The Ark and The Dove

Pro Bono Screenwriting

I read somewhere that one of the producers for the Transformers movies is already talking about a second trilogy to the nightmarish series.

I hereby offer my services, free of charge, to compose and/or doctor any scripts for future Transformers movies.

Heck, I'd even pay Paramount to let me write the script. Can't beat that deal, Mr. Spielberg.

Some Things I've Learned So Far This Summer

Mum-ra is like the Emperor, if the Emperor were his own Darth Vader.

Inside Isabel lives a berserker warrior.

Latin is haaarrrd.

Lego berets are easily mistaken for soccer trophies in blind-packages.

He-man always gives it to us straight-up.

Allergic reactions to deodorant bear an uncanny resemblence to sunburns, even though they are not. (Recovery from this discovery also explains why I've smelled more like a spring blossom breeze than an arctic adventurer for the last three days.)

For the total retail value of the toys on my desk alone, I could have purchased an XBOX360, PS3, and a Wii.

Dependence Day

Isabel and I missed Independence Day this year.

This is because our township decided to celebrate it on July 2nd, and we somehow didn't get the message.

We had just pulled around 9 PM from visiting one of her friends, stopped to get ice cream, walked in the door at 9:30 and settled in our office for some Co-op gaming...and then realized that the explosions weren't in the game. Yep, the fireworks were well underway by the time we realized what happened.

Thus, for July 4th proper...we were left with...well...more Co-op gaming.

At least we had burgers, corn, and watermelon for dinner...just to be festive.

This is my fourth year up here, and I have yet to have anyone I know from the area invite me to a BBQ. But at least I have Isabel.

As we were picking our watermelon from the grocery store, an elderly man interjected: "These whole watermelons are the same price as the half watermelon...but I could never eat one of these whole watermelons...alone...by myself...because I'm a lonely old man whom no one has invited to a BBQ...so I guess I'll just buy this half watermelon...and eat it...alone...by myself...and wait for death."

Okay, he didn't say all that. That's just what it evoked to me. After all, he was talking to two complete strangers at the watermelon station, which gave me the impression that he had no one else to talk to.

Is it me, or is this blog getting the blues lately?

Wasting Time...

I'm very fortunate to have (while it is mine to have) a job with very flexible hours. Especially the flexibility of a summer.

It's a pretty common misconception that teachers have off in the summer.

We don't.

We just often lack the internal discipline not to goof off when we are given three solid months to work where we want and during times we want.

This summer, for instance, I am tasked with:

1. Designing a new course for the Fall (selecting readings, developing lesson plans, and constructing papers, among other tasks)

2. Writing a book proposal

3. Revising at least one article to submit for publication

4. Researching and then writing ten additional pages to suplement another article to submit for publication

5. Writing a book review

6. Writing a ten page essay for a non-scholarly collection

7. Revising my job materials in anticipation of the new market

If I spent two weeks on each of those tasks, that would have been a little over two thirds of my summer.

Unfortunately, I can't say that I've had the discipline to work on any of these tasks for a straight two weeks. Now, summer is about half over and panic is setting in. Sure, I've worked on each of these, but I haven't completed any of them.

It's not only a matter of discipline, though. There's also mental exhaustion to keep into account (especially after the failed job search last year). And, of course, there is the lack of a support network. It's a blessing that Isabel and I can swap papers, discuss each other's work, and plan pedagogy together...but we're both pretty much at the same level now.

Thus, there are a few days when I log more time killing alien robots on the Internet than writing, and a few more hours loitering about the mall than reading.

I'm pretty sure that the will be a special presentation in purgatory for slothfulness. I imagine I'll be forced to listen to all of the ways I could have advanced the Kingdom of God if I had made other choices than hanging out with Super Mario.

Was the Same-Sex Marriage Debate Already Lost?

Isabel and I were musing on New York's recent legislation recognizing same-sex legal marriage...on our way to look for rare action figures at Ross: Dress for Less (I will find you Reveal the Shield Wreck-gar...it's only a matter of time).

It seems to us that the problem is really that the definition of marriage has already changed in the hearts and minds of most Americans, so it was pretty much inevitable that New York would vote this way.

I'm not saying that gay marriage itself is an inevitable result of civilized society; merely that a civilized society that regards marriage as we currently do has logically cornered itself into gay marriage.

As far as I can tell, our society currently defines marriage as sharing certain designated stuff with a person that you happen to love at a particular moment. Cynicism much?

But who could possibly argue against allowing gays such a marriage?

This, of course, is not how the Church defines marriage, or even how most societies considered marriage only a few decades ago.

Seems to me that even outside Church sexual theology, marriage served two essential purposes: to protect property rights and maintain a stable population.

