I could've called this "The Lying Eudemon." Yesterday I said that I had Friday off and was going to use the time to read and write. Well, that wasn't quite accurate. My wife and The Seven are gone for the weekend, and I have a chance to do jobs that can't be done when the kids are tramping around. So I borrowed my firm's upright carpet cleaner and cleaned the carpet in our house. I didn't move much furniture, but I hit all the main traffic and lounging areas, some of them twice. It took over three hours. It had been years since the carpets were cleaned. I suspect troglodytes get up less dirt when they shampoo their cave floors. It was kinda gross. Anyway, I didn't mention it yesterday because I wanted it to be a surprise for my wife and she's forced to read my blog every morning.
My most-recent Register column is online, but you have to have a subscription to read it. It's about movies and the Internet. Excerpt:
Tinseltown is also unfriendly to Christianity in general and the Catholic Church in particular. . . .
It hasn't always been this way. Many commentators have noted that Hollywood's glory days in the middle of the century were downright pro-Catholic, so much so that the essayist Joseph Epstein once wrote about watching movies during the 1940s: “From the movies of those days I acquired a rich mine of misinformation. For a very long time, for example, I believed that the United States was a Catholic country; this was a result of the large number of movies ”¦ in which Bing Crosby, Spencer Tracy, Pat O'Brien or Gregory Peck played a priest.”
Those days, of course, are gone. We have Mel Gibson, and Nicole Kidman has returned to the Church, but other than that? Hollywood is Ulster Orange, without the Protestantism.
Tim Drake also has a good piece over at The Register. It's about families that wisely give up TV for Lent. It's not often Marshall McLuhan gets referenced in today's press:
Dunlap said that the total bombardment of turning the home into a media center reminds him of the late Canadian philosopher and scholar Marshall McLuhan's description of media as a “central nervous system existing outside the human body.”
“We're reduced to nerves in the system, bound to react to the next stimulus that gives us a jolt,” said Dunlap, who is a teacher at Sacred Heart Apostolic School, a school run by the Legionaries of Christ for boys who are discerning a vocation to the priesthood. With the advent of television, cable, radio, satellite radio, iPods, computers and the Internet, Dunlap said that McLuhan's description is “even more true than when he wrote those words in 1964.”
The 2007 Catholic Blog Awards results are in. I won nothing, but I'm happy with my showing. I finished in the top 15 in "Best Political/Social Commentary" (out of 60 or so nominees) and top 15 in "Funniest Blog" (out of 45). I finished middle of the pack under "Best Overall Blog." I probably could've plugged the voting a little more, but I figured one hard plug (the one last Wednesday) was enough without being overbearing.
Just read about this guy: The Catholic Cartoon blog. Unique and pretty good.
A sad note. Brews none of us can use: "Alan D. Eames, a beer historian and author whose globe-trotting research into exotic brews and their origins earned him the nickname "The Beer King," has died. He was 59."
My blogging software notifies me when another blogger links to my blog (it doesn't pick up all links, but it usually notifies me of 3-5 new ones every week). This morning, I saw a new link and read this:
Über den Daily Eudemon zur "Liste der 50 Biere, die man vor seinem Tod getrunken haben sollte" gekommen. Sie hat zwar eine Schlagseite über den Atlantik hinweg und ist aus "fun" aufgestellt worden, aber ganz so schlecht bin ich nicht dabei.
Can anybody translate it? I suspect my father can. I just want to make sure he's not accusing me of any unnatural acts or inferring that my wife keeps company with escaped convicts.
Hello, Nicole Richie was arrested for DUI? She can't slow down. She just likes to party all night long and run with the night. No penny lover will bail her out this time. (To understand the (weak) humor behind this posting, you need to know the song titles from her father's biggest album.) Anyway, it's gotta be rough trying to drive in LA when your body weight doesn't allow you to drink more than half a beer without going over the legal limit.
My childless Saturday awaits!
