How 'Bout Some Halloween Music?

It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World

Does anyone remember the point of marriage? Is there a point to marriage? I really can't remember anymore. I think it's "do what feels good".

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/family-and-relationships/love-objects/article1259075/

So we have a woman who married the Eiffel Tower, a woman who married an amusement park ride, a guy who's dating a sound board, and a woman in a relationship with an archery bow.

Nothing wrong with any of it right? I mean, if sexuality is about what makes us happy, we can't object to this anymore than we can object to someone attracted to a member of his sex (I find it interesting how many of the arguments in the article mirror those made by homosexuality advocates).

Perhaps the LGBT community should be called the LGBTNPBO community? Of course, many of them probably don't want to be grouped with those other weirdos, which leads to the hilarious claim of "my sexual perversion isn't as weird as your sexual perversion" which would also be a great bumper sticker.

So if, fifty years ago, I wanted to write a SF story about how bizarre the future was, and I wrote about how in fifty years people married inanimate objects, would it be dismissed as completely implausible? And if some people still somehow found it even remotely within the realm of consideration, how could I alienate even those readers with wild and far flung imaginations?

Ah, I know!

A Taiwanese woman marries herself!

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE69L3H720101022

(And spends $5675 on it, too!) Surely this is too far fetched for even the mind-bending and imaginative world of speculative fiction.

But what could possibly be wrong with this? What makes her marriage any less valid than yours?

I actually feel sorry for the woman. "Hell," Fr. McHugh would say, "is an eternity of saying 'me'."

(H/T Mike Flynn)

Pics on Teh Interwebz

So there are pics of my wife all over the interwebz.

http://www.1up.com/do/feature?pager.offset=10&cId=3182053

http://videogames.yahoo.com/events/blizzcon-photo-gallery/blizzcon-photo-gallery/1415399/12

http://us.blizzard.com/blizzcon/photogalleries/index.xml?1

So what do you think of her as a blonde?

The Six-Toed Wonder

I don't know if you knew your real mother. Yet, despite your young age, you went forth, venturing out into the world to make your presence known.

One of your first acts was to walk into a bustling office building on a busy work morning, stand in the middle of the marbled lobby, and meow at the top of your little lungs. It was easy to translate: "Hi everyone!"

Of course, everyone stopped in what they were doing and turned to find you, a tiny, barely a few weeks old, Bombay kitten standing in the middle of a sea of giants, simply looking for company; perhaps a mother to take care of you.

But, no one in that business building thought of that. Or perhaps they weren't truly listening. They simply called a rescue group to come pick you up and care for you until a proper home could be found.

Off you were whisked to a foster home, where you first met a Pastel Calico kitten about the same age as you. You became instant friends, and dare I say, sisters.

Little did I know, shortly after my husband and I made the decision to get a cat, that our paths would cross, and thusly join.

I did not know of your existence until I found your adorable picture online through a search of various cat rescue groups. I'd found several potential kittens that we could adopt, but your little eyes spoke volumes through the picture I saw. It was at that moment that I knew you were the one.

We went to visit you at the foster home, and found you tumbling and playing with your little sister. You came up to us as if you'd known us all along, and bounced and played in our laps, climbed our legs, arms, and shoulders, rough-and-tumbling about. We even discovered you had six toes on your front paws and five toes on your back paws. You were definitely special. And while we had come in with the thought of simply adopting you, we left that day deciding we would adopt both you and your sister.

A few weeks later, when your foster parents had deemed you old enough, we came to take you both to your permanent home. You and your sister frolicked in your knew abode, getting into trouble at every turn. But we didn't mind. You were our new babies.

You, we named Isis, and your sister we named Bastet.

You grew up into a beautiful and graceful cat, along with your sister. You played, you loved, you were at home. And you knew you had finally found a mother, and father, that would care for you. You, and your sister, had become our first babies.

It was very hard when you suddenly got sick. We gave you the best care we could, took you to the best doctors, and gave you the best medicines. And while the doctors said you would not live long, you still gave us an extra eight months to love and purr.

