OK, before I go outside for my run-around, let's list three things we all know how to do that would be useful real-world skills (that is, having nothing to do with computers or not dependent on electricity) that would allow us to be picked for the surviving team in the apocalypse.
I'll go first:
I can shear a sheep, clean, card and spin the fleece and knit a sweater out of it.
I can snare rabbits and know how to use a tap-board to drop a net under a sheet of ice on a lake to catch fish.
I can shoot 13 clay pigeons in a row.
OK, now you.
~
Showing posts with label Let's play a game!. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Let's play a game!. Show all posts
Thursday, January 16, 2014
Wednesday, October 02, 2013
Let's play a game! - The "Shrinking Ice Floe" game
I hope everyone feels better today. No silly panicked runnings-off to the Orthodox or the SSP-2.5?
Good. The sun continues not to set on the Catholic world, and the Faith is still the Faith.
In fact, I predict that in, oooo let's say a year's time, nothing from the highest office in the Church, no implicit denials of doctrine, no fuzzy New Age blatherings, no ambiguously worded incomprehensible pseudo-theological nonsense will any longer come as a surprise or shock to anyone.
What we are experiencing now is merely the shock of hearing plainly spoken what has been implicit and said in coded language by the hierarchy for decades. We thought we could ignore it or wish it into the cornfield when it was "just" a local bishop, or "just" a parish priest or "just" a high-ranking Vatican prelate. We had the luxury of having the pope to point to and say, "Well, he's not saying that, so things are fine."
But how long has it been since anyone has been shocked by incomprehensible New Age Modernist gibberish coming from a cardinal or bishop? How long has it been since we learned to just ignore it, or at least allow it not to burden us personally?
If you are a Catholic, you know what the Faith is. If you don't, trust me, its written down somewhere, using very *very* precise and comprehensible language, leaving NO room for ambiguity or "misinterpretation". Look it up.
Do the work, people. The time of just sitting back and letting the pope do the driving is over.
In fact, we can have some fun.
Let's play a game! I like to call it the "Shrinking Ice Floe Game". We can sit back and watch to see which of our NeoCatholic friends will be the first to abandon their compromises and face up to reality. It'll be fun also to watch the increasingly desperate attempts of the professional neocatholic apologists to keep the whole business afloat. And I think I agree with Kat; this ought to be a drinking game.
Whenever the next interview, off-the-cuff remarks or homily chips away a few more feet of ice, we can yell, "Extra ecclesiam nulla salus" or "Viva il papa!" and chug a beer.
On the day, (which is certainly coming) when the first encyclical or other formal teaching document tries to deny a dogma or doctrine of the Faith, we can all meet back at Scholar's Lounge on the Via Del Plebiscito and get plastered together. Won't that be fun?
It's not a mean game. Polar bears can swim, did you know that? And Catholics don't depend on the pope for the Faith. There's nothing to fear; you don't have to stay on the ice floe.
I have to say, though, that all this has really made me feel much better. Unburdened. I can't tell you how sick I was getting of Cassandra Syndrome. Now that the Successor of Peter has decided to take over the task of demonstrating that the Traditionalist critique of the post-Conciliar Church was right all along, I can relax, and get on with what we should all be doing: being Catholic. Which means? ... Come on people, you know this one...
Embrace the Cross. Sure there's going to be suffering. Sure it's going to suck. Things are going to get higgeldy-piggeldy. But this is nothing new. We've known about this for a long time, whether we have been in stubborn denial or not. The Index of Leading Catholic Indicators and a bunch of other books told us all decades ago where this was going, and anyone with Catholic eyes to see knew precisely how and by whom it was being pushed.
Why should we be surprised or upset now when it actually gets there?
So, calm down. Nothing important has changed, because nothing important can change.
I've got more to come, of course, but I'm afraid I'm not going to be the one to waste my time demonstrating with documentation exactly which quotes were heretical or nonsensical. There's more than ample of that stuff around about. Plus, it's booooring, and I'm not going to do your homework for you.
Back in my day, when I started down this path, you had to actually leave the house to look things up...in books... in a "library".
So don't complain.
~
Monday, August 26, 2013
Let's Play a Game!
This one will be fun.
I call it the "Personally opposed but..." game.
I don't need to explain it, do I?
I also call it the "Moral Equivalency" game.
Come up with something the stupid liberal soixant-retards think is morally equivalent to murdering 50 million babies a year. Like smoking in a pub.
Or thinking limits on illegal immigration might be a good idea.
I'll go first:
"I'm personally opposed to shooting illegal Mexican immigrants who sneak over the US border, but I don't believe it's right to impose my personal beliefs on the Texans who want to shoot them."
