The Vengeful Knight

Wow, you gotta look out for those EWTN kids’ shows on Saturday morning when you surf by They have some pretty fun science experiments on Hey Brother Leo, some pretty weird stuff, some English-dubbed Spanish shows, Irish animation about early Christians in Rome… seriously, you never know what you’ll get. A very mixed bag.

This time, I turned on the English-dubbed Spanish puppet show, and they had on a cartoon short about a medieval knight! Luckily, I came in at the good part and caught the guy’s name, so I was able to do a little research and find out more.

Giovanni Gualberto Visdomini was a noble knight of noble Florentine family. He lived from about 985 to 1073 — a very long life! But alas, his only brother, Ugo, was not so lucky. He was assassinated by an enemy. As was his duty and inclination, Giovanni swore to track down the murderer and avenge his elder brother.

On Good Friday, Giovanni encountered the murderer on the road to his father’s country house, outside the gates of St. Miniato al Monte. The murderer, unarmed and taken unawares, knelt, threw his arms up in a defensive position, and begged for mercy for the love of Jesus.

Giovanni was struck by the way the man’s arms were crossed as he begged for mercy. It was Good Friday, of all days of the year, when all Christians were forbidden to make war, much less carry out private vendettas. In a sudden rush of chivalric generosity, Giovanni threw down his sword. He told him that he would spare and forgive him, for the love of Jesus, and bade him rise and go. The murderer quickly obeyed.

At this point, Giovanni appears to have had a sudden knightly life crisis. He went into a small chapel inside the church to pray, probably unsure that he’d done the right thing for his brother’s honor and for Christ’s, certainly repentant that he’d almost killed someone on Good Friday. But while he knelt in turmoil and looked up at the crucifix, he saw Jesus nod approval at what he’d done.

Seized with a sudden desire to serve his Master more directly, Giovanni joined St. Miniato’s Monastery. His dad wasn’t thrilled about losing his second heir, and the abbot wasn’t sure he wanted the trouble, but Giovanni gave himself a tonsure and stayed despite everything. Not being a frail fragile flower, he eventually began to speak out about the simony practiced by his boss the abbot, and by the local bishop, Mezzabarba. This of course didn’t go over well with them, but everybody else liked it. Refusing to compromise or shut the heck up, he left the monastery, lived solitary for a while, wandered around with some other misfit religious for a while, lived with some other monks for a while, and then finally founded his own monastery and order of monks, the Vallombrosans. They were hardcore and holy, with their own strict version of the Benedictine Rule, and people much admired their toughness.

Naturally, Bishop Mezzabarba looooooved having a whole order of crazy monks run by the relentless, uncompromising guy who kept ripping on his money practices. Fussing and feuding ensued. The bishop must have been plausible, because the Pope’s anti-simony guy, St. Peter Damian, bought his story. In the end, there was actually a trial by fire — Pietro Aldobrandeschi, another noble turned Vallombrosan monk, was chosen by Giovanni to submit to a fire ordeal to prove which side was telling the truth. (After which, people called him Igneus. He ended up as a bishop and cardinal, and I guess nobody messed with him. Feast day: February 8.)

Bad Bishop Mezzabarba was deposed by the Pope; but apparently he repented, retired to a monastery (not a Vallombrosan one!) and lived a model life of prayer and contemplation afterward. So a much happier ending than the Sheriff of Nottingham’s.

Sometime after this, the Vallombrosans got papal approval to expand the order, and it grew and grew. Their founder Giovanni died in 1073, as I said, and by 1093 he had been canonized. There are a few parishes in this country dedicated to him, under the name of St. John Gualbert. His feast day is July 12. You’d think he’d be the patron saint of relentless seekers of justice or something, but in fact he’s the patron saint of foresters and park rangers and parks. I guess tracking and investigation is in there somewhere!

(The monks owned the forest of Vallombrosa — of “Thick as autumnal leaves that strew the brooks in Vallombrosa” fame — and there were forester monks to administer it. That’s why.) (Btw, although it was used for raising silver fir, it’s also always had lots of beech and larch. By brooks. So don’t mess with Milton.)

