Octopodial Chrome

A Serb was sentenced to 17 years for the supposed murders of 228 Mohammedans back in ’92; the judge stated that the sentence should reflect all of the cruelty embodied in Darko Mrdja's participation.. By that reckoning, murdering one man should get 27 days. The Europeans have eliminated the death penalty—the only just punishment for rape, murder & treason—but apparently don’t seem bothered enough when someone kills others to punish him much at all.

All of this, of course, ignores the genocide of Christians in Bosnia, the destruction of our churches &c. But that’s normal: the world doesn’t give two figs when Mohammedans or Latins slay the Orthodox.

As CNN reports, a Mohammedan girl was suspended for wearing a scarf to a public school which requires students to doff hats. This is ridiculous; would a Jew be forced to remove his hat? Would an Orthodox Christian be forced to shave his beard? Would a Latin be forced to remove his scapular? Would a Baptist be forced to remove his WWJD t-shirt?

I do not agree with Mohammedans, nor with Jews, nor with Latins or Baptists—but surely they deserve the same liberty I desire. This is a nation founded, however imperfectly, upon principles of freedom; that is our principle strength. We allow our fellow men to endanger their very souls in the name of freedom (what else is religious toleration but allowing another to go to Hell?); surely we can afford to allow them to wear head-coverings.

You’re the President of the United States of America, and you’ve just been informed that an asteroid may or may not hit the Earth. What do you do?

Christopher Browne has an excellent article on spreadsheets, why they’re and why they’re bad, among many other excellent pieces. A fine site in general.

On the way back from Castle Rock this evening I was pulled over for the second time in my life—for supposedly failing to make a full stop at a stop sign. Fortunately, the fellow in question was nice enough to let me go without a ticket. It’s a good thing he wasn’t a mile up the road…

Tonight I got my calze properly fitted. Next I need to sew over the basted seams and put in eyelets at the proper spots, but I’m in the home stretch now! I’m wearing my mutande (underwear), calze (what some might term tights), camicia (shirt) and farsetto (doublet), and I look completely and utterly sharp. I cannot wait to get everything completed!

Yesterday my parish had a men’s retreat led by His Grace, Bishop Basil covering the works of Elder Joseph the Hesychast. Very, very interesting review of Mount Athos, Athonite monasticism and more.

We men of the Schola Cantorum chanted Matins, the Liturgy, Sext and Vespers. Did a pretty good job, except where our pastor sprang surprises on us—we’re as yet unable to sight-sing new material. There’s something wonderful about the sound of men’s voices chanting to God, an effect quite ruined by even a single woman’s voice. It’s strange how those same tones which delight one so in ordinary speech repel one in church. It’s been pointed out to me that there is a similar effect with women’s voices vs. a single man’s voice. Apparently men sound good and women sound good, but not together. There is probably some sort of lesson there…

Last night I dropped by my folks’ house in order for my mother to fit my calze to me; while there, I played about with the cable TV music channels. For those who don’t have ’em, these are simply channels which play songs and display title, artist, album & some random trivia. No videos, no DJ, no ads: just music. Very, very, very cool—the one reason I might consider getting cable or Dish Network or something similar.

I discovered that my mother enjoys the song Rebel Yell by Billy Idol. Disturbing, that. I also discovered that a majority of the songs I enjoy come from before my youngest brother’s birth. Yet more disturbing, that.

The premium gas today was selling for the princely sum of $1.999 per gallon. I had to pay $1.919 per, myself. If this war was about oil, as all the idiot leftists seem to think, then why the hell am I facing the prospect of paying $2/gal. this summer? Sheesh, I remember when it was less than a dollar. Those were the days.

Cars now no longer come with proper cigarette lighters and ashtrays; instead one must pay extra for the so-called smokers’s package. Now, I don’t smoke in my car, but I want ashtrays and a lighter. I devoutly hope that some namby-pamby pansy fairy-twit limp-wrist anti-smoker freezes to death in the mountains because his car got stranded and he was unable to start a fire with the cigarette lighter he would have had, had he been a man.

