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Tuesday, April 19, 2005
Have merci 
| | I trust the francophones among you will be able to parse this, occasioned by my speakage at Les Blogs next Lundi. |
Two degrees and falling
Congrats
White smoke for a black pope?
| | Oh well: It's Ratzinger. Pope Benedict XVI. |
| | CNN is calling it a "breathtaking, staggering choice." Why? I wonder. He's the senior cardinal, Dean of the College, named by the late pope, whom he served as ..."doctrinal officer" or something? Whatever. Seemed more than predictable. Predicted, in fact. The crowd in St. Peter's Square is happy. Makes great TV. |
| | Bad luck for women, gays, etc. But no surprise. |
| | And so the Catholic church accelerates its turn toward authoritarianism, hostility to modernity, assertion of papal supremacy and quashing of internal debate and dissent. We are back to the nineteenth century. Maybe this is a necessary moment. Maybe pressing this movement to its logical conclusion will clarify things. But those of us who are struggling against what our Church is becoming, and the repressive priorities it is embracing, can only contemplate a form of despair. The Grand Inquisitor, who has essentially run the Church for the last few years, is now the public face. John Paul II will soon be seen as a liberal. The hard right has now cemented its complete control of the Catholic church. And so ... to prayer. What else do we now have? |
| | It would be hard to over-state the radicalism of this decision. It's not simply a continuation of John Paul II. It's a full-scale attack on the reformist wing of the church. The swiftness of the decision and the polarizing nature of this selection foretell a coming civil war within Catholicism. The space for dissidence, previously tiny, is now extinct. And the attack on individual political freedom is just beginning. |
| | All less mamby than the multihanded stuff being said on CNN. |
| | Most sadly of all, as occurred even at our own diocesan convention last weekend, gay and lesbian persons are spoken of as though they are not in the room. A statement that gays and lesbians should not be hated or murdered does not atone for a lack of any recognition that gay and lesbian persons' experience in Christ is generative of any theology that must be taken into account by the majority or that their experience in any way legitimately serves to criticize the status quo. |
| | Paul is a brilliant writer and speaker who has written many books. He even turned me on to computing way back when he was a member of the Osborne Users Group in New York City. |
| | Long before that, we were roommates in high school, where he was named Class Wit. One of the funniest guys I've ever known. We haven't talked in years; but I still find myself wondering what he makes of the Vatican's latest. |
Fkr?
| | What's the difference between "Flickr is getting a massage" and "Flickr is currently being worked on?" Could the latter be a new serious Yahoo message, rather than the old casual Flickr message? |
| | I guess some of my new photos made it up there. Not sure. |
| | The service is back up now. I just put together a "set" which was promptly "deleted". Still figuring this thing out, I guess. |
| | Oh. It wasn't deleted. (Then why the message? Never mind.) Here it is. |
So to speak
| | A lot of people use the terms "bespoke" and "made-to-measure" interchangeably. They are mistaken. |
| | 'Bespoke' is actually a term which dates from the 17th century, when tailors held the full lengths of cloth in their premises. |
| | When a customer chose a length of material, it was said to have "been spoken for". Hence a tailor who makes your clothes individually, to your specific personal requirements, is called "bespoke". This is unlike "made-to-measure", which simply uses a basic, pre-existing template pattern, which is then adjusted to roughly your individual measurements. |
Blog characters, on the other hand...
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