Just because I am not paranoid doesn't mean no one is out to get me.

There was a time when the toy industry got their ideas from the military industrial complex. “Hey let’s play war!” Now it might be the other way around - enter stage left Microsoft’s Kinect. This is a game that uses image recognition soft ware to connect you to the game, no more troublesome controllers like with Wii. This system can recognize individuals that pass in front of it and react appropriately.

Last week at a developers' conference, a Microsoft VP said the image recognition capabilities of the Kinect provided, “…an interesting opportunity to target content to specific users”. And if you don't speak Microsoft, "interesting" is their word for terrifying.

One thing it can be used for is that law enforcement won’t have to bother with those pesky search warrants or wire tap permits they just send a game system to a suspect or someone on the “watch list”. “Is that a boulibase, meth or nitro he is cooking?”

But for you and me - it might see you in your living room, wearing a New York Giants T-shirt, and it will send you an ad for more Giants stuff. It might see you eating an entire bag of Doritos and send you an ad for sweatpants.

After some outcry about the VP's remarks, Microsoft said it would never use the Kinect, ever, to violate anyone's privacy - in a carefully worded statement it sent to everyone it saw reading the VP's remarks on their computers.

Soon there will be nowhere you can go where you're not spied and peeked and prodded and patted.

The interesting opportunity there for the Kinect is to invent a game like Sim TSA.

Clerihew (Obama)

Barack Obama
thrives in electoral drama.
Unfortunately, governing
doesn't seem to be his thing.

Monday blues

Hey its Monday and you really don't want to work do you? Take a break and play a mindless video game.
click here to play

Description: Some people think sharks are just ruthless killing machines, who just want to devour humans and break all our stuff. Those people are right. Sydney Shark, a shark, is a perfect example of what all sharks are like.

Gameplay: The instructions are simple:

JUMP ON BOATS AND THINGS TO BREAK THEM

BITE AND EAT THE MAMMALS, FISH AND BIRDS

TRY TO BITE AIRCRAFTS AND PULL THEM INTO THE WATER

All Hail the King

As a child Christ the King Sunday meant it was time to finalize my Christmas list. As a teen I wondered why the church year ended with readings of the "angry" Christ concluding with his crucifixion. As an old man I have come to know what King means and why it matters.

"To love means loving the unlovable. To forgive means pardoning the unpardonable. Faith means believing the unbelievable. Hope means hoping when everything seems hopeless."
G. K. Chesterton.

I've got good news and bad news

Tins of Spam sit waiting to be loaded onto a plane headed towards relief efforts for the cruise ship Carnival Splendor Tuesday, Nov. 9, 2010, in San Diego.

here we go again.

Around this time each year we are bombarded with messages that try to get Christmas removed from the calendar. Personally I love this ad but the chattering class is "offended" by it.

Here’s a sample of the criticism this ad campaign is receiving:“It gives the impression that it was politically motivated, that they are trying to put across some sort of subliminal message,” said Terry Sanderson, director of the National Secular Society. “The image is too specifically associated with pro-lifers to be seen in a benign context. They should go back to angels and cribs.”

Angels and cribs???!!! Don't they know that Angels are militantly politically, they are working and fighting to get everyone into THE Kingdom. And what, today, is more counterculture than the image of a crib.

In Philip Schaff's, History of the Christian Church, Volume III: Nicene and Post-Nicene Christianity. A.D. 311-590 we read: "For this reason the Saviour assumed humanity, that man, united with life, might not remain mortal and in death, but imbibing immortality might by the resurrection be immortal. The outward preaching of redemption would have to be continually repeated, and yet death would abide in man.”. The object of the incarnation is, negatively, the annihilation of sin and death; positively, the communication of righteousness and life and the deification of man. The miracles of Christ are the proof of his original dominion over nature, and lead men from nature-worship to the worship of God. The death of Jesus was necessary to the blotting out of sin and to the demonstration of his life-power in the resurrection, whereby also the death of believers is now no longer punishment, but a transition to resurrection and glory.—This speculative analysis of the incarnation Athanasius supports by referring to the continuous moral effects of Christianity, which is doing great things every day, calling man from idolatry, magic, and sorceries to the worship of the true God, obliterating sinful and irrational lusts, taming the wild manners of barbarians, inciting to a holy walk, turning the natural fear of death into rejoicing, and lifting the eye of man from earth to heaven, from mortality to resurrection and eternal glory. The benefits of the incarnation are incalculable, like the waves of the sea pursuing one another in constant succession."

