The Ark and The Dove

Weird food

Doing some research for recipes to cook, I stumbled across this Chowhound post about weird recipes.  The comments section has some much better ones than the post itself.

For further intellectual (not sensual) food-related entertainment, here's satirical columnist James Lilek's web gallery of "Regrettable Recipes" from 1950s America.  Why would anyone want to put green olives in Dr. Pepper-based jell-o (or whatever that stuff is)? 

Last Supper seating arrangements

I have often heard Leonardo Da Vinci's famous painting criticized on the grounds that everyone is sitting all on one side of the table.  The typical assumption is that he did this so the picture would look better due to not having to portray anyone with his back towards the viewer.  It may be so that the picture is better that way, but the fallacy behind this assumption is the prior assumption that the Last Supper was conducted at a modern Western-style table.  Actually, if you are going to criticize it on historical grounds, a more accurate criticism should be that they are sitting in chairs when the Bible indicates that they reclined, i.e. were lying down.  Lying on one's side at the dinner table, though it may seem odd to us, is a typical ancient Greek/Middle Eastern custom.  It is still practiced, I understand, today in the Middle East - I went to a Turkish tea house once where guests had the option to sit at Western-style tables or to recline Eastern-style.

In ancient Greek culture, including the Hellenized culture of New Testament Israel, one ate dinner reclining on a "triklinion" (or triclinium, if you prefer Latin), a set of three low couches placed either around three sides of a low rectangular table or around one side of a broad horseshoe-shaped table - the setup was designed with the idea that that way servants would be best able to bring dishes and wait on people with a minimum of inconvenience to the guests.  St. John indicates that our Lord sat in the place of the host (ha! He's the host!), with the Twelve to His right and to His left.  So regardless of the precise shape of the table, Jesus and the Twelve were all basically facing the same direction.

St. Patrick

The Lorica (English here [slightly better English here]) is great, too.  If you haven't been praying to the Holy Trinity One God to be delivered from the black laws of heathenism, the false laws of heresy, the deceits of idolatry, etc., maybe you should start. 

Here's an Irish Beatha Phatraic (Anonymous) for you if you like - I can't read it but maybe you can.  So you know, he wrote his autobiographical Confessio in Latin.

Is this great or what?

Photos from La Grande Chartreuse

The social function of laughter

Researchers find that laughter often has a social function that can be relatively unrelated to actual humor.

One thing that is probably helpful to keep in mind, though, is that what is humorous is highly dependent on context - the attempt to find, beyond broad archetypes, something "objectively funny" is a wild goose chase.  Everyone knows that jokes from other cultures can be hard to understand, but even among people you know well, how many times have you found yourself trying to explain something funny after the fact and giving up and saying "You just had to be there"?

How do you say "Surf's up" in Portugese (or Tupi)?

Did you know you can surf the Amazon?  I didn't until just a minute ago.

Happy Saint Patrick's Day

For your devotional reading pleasure, once again the Confessio Sancti Patricii.  Or in English.

The Grail

I just watched Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade with the guys.  This was actually the first time I saw the whole thing.

Some things I was thinking about it:

One, anyone who knows about how the Grail works knows you don't find it just by looking for it.

Marcus Grody - he gets bonus points because he might be the only one in the whole movie actually to pray explicitly.

Getting to drink from the Holy Grail.  That'd be pretty great.  But what makes the Grail the Grail?  The Precious Blood, obviously.  We get the Precious Blood at every Mass.  And from it, eternal life - not just diuturnal worldly life like the characters in the movie were hoping for.

Kudos to Garrison Keillor

For his new feature "The Writer's Almanac."  TWA has become the highlight of my early morning.  A daily few-minute segment on the radio, Keillor shares facts about authors, poets, or other thinkers born on that day, then reads a poem by a recent poet to finish it off.  Neat facts, presented in his reserved, soothing style, both comforting and feeding my brain on the morning drive.  "Be well; do good work; stay in touch [cue music]."

May 15

That's when this book of Pope Benedict's on our Lord becomes available.