Conference clerihews

Wow, based on what I'm reading, I'm almost glad that I can't go to the conference. (I can't because as a teacher/principal, I can never get away this time of the year, and they won't move the date of the conference, so I won't be able to go until I retire!).

Anyway, although I can't be there, I did submit 6 clerihews for the clerihew contest.

So maybe I'll be there in spirit.

“A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.”

Depending on where you live your Bishop will fall into one of those categories.

Contact Archbishop John Clayton Nienstedt about the Chesterton Conference and see what category he is in.

Then go here to see a Bishop not afraid to go against it.

Poisoning the Annual Chesterton Society Conference

First, the letter from Dale Ahlquist at the American Chesterton Society that just came out:

St. Thomas Security has taken over our conference. This is what we have to deal with this year:

1. Alcohol can only be served and consumed in the lobby of OShaugnessy Education Center. Glasses cannot be taken into the auditorium or outside.

2. The wine and beer has to be served by St. Thomas food service staff, for which we will be charged a fee.

3. The alcohol has to be served with food. Not just cheese and crackers. The food has to be ordered through Food Service. We can’t bring our own. They may make an exception for the wheel of Stilton cheese.

4. We have to serve other drinks as well. The other drinks have to be ordered through Food Service.

5. We can serve wine and beer only during the following hours during the conference: 7-10 Thursday, 1-4, Friday, and 1-4, Saturday

6. We can have an outdoor “afterglow” in Foley Plaza on Thurs, Fri., and Sat nights from 10:30 to Midnight. Again we have to have a food service staff member act as bartender with the last drink served not later than 11:45 pm. The plaza will be fenced off with one entrance and exit and everyone there has to wear a conference badge. We have to pay for the fence, too.

7. There will be a security officer present at all our events.

8. We had to get a special license to serve wine with the banquet on Saturday night.

The costs of these extra requirements will do a good job of eating up the costs saved by having Catholic Studies co-sponsor the event. So we’re back to the conference being a money-loser.

I think we’re done with St. Thomas, and I think the conference is changed forever.

This is frustrating. First, you know the person that has imposed these restrictions is a self-righteous little jackass that is probably chanting “liability." Second, the self-righteous little ass probably has very little, if any, exposure to the Annual Chesterton Conference and doesn’t know how this will kill the Conference. Third, you couldn’t explain it to the self-righteous little ass because all these changes affect the “intangibles”–the spirit, the little things, the unnoticed things, the “air”–and if you can’t show such a person in black-and-white how changes will screw things up, he won’t believe you. Most frustrating.

Some Chestertonians are fighting back. An enjoyable email from one of them:

Dearly Beloved Mailing List 1, and Bcc’s:

Please find below a forwarded copy of a sad and distressing email I received tonight from Dale, the reigning Czar of the American Chesterton Society. For those of you who are unaware, the American Chesterton Society has held its annual Conference at the University of St Thomas in St Paul, Minnesota, since June of 1997 (previously it had been hosted for nearly two decades in Milwaukee). Until last year, our Conference was a joyful, personalist, self-directed meeting of minds and hearts regarding all things Chesterton (and, therefore, Catholic and godly), but it appears that those pathetic, treasonous, squash-every-life-like-a-bug, Left-wing, sour, ruthless, joyless, little nimrod-minded, Obama-voting imps of the Fifth Pillar (hereafter referred to only as they) cannot stand the sounds of resounding laughter, singing and conversant chatter that are the ordinary hallmarks of a good, traditional Catholic party; they cannot tolerate the warm, sweet scent of cigar smoke wafting though the trees and, by GOD, they must not let us alone to, as responsible adults are sometimes wont to do on festal days, be allowed to imbibe anything stronger than Coca-Cola without wage-sucking chaperones and security. After all, they must tell themselves in the wee hours of the cold dark nights in the Caves [faculty housing], we evil Chestertonians might get a little loose in the head and begin planning the sacking and overthrow of all that is good and Marxist in a modern-day liberal “Catholic” house of education; we might even gang up as an unruly mob in the first night, storm the Caves, and run all the sad little tenured heretics off the premises with our pen-knives and holy-water-guns and (gasp!!!) raise the standard of the Papal household in the Quad before the dawn breaks! Eek-gads!

