Today in Porn, Richard Burton's Huge, Overwhelming Need Edition

Candy was a Terry Southern-penned parody of Candide that somehow got made into a movie starring Richard Burton, Marlon Brando, and Ringo Starr, the last as a Mexican gardener. (Yay, the '60!) Also starring: James Coburn, John Huston, Walter Matthau, and Sugar Ray Robinson (!) Anyway, the scene above gives us Burton as Macphisto (hello, Bono!), a drunken Welsh poet (is there any other kind?) who takes a fancy to our heroine.

[Warning: the above clip features feminine undergarments and brutish behavior. The whole thing is so ridiculous that I felt safe putting it up. Still, make your own call on this one.]

Art!

Godsbody Aunt Cheryl writes: "So, my tray is done! Yeah!!!!! To be auctioned off this Saturday along with 24 others (see them at www.artscolumbia.org) at Eat For Art, proceeds going to the Columbia County Council of the Arts. Titled (at least in my head) "I Must Be Crazy Quilt"...because everything including the stitches and the button in the center, is painted! I must be...

File Under: It really doesn't take much to make a Dad happy.

A little Mad Men on iTunes, a little Manhattan, a little snack of steak and mushrooms and spinach...

I am the most fortunate of men.

Art!

Godsbody uncle Terry Lickona announced the lineup for the 35th season of Austin City Limits recently...

October 3: Dave Matthews Band
October 10: Ben Harper and Relentless7
October 17: Kenny Chesney
October 24: Andrew Bird / St. Vincent
October 31: M. Ward / Okkervil River
November 7: Elvis Costello / Band of Heathens
November 14: Willie Nelson & Asleep at the Wheel
November 21: Pearl Jam
January 9, 2010: Allen Toussaint
January 16, 2010: Mos Def / K'Naan
January 23, 2010: TBD / Heartless Bastards
January 30, 2010: Steve Earle / Kris Kristofferson
February 6, 2010: Them Crooked Vultures
February 13, 2010: Madeleine Peyroux / Esperanza Spaldin

I kinda dig Okkervil River. Never heard of these other clowns, though.

Art!

Van Gogh's "Starry Night":



And First Daughter's version, done from memory after seeing it briefly on the Baby Van Gogh video we were playing for Third Daughter:



Yes, she put the moon on the left instead of the right. She's young yet. What I like best about it is that it wasn't part of any sort of assignment. She saw the painting, and decided to copy it, and that was that.

Bookmark

"Then she dropped a coin in the box, and with a thunk and a flash the painting flared before her: sacred conversation, Virgin and the saints, the figures so familiar, so dear...The figures gazed away, each one away, not even at each other, yet it seemed to her that something hung between them, a constellation drawn among all those thoughtful eyes. Sacred conversation, silent conversation. Just what are you speaking of? Lucinde wondered. She had always wondered this - in all the sacred conversations, but especially this one, where the conversation seemed so intent. It was not even a conversation, but silent, without words, it seemed more a belief that hovered about the figures, like the invisible music of the angel singing at their feet. What, then, do you believe? What does that angel sing?

Music of the angels, music of the spheres. Lucinde tried to imagine the spheres and their music: abstract and pure, their tone like that of a triangle, clear. She contented herself that the silent conversation was something like this, a music that was pure concord, a concord that was surely love. And so a love that was invisible, a love that was intangible, but a love that was all the same known."

- Jane Alison, The Marriage of the Sea

Art!

The Godsbody children were fortunate enough to be allowed to paint sea critters on the side of the Catalina Offshore Products building here in town...


Second Son's Sea Turtle


Second Daughter's Octopus, Third Son's Shark, First Daughter's Harlequin Whale (Daddy helped)


First Son's Big Fish/Little Fish Scene

Exchange.

Context: We regularly remind our children that they are not each other's parents, in an effort to keep them from scolding/commanding one another.

Me: Go play for a little bit.

Third Son: I just did.

