Fr. Jon's Lent & Holy Week Notes:

(3 more reasons why I love our priest!)

1. On Friday, February 26, 2010 we will have very simple Stations of the Cross followed by a showing of Into Great Silence. Into Great Silence is a documentary film directed by Philip Groning that was first released in 2005. It is an intimate portrayal of the everyday lives of Carthusian monks of the Grande Chartreuse, high in a remote corner of the French Alps. The film was made 16 years after the director first requested permission to make it. He lived at the monastery for six months, and filmed all alone; behind the walls no "outsider" had ever before been allowed to enter. One of our parishioners is a Carthusian.
2. On Holy Thursday we celebrate the institution of two sacraments, Holy Orders and the Eucharist. Holy Thursday is also the Liturgy in which we remember Jesus washing the feet of the Apostles. In John's Gospel, this foot-washing is connected to the Apostles being ordained. In light of this year being named the Year for Priests, this year's Holy Thursday foot-washing will be all men.
3. This year the Easter Vigil will begin at 8:00 PM instead of 7:00 PM. In the early church, Mass would begin at sun down and this will get us a little closer to that. If you forget and still come at 7:00PM, don't worry, it is a good day for a little extra prayer.

Christmas Letter 2010: January

Well, it's the end of the month, so to simplify our Christmas letter writing in December, take 1 minute and leave a comment with ONE thing you did this month. This is mandatory! It's pretty darn easy to tell who did or didn't do it. That is all.

Oh, Minnesota!

Really? B+?

A Canadian journalist's assessment of Obama's first year in office:

The president has three principal problems. He is well to the left of the public and of what he promised the voters in 2008, and it is an old, passe leftism, that is authoritarian, deviously presented and was discredited in this country decades ago; the sort of nostrums that caused Bill Clinton and others to become 'New Democrats.' He is increasingly perceived as having credibility problems and of being cold, cocksure, narcissistic and intoxicated by what he modestly called 'the gift' of his own articulation. And as president, he has been quite, and quite surprisingly, incompetent.

The second of these problems seems to prevent the president from appreciating the last. The only serious domestic initiative to show for the last year is an obscene stimulus bill that has had to be defended by the spurious supposition of 'jobs saved' since, contrary to promises, unemployment has risen by over five million after it was enacted. That target could have been attained without squandering 787 billion borrowed dollars...

Current economic projections call for massive debt increases of $1 trillion a year for a decade, with huge money supply increases that will make history not only by their size but, according to forecasts, by their non-inflationary nature, accompanied by tax increases that will, also miraculously, not retard recovery from the recession. No audible sane person believes this arithmetical fairy tale, including, one dares to hope, the president himself. It is a recipe for guaranteed stagflation and currency devaluation.

President Obama rose with astonishing speed from a more improbable sociological provenance than any of his 42 predecessors, an alumnus both of the genteel finishing school of Harvard Law and of the Chicago boiler room for hardball politicians. Neither his radical nor sleazy connections stuck to him. He deftly made an unspoken arrangement to liberate white liberal America from its guilt complex over historic treatment of African-Americans, and to banish the down-market Al Sharptons, Jesse Jacksons and Charlie Rangels as black spokesmen, in exchange for a one-way ticket to the White House.

Lots more here on environmental policies, foreign policy, Guantanamo, the Olympics, and other stuff that we already know (but it's nice to read it all in one condensed place).

Questions that keep English geeks up at night...

English has acquired the largest vocabulary of all the world's languages, perhaps as many as two million words, and has generated one of the noblest bodies of literature in the annals of the human race. Nonetheless, it is now time to face the fact that English is a crazy language -- the most loopy and wiggy of all tongues.

• Why is it that when we transport something by car, it's called a shipment, but when we transport something by ship, it's called cargo?
• Why do we pack suits in a garment bag and garments in a suitcase?
• Why do we call it newsprint when it contains no printing but when we put print on it, we call it a newspaper?
• Why are people who ride motorcycles called bikers and people who ride bikes called cyclists?

• In what other language do they call the third hand on the clock the second hand?
• Why is phonetic not spelled phonetically?
• Why is it so hard to remember how to spell mnemonic?
• Why is there no synonym for synonym or thesaurus?
• And why, pray tell, does lisp have an s in it?

A slim chance and a fat chance are the same, as are a caregiver and a caretaker, a bad licking and a good licking, and "What's going on?" and "What's coming off?" But a wise man and a wise guy are opposites. How can the weather be hot as hell one day and cold as hell the next?

More Here