Tonight, trying to get to rehearsal, in the dark and the cold and the rain, I walked from Bearno’s to Bellarmine. The other side of Bellarmine.
Anyway, if you understand what that means and you’ve got a minute, I could use some chicken soup.
Category: Angst
“Before the bodies are wrapped and bound, however, the blankets are opened twice: first so that a cleric can rub a bit of dirt on the face and hands of the dead. In extreme circumstances, the ritual is considered an acceptable substitute for washing the body.
Then a man with a video camera bends over the face, panning down to a number written on a scrap of newsprint folded into the funeral shroud. The footage will be made available to families looking for loved ones, along with a record of where they were buried.”
In the Post, a description of people trying to impart spiritual significance to the mass-grave burial of tens of thousands. It’s pretty affecting.
Apparently they’re getting plenty of aid in Bam, which is good–even American planes landed there, and were welcomed, for the first time in ten years (edit: twenty-two). But it doesn’t seem likely that any amount of aid is going to make much of a difference now.
In Iran, a mother held her baby girl to shield her from falling rubble, and it worked–rescuers found the mother dead, but six-month-old Nassil lived.
I wonder if I’d have had the presence of mind to do that myself.
Audrey is totally meta.
Audrey is totally meta. And speaking of Lexingtonians, the interweb tells me that U of L just beat UK. I’m frightened. I don’t watch much basketball, but the sheer societal hate-force involved in that matchup is an anthropologist’s dream. UK fans–undefeated this season, playing against their former hero coach–are not going to be happy. They may well just go ahead and set the entire state on fire.
Embarrassingly, I only found out via the Checkerboard Nightmare forums that, not too far from here, a cookie dough truck overturned and popped open in Jefferson County.
Good Part: Now, I have fuel for dreams that involve me scooping my way through literally tons of cookie dough.
Bad Part: Alas, the brave souls involved in that cleanup operation will probably never be able to stand licking the bowl again.
The Post has a fairly deep and interesting article about the assembly of a His Dark Materials movie.
HDM and Philip Pullman are a source of great conflict for me. The Golden Compass is a stunningly, impossibly good book, and The Subtle Knife was excellent too. But reading The Amber Spyglass was like a punch in the stomach, or maybe a stab in the back.
I read the books as soon as they came out, so it’s been a few years. Maybe if I started Compass now I’d see it coming, but I didn’t then. It’s one thing to set up an oppressive, evil church in an alternate universe and make your point through metaphor; it’s very much another to have one of your most sympathetic characters, ostensibly from our world, say “the real Catholic Church is a bad thing and here’s why.”
It’s not like I burned the book after that, or even put it down. I finished it, and I was still affected by the story and moved by its ending. I have a difficult time even expressing what I disliked about it.
I guess what it comes down to is that my mom read Compass to the kids in her middle school class, at a Catholic school, on my recommendation. They loved it. I have no doubt that many of them went on to finish the series themselves. And it doesn’t feel right to know that they got to the end of Spyglass to find a brilliant, trustworthy author turning a shared story into a political statement against something in which they probably believed. Against a church that, in my experience, is nothing like the way he portrays it.
I have no problem with the call to question your beliefs–that’s a call it’s been my job to make, and one that I welcome for myself. And of course the reflexive response is that it’s his world, he has the right to do with it what he wants.
That’s not true. But that’s also a subject for another time.
Philip Pullman and Tom Stoppard–I’ll definitely see the HDM movies, when they finally get made. I hope they live up to the books. But it’s going to make me sick to know that there will very likely be people from my church protesting and condemning the third movie, and that there will be other people hating them for it. What does that solve? Who learns anything from that? Why such a waste of a potentially perfect story?
Sumana sent me pretty cool article.
“Louisville Christians are demonstrating that the Church is indeed one. Predominately black Forest Baptist Church has joined predominately white Highland Baptist Church in commemorating those killed by violence in the Louisville area during the past year. Church members drive white crosses into the ground outside their churches equal to the number killed during the past twelve months….”
Times like this, I like to remember my city’s motto.
Louisville: Hey, we’re not Cincinnati.
Apparently there was a wave of layoffs and transfers this morning, but I wasn’t one of them. I feel like I dodged a bullet–it’s kind of a financial crunch right now, and I’m not exactly a crucial resource. Then again, there are people within ten feet of me who make my annual pay in a week, so I guess my value still outweighs my cost.
Yeek.
Update 1246 hrs: Okay, two weeks. Still.
Fever peaked at 102.3 Fahrenheit today. Proteins become denatured–ie brain damage can occur–at 103 (and I very nearly just spelled that “brane damage”).
Bleagh. Don’t really see myself doing the work thing tomorrow. Instead I’ll try to get an appointment with the reputedly horrible University Health Services and obtain antibiotics, as there’s a good chance it’s strep, so I’ll at least be noncontagious at some point on Tuesday. If I’ve touched you recently and you happen to suffer brain damage (“brean damange,” that time, what the fuck) in a few days, I apologize a lot.
“If that sketch was contagious, now I’d be contaged!”
–Ken Troklus