The thing that blows my mind is that all of this drama isn’t even some crazy piece of Celtic hagiography or complicated geste. This is documented history. Man, I love the Middle Ages!

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Here’s an illustration by Burne-Jones of a more romantic version of the approval story, which has the knight kneel at a roadside shrine instead of a church, and has Christ embrace him as well as nod. (I highly recommend the highest resolution of this picture file.)

Other versions have Christ speak to the knight, saying, “Well done”, or “Now that you’ve forgiven your enemy, come and follow Me.” A lot of versions have it just his kinsman who was killed, but historically it really was his own brother. (I guess that was just a little too forgiving for some storytellers!)

Here’s a 15th c. vestment used for the feastday of St. Giovanni Gualberto, in Vallombrosa. I’m not sure what scenes from his life are depicted. Presumably the really dramatic ones are on the back.

The miraculous crucifix of St. Miniato’s Church is now kept by the Vallombrosans in their mother church,
the Basilica of the Holy Trinity. Here’s the chapel at Holy Trinity where Gualberto’s relics are.

Here’s a very nice piece with dramatic scenes from the saint’s life. You can see the whole crucifix bowing in one, and in the other, you can see Igneus doing his walk through fire.

A picture showing the forgiveness and the crucifix at the same time.

Men in Shorts Plus Leggings.

I’m not real thrilled with the look under short trousers. But under baggies, it’s actually reasonable.

My guess is that these guys are looking for a more athletic look, like runners or bikers in cold weather. Possibly they want to prolong the wearing season for their shorts, just as many women are wearing their high heeled sandals into the fall with heavy tights. The patterns appear to be an effort to make sure people know they’re not wearing women’s clothing, or because these guys are Akihabara geeks and that’s how they roll.

Why they’re wearing the big clunky boots and grungy clothes in the first place, I don’t get.

Anyway, the funny thing is that the Akihabara girl geeks appear to be copying the look, except that they wear the leggings under their tight, short shorts or their stylishly cut Capris. So a guy’s fashion quickly is adapted into something that is meant to seem tomboyish, but really is the farthest thing from it.

Ha! Fashion cracks me up.

Yet Another Problem with the Davies Doctor Who

There isn’t any Time Lord government, agency, or quango around to be nasty or take the blame.

So the writers make the Doctor into the heartless arrogant arse who treats peoples’ lives like pieces of paper, instead of being the one who fights for normal little people against the proud, uncaring, bureaucratic State.

This comes to mind because recently, it seems that someone had the memory of all their adventures taken away. This was a violation of mental rights which the Doctor vigorously protested in the cases of Jamie and Zoe, when the Time Lords did it to them. Many lives later, he was still mad as fire about it. But apparently the writers feel that it’s quite all right to set up a situation where the Doctor has to do it himself, to one of his best friends.

Oh, and it’s okay as long as the Doctor agonizes about it before and after. Yeah, anything’s okay as long as you pull a piously long face while you do it; even better if you can get the victim’s consent! OTOH, I suppose that after the writers had the Doctor committting genocide several times and causing one of the world’s worst natural disasters (among other incredibly bad writing decisions to make the Doctor lower than a worm), the matter of taking away a friend’s memory seemed rather minor.

I’m telling you, something has to change. David Tennant is a wonderful actor, but they’ve made unwatchable the show he’s in. It’s a mercy that he gets to stop playing this objectively evil person out of bad fanfic, and has never really gotten to play the Doctor except in short spurts. I’m glad I haven’t forced myself to watch this travesty of the show I love, because everything I find out about its storylines makes me want to vomit.

It’s a good thing The Sarah Jane Adventures are around. The real Doctor stopped in there.

Home of the Brave

The Fort Hood shooting spree was a terrible thing, done by an American who decided he’d rather be something else.

But to compensate, we have seen much heroism and generosity of spirit from many other Americans, and from non-Americans who want to become American. Soldiers aiding other soldiers without heeding their own wounds; townspeople crowding in and waiting hours to give their blood; and police sergeant Kimberly Munley, rushing in with her partner to stop a killer.

They are people of every color of skin, of every national heritage, who believe that their true heritage is freedom and their true colors red, white, and blue. They stand together, not out of fear. Their bond is freedom — and responsibility, and love.