"I'm personally opposed to men getting twice the pay as a woman for the same job, but hey, who am I to impose ..."
OK, now you.
~
I call it the "Personally opposed but..." game.
I don't need to explain it, do I?
I also call it the "Moral Equivalency" game.
Come up with something the stupid liberal soixant-retards think is morally equivalent to murdering 50 million babies a year. Like smoking in a pub.
Or thinking limits on illegal immigration might be a good idea.
I'll go first:
"I'm personally opposed to shooting illegal Mexican immigrants who sneak over the US border, but I don't believe it's right to impose my personal beliefs on the Texans who want to shoot them."
"I'm personally opposed to men getting twice the pay as a woman for the same job, but hey, who am I to impose ..."
OK, now you.
~
Sunday, June 23, 2013
Let's play a game!
I call it the "Sound of Thunder" game.
Everyone will know the general gist: you meet someone with a time machine who says you can go back in time and kill one person in order to change, and hopefully improve, the course of history.
So, tell who you would pick and the rest of us get to guess why and how the course of history would be improved/changed.
Less violent variant, for those with delicate sensibilities, is to go back in time and give a single piece of information to a single person. Who would you pick, and what would you tell him?
I'll go first.
My first pick to shoot, would be William of Ockham.
Second pick would be Henry V of England while he was on campaign in France. And I would tell him, "Buddy, boil your water for ten minutes before you drink it."
OK, now you.
~
Everyone will know the general gist: you meet someone with a time machine who says you can go back in time and kill one person in order to change, and hopefully improve, the course of history.
So, tell who you would pick and the rest of us get to guess why and how the course of history would be improved/changed.
Less violent variant, for those with delicate sensibilities, is to go back in time and give a single piece of information to a single person. Who would you pick, and what would you tell him?
I'll go first.
My first pick to shoot, would be William of Ockham.
Second pick would be Henry V of England while he was on campaign in France. And I would tell him, "Buddy, boil your water for ten minutes before you drink it."
OK, now you.
~
Friday, December 14, 2012
Hey! Let's play a game!
The Sharing Game.
It's our very favourite.
Share the closest you've ever come to dying.
Mine's easy. And not what you might expect.
It was April in Halifax and it had been a really snowy winter but it had been thawing and re-freezing a lot in the previous couple of weeks, as it does in early spring, and there was still a LOT of ice and snow around. A lot of the roofs had huge overhangs of ice, hundreds of pounds, some of them. And of course, it was all pretty unstable and when it warmed up in the afternoon on sunny days, sometimes the whole enormous pile of it would come sliding off the roof and crash onto the ground. The city was supposed to make people knock the ice and snow off their roofs, but people often didn't bother.
I was walking down Barrington Street, heading over to the Trident cafe for a tea and a read one sunny afternoon. Close to St. Patrick's church I had just passed under one of the really big ice overhangs, one of the kind that was produced by a really big pile of snow that no one had knocked off all winter, that had thawed and re-frozen a couple of times, so it was as big and heavy as a load of cinderblocks.
The crash sounded loud enough to be a car accident, and I froze, realising that a good 2 or 3 hundred pounds of solid ice, with lots of pointy jaggedy bits, had just crashed down onto the sidewalk about five feet behind me. A few seconds slower and I'd have been a bit of a jaggedy mess myself.
And people say that a belief in guardian angels is dumb.
OK, now you.
~
It's our very favourite.
Share the closest you've ever come to dying.
Mine's easy. And not what you might expect.
It was April in Halifax and it had been a really snowy winter but it had been thawing and re-freezing a lot in the previous couple of weeks, as it does in early spring, and there was still a LOT of ice and snow around. A lot of the roofs had huge overhangs of ice, hundreds of pounds, some of them. And of course, it was all pretty unstable and when it warmed up in the afternoon on sunny days, sometimes the whole enormous pile of it would come sliding off the roof and crash onto the ground. The city was supposed to make people knock the ice and snow off their roofs, but people often didn't bother.
I was walking down Barrington Street, heading over to the Trident cafe for a tea and a read one sunny afternoon. Close to St. Patrick's church I had just passed under one of the really big ice overhangs, one of the kind that was produced by a really big pile of snow that no one had knocked off all winter, that had thawed and re-frozen a couple of times, so it was as big and heavy as a load of cinderblocks.
The crash sounded loud enough to be a car accident, and I froze, realising that a good 2 or 3 hundred pounds of solid ice, with lots of pointy jaggedy bits, had just crashed down onto the sidewalk about five feet behind me. A few seconds slower and I'd have been a bit of a jaggedy mess myself.
