Mysterious Things

So, long ago, Father Alfonso Durán came to... the place where I was then living (no mysteries there; it really is just so many years ago that I cannot for the life of me recall exactly when this happened, or where-- prior to 1978 at any rate...) to meet me as I was attempting to discern vocation; he impressed me as a very pious cleric indeed.  I hope that, for the good of the members of the institute and for the Church, the problems can be dealt with justly and, now that Rome is involved directly, expeditiously.

Due to this unfortunate recreational vehicle fire was stretched south for miles and miles (that is, perhaps, an exaggeration) yesterday, but the Interstate was, happily enough, returned to its normal conditions by the time I was driving north.  I have just realised-- a very good example of what reading with a definite preconception will do to one's comprehension skills--  that this cannot have been the burning RV I saw, driving south to Dorena, yesterday, unless some people in the newspaper business have gotten their stories mixed up. As it stands, there were two burning RVs at different locations on I-5 yesterday during the three o'clock hour, one north of Eugene (toward Albany) and one south of Eugene (toward Dorena). 

In the newspaper article certainly confirm my distaste for 'human rights' bureaucracies in local government. One understands that passions aroused tend to affect perception, but how likely is it that Mr Raised By a Militant (yes, that is my gloss) Feminist is willing to publicly allow himself to cry 'racist' without some form of provocation? on the other hand, of course, it is just true that some fellows 'play well with other children' and some don't.

But I find it rather amusing that in the one section the banker's prose declares that "LGT has 1,900 employees in 29 locations" worldwide, and in the other section (on the same page) it is affirmed that LGT has "1,700 employees producing excellent work across the globe every day".  We are to congratulate the managers for continuing, in their charity, to employ 200 underperforming analysts and clerks?  I expect that someone (ahem) has not been excellently keeping each of the language versions of the site pages up to date, although it may all be Opus Dei and the Stuarts and the IOR and the Knights Templar lurking undetected amidst the remnants of the Teutonic Knights et cetera.

Beautiful Troutdale, OregonOf one of the casino gambling ones, at least if the Register-Guard has gotten all of it right.  I intend to vote against the entire lot of them.  The current regime that requires (at most) a drive to Portland or Salem or Bend to purchase so-called 'medical marijuana' is "too limiting for patients": two words of venerable Anglo-Saxon etymology, two words. As the reporter admits, it is legal to effing buy it on the street in effing Troutdale, if you have a 'medical marijuana' license. People have tried to sell me weed on the street. Two words.

And freely available, albeit in pdf format.  Charles du Fresne du Cange's Glossarium Mediae et Infimae Latinitatis is one of those resources I'd give... well, at least a little finger and perhaps a tooth or two to own: it simply never occurred to me that it might be online, ha. Am delighted, delighted... although am aware that I can easily find sufficient reason to waste time wandering through the centuries; stopped subscribing to the Oxford English Dictionary online for that very reason: but this is free; ha, there is a non sequitur for the ages.  The first word, following the phrases beginning with 'a':

AAGIATUS, egressus annos alienae tutelae, Gall. Majeur, en age. Franciae Reges regno maturi sunt anno aetatis l4. ex Edicto anni 1375. Oeteri ex jure civili Majores declarantur anno setatis  25°. Normanni 20°. Chronicon MS. Regum Francorum ex Musaeo D. de Cangey, ad Carolum V: Dominus dux Andegavensis frater suus antiquior incepit regnum regere, quod rexit usque ad secundam Octooris postquam Carolus fiilius dicti Regis fuit Aagiatus; id est Major renunciatus,
Gall, declaré Majeur....

(The word, aagiatus, means a man who has reached the legal age of maturity, his years of majority.) The text is driving the spell-checker out of its digital mind, ha. It will prove fairly clumsy to actually use, alas.

Jason the Commenter (not a particular friend of Holy Religion, alas) is posting on them seriatim and these have been happily diverting.

The workplace is likely to overflow its banks and inundate the freshly germinated little seedlings which might otherwise, left in bright sun and only moderately watered, grow up into posts here.  Ordinarily, I work with N. three days a week (the non-profit agency supports people with intellectual and other disabilities); four this week, however, which perhaps might not seem to be such a major alteration but the reality is that Monday, Wednesday and Friday is the routine, it allows both himself and myself the intervening Tuesdays and Thursdays to recuperate from each other, et cetera.  And, apart from that, there is a certain very dissonant crescendo of paperwork that is occurring. Perhaps I just haven't seen anything worth running my fingertips off about, pft. 

Reminded me of the fact. Half naked and, well, it is hot today and I was not myself particularly redolent of flowers fresh in the morning's first sun... in those circumstances it takes quite a lot to distract me from my own state injurious to the public weal; I was very distracted.  I went out there-- it is an annual motley collection of exhibits, crafts sellers, entertainments, advocacy booths, and assorted vendors of all sorts on a couple hundred acres of pleasant enough land 12 or 13 miles west of Eugene-- once for a couple of hours, the first or second summer I lived here. For many of the faithful, it involves camping out near the site. (My understanding is that it is necessary to smoke, ahem, whilst one camps out, and also at every available windless spot whilst fairgoing; I don't think the latter can be quite true.  Certainly, the entire place reeks of patchouli. [That is an exaggeration, of sorts, at least if one reads the sentence literally.])  It was too crowded for me, and no Mozart, Chopin or Messiaen was on offer anywhere, and if I am aware that out pagans and witches and such people exist, to be quite truthful I don't care to go out of my way to encounter them, and regular visits to Saturday Market downtown have inured me to the delights of hand-woven sweaters, hand-crafted soaps, hand-carved puppet heads and hand-thrown pots. On the other hand, the Lefebvrists have a chapel in the nearest town, Veneta; I don't imagine many fairgoers present themselves at the communion rail on the Sunday morning but one never knows.