In a society based on a bona fide class system of aristocrats and commoners, these two purposes were intrinsically combined. You protected property by keeping it in the family. You kept it in the family by 1) making sure you had babies, and 2) making sure those babies were yours.

There were fringe benefits to marriage -- protection for female spouses after child-rearing ages, for instance--but it seems to me that this is less immediate of a concern.

Without such a class system (and I am NOT advocating a return to class systems), there is far less concern over protecting family property or even the name.

Despite the prevalence of genealogy websites, few people I know are really all that concerned with the legacies they have inherited or even feel particularly connected to their ancestors. They might take a certain pride in their ethnicity, but that's just a nod to the Old Country. When non-Hispanic married couples today don't merely take the man's name it's because the man doesn't really care all that much to preserve his patriarchal heritage, and the women is just asserting her equality (she doesn't really want to preserve her patriarchal heritage either...after all, that would be patriarchal).

Does this breed a similar lack of concern for future generations? Does a lack of feeling connected to the past (even if only through heirlooms or family names) breed a sort of contempt for the future?

Nobody is really worried about who will inherit their LCD screen TV, or PS3...because most of our stuff today is temporary, disposable. It's about taking pleasure in the now. We aren't even worried whether our children will inherit our names.

Children not only won't appreciate what we have or who we were...they are also immediate threats to our current material wealth and pleasure.

One assumes governments once protected and promoted marriage as a means of stability--because common sense dictated that sticking a boy and a girl in a house together would eventually and usually produce more boys and girls. It didn't even matter if they really loved each other; nature would take its course. Heck, even if the individuals didn't care a bit for inheritance, passing on legacies, stable societies--even if married individuals didn't want babies--nature had its charms to get what nature wanted...

For all of the talk that our society does regarding "the chiiiiiildren," the fact is that marriage has been reduced to our stuff, for us, right at the moment.

Long story short, this brings us to the now banal argument that when we divorced the likelihood of making babies from marriage, then government had little reason to protect marriage.

The only reason a secular society has to protect marriage between a man and women, or to give it a special privilege, is because that society seeks to replicate itself and its values in the next generation. We want Americans to have babies so we can teach them to be Americans and keep this American experiment going.

Property rights, inheritance laws, tax breaks to married couples are all designed for one reason really -- to make it easier for married couples to follow the course of nature and churn out future citizens.

This, of course, sounds downright sinister to anyone trained in a Marxist background (read the entire population of educated America)...so now we are left with a morbid, empty shell of what marriage used to be and how it used to function.

This is not--and cannot-- be the purpose of "marriage" between two men. They will never, ever, no matter how hard they try, produce a new citizen between the two of them. But, then again, so many heterosexual Americans would rather not produce new citizens. If it's no longer common sense that trapping a boy and a girl in a room will make more boys and girls, then what difference does it make to our government whether it traps a boy and a girl or two boys or two girls?

This is the cold, secular, logical approach. I suspect that the passage of same-sex legislation owes just as much if not more to social bullyism...but that's another post.

It's Curtains for Shakespeare

After almost 34 years, I've finally read the entire extant corpus of Shakespearean drama (plus the Sonnets, Rape of Lucrece, Venus & Adonis, and the Turtle and the Phoenix).

One would think I needed to have read all of Shakespeare to qualify for a PhD in Renaissance literature, but this was evidently not the case.

In case you were curious, the last holdouts from the bard were: Henry VIII or All is True, King John, The Merry Wives of Windsor, the first two Henry VI plays. Knocked them all out this summer.

Of course, it's not like I wasn't already mostly aware of the plays at this point or what they contained. Perhaps the biggest surprise was getting through 1 Henry VI and actually seeing just how negative Shakespeare's portrayal of Joan of Arc was. She was a bad, bad lady in Shakespeare's rendition.

What I learned the most, however, was how my own tastes have changed.

I tried to take out Merry Wives several years ago...got about three scenes into it...and dropped it from sheer boredom. This time, I was hooked most of the way through. Likewise, the histories have always been something of a bane to me...hence why they were the remaining obstacles. In my old age, however, I got into the almost melodramatic, soap opera quality of the early histories. Each part of the first tetrology has the equivalent plot development of an entire season of an HBO series.

So now I'm moving on to Shakespeare apocrypha. The Arden book series has just published Cardenio, which claims to be based on a no longer extant manuscript of a lost play; Isabel and I plan on working our way through it soon. And I gobbled up Mucedorus and The Birth of Merlin. Both are exceedingly dreadful. I had thought maybe I would teach a course just on the plays that have been erroneously attributed to Shakespeare, but those two have convinced me that it would only work as an advanced graduate seminar.