Me: Son, go. We need a couple of minutes to talk.

Third Son: You're not the parent!

Dad-burn it!

Just when I'd finally caught up!



Yesterday's News Today: it seems that Brad and Angelina are planning to add a seventh child to their ginormous brood! I just hope everyone else in the CCBA* is as pleased as I am with everything these people are doing to bolster the acceptability of large families. Angelina: "We do love children and we do want a big family. Never say no." How much more open to life can you get?

*Crazy Catholic Breeders Association

Le Deluge

I've been mulling over a bunch of sorta religio-theological posts, thinking about, you know, serious stuff. And then I see this, and think, who am I kidding?



"Marie Antoinette dress. 'In honor of Halloween,' she declares, 'let them eat...candy!' A lavish confection of gold lamé, lilac and gold brocade and ivory lace, this is a costume treasure worthy of your French queen. The stunning wig and accessories add that ooh la la!"

Because girls want to be royalty, you see. Even if it means getting their heads lopped off. Ooh la la!

One more word.

Okay, several more words. This proved a remarkably fertile bit of bloggery, and recently, normally silent Godsbody reader df sent a comment I thought would make a good sort of coda to the discussion. Here 'tis:

"PPS: 'On a practical level, what has helped me, prosaic as it sounds, is keeping Christ as the center of my attention, and not His Church.'

You are exactly right. It worries me that discussions on all sides of the theological/political spectrum go on as if the Church had life and could be understood as living apart from her relationship to her Head, who is Christ the Lord, or, conversely, as if Christ Jesus could be properly estimated apart from his having a living body. Not for no reason did Saint Thomas treat the Church as Body precisely within his treatise on Christ in the Tertia Pars. And for good reason did Augustine, preaching against the Donatists, say that the Christian who disdains another Christian is like a man who steps on the foot of Christ even as he draws near to kiss him. Christ would say to such a one (Augustine says): Get off my foot, for you are hurting me, … get off my foot and then you may approach to kiss me. Granted that these are uncommonly contentious times, and many Catholics are angry and suspicious, still, within the Church, when contending with thoughts and with one another, the presumption must be in favor of Augustine’s admonition to protect the unity of the Church, which is simply to say in favor of charity manifested in the form of patience. For Augustine, the error of the Donatists was a failure of charity and humility before it was an error of doctrine.

It does, ultimately, become a matter of aesthetic proportion, that is to say, knowing the moment and hearing the call of conscience to respond to it well. But this aesthetics is best taught to us by the luminosity of the saints, whose dramatic engagement with the hour in time given to them serves as our best light to discern the demands of charity and truth in our time. Seeking their counsel is not only about following their example, it is also about seeking a share in the sympathy granted to them with which they discerned that impulse of the Holy Spirit guiding their assessment of the needs of the moment. There is no formula for dealing with difficult people in difficult times; there is only charity in truth, and the forms it can take are almost as many as the moments a day can bring to a Catholic of good conscience. King David recognized that the kinsman of Saul might have had reason from the Lord to denounce him in his hour of dejection. Such humility is needed in the Church’s members, as we contemplate either publicizing a challenge to the conscience of another, or as we consider having received such a challenge.

And this is the point of what you say about the center of our attention. The saints contemplated Christ and because of this they loved his Body the Church: not the Church in general, but the Church in her totality, indefectibly holy at her heart, yet marked with unsightly particulars: our failures, our sins, our stubbornness; the saints knew that only by embracing the bloody particular, only by loving his members, could they encounter Him. In the Church, there is no them and us, there is only us in Christ, and the deepest Catholic impulse is to invite the world to see itself in Christ through conversion, and thus live and act in the us that Christ creates by his blood. The saints knew also that the only hope for us all is to encounter the Love that sees through to the cause of our shame, and loves us in the midst of it all, all the way to the end.

