How to walk down the street

in Anglican

British culture is just so very helpful.

I hear they had snow in England this year

It was 18 degrees here on Christmas day. V. annoying.

So, I thought it was a good moment to revisit an old fave.

More on why journalism is failing

David Blevins, a former Washington correspondent for Sky News, was asked in 2008 whether the media in America and the UK understands "evangelical Christians," [note, in Britain, the term "evangelical Christians" functions as a euphemism for "believing" Christians, since the "mainstream" Christians like Catholics and Anglicans don't actually believe anything,] he said:

“Not at all. It’s important to remember that what appears in the newspapers is not an objective summary of the significant things that happened yesterday but an ideological selection based on the prejudices, agendas and assumptions of a relatively small group of people. Their ideology could be loosely defined as ‘progress will one day meet our needs.’ So as with other forms of thought that deviate from that ideological view, evangelical Christianity is either dismissed out of hand or reported in a manner that serves to reinforce the ideology!

Journalists hate Christianity. Most people who read newspapers and magazines and watch TV news are Christians. Ergo: journalists are failing to communicate intelligently to their audience (ie: their customers, the people who pay their expense accounts).

It's not that hard to figure out why the internet has killed even things as old, huge and fleshy as the New York Times.

I've always felt like a Gentile,

so I guess today's a good day.


"Rejoice in the Lord Alway". My first and still favourite Purcell anthem.

D - "Fail"

I'm thinking of a new meme for the new decade.

"Top Ten Things You Ought to Have Done Already and Will Now Probably Never Get Round To"

The rules

- Only people over forty can participate.

- You have to list real ones that really apply to you, not ones you think will get a laugh.

- Start with the worst ones first.

Ready?

Warren on why journalism doesn't work

Winter solstice tomorrow (12:47 p.m. EST). I mention this baldly and up front as a little protest against the contemporary journalistic habit to be generous with interpretation, but stingy with facts. One must often scan through ill-written prose in fruitless search for the fact one is seeking -- the actual seat count from an election; the precise event and location at which some luminary was speaking; the source for some widely cited statistic; or even the actual date and time of an astronomical event.

Often all we get is the number killed. But that tends to be an instance from category three, above: a "widely cited statistic." In such a case, I want to know who provided the number. Then I would like to hear other numbers, from other sources -- for in my experience, whether a catastrophe is "natural," or the product of human malice, it must have happened in a specific jurisdiction. And within most of the specific jurisdictions of this world, games are being played with numbers.

Yep.

Very often, a large part of my work consists of backtracking information from news sources (NYT, Guardian, Telegraph, BBC etc) to the actual place where the information comes from. Very often, and I mean very often, the source is actually providing information that is the precise opposite of the conclusion drawn by the news source.

I remember once, in fact, when the news agencies merely anticipated the results of a given action and started writing stories about something that hadn't happened yet in order to make it start happening.

And it is a regular thing, as Warren says, to have to wade through hundreds of words of blather before finding the actual nut at the centre. In many cases, the actual vote count, jurisdiction, date, name or specific act isn't mentioned at all and I have to sift through dozens of pieces before being able to cobble together what actually happened. Sometimes it is impossible, even by calling the principles in the case.

I was just down at the Sala Stampa earlier this afternoon and commented to my friend the accreditation guy that when I got into this business I had no idea that journalists are the second most hated profession in the world. Silly me.

We've missed quite a few Purcell Wednesdays,

so here's a little catch-up

"Mark how readily each pliant string," The one I was just listening to on the CD as I was reading the news. Makes the doom n' gloom parade a lot easier to take. A bit like wearing a haz-mat suit. Protective brain gear.

Forgive my scepticism

Vincent Nichols:

"A secularist is just as dogmatic as the worst religious believer and sometime they are more stridently so."

But I have this knee-jerk never-trust-a-guy-in-a-pointy-hat thing, and I do rather wonder what, precisely, he meant by "the worst religious believers".

People who believe religious dogmas?

So hard to tell what liberals mean when they start using words.

Rome in December

This guy is my favourite Roman street musician. It seems to embody all the weirdness that is Rome to have a Vietnamese guy playing American pop tunes on the accordion on the Ponte Sisto, one of the oldest bridges over the Tiber.


And he really grooves. The day I took this picture, which was I think December 5th, he was playing the love theme from Titanic. The Ponte Sisto leads right onto the street where the parish is, so many's the time when I have come into the church humming the Simon and Garfunkle tune this guy was playing.


Beautiful day in Rome. This picture makes it look a lot more peaceful than it is.


Random bits of priceless art: 15th century triptych at Santa Barbara, an otherwise criminally novusordoed church down the lane from us.

More Christmas pics

A pre-Mass lounge-about, guarding the post-Mass spread from the ravenous hordes.


Urbi et Orbi the next morning. (Well, OK, it was noon, but when you've been up till three the night before, 11 am feels like a pretty early start.) Pretty good zoom on that camera huh?


Me sleepy. It was 18 degrees on Christmas day. Even the Romans, who bundle up when it dips below +20, were carrying their coats over their arms.