Rep. Weiner = Sen. Palpatine?

Don't worry, I won't post any pictures for this entry.

I've been sucked into the vortex of these carnivalesque Weiner interviews. As Isabel pointed out, he's become a bit like a Capitol Hill Charlie Sheen--giving almost daily glimpses into a grotesque media.

But Isabel's comment struck a chord with a conspiracy theory I've been developing. Who knows how much of Charlie Sheen's madness has been the result of bipolar disorder, drugs, a combination of both or...possibly...a constructed self. Has Charlie Sheen really been having a breakdown, or has he just been acting as if he's having a breakdown as a publicity stunt.

So here's the conspiracy theory...

What if Weiner has been baiting the media for the last few days? What if he personally did not send the lewd photo to the college girl, but has been devilishly giving evasive answers to the media because he knows it means they will come back. If, at the end of this all, Weiner's innocence is vindicated, then he will have gained sympathy from constituents, massive national recognition, and a heapload of anecdotes to advance legislation to regulate the internet, media, and citizen journalism. People will forget that he was baiting the media and start blaming the conservative blogs who flagged the image in the firt place.

Weiner could have even had one of his own staffers post the image, thus allowing him to reasonably deny he sent it...and yet still claim that the whole thing was "a prank" that made him the butt of the joke. By refusing to deny the image is of him, he's keeping the media curious...his office has literally called the cops on journalists desparate for interviews at this point.

Is the media getting totally played by this guy?

It's pretty far fetched and about as complicated as the plot of the Star Wars prequels. It would require that his staff concocted the most perfect scheme to play on every possible media hot button -- sex scandal, infidelity, possible pedophilia, internet security, celebrity meltdowns -- to put this guy in the limelight. It's a gamble, but 1) Democrats have had no problem voting for perverts, so there is little harm there, and 2) he still retains plausible deniability because no one has actually proven he did it. In fact, he's in a kind of logical sweet spot since it is far easier to prove that he was hacked or that the picture is of someone else than to prove that he wasn't hacked or that the picture is of him. He can come out of this with a somewhat suspicious reputation, but not a demolished one. And what politician doesn't have a suspicious reputation?

I'm not saying I believe my own conspiracy theory that a Congressman would stage his own sex scandal...but I'm not sure how you prove that he didn't. (insert emoticon of your choice here to denote sarcasm)

 

UPDATE: So sometimes life really is as simple as it looks after all. Rep. Weiner isn't Palpatine; he turns out to have been Sen. Binks...

Washington Times Video Features Catholic Terp Dominicans!

Is Stephen Hawking Right?

If you believe that popular depictions of Heaven reflect actual beliefs of Heaven, then Stephen Hawking might have point.

If you ask the average person what Heaven is, will they describe a metaphysical, spiritual state of union with an all-powerful Deity, or will they describe the setting for an ice cream commercial or a backdrop to a Bugs Bunny cartoon?

Because of its transcendent nature, artists must depict Heaven in allegorical, analogous, or fanciful imagery. Pop culture Heaven generally consists of people walking on clouds, a throwback to an earlier literary tradition of Heaven literally being in the sky. But if we start taking that imagery literally ourselves, then maybe we do risk buying into a fairy tale.

Our imagery of Heaven is supposed to represent an ethereal, lofty state of being. Clouds can signify majesty, beauty, and even a numinous fear. They look cool in certain lights. And, frankly, they are probably the most effective expression of bigness and enormity we can imagine. Sure, the sun and moon are big...but we can't really grasp just how big they are by looking at them...especially since they are so easily obscured by that massive thunderhead that rolled in and swallowed up the sky.

So it's not hard to imagine why early poets chose the heavens to represent something as enormously huge as God's glory.

It's also hard for us to imagine precisely what we'll be doing in Heaven. We know it will be glorifying God, so we come up with images of praise--like singing in choir robes. We have to imagine something, after all.

But, again, if we get wrapped up in our pet theories, or buy too much into the external signifiers and forget the spiritual concepts they are supposed to signify, then, maybe we have gone too far astray into our own myths and forgotten the Truth.

And maybe we, like Stephen Hawking, get so distracted by the clouds that we aren't seeing the exponentially larger Sun that exists behind them.

Oh, Lady Gaga...

If you were "born this way," then you must have been this way at some point before birth. Very few of us have our character traits through the process of birth itself (or so I assume--infant psychologists should be free to leave comments regarding which of Laday Gaga's ways were generated by her actual birth).

Were you "conceived this way" or did you develop this way while still developing in the womb?

So at what point did Embryo Gaga become the way she was?