizes (just pedestrian stuff, but I know he'd wonder how I knew, if it ever came up in conversation.)

I realized at this point that this was a lot more than I'd want people knowing about me – the golden rule. I decided after ruminating on this that I would not do it anymore. No googling people up just because I knew them, unless I know they are OK with it.

You see, I know this other fellow who makes the most realistic model railroads you can imagine – he even makes the little houses with scaffolding, timbers, and bricking. He told me I could look him up on Google, and see the photos.

Honest!

Daughters

....of a certain age seem to have company over all the time. I'm a very private person - one who never gets privacy!

I've always cherished a certain amount of solitude. Fortunately, with the good weather coming and daylight savings here, the means is at hand. On Thursday night, my younger daughter and my wife go off to girl guides, and as the weather gets nicer, I spend that time walking on the trails of Pine Grove Forest. I sometimes ski it in the winter, but I really enjoy watching the world come back to life.

I wish I had done that walk tonight, but it was grim and drizzly. But how I'd like to be on my own with my thoughts at times.

The funeral tomorrow

I read an interesting article just now about a more personal Pope. A man can do great things - for instance help lower the iron curtain - but it is still the small things he does, the personal warmth, that makes him worth memorializing. His photographer likes to say that "he became a child with young people."

So why are four million people trying to crowd past his bier? I think it may be that this was a man completely unafraid. He had in his youth seen the worst things humanity had ever put on offer, and yet wrote a book on it called "Crossing the Threshold of Hope." It was John Paul's refusal to be afraid, either in the face of communists, kings, or even infirmity and old age, that gave him the holiness people felt certain he had. And people in this world are afraid and maybe they are hoping this man's fearlessness will rub off on them.

As for me, I am basking in the CNN coverage. I begin to realize the real value of belonging to a religion that is ancient; the religion has a culture. I realized this as I saw a red robed Cardinal singing in Italian, for I knew what he was singing - the ancient litany of the saints; even though I do not know any Italian, I knew what was being sung.

Gomery partially opens the door

A somewhat sheepish Justice Gomery opened some of the testimony Brault gave, owning up that publication bans are a violation of constitutionally guaranteed rights. So I guess that means we're mostly not a banana republic. :-)

The Globe and Mail: Gomery partially lifts ban on volatile testimony

Sony invents real-life Matrix

At last... Mr. Anderson.

Techtree.com India > News > General > Sony Patents a Brain Wave

Canada's death row - PittsburghLIVE.com

It certainly is not my business to tell other countries how to conduct their health care. Different countries value different things, and what may work for one nation often doesn't for another. As a result, I have no prescription for the challenges facing health care in the US. I am wise enough to know that translating the model Canadians use to the US probably just wouldn't fly.

That said, obviously some newspapers definitely feel they have things to tell us about our health care system....

Canada's death row - PittsburghLIVE.com

Excuse me? If we're on "death row," how come Canadians have significantly better longevity? (With a harsher climate?)

CBC Ottawa - Debate over new passport rule at U.S. border

I remember when the two countries were, well, almost not two different countries. On a trip to Niagara Falls with the debating club in 1981, I walked across the entire length of the Falls - the border guards hardly noticed me.

Due to an agreement between the three countries, you'll need a passport to go from any of Mexico, the USA, Canada to any of the others, starting in 2008. So much for going to the US for milk! :-)

CBC Ottawa - Debate over new passport rule at U.S. border

HoustonChronicle.com - Star Wars fanatics line up at wrong theater for May debut

Now I am an admitted Star Wars nerd. But there are limits to my geekiness. First of all, I will not be lining up, in this age of phone ahead convenience, to get a seat.

But even if I were to, I would certainly line up somewhere that the film might actually be showing!

HoustonChronicle.com - Star Wars fanatics line up at wrong theater for May debut

Gomery Inquiry

The judge holding an inquiry into a Canadian Federal government scandal called AdScam has issued a publication ban on the testimony of a former executive of a company called GroupAction.