The heartache in losing you will dull over time, but it will never fully fade. That is how deep a mark you left in our lives.

Thank you for your constant company.

Thank you for being a part of the kitty-greeting-committee with loud meows when we'd come home.

Thank you for your loud purrs, and always "leaving the motor running".

Thank you for the licks, sometimes rough, sometimes tickling.

Thank you for forcing your way onto our laps and keeping them warm on cold, and hot, days.

Thank you for greeting our guests so politely.

Thank you for acting silly when we needed a good laugh.

Thank you for being underfoot and nearly tripping us.

Thank you for chewing through the small wires attached to our headphones and phone-chargers, and leaving little chew marks in the thicker ones.

Thank you for eating my husband's and son's shoe laces.

Thank you for rough-housing with us, when your sister didn't feel like rough-housing with you.

Thank you for being there when we needed comfort.

Thank you for sleeping nestled in between my husband's legs, making it impossible for him to turn over.

Thank you for curling up on our pillows and keeping our heads warm.

Thank you for keeping my feet warm at night while I slept.

Thank you for standing guard over my son's toys as you watched him play.

Thank you for being so patient with my son, and letting him "pet" you.

Thank you for loving us, no matter what.

You gave us so many years of happiness, and for that we will be eternally grateful. We will never forget you, and I promise we will look after your sister.

Rest with the Angels, my first baby. I love you. ♥

In Loving Memory of Isis

9/23/2005 - 10/13/2010

~The Resident Murloc

Sandbox

How to tell when you've written a flexible game:


Yo dawg, I heard you like computers, so I put a computer in your game so you can compute while you game.

When your game's physics engine supports building an ALU. This means that, theoretically, you could write the game within itself.

Learn more about the Minecraft phenomenon here:
Wikipedia.
Penny Arcade: Mine All Mine, Part 1 and Part 2.
Experienced Points: Mine All Minecraft.
Minecraft developer forming his own studio.
Minecraft allows you to set fire to your house.

Other things built in Minecraft:
A rollercoaster;
A giant waterslide;
Doom E1M1;
Notre Dame cathedral;
The Reichstag;
The Empire State Building;
A 1x1 scale model of the USS Enterprise (NCC-1701-D);
The Earth (not full scale, although theoretically the game's engine would allow it);

I haven't actually played the game yet. I'm kind of scared to try it.

The Toy Fairy Exploded in Our Living Room.

The Culprit

October 7th, 1571

White founts falling in the Courts of the sun,
And the Soldan of Byzantium is smiling as they run;
There is laughter like the fountains in that face of all men feared,
It stirs the forest darkness, the darkness of his beard;
It curls the blood-red crescent, the crescent of his lips;
For the inmost sea of all the earth is shaken with his ships.
They have dared the white republics up the capes of Italy,
They have dashed the Adriatic round the Lion of the Sea,
And the Pope has cast his arms abroad for agony and loss,
And called the kings of Christendom for swords about the Cross.
The cold queen of England is looking in the glass;
The shadow of the Valois is yawning at the Mass;
From evening isles fantastical rings faint the Spanish gun,
And the Lord upon the Golden Horn is laughing in the sun.

Dim drums throbbing, in the hills half heard,
Where only on a nameless throne a crownless prince has stirred,
Where, risen from a doubtful seat and half attainted stall,
The last knight of Europe takes weapons from the wall,
The last and lingering troubadour to whom the bird has sung,
That once went singing southward when all the world was young.
In that enormous silence, tiny and unafraid,
Comes up along a winding road the noise of the Crusade.
Strong gongs groaning as the guns boom far,
Don John of Austria is going to the war,
Stiff flags straining in the night-blasts cold
In the gloom black-purple, in the glint old-gold,
Torchlight crimson on the copper kettle-drums,
Then the tuckets, then the trumpets, then the cannon, and he comes.
Don John laughing in the brave beard curled,
Spurning of his stirrups like the thrones of all the world,
Holding his head up for a flag of all the free.
Love-light of Spain--hurrah!
Death-light of Africa!
Don John of Austria
Is riding to the sea.