Several Congressmen, including fellow Coloradan Hefley, believe that Congress should be able to overturn the Supreme Court by a simple two-thirds vote. Utter lunacy. The Founders were wise to provide a mechanism by which the Constitution can be amended; this would short-circuit that entire process such that the Congress could effectively rewrite the Constitution at will.

Steven Weinberg argues cogently against manned space exploration, noting quite rightly that all the benefits of space have come (or could have come) through unmanned missions. For the cost of the current Hubble and its repair missions, we could have sent up seven in unmanned launches. Sending men to Mars is a thousand times more expensive that sending robots—and there’s no value to it. Why?

Today several of us had lunch with a gal we used to work with who is moving to Chicago in a few days. She’d not seen me in several months, and upon doing so exclaimed, you’ve lost so much weight! In addition to being one of those phrases a gal can say to a guy but no guy can ever say to a gal, it has the virtue of being true. Life is good.

Well, except for the spirit-crushing loneliness. Other than that, it’s going well.

Well, I just finished re-reading the Chronicles of Prydain, and they brought to mind several things: the girl who gave them to me; a fall in which the dreariest of days was full of sunshine; a winter which was gloriously golden summer. I rather hoped she might be my Eilonwy and I her Taran. And then came that black day just over four years ago (27 Feb. ’00) when all those hopes came crashing down about me, and my striving came to naught and that was, as it’s said, that.

My doublet, it is finished. After hours upon hours of labour (there are 40 eyelets, each of which took 15–30 minutes to complete, and the collar lining took several hours itself, and then there’s the rest of the construction), I have sewn a 15th century Italian farsetto. Interestingly, now that it is done I cannot even recall how long it took (although I should note that at my current bill rate the eyelets alone would have cost $1,000–$2,000).

I should also note that I am incredibly sexy in my camicia (shirt) & farsetto. I may need to hire a police guard in order to protect myself from the hordes of women certain to throw themselves at me. It’s that good. Now, to work on my calze…

These are the fundamentals of bachelor cooking:

1. A properly balanced meal consists of meat, beer and one or fewer vegetable ingredients. The permitted vegetables are: instant mashed potato or frozen peas.
2. Taking any active part in food preparation is called cooking. This may include choosing the pizza toppings, phoning the order to the curry house and putting the frozen lasagne into the microwave.
3. Salad is for rabbits.
4. The complete list of allowable BBQ foods is:
   • Beer
   • Hamburgers
   • Sausages
   • Steak
   • Ketchup
   • Bread
   But not too much bread.
5. Food does not age when put in the fridge. In future, people seeking the secret of eternal life will spend years in their fridges, wrapped in cling-film.
6. It stands to reason that if a food is full of preservatives, then the consumer who eats it will also age slower, and remain healthier for longer.
7. The Bachelor should always be ready to entertain unexpected guests. In the fridge keep plenty of beer.
8. The correct place for dirty pots, pans and plates is in artistic and precarious piles in the sink, on tables, benches and chairs, on top of the T.V, on the floor or in the garden. In each pile the smallest item should always form the base.
9. The correct time to wash dirty plates is right before you next want to use them.
10. Evil things from months ago lurk in the back of food cupboards and fridges. Never explore the dark reaches beyond the warm, comforting light that plays on the (relatively) recently bought items in the front. Whatever is going on in the back should be left alone.
11. No potato is ripe until it has developed leaves and a root system of its own.
12. Rice never goes off.
13. Beer should never get the chance.
14. Everything tastes better fried.
15. Food dropped on the floor is best cleaned by holding it carefully and blowing on it. This works regardless of what was on the boots you wore in the kitchen yesterday, where your dog went last night and whether or not you ever turned on a vacuum cleaner.
16. Dessert is for wimps.
17. The ultimate aim of cooking is to use only one pot in the process. For maximum points, that pot should be a frying pan.
18. The correct procedure to follow whenever anything goes wrong is to order pizza. The list of possible things going wrong includes failure to buy food, tiredness, rain, visitors, or a lack of visitors. It is amazing how much can go wrong.
19. Cleaning the cooking scraps out of the pot you last used last week ruins the flavour of the meal you try to cook in the same pot tonight. Better to just use it anyway.
20. Cooking the food is easy. Eating it afterwards is the hard part.