Of course, in this Internet age, publication bans are completely ineffectual, and just as with the last attempt by the Canadian judiciary to squelch dissent or information freedom (the Bernardo trial), Gomery has completely failed at the task of blocking GroupAction's Brault's testimony. Bloggers in the US have picked up the trail and have claimed to publish the alleged testimony of this man. I of course, as a Candian, am bound by this publication ban and can't point in any way at, or link to, any testimony Brault may or may not have given. But I do find the reaction of Gomery telling.

He is, of course, furious at the leak onto the web. Is he raging at his judicial impotence? Perhaps. But I can hardly imagine that he would be surprised. When the Bernardo trial began in the nineties, the publication-banned testimony was leaked all over the then much-smaller Internet, too. For Gomery to be unaware that he was facing this tells me that the legal profession needs a good whack with a cluestick - you can't hide the truth anymore.

The book thing

OK - here is my take on a quiz about books, and of course, my answers.

1. What book would I like to be?

I haven't fantasized about being a character in a book in a long time, but I was always particularly enamoured of classic stories with shipwrecked people marooned on islands. (I've always been fascinated with islands because of this, and I take some delight in the fact that my parents now live on an island in Lake Ontario.)

I particularly wanted to be Robinson Crusoe - the book version, not the dreadful movie versions. I often mused as to whether I could turn my brother into Friday. :-)

2. Have I ever had a crush on a fictional character?

Possibly. When, as a boy, reading about Heathcliff and Cathy in Wuthering Heights, I always felt a glimmer of longing, but that may have been because I felt able to insert myself into Heathcliff's bleak soul.

Actually, I felt the same sort of ache with regards to many heros and heroines of the gothic novels, but that may have been more empathy than a crush, per se.

3. What was the last book I bought?

Well, it would have been Star Wars: Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, if I'd had my way this weekend. (Yes, I am a nerd.) The last book I think I bought was The Bible Unearthed by Neil Silberman and Israel Finkelstein, who examine the archaelogical history of the Holy Land.

4. What is the last book I read?

Read, or re-read? I've usually got a few on the go, and I often re-read things I've been into in the past. "Building Secure Microsoft ASP.NET Applications" is one I've been at. I recently re-read Utopia by Thomas Moore, and also Plato's The Republic and Pope John Paul II's Crossing the Threshold of Hope.

I abandoned Edith Stein's The Science of the Cross recently, after getting about half way through it. She had an interesting (if controversial life) and she may have come to earnestly follow the way of St. John, but she certainly never embraced his lively and soulful way of writing! What a dreadfully dull writer she was, even if a saint.

I also recently re-read Christopher Marlowe's play, The Tragedy of Dr. Faustus.


5. What am I currently reading?

This is a problem for me. I read so fast (speed-reader) that I can rarely say that I am currently reading anything. I devour a novel in two hours or less. It took a lot longer for Edith Stein's book, but that's because it was so boring I'd fall asleep a few sentences into it. :-)

However I will soon be reading the novelization of the next Star Wars movie. (Yes, again, I am a nerd. :-)

[Edit]
6. What five books would I take to a desert island?

I am afraid I am quite practical. One would be The Worst-Case Scenario Travel Handbook (which I do actually own.) Another would be the Audubon Field Guide (a version appropriate to the south pacific? :-) I might bring Small Log Homes-Storybook Plans and Advice. To round things off, Robinson Crusoe and the NRSV.

How I became Catholic

This weekend has been a little hard for me.

Irina asked how I became Catholic. And I think I can answer that I only became Catholic in outlook at least (though I'd been attending infrequently for years at my wife's church) as I sat and watched another person's life ebb away to shallow breathing and intermittent consciousness – my mother in law.

For years she had been the matriarch and thread that stitched my wife's family together. The rituals of our lives that she loved became the rituals we all loved. The quirkiness which she embraced in us became the quirkiness we embraced in each other. We used to camp, every summer, on an island without electricity or any conveniences, in the middle of a lake, at her insistence. I remember one time when the grandchildren conspired to fill her tent with balloons while she was sunning on the rocks. They snuck into her tent with a dozen bags full of balloons, and blew them up for hours, until they were dizzy.

She went back to her tent and found all the kids in there, with hundreds of balloons. Laughing, she sat on her cot, surrounded by balloons, posing for pictures so that the moment would be remembered - so that she would be remembered. Then we all laughed as the kids made a raft out of the hundreds of balloons and tied to float on them in the water.