Mahound is in his paradise above the evening star,
(Don John of Austria is going to the war.)
He moves a mighty turban on the timeless houri's knees,
His turban that is woven of the sunsets and the seas.
He shakes the peacock gardens as he rises from his ease,
And he strides among the tree-tops and is taller than the trees;
And his voice through all the garden is a thunder sent to bring
Black Azrael and Ariel and Ammon on the wing.
Giants and the Genii,
Multiplex of wing and eye,
Whose strong obedience broke the sky
When Solomon was king.

They rush in red and purple from the red clouds of the morn,
From the temples where the yellow gods shut up their eyes in scorn;
They rise in green robes roaring from the green hells of the sea
Where fallen skies and evil hues and eyeless creatures be,
On them the sea-valves cluster and the grey sea-forests curl,
Splashed with a splendid sickness, the sickness of the pearl;
They swell in sapphire smoke out of the blue cracks of the ground,--
They gather and they wonder and give worship to Mahound.
And he saith, "Break up the mountains where the hermit-folk can hide,
And sift the red and silver sands lest bone of saint abide,
And chase the Giaours flying night and day, not giving rest,
For that which was our trouble comes again out of the west.
We have set the seal of Solomon on all things under sun,
Of knowledge and of sorrow and endurance of things done.
But a noise is in the mountains, in the mountains, and I know
The voice that shook our palaces--four hundred years ago:
It is he that saith not 'Kismet'; it is he that knows not Fate;
It is Richard, it is Raymond, it is Godfrey at the gate!
It is he whose loss is laughter when he counts the wager worth,
Put down your feet upon him, that our peace be on the earth."
For he heard drums groaning and he heard guns jar,
(Don John of Austria is going to the war.)
Sudden and still--hurrah!
Bolt from Iberia!
Don John of Austria
Is gone by Alcalar.

St. Michaels on his Mountain in the sea-roads of the north
(Don John of Austria is girt and going forth.)
Where the grey seas glitter and the sharp tides shift
And the sea-folk labour and the red sails lift.
He shakes his lance of iron and he claps his wings of stone;
The noise is gone through Normandy; the noise is gone alone;
The North is full of tangled things and texts and aching eyes,
And dead is all the innocence of anger and surprise,
And Christian killeth Christian in a narrow dusty room,
And Christian dreadeth Christ that hath a newer face of doom,
And Christian hateth Mary that God kissed in Galilee,--
But Don John of Austria is riding to the sea.
Don John calling through the blast and the eclipse
Crying with the trumpet, with the trumpet of his lips,
Trumpet that sayeth ha!
Domino gloria!
Don John of Austria
Is shouting to the ships.

King Philip's in his closet with the Fleece about his neck
(Don John of Austria is armed upon the deck.)
The walls are hung with velvet that is black and soft as sin,
And little dwarfs creep out of it and little dwarfs creep in.
He holds a crystal phial that has colours like the moon,
He touches, and it tingles, and he trembles very soon,
And his face is as a fungus of a leprous white and grey
Like plants in the high houses that are shuttered from the day,
And death is in the phial and the end of noble work,
But Don John of Austria has fired upon the Turk.
Don John's hunting, and his hounds have bayed--
Booms away past Italy the rumour of his raid.
Gun upon gun, ha! ha!
Gun upon gun, hurrah!
Don John of Austria
Has loosed the cannonade.