Saint Edmund Campion and Pope Saint Pius V each contemplated the face of Christ and for love of him gave their lives for the Church; one accepted his moment and became a martyr, the other accepted his moment knowing that his decisions would likely cause martyrs to be made. There are times that call for prophetic denunciation, and there are men called to do it; Pius V was such a one; but I do not think such moments and such men are as common as we might, at first thought, imagine. More frequent is the quiet protestation of an honest conscience, the witness of Campion faced with the challenge of responding to the dazzling lure that the flesh, the world and the devil can mount. I am not sure which Saint suffered more for his love, but I do know that both discerned their moments with humility, purification of intentions, and with much fear and trembling. I also know that deep interiority, a conscious reliance on the mercy of God, and much prayer accompanied their respective judgments. The Lord expects us to engage our moment with no less care. When we do this, He who is Head of the Church will order all things to the good. And let us never forget that the good the Head seeks most to give us is the grace that allows time and circumstance to conform us more perfectly to Himself."

Stones

Gary Friedman, CEO of Restoration Hardware, is not afraid of marketing. Viz the letter in his latest catalog:

"'Hell, there are no rules here; we're trying to accomplish something.' Three months of formal schooling, 1,093 U.S. Patents including the Phonograph, the Kinetoscope (think motion pictures), the Alkaline Battery, and the Incandescent Light Bulb. Thomas Alva Edison was famous for both his inventions and his irreverent perspective, exemplified by the quote above. His inventions transformed the world, and his perspective revolutionized everyone in it. He held the status quo in disdain. He broke the rules. He recognized that risk-taking and failure were the only ways to truly advance society...It is that perspective that has led to the many innovative interpretations of Edison's invention represented among the pages of our Famous Fall Catalog Lighting Sale."

Emphasis most definitely mine.

Art for art's sake. (A pun? No, no - a play on words.)

Gillian Welch weighs in on the current state of music distribution. (And yes, I am aware of the irony of posting a free version of this song.)

First Son, Film Critic

"9 was like a sloppy mosaic. The director had lots of great pieces that were awesome to look at, but he didn't put them together carefully."

Overheard.

Third Son: "The Spider-Man pants are really comfy."

Visualizing the Bible

Yesterday's News Today, but this is really kind of cool: Visualizing the Bible. Writes Chris Harrison: "This set of visualizations started as a collaboration between Christoph Römhild and myself. Christoph, a Lutheran Pastor, first emailed me in October of 2007. He described a data set he was putting together that defined textual cross references found in the Bible. He had already done considerable work visualizing the data before contacting me. Together, we struggled to find an elegant solution to render the data, more than 63,000 cross references in total..We set our sights on...something more beautiful than functional. At the same time, we wanted something that honored and revealed the complexity of the data at every level –- as one leans in, smaller details should become visible. This ultimately led us to the multi-colored arc diagram you see below.

The bar graph that runs along the bottom represents all of the chapters in the Bible. Books alternate in color between white and light gray. The length of each bar denotes the number of verses in the chapter. Each of the 63,779 cross references found in the Bible is depicted by a single arc - the color corresponds to the distance between the two chapters, creating a rainbow-like effect."

Go check it out.

Poetry Happens

So the Original Interlocutor (along with a couple of compatriots) was over at Casa Godsbody on Saturday, and it got to be a certain point in the evening, the point where people start reading poetry. (Future guests take comfort: I only ever pull this kind of nonsense when guests have expressed a desire to participate in it.) The Wisconsin Poet once gave me a great fat volume of Robert Lowell's Collected Works, and he was a Catholic for a while, right before he went a little loony. (Wags, please insert jokes about the timing of said turn for the loony Here.) So hey, if the straitjacket fits...

For George Santayana (1863-1952)

In the heydays of 'forty-five
bus-loads of souvenir-deranged
G.I.'s and officer-professors of philosophy
came crashing through your cell,
puzzled to find you still alive,
free-thinking Catholic infidel,
stray spirit, who'd found
the Church too good to be believed.
Later I used to dawdle
past Circus and Mithraic Temple
to Santo Stefano grown paper-thin
like you from waiting....
There at the monastery hospital,
you wished those geese-girl sisters wouldn't bother
their heads and yours by praying for your soul:
"There is no God and Mary is His Mother."