Some see dem as fighting words

Fr Longenecker, a friend of Chesterton, brings us good news in Anglican Bishops Fly Away Home

Musical Distributism

I got a chance to put a little Distributism into practice last weekend - and to have a good time doing so.

My fair city, Rochester, was to enjoy concerts by two folk icons - Bob Dylan and Arlo Guthrie. I have attended concerts by both in the past. I own a number of their albums. As an amateur musician myself, when I have occasionally performed in public I have often played songs written by Dylan or performed by either Dylan or Guthrie.

Which concert to attend?

Ah, but just as with Distributism, there was a third way.

That same weekend, a local parish was celebrating its feast day. The celebration included a performance by two local folk/Irish music icons, the Dady Brothers.

They may not be as well known to the general public as Dylan or Guthrie, but in folk/Irish circles the Dadys are well-known and respected.

John and Joe Dady are local lads who grew up in Rochester, still live in the area, and make their living as musicians. They produce and sell their own records. They also help produce the albums of other local musicians. They regularly perform concerts - sometimes benefit ones - for local churches, schools and organizations.

Plus, their tickets for the church concert were only $5 each - as opposed to the $45 for Guthrie and the $47 for Dylan. And the money went to the church or the Dadys, as opposed to the pockets of the record labels and management companies.

Nothing against Dylan or Guthrie, but we had a grand time listening to the Dadys.

Unless you have been residing under a rock for the past few weeks you are aware of the bubbling buzz about the midterm elections. The Republicans are cheering from the roof tops. The Democrats have given the results a sound ho-hum because the republicans may have a majority in the house but the dems still run the town.

The current resident made that clear when he said, “We will not relitigate the past two years.”

As you peruse the reactions of pro-life groups they range from unabashed glee to cautious optimism. They still think the Feds will do something where after 40 years they have done nothing to stop the slaughter. Yes, we still need to keep the pressure on and keep it high but to expect different results from the same actions is one of the definitions of insanity.

"The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected.” GKC

I, however, am not discouraged because truth always wins. It just does not win quickly or without a messy fight. I know that both political parties are intimidated by the truth but when a majority (and this needs to be a big majority) stand up and say NO MORE they will listen - if for no other reason than to keep their jobs.

I am encouraged on the election results of the local and state levels. Also the Personhood movement is gaining traction.

So in war, the way is to avoid what is strong and to strike at what is weak.

If your enemy is secure at all points, be prepared for him. If he is in superior strength, evade him. If your opponent is temperamental, seek to irritate him. Pretend to be weak, that he may grow arrogant. If he is taking his ease, give him no rest. If his forces are united, separate them. If sovereign and subject are in accord, put division between them. Attack him where he is unprepared, appear where you are not expected.
- Sun Tzu, the Art of War

ATTACK OF THE KILLER BEES.
RUN FOR THE HILLS!

“Nothing on Earth so beautiful as the final haul on Halloween night.” – Steve Almond
------------------------------
THE GHOST OF A FLOWER

"You're what?" asked the common or garden spook
Of a stranger at midnight's hour.
And the shade replied with a graceful glide,
"Why, I'm the ghost of a flower."

"The ghost of a flower?" said the old-time spook;
"That's a brand-new one on me;
I never supposed a flower had a ghost,
Though I've seen the shade of a tree."

-Anonymous

Pope to Adolescents: Learn to Love Truly

More wonderful stuff form Papa Ben

"....After a question from a young woman of Catholic Action, Benedict XVI responded, "It is very important, I would say fundamental, to learn to love, truly to love, to learn the art of real love!"

