The Anchoress

I love this fellow’s expressions. Pretty funny; some great one-liners. Check back later for a linkfest!

Actually, my Elder Son gets textbooks. I did think, though, that when Buster majored in music, it would cut down the cost of textbooks. I didn’t realize how much music scores can cost, though. They can get pretty pricey!

If you’re heading back to school this week - Buster is - Amazon has new and used textbooks galore with special deals.

None of the music scores we need, though!

I hadn’t realized it but voting opened today for the 2008 Weblog Awards, and you can vote for all of your favorite blogs here. (My li’l old category is here, if you’d like to vote for me!)

Who am I voting for? Well, I have my favorites, but so many of them are nominated, that I’ll be splitting many of my votes throughout the days (you can vote once per day in each category). Here are a few of my choices:

Best Blog: Hot Air, with my Blogfather, Ed Morrissey, is my go-to-several-times-a-day site. I can always count on Ed to give the story straight up, lucidly and fairly, and in our balkanized age, that’s a rare thing in blogging.

Best Individual Blog: I could lie and say I won’t vote for myself, but since I’m going to lose anyway, I figure why not throw a few votes my way as I scatter them throughout this list of interesting bloggers.

Best Humor Blog: Treacher. Anyone else surprised Iowahawk wasn’t on that list?

Best Comic: I admit, it’s the only one I read of the nominees, and I am also spoiled because Chris Muir once drew a flattering cartoon me, but Day by Day is the answer to Doonesbury, and deserves recognition.

Best Liberal Blog: Taylor Marsh.

Best Conservative Blog: I think I once came in second to Ace in this category before I got kicked out of the “pure conservative” club, which was okay with me, since I’m not much of a joiner. He’s currently in the lead and I expect it will come down to him, and Michelle Malkin, and that’s probably as it should be. But because I like so many, my votes will be scattered, with attention paid to Kate the Great and to Eject, Eject, Eject because I wish I could write like Bill Whittle.

Best Political Coverage: I frankly thought Ann Althouse had the best, and funnest, and most insightful coverage of the election and I wish there was a category for Best Live-Blogging With Outstanding Commentary from Readers, because although my commenters are great, and Ace’s are funny, I do believe Ann Althouse has the best comments threads to be found anywhere. But since she’s not in this category, I’m going with The Politico, mostly, with some votes scattered among other sites.

Best Military Blog: Michael Yon. His stuff is just astonishing.

Best Middle East or Africa Blog: Michael Totten

Best Law Blog: The Volokh Conspiracy. Law writing that even I can understand!

Best Business Blog: For the life of me I don’t know why Bizzyblog isn’t in here - that would have been my sole choice, but the nominees here are all good, and I’ll likely scatter my votes.

Best LGBT Blog: Gay Patriot and Tammy Bruce

Best Religion Blog: This is a category full of great, profound, instructive and moving blogs, but my vote will go solely to Happy Catholic, which is outstanding, everyday. Julie’s blog is classy, thoughtful, wise, faithful, humorous, sometimes searingly honest and she is the exceedingly modest and generous blogger who will continually link to all of the other religion blogs - whether Catholic, Evangelical, Lutheran, Jewish, Atheist or whatever - whenever she gleans something good for all of us, and she does it without ever asking links for her own efforts. I love Happy Catholic, and I bet most religion bloggers would agree that she is sorely under-recognized, even among those of us who appreciate her, because she is so busy pushing everyone else to the front of the stage. Happy Catholic is a hands-down great blog. Vote for Julie!

Best Food Blog: Cake Wrecks. So, it’s cakes. I like cakes.

Best Blog Design: Snapped Shot

Best Culture Blog: Dirty Harry’s Place

Best Aussie or Kiwi Blog: Tim Blair

Best Major Blog: Instapundit. Of course. Glenn Reynolds is the best gleaner of worthwhile reading I’ve ever seen.

Best Very Large Blog: Scattered among many great blogs.

Best Midsize Blog: Betsy’s Page. I love straightforward and challenging teacher that comes out in all her writing!