Found at http://www.btinternet.com/~knutty.knights/more_bach_cook.html.

I recently discovered that Vitamin Cottage doesn’t just sell vitamins and dietary supplements, but also organic, healthy and vegetarian groceries. I’ve been in this condo for nearly a year with a grocer’s within walking distance and never knew this! Maybe I can actually do the whole market fresh food thing sometime.

Lucy Gaston was an early anti-smoking activist described as looking like Abraham Lincoln without the beard (I’d add that she also possessed approximately the same moral sense as that tyrant) whose efforts eleven states banned smoking. Amusingly and fittingly, she died of throat cancer despite never having smoked: her foolishness didn’t save her.

One can only hope that a similar fate would befall all anti-smokers. Although to tell the truth, I’m not picky about their manner of leaving: they can fall from great heights, or get food poisoning, or forget to breathe (not unlikely among such unintelligent types), so long as they stop spewing their venom. It’d be even more pleasing were they to repent, becoming pleasant neighbours and useful members of society—but that’s not very likely as the great mass of them are fanatics.

Islamist Bahrainis attacked a restaurant and its patrons for serving alcohol, going so far as to throw Molotov cocktails at cars and storming the restaurant bearing knives. One brave diner wrested a knife from one of the hoods and severely injured him.

This is the result of allowing a religion to dictate state policy. The only difference between these idiot Islamists and an American prohibitionist is their religion of choice. Religion has a definite place in the public sphere, but it has no place in lawmaking. We should all be free to pursue our beliefs, so long as we do not impose on others who do not share them. These thugs wish to impose their religion on others, and we rightly decry them. Who will be logically consistent and decry those thugs in our very own country who wish to imprison and fine those who work on Sundays, or who consume alcohol, or whose behaviour is sinful?

Rich Lowry rebuts Al Franken’s criticisms, once again proving that to be a leftist one must necessarily be ignorant or dishonest. That is, either one has no real knowledge of the subject at hand, or one ignores the knowledge one has.

John Derbyshire argues that we should eliminate Congress, since it hasn’t really done anything useful in years. He also has an amusing account of becoming an American.

Project Gutenberg is an invaluable resource containing thousands of free electronic books dating back to 1971. The books are stored in plain ASCII and can thus be easily viewed and reformatted; I got much of my Classic Literature from it.

Apparently George Washington spent 7% of his salary on drink; amusingly enough, since he’s one of my ancestors (kinda: he had no children but adopted one of my forefathers, I budget just shy of that amount from my own income. I should note that’s after taxes, savings &c.: last year I spent 3½% of my actual income on the stuff: less than taxes, rent, mortgage interest or food.

My Doublet is nearly done now: it’s completely assembled and tonight I finished half of the eyelets which lace up the front. Another dozen and I’ll be done with it, and then on to the chausses.

When I replaced the faulty drive yesterday, I discovered that I had screwed up my IDE configuration: both mirrors were on the same IDE bus, one master & one slave. This meant that it was almost always saturated. I fixed it, and now everything is fast, blazing fast.

For those who don'’t know, an IDE bus can handle one or two drives. If two, the one at the end of the bus must be configured as the master and the one in the middle as the slave. Nowadays many drives have a Cable Select option which is supposed to negotiate the master-slave relationship, but that's untrustworthy. If you’re mirroring two drives, make sure that they are on separate buses. Also, the master typically gets better performance than the slave—make rarely-used drives like CD drives the slaves if possible.

Yesterday one of my hard drives failed. Fortunately, it’s mirrored, and I so today after work I replaced it. Very straightforward operation. Linux is cool.

Foresters accidentally cut down the 500-year-old oak tree, symbol of its village and attraction for artists from around the world. Truly, truly sad. The tree survived the Thirty-Years’ War; it survived world wars; but it couldn’t survive a bunch of bumbling buffoons. I’d wager good money that they were Gastarbeiten…

In New South Wales, Australia, it is illegal to carry a knife in a public place or school, except under certain restricted circumstances (it’s necessary to one’s job; one is preparing food &c.)—and it is not considered a reasonable excuse to possess a knife for self-defence. This is where we are headed, people: the handgun prohibitionists dearly want to move onto all firearms, then all edged weapons, and finally all weapons, period. They are, quite simply, insane.

