New Portrait

A Blogger profile picture can only be 50 kb in size and must be posted on the web. Since the picture I wanted was too large I had to resize it myself and then post it, a-like so.

What Is Your Battle Cry?

Time to give a shout out to one of my favorite websites: What Is Your Battle Cry?.

You're going to have to play around with the variations of your name a little bit to get a truly epic response, e.g. "Duke of the North Ridings" wasn't quite up to snuff, but I cannot see how "Ridings" can fail to impress:

Zang! Who is that, prowling on the tarmac! It is Ridings,
hands clutching a jeweled meat hammer! And with a mighty
roar, his voice cometh:

"By Odin's mighty spear, I hereby void your
warranty, and send you back to God!"

Best. Headline. Ever.

It really is too good to be true, isn't it?

Flying Cow Leaves Two Police Cars in Flames
LAST UPDATE: 3/17