Best Up-and Coming Blog: Sundries Shack

And a hearty round of applause to Kevin Aylward, founder of Wizbang, and founder of these Awards, who every year puts this together - and it’s a lot of work - and gets few thank-yous from the rest of us who are too busy jumping up and down shouting “vote for me, Vote for ME!”

Ummm….yeah, vote for me!

Okay, I am a sucker for colorful, interactive things - I like my Rosetta Stone stuff, too - but this is a little different. If you look to the right sidebar there is a new ad there, for ScriptureDirect.com, that offers a 15 day free trial. Tonight I signed up for it, just to check it out, and I likee.

ScriptureDirect.com is a useful tool for religion teachers, preachers, discussion group facilitators and those interested in studying the New Testament with the original Greek texts close at hand.

Once you open it (it can register multiple users), you choose the book you want to study, or insert a bit of text and have it opened to you within that book, and you’ll find a map colorful and fascinating map (including way cool animated missionary routes) highlighting where the accounts took place, or to whom the epistles were directed. Here you can also get a summary of who wrote the book, to whom, for what purpose and the literary style. Then you can click to see how the book is structured (helpful for reference) and finally, another click brings you to the text itself, line-by-line in Greek with the translation directly below, then the KJV off to the side.

I see there is room for two more translations, but haven’t figured out yet if those are purchased separately and plugged into the program or something.

Once you’ve opened the Greek, you can color code text to suit your needs; whether you want to do a word-comparison or so forth and there is an excellent tool (very intuitive, even I can use it!) for outlining and writing a paper, sermon, questions for discussion or your own journal-type entries.

I like ScriptureDirect.com a lot, and as it’s not terribly expensive I’m considering taking it on, but I’ll decide about that after trying it a bit more. If you’re kicking around in the winter looking for something new to jump start your brain or your prayer life, give the free trial a whirl!

A reader writes to say she is at her father’s deathbed and he will soon be gone. While he has been ill for over a year, the whole family feels very blessed that they have had time together, and the opportunity to walk with each other through a journey of terrible beauty. Please pray for DMD’s father and her family.

In paradisum deducant te Angeli; in tuo adventu suscipiant te martyres, et perducant te in civitatem sanctam Ierusalem. Chorus angelorum te suscipiat, et cum Lazaro quondam paupere æternam habeas requiem.

May angels lead you into Paradise; may the martyrs receive you at your coming and lead you to the holy city of Jerusalem. May a choir of angels receive you, and with Lazarus, who once was poor, may you have eternal rest.

And while you’re praying, if you could remember Michael’s three year-old daughter who is in crisis and for adorable little toddler Gwyneth, who has been diagnosed with a sometimes-lethal skin infection.

As we know, everyone gets a turn in the crucible; if we can pray for each other, perhaps our own turns will burn a little less whitely.

“Thrummmmmm….”

“It’s been a hard day’s night
and I been workin’ like a dog…”

You can hear the chord, of course. But can you play it? Exactly?

Many have tried, all have failed, it seems, until now:

The opening chord to “A Hard Day’s Night” is also famous because, for 40 years, no one quite knew exactly what chord Harrison was playing.
…
Four years ago…Jason Brown of Dalhousie’s Department of Mathematics decided to try and see if he could apply a mathematical calculation known as Fourier transform to solve the Beatles’ riddle. The process allowed him to decompose the sound into its original frequencies using computer software and parse out which notes were on the record.

It worked, to a point: the frequencies he found didn’t match the known instrumentation on the song. “George played a 12-string Rickenbacker, Lennon had his six string, Paul had his bass…none of them quite fit what I found…the solution hit me: it wasn’t just those instruments. There was a piano in there as well, and that accounted for the problematic frequencies.”
…
Dr. Brown deduces that another George—George Martin, the Beatles producer—also played on the chord, adding a piano chord that included an F note impossible to play with the other notes on the guitar. The resulting chord was completely different than anything found in the literature about the song to date”
(H/T to Jonah)

There is a mysterious alchemy in forming a band. Lennon-McCartney wrote great, fresh music - even when it got cynical, it was still fresh; George Harrison had a mystical bent, and Ringo, for all he is derided, was the perfect drummer for the Fab Four (think of how instinctively his heavy stomps and triplets make their solid mark, imperfect drumming perfectly suited to the band) but it has always seemed a question worth pondering, to me: would the Beatles have been anything like the phenomenon that was The Beatles, without the quiet innovations of George Martin? Martin’s contributions are largely unrealized (the calliope in “Mr. Kite” was the result of Martin’s random cuts and splices in the tape), but after the tracks were laid down, he seems to have performed a wizardry of his own.