It’s sad to think that a fellow member of the Anglosphere is as degraded as Australia. Perhaps there will come a day that she will come to her senses. Doubtful, though.

My dear brother informs me the girls’ lacrosse is an entirely different game from the real thing—apparently it bears approximately the same resemblance to actual lacrosse that field hockey bears to the genuine article. In that case, I rescind my comments on the matter. Mens sana in corpore sano, after all: it’s no less true for gals than for guys.

I drove by a middle school recently and saw that its sporting fields were full of little girls playing lacrosse. What could their parents have been thinking? The sport is a nasty, vicious mass of fighting and swearing. I’ve seen professional lacrosse games—they’re as violent as hockey, or moreso. Had I children, I wouldn’t care to have my sons, much less my daughters, play it.

Found a wonderful website today which searching for resources on how to properly lace up garments: AmIPeriodOrNot.com. Based on an idea similar to amihotornot.com and many, many imitators, it’s a way for folks to evaluate how historical one’s clothing is. Pretty cool.

Sorry for the paucity of new entries—I’m sewing a doublet (kind of a cross between a shirt, a vest and a jacket) and hence haven’t much time to write anything. And of course I just realised that I have one of the fronts and one of the backs mis-sewn, so I’ve to unstitch them both and redo them. Sigh.

Pia de Solenni writes that 40% of women under the age of 45 have committed infanticide, that 25% of pregnancies are aborted and that since national legalisation 40 million have been slain. Forty percent—that means that the odds are roughly even that any particular woman has had an abortion. It boggles the mind. To be honest, I have difficulty believing that figure. Can it be that high?

Sandra Tsing Loh has lost her job for accidentally saying f—— on the air. What a bunch of nonsense. Who cares if a commentator curses? For millennia somehow mankind has somehow managed to deal with swearing, but now we have to protect the chiiildren from ever hearing a bad word. Lunacy.

At the end of the film Top Gun, there’s a great bit where Val Kilmer says, You can be my wingman any time, and Tom Cruise replies, Bullshit—you can be mine. The TV censors edited that to Nonsense—you can be mine, in a squeaky little voice-over. It ruins the scene. Morons.

Use properly, swearing is a useful conversational technique. It can highlight emotion and indicate points of interest. And in a supposedly free country, what is truly obscene is that anyone should be afraid of losing a radio license for airing a curse word.

I saw a .sig line today:

A village in Texas has lost it’s [sic] idiot.

Look to the plank in thine own eye before pointing out the mote in thy brother’s…

I received an email from Lois McMaster Bujold, authoress of the amazingly great Vorkosigan Saga, a series of ripping yarns set in outer space. I’d sent her webmaster one regarding how I got interested in her work through the Baen’s Free Library—The Mountains of Mourning is available as a free download, in HTML, Palm & other formats.

She’s one of my favourite authors, and now I have received an actual note from her. My cup runneth over and all that.

Tonight I finished my Italian Renascence shirt. It is so cool. Three-and-a-half yds. of linen gave their lives to make it—it’s nearly roomy enough to fit another in it. I did make one slight mistake: the left cuff had no seam allowance, and so it is a bit snugger than is perhaps strictly necessary, but that just keeps me humble. Maybe if I get a couple of hours to kill I’ll take it off and add another. As it is, it’s an absolutely beautiful piece of work. Perhaps I’ll get around to putting pictures of it up (shortly after I get access to a digital camera). The eighteen or so hours necessary to finish it have paid off well.

Now, to work on the doublet & chausses to accompany it…

Today I went out and purchased the materials for an Italian Renascence shirt (15th century). It should look pretty sharp, and I can also wear it underneath my Elizabethan doublet, should I ever get that piece finished (or even started!).

Man, I’ve watched a lot of films since getting a Netflix subscription: in two and a third years, I’ve seen 677 movies—over 5½ a week! For most of that time, I’ve been on the 8-at-a-time plan, and thus have paid a bit less than $1,200, averaging $1.76 per movie. It’s amazingly cheap.

