Stallions! In Space!

A few days ago some people were surprised I thought this was a parody. It is a spoof; a real advert but a spoof.

Space Stallions is a parody. He-Man, Ulysses-31, Thundercats ect ect ect. All rolled into one. Actually its production values are a little too good.

The size of Curiosity

In case you were wondering. About the size of a HumVee someone said.

Why didn't they take the tram?

The Curiosity Rover seems to have missed Mars by a long way and has ended up in Adelaide. Its now heading for Glenelg.

(Loving the name of the reporter).

Ss Thomas Plus et Ioannes Piscator

The Familia Sancti Hieronymi or Family of St Jerome is an organisation from Clearwater in Florida on the western side of the Florida peninsula. It is

…a canonical association dedicated to the advancement of the Latin heritage of the Catholic Church, as it is reflected in the Church’s liturgy, in its sacred music, in its devotional life, in its official documents, and in its propagation of the Faith.

Makes Lord of the Rings look like Dora the Explorer

In 2010 I started reading George R. R. Martin's series A Song of Ice and Fire. It's a calque (as T. A. Shippey would say) on the Wars of the Roses, extremely complicated and highly addictive. I read the whole published series and then re-read them again last year in preparation for volume 5. Like many others, the only reason I haven't finished it is because the author hasn't either.

For some people this is a problem.

What a lovely man

Dinesh D'Souza writes:

He was a bit flustered, and soon informed me that his young son was sick with a chest condition.  He pleaded with me to send him $1,000 to cover the medical bills.  Since George was at the hospital I asked him to let me speak to a nurse, and she confirmed that George’s son was indeed ill.  So I agreed to send George the money through Western Union.  He was profusely grateful.  But before I hung up I asked George, “Why are you coming to me?”  He said, “I have no one else to ask.”  Then he said something that astounded me, “Dinesh, you are like a brother to me.”

George's surname is Obama. He has an actual brother, of whom you might have heard.

Lee Habeeb writes:

That guy again

So there is this new movie called Celeste and Jesse Forever. I think the actor is Jesse Eisenberg, or maybe Michael Cera.

Professor full stop

Professor J. Budziszewski of the University of Texas at Austin writes an occasional column for the online Christian magazine (oh, all right, webzine) Boundless. He generally writes under the pseudonym Dr Theophilus. It was from his writings I learnt the definition "love is a commitment of the will to the true good of another". It might be from somebody else but I heard it first at the feet of Dr Theophilus.

"He used an adjective"

A profanity in Dickens.

Ronald Knox's Particular Dialogue

While he was teaching at Shrewsbury School, Ronald Knox made a number of contributions to its newspaper, The Salopian. One of them was 'A Particular Dialogue' – a conversation between different Greek particles, and combinations of Greek particles, designed to illustrate how they were used.

Dining etiquette in Space

Not a problem that had occurred to me:

Always have a loaner spoon available. In weightlessness, it is easy to lose things. It is not unusual in a group of six for someone’s spoon to have floated off. Having a clean loaner spoon allows for the evening to continue and the conversation to flow. It is rude to give your guest a loaner spoon caked in crud from the last time it was used. The lost spoon is usually found by morning, stuck to a ventilator inlet screen, and your guest will appreciate it being returned.

Governors General's house?

Sir Jerry Mateparae, David Johnston, and Quentin Bryce are Governors General.  In Australia Stephen Brady is head of the Governor General's staff. Taking that together consider the following. Mateparae, Johnston and Bryce club together to buy a beachfront house in Hawaii. Is it the Governors General's House?

Life of the Queen

Fan-tastic.

I love Americans

(The pro-life ones certainly).

I can't quite see this initiative working. But God bless them for trying. How unlike our own "Captain Catholic" shufflers.

Note to Australian readers. Despite the mention of "senators" and "dollars" in this video, this applies to the United States only. Apparently they have dollars and senators too. Yes I know – it is really confusing.

Note to British readers. the Pro-life Alliance (note the hyphen) mentioned is not the organisation for which I used to work.

Tolkien Songs by Colin Rudd

So there's this bloke with a guitar and a webcam. He does straight versions – no parody, no funny effects – of songs from The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. In a few cases they are just sound playing against a black screen.

It's a shame about his politics, he has a song up in honour of Fidel Castro for crying out loud! The songs are reminiscent of the style of acoustic Led Zeppelin, or the Vagabond Crew song "I Was Only 19". Better than a ropy adaptation of a phrase from one of Tolkien's letters.

One Small step etc.

Because you wanted a collection of sounds from NASA.

Fr Cassian Folsom OSB : From One Eucharistic Prayer to Many

A striking omission from Archbishop Annibale Bugnini's memoir The Reform of the Liturgy 1948-1975 is any discussion of the reordering of churches. Striking because things like the demolition of the High Altar in St Patrick's Cathedral in New York, or the Rood Screen in St Chad's Cathedral in Birmingham, are precisely the sort of things that most Catholics noticed as the reform was underway, whether it gave them joy or pain.

Archbishop Bugnini does use building (and, sotto voce, demolition) as a metaphor.

The unpatented tablet

Clearing out some old clippings at work I came across the following article from the Townsville Bulletin reprinted from (I guess) a Colorado newspaper. It turns out that Roger Fidler is a little bit famous on this point. In a nutshell he probably invented the iPad.

…Fidler had a chance to patent his tablet idea way back when, but took a pass. He believed it should be left unprotected so that the entire newspaper industry could benefit from it. Unfortunately, none of the high-powered brains running the newspaper business 20 years ago took him up on that offer…

Voyager 1 and 2 Are Leaving

(This is not an update, I am just very late.)

Given how easily everyone zips around space in SciFi and how many planets they can visit which are 100%  like specific parts of Earth (but not Earth as a whole), it is surprising that no extra-solar planets had been certainly observed until 1992 (an early candidate found in 1988 was not confirmed until 2003) and so far nothing made by man has actually left the Solar System.

Searching the Septuagint

To teach New Testament Greek, you need to have a handle on the Greek of the Septuagint.

Created, Gathered, Pleasing – The Collect for the 18th Sunday

A few years ago I came across a useful document on the website of the Committee on Divine Worship of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops. At the time they were concentrating on the third typical edition of Missale Romanum (for what we now call the Ordinary Form of the Roman Rite) - i.e. the Latin original. Now their focus seems to be entirely on the newly issued English translation and I have been unable to find this document on the website at present. It consisted of extracts from the March-April 2002 newsletter of the Bishops' Committee on the Liturgy (as it was then called) which included the noteworthy changes to Missale Romanum made in the editio typica tertia. Thanks to the Wayback Machine, the document is still available.

Included was the remark that "some prayers, such as the collect for the 18th Sunday of the year, have been corrected." At the time I was gathering texts for the Divine Office for the celebrations inserted into the calendar in 2000. The collects at Mass are by design the same as the concluding prayers in the Liturgy of the Hours on the same day. A change to the Missal in this respect means a change to the Breviary. Naturally I looked up this corrected prayer.

It was a matter of one word.

Corvopolis is where?

The Roman Martyrology today – to pick a day at random – has the following at number 14:

Eboraci in Anglia, beati martyris Thomas Welbourne, qui…

 At 15:

In urbe Nam Định in Tunquino, Sanctorum Dominici Nguyễn Văn Hạnh (Diêu)…

Where on earth are these places?