Michael Flynn's Blog, page 26

The Odd Ends of Odds and Ends

Yes, it's that time again.  Clearing out bunch of ends and odds.
The Little Ironies of LifeLife Used to be So Much SimplerThe Music of a GenerationHot Enough For Ya Return of the QuantaRead more »

Bad News

The diocese of Allentown and the parish of Our Lady of Mercy have thrown in the towel on the possibility of raising the money needed to repair the main church building.  The church, formerly St. Joseph's, was closed two weeks ago and all operations were transferred to the oratory, formerly St. Bernard's.  

That the parish had two church buildings may seem odd.  However:
St. Joseph's was the largest of the church buildings and therefore was able to accommodate the three combined parishes St. Bernard's was the oldest parish in this part of Pennsylvania, the "mother church" for all the rest, including St. Joseph's.So there were practical and historico-sentimental reasons for keeping both in operation.  Now the large and liturgically rich church will be used only on Christmas and Easter and for Kirchweihe and the like.  Marriages and funerals will be done in it, if requested.
A farewell to old St. JosephRead more »

Gold Rush

Years ago at TOF's over-the-hill 40th b'day party he was given a "newspaper" full of headlines and such from the year he was born.  Included was a list of the price of several things in birth year versus then-current year, including the median wage, an ounce of gold, a new home, a new Ford automobile, a loaf of bread, a jug of wine and some thou. 

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Sometimes You Learn That You Did Something Right

Learned today that my son up at Univ. Alaska - Anchorage saw a nativeman attempt suicide by swallowing a bunch of pills out on the street.  He called 911 and then stayed with and encouraged the man until help came.  (While other good Samaritans diverted car traffic around them.)  
Sometimes you wonder if you were a good enough father, and then you get proof.  Well done, Dennis.  We are proud of you.

The Shipwrecks of Time - Preview

I have ducked back a chapter to introduce some of the other characters and a new complication.  We are back with Frank Delacorte.  He has left the Institute on that first day with a list of potential lodgings that Mrs. S has given him.

nbsp;   The first address on the list was an apartment building on the same block, but that was too good to be true and when Frank got there, he was told that the last remaining room had been rented the week before.  “The kids are coming in for the new semester,” the apartment manager told him, just in case he cared.  Armed with that information, Frank studied the list more carefully, compared it to his map, and crossed off all the buildings closer to the University than where he now stood. His best chances lay in those boarding houses and apartments farther west.  He set off into the wilderness at a brisk pace

Continue reading.  

In the next, and possibly final installment, we will learn something of the plot problem that will confront Frank. 

Thinking with the wrong glands

Yes, he was arrested for "child endangerment."
Beginning in the 1950s, Jacques Barzun noted that the phrase "I think that..." was being replaced by "I feel that..."  You might take count for a few days how often you hear people say that.  "I feel we should
eat at this restaurant."  "I feel the president is a sage (and/or fool)."  "I feel we ought to do something about Iran."  And so on.  Lost in all this are two important things: thoughts and feelings.  When everything is felt and nothing is thought, genuine feelings, the significance of feelings themselves, can be diluted like homeopathic philosophy.

In the old Aristotelian dispensation, the intellect was prior to the will.  That is, the will was regarded as the intellective appetite, a hunger for the products of the intellect.  After all, you cannot want what you do not know.  (And because the knowledge is hardly ever perfectly certain, the will is hardly ever perfectly determined, and hence is free.)


You go, Will!

But we live now in the age of the Triumph of the Will, and more often,
the triumph of the appetites, and we want what we want when we want it.  What do we want?  You name it.  When do we want it?  NOW!  There are times when this is understandable, when a man who hates evil is impatient for its crushing.  But it is not uncommon to find that people desire things that are contrary to the intellect.  Adam wants to eat lots of chocolate and not get fat; but the universal verdict of the intellect is that that ain't gonna happen, no matter how much he might "love" chocolate.  And we intuit the nature of sin as a defectus boni when we say "Too much chocolate is bad for you."  (Bad?  How dare we make value judgments!)  So we have a society that eats when its hungry and is afterward shocked, shocked to discover an "epidemic" of obesity in its midst.



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Commemoration of Thomas Aquinas

Yeah, I know.  A day late and a thaler short.  But to make up for it, we have this link.

Whether St. Thomas is boring.

The Late Modern Age, which has substituted the locution "I feel that..." for "I think that..." undoubtedly finds the Dumb Ox boring.  Logic has that effect on the video-game mentality. 



Previously on the TOF Spot...
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Random Thoughts on the White Room

One of the critiques often leveled at SF from the 50s and 40s is that it envisioned the future as the 40s and 50s on steroids.  But when we look back today at the 50s, we blink and say, "we're not like that any more," even those of us who were there (when our memories are not failing us).  There were things we took for granted -- little kids running around the neighborhood unsupervised; going out of the house without locking the doors, and so on -- that are unimaginable today for most people today, when play has become play-dates and helicopter parents supervise the child's downtime. 

And those are just minor changes of culture and setting.  I had the fortune as a management consultant to visit all parts of the country and a fair number of other countries, and so had the opportunity to view people who did not behave like the people on the TV shows. 
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Shipwrecks of Time -- Preview

Carole Harris, having left the convent, is being introduced to secular life by her new roommate, Vivian, in The Short Farewell of Sr. Mary Barbara

Headlines of the Week

Culled from the WSJ "Best of the Web

Group Snags Trout.  Now That Would be News!

"Mike Trout snags 550-pound grouper at Key West"--headline, Yahoo! Sports, Jan. 15

Unclear on the Concept

"Traditional Wood Antiques Are Beginning to Get Old"--headline, Journal News (White Plains, N.Y.), Jan. 13

What is Wrong With This Metaphor?

"The Bears took a swing for the fences by choosing Marc Trestman to be the 14th head coach in team history, an NFL source told the Tribune early Wednesday."--Chicago Tribune website, Jan. 16

Thank Goodness for Arab Spring

"An earlier version of this article misstated the timing of some of Mr. Morsi's comments. The television interview in which he referred to Zionists as "these bloodsuckers who attack the Palestinians, these warmongers, the descendants of apes and pigs" was made in September of 2010, not early that year."

-- correction run in New York Times, Jan. 15

Contest: Imagine the Context

"Morsi Says His Slurs of Jews Were Taken Out of Context"--headline, New York Times, Jan. 17

Unclear on the Concept

"Obama Declares War on Violence"--headline, New York Post, Jan. 16

No Wonder She Turned Teacher

"Calif. Porn Actress-Turned Teacher Loses Appeal"--headline, Associated Press, Jan. 15

News of the Oxymoronic

"Returning Zing to Dutch Cooking"--headline, New York Times, Jan. 16