Mark P. Shea's Blog, page 1415

Thanksgiving: An Odd Reconciliation

In which we watch as the Puritan endures the humiliation of becoming respectable and discovers a curious and unexpected friend.

Stuff to do, so that's it for today, except for this little piece, also offered in gratitude to Our Lord.

Happy Thanksgiving!  I'm especially grateful for all youse guys!

About that Whole "Immigrants are a Menace!!!" narrative...

Lowest Crime Cities Have Huge Immigrant Populations and Vice Versa

I'm likin' this gal

The author of the fetchingly titled blog "The Hell with it" wants to buy me a drink. Sounds like a hale fellow lady well met. If I'm ever wherever he she happens to be (wherever that is) I'll happily see him her one drink and raise him her another by buying him her a drink.

Pleased to meetcha, chum chumette!

Update: Post corrected to reflect Gender Awareness.

I'm likin' this guy

The author of the fetchingly titled blog "The Hell with it" wants to buy me a drink. Sounds like a hale fellow well met. If I'm ever wherever he happens to be (wherever that is) I'll happily see him one drink and raise him another by buying him a drink.

Pleased to meetcha, chum!

Probably unwise to say this just before Thanksgiving but...

I'm down to 290 lbs. from my high of 334. I find that when I eat less food, I lose weight. I'm working to understand if this is a coincidence or if there is an actual correlation. Also, moving is good.

The good news for my fellow Jollies out there is this: If a largely sedentary *writer* (job description: sit in a room all day) can lose nearly 50 lbs., so can you. My exercise, such as it is, typically consists of a walk to the post office. Not Herculean stuff. So despair not.

And yeah, it feels good. Onward! Excelsior!

Three Inches of Snow in Seattle: CITY PARALYZED!!!!

Here in the western half of the Soviet of Washington, we are total snow lightweights. Partly that's because we don't know how to drive in it. Partly it's because our traffic is the worst in the country even on good days. Partly it's because we have hardly any snow removal equipment since our temperate climate doesn't justify the cost. Partly it's because our city government is hamstrung by daft PC pieties that only this bluest of blue state cities would observe (such as refusal to salt the roads because some environmental cranks decided that runoff of a few tons of salt into the (salt) water of Puget Sound constituted a crisis (despite the we've done it for years with no ill effects).

Result: our friend Angela the Foodie, along with thousands of other people, was stranded in creeping lines of traffic out of downtown for *seven* hours last night as the blizzard hit. She left work at 5:30 and didn't get home to West Seattle (not that far) till Mid-freakin-night. Poor dear.

Every sane person in Seattle has called in to say he's not coming to work. The homeschool co-op is shuttered. Our kids are currently on a bus adventure over to help take care of The Cuteness. I'm loving the site of brilliant sun on the snow. It's like being on Hoth, but with evergreens and stellars jays working away at the suet feeders. What a gift!

So we are buttoned up snug as badgers and savoring the global warming of it all (22 degrees last night, 25 today). The climate is *definitely* changing. It's *way* different than it was in July.

Got a call from the Associated Press this AM

Doesn't happen everyday. A reporter read the IC piece on the Pope and wanted to talk. Hopefully, what I said won't get too twisted. We'll see.

Prayer Request

A reader writes:

At the end of August my wife and I met this homeless woman at the adoration chapel near where we live. We allowed this woman to come and stay with us until we could help her get back up on her feet again. This proved to be harder and not to the fact that the woman was on crutches. She ended up staying with us for around 3 months. We ended up having to ask her to leave with the escort of the police as she was starting to stress my wife out to point where she was having more seizures as she has epilipacy (sp).

This woman has been chronically homeless for 5 years due to the fact that she keeps walking away from real help. Help has been offered to her time and time again and she continues to refuse the help that has been offered to her. She then complains that know one is helping her. She has worn out the social agencies that offer help to homeless people, various priests and ministers, her own family, various kind people and lastly ourselves. She has been in and out of the hospital so many times that they don't even want to take her when she calls to complain about yet another problem with her that turns out never to be a serious problem.

No one will take this woman in including her family because she has burnt all her bridges and we can not let her back into our house. The cold winter months are upon us and she will be thrown out of her hotel room soon. It breaks our heart but there is nothing more we can do for her.

Please pray that God will somehow intervene in her life so she can get the real help that she needs despite alienating people with her constant refusal of accepting help and criticizing others who do help her when she doesn't get her own way. Thank you for always praying for others.

Father, hear our prayer for this woman that she would respond to grace and stop destroying her relationships with those who want to help her. St. Michael, defend her from the devil and free her from his snare to respond to grace. Mother Mary, pray for her that she would receive grace and act on it so as to be strengthened to make her next step toward virtue. We ask this through Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Vocation of the Catholic Blogger

Boniface, who takes blogging a whole lot more seriously than I do, pens a sort of manifesto about what he takes to be the vocation of the blogger. More power to him. The world needs Catholics who think about such things and try to work out the theological implications. The Faith, after all, is Catholic--and therefore about everything, including blogging.

That said, this is the sort of thing that would engender tremendous performance anxiety in me if I ascribed to it. I do blogging as a sort of lark. It's a chance to say whatever I feel like saying without too much solemnity surrounding it. I'm not writing for the Ages. I'm just dashing off ideas and shooting the breeze with readers. It's a great gift for somebody like me--an extrovert trapped in an introvert's job--to have a tool for writing interactively. Sometimes I will try out an idea here that becomes an article elsewhere. Sometime I just want to tell a joke. Now and then I will do something stupid as, for instance, when I stupidly published that account of the Sungenis conference that some reader sent me without bothering to check the accuracy (mea culpa). When I screw up, I try to make things right by deleting or editing offending posts, as I did with that one.

I try to run a clean joint and keep things on the up and up as best I can, though I know there are still people who hate me. Oh well. But on the whole, I regard blogging as a chance to gab somewhat informally about whatever interests me at the moment, from a Catholic perspective. While a manifesto may be helpful for other folks (and God bless those who find it so), such an approach solemnizes these proceedings more than I prefer them to be solemnized. This is my living room, not Church--though it is, of course, a Catholic living room and I ask readers to observe ordinary living room rules of discourse.

He was pandering then...

...but you can trust him now. The Prophet Gore has spoken.