Lying outside the consecrated ground
forever now, you smile
like Ser Brunetto running for the green
cloth at Verona - not like one
who loses, but like one who'd won...
as if your long pursuit of Socrates'
demon, man-slaying Alcibiades,
the demon of philosophy, at last had changed
those fleeting virgins into friendly laurel trees
at Santo Stefano Rotundo, when you died
near ninety,
still unbelieving, unconfessed and unreceived,
true to your boyish shyness of the Bride.
Old trooper, I see your child's red crayon pass
bleeding deletions on the galleys you hold
under your throbbing magnifying glass,
that worn arena, where the whirling sand
and broken-hearted lions lick your hand
refined by bile as yellow as a lump of gold.

Exchange.

So. A kind soul recently inquired about the unpublishable book two, and I directed her to this bit, which was to have served as the opening.

She replied:

"Here's what struck me:

'...Conversion can mean upheaval and uprooting – a break with loved ones, the sacrifice of a common culture, the crucifixion of old, familiar habits. And to hear Alexander tell it, conversion could mean a skewed vision that threw things out of proportion. If there was a cradlish tendency to treat the faith as just another part of life, it seemed there was a converted tendency to treat it as the only part that mattered. And such a tendency could take its toll.'

And I believe this is true of reversion, as well. I've been thinking about it quite a bit over the last few years - and even more over the last few months. (Maybe too much time in the blogosphere?) It's that increasingly diminishing (? oxymoron alert!) sense of proportionality, which is fundamental to human interaction, it seems to me. Without it, we are reduced to babbling tribes, recognizing nothing human in those with whom with we resolutely disagree.

Here's the concrete take: When I was a young university student, wholly in the thrall of the 'Spirit of Vatican II' and all its fuzzy ecumanist/humanist feel-goodness, the people I simply could not abide were the 'orthodox' liturgical prescriptionists, who I derisively and regularly referred to as the 'Pre-Vat-II' set. Two of them were my roommates, and I called them friends even so. But their reactionary, un-nuanced (to me) mindset I found to be one of the arguments against 'the True Faith,' effectively preventing me from engaging the principles to which they so ardently clung (rightly, though at the time I could not see that). So fast forward a decade, give or take, and suddenly lo! various life-changing events conspire to bring me around to a position pretty much identical to my reactionary friends'. And lo! I have become exactly like them in my disdain for all things smacking of the 'Spirit of Vatican II.' And I hear myself making the same kinds of contemptuous proclamations about the Masses at St. Thus-and-such and the committees behind the workshops at Catholic Group Retreat.

So I am asking myself - what has happened here? Does the embrace of Truth as a real thing necessarily do away with one's ability to hear/speak to/celebrate/love The Other? Why cannot we acknowledge Truth=Beauty; God=Love without invariably continuing on through to Us Vs. Them? Because it seems to me more and more unlikely (speaking for myself, though the culture would suggest as much). And I do not see anyone within or without Holy Mother Church who has any answers.*********"

To which I replied, rather grumpily:

"CATHOLICS SUCK.

I haven't gotten into an online dustup over Catholic Crap in years, because I don't want to go to hell for hating my fellow Catholics. I almost broke that policy last night, after reading a bunch of The Orthodox go to work on a priest who dared to criticize a BROTHER PRIEST (gasp) for telling parents to PULL THEIR KIDS FROM SCHOOL RATHER THAN LISTEN TO OBAMA'S SPEECH. The critical priest runs a parish of 10K in the South, hears confession six times a week, quotes Evangelium Vitae from the pulpit, but don't you know it, he's a liberal traitor to Christ because he watches American Idol and suggests that sermons ought to avoid this kind of bs isolationist scolding.