The Pope was in his chapel before day or battle broke,
(Don John of Austria is hidden in the smoke.)
The hidden room in man's house where God sits all the year,
The secret window whence the world looks small and very dear.
He sees as in a mirror on the monstrous twilight sea
The crescent of his cruel ships whose name is mystery;
They fling great shadows foe-wards, making Cross and Castle dark,
They veil the plumèd lions on the galleys of St. Mark;
And above the ships are palaces of brown, black-bearded chiefs,
And below the ships are prisons, where with multitudinous griefs,
Christian captives sick and sunless, all a labouring race repines
Like a race in sunken cities, like a nation in the mines.
They are lost like slaves that sweat, and in the skies of morning hung
The stair-ways of the tallest gods when tyranny was young.
They are countless, voiceless, hopeless as those fallen or fleeing on
Before the high Kings' horses in the granite of Babylon.
And many a one grows witless in his quiet room in hell
Where a yellow face looks inward through the lattice of his cell,
And he finds his God forgotten, and he seeks no more a sign--
(But Don John of Austria has burst the battle-line!)
Don John pounding from the slaughter-painted poop,
Purpling all the ocean like a bloody pirate's sloop,
Scarlet running over on the silvers and the golds,
Breaking of the hatches up and bursting of the holds,
Thronging of the thousands up that labour under sea
White for bliss and blind for sun and stunned for liberty.

Vivat Hispania!
Domino Gloria!
Don John of Austria
Has set his people free!

Cervantes on his galley sets the sword back in the sheath
(Don John of Austria rides homeward with a wreath.)
And he sees across a weary land a straggling road in Spain,
Up which a lean and foolish knight for ever rides in vain,
And he smiles, but not as Sultans smile, and settles back the blade....
(But Don John of Austria rides home from the Crusade.)

-"Lepanto" by GK Chesterton


Our Lady of Victory, Ora Pro Nobis!
Pray the rosary for peace/an end to abortion/the conversion of Muslims/the survival of Christendom.

Stop the World, Please. I'd Like to Get Off.

For the benefit of impatient readers, who can't be bothered to read long screeds, I've asked Dr. Seuss to re-write my previous post as a poem.

Stop the world, I'd like to get off,
It's spinning so fast and I've had enough.
It's making me dizzy, I just can't keep up,
To this changing reality that makes me throw up.

An orange is an orange, a rose may be pink,
A dog is a dog, or so I would think.
But others tell me that I'm being mean,
To insist on reality instead of a dream.

They make up what's real when they don't like what's fact,
And pretend not to notice that their lives are an act.
"Don't be so close-minded, it's simply uncouth,
"Life's what you make of it, just like the truth."

"An orange is an apple, a dog is a cat,
"No rose can be pink." What's up with that?
I simply don't get it and I've had enough.
The word's simply crazy and I want to get off.

LinkDump

"A group proposes to build a religious establishment on their own property near a site associated with great pain and significance for some people. These people, rightly or wrongly, associate that religion with the many deaths that were caused and so raise a great ruckus in protest against the said establishment. For their part, the religious establishment pleas that they intend to pray for all who died there, including their own co-religionists. But this plea is dismissed," writes philosopher, statistician, physicist, historian, SF author extraordinaire, and all-around cool guy Mike Flynn.

"I pause while you assume the proper attitude," he continues.

"I write, of course, of the Polish sisters who wanted to establish a convent near Auschwitz, which created a great outcry that it was insensitive to Jewish concerns. The Pope intervened and told the sisters to place their convent elsewhere, since if they remained intransigent they would do more harm than good. That they had a right to do what they planned did not mean it was right to do it."

We haven't discussed the ground-zero mosque in this space, and I am curious what my readers think. Me, personally? I am in favor of it, so long as they build a chapel to Our Lady of Victory right next door.

Mike Flynn continues:

"A pastor of a sect of 50 people announces that he will burn copies of the Qur'an, sending the entire world into a tizzy. The POTUS intervenes personally to beg him not to do so as such a burning will deeply offend many people. (Unlike, say, the burning of a US flag.) Curiously, in a TV shot, all the copied stacked up appear to be in English and thus not legitimately Qur'ans. (The true Qur'an is written only in Arabic.)