He continued: "In adolescence we stop before the mirror and we notice that we are changing. But if you continue to look at yourself, you will never grow up!

"You grow up when you do no longer let the mirror be the only truth about you but when you let your friends tell you.

"You will grow up if you are able to make your life a gift to others, not to seek yourselves, but to give yourselves to others: this is the school of love."

The Pope added, "This love, however, must bring you into that 'more' that today shouts to everyone: 'There is more!'"

Pure air

He recalled, "I too, in my youth wanted something more than what the society and the mentality of the time presented to me."

"I wanted to breathe pure air," the Pontiff said. "Above all I desired a beautiful and good world, like our God, the Father of Jesus, wanted for everyone."

"You cannot and must not adapt yourselves to a love reduced to a commodity to be consumed without respect for oneself or for others, incapable of chastity and purity," the Holy Father urged. "This is not freedom."


read whole article here

Please welcome into this world Molly Marie.

fun facts:
she was born in room 7 at 11:07
weighed in at 7lbs. 7 oz.
our 7th Grandchild.
One big ball of buttery goodness

Mom and babe are doing well.

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A Defense of Baby Worship by our Uncle Gilbert

The two facts which attract almost every normal person to children are, first, that they are very serious, and, secondly, that they are in consequence very happy. They are jolly with the completeness which is possible only in the absence of humour. The most unfathomable schools and sages have never attained to the gravity which dwells in the eyes of a baby of three months old. It is the gravity of astonishment at the universe, and astonishment at the universe is not mysticism, but a transcendent common-sense. The fascination of children lies in this: that with each of them all things are remade, and the universe is put again upon its trial. As we walk the streets and see below us those delightful bulbous heads, three times too big for the body, which mark these human mushrooms, we ought always primarily to remember that within every one of these heads there is a new universe, as new as it was on the seventh day of creation. In each of those orbs there is a new system of stars, new grass, new cities, a new sea.

There is always in the healthy mind an obscure prompting that religion teaches us rather to dig than to climb; that if we could once understand the common clay of earth we should understand everything. Similarly, we have the sentiment that if we could destroy custom at a blow and see the stars as a child sees them, we should need no other apocalypse. This is the great truth which has always lain at the back of baby-worship, and which will support it to the end. Maturity, with its endless energies and aspirations, may easily be convinced that it will find new things to appreciate; but it will never be convinced, at bottom, that it has properly appreciated what it has got. We may scale the heavens and find new stars innumerable, but there is still the new star we have not found--that on which we were born.

But the influence of children goes further than its first trifling effort of remaking heaven and earth. It forces us actually to remodel our conduct in accordance with this revolutionary theory of the marvellousness of all things. We do (even when we are perfectly simple or ignorant)--we do actually treat talking in children as marvellous, walking in children as marvellous, common intelligence in children as marvellous. The cynical philosopher fancies he has a victory in this matter--that he can laugh when he shows that the words or antics of the child, so much admired by its worshippers, are common enough. The fact is that this is precisely where baby-worship is so profoundly right. Any words and any antics in a lump of clay are wonderful, the child's words and antics are wonderful, and it is only fair to say that the philosopher's words and antics are equally wonderful.

The truth is that it is our attitude towards children that is right, and our attitude towards grown-up people that is wrong. Our attitude towards our equals in age consists in a servile solemnity, overlying a considerable degree of indifference or disdain. Our attitude towards children consists in a condescending indulgence, overlying an unfathomable respect. We bow to grown people, take off our hats to them, refrain from contradicting them flatly, but we do not appreciate them properly. We make puppets of children, lecture them, pull their hair, and reverence, love, and fear them. When we reverence anything in the mature, it is their virtues or their wisdom, and this is an easy matter. But we reverence the faults and follies of children.

