My favourite Swede should not be left out. And he does not have an identical twin.
By the way, he drew my caricature on the bottom right of the blog. Clever boy all round. But stubborn: he would not do a full version of the theme to Cheers. :-/
They wrote superb TV themes once upon a time:
Can we get these Swiss lads attached to the papal Swiss Guards?
AWE……SOME!
Some time ago I watched someone’s parody of Carly Rae Jepsen’s catchy pop ditty Call Me Maybe. I have been paying the price since as my various web services, remembering this, keep suggesting other versions of the song. For it seems there are ten gazillion videos of parodies, lip synchs, spoofs and homages to the song, by all sorts of people. Just search in Youtube if you have several hours to kill.
So when I saw in the list “Call Me Maybe on Bottles”, my interest was piqued and I expected to see bottles lined up in a row played by some child prodigy. But no – there was cool, and there were Danes. It seems the Danes of today have turned over a new leaf since the time of their forefathers a millennium ago. I mean 50% of all Copenhageners cycle to work, in part because you can do so without risking death. The place seems so clean and modern and tranquil. If someone needs a companion when visiting Denmark, take me!
So it seems these Danish lads have made a name for themselves beyond this classic. But enjoy this one – it makes me smile every time.
Just …. so …. clever. And the work in emptying all those bottles. Dedication.
Well, you could knock me down with a feather. The wonderful 1catholicsalmon has generously put me up for a Liebster Award! I am beetroot with blushing. Do go read that soothing blog if you have not already: it is gentler than mine, and reflects balanced Catholicism at its best.
The Liebster Award seems to be a way for small-scale bloggers to recognise and encourage other small-scale bloggers. It is an award that carries responsibilities, and not some mere frippery. So on to my happy duties.
The requirements for accepting this award are:
1) Post the Liebster award graphic on your site. Done
2) Thank the blogger who nominated the blog for a Liebster Award and link back to their blog. Done, but inadequately I fear
3) The blogger then writes 11 facts about themselves so people who discover their blog through the Liebster post will learn more about them.
(i) I am 44 years young (yes, I know – who am I kidding?).
(ii) I am Australian by birth, but have dual nationality by law.
(iii) I was once a Jesuit, though not for long!
(iv) I can eat almost anything but offal.
(v) My favourite job “in the world” was with Police Communications Branch in Sydney. Still miss it…
(vi) Somehow I have managed to study in 3 different countries. What a world…
(vii) Uncomfortably for a monk, I am a night person.
(viii) I take sugar in coffee and tea. I am an unreformed Benedictine…
(ix) What frightened me most when first preparing for priesthood was preaching.
(x) I am a Pope Benedict XVI Catholic (in case you haven’t guessed!)
(xi) My guilty pleasure is the works of Frederick Rolfe, Baron Corvo – Hadrian VII is amazing!
4) In addition to posting 11 fun facts about themselves (oh dear, they were supposed to be fun… now they tell me!), nominated bloggers should also answer the 11 questions from the post of the person who nominated them.
Not 11, but only pedants keep score!
5) The nominated blogger will in turn, nominate 9 other blogs with 200 or less followers (We’re guessing for our nominees) for a Liebster award by posting a comment on their blog and linking back to the Liebster post. This is tough: I can guess the obviously big blogs but some of the other ones can have more followers than might seem obvious, and some of my choices have already been Liebstered. Anyway…
6) The nominated blogger will create 11 questions for their nominated blogs to answer in their Liebster post.
The knives are out already for the new Pope. The Vatican is having none of it.
Viva il Papa!
Accusations against Pope Francis relating to his time as Jesuit Provincial in Argentina.
Our internet is near dead so I am using a phone to blog. Strange it feels.
I have also been busy instructing a confirmand so this is yet to sink in.
What strikes me? A Jesuit pope. It is unprecedented especially given the folklore precluding a Jesuit pope.
He is 76, only a year younger than Benedict at his election. Youth has not appealed. What does this reveal of the cardinals’ thinking? A short term pope? So was John XXIII!
Francis? Surely after Francis Xavier, the great Jesuit missionary and ideal saint for the New Evangelization. By choosing a new name is he signalling he is to be his own man?
He is non-curial, and Jesuits are adept at confronting the Curia. Reform is in the air.
He is Argentine. Expect that country to harp even more on the Falklands.
Viva il papa!
More when I can use a real keyboard!
Pax
Earlier this year I remember hearing someone complaining about the British monarchy, that it was paid for doing not much at all by the British taxpayer, blah blah blah.
