Bundled

Get your bumper engaged in the clash of civilizations!

Buy one of these things over here.

3 weeks old today. More William Sean McClintock pics here.

"Hitler, after all, was elected . . . " A commentary
on the Hamas victory and the idea of democracy for all in the Middle East.

Ajay. A few days ago I had lunch with Ajay M. Bhatt, a lawyer with the Department of Homeland Security. He is from Spartanburg, SC, and had been a student of my aunt, Ann Dobbs, when she taught English in a private secondary school there. Ann and Ajay had become great friends, and I met him once when we visited Ann in Eastman, GA, where she runs a bed and breakfast called "The Dodge Hill Inn". You don't "drop by" Eastman, so his visit attests to their friendship.

So Ajay was in Miami for a couple of weeks, where he was handling some cases in the Immigration courts not far from my office, and I got to have lunch with him. After our visit, he sent me an email with a link to his website where he has posted photos of a trip to India. He does street-clowning (I don't know if that's the right word) and the photos are from some of his performances. Now that is an unusual way to spend a vacation. Way to go, Ajay!

Bill Cowher and the Steelers. Good article on SI.com.

Whose side is she on? The irony is that only in America is such a plight possible. Good luck with that.

Fusion Magic. No sooner do I master the Mach3, power version, Gillette comes out with the Fusion. In stores this week. Suddenly the mundane becomes spectacular. (Five blades in front! One in the back!) No doubt Carol will be up at dawn with me just to see me shave. It comes in a power version as well. I can't wait for Father's Day. I'm putting the Mach3, power version, on Ebay immediately.

Miami (half) Marathon

It was a beautiful morning for a run in Miami.


-wake-up time: 4.45 am

-time on metrorail, from Earlington Heights to Government Center: 15 minutes



-the course.


-start time: 6am

-temperature: 70

-number of people I ran with: 11,000?

-cruise ships passed: 4

-bridges traversed: 6

-causeways travelled: 2

-sunrises seen: 1

-port-o-john stops: 2

-cups of water taken: 4

-cup of gatorade: 1

-power gels consumed: 1

-glimpses of the man in the gold daisy dukes: 2

-prostitutes along the way: 2

-crazy homeless folks who joined the run for a bit: 3

-collapsed runners: 1

-miles run: 13.13 (that extra .03 is what I figure I traveled from the shotgun start to the actual starting line...which took me about 5 minutes in the slow traffic)

-marathoners who finished all 26.2 before I finished 13.1: 0 (phew!)

-race time: 2:09:47

-pace/mile: 9:55 (geez! that's too slow! we'll run faster next time, or at least take fewer bathroom breaks.)

post race details:




-bananas consumed: 2

-power bars: 1

-orange slices: 9

-bottles of water: 1

-parents found: 2

-pictures taken: 7

-salsa bands playing: 1

Solidarity
Boy, Will, I sure know what you mean!

UPDATE: Mary ran in the Miami Half-Marathon. How was it, Mar?

Oh, Yeah!

If we come to [nature] with the assumption that it is a creation, we shall study it with awe; if assuming it to be a system, with mere curiosity.

-Cardinal Newman in The Tamworth Reading Room, as quoted in the review by Oakes which I cite below.

I know this sounds a little ridiculous in light of Newman's sublime statement, but I look at what I see in Amateur Radio with a specie of this sort of awe. To think that God, in his great plan before the beginning thought to include an ionosphere, a thing which several millennia after that beginning facilitated worldwide communications by providing a ceiling around the earth from which to bounce radio signals like ping-pong balls - it amazes me.

I really can't get my head around all of creation (who can?). For that matter, I can't get my head around the marvel of the members of my family and the richness of the love that it pulses. But ham radio I can get a little inside of and get an idea of how that section of creation seems to work. The awe there is somewhat particularized and somewhat accessible (though barely) to my small mind, and I can just begin to deal with it. The richness of family, on the other hand, not to mention the rest of creation, simply leaves me slack-jawed and awe-struck into unintelligibility.

'Cause I like to stir the pot

[That Wal-Mart opening I posted on a while back] received 25,000 applications for 325 openings for a new Chicago area store. Critics charge that this will encourage a race to the bottom, as the store fills many of these vacancies with part-time employees and offers lower wages and benefits than the competitors that will inevitably fold against Wal-Mart’s enormous buying power.

Meanwhile, Chad Donath, the corporation’s Chicago area manager argues, “That incredible number of applications shows the community thinks Wal-Mart is a great place to work.”

Well, not exactly. What it shows, though, is that 25,000 people would prefer to work in those jobs than the jobs they have -- or don't have -- at the moment.

That's the fundamental fact of economics that the critics seem not to get. Sure, for those with college educations or substantial technical skills in high demand in the marketplace, work as a stocker or cashier in the retail industry would be undesirable. It's hard, stressful work. But there would appear to be 25,000 people out there who consider those jobs a step up from where they are now.

