See It Soon or Not at All

The Neil Armstrong Air and Space Museum in Wapakoneta, Ohio, is being closed July 20, 2009, thanks to budget cuts at the Ohio Historical Society. It was just renovated in 1999.

Yes, that stinks.

However, there will be special events around the Moon anniversary (like Wapak’s Summer Moon Festival), and odd hours before that last hurrah. So call ahead, but definitely go if you’ve never been. It’s a great little museum, and just the right size for kids.

Meanwhile, the Summer Moon Festival will feature a lifesized astronaut carved out of green cheese, an exclusive Lunar Lager brewed by Thirsty Dog, the world’s largest Moon Pie, and special exhibits, tours, dinners, and events all week throughout Wapakoneta. They’ll even have free movies. Looks fun.

The Catacombs of St. Joseph in Newark: Catholic Field Trip Idea

St. Joseph’s Church in Newark, New Jersey has its own set of artificial catacombs, filled with wax images of Early Christian martyrs.

Fr. Mateo Amoros, the assistant pastor back in the 1930’s, apparently decided that what was missing from his church’s basement was underground tunnels, like in the old country. So he made some. Very cool. He was transferred out of the parish in 1945, no doubt to do great things elsewhere as a pastor.

Newark, New Jersey is a bit easier of access than Butte, Montana, so I’m surprised I’ve never seen anything blogged about this.

Via Roadside America, which is showcasing the Catacombs this week.

Our Lady of the Rockies Statue: Catholic Field Trip

History Channel has a reputation for digging out weird anti-Catholic or anti-Christian myths, but I want to give it credit where credit is due. I just saw a very interesting story on the engineering show Boneyards about the reclaiming and reusing of the old Anaconda copper mines in Butte, Montana. Said show did its darndest to imply in its closing segment that all the good stuff being done by the current owners is courtesy of the intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

Anyway, a miner guy with the felicitous name of Bob O’Bill found out that his wife had cancer. He told all his buddies that if his wife recovered, he had vowed to build a nine foot concrete statue of Mary in his yard as thanks. Well, his wife did recover, but in their eagerness to help out, his coworkers transformed the statue project into a ninety foot statue to be placed on the Great Divide. (It would have been 120 feet, but the FAA told them Mary would then have to have a giant blinking light on her head, which would have really messed up their windshear calculations as well as the look.)

Using donated land and donated materials (like pipes!), designed by a retired engineer and a welder, put together at a construction company, and then put into place at a site so high that a road had first to be built and the statue parts flown in by helicopter, this thing is an amazing product of grassroots Catholicism and blue-collar American faith and friendship.

(It’s officially nondenominational, interestingly enough, and much is said on the website about it honoring all women. To which I say, Whatever makes non-Catholic people comfortable with building and loving a big giant honkin’ statue of Mary.)

I’d never even heard of it! Had you? I’m pretty sure I never saw anything about it as a kid, and I was watching the evening news by 1985. I guess it makes an appearance in one of the old Bud McFarland novels, but I never got around to reading those.

Official Website for Our Lady of the Rockies.

If Karen Anderson Gets Torqued at You, You’re in the Wrong.

Also, you don’t lecture Jerry Pournelle on how SDI works, just as you don’t teach your grandmother to suck eggs.

More basic guidelines suggest that you don’t complain about someone with bad hearing (like Pournelle) talking loudly. Nor do you opine about what kind of bad mother-in-law a woman must be, especially a woman much your senior, unless you are no gentleman as well as tactless.

Yes, some people do act like trolls both in person and on their blogs. The tales I’ve been reading of a recent contretemps at an LASFS meeting tell me that a certain young visiting sf writer apparently is one of those trollish, socially unaware people who really aren’t ready to go out in public. Especially when he then whines self-righteously about being hard done by.

I’ve had some pretty darned spirited discussions with people at sf cons, and I’ve hung out with people whose ideological and scientific opinions were not even vaguely consonant with mine. I’ve seen epic arguments. But when any situation got heated, I’ve never seen anyone not realize that he was in the wrong in such a situation at least in part, not apologize at least a little, or not at least try to cover his butt socially. If it was mutual blowup, that was generally admitted. You might hear people saying after such a verbal fight, “I hate XY!” or “XY was all wrong!” You never heard them saying, “XY had no right to argue with me at that party, because I was a guest and he should have been nice to me and not picked on my equations!”

It’s pretty stunningly bad manners. I mean, not even a little healthy post-incident hypocritical mouthing of the pieties. Incredibly, for an alleged hard sf writer, we don’t even have the standard hauling out of the equations to prove that _I_ am right and XY is clearly wrong, the poor fool. Can you really claim to be writing hard sf if you don’t haul out the calculations to further your arguments? I mean, sheesh, justifying your choices in meta-discussions of even a hard linguistics sf novel would mean hauling out some morpheme theory diagrams, or grammar trees, or something….

