Old Stuff

Movin' on up

You may now find Summa Minutiae at stblogs.org. This version of the blog will remain as an archive, Vetus Minutiae.

Update

Since Mr. O'Rama has been wondering... we just finished moving to our new house, and there's not much of me left for blogging right now. And I suspect the "gesima" Sundays have started on the old calendar, leading to my regular but mysterious penitential season shutdown.

Anyways, I hope to be "back" soon.

Simplicissimus

An entirely new approach to learning the Latin of the Traditional Roman Missal by Carol Byrne, MA PhD (Dunelm), which I found while googling for the Latin texts of the opening prayers of the Mass. I vaguely remember a chant book from Solesmes having such a collection; can I find them on the web somewhere?

On saving stuff for history

A meditation on preserving information for the next few thousand years.

Measuring my Jesus Christ

It seems that some St. Blog's parishioners like to get a rough measure of the orthodoxy of a web site by finding out how many times the site mentions Jesus. (Aside: What should this measure be called?) Anyway, Mr. O'Rama measured a couple of blogs and found scores of 4 and 15, meaning one blog mentioned Jesus 4 times and the other 15 times.

May I humbly announce that my score is 879?

:-)

Christianity in Roman Africa

This site has some interesting essays on the practice of Christianity in Roman Africa. Of course, anytime you talk about Christianity in Roman Africa, James O'Donnell should come to mind.

Curfew violations and homeschoolers

How the HSLDA can help when a homeschooled child is accused of a nutty curfew violation.

When nuns attack

For those of you following the lesbian nun news beat. Here's the website for the Sisters of Mercy, which scores a 75 in the Jesus Christ Google category.

Rarr!

Big Arm Woman gives a synopsis of Return of the King. Strap your ass on!

Proud Daddy

Here is our 7-year-old son's very first research report, completed a few minutes ago. He did it all himself - selected the subject, researched the facts with three reference books (The Sibley Guide to Birds, Reader's Digest North American Wildlife and a National Geographic bird book) and typed his results in emacs.

exticnt means that an animal is no longer on earth

there are ten species of extinct birds the labrador duck
the heath hen the eskimo curlew the great auk the passenger pigeon
the carolina parakeet the bachmans warbler the dusky seaside sparrow
the dodo and the ivory billed woodpecker

ordo.el

While on kid patrol at home today I've finally started re-writing my liturgical calendar program, making it more efficient and straightforward and vastly reducing namespace pollution. With the new version it'll also be easier to implement the pre-1969 "Tridentine" calendar, still followed by indult parishes and various schismatics, and for which there exists a large devotional literature.

I'd like to end up with an ordo calculator, which would report all the relevant liturgical information for each day in both calendar schemes - Mass readings, colors, proper prayers, preface choices, rank, readings from the Liturgy of the Hours/Breviary, historical and devotional information, &c, &c. Sort of the raw material for a new edition of Pius Parsch's The Church's Year of Grace, perhaps.

I'm doing this in emacs lisp, my "native" programming language - it's the first I learned and it's still the easiest for me to work with in emacs - so maybe when I'm done I can somehow output the info to the web each day.

I started writing this thing about 5 years ago, when one day I idly wondered what were the prayers and readings in the Mass and the Liturgy of the Hours the day our eldest child was born.

Need a slavery-reparations laugh?

Vide.

Language arts

Perhaps the Black Speech of Mordor would be a good homeschooling subject ;^)

(Tolkien's Black Speech always seemed to me more Slavic than Arabic, but anyway...)

The three lusts

1 John 2:15-16:

Do not love the world or the things in the world. If any one loves the world, love for the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the pride of life, is not of the Father but is of the world.

See here and here for a good general commentary by Saint Josemaria Escriva.

A warning from Saint Thomas More

ROPER So now you'd give the Devil benefit of law!

MORE Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?

ROPER I'd cut down every law in England to do that!

MORE (Roused and excited) Oh? (Advances on ROPER) And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you - where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? (He leaves him) This country's planted thick with laws from coast to coast - man's laws, not God's - and if you cut them down - and you're just the man to do it - d'you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? (Quietly) Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake.

Is this quote apocryphal? I hope not.

Glory!

Rec'd in the mail today: the 5-volume 1962 English edition of Dr. Pius Parsch's The Church's Year of Grace from Catacomb Books in Greenville, South Carolina, complete with that old book smell that makes me tremble; the books were formerly owned by "Sr. M. Nathanael", then by "Sr. Eileen Woods".

God is good.

We win

"The breeders shall inherit the earth." -- Mark Shea

Wisdom from Blessed Gilbert

Mr. O'Rama, you can never go wrong by quoting Chesterton (which I reproduce in full here lest someone miss this by not clicking on the link):

More from Chesterton's "Varied Types"
... refuting one of Tolstoy's "5 Rules of Christianity":

Here is a statement clearly and philosophically laid down which we can only content ourselves with flatly denying: 'The fifth rule of our Lord is that we should take special pains to cultivate the same kind of regard for people of foreign countries, and for those generally who do not belong to us, or even have antipathy to us, which we already entertain towards our own people, and those who are in sympathy with us.'

I should very much like to know where in the whole of the New Testament the author finds this violent, unnatural, and immoral proposition. Christ did not have the same kind of regard for one person as for another. We are specifically told that there were certain persons whom He especially loved. It is most improbable that He thought of other nations as He thought of His own. The sight of His national city moved Him to tears, and the highest compliment he paid was, 'Behold an Israelite indeed.' The author has simply confused two entirely different things. Christ commanded us to have love for all men, but even if we had equal love for all men, to speak of having the same love for all men is merely bewildering nonsense. If we love a man at all, the impression he produces on us must be vitally different to the impression produced by another man whom we love. To speak of having the same kind of regard for both is about as sensible as asking a man whether he prefers chrysanthemums or billiards. Christ did not love humanity; He never said He loved humanity; He loved men. Neither He nor anyone else can love humanity; it is like loving a gigantic centipede. And the reason Tolstoians can even endure to think of an equally distributed affection is that their love of humanity is a logical love, a love into which they are coerced by their own theories, a love which would be an insult to a tom-cat.

Just in case

You never know when you'll need... The Anglo-Saxon Computer Dictionary! Part of Dr. Carl Berkhout's webpage.

Which reminds me of a sci-fi story in a mid-1970s Analog magazine in which a thousand-year-old piece of pottery was discovered to contain a phonograph-like recording of Anglo-Saxon speech captured accidentally as the potter spun the item and scratched a line in the wet clay.

UPDATE: the story is Time Shards by Gregory Benford. Good stuff!

Girl meets Pope

Crossville TN girl in Europe for surgery gets to meet pope.