Day: March 13, 2010

The diem endeth

Sleep-loss alert, peoples.  Prepare to spring ahead (lose an hour of your precious time) because we have to SAVE THE DAYLIGHT, which is easier than saving the whales.  All the gummint dictators have to do is decree it.  A liberal’s dream: DECREEING THE ALLEGEDLY RIGHT THING TO DO.

47% of us think saving the daylight is a mug’s game, says Rasmussen; 40% think it’s hunky-dory, 13% are not sure.  These are people who don’t vote, who think democracy is a given, who don’t realize vigilance is the price of freedom.  Let them go, they are not worth the trouble to chide them.

Whatever.  Set your clocks AHEAD.  It’s the SPRING LEAP.  Pass up that last number at the dance hall, that last hand of whist, that last drink at your neighborhood saloon.  Get to bed early, so you wake up REFRESHED.

Well this advice is strictly in the coals-to-Newcastle category for the whopping 83% of grownups who already know this is a 23–hour day — again thanks to Rasmussen, who is quick to point out that the 17% of us in the dark about it are “a lot.”  

I hasten to agree and must add this: OF THE 83% ANOTHER LOT OF US WILL GO ON AS BEFORE, dancing and card-playing and quaffing brew in devil-may-care manner.  We will carpe the diem, let chips fall where they may, disobey the voice of T.S. Eliot telling us, “Hurry up, it’s time.”  What, me worry?

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The diem endeth

Sleep-loss alert, peoples.  Prepare to spring ahead (lose an hour of your precious time) because we have to SAVE THE DAYLIGHT, which is easier than saving the whales.  All the gummint dictators have to do is decree it.  A liberal’s dream: DECREEING THE ALLEGEDLY RIGHT THING TO DO.

47% of us think saving the daylight is a mug’s game, says Rasmussen; 40% think it’s hunky-dory, 13% are not sure.  These are people who don’t vote, who think democracy is a given, who don’t realize vigilance is the price of freedom.  Let them go, they are not worth the trouble to chide them.

Whatever.  Set your clocks AHEAD.  It’s the SPRING LEAP.  Pass up that last number at the dance hall, that last hand of whist, that last drink at your neighborhood saloon.  Get to bed early, so you wake up REFRESHED.

Well this advice is strictly in the coals-to-Newcastle category for the whopping 83% of grownups who already know this is a 23–hour day — again thanks to Rasmussen, who is quick to point out that the 17% of us in the dark about it are “a lot.”  

I hasten to agree and must add this: OF THE 83% ANOTHER LOT OF US WILL GO ON AS BEFORE, dancing and card-playing and quaffing brew in devil-may-care manner.  We will carpe the diem, let chips fall where they may, disobey the voice of T.S. Eliot telling us, “Hurry up, it’s time.”  What, me worry?

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The St. Patrick’s thing

St. Patrick’s message “often gets drowned out by the parades, the plastic shamrocks and the green-dyed beer,” says Brother Colmán Ó Clabaigh, OSB, in The Catholic Spirit of the St. Paul & Minneapolis archdiocese.  Bold words, verified by reality.

He wrote two letters in the fifth century as a missionary to Ireland, in which (a) he condemns a chieftain for enslaving converts and (b) tells about himself and his work.

He’d been captured himself from his posh family villa in Britain and ended on a hillside herding sheep.  In desperation he turned to God and Jesus.  Escaping, he made it back to Britain and became a priest.  Could have enjoyed life as a pastor but decided to go whole-hog and return to Ireland to see what he could do for and with his erstwhile captors.

Altruistic, to be sure, but he had a skeleton in his closet, some crime committed when he was 15 that might have disqualified him for the ordination.  He admitted it to a friend, who betrayed his trust.  Patrick was attacked by “men of letters, sitting on your estates.”  He defended himself in his “Confession.”

He made an unlikely bishop, he admitted, “rustic, exiled, unlearned” as he was, “like a stone lying in deep mud.”  But “he that is mighty” had picked him up and made him part of a wall of the sort that lined the Irish countryside.

Bishop material or not, he recognized “the Gospel’s power to transform, transfigure and uplift,” Brother Ó Clabaigh, of Glenstal Abbey in Ireland, concludes.  Recognizing this was the secret of his success, “and this is as true for us in the 21st century as it was for him in the fifth.”

End of St. Patrick thought for the day. 

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The St. Patrick's thing

St. Patrick’s message “often gets drowned out by the parades, the plastic shamrocks and the green-dyed beer,” says Brother Colmán Ó Clabaigh, OSB, in The Catholic Spirit of the St. Paul & Minneapolis archdiocese.  Bold words, verified by reality.

He wrote two letters in the fifth century as a missionary to Ireland, in which (a) he condemns a chieftain for enslaving converts and (b) tells about himself and his work.

He’d been captured himself from his posh family villa in Britain and ended on a hillside herding sheep.  In desperation he turned to God and Jesus.  Escaping, he made it back to Britain and became a priest.  Could have enjoyed life as a pastor but decided to go whole-hog and return to Ireland to see what he could do for and with his erstwhile captors.

Altruistic, to be sure, but he had a skeleton in his closet, some crime committed when he was 15 that might have disqualified him for the ordination.  He admitted it to a friend, who betrayed his trust.  Patrick was attacked by “men of letters, sitting on your estates.”  He defended himself in his “Confession.”

He made an unlikely bishop, he admitted, “rustic, exiled, unlearned” as he was, “like a stone lying in deep mud.”  But “he that is mighty” had picked him up and made him part of a wall of the sort that lined the Irish countryside.

Bishop material or not, he recognized “the Gospel’s power to transform, transfigure and uplift,” Brother Ó Clabaigh, of Glenstal Abbey in Ireland, concludes.  Recognizing this was the secret of his success, “and this is as true for us in the 21st century as it was for him in the fifth.”

End of St. Patrick thought for the day. 

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