If you’d like to try comparing the studio chord to a live strike, here you go. I don’t know if they prove anything, though, since mic set-ups, equipment, different timbres and so forth can all make subtle differences. And my goodness how young and beautiful they all were…

Opening to the film AHard Day’s Night, with the magic chord

Live performance in Paris, 1965, perhaps more notable for the audience and the spare stage

Rock and roll has changed a great deal. The world has, too. It is very interesting, indeed, to look back at the crowds. Funnily enough, we don’t even consider their behavior odd, anymore. We’ve become very used to the idea of mere mortals screaming for, adoring and idolizing other mere mortals.

Such outpourings for a rock star - or a “rock star politician” - are not looked at as aberrant or psychologically questionably behavior, whereas the (by comparison) relatively staid cheering for a pope is looked at, by some, as embarrassing, oogedy-boogedy weirdness.

Popes, like pop-musicians and pop-politicians, are also mere mortals - but it could be argued that their impact on the world is quite different than the impact of what Flip Wilson used to call “The Church of What’s Happening Now”. Not greater or less, but profoundly different and, for the last 40 years or so, outright contradictory.

Cheering crowds are cheering crowds - but what we’re cheering matters. Even a “rock-star pope” is “in” the culture, but not “of” the culture - and as we see here, they tend to strike a different chord, altogether.

“Praised be Jesus Christ! Dear brothers and sisters, we are still all very saddened by the death of the very dear Pope John Paul I. And now the most eminent cardinals have called a new bishop of Rome. They called him from a far-away country, … far, but always near in the communion of faith and the Christian tradition. I was afraid in receiving this nomination, but I did it in the spirit of obedience to Our Lord and with total trust in his Mother, the Most Holy Madonna.

“I don’t know if I can express myself well in your - in our - Italian language. But if I make a mistake, you will correct me. And so I introduce myself to you all, to confess our common faith, our hope, our trust in the mother of Christ and of the Church, and also to begin again on this path of history and of the Church with the help of God and with that of men.”

And too, the crowds cheering for a pope are - often as not - cheering as much for the Office as the man:

Meanwhile, can we say it: rewriting a Christmas Carol to reference Barack Obama must be a kind of idolatry. It really must be.

September’s Child by The Joel LaRue Smith Trio

I don’t have much exposure to Afro-Cuban Jazz, but I was given this CD as a Christmas gift, and I like it a lot. Although I’m no aficionado, I found this album to be immediately engaging. I love Smith’s fluidity at the piano; he has a very smart, bright sound that reminds me a little of Vince Guaraldi.

Smith is on the music faculty of the Tuft’s University. There’s no Amazon connection, but if you go to his website and hit the “MEDIA” button, you can hear samples of the work. I like it a lot - I suspect many of you will, too. Give it a listen!

A profile of three young Dominican sisters from the Ann Arbor-based teaching order, the Sisters of Mary, Mother of the Eucharist, yields some good things:

Sister Maria, a native of the Bronx, a first-year novitiate…gave up a successful corporate career in the car business to enter the convent. She chose the Dominican Sisters of Mary, Mother of the Eucharist, she said, because of their devotion to Mary, traditional lifestyle and sense of humor.

“I knew that to go to heaven, I needed to be in a convent!” she said with a laugh. “I knew that I could slip into being greedy. I wanted more than a house on the lake and a closet full of shoes. Life is empty without Christ. It doesn’t make any sense without him.”

In the end, she said, she felt compelled to stand up for what she believed in, regardless of what other people thought she should do.

“Go big or go home,” she said. “No one will live my life but me.”

Sister Maria Jose, a second-year novice, grew up in a strong, Catholic, Mexican-American family and graduated from the University of Texas-El Paso. After working as a software engineer for six years, she entered the convent.

