The flowers that bloom in the spring

...tra la...*

 

These are doing nicely, even though I neglected to transfer them to the big pot for some weeks and nearly killed them several times by failing to water them.

 

I like flowers that can stand up to abuse.



[* it's a Gilbert and Sullivan reference, you barbarians.]

Is it me, or are things actually, well...looking up?

A few weeks ago, I reported on the first ever March for Life in Brussels.

It struck me as being a pretty amateurish affair, frankly. Especially since I have been used to the large events in the US, run by well organised cadres of people who understand what "professionalism" means. And who aren't Europeans.

Their press releases were not well written; their website was confusing and difficult to navigate; and honestly, the communication skills of some of the people they put in charge of dealing with the media... well, let's say I've dealt with better.

And they got 2400 people there, from several countries.

And that's kind of the point.

It was not organised by a group of highly skilled professional organisers with lots of experience. It was put together by a group of students who had never done anything like it before. They really were just a group of ordinary people, not really activists, who deeply believed that abortion is killing Europe's future and thought that a public demonstration should be held, every year, to show the world that not everyone in Europe is on with the Death Programme. They told me they had expected a few hundred. They made a lot of mistakes, but still got 2400 people to turn out.

A few weeks before the Brussels March, there was another one in Copenhagen, I think. And they've had them in Prague and a few other places around Europe recently. And at each of these there have been about ten times as many people as were expected by the organisers.

And the way you get to be a highly skilled and experienced event organiser is to do it for a while and learn the ropes.

The fact that these marches are happening, that there are (thank God!) (finally) better bishops being appointed to key places around the world, that more and younger people are turning out to march in the streets to say please stop killing babies,

strikes me as a positive thing that doesn't get a lot of airtime.

Is it me? or are things turning around?

Am I dreaming or is that a light I see all the way down there at the end of that tunnel?

Kristan Hawkins of Students for Life of America told LSN that the fears expressed by the pro-abortion giant are playing out visibly on college campuses, where she says pro-life groups are routinely more vigorous and longer-lasting than pro-abortion groups.

"That's exactly what we see every day on college campuses," said Hawkins. "We'll have pro-choice groups that spring up in reaction to the pro-life groups that are started on campus and those groups, they last maybe a year. The only purpose they serve is to be reactionary towards our pro-life students."

Hawkins noted that groups such as Planned Parenthood, NARAL, and the Feminist Majority Network struggle to maintain campus chapters. "They all are incredibly well-funded, have a lot more money than Students for Life of America, yet none of them can [keep] active groups," she said.

Templars...mysterious!

Nothing like a drone to make a bit of chant sound gorgeously medieval and spooky.

Um, guys? I don't think the "glitzy" part is really the problem

...yeeeee!!

And hey, love the polyester bath robes on the altar-chicks.

If you go into that church at night and listen carefully, I bet you can hear a faint knocking from behind the "people's altar".

It's all a plot, I tell you!

Hmm...

never noticed before how much Lenin looks like


Michael Ironside.

Who's Canadian, as it turns out...

Happy BirthEarth-day Lenin!

Yep, "Earth Day" is indeed a communist plot.

One of the smaller ones, admittedly.

Today, the so-called "environmental movement" he helped spawn has devolved from a gaggle of unwashed adolescent peaceniks into a slick cadre of leftists, lobbyists and lawyers. The result of this devolution has been an enormous hidden tax on American products and services -- more than a trillion dollars last year -- in the form of runaway environmental regulation.

Actually, I've seen the left in Rome, and they're still pretty much a bunch of unwashed, unshaven adolescent peaceniks who can join the manifestazione at two pm on a Wednesday because none of them have jobs.

So, in the name of monarcy, hierarchy, patriarchy and generally of Christian civilization,

burn down a tree today.

Never had much time as a kid for the Disney cartoons

but of all the Warner Bros,


I think Sam and Ralph were my favourites.

There's one thing you can say about the Coyote,

he really loves his work.


This is a good one too...

Ruskin III

"They should go to nature in all singleness of heart, and walk with her laboriously and trustingly, having no other thought but how best to penetrate her meaning; rejecting nothing, selecting nothing, and scorning nothing."

One of the things I like about Ruskin is that his is the wisdom of the quintessential Dead White European Male. The best kind.

"It may be proved, with much certainty, that God intends no man to live in this world without working: but it seems to me no less evident that He intends every man to be happy in his work. It is written, "in the sweat of thy brow," but it was never written, "in the breaking of thine heart," thou shalt eat bread...

No small misery is caused by over-worked and unhappy people, in the dark views which they necessarily take up themselves, and force upon others, of work itself. "

More on Ruskin and his Good, Beautiful and True ideas about art and life

later.

Ed the Volcano

Everyone here is talking about the volcano.

There are even a few fairly good jokes running around the internet:

"It was the dying wish of the Icelandic economy that its ashes should be spread all over Europe."

I'm not sure, but I think on the Grand Coolness Scale of Science, volcanoes have to be second or first. Neck and neck with dinosaurs, at least. Maybe not every kid wants to be a volcanologist when he grows up, but at least there still are some volcanoes.

For our small but interesting "All Scientists are at Least Slightly Crazy" file, I remember watching a nature show on tv when I was a kid that featured a segment in which a pair of geologists in Hawaii went out onto an active lava flow (that looked none too steady underfoot to me), holding a sheet of corrugated roofing material as a heat shield and with nothing more than asbestos gloves on, scooping lava samples into an empty coffee can with the claw end of a hammer. I couldn't decide at the time if it made me want to march right out and become a volcanologist, or if it put me off going to Hawaii for the rest of my life.

As Dale Price pointed out on FB a few minutes ago, it seems that the journalists of the world have grown weary of typing out "Eyjafjallajokull". I suppose it is better for print/net writers. Imagine being the guy in front of the camera trying to pronounce it.

Ruskin II

Ruskin's study of his study. Looks like the perfect life to me...

Went briefly mad yesterday. On the way back from the class, I went into Feltrinelli's while I was waiting for the bus, and in their fairly substantial art section, found a copy of Ruskin's Elements of Drawing in Italian, and bought it.

Then I bought a dictionary.

I managed to get through a few sentences on the train home and it wasn't so hard. In some bits, I could get the general gist just by concentrating.

Gotta learn Italian somehow. Might as well be slow and painful.

Also,

found a website that has lots of Ruskin's works in easy-to-read "English" format.