They are my nation. They make me proud.

The Strangeness of the Familiar

I was just reading someone’s enthusiastic comments on his first reading of Tolkien’s essay “On Fairy Stories”.

The first thing that blew my mind was that he had to order a special essay book to get it. Somewhere in my mind, I am still convinced that everyone owns my dad’s Ballantine set of five, with the creepy globbyblob Shire illustrations. They just go together: The Hobbit, the three Lord of the Rings volumes, and the Tolkien Reader.

As it happens, the first time I read “On Fairy Stories”, it was after I read The Hobbit but before I managed to get past the incredibly dark creepiness of the first Rider under the compulsion to keep up with my brothers. So that would be sometime in the Seventies before Star Wars came out, probably in the first or second grade. The beauty of Tolkien is that, given a sufficient reading level or someone to read to you, you can be in second grade and still appreciate Beorhtnoth as much as when you take Old English in college and see the line about the monks of Ely in the original. Different things may appeal to you later; but there is no barrier, only a universal humanity.

I enjoyed “On Fairy Stories” even more than the poetry or the play. It seemed to be an eminently sensible sort of essay for an adult to write, and I still think so. I’m sorry that it took me until college to find Sayer’s book on The Mind of the Maker, because they would make a great Ace Literature Theology Double.

The thing with reading a great work of academic literature in the second grade is that you tend to assume that everyone thinks like that — that God made us to be subcreators, that fantasy novels are meant to be shards of true making, that eucatastrophe awaits us, and that it’s a great shame that “The Juniper Tree” is nowadays left out of Grimm. I suppose that a great deal of my skepticism about various academic interpretations of legend and myth is also a legacy of Tolkien, along with a total lack of fear of flipping through huge dry volumes in search of The Good Stuff.

I am glad that other people have a chance to appreciate these things; but it seems so strange that they were not always there. But then, it took me until college to find any Chesterton, and then it seemed strange that I’d ever read Lewis without reading Chesterton first. You never know what books you’ll be sent, do you?

The Naughty Time Travelers and Clone Wives Theories

If you read Bible discussion websites, you’ll see certain topics come up again and again. One of the favorites is who Cain and Seth married. The traditional presumption is that Adam and Eve had daughters, too, and that their names are left out either because the genealogy story is about the guys (who were doing all the murdering or being murdered), or because the whole thing was squicky enough without coming right out and saying God had allowed incest because of special circumstances. (Since the noble family Egyptians, at least, were into incest under any circumstances, the Israelites really didn’t feel like talking about it.)

(And heck, that’s what happens when mortal sin happens for the first time. One minute you don’t have to worry about survival of the species (possibly because their first kid would have been Jesus, but why speculate?), and the next minute you’re having to marry your kids off to each other. Nothing like trying to go it alone and then not liking the consequences….)

Week after week you see it — no reasoning that wasn’t common knowledge 3000 years ago, getting discovered on the Internet by people who think it must be the first time anyone ever has thought of this. Some of whom think they’ve discovered The Argument That Killed Judeo-Christianity, instead of Stuff Humans Probably Talked About Before Writing Was Invented. It’s pretty funny.

There is one fairly common alternative thought, which is okay if you’re okay with evolution as part of creation. (And why not? It’s perfectly convenable with the two Genesis stories.) This points out that there were tons of Neanderthals walking the earth, and that we now know that Neanderthals were genetically compatible with Cro-Magnon humans. So the kids married nice gracile Neanderthal women. Unfortunately this introduces a different level of squick, because this might imply that before marriages took place, all Neanderthals were… well, not soulless, but with higher animal souls… and not made in the image and likeness of God. Or at least, not the same kind of human soul. Kinda creepy. Not as creepy as the Lilith theory, true.

Anyway, if you like funny theories, the one to go for is the Naughty Time Traveler Disposal Theory. If you theorize that people eventually might invent time travel (or Weird FTL Spaceships) and try to travel back in time to see human origins, suddenly you’ve got your rich source of genetically diverse additional human tribe members, all descended from Adam and Eve however distantly. If you’re a hardcore anthropologist or archaeologist, you shouldn’t mind getting to do an in-depth study for the rest of your life, right? And it serves you right, if you were a smartaleck when you studied Genesis back in CCD.