I am so grateful that I have known holy men and women whose embrace of the faith has been so complete that they are able to be orthodox and yet continue to love the Other."

p.s. Why do I consider attending the Trid Mass at St. Anne's? Not in the least because of liturgical prescriptionism. Because I want to AVOID it. Because I would like to attend a Mass where I can worship instead of being tempted to critique. Liturgy matters, but I hate the prescriptionism, the discussion of failure. Or rather, I hate myself after doing it/listening to it.

p.p.s. On a practical level, what has helped me, prosaic as it sounds, is keeping Christ as the center of my attention, and not His Church."

To which she replied:

"Well, yes. And weekly adoration (and Mass) is the principal reason I'm still doggedly pursuing heaven, in spite of the nagging knowledge that in all likelihood, if I ever get there I'll be standing next to ... that guy.

But the question that still troubles me is...WHY do Catholics suck? Why, if we are the heirs the Tradition, Truth, sacraments, grace, countless saints? C'mon God, what is it about Catholicism that makes us MORE likely to become imitators of Lucifer than his Enemy? Hm, maybe the answer is there and I just haven't read the right books (that's what [mutual friend] would probably say). Of course it's a given that I haven't read 90 percent of the Bible: I was catechized in the Spirit of Vatican II!

One of the things that I found so appealing about postmodernism is that I think its hesitancy to acknowledge truth exhibits a kind of humility that is lacking in modernism and POMO's totalitarian offshoot, relativism. I think Waiting for Godot has heart and humor--and even the potential for hope, though that often depends on the staging. What it doesn't have--and what too much of Orthodox (TM) Catholicism has in spades: Disdain for The Other. And maybe this is one reason Catholics suck in general: They don't understand art, nor do they make any effort to do so. They either fear it or they think it needs to Be Important or Uphold the Faith, but they mostly just 'know what they like and don't like.' Us Vs. Them."

To which I replied:

"Art is dangerous, sister - there's a reason so many of the sterner saints warned against attending the theater. It's dangerous because it deals in particulars, and particulars are a lousy place to search for universal truth and affirmation of doctrine.

Tribalism flourishes in lots of places - the [REDACTED] have built higher walls than we ever will. Their own music, their own novels, their own worlds in those [REDACTED]. [REDACTED]l authors make more money because they have a captive audience. So I don't know if we're worse than everybody else.

When you get to heaven, you and that guy will both be lovely people. So that's all right then."

So. There it is. Thought it worth sharing, if only for my interlocutor's observations.

UPDATE FROM THE DEPARTMENT OF MAKING THINGS CLEAR: Yes, I homeschool. Yes, I think the President has a right to address children in public schools. No, I am not a fan of President Obama. Yes, I think parents ought to be able to pull their kids if they want to. No, I don't think a priest should suggest that letting your kids listen to the President give a speech on education is tantamount to leaving the gate open for the wolf. Yes, I think he has the right to say that, even if he's wrong. I also think a fellow priest has a right to criticize it without being tarred and feathered by God's loving family. Great line from an old Jesuit: "Do I not conquer my enemy when I make him my friend?"

Why we work.

Kids in the yard, Fall 2009

Today in Porn, "Something within me, long sickening, had quietly died" Edition

Hugh Hefner has filed for divorce from his wife of 20 years, Kimberly Conrad. Now maybe he can get out there and have some fun before he dies, hm?

[Thanks to the Wisconsin Poet for the heads-up.]

Alphonse Issue Three.

Let me explain. As of today, any new project put up on Kickstarter has to pay a 5% fee - the site is out of its startup phase, and is (understandably) looking to make some money. So they sent out a heads-up to all their early adopters, your humble Mr. Godsbody included, saying that Sept. 14 was the last day to slap something up for free. I took the nudge, and slapped something up, even at the risk of seeming presumptuous/greedy (what with issue two not even finished yet). (That's a bit from the issue two pencils up above.)