We should probably come considerably nearer to the true conception of things if we treated all grown-up persons, of all titles and types, with precisely that dark affection and dazed respect with which we treat the infantile limitations. A child has a difficulty in achieving the miracle of speech, consequently we find his blunders almost as marvellous as his accuracy. If we only adopted the same attitude towards Premiers and Chancellors of the Exchequer, if we genially encouraged their stammering and delightful attempts at human speech, we should be in a far more wise and tolerant temper. A child has a knack of making experiments in life, generally healthy in motive, but often intolerable in a domestic commonwealth. If we only treated all commercial buccaneers and bumptious tyrants on the same terms, if we gently chided their brutalities as rather quaint mistakes in the conduct of life, if we simply told them that they would 'understand when they were older,' we should probably be adopting the best and most crushing attitude towards the weaknesses of humanity. In our relations to children we prove that the paradox is entirely true, that it is possible to combine an amnesty that verges on contempt with a worship that verges upon terror. We forgive children with the same kind of blasphemous gentleness with which Omar Khayyam forgave the Omnipotent.

The essential rectitude of our view of children lies in the fact that we feel them and their ways to be supernatural while, for some mysterious reason, we do not feel ourselves or our own ways to be supernatural. The very smallness of children makes it possible to regard them as marvels; we seem to be dealing with a new race, only to be seen through a microscope. I doubt if anyone of any tenderness or imagination can see the hand of a child and not be a little frightened of it. It is awful to think of the essential human energy moving so tiny a thing; it is like imagining that human nature could live in the wing of a butterfly or the leaf of a tree. When we look upon lives so human and yet so small, we feel as if we ourselves were enlarged to an embarrassing bigness of stature. We feel the same kind of obligation to these creatures that a deity might feel if he had created something that he could not understand.

But the humorous look of children is perhaps the most endearing of all the bonds that hold the Cosmos together. Their top-heavy dignity is more touching than any humility; their solemnity gives us more hope for all things than a thousand carnivals of optimism; their large and lustrous eyes seem to hold all the stars in their astonishment; their fascinating absence of nose seems to give to us the most perfect hint of the humour that awaits us in the kingdom of heaven.

Relativism to its logical conclusion

In the beginning it was Religion is just superstition so "keep your rosaries off my ovaries" now it is science that is just superstition so "keep your chromosome off my ovum".

Opinion is ALL that matters.



"The modern mind will accept nothing on authority, but will accept anything on no authority. Say that the Bible or the Pope says so and it will be dismissed without further examination. But preface your remark with “I think I heard somewhere,” or, try but fail to remember the name of some professor who might have said “such-and-such,” and it will be immediately accepted as an unshakable fact."- GKC

News from the United Catholic Geek Front.

In Peter Freeman's Article God and the Geeks he mentions the graphic novels of Gene Luen Yang.
(I am a geek but not a consumer of graphic novels so if any of you are what do you think of this guy?)

Peter also mention J. R. Tolkien's work. Aside from that he makes an excellent point on Catholics today in the media and that we should not put aside our faith in the art creation process.
"But the question is a serious one for geek culture: Is there a way to convert all that time spent re-watching Star Wars, reading fan fiction, and playing epic video games into something greater than entertainment?"

Yes we need more writers like Gilbert, Lewis, and Belloc.

People unafraid to write from the Truth in order to get published.

pop quiz

In general the results of this quiz had sad results. As Catholics many have forgotten we are to be counter cultural. And yet more know who the greatest left handed pitcher was but can not tell you who the Beloved Apostle is.
Chesterton wrote a lot on the fallacy of comparative religion but i will leave you with this one.

"Impartiality is a pompous name for indifference, which is an elegant name for ignorance." GKC

Take the test and see how you do. I got one wrong.

results of the report are here

A review of Table Gype

A while back I mentioned Table Gype as a good idea for a tournament at the Chesterton Conference. At the time that was only speculation for I had not played it yet.

I now have this game and highly recommend it to those of you who enjoy playing board games with friends and family.

I know some of you out there have contact with Dale Ahlquist so see if you can get a Table Gype tournament going next year. Add a tankard of beer and some muffins to the night and a good time will be had by all.