CNN have an article on the theory that those with more noble blood tend to win presidential elections more frequently than those who do not. It makes sense: blood will tell, after all. Who better to conduct affairs of state than one who ancestors were bred for it? Of course, CNN are only reporting this because purportedly Kerry has more than Bush. The article is a puff piece, unfortunately, lacking a family tree. And it’s a bit silly: much is made of the fact that Kerry is (probably) descended from James I, and that Bush is descended from Charles II: the one is the grandson of the other!

How heavy was a mediæval sword? Those who’ve watched too many movies or read too much silly fiction might answer twenty pounds, or a dozen, or eight. The truth is most weighed less than three pounds.

Imagine if rather than Tolkien, it had been Douglas Adam, or Jane Austen, or Shakespeare who had written the Lord of Rings. An hilarious site.

Whilst downloading the newest crossfire client from Sourceforge, I saw an ad which interested me. Not wishing to disrupt what I was doing (and also aware that many ads pop open new windows when followed), I middle-clicked to open a new tab. When I got a moment, I eagerly turned to the tab to see what the ad was selling, only to find that the morons had, instead of using nice standard HTML links, done something-or-other which doesn’t play well with others, and so their link never loaded. They had to go above-and-beyond to break things; the easy way is also the correct way. Don’t they want to sell their product?

Robert Moran doesn’t think so. Bill Clinton re-elected with the exact same rates, and twenty years ago the current rate was considered the lowest possible.

There’s recently been several stories about certain memos written by Democratic senatorial staffers which Republican staffers read. The Dems claim that this required some act of cracking their computer systems to read. As Ira Winkler, a Democrat, demonstrates, this is not the case at all: the Democrats left the files wide open, even after being informed of the problem. A reasonable browser would conclude after the warning that any files remaining unsecured were public.

A 14 yr. old apprehended a burglar with a sword. The weapon was part of his brother’s collection—said brother having gone off to war, telling him to protect his mother and sister. I tell you, it’s as though it were in a book. This kid can dine out on the story for the rest of his life. Lucky fellow.

I placed an order with Arms & Armour today for the first of many pieces: the High Gothic Mace (I had called on Saturday, but I guess the smith was out). A mere eight weeks from now and it will be mine!

My next purchase, later this year, will be the German Flail, which is an absolutely beautiful item; next year I plan to purchase the German Rapier. I’m not certain what I’ll get the next year: possibly the German Branch Sword or Italian Stiletto, or perhaps a parrying dagger. No matter what it is, it shall no doubt be magnificent.

In my monthly Target Visa bill I received a number of coupons: one for a Playtex bra; one for a Hanes Her Way Pure Bliss bra (women’s clothing has odd names); and one for L'eggs Body Beautiful No Hose (ditto the last comment—and despite the name, I believe that the No Hose are in fact hose after all). I suppose some computer somewhere must believe me interested in such things. Which is not altogether untrue, but I’m certainly not interested in buying them; my attention is normally drawn by the one buying.

I thought marketing was supposed to be targeted these days. One would doubly expect it from a company named Target.

A group of Tolkien fans have produced a superlative Encycolpædia of Arda. Check it out—it’s good. Imperfect, but good.

Apparently The Lord of the Rings won every single award for which it was nominated. Despite my well-known concerns and grave with the adaptation, it will be an eternal monument as an incredibly well-realised visual rendition of a magnificent opus. Jackson captured the look of Middle Earth as none of us dared hope he would. From henceforth and forevermore I will read the books with his landscapes, his Riders, his buildings, his towers and many of his characters (not all, but many). My concerns are with his script, with his take, with his emphasis: never with the way he painted Tolkien’s great work onto the silver screen.

The mere making of the films demands recognition: for the first time in history, a trilogy has been filmed all at once, rather than piecemeal. The attention paid to atmosphere and detail was incredible: I recall a tale that the set for the Chamber of Mazarbul had shreds of parchment written with the Cirth Daeron scattered about itself—and that those shreds meant something. No camera ever focused on them; the effort of their preparation could be said to have been wasted—but they lent atmosphere to the actors, atmosphere that enabled them to better play their parts.