If you’re not all that worried about genetic diversity but sibling marriages deservedly squick you, I suppose you could theorize that God cloned wives for the boys out of their sides, too. If Cain was marrying his clone twin Cainah, who wasn’t actually raised with him as his sister and who came to life as an adult, there’s no problem. (Also, not much point mentioning her in the genealogy, since she would genetically be a double-X Cain.) If there were extra daughters of Adam and Eve running around, presumably God could clone them husbands out of their sides, also. I mean, it doesn’t say anywhere that that sort of genetic manipulation only happened once, now, does it? They too would be genetically exactly the same as Adam and Eve; so again, not much point mentioning them in the genealogy unless they invented something. Eventually some genetic diversity would start to creep in through mutation. (Especially if you really did live a few hundred years. Tons of time for your genes to fragment and mutate and make bad copies.)

The thing is, you can waste a lot of time on speculations (amusing as they are) or you can stay on the point (Adam and Eve, our first parents, messed up big enough that we’re still dealing with it; but then, so is God). Myself, I can’t really take speculations seriously, although they’re good joke value. But there’s no sense distressing yourself over anyone’s speculations, much less working yourself up enough to lose your faith. If we needed to know, it would have been in the story. If it’s not, it’s not all that big an issue.

That said, it’s true that the Bible does seem designed to encourage thinking about the text, back and forth and skither and yon, in every possible way — including speculation about all the blank spots and mysteries. You just have to know when to step back and give yourself a breather.

Radiator Reflectors Up

Last year, if you’ll remember, I had the radiator reflectors up in September. (Just in time to keep out drafts from the big windstorm.)

This year I’m using a slightly different design, by using fewer and bigger bubblewrap envelopes and no cardboard before wrapping it all in tinfoil. It seems to be working so far, at least to cover up the air conditioner on the inside and prevent drafts. I have yet to see whether it does the job of reflecting cold back outside, and radiator heat inside, where they both belong.

Why do I use bubble wrap envelopes instead of cardboard box cardboard? Lighter and better insulation. But bear in mind, I’m just covering up an air conditioner, and it’s not even mine. I’m attaching the envelope/foil reflectors with Scotch tape, not using a real indoor a/c cover. So it all has to be cheap, light, and easily removable in spring. (And not likely to catch on fire. That’s the other reason to use foil.)

Here’s a sturdier plan for an against-the-wall radiator reflector. (Not my situation.)

UK: The Kids Are All Right

The good side of the Sun posts a story about kids being given a chance to thank British servicemen by sending them postage-paid postcards. The kids stepped up.

Via Instapundit, Michael Yon reports on a great British loss and a great Briton.

Dave Armstrong’s Dad in Poetry

Apologist Dave Armstrong’s dad just passed away on the 2nd. He’s posted a very touching tribute, which I recommend to you.

A lot of people are reluctant to write, but it’s clear that Armstrong’s prolific writing is a case of the acorn not falling far from the tree. Also, the bagpipe anecdote is worth reading just by itself….

This has been a pretty rough time for a lot of folks out there — people seem to pass away in the spring and fall, I guess.

Rebellious Use of a Microwave Egg Poacher!

I bought one of those cheapie NordicWare microwave egg poachers over at WalMart a month or so back.

(In one sentence, see how many groups I have howling for my blood!)

So I decided this morning that I’d better try it out. This entailed reading the directions. I find that this ensures a lot fewer fires and explosions, when it comes to microwave cuisine.

The basic principle is that you put an egg in one or both of the poacher’s cups, pierce the yolk with a fork so it won’t explode on you, add a 1/2 teaspoon of water to each egg (or empty cup, if you’re only cooking one egg), and then follow the cooking time directions.

Being a rebel, and not really feeling like poached egg today, I cooked my two eggs at the long end of the recommended cooking time. I used large eggs. My microwave cooks stuff quickly, so I was happy to find that 1 minute and 39 seconds created a totally cooked egg. Thanks to not frying it, the yolk was rather hard-boiled, but the white was very similar to that of a fried egg. Both eggs came out pleasantly symmetrical, and there was very little mess. I think they would make nice sandwich eggs.