Here’s the deal: I didn’t spend all freaking year babying thirty gallons of prize merlot along just so I can turn around and have it measured out by the thimbleful, like so much poison, by some snot-nosed little Liberal-hack-without-a-clue because ol’ Archbishop Flynn has refused to grow a spine and let one of the most historic hallowed halls in American Catholic academics be turned into a den of Green Peace-worshiping, law-mongering, joy-sqwashing Commies. Sounds harsh? Too bad. It’s the bare truth.

We need help. Please!!! Send this communique to everyone you know–especially the media. St Thomas will invite every anti-Catholic, anti-Life, anti-Reason moron and hack to our campus to spread Modernist filth and lying propaganda, but we orthodox, faithful Chestertonians (with 10 solid years of peaceful, non-confrontational, trouble-free, self-directed, responsible assemblies under our proverbial belt–and not one single DUI) can’t be trusted to meet without Big Brother monitoring our every move??? O, puleeze…..

We need you to protest.

We need donations to find a new Conference home.

We need dynamite in the Church, as Peter Maurin put it–and you all are the fuse!

Please email Fr. Dennis Dease (DJDEASE@stthomas.edu) and tell him that this is a sophmoric, vengeful move on the part of the University of St Thomas. And if you are giving money to these idiots, please stop!

That’s all. Up until now, this has been the best three day party on the planet. Now, like everything else, the Libs are trying to destroy it. We alone can stop them.

In His Grace, miki

Between a Rock and a Rock

With current gas prices I work one day a week just to fill my tank and because of the fuel prices I have to work a day and half to buy groceries for my family. Many complain that the money we spend for gas goes back to governments that fund terrorism and scream for energy independence. One of the things that is keeping us for this independence is the enemy within, in this case the environmental terrorists who won’t let us drill within our boarders.

Mark Steyn has a good piece on this here and manages to quote C. S. Lewis at the same time.

If you still believe that the people have a voice in government go here.

Good for GKC

The story is told of GK Chesterton delivering proofs, late, to his editor. The office was deserted, with just one person, from the accounts department, to take delivery of the great man's work. When Chesterton produced from his bag not only his corrected pages but a bottle of port and a glass, the terrified clerk confessed he was teetotal. 'Good heavens,' Chesterton squeaked in dismay. 'Give me back my proofs!'

Yes we remember

As I was going through some of the old war photos of my Dad’s I was struck by the obvious fact that these soldiers were just boys. Or rather they were in that space between boy and man. I also read the letters he sent home to Mom in hopes to find some insight on battles and life on the front but what I found was a series of love letters with no mention of war at all. Then again the war was, at its heart, about love - love of liberty and freedom, love of hearth and home.


“A real soldier does not fight because he has something that he hates in front of him. He fights because he has something that he loves behind his back.”
G. K.C.


A good read for this weekend.

Katy Bar the Door

Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions.
-- G K Chesterton, Illustrated London News (April 19, 1930)

The reformer is always right about what is wrong. He is generally wrong about what is right.
-- G K Chesterton, Illustrated London News (October 28, 1922)


I find the recent ruling by the California Supreme court that same sex couples have a “right” to marry interesting on several levels; first they are telling us that our votes don’t matter - that pesky will of the people thing is soooo 10 min. ago. Secondly San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom told us that, "As California goes, so goes the nation." But where are they going? Does it mean we are all going down the drain? Does that mean that from now on the minority rules? Is this the ideal future ACLU, NARAL, Planned Parenthood, and the Gay Mafia want us to attain? Is this making things better?

Money buys power, power buys influence, influence drives the society toward what ever end money wants and our kid’s future required reading list will now include Heather Has Two Mommies.