And people say that a belief in guardian angels is dumb.
OK, now you.
~
Tuesday, August 28, 2012
Let's play a game!: name your obscure heroes
I was looking at my book shelf the other day (thinking I spend more time on the internet and less time reading them than I'd really like) and noticed that I like a great number of people whom the world would think very odd and obscure writers. It got me thinking; perhaps one of the things we can do, perhaps the only thing, to counter the evils of the celebrity-worship culture is to adopt another type of hero.
I'm betting that in our little O's P circle of readers we have amongst us a wonderful array of interesting, obscure and forgotten people who have influenced our thinking and lives who should be made more generally known.
So,
name ooooh, let's say, four, interesting writers, artists, political thinkers, philosophers, adventurers, explorers, warriors, gardeners, scientists, saints or relatives who have strongly influenced you to think and behave independently of the general crowd of our degenerate post-everything anti-culture.
I'll go first.
Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, the writer, professor and literary philosopher who I most want to be when I grow up. He more or less invented the notion of studying literature as an academic field, and instituted the chair of English literature at Cambridge. Of a long and fruitful lifetime of works, including the monumentally important Oxford Book of English Verse (of which I think I have at least two editions) Sir Arthur's work that got me thinking about literature in a new way was his address to students in 1916 that was later published as "On the Art of Writing".
He was the inspiration for the character of Ratty in the Wind in the Willows (my first literary influence) and invented the adage for all writers of fiction, "murder your darlings."
Roger Tory Peterson
whose bird books got me started as the (half-assed) amateur field naturalist I am today. When I was eight, or so, I saw a TV programme about him and knew, right then, that I wanted to be a field naturalist artist when I grew up. (Too bad real life intervened so brutally about then, but that's another sob-story).
Sir Thomas Browne
the wacky 17th century English doctor whose book Religio Medici was condemned by the Vatican and demonstrated that pure, and very endearing, bull-headed English attitude that with the right sort of education, an Englishman can just damn well write about any subject he pleases, and to hell with the facts. His description of elephants will make you fall on your face laughing.
His literary style is the very model of a 17th century Protestant gentleman, and his whimsical spelling and random capitalisations are a delight to behold. I have a very nice three-volume edition of his collected works given to me by the late, great John Muggeridge from his father's collection which I treasure. His religious ideas are proof that what we today regard as nutty liberalism, born in the 60s, has been the mainstream of Anglicanism from its earliest days. But from a literary viewpoint, he, with John Donne and John Evelyn, epitomises all that was best and worth preserving about post-Medieval, early modern Anglicanism, and will do very nicely as part of the booty when we bring them in.
Blessed Margaret of Castello
who was a dwarf, born blind and hunchbacked with a gammy leg in 13th century Italy. She was rejected by her shallow, noble parents who wanted none of their rivals to know they'd spawned such a misfit. She was locked up in a kind of hermitage for most of her childhood where she was allowed only to speak to the parish priest and the servant who brought her food from her parents' palace.
Then, when she was 20, her parents took her to the town of Castello where miraculous healings were rumoured to be taking place, and when after a day of prayer she failed to be miraculously restored, they walked away, abandoning her to the streets. She was at first adopted by beggars and street people who protected her and taught her to beg. She became known in the town for her great holiness and cheerful disposition and was eventually (after many adventures) allowed to join the early Dominican Mantellatae, the third order for widows who wore the habit and took vows but did not live in community.
As a mantellata, she cared for the sick and poor, and especially visited and talked to poor prisoners, converting all of them. She was a wonderworker, putting out house fires with her cloak and healing people of blindness and cancer and all manner of things, including one little girl whom Margaret healed after her own death, rising briefly to life from her funeral bier to stretch out her hand to heal the girl.
She remains incorrupt in her glass Snow White coffin in Citta di Castello, Italy. And just as soon as I get it together, I'm going to work out the Trenitalia route and go see her.
I adopted Margaret as my patron at my confirmation because she was abandoned by her parents and in her whole life was not bitter and was never heard to criticise them for it.
...and if I'd said seven obscure heroes, I'd have added Fr. Frederick Faber (WAY more holy than Newman), John Ruskin, and Richard Lack for nearly single-handedly rescuing Art from the abyss of postmodern nihilism.
Oh, and Roger Scruton, for telling the entire academic philosophical world they're full of shit;
And of course, John Muggeridge who didn't let his famous surname make him into a twit, and who showed me that it is possible to overcome one's personal failings and become a saint in ordinary day-to-day life. Yes, I said it; John was clearly a saint and the three years I lived in his house totally changed me and my life.
OK, now you.