Well, I’ll keep an eye out to avoid this guy. If he stepped on my foot, he’d say it was my fault for violating his personal space, and rail at me on his blog for polluting the pristine cleanliness of the bottom of his shoe.

Honorary Doctorate Wielder

Crimony. The University of St. Andrews just gave Stephen R. Donaldson an honorary degree, in the same ceremony as it gave one to N.T. Wright. Via Paleojudaica.

(That sound you hear is me biting my tongue.)

Although I will mention that anyone who complains about Tolkien’s wordiness does not even know the meaning of verbosity. Donaldson, OTOH…..

(Biting my tongue again.)

Anyway, one understands that St. Andrews is a very pretty town in the summer, and one is very glad for both men, even if one of them made me suffer hours of agony without even counting what he did to his characters, and I don’t mean the one who writes a lot about St. Paul.

UPDATE: To be totally fair, I should say that Donaldson is extremely erudite and well-informed when talking about writing and how to do it, and probably does indeed deserve a doctorate for his work in that area.

Copyfraud

The Register apparently ran a passionate but inaccurate article on the topic of grabby people claiming copyrights that don’t exist or which have run out. (Like, say, the Conan folks threatening legal action against the Broken Sea folks, who were only doing Conan stories in the public domain.) It called this “copyfraud”, which is a catchy name.

Apparently, Creative Commons got dragged into this, so here are their comments, with a link to the original article.

Westphalian Folksong Archive Online

In happier news, you can apparently now listen to Westphalian folksongs until they come out of your ears.

St. Albert the Great: His Cologne Autograph Manuscripts Did Survive l

UPDATE: I panicked too soon! Or rather, too late by half a month and more…. They did find both of the St. Albert manuscripts in his own hand, which makes me very happy. The link also shows where you can learn about other Albert mss in the city, but not in the same archive.

The moral of the story is that your resident Banshee should keep up better with the news.

————————————————-
OUTDATED ENTRY:

Well, heckydarn. This stinks. It seems that, of the few manuscripts preserved from St. Albert the Great’s own time and hand, a few more may have been destroyed, in that horrible archive collapse into an inadvertently-manmade sinkhole, in Cologne. Copies exist, yes. But for the scholars trying to put out a new edition of his complete works, who intended to use all the new technology available since Borgnet did his edition in Victorian/Edwardian times… well, it looks like it’s not going to happen.

Read the bad news from the Koln (Cologne) Statsarchiv here in German, or in Google Translate here. (Yes, I know this article was from March 6, but I just read it today. Sorry.)

You can read earlier accounts of the horrible fate of the archive here from Roger Pearse.

Other accounts of stuff which may or may not have been lost forever, here at Google Translate.

Here’s the current state of matters, also through Google Translate. Archivalia is a German archives blog, so I’m sure it has tons more on this subject.

Anyway, there’s a video in German, and it shows some kind of book that’s only got its binding ripped while they talk about “handschriften”. (I mean, yeah, sad for the binding, but after a building collapse, not bad.) Are they saying this is one of the autograph manuscripts, or just something like them??

The autograph manuscripts still lost back in March, and possibly still lost, are Quaestiones on Aristotle’s On Animals (of which there’s an English translation from CUA), and St. Albert’s Commentary on the Gospel of St. Matthew.

Which brings us to our next order of business. Clearly, this is a time to pray. (More than before. I mean, obviously any time when I first heard about this place getting destroyed, I couldn’t help but pray.)

Found via the website of the folks in Cologne who are putting out the new edition. Seriously, everybody, pray for them. This stinks.

“Aurea Luce et Decore Roseo” from Rome

Elpis, Boethius’ first wife, was said to have written this great hymn for the morning of the feast of Ss. Peter and Paul, which celebrates the beauty of the Roman sunrise, and Rome as a city made truly imperial red-purple by the blood of martyrs.

Here’s a choral version of the hymn, sung today at the Basilica of St. Paul Outside the Walls, at the same Mass where it was also announced publicly that archaeologists had confirmed that the tomb on which the basilica was built is almost certainly that of St. Paul, as history and tradition have always agreed. The tomb will now be able to be seen more easily by visitors.

Heather McDonald vs God

Apparently God doesn’t always give you what you want, does do things you don’t want, and doesn’t always explain His actions. This is news to us theists.

I fail to see how this makes God any different from, say, an editor. Yet clearly McDonald has no problem devoting her entire working life to the process of submitting articles to a mysterious, powerful being who doesn’t necessarily feel the need to explain his editorial decisions, give writers the assignments they want, and not give writers the assignments they don’t want. She blithely enters the roulette wheel, knowing in advance that she may meet the judgment, unappealable and unexplained, of “This does not meet our needs at this time.”

