• Lament For the Book

    Anthony Daniels at The New Criterion muses on what appears to be its inevitable slide into irrelevance and obsolescence. He doesn't ignore the conveniences of electronic publishing, but like everyone who loves books he isn't happy about the trend. This is probably definitive evidence for the contention that the trend will not be reversed (barring some…

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  • Gephyrophobia

    I did not know there was such a word. It means "fear of bridges." Coincidentally, apropos the discussion of bridges in the comments on the preceding post, I was reading a story on some news site and noticed at the bottom of the page a link to The World's Scariest Bridges, and that's where I…

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  • Don and the Unprofitable Servant When you pick up a hitchhiker, there’s a moment when he opens the door and you look at each other, and you’re both wondering whether you’ve made a big mistake: Is this guy going to do me some kind of harm? I could see that question in the eyes of…

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  • Lemons and Satsumas

    It's citrus harvest time here. And these are our very own trees. Meyer lemon (a larger and mellower lemon): And satsuma: I've written before about the glory of the satsuma. I was going to say it was a couple of years ago but I see it was three. This is the tree I mentioned in…

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  • It Really Is

    It is very meet, right, and our bounden duty, that we should at all times, and in all places, give thanks unto thee, O Lord, holy Father, almighty, everlasting God. —traditional English version of the prayer of thanksgiving from the Mass

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  • Anglican Catholic News

    (See this post for background.)  Our little, and I do mean little, group perseveres. We now have our own chapel–well, almost: we don't have an altar yet, but we hope to have the first Mass there on the first Sunday of Advent. There is a group blog called Anglican Patrimony to which our priest, Fr.…

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  • I expect most people who read this blog know of Dawn. Her conversion story is pretty powerful, and connects with a couple of recent discussions here, including this week's Sunday Night Journal, about the state of relations between the sexes, and this one, which touched on the apparently absent sense of God's absence among so…

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  • Can This Marriage Be Saved?: On the Meaning of Sex, by J. Budziszewski. Once when I was, as best I can remember, in my early teens, and spending the night at, as best I can remember, my maternal grandmother's house, I was looking for something to read and couldn't find anything except a stack of…

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  • Weekend Music (I know, it's already Saturday afternoon here, Saturday night in Europe, and sometime Sunday in Australia and New Zealand.) This is by very far not my favorite Sinatra song, but I heard it more or less accidentally, on XM radio in a rented car, a couple of days ago, and the lyric had…

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  • Computers and Gambling

    In a comment on the previous post, Marianne quotes an Atlantic article which compares the stimulus and reward pattern of using a computer to playing a slot machine. This is a topic of great interest to me, since I spend all day at a computer and have done for many years, and I really see that effect in…

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