The question remains for us now as it did for Chesterton’s time, can this train be stopped and turned and who will stop it? The answer to this lies within the Catholic Church and the who is us.

As Uncle Gilbert tells us:
"Everyone is interested in making things better. But what does "better" mean? Nature cannot answer this question, for nature accepts things as they are without making value judgments. Nor does the mere passage of time guarantee progress. Any meaningful sense of progress must come from a definite vision of how things should be, a point toward which we can move . . . A belief in the inevitability of progress is the best reason not to be progressive. For in that case we need do nothing at all. The best reason for being progressive is that things tend to get worse . . . Christianity answers these three challenges of progress. 1. It fixed the ideal before the foundation of the world. 2. It can give us the complex picture of life toward which we should move. 3. And its doctrine of original sin alerts us to the need to work toward that ideal."

It has been said that the first millennium belonged to the Bishops, the second belonged to the Popes and the third belongs to the laity. It is up to us to say enough! And preach the Good News for as Cicero said, (I know he has been quoted many times whenever something stupid like this happens but truth is still truth - in or out of fashion).

“A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and he carries his banners openly against the city. But the traitor moves among those within the gates freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears no traitor; he speaks in the accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their garments, and he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation; he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of a city; he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to be feared. The traitor is the carrier of the plague. You have unbarred the gates of Rome to him."

let's kick him out and bar the door, because this is what is next.

Roy, Gilbert!, and GKC

Roy F. Moore, Gilbert Magazine, and GKC in The Phoenix yesterday:

“Ever get that feeling like you just kicked Lucifer in the face and got away with it?!” Roy F. Moore of Woburn grimaces in triumph against the broad afternoon light. “That’s the feeling I get from that movie.”

We’re outside the Fresh Pond 10 — most desolate of Cambridge’s multi-screens, wedged in the southeast corner of the Fresh Pond Mall between a boarded-up acupuncture center and the railroad track. It’s one of the four places in Massachusetts where you can see the anti-Darwin documentary Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. It was just the two of us in the theater, and having observed the affirmative nature of Mr. Moore’s reactions — his gasps, guffaws, fist-shakings, and signs-of-the-cross — I introduced myself. Mr. Moore (somewhat unexpectedly) is a columnist for Gilbert Magazine, the official publication of the American Chesterton Society, so we talk about that roly-poly old Catholic apologist G.K. Chesterton. We talk about the Tridentine Mass, and punk rock, and Mr. Moore quotes approvingly from the Dead Kennedys’ “A Child and His Lawnmower”: “You know some people don’t take no sh!t/Maybe if they did, they’d have half a brain left!” And we talk about Ben Stein.

Margaret Sanger clerihew

Margret Sanger
Eugenicist haranguer
Thought with certain groups it would be good
To strongly “encourage” Planned Barrenhood.

Dont want to mention here.......

.......but its bugging me to see just how poor Hilary Clinton's (aka Lady McBeth) rhetoric is.

The whole thing with Hilary being the most qualified to take the 3 am phone call in particular just leaves me dumbfounded.

If Hilary got the call, I have no doubt that no decision would be made until dawn, her first communications are going to be to her media relations staff, her pollsters, and probably some attorneys. I do trust Obama to take action, albeit action I would likely disagree with. McCain? Well for gosh sakes, most men his age are up at that time to use the bathroom anyhow, so he would probably be the freshest to take the call.

Have a great week!!

Helen Steiner Rice Clerihew

Critics of Helen Steiner Rice
say her poems are just too sweet and nice.
But I suspect those poems will be read
long after those critics are dead.

Super Duper

There has been a lot of talk these days about Super Delegates. A concept I pretty much found amusing- you know a group of politicians creating a legal program to ignore the wishes of the people, (like the witches in Macbeth). It is not that they think the people ignorant it’s just that you and I don’t know what’s good for us. The other thing that has sparked my interest in that group is that I have a Super Delegate living close by me, her name is Enid Goubeaux. I have seen her at the grocery store! Now really how cool is that.