~
I'm betting that in our little O's P circle of readers we have amongst us a wonderful array of interesting, obscure and forgotten people who have influenced our thinking and lives who should be made more generally known.
So,
name ooooh, let's say, four, interesting writers, artists, political thinkers, philosophers, adventurers, explorers, warriors, gardeners, scientists, saints or relatives who have strongly influenced you to think and behave independently of the general crowd of our degenerate post-everything anti-culture.
I'll go first.
Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, the writer, professor and literary philosopher who I most want to be when I grow up. He more or less invented the notion of studying literature as an academic field, and instituted the chair of English literature at Cambridge. Of a long and fruitful lifetime of works, including the monumentally important Oxford Book of English Verse (of which I think I have at least two editions) Sir Arthur's work that got me thinking about literature in a new way was his address to students in 1916 that was later published as "On the Art of Writing".
He was the inspiration for the character of Ratty in the Wind in the Willows (my first literary influence) and invented the adage for all writers of fiction, "murder your darlings."
Roger Tory Peterson
whose bird books got me started as the (half-assed) amateur field naturalist I am today. When I was eight, or so, I saw a TV programme about him and knew, right then, that I wanted to be a field naturalist artist when I grew up. (Too bad real life intervened so brutally about then, but that's another sob-story).
Sir Thomas Browne
the wacky 17th century English doctor whose book Religio Medici was condemned by the Vatican and demonstrated that pure, and very endearing, bull-headed English attitude that with the right sort of education, an Englishman can just damn well write about any subject he pleases, and to hell with the facts. His description of elephants will make you fall on your face laughing.
His literary style is the very model of a 17th century Protestant gentleman, and his whimsical spelling and random capitalisations are a delight to behold. I have a very nice three-volume edition of his collected works given to me by the late, great John Muggeridge from his father's collection which I treasure. His religious ideas are proof that what we today regard as nutty liberalism, born in the 60s, has been the mainstream of Anglicanism from its earliest days. But from a literary viewpoint, he, with John Donne and John Evelyn, epitomises all that was best and worth preserving about post-Medieval, early modern Anglicanism, and will do very nicely as part of the booty when we bring them in.
Blessed Margaret of Castello
who was a dwarf, born blind and hunchbacked with a gammy leg in 13th century Italy. She was rejected by her shallow, noble parents who wanted none of their rivals to know they'd spawned such a misfit. She was locked up in a kind of hermitage for most of her childhood where she was allowed only to speak to the parish priest and the servant who brought her food from her parents' palace.
Then, when she was 20, her parents took her to the town of Castello where miraculous healings were rumoured to be taking place, and when after a day of prayer she failed to be miraculously restored, they walked away, abandoning her to the streets. She was at first adopted by beggars and street people who protected her and taught her to beg. She became known in the town for her great holiness and cheerful disposition and was eventually (after many adventures) allowed to join the early Dominican Mantellatae, the third order for widows who wore the habit and took vows but did not live in community.
As a mantellata, she cared for the sick and poor, and especially visited and talked to poor prisoners, converting all of them. She was a wonderworker, putting out house fires with her cloak and healing people of blindness and cancer and all manner of things, including one little girl whom Margaret healed after her own death, rising briefly to life from her funeral bier to stretch out her hand to heal the girl.
She remains incorrupt in her glass Snow White coffin in Citta di Castello, Italy. And just as soon as I get it together, I'm going to work out the Trenitalia route and go see her.
I adopted Margaret as my patron at my confirmation because she was abandoned by her parents and in her whole life was not bitter and was never heard to criticise them for it.
...and if I'd said seven obscure heroes, I'd have added Fr. Frederick Faber (WAY more holy than Newman), John Ruskin, and Richard Lack for nearly single-handedly rescuing Art from the abyss of postmodern nihilism.
Oh, and Roger Scruton, for telling the entire academic philosophical world they're full of shit;
And of course, John Muggeridge who didn't let his famous surname make him into a twit, and who showed me that it is possible to overcome one's personal failings and become a saint in ordinary day-to-day life. Yes, I said it; John was clearly a saint and the three years I lived in his house totally changed me and my life.
OK, now you.
~
Thursday, March 08, 2012
Let's play a game!
The EU hath decreed that all young women will now be charged the same amount for their car insurance as young men. It's going to mean that young women are going to pay as much as £362 more per year.
Guess why.
Come on...
guess.
(No, I'm going to post the link later. I know you guys are a pack of shameless cheaters!)
~
Guess why.
Come on...
guess.
(No, I'm going to post the link later. I know you guys are a pack of shameless cheaters!)