Is, after I've said a prayer or two in thanksgiving for not having slaughtered anyone at the workplace, to skim the headlines at six or seven news sites, one of which remains the New York Times. It is significant of something that the most important business on there five minutes ago was the fact that Spain has advanced to the World Cup finals.  Will pretend that Charles V is still reigning and be happy with whichever side wins Sunday....

Des canyons aux étoiles will be performed to honor the day? A bit of background:

... Having receiving a commission from Alice Tully to compose a work in honor of the American Bicentennial, Messiaen found himself browsing for inspiration in a book entitled Wonders of the World. He was so engaged by an entry on the national parks of Utah that he decided to visit them himself. Consequently, the names of three of the 12 movements of Des canyons aux étoiles (From the canyons to the stars) take their names from geographical wonders of the Utah desert. The fifth movement, "Cedar Breaks et le don de crainte" (Cedar Breaks and the Gift of Awe), depicts the composer's own reaction to the jagged cliffs and delicate fissures of the red rock canyon, a reaction heavily informed by his devout Catholic faith: "These features imbued in me a sense very close to Awe...the reverence of the sacred, of the Divine presence." The final movement, "Zion Park et le cité céleste" (Zion Park and the Celestial City), renders the multicolored vista of this hidden geological wonder as a metaphor for the scriptural Zion, the Celestial Jerusalem. The most evocative movement, however, is the seventh: "Bryce Canyon et les rochers rouge-orange" (Bryce Canyon and the Red-Orange Rocks). Messiaen recalls his impressions with fantastical language: "Fantastic, red-orange, purple rock formations shaped like castles, square towers, bulging towers, natural windows, bridges, statues, columns, entire cities..."

In these movements, as well as the rest of the piece, other sources of both pictorial and aural inspiration are the calls of birds—many of them from the western continental U.S., others from as far away as Africa and Hawaii; some of them lending their name to the titles of movements. An expert ornithologist, Messiaen combined strikingly accurate birdsong transcriptions with large blocks of highly systematized and stylized musical materials, lending Des canyons an appropriately geological sense of construction (and pointing up Pierre Boulez's complaint that his former teacher didn't compose, but rather juxtaposed)....

@MessiaenProject g a.

Yes, yes, party politics aren't quite the ideal but the Founders knew, or the most perceptive did, that their rise was almost inevitable. When someone brings to my attention a video of a group of the Democrats or of the Greens or of the Constitutionalists reading from the Declaration, I'll happily post it or them.

Greater pleasure in ages.

Quare ut a cavo cavea et caullae et convallis, cavata vallis, et cavernae a cavatione ut cavum, sic ortum, unde omnia apud Hesiodum, a chao cavo caelum.

The Loeb editor and translator, Roland G. Kent, remarked, "This text is a desperate attempt to bring sense into the passage"-- lots of the letters in the Latin are supposition and conjecture.  The translating, given the corrected text, is doable enough, at least with the Varronian-Kentian sense already known, although for me time-consuming.  Professor Kent:

Wherefore as from cavum 'hollow' come cavea 'cavity' and caullae 'hole or passage', and convallis 'enclosed valley' as being a cavata vallis 'hollowed valley', and cavernae 'caverns' from the cavatio 'hollowing', as a cavum 'hollow thing', so developed caelum 'sky' from cavum, which itself was from chaos, from which, in Hesiod, come all things.

But it is the euphony of the sentence that makes me happy. Old Varro's etymologising is by modern standards pretty hit or miss-- Professor Kent only notes when he happens to get a derivation right, ha, rather than belabor all the incorrect ones.  

For the Saturday night's recreation. Hadn't remembered this at all, but do now, a bit, in the middle of the third episode; principally, the major plot premise i.e. that Smith and Jones have "to stay out of trouble" for a year--funny what odd bits and pieces stick in the memory.

Five or six miles, as the crow flies, from here.  I think I wouldn't have gone back to bed, tsk.

Because I had to spend an intolerably inordinate number of minutes to try to figure out why his departure from the Post was such a major! news! story! and wasn't at all amused when I did, more or less (so many journalists/quasi-journalists in the DC metro area, so few jobs, professional jealousy perhaps). Note to DC based people: there is an awful lot you all write about that we out here in the real world don't really care about.

Although I'm pretty sure something like this is going to happen eventually: we in the US may avoid a national identity card but 'they'll' find some other way to keep better track of us, tsk.

That is an excellent brief introduction (erster Blick would work but I will hold off on using that until my German vocabulary is increased beyond twenty words, and in any event I'd swear I've seen it written as one word so...) to the saint and his theological work. Embedding the video seems to result in the video automatically going off as soon as the page is loaded, so the link is substituted.

So half of my interest in the World Cup has now been suppressed by the Slovaks; I shall reassess when the XVI is finalised.