Anyway, the popular vote in the Democratic primary of Ohio went to the Madonna loving Hillary but Enid has cast her support for Barack Hussein Obama.
Because:

“I am endorsing Sen. Obama because his message, ‘yes we can’ has inspired so many voters, especially younger voters, to take part in shaping our country's future.

“I believe that Sen. Obama will end politics as usual which divides the nation and prevents us from confronting our most serious problems.”

With well thought out, reasoned and insightful comments like those she certainly has shown others the error of their voting.

Reminds me of the story of a boy coming home and announcing that he is going to major in philosophy. His father asks, “What are you going to do with that?”
The boy answers “Open up a shop and sell ideas.”

Barack supporters opened a shop and are selling platitudes and people are buying.

Chesterton Conference

The latest issue of Gilbert reminds me of a sad reality,

The back cover has an ad promoting the 27th Annual G.K. Chesterton Conference, June 12-14.

In red.

So you can't miss it.

Alas, I will miss it. Again.

You see, every year they schedule these conferences for June.

I am a principal and a teacher.

June is final exams and graduation.

I'd have a hard time justifying to the trustees suddenly taking off for four days or so right in the midst of all that.

A death in the family. Surgery. Okay. But I only have so many relatives and body parts I could use as an excuse.

("How many grandmothers do you have?")

Uncle Gilbert .... Hmm.

Anyway, once again, I can't be there.

It would be nice if the organizers could occasionally rotate the date. I realize that consistency is nice, and that no matter when they scheduled it someone would be inconvenienced. But it would be nice if we educators could catch a break once in a while.

And I don't want to wait until I retire. Some of my fundamentalist friends tell me the Rapture will happen before then. Should they be right, I suspect most of the regular conference attendees will get called home, cancelling the conference anyway.

So have fun everyone. I'll be thinking of you as I grade exams and fill in report cards.

One question for organizers - should any of you visit this site.

I have been known to scribble clerihews. I know there is an annual contest at the conference. Do you have to be there to enter? Or can you e-mail entries in? Or send them along with someone who is attending?

Tonight......

For those of you on night shift, or tend to be owls. Br. Guy Consolmagno, of the Vatican Observatory, is going to be on Coast to Coast AM tonight.

.......and some of us have ugly sisters

Title is regarding that post about nature. The following may be of interest to homeschoolers, or anybody interested in science. The technical issues involved here are impressive. Other than that, little connection to Chesterton besides that Chesterton is cool, and so are GIANT SQUID.

A Sister’s Surprise

“The main point of Christianity was this: that Nature is not our mother: Nature is our sister. We can be proud of her beauty, since we have the same father; but she has no authority over us; we have to admire, but not to imitate. This gives to the typically Christian pleasure in this earth a strange touch of lightness that is almost frivolity. Nature was a solemn mother to the worshippers of Isis and Cybele. Nature was a solemn mother to Wordsworth or to Emerson. But Nature is not solemn to Francis of Assisi or to George Herbert. To St. Francis, Nature is a sister, and even a younger sister: a little, dancing sister, to be laughed at as well as loved.”

Within every small town or neighborhood where there is tillable dirt you will find a lady whose garden is the envy of all others. A garden where people slow down as they drive by to look at or walk the long way home so they can stroll pass her flowers. This lady is always generous with giving or trading cuttings and bulbs. She will always listen to your garden stories and advise when necessary. She has dirt under her nails all summer dancing with her “younger sister.

In our town that lady is my wife.

She has set it up so that every two weeks or so the garden changes color. Slow waves of yellow to purple to blue to red back to yellow then burnt orange and gold all moving within an undercurrent of all the hues of green. She knows all the names of the flowers both the common and the Latin. She can do this whether the plant is in full bloom or just a half inch out of the ground. When she and I wander around the garden in summer I ask her to tell me the Latin names of each one we pass. Not that I have forgotten from the last time she told me it is just that to hear the sound of Latin spoken in a soft Kentucky accent is beautifully lyrical. It is the voice of angels or at least the voice of the elves of Arda.