. . .as economist Thomas Sowell explains, people who take low paying jobs gain valuable skills that they can translate into higher paying jobs. “Notions of menial jobs and dead-end jobs may be just shallow misconceptions among the intelligentsia but they are a deadly counterproductive message to the poor. Refusing to get on the bottom rung of the ladder usually means losing your chance to move up the ladder.”

This from an article comparing Wal-Mart to Universities. Interesting.

A Reply to "Subjective Idealism".

There was a young man who said
"God
Must think it exceedingly odd
If he finds that this tree
Continues to be
Where there's no one about in the
Quad."

"Dear Sir, your astonishment's odd;
I am always about in the Quad
And that's why this tree
Will continue to be
Since observed by . . . Yours faithfully,
God."

-Attributed to Ronald Knox by Edward T. Oakes, S.J. in his review of Sweet Dreams: Philosophical Obstacles to a Science of Consciousness by Daniel C. Dennett, which review appears in the January 2006 issue of First Things.

the chronic(what?) Via Walter.

Pray I'm not too soon

In a startling fit of discipline and disregard, I'm going to respond to Macon's challenge but leave out some of the less savory topics:

Seven or fewer things:

I want to do before I die:
I don't know what to do with this one. I'd like to be friends with Bob Dylan, James Hetfield, Tom Waits, and Jeremy Enigk. Talk Mcluhan with them. I don't need to get it done before death, though, I think.

Things I cannot do:
Produce my own thyroid hormone.
Laugh at anything Kevin Smith has produced.
Put my clothes away.
Use toenail clippers instead of picking with my fingernails
Stop the Rock!

Things I say most often:
what a beets
the lofe
pompaton
run to the hills

Celebrity Anti-Crushes:
Incubus
Sum 41
Blink 182
311
Limp Bizkit

Attention, Young Parents! You can have it all.

Apparently.

New Words from First Things.

People may disagree, but I think myself somewhat literate. Nevertheless, each issue of FT has articles with words either I haven't ever seen before or, if I have, I have forgotten the meaning. (Oh, gee, I hope its more of the former than the latter . . . Now, where was I?) Here are some from the January 2006 issue:

endogamy: This word appears in an article entitled "Protestant-Catholic-Jew, Then and Now" which discusses the 1954 book Protestant-Catholic-Jew, by Will Herberg, a sociologist, a book that the author of the article, Kevin M. Schultz, describes as "still a classic of American religious history". The word describes the practice of people who marry within their ethnic, nationality, or religious group. What Herbert saw in the mid fifties was a "decline of endogamy among people of the same nationality . . . and a rise of endogamy among the three religious groups [Protestant, Catholic, Jew]."

natalists: These are people whose personal identity is defined by parenthood and who have three or more children, at least according to David Brooks. Natalists 'are more spiritually, emotionally, and physically invested in their homes than in other spheres of life, having concluded that parenthood is the most enriching and elevating thing they can do.' This discussion appears in the Public Square section of the January issue. Neuhaus looks at a review of David Brooks' Paradise Drive and other writings, of whom and of which I have no acquaintance except what Neuhaus says of them. Other characteristics of natalists are described. For example, "People who have big families, Brooks goes on, 'are explicitly rejecting materialistic incentives and hyperindividualism'.

qualia: This appears in a review of a book by Daniel C. Dennett entitled Sweet Dreams: Philosophical Obstacles to a Science of Consciousness. The review is by Edward T. Oakes, S.J. Oaks writes, "Among philosophers working on the mind/body problem, the word 'qualia' stands for all those features of consciousness that give awareness its specific identity as a particular kind of experience: the redness of red, the sadness of depression, the piquancy of papaya juice, the irksomeness of traffic jams, the crankiness that comes from insomnia, the hurt feelings arising from play-ground taunts, and so forth . . . Qualia consitute the central challenge for any philosopher who wants to provide a fully naturalistic account of consciousness based on the neurochemistry of the brain."

"The most technologically advanced manual shaving system in the world."

I use it. I like it. If I can't work an iPod, I can work this.

SCOTUS
I am hopeful that with Judge Alito's soon-to-be confirmation, the Supreme Court will release some (all?) of the powers it's arrogated to itself over the past 20 years. I like how Professor Bainbridge sums the problem up in this post (it's a short post & worth reading).

Once again, nine old men and women in robes have elevated themselves into a super-legislature in which they have exercised privileges they deny to our elected representatives. So much for having a democracy. Indeed, at this rate, so much for having a republic.

Moral education

"We should not think of moral education as indoctrination, but as initiation. It is initiation into the human moral inheritance: 'men transmitting manhood to men.' . . . We have not decided what morality requires; we have discovered it. We transmit not our own views or desires but moral truth-by which we consider ourselves also to be bound. Hence, moral education is not an exercise of power over future generations."

-Gilbert Meilaender as quoted by Richard John Neuhaus in the January 2006 issue of First Things at page 66.