Repost: π with Jesus
DarwinCatholic
by mrsdarwin
2w ago
Enjoy our annual repost of 2017's π with Jesus, mostly meant as a reminder to eat yer pie today, but also because we are up to our eyeballs in Life -- all good and wonderful, but busy and one thing after another, from audition prep for The Music Man, to children turning 18, to helping young people buy cars, to having a college senior and a kindergartner at the same time.  It's the second week of Lent, which means that observance has lost its zest. I don't know about you, but I'm yearning for a bit of chocolate. Not a bright, hopeful yearning; a dry, intellectual, arid yearning, because I ..read more
Visit website
The Art of the Backlist Book
DarwinCatholic
by Darwin
3w ago
 Back in 2020, fresh from the experience of my own novel being published by Ignatius Press and then publishing MrsDarwin's Christmas novella independently under out imprint of Oak & Linden Press, MrsDarwin wanted a reading copy of Fr. Robert Hugh Benson's classic book The Friendship of Christ. Used copies in good condition were hard to find, and so she went on Amazon and found a paperback copy for $5.00.  The problem was, that copy was the one shown here on the left. Not only was the cover itself aggressively ugly and the interior formatting bad, but the person who had set it u ..read more
Visit website
The Strange Demographics of the Russia-Ukraine War
DarwinCatholic
by Darwin
1M ago
 In my wallet, I still carry with me the selective service card I received when I turned 18. Since that was in 1997, and the Selective Service Act only allowed for the calling up of men aged 18-25, it's a pretty empty gesture at this point, but I keep it with me as a reminder. As the Russia-Ukraine war enters its third year, there are headlines about how the average age of front line Ukrainian troops is 43. To our American eyes, that suggests a country which has already run out of draftable men aged 18-40, a country in the final stages of defeat, such as Germany in 1945 or the Confederacy ..read more
Visit website
The Music Man
DarwinCatholic
by mrsdarwin
1M ago
 Last Friday night, my ten-year-old laid his head on the table at dinner and said, "I don't feel well..." ...and a week later, we are dragging ourselves by our elbows out of a feverish slough of mucus and sinus pressure. I've stopped sneezing this morning, but my head feels like a solid block pressing on my eyeballs. Darwin worked from home two days this week, and every moment he wasn't on a call, he crept back into bed. Various children drip around the house. Fortunately, the older teens have been so far immune, but we are in general a house shrouded in tissues. All this is to explain wh ..read more
Visit website
Reading the Herculaneum Scrolls
DarwinCatholic
by Darwin
1M ago
This is a really fascinating story, and a good example of the way that AI and be used as a tool for the traditional humanities: Machine learning tools are being used to turn CAT scans of scrolls entombed in volcanic mudflows in Herculaneum in 79AD into readable images which papyrus experts are then turning into text and philologists are translating. This first victory consisted of successfully producing readable images of just a dozen columns of text -- a little over 2000 characters -- from one scroll. But it's amazing progress from where things stood a year ago, and the prize for this yea ..read more
Visit website
Immediate Book Meme
DarwinCatholic
by mrsdarwin
2M ago
It's book check time, my friends.  photo by Evan Laurence Bench There are plenty of memes that want to know all about your book history and your all-time greats and your grand ambitions, but let's focus on something more revealing: the books you're actually reading now, or just read, or are about to read. Let's call it The Immediate Book Meme. *** 1. What book are you reading now? My nightstand is stacked with books I'm working through: The Aesthetics of Architecture, by Roger Scruton This book demands careful attention, and even so I often need Scruton's practical exam ..read more
Visit website
To Sleep, Perchance to Dream
DarwinCatholic
by mrsdarwin
2M ago
It has been a time of dreams for me lately -- long, involving, pleasant dreams, full of plot and incident and characters both real and imagined. If I drift to the edge of consciousness, I can fall back into the same plot, such as it is. And yet, I can't tell you about them. As soon as I try to make concrete in words the visions of my subconscious, the images slip away, like that small bit of eggshell in the bowl you keep trying to nab. (You can pin the eggshell if you dip your finger in water first, but that doesn't seem to help with describing dreams.) I might try to tell you about last night ..read more
Visit website
One Week
DarwinCatholic
by mrsdarwin
2M ago
We're about a week into 2024, and I don't have anything more intelligent to offer you than this inessential bit of textual analysis I've been low-key working on since before Christmas: is the one week in the Barenaked Ladies song One week actually one week (and two days 'til they say they're sorry)? There are three verses in this hit from 1998, which I listened to on the radio (the radio!) when it was still in top-40 territory. Each one covers nine days of a relationship quarrel, from initial conflagration to the still-deferred apology. I'd always thought of the verses as being a sequence of s ..read more
Visit website
A Year End Post
DarwinCatholic
by Darwin
3M ago
It's December 31st, and the sidebar tells me that it is our least prolific writing year in the 18 years of the blog's existence.  Though as I say that, the idea of a blog being 18 years old is also rather shocking.  51 posts this year to date is pretty pitiful after years (many years ago at this point) when we averaged more than one post per day. Though, to be honest, I'm surprised that this post will even bring us up to that average. It seems like less. So what has happened this year? MrsDarwin and I each directed one play for our local community theater. In the spring, MrsDarwin ..read more
Visit website
Tired of Lies
DarwinCatholic
by Darwin
3M ago
For those in the Catholic media world, peace on earth was slow in coming this advent, as a mini firestorm blew up on December 18th with the release of Fiducia Supplicans, a declaration from the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith on the pastoral meaning of blessings. You might think that blessings would be a pretty non-controversial topic, perhaps even a boring one. Blessings are everywhere in Catholic life. It's quite normal for a parish priest, at the request of his parishioners, to bless rosaries and other sacramentals, cars, houses, etc.  Nor are blessings something reserved only ..read more
Visit website

Follow DarwinCatholic on FeedSpot

Continue with Google
Continue with Apple
OR