As I watched her life ebb away, I was still surrounded by her spirit. Her family sat around her hospital bed in the same camping chairs in which we'd watched her balloon antics. Her room was filled with visible signs of who she had been, even if now she was no longer capable of being her own sign.

After she passed away, I was asked to sing “Ave Maria” for her funeral Mass – the words are the Latin you see in an earlier post. It had been her favourite hymn. As I sang, I knew I was destined for this journey. Just as we were living signs of my mother in law's many years of love, I now realized I could see in the lovely rites and sacraments of the church the visible signs of who perhaps God might be.

I'd struggled with religion for years. I spent most of my denominationally-Protestant but actually-agnostic life in a twilight zone. I never really believed, not the way I perceived belief. And yet, I never was able to fully doubt either. I still hold onto the vague echo of my earliest memory – standing in my crib, wondering who or what I was. I remember having a palpable sense of my own newness, and pondering in a surprisingly philosophical way what I was, how I got there, and what I was meant for.

I never had an answer for that question. I remember being attracted by the joyful faith of many people that I met, but how could I come to swallow it? I knew beyond any doubt the world was ancient. Strange creatures struggled into the biosphere, and left the stage over eons of unimaginable magnitude. You cannot explain fossils like Archaeopteryx, Homo Habilis, Hesperornis, Icthyornis, and the trilobites unless you accept Darwin's basic premise that life derives through survival mechanisms from earlier life. How could I be asked to embrace belief if it meant adamantly disbelieving what I knew to be true about the natural world?

Catholicism was my wife's faith, but I didn't adapt it simply to buy family peace. In part, I came to accept it because it was a religion that treats the subject matter of my most probing questions with great seriousness, and yet does not try and shuck off the knowledge we have about the world (remember, Galileo is hundreds of years in the past.) About the question of evolution, the Pope asserted, “Truth cannot contradict truth.” The province of science is the discovery of the natural world. The province of religion is the discovery of purpose and meaning, the very first questions I ever wanted an answer to. True journeys of discovery should be journeys where varying truths meet in unity. In the many rich layers of the Catholic view of the world, great intellectual disciplines unite with great heartfelt devotion and faith, often in the same persons (such as St. Augustine, Thomas Moore, Therese of Lisieux, or Thomas Aquinas.)

My own grandmother had had simple faith. Yet she would listen with tremendous interest as the precocious five year old that I was would natter off arcane facts about dinosaurs, red giant stars, and the Apollo space missions. In the year I studied in RCIA, I began to realize that Catholic faith was like both of us – able to sound out learned discernment about every aspect of the human experience, and yet so very simple that the entire faith and all of its mysteries is contained within these words; “This is my body, which will be given up for you.”

That is why by the time my grandmother's funeral came, two years on the heels of my mother in law's, and I came to sing in her small country church, I was filled with far more peace about it. I was united to her, for I had finally, in all my complex seeking, the sifting through cosmology, paleontology, phislosopy.... I had finally found simplicity. I selected one of the readings for her funeral, “Lazarus, come out!” Here in a nutshell was my faith – that somehow, beyond any hope, we are called. My first questions in the crib had been, “Who am I?”

And the very simple, answer, the one I'd spent a lifetime searching for was simply this.

You are mine.

"Well done, good and faithful servant..."

"...Enter into the joy of your master." (The Parable of the Ten Talents)

My memories of the Pope

When the Pope was in Ottawa, he presided over a Mass in Lebreton flats, right behind my house. seven hundred thousand people were gathered back there. I watched from my window, and had a better view than most of them. I remember to my chagrin (I wasn't Catholic at the time, so I did not know better), ascending the altar structure one night a few weeks later and pretending to be the Pope giving a homily in front of my friends.

However, I was not completely disrespectful. I also stood beside the Rideau canal a day before the Mass when the Pope went by in an aquatic version of his Pope-mobile, a Pope-boat. His deft nod to my city's culture (downtown life revolves around the canal) taught me something valuable that I also learned in Cursillo - the importance of meeting people where they already are. Our archbishop, Marcel Gervais, recalls that whenever he met the Pope, the Pope always reminisced about that boat ride.

