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.