"OTOH, Charles Merrill, cousin to Merrill Lynch co-founder, burned a Qur'an valued at $60,000 (in the apparently magick belief that it would 'eliminate homophobic hate.' This book was not only a genuine Qur'an (in Arabic) but was a rare manuscript given to his late wife, Evangeline Johnson Merrill of Johnson & Johnson, by the late king of Jordan during a UN mission in the 1950s. So not only was it a real Qur'an, but a precious antique, and a diplomatic gift by the King of Jordan, and he actually did burn it. Not a peep."

For those of you who didn't click through the link on my previous post, I will re-link the blog of Jennifer Fulwiler, a Catholic convert from atheism, whose blog I discovered by following a link from a link from a link from my Google reader (it sometimes gives me interesting things, though for some reason it's convinced I like Andrew Sullivan). She has an audio link to a talk she gave about her conversion which is really quite remarkable. I think my favorite part was when she finally saw the "fingerprints of God" on the Church. It really is amazing that She's still around, 2000 years later, i'n'it?

Anyways, her article on her pro-life conversion is, simply, a-mazing. I'm not a particularly eloquent or insightful person, and when a thought enters my head, I have a very hard time forming it into something meaningful and expressing it. For this reason, I rely on other people to express my thoughts in fully-formed ways. Usually, reading John C. Wright sufficiently tells me what I'm thinking, but Mrs. Fulwiler hit on something that had been smoldering in the back of my mind for a while but I had been unable to express, namely that abortion comes from society's understanding of sex. She even put a name to it: the "contraceptive mentality". I will plagiarize that term heavily from now on. (That is the idea I was working up to here and here, but was not completely able to develop.) It's for this reason that I'm becoming increasingly dubious that the abortion holocaust will be ended by laws or judges, but instead by conversion, one heart at a time. I feel more and more that the pre-born will only finally be treated as equal under the law once society, as a whole, no longer feels it needs abortion. Only then will it wither away.

I always find conversion stories to be fascinating. As a cradle Catholic, I always doubt whether I believe what I believe because it is truth, or merely because I was taught to believe it. Do I defend it because it is right or because it is reflex? That's why I always find it interesting when someone who started with opposite beliefs to my own, through a slow and gradual process of philosophical inquiry and open-minded questioning, climbs the mountain of Truth and finds the Church built atop it, where she has been waiting for 2000 years. There is something reassuring about knowing other people reasoned their way to the Truth I've known since childhood.

Lastly, this is simply a-mazing:

"If abortion is merely about women's rights, ladies and gentlemen, then what were mine?"

Delusions of Reality

Do you know what the definition of insanity is? No, it's not doing the same thing expecting different results. That's called practice. I do it every day with the piano and, sure enough, the results are slightly better each day.

No, insanity is when one's perception of reality is different from reality itself. For instance, a man who believes himself Theodore Roosevelt, or thinks himself a cat, or that he hears voices. In each case, the person's idea of what is real is different from what is really real. The man is not Theodore Roosevelt, or a cat, and the voices are mere hallucination.

Increasingly, I've been feeling that the whole world has gone, by this definition, completely insane. Totally loony. Off their rockers. Large swaths of the population seem to be totally given over to ideas that have no bearing in reality. It's like everyone is playing a children's game where we all pretend we're monkeys in the zoo, or astronauts in outer space, or cowboys and Indians. But when I don't play along, or return to reality and stop pretending, everyone gets mad and indignant with me because they really believe they are monkeys or astronauts or cowboys. It's really quite surreal.

What brought on this feeling most recently was an article my Google reader recommended items pointed me towards (it recommends weird things). Apparently a school in Michigan has refused to allow a girl to be homecoming king because she's a girl, not a boy. This is, apparently, a problem because the girl is playing a make-believe game in which she pretends she's a boy. But the weird part is that so many other people are playing along and pretending the same thing. The news item itself refers to her as a "him", despite the fact that it even mentions towards the end that she hasn't even had the cosmetic surgery to add boy-parts. So in no real, objective way is this girl a boy--only in her mind and the minds of those playing along with her. She has no Y-chromosome, or male genitalia, or a prostate, or any of the biological capabilities that set men and women apart, yet many people seem totally willing to give themselves into the fantasy that she is somehow a boy.