I'm hesitant to mention it on the blog, since many Godsbody readers proved wildly generous in the funding of issue two, and I am most certainly not trying to crack open the same set of wallets here. If you already donated, please ignore this. Just trying to get the word out on behalf of the little guy. Thanks, all.

Little Flower, Rose Window, St. Therese Church, San Diego

The Children are Listening.

Me: "Well..."

Third son: "...how did I get here?"

"...like some kind of low-rent Narnia..."

Lamppost, Casa Godsbody.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA... Part II

"I am deeply saddened that my inappropriate comments have become a major distraction for my colleagues in the Assembly..." As opposed to before, when my inappropriate comments - that is, my ridiculously detailed tales of sexual debauchery - were only a minor distraction, something I entertained my fellow Assemblymen with in the minutes before our formal meetings. That was okay. Hell, that was great.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA...

"Inappropriate story-telling" is my new favorite euphemism.

Adventures in Homeschooling

Overheard while passing by schoolroom: "Okay, so he's in the garden, and he's praying, and he's sweating blood..."

Hoo! Christianity: it's either true or it's eight kinds of crazy.

Kingsley & Waugh

"Sometimes, in a slightly different vein Marilyn [nee Kerr] would talk about her life before Peter [Quennell]. She had known Evelyn Waugh. 'Horrible little man. What I couldn't bear about him was the way he arse-crept rich and important people. He wouldn't just say something about the house looking very nice. He'd say, "I do hope you and Cedric realise how much all your friends admire you for the wondering things you've done to this room. That ceiling is a dream. And the orangery, which I saw this morning, it absolutely took my breath away." Little fart. You know I used to be Lady something. Nobody could have made more fuss of me while I was. And nobody could have started ignoring me quicker when I stopped being it."

Fine, fine. And so Brideshead Revisited is just Waugh working out his fondness for pretty houses and the titled aristocracy. Except that "working out" gave rise to passages such as this: "The builders did not know the uses to which their work would descend; they made a new house with the stones of the old castle; year by year, generation after generation, they enriched and extended it; year by year the great harvest of timber in the park grew to ripeness; until, in sudden frost, came the age of Hooper; the place was desolate and the work all brought to nothing; Quomodo sedet sola civitas. Vanity of vanities, all is vanity

"And yet, I thought, stepping out more briskly toward the camp, where the bugles after a pause had taken up the second call...and yet that is not the last word; it is not even an apt word; it is a dead word from ten years back. Something quite remote from anything the builders intended had come out of their work..."

I won't spoil the novel's ending any further; go read it for yourself. This is just to say that if ever alchemy really did hold sway, if ever lead really could be transmuted to gold, it was surely here, in the realm of arts and letters.

What have I done?

Me: Son, what do you want to be when you grow up?

First Son: I want to be a marketer. I love watching ads. Not even for what they're selling - for how they work.

Nostalgia: Press Play

Pity the Pundits

Dept. of Being Careful What You Wish For: you become a pundit, finally able to express, in public, your opinion on anything and everything, only to find that you are obliged to express, in public, an opinion on anything and everything.

I got your comic-book priestly analogue right here...

Dr. Stephen Strange, Master of the Mystic Arts. Drawn by Gene Colan at Comic-Con 2009 (olde-timey Gene Colan cover showing Strange playing St. Anthony assaulted by devils is below). Bought by my brother as a birthday present. Framed by yours truly, because I'm not only a geek, I'm a bourgeois geek.

Kingsley

"The productive careers, or the public reputations, of two of the American writers just mentioned went into notorious decline, that of Hemingway (1899-1961) after about 1945 no less than that of O'Hara (1905-70) after 1949. This kind of thing can happen to anyone, agreed, but many people would see something typically American about those declines, set against the examples of, say, Anthony Powell or Iris Murdoch. As can be seen, whatever it is afflicts not merely the drop-outs...those of slender achievement or none, but the once-established, the highest hopes of their time. Too much success, the old scapegoat? Perhaps the American fondness for size, for big books, for large statements, subjects, themes, a desire for greatness now rather than after a few decades of work - very demoralizing and exhausting. Is it a gentles' weakness in a literary culture more and more dominated by Jews? No to that one: for every couple of continuingly successful Jewish writers (Bellow, Roth) there are a couple of failures (Mailer, Salinger), not to speak of durable gentiles (Nabokov, Updike). But something does happen."