In Memoriam - His Holiness, Pope John Paul II

Ave Maria, gratia plena
Benedictus tu in mulieribus
Et benedictus fructus ventris tu, Iesus
Sancta Maria, Mater Deo
ora pro nobis peccatoribus nunc et in ora mortis nostrae.

Pater in manus tuas commendo spiritum papa.

Easter octave/Friday

Today is part of the Easter octave, which makes it Sunday today. However, it is also Friday, the day that weekly commemorates the death of Jesus. As a result today is a day of both the death and ressurection.

His Holiness the Pope is at death's door today. Were he to pass on today, I would take some comfort from the day that it happens to be. The Pope has carried his infirmities as a cross, in emulation of Jesus. This day is a sign of both our mortality, and the extraordinary salvific sign of Easter. It is difficult to imagine the church without this man.

I'm listening to TV wags speculating on who will run the church if the Pope remains incapacitated. That is just silly - the Catholic church is an agglomeration of individual "particular churches" (what we call dioceses.) It is largely run by the heads of these particular churches, the bishops. With a 2,000 year legacy of canon laws, theologies, rites, and sacraments, the church could run for a decade without an active papacy. The Roman diocese even has auxiliary bishops who can provide government for Rome's diocesan affairs. This stuff is a complete non-issue.

My prayers are simply with and for the man himself. He has given so much of himself - he has helped to defeat communism in Eastern Europe, fight for peace and justice for the poor, and above all has done much to bring good relations between Catholics and Jews. He has no small legacy.

Constantine (spoilers)

I went to see the movie Constantine yesterday, the comic book adaptation that stars Keanu Reeves as an exorcist who once killed himelf and learned that the visions that plagued him were demons from Hell. The flick is a lot deeper than most comic book movies, the action a veneer for the deeper question, "Who then can be saved?" As I write about this, below, I have to talk about some of the film's details. If you like your films completely unspoiled, read no further.

The movie's necessarily bad Catholic theology got me thinking; a lot of marginally Christian (and particularly Catholic) folks often form ideas about their own belief from the stretched, convoluted, or downright wrong ideas that fiction conveys about religious beliefs (often as a Deus Ex Machina - necessary changes to a religion to prevent a story from otherwise breaking.) Constantine is one example. The Da Vinci Code is another, with its claim, among other things, that Christianity was essentially invented in Nicaea.

One of the biggest disservices these fictional stories do to Christian theology is to recast it as Manicheeism - a 4th century sect who believed Good and Evil were the equal and opposing forces that make up the universe. In Constantine's case, they all but come out and recite a Manichean creed; God and the angels have a territory (Heaven) that they are constrained from leaving, and Lucifer and his demons the same (although curiously, 'Lou' comes to Earth at the end of the film.) The only beings that can turn in an appearance from these realms are "half-breeds," half-human angels and demons who are never quite explained.

Needless to say, in traditional Christian theology, neither evil nor the devil are equal rivals or counterparts with goodness and God. Evil is defined as the absence of good, as the result of choice, and the devil is basically just a cast-out angel, the tempter of The Book of Job with the temperature amped up a notch, a figure who is in misery for his own choices, and whose misery would like company. He certainly represents no equal to God, the sole source of life, creation, and existence, and the goodness that permeates it.

The other thing the film does is misrepresent the church's stance on suicide. In one scene in the film, a woman whose sister jumped off a building is arguing with a priest about giving her sister a funeral, which the priest mercilessly declines to do, citing suicide as a mortal sin that has surely resulted in her going to hell. Constantine, as a one-time suicide attemptee is also hell bound by the same regulatory restraint. Only a redemptive act of pure selflessness would give him a hope of beating the rap, so to speak.

I don't know about other Christian denominations, but the Catholic Church does not think this way. The Cathechism states "We should not despair of the eternal salvation of persons who have taken their own lives. By ways known to him alone, God can provide the opportunity for salutary repentance. The Church prays for persons who have taken their own lives."

That may be the biggest disservice the film does; how many marginally Catholic filmgoers who may someday lose a relative or friend to suicide will not even approach the church for funeral rites because of films like this? It would be truly unfortunate for people to think they have no access to the church's compassion because of some misrepresented theology in a movie!