~
Thursday, September 08, 2011
Let's play a game!
Time for another round of our favourite game...
Liturgical Dance Chicken.
The location is "Mary, Mother of Jesus Catholic Community House Church," a warm, inclusivenursing home Catholic Community that welcomes women who feel called to sacerdotal ministry,
and wafting about in tiaras,
in Florida.
But wait, there's more!
Take your positions...
Ready...
Set...
CLICK!
(Contestants please record their times in the commbox.)
Plus a bonus, just-for-fun, video of our all-time fave,
Worst Procession EVER.
Seriously that's how you find it on Youtube. Those are the search words.
(No points, since we've all seen it already.)
~
Liturgical Dance Chicken.
The location is "Mary, Mother of Jesus Catholic Community House Church," a warm, inclusive
and wafting about in tiaras,
in Florida.
But wait, there's more!
Take your positions...
Ready...
Set...
CLICK!
(Contestants please record their times in the commbox.)
Plus a bonus, just-for-fun, video of our all-time fave,
Worst Procession EVER.
Seriously that's how you find it on Youtube. Those are the search words.
(No points, since we've all seen it already.)
~
Wednesday, August 24, 2011
Let's play a game!
Caption contest.
What is this a statue of and where is it?
Mine: New statue commissioned for Los Angeles Cathedral gardens.
~
What is this a statue of and where is it?
Mine: New statue commissioned for Los Angeles Cathedral gardens.
~
Wednesday, July 20, 2011
Let's play a game!
Well, enough of all that.
Had a nice few days, bought a bunch of needful stuff, new pj's and whatnot, to get ready for Chemo 2.
They were going to start me today, but having seen the results of some blood tests have decided to put it off for a week or so, to let my liver have a bit more time to recover. I'm taking liver-fixing drugs as well as a bunch of vitamins. Other than this everything's fine. Back to work in a limited way, which is really great.
Nice to have a week of reprieve so I can get some more cooking done and get things ready for Dorothy's visit and ... (fanfare) The Return of Sarah! (woop!)
Starting chemo 2 next Wednesday, if the blood tests come back favourably.
In the meantime, let's play a game.
Name the strangest place or circumstances you've ever had your confession heard.
Mine is on the steps of Canada's parliament in Ottawa.
Behind a plinth.
Oh, I almost forgot. I've also made confession in Latin at the Jesu in Rome. I had been told that there were always English speaking priests available at the Jesu, which is a conveniently located church in Rome (near a big bus stop). So I went in and sure enough there was a box near the entrance that had a sign on it saying "English" but when I asked the old chap in the box, he shook his head and said, "Mi dispiace". I went away annoyed, and then thought, wait, this is the Jesu and that's an ancient, retired Jesuit. No way he doesn't know how to do it in Latin. So I went back and asked and he looked a little startled, but said, in Italian, that we could try. I knelt down and riffled through my mental Latin files and we stumbled through on a halting combo of Latin, English, Italian and French. I got the gist across, he gave the ancient absolution formula. And "three Hail Mary's and one Our Father" is pretty easy to understand in any language.
~
Had a nice few days, bought a bunch of needful stuff, new pj's and whatnot, to get ready for Chemo 2.
They were going to start me today, but having seen the results of some blood tests have decided to put it off for a week or so, to let my liver have a bit more time to recover. I'm taking liver-fixing drugs as well as a bunch of vitamins. Other than this everything's fine. Back to work in a limited way, which is really great.
Nice to have a week of reprieve so I can get some more cooking done and get things ready for Dorothy's visit and ... (fanfare) The Return of Sarah! (woop!)
Starting chemo 2 next Wednesday, if the blood tests come back favourably.
In the meantime, let's play a game.
Name the strangest place or circumstances you've ever had your confession heard.
Mine is on the steps of Canada's parliament in Ottawa.
Behind a plinth.
Oh, I almost forgot. I've also made confession in Latin at the Jesu in Rome. I had been told that there were always English speaking priests available at the Jesu, which is a conveniently located church in Rome (near a big bus stop). So I went in and sure enough there was a box near the entrance that had a sign on it saying "English" but when I asked the old chap in the box, he shook his head and said, "Mi dispiace". I went away annoyed, and then thought, wait, this is the Jesu and that's an ancient, retired Jesuit. No way he doesn't know how to do it in Latin. So I went back and asked and he looked a little startled, but said, in Italian, that we could try. I knelt down and riffled through my mental Latin files and we stumbled through on a halting combo of Latin, English, Italian and French. I got the gist across, he gave the ancient absolution formula. And "three Hail Mary's and one Our Father" is pretty easy to understand in any language.
~
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)