While Table Gype is reminiscent of classic abstract strategy games such as Chinese Checkers, it features several elements that make it stand out from other board games. It is played on a cloth mat, and the lines on the board are made to look like they were drawn with white chalk, (something Gilbert always carried in his pocket). The playing pieces are in fact fat colored dice, which get rolled over whenever they are jumped - an effect that limits long-range strategic planning. The side of the dice that is up determines how that piece can move.

The faces of the playing pieces, which Chesterton referred to as "mysterious and significant shapes," are all taken from Chesterton's writings, such as Fire, Swords, and a Tree. The most wildly moving piece is a Hat, and every die has the chance of becoming the dreaded Gype's Ear when rolled. Four of Chesterton's quotations regarding games and playing decorate the board, and several more quotes appear in the rule book. One of the rules that me think of Chesterton is “…it is not polite to touch another player's piece in the course of the game.” It is not forbidden just not polite, something that was mentioned several times the last time I played it with my kids.

The game also has variations; one is for those who don’t like or can’t handle the random element such as small children.

The game is for 2-4 players and is most exciting with 3-4 players.

The only reason I gave it 4-1/2 out of five stars is that when I first received this game in the mail I was ready to play but there is some assembly required. This however was blessing in disguise. While my daughter was putting it together I read the rules. When I was done she was done and we played. It turned out to be an "inconvenience rightly considered". Also as a former marketing director I was not thrilled with the packaging. But hey, you don’t play the box.

Uncle Chestnut's Table Gype is available for purchase from Eternal-Revolution.com,

Wierd Science

The following video was made by the Canadian Wildlife Service. I have now heard several American scientists are scrambling for Obama stimulus dollars to replicate this experiment.

He is a sane man who can have tragedy in his heart and comedy in his head. GKC
--------------------------------------------------------------

An Irishman moves into a tiny hamlet in County Kerry, walks into the pub and promptly orders three beers.

The bartender raises his eyebrows, but serves the man three beers, which he drinks quietly at a table, alone.

An hour later, the man has finished the three beers and orders three more.

This happens yet again.

The next evening the man again orders and drinks three beers at a time, several times. Soon the entire town is whispering about the Man Who Orders Three Beers.

Finally, a week later, the bartender broaches the subject on behalf of the town. "I don't mean to pry, but folks around here are wondering why you always order three beers?"

'Tis odd, isn't it?" the man replies, "You see, I have two brothers, and one went to America, and the other to Australia. We promised each other that we would always order an extra two beers whenever we drank as a way of keeping up the family bond."

The bartender and the whole town was pleased with this answer, and soon the Man Who Orders Three Beers became a local celebrity and source of pride to the hamlet, even to the extent that out-of-towners would come to watch him drink.

Then, one day, the man comes in and orders only two beers. The bartender pours them with a heavy heart. This continues for the rest of the evening - he orders only two beers. The word flies around town. Prayers are offered for the soul of one of the brothers.

The next day, the bartender says to the man, "Folks around here, me first of all, want to offer condolences to you for the death of your brother. You know-the two beers and all..."

The man ponders this for a moment, then replies, "You'll be happy to hear that my two brothers are alive and well... It's just that I, myself, have decided to give up drinking for Lent."
------------------------------------------------

I entered the hospital on Oct 1st for a semi-serious procedure. It turned into a serious one so instead of a short stay I was there most of last week. I used that time and this time as an opportunity for Redemptive suffering.

As my Mom would tell me, “offer it up.”

It’s not that I recommend that kind of retreat for anyone but I know some great work was done.
The fruits of which I will never see this side of the great divide.

More NY election clerihews

"The right to wed," said Andrew Cuomo,
"should be granted to all members of the genus homo.
But I can't be bothered with the right to wed
the woman who shares my bed."

No one says Carl Paladino
is overly fond of vino.
But he does seem to like barking
and parking.

NY election clerihews

Carl Paladino
downed a cappuccino
then threatened to kill
unless he got a refill

The aim of Andrew Cuomo
is to be New York's majordomo.
If that's the way things go
it means four more years of the status quo.