She doesn’t examine the whole matter from the point of view that, if real life is eternal life, that death might eventually turn out to be the equivalent of a paper cut. She is sure that God must take suffering and death seriously or not be worthy of worship, which is an awfully monotheistic ethical idea. People were willing to hoick offerings and prayers to many of the old pagan gods on the off-chance they’d get a positive response or be left alone. She is sure that a capricious god would also be forebearing about being ignored or too weak to do anything, it seems; she doesn’t seem to have any idea of grand defiance against the entire power of an omnipotent being. That’s too bad. I always like those declarations for Ethics vs the Universe. The people who make them never wonder where they got their ethics, but there you go.

Considering that she’s willing to celebrate the human spirit, and that the human spirit continually does the inexplicable or returns evil for good and good for evil, she apparently has no real problem dealing with the black boxes of other people’s personalities.

So basically, the only one who gives her a rash on this score is… God.

It’s a personal fight against a person, not an idea or principle. She just wants to be convinced that God is the Logos, Reason and Truth Himself. (And most likely, she also has something else going on which has nothing to do with reason and logic, which is usually how people work on all deep philosophical issues.)

This is why I’m glad I’m not an apologist, because honestly, I believe all people are capricious and hidden in unapproachable weirdness, and only God makes any sense. This is probably a heresy against humans being made in the image of God, of course.

Anyway, there are serious books and articles out there on the problem of evil and the reasons why disasters and tragedies are allowed. This isn’t one; it’s one of those mannered, disguised cries to the heavens that you can’t help but feel for.

A real convinced atheist, however, wouldn’t waste a moment’s time or emotion on this sort of theodicy/power of prayer thing, other than on the human level. Bad stuff would just happen, and there’d be no point dwelling on it. He wouldn’t care that people went to church about it; he couldn’t be bothered to worry or to decree how people should spend their energies. Prayer would be useless, but it wouldn’t be as if there were any particular way to deal with such troubles, other than acceptance or resignation. So it wouldn’t be his business, and his article would be one long “Eh. Why’d the editor wake me up on the weekend for this?”

Thomist Fried Chicken

Apparently this is an instructional video for some kind of philosophy of religion course.

It’s followed up with Thomist architecture.

There’s also a video on the problem of evil pop.

I’m not really into philosophy and haven’t watched these yet, so I don’t know if they’re any good. But I thought I’d put them up so I’d remember they’re there!

Most Creepy-Cool Idea for a Book in a While

Sid Fleischman, The Entertainer and the Dybbuk.

“After World War II, Sergeant Freddie T. Birch’s ventriloquist act takes a radical turn when he is possessed by the ghost of Avrom Amos, a twelve-year-old Jewish boy killed by the Nazis.

“Though Freddie is deeply annoyed by the little invader, he finds that working together his act goes from third rate to top notch.

Unfortunately for Freddie, Avrom has other things in mind besides just making people laugh. He’s on a quest for revenge, and despite the sometimes hilarious havoc it wreaks on Freddie’s personal life, the dybbuk plans to track down his Nazi murderer and bring him to justice.”

Check out that creepy-cool cover, too. Brrrr.

I know I’m usually not into horror. But heck, yeah. Bring on a movie. Put Jeff Dunham in it. Holy crud, it’ll be freaky-good.

Best Band Name in a While

Roy G and the Biv.

You can tell they’re not a funk band from the Seventies, because the song assumes that nicotine sounds dangerous.

More CMAA Colloquium Fun!

There’s a group called Corpus Christi Watershed filming a documentary at the Church Music Association of America Colloquium this year. (Yes, the CMAA’s name sounds pretty grandiose. It’s one of those things where an old organization was pretty big, shrank for various reasons, but has been making a big resurgence.)

Anyway, the Watershed people did a little videoblogging from the Colloquium. It gives you a pretty good idea of what people get up to, during the Masses and classes. But it might need some annotation!

1st organ guy: Horst. He’s also a conductor, director, etc.
1st stained glass window: That’s Christ getting baptized.
Lake Michigan. Too gorgeous to believe, no? But yes, that’s how it sometimes looks at Loyola.
Waving hands – that’s the desired flow or rhythm for Gregorian chant.
Dapper guy with the bowtie – Jeffrey Tucker.
Round thing with singers gathered around it in the back of the chapel – Yes, that’s the baptismal font.
Really skinny director with his mouth open – Wilko Brouwer. Good director.
Comments about people wandering in and being stopped by the music — Oh yeah. Happened all the time last year, too.