Except. I only poked each yolk once, and so there were at least three chonkety-whoof! noises of minor water/yolk steam explosions in my microwave toward the end of the cooking time. The poacher is designed to release under explosive steam pressure, so there were a few tiny bits of exploded cooked egg white on my microwave door. Next time I want cooked egg, I will poke the yolk a few more times.

I’ll report on the egg poacher again, and we’ll see how it works as an actual poacher. Some people claim it works better with a whole teaspoon of water per egg; many say that piercing the egg multiple times is the key. One gentleman out there apparently doesn’t pierce the yolk much, and thus times his poached egg by the chonkety-whoof! noises; if he stops the microwave after the first one, it’s perfectly poached.

Also, some people seem to manage to whisk in enough water or milk to make actual scrambled eggs in these poachers. That sounds like another fun experiment.

If Miss Marple Had Been a P.I.

I’ve just been listening to the first Maud Silver mystery by Golden Age author Patricia Wentworth. I have to say, it was a lot of fun — an adventure story with damsels in distress, a romance, and a sleuth tale — with shrewd old private detective Maud Silver beetling away in the background to keep the young hero from getting himself killed.

I really like the whole idea of an older woman being an inquiry agent.

The first Maud Silver book, Grey Mask, came out in 1928.

The first Miss Marple appearance, a story called “The Tuesday Night Club”, came out in 1927.

The first appearance of Miss Katherine Climpson, in Unnatural Death, was in 1927 also.

So you can see that probably this idea was floating around in the authorial id. (And I wouldn’t be surprised if there were some pre-Golden Age mysteries starring old biddy detectives. We forget about how far back the mystery genre goes; the antebellum issues of Harper’s are full of mysteries.)

The Dance of Death Is with Yourself

The Lion and the Cardinal has a super-interesting post on the origins of the Danse Macabre.

The most interesting point is that originally, the folks were not shown dancing with Death himself (la Mort), but with the dead version of themselves (le mort). That’s a considerably more intimate dance, eh?

There’s even a creepy medieval version of the Bloody Mary and doppelganger legends attached, wherein reading a certain message written in your own blood while in front of a mirror would call up a vision of your dead future self. (Fast Forward’s not so new, eh? Heh. Sounds like something the Goth students at Hogwarts might do with the Mirror of Erised….)

But of course there’s certainly something to be said for the version with la Mort.

“Bring away the beggar, bring away the king,
And every man in his degree;
Bring away the oldest and the youngest thing,
Come all to death and follow me…

“Be ready, therefore—watch and pray…
You may to heaven dance the way.”

How Did I Miss This One?

Paul and Storm announce a boxing match between nuns.

This is right up there with the Anglican chant weather report. (Btw, that links to an old skit about the new revised Anglican Apostle’s Creed from 1983, from Not the Nine O’Clock News, that I’d never seen before. I think themcj.com must have time-traveled back and written it.)

Also, if anybody knows who did it, I’d love to revisit the old fake radio commercial about “Sunday Sunday Sunday! At the Orange County St. Augustine’s Catholic Church! With Fr. Fast Freddy Flanagan!”

(There’s a later “Sunday Sunday Sunday” called Critical Mass, but it’s a fake TV commercial. Very different era and theme, too.)

In Which the Banshee Becomes a Psilological Doryphore.

Yes, I nitpick. So it really worries me to hear Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters announce that all the world’s oceans are nearly closed to travel. Why?

Because Regency England depended heavily on oceanic trade for many of the essentials of life. This is why, even in the middle of the Great Famine of potatoes, there was such a good market for grain in England that it paid Irish landowners to continue shipping grain to English markets. This is why the US privateers were such a nuisance, and why the U-Boats did such a good job of hurting the English economy in both World Wars, to the point that people would eventually have starved.

England was fertile, but Ireland was its breadbasket, the Caribbean its sugar bowl, Egypt its cotton farm, and India very useful. If they could have kept the US as another resource source, they would have. All this was stuff England desperately needed.

So I’m hoping the author explains why the English people are still alive and maintaining civilization, additional supplies of malicious fish or no. Maybe the alternate universe submarines they’ve mentioned have something to do with it.