Jackson’s work was imperfect, but it far exceeded anything anyone might reasonably have hoped for. He surpassed what might have been expected, and has earned the right to hold his head high amongst our cinematic greats. To be brutally honest, I do not believe that he will ever reach or surpass the mark thus set—but that mark is graven in a fiery line which shall burn for decades to come.

I only hope that I live until the next interpretation of Tolkien’s works, the interpretation that weds visual excellence with narrative perfection to produce the film equivalent of Tolkien’s corpus.

I’ve read a very great deal about Gibson’s Passion from very perspectives. It occurred to me in church yesterday what the fundamental problem with it is: it is not Christ’s suffering and death which save us, but His Resurrection. That is why, even in the West, we Christians celebrate Easter, Pascha, the Feast of the Resurrection, not a theoretical feast of the crucifixion.

I then realised a problem with the Western theory of salvation-through-passion (albeit not the fundamental problem): it focuses on what was done to Christ, not on what Christ did. It’s a passive, feminine account of Salvation. It discounts Christ’s actions. He suffered, yes; He died, yes—and then He descended into Hell and harrowed it, freeing those who were bound there: trampling down death by death, and upon those in the tombs bestowing life, as the hymn puts it. It is not by passivity but by action that Christ saved us.

I think that it’s also related to the Western love of inflexion points. Just as in the West there has to be an instant at which the bread and wine become the Body and Blood of Christ, so too there must be a single instant at which salvation is achieved. But that’s just not the way it is. The entire Liturgy is the process of changing the gifts into the Eucharist—and so to Christ’s entire life is part of the process of salvation. His incarnation as a man; His birth; His growing-up; His ministry; His suffering; His death; His resurrection; His ascension—all these are important. It’s not any one thing: it’s that God eternal became man and was born like we were, died like we do and rose like we will.

This obsession with one particular point in salvific history is unhealthy. It’s something like interpreting all of American history through the prism of 18th century settlements in Tennessee.

In an item brought to my attention by my dear brother, it seems that the California Supreme Court has ruled that Catholic Charities are not, in fact, a religious organisation—and thus that it must fund contraceptives for its employees, despite the Catholic stance against birth control and contraception. I suppose that soon the court will rule that black is white, the sky an interesting vertiginous shade and trees legally sentient.

If Catholic Charities are not religious, then what is? The fuckwits—I used the term deliberately: these are judges who brains have been severely fucked with, if they could come up with such specious reasoning—note that most folks served by the charity are not Catholic. What possible bearing does that have on anything? All that matters is that the organisation has a religious aversion to funding such coverage.

For that matter, how can any state justify requiring an employer to cover prescription contraceptives? Maybe that employer disagrees with them. Maybe that employer just doesn’t wish to pay for them. If his employees don’t like it, they can get another job—or simply stop screwing. One has no right to expect consequence-free happiness. With drink comes the risk of a hangover; with shooting, of an accident; with driving, of a crash; with sex, of producing children.

I don’t particularly agree with the Roman Church’s views on contraception (I think that it’s less ideal than it could be, but that it is not evil in and of itself), but that doesn’t change the fact that members of that church should be free to act according to their consciences.

I just finished watching Uncle Buck, just one of the many masterpieces in the Hughes œuvre. It’s amazing how astoundingly good so many of his films were: classics like Ferris Bueller’s Day Off; Vacation; weird Science; Planes, Trains & Automobiles; She’s Having a Baby; The Great Outdoors—and then he just dried up. Still, his numerous great films far outweigh the duds of his later years.

I entered the Ben Affleck/Sandra Bullock vehicle Forces of Nature with low expectations. Actually, it’s not at all bad. Despite what one might infer from the trailer, he actually does the right thing and sticks by his girl despite the not-insignificant attractions of Miss Bullock. It’s quite startling to see a movie advocating proper behaviour.

I saw Little Women on Saturday and, to be frank, I just wasn’t impressed. We’re supposed to pity this supposedly impoverished family—yet they’ve a fine, big house and can afford a servant. I hadn’t realised that mansions and maids are but one step away from utter destitution.