The thing is, I understand how we arrived at this point. This bit of insanity starts with a very simple and common desire--people want to have sex. Nothing in the world wrong with that, of course. "The union of man and woman in marriage is a way of imitating in the flesh the Creator's generosity and fecundity," sayeth the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC 2335) (emphasis original). The problem comes when people want sex without consequences. Since procreation is the natural end of sex--as ordained by God and, y'know, biology and natural selection--we have to step into our first little bit of insanity to get the footloose and fancy free sex we want: we must pretend that babies are not the natural end of sex, but an unintended side effect. This is, of course, a perception that is disconnected with reality--an insanity, if you will--but one that is pretty easy to make. After all, babies only occasionally occur from sex, and with contraception, they almost never occur (although I always feel obliged to mention my friend who has gotten pregnant three times while on The Pill). It becomes very easy to enter the contraceptive mentality, and convince ourselves that, as Jennifer Fulwiler says, "pregnancies that weren’t planned [are] akin to being struck by lightning while walking down the street — something totally unpredictable, undeserved, that happened to people living normal lives."

But this new pseudo-reality we've created for ourselves has consequences and implications of its own. If we pretend that sex is only for pleasure or bonding, and only mutual consent is required, then that means that any sexual act that fulfills that purpose of pleasure is not only licit, but equivalent to any other sex act with the same goal. The necessary outcome of this make-believe logic is that homosexual acts are equivalent to heterosexual acts. Suddenly, we've found ourselves with a new bit of insanity and we must now say that sex that has the potential to produce life is no different than sex that cannot by its very nature. We must pretend that homosexuals' unions are just like that of my wife and me, even though we made one of these and they can't. This is a much bigger disconnect from reality, but once we have accepted it, we are forced to pretend that, since homosexual sex and heterosexual sex are the same, therefore gay "marriage" must be permitted because not to do so would be discrimination.

And yet again, this new bit of greater insanity pushes us further along. For if gay "marriage" and real marriage are no different, then that means that men and women, when you get right down to it, are no different. And here we've finally arrived in Cloud Cuckoo Land. This is where we end up saying that we must pretend a girl is a boy simply because she says she is. We have separated our thoughts from reality. Real, objective things in the real, objective world no longer hold sway on our minds. We have gone bonkers.

(Another consequence of the make-believe world in which pregnancy is an accident is that it leads us to the perfectly reasonable and compassionate conclusion that it's cruel to require a woman to be pregnant against her will--since her little insanity made her incapable of knowing sex could get her pregnant--which leads to allowing her to "terminate the pregnancy", to use a euphemism for infanticide. But since no one is in favor of infanticide, we must, therefore, pretend that the infant is not one, or is not alive, or does not exist. This delusion leads us to completely absurd ways of rationalizing our make-believe world. Instead of using the English word for baby, we use the Latin one ("fetus"), and pretend that changes the nature of the baby. We invent arbitrary and make-believe criteria for humanity or personhood or "aliveness" and pretend that since the baby absorbs oxygen through an umbilical cord instead of his lungs, or since he cannot survive in an environment hostile to him, he somehow is not alive (how many dead people do you know with a heartbeat?). The more science piles on evidence of the humanity of the pre-born, the more we arbitrarily raise the bar and invent make-believe reasons that it is not.)

The thing is, at some point between "I want to have sex with that hot girl in the bar" and "a girl is a boy," I would think that people would realize the insanity of their train of thought, and the disconnect it has with reality. But yet people plow ahead, full throttle, never looking back, never stopping to consider where they're going. I find myself wondering, with a good deal of trepidation, what the next piece of absurdity will bring.

As J. Budziszewski points out, sin begets sin, but as Mark Shea points out, sin makes you stupid. We start with a simple sin and end with a simple madness.