“I loved my career, but Jesus Christ is better,” she said. “I realized that there was more to life than going to a job. There was a lot of emptiness there. I could either do something to distract me, like going out to the bars, or I could pursue prayer, seek Jesus, and see what it was that Jesus was calling me to do.”

This jibes rather nicely with Deacon Greg’s homily for The Epiphany of the Lord, which we celebrate this weekend - we finally get to sing We Three Kings - my favorite!

Writes the Deacon:

…the magi, the wise men, in today’s gospel reading. They also looked up. And then looked forward. And then followed. They discovered something far more valuable than anything painted on the ceiling of an ancient cave.

They followed a star to the savior of the world.

And what led them there was more than astronomy. They were led by fascination, moved by wonder. They needed to find where that star would take them.

The biologist J.B.S. Haldane once said, “The world will not perish for want of wonders…but for want of wonder.”

Wonder. That is the great well-spring that nourishes us on this particular feast, the feast of the Epiphany. That word comes from Latin, “epiphania,” meaning “manifestation.” A revelation. Or, as Webster’s puts it, an “illuminating discovery.”

The magi discovered the greatest illumination of all: Christ.
…
The magi had no idea where the star would take them. They didn’t know what their final destination would be. They couldn’t anticipate what they would find, or that it would all end up in Bethlehem.

The journey to Jesus was, for them, as it is for all of us: unpredictable, uncharted, unknowable.

And it left them changed.

As Matthew writes: “They departed for their country by another way.”

After encountering Christ, they couldn’t travel the same road.

It should be that way for all of us. After discovering Jesus, after our own epiphanies, nothing can be quite the same.

The Magi caught sight of something, and it led them away from everything that was “usual, - to Christ, and to wonder - and everything changed for them. These young women caught sight of something, and it let them away from everything “usual,” - to Christ and to wonder. The story happens over and over again, every day.

Next week we celebrate the Baptism of the Lord, and then we head back into Ordinary Time until Lent. But the Christmas story is still going on; it is still being read at daily mass. We have read about the slaughter of the Holy Innocents, and the Presentation of Christ, at the Temple, where Simeon and Anna recognise the Messiah, and where Simeon told Mary about the sword.

Because Christmas and Easter, in their way, always come together, as this nun-blogger shares in this wonderful poem

If you feel like Christmas is over, and it all went by a little too fast, pick up your scripture and read Luke, and keep reading Chapter 2 for a little while. It’s okay to linger, a bit, when you have caught sight of a star and found something that changes everything. In fact, without lingering a while - to wonder at it all - we may miss the point.

UPDATE: I like this last paragraph here.

Deacon Greg has a story about a fellow following the star via the Capuchin route. The Caps are exceedingly good men, and many of them are the brightest lights of the priesthood in the current age. Bro. Vito’s blog is here

Heh. I’m a finalist in the Best Individual Blogger category, which is very cool, and I thank y’all for the nomination! Up against a bunch of interesting bloggers I won’t mind losing to.

If it weren’t for Happy Catholic, I don’t know if I’d even realize it. Julie, of course, gets my vote for best religious blog, even though it’s a tightly-matched group.

I haven’t had a chance to look over the whole list of nominees; I’ve been having computer problems, but Doug Ross has already made his endorsements, and he kindly mentions me; how nice! Another list I’ll have to look over!

Voting begins Monday, January 5.

Oh, and the Winner of the Grande Conservative Blogress thingie over at Gay Patriot was Atlas Shrugs. That was fun.

Also, meant to link to this earlier, but computer problems prevented: an end-of-year look at what many bloggers submitted as their best blog posts of the year. A chance to catch up on what you may have missed!

Buster, March 1991

Happy New Year!!!

A day late; my new year began with company in the house and a computer that needed to more or less be rebuilt! More later! Houseguests are making writing rather difficult!

Part of my new years resolution is to “blog-smarter” and earn more money to help out with that kid’s tuition. Until I get back on track, why not tell me what are your new year’s resolutions?

HAPPY NEW YEAR AND MAY GOD BLESS US ALL!