My function in this garden is to do the heavy lifting and provide patience. The later is most important this time of year. This past weekend as I was turning and adding compost to some dirt for our beets and lettuce she exclaimed, “I want to uncover the beds!”

“It is to soon. Next week will be safer.” I tell her and she knows I’m right.

So she walked around behind me and gentling moved away some leaf matter to take a peek. “Daisys?” she wondered “What are they doing over here? I thought I had those contained.”

I laughed and told her, “You can’t contain daisy’s.” and then said, “It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike: it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.’ Do it again He says and our sister obeys. A nice surprise for us huh? ”

Oh yea the garden is also a place I can quote Chesterton where my wife does not roll her eyes at me.

George's Day

It’s St. George’s Day. Time for the only non-Nantucket poem that I ever memorized (and to be honest, I only memorized the first verse):

St George he was for England.
And before he killed the dragon
He drank a pint of English ale
Out of an English flagon.
For though he fast right readily
In hair-shirt or in mail.
It isn’t safe to give him cakes
Unless you give him ale.

St George he was for England,
And right gallantly set free
The lady left for dragon’s meat
And tied up to a tree;
But since he stood for England
And knew what England means,
Unless you give him bacon
You mustn’t give him beans.

St George he is for England,
And shall wear the shield he wore
When we go out in armour
With the battle-cross before.
But though he is jolly company
And very pleased to dine,
It isn’t safe to give him nuts
Unless you give him wine.

Mighty GKC

The Digital Catholic

Thirty-five Catholic treasures on CD Rom for $29.95. Includes one Belloc and seven GKCs. I'm pretty sure I'm going to order it.

Weekend Thoughts

I think most people who read this and similar blogs have been paying attention to the B16 visit to the US. Unfortunately the crazy woman at Yale with her "performance art" has sucked up some valuable media time. It is good to note that several of the usual protocols for heads of state were broken for the Pope. I think we have a tendency to try to always look for the cloud behind every silver lining, and there have been some problems with the Papal visit, but all in all I think that a character such as B16 does come off as an enigma to the press. There is nobody left in our mainstream culture who represents scholarship, prayerfulness, and erudition of lifestyle the way B16 does. There is something that is felt and experienced by all, even if words cannot be found to express it adequately. Perhaps the contrast with the Yale faculty is appropriate?

I think people get this same sense from GKC, one is in the presence of a master, and we are so heretical and fanatic in our cultural egalitarian pathos that we never get to experience this.

Gilbert Sighting

A handful of weeks and a bucket of lost sleep ago I directed a play for my local High school for them to enter in the state competition, (their regular teacher was out on maternity leave). We placed second in our category but that is not the story. On our first day of rehearsal I entered a classroom to meet them and there before me stood a blank blackboard. I am always drawn to a blank writing surface like a groom to his bride I cannot leave it untouched.

Upon it I wrote some of my favorite quotes about art and theatre, two of which were Gilberts: “A man does not know what he is saying until he knows what he is not saying.” and “Art, like morality, consists in drawing a line somewhere.”

During that rehearsal I did not talk about any of the quotes. I just let them sit there. Unusual for me but that is just how it played out.

A few days ago I was back in the school, to pick up my son, and they had a display case up containing some students favorite quotes and there in the bottom center done up in red marker on yellow card stock was G.K.C’s, “Art, like morality, consists in drawing a line somewhere.” I smiled big.

But not so fast white boy. When my son finally showed up I pointed that quote out to him all puffed with pride, “Gilbert strikes again” I said.

“Oh yea, There’s a new teacher this year that is constantly quoting Chesterton.” My son told me.

“Thanks for the heads up son.”

“Sorry. What’s for supper?”

So I guess there is a new friend for me to make.