Please look at this lovely little animation to see a simple yet compelling defence of the monarchy on purely economic grounds… by an American. By all means object to the monarchy on ideological grounds, if you must. But let’s hear no more fallacious economic whining on behalf of the poor British taxpayer… at least when it comes to the monarchy.
Mind you, to the ideological objectors I still say
While trying to find a graphic of a monk I could use on the Douai Abbey web site I stumbled across a wonderful blog, the Catholic Illustrators Guild. It is superb. Such a wonderful variety of religious art. Some examples…
From teenage Gaelen Mibeck, a lover of Lego, Tolkein & Chesterton:
A monk
Fr Brown
From a more mature-aged John Howley:
Monks at prayer
St Francis weeping himself blind over the Passion of Christ
A modern illuminator, greendaze55 (!):
Mini-missal 1
Mini-missal 2
A graphic designing young mother, who etches, A R Danziger:
A Carthusian monk
There is something there to suit most people’s tastes, at the Catholic Illustrators Guild .
Pax.
There is a wonderful (free) site, FlightRadar24, that overlays on Google Maps a real-time overview of what planes are in the world’s skies. It even has apps for your phone, so you can point at a place flying overhead and see what flight it is, and where it is going. It is just wonderful, and quite mesmerizing. When you click on a plane’s icon, a panel appears with the flight details, a picture of the plane and sometimes even trivia about the flight in question. If you click on an airport’s icon you can see information about the airport as well as details of incoming and outgoing flights.
Below is the view of England from the Midlands south and a part of western Europe at 3.15pm today. Click it to get the full effect. I do not think it counts military flights. Still, it is dizzyingly busy up there!
The recent tragedy at Newtown, Connecticut, for which senseless is a vastly inadequate adjective, has prompted a louder questioning of America’s worship of the gun. One US senator is seeking to reintroduce the ban on assault weapons. That this will certainly be highly contentious is hard to fathom: what can ordinary citizens possibly want with assault weapons?
As news and commentary develop it gets more disturbing. The shooter’s mother, sadly murdered by her son before he went on his rampage in the school, was herself, to judge from news emerging, a mentally unstable person with paranoid tendencies and an arsenal of weapons including the assault rifle used by her son at the school. It is clear that police checks and licencing laws are wholly inadequate in preventing disturbed people from accessing weapons of a frightening type. An argument often used is that an armed population is able to defend itself against such people. Yet this has proved time and again to be manifestly untrue. One enterprising chap has posted a world map of school shootings since 1996. Of the 78 incidents, all but 17 occurred in the USA. So much for an armed nation able to defend itself against psychopaths. In fact, an armed nation has armed psychopaths.
It is worrying that a civil constitutional right is accorded almost dogmatic status by many right-wing or otherwise orthodox Catholics in the USA. As statistics show, such as that outlined by the map of school shootings mentioned above, the USA is dangerous beyond what it should by rights be, given its economic prosperity and stable democracy. Gun ownership in the USA far exceeds that anywhere else in the world. The nation with the second highest rate of gun ownership is Switzerland. There is a good reason for that: the population at large constitutes a military reserve to be activated in the event of invasion. Even so, ordinary reservists are issued ordinary rifles, and since 2007 ammunition is no longer kept at the homes of the reservists save for the minority who make up the rapid reaction force. No school shootings were recorded in Switzerland since 1996. There are socio-cultural factors at play, of course. One must surely be that the Swiss do not worship the gun.
A slogan often employed by the pro-gun lobby is that guns do not kill people, people kill people. But psychopaths with guns kill far too many people than they would with a knife. Another slogan employed is that criminals and psychopaths will always be able to access guns, so why bother restricting ordinary people’s access to them. But this is an argument more suited to the question of arming police than of arming citizens Adam Lanza had been an ostensibly ordinary person; he had easy access to guns and assault weapons; the result was tragic beyond words. One advantage, beyond the obvious ones, is that by restricting access to guns by statute, is that a criminal or psychopath would have to go to some trouble, and would have to commit a criminal offence, in order to obtain a gun. This increases the chances of such a person being caught before he commits a more serious crime such as we witnessed in Connecticut. And though no one will want to mention it in the circumstances, Adam Lanza might be alive today, quite apart from his victims, if he had not had such easy access to high-powered firearms.
To be honest, I really do not understand how a Catholic can defend, on Catholic grounds, nearly unrestricted access to high-powered firearms by ordinary citizens. It is beyond me.
May the Lord receive the victims of the Connecticut shooting, young and old, quickly into his Kingdom; may he comfort those whose Christmas will be one of grief and emptiness; and may he have mercy on Adam Lanza, a sinner.
