Redeem the Time

Go read this blog now.

And listen to the Pope’s Latinist, here (scroll down here for a recent recording). The recordings sound as if Triumph the comic dog entered a Monty Python skit, if Triumph lived a saint-like existence and was a brilliant expositor of Latin, and if Monty Python skits were performed on Vatican Radio. Go listen; I promise Father Reginald Foster will amuse and enlighten!

Read more about the Pope’s Latinist here. The existence of such men gladdens the heart and brightens the soul.

Preparation for actress Nicole Kidman and country singer Keith Urban’s anticipated June 25 wedding has helped guide her back to the Catholic Church, said a priest who knows her.
***
In recent months, it has been reported that she has studied theology at Pepperdine University in Malibu, Calif., as “a return to her Catholic roots.”

“Catholicism guides me. I certainly have a strong belief. I try to go to church regularly, and I try to go to confession,” she told the Philippine Daily Enquirer.

Read the whole article.

See more by googling the priest’s name. At first, I thought for sure this was just some wacky Jesuit doing tricks for rich people, but apparently she did have her previous marriage to the Tomcult taken care of (see especially this article). I would venture to guess that there are lots of “Catholic” politicians who are on their second, third, or fourth wife who haven’t taken the pains she has to obey the church.

I suppose that even if you had to get an annulment, you might have a good shot if your partner was…well, him. Thankfully, the Church doesn’t recognize “weddings” performed by “churches” with the (atrocious) word “scientology” in their title. I mean, just think about the absurdity of that redundant word being used as a name for the particular form of crockery it represents.

I found this article to be fascinating on many levels. I’ll just let it speak for itself:

It’s not easy to determine where and how Cookie Monster singing actually began. Early death-metal bands such as Death and Morbid Angel that emerged from Florida in the mid-’80s helped create the musical template that characterized the blasting sound as well as that of its Satan- and occult-obsessed sibling, black metal: fast, relentless drumming often featuring two bass drums; grinding, rapid-fire chording on guitars; squealing guitar solos; muted electric bass; unexpected sudden tempo changes; and a sense of theatricality that’s inevitably threatening–”a horror film put to music” is how Monte Conner, a vice president at Roadrunner Records, sees it.

But while the vocals in early death metal are low, raspy and aggressive, not unlike the vocals by, say, Lemmy Kilmister of Motörhead, that extreme degree of Cookieness is missing.

To be a true Cookie Monster vocal, said Mr. Conner, who signed some of the subgenre’s biggest bands, including Sepultura and Fear Factory, “it’s got to be really, really guttural. It should sound like they’re gargling glass.”

UPDATE I
Speaking of satanic music, my old post on Depeche Mode and John the Revelator has some comments worth reading.

UPDATE II
I wanted to quote the “gargling glass” bit above because it is very similar to a point the shulamite made in an old post quoting Dante on “the song of the sullen” in hell:

“This canticle they gargle in their throats,

as if they sang, unable to speak whole words”

He’s right—we should all get each other this t-shirt for Christmas.

By the by, comments are off all over the liverevolt domain because of technical difficulties. I’d leave ‘em on if I could, but there is a greater chance that Santa will magically turn them on again for Christmas than there is of me ever figuring out how to solve the problem.

Totally unrelated, but I love the absolutely beautiful picture and the hilarious title of this post. If you don’t know what he is talking about, go here.

So I guess everyone else already knew about this word, but I missed the memo years too late. Now I look, like, so immature for even talking about it:

Crapulous
(KRAP yuh luhs)
adj. gluttonous or immoderate in drinking; suffering from the effects of overindulgence

After the all-night party to celebrate his graduation, he succumbed to a crapulous slumber.

Indeed.

Ah, its about time disseminated renal cell carcinoma and Bob Dylan were mentioned in the same post.

I have a strange fascination with the maladies of human beings—they tell us things about ourselves, bringing good forth from evil as they reveal the mystery of our eternal souls.

One of my personal favorites is the oft-told human interest story about the local animal hoarder—you know, the weird old lady with 200 cats in her smelly, soon-to-be-condemned house. This happens fairly often across the country, and I have always wondered what sort of disfunction causes this tiny but amazingly similar percentage of the population to let themselves, their families, and their ever-increasing number of pets live in filth and squalor.

Thankfully, the Center For Animals and Public Policy of the Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine at Tufts University has been studying this bizarre behavior at the HARC, the Hoarding of Animals Research Consortium. It’s truly a goldmine of information. Googling “animal hoarding” and other similar words and phrases will also get you well on your way towards satisfying all your animal hoarding research needs.