Kingsley Amis, Memoirs

Coda via Terry Teachout:

"I got on with the task of turning myself into a brief professional writer. The term professional is not meant to imply a high standard of commitment and attainment: it meant then, as it still does, the pursuit of a trade or calling to the end of paying the rent and buying liquor. I leave the myth of inspiration and agonised creative inaction to the amateurs."

- Anthony Burgess, You've Had Your Time, Being the Second Part of the Confessions of Anthony Burgess

Food(ie) Fight

The New Mexico Nurse loves to watch the wrestling match of ideas - move and countermove. So naturally he was delighted to send me this piece laying into the "agri-intellectuals" who are seemingly so dead-set against farming as currently practiced in America. The author, Blake Hurst, has the advantage of actually being a farmer, and it's very much worth reading his essay, once you get past the peevishness (justifiable or otherwise) in the opening grafs. I think a few of the shots he takes are cheap - the whole bit about turkeys drowning themselves in the rain is a fine story, but when people complain about contained poultry, they're not complaining about a roof overhead. Still, Hurst has reason to be grumpy, and deserves to have his say.

But you know, not everybody who's critiquing modern farm methods is doing so from an ivory tower. It's part of the reason The Wife is so fond of the book she's reading these days: Rowan Jacobsen's Fruitless Fall: the Collapse of the Honeybee and the Coming Agricultural Crisis. The book opens in the field: a modern, large-scale beekeeper inspecting his hives. It's very much a book that begins on the ground and works from there. When Jacobsen points to possible problems with modern agricultural practices, well, he deserves to have his say, too.

Here and elsewhere, it seems that both sides need to work harder at listening to each other.

My son.

Third Son, tucking into his third helping of pork: "This pork is really good, Mom. What did you do, put sugar in it?"

That goodness, my dear boy, is not sugar, but reduced stock and wine and a few other goodies. Le sauce, c'est tout. But still, I'm delighted he noticed.

Oh, come now.

The New Mexico Nurse sends word from the British press: "Give us this day our daily... Catholic church issues prayer for faithful to say before sex."

They do know their way around a headline; I'll give them that. So, exactly which office of the Vatican issued this pre-coital prayer? Er...um... "The London-based Catholic Truth Society." Ah. As organs of Church authority go, that's pretty darn ex cathedra. Empahsis on the ex.

Oh, but wait. "The group has close links to the Catholic Bishops' Conference of England and Wales." Oh, well then. And what did the Auxiliary Bishop of Southwark have to say about this pronouncement? "'I suppose it is a bit idealistic but it is recognising that God is at the heart of the marriage relationship between husband and wife...It is important for the Church to affirm the value of marriage and family life and I suppose this is a particular way of doing that...Perhaps it is something that has not been tried, certainly for a while - I can't remember seeing something like that before."

Sort of like when Pius IX defined the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, no? Who can forget that stunning pronouncement? "I suppose it is a bit idealistic, but it is recognizing that God had a special purpose for the Virgin who was to bear the Incarnate Word...It is important for the Church to affirm the goodness of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and I suppose this is a particular way of doing that...Perhaps saying that she was preserved exempt from all stain of original sin is something that has not been tried...I can't remember hearing something like that before."

Le sigh.

Exchange.

Me: Son, please stop with the forced burping. There is no virtue in it.

First Son: But Dad, it wins you the respect of others. It's like being the dominant male in the herd.

Me: ...

The Wife: There's probably about a year of life where that's actually true.

No photo attached.

That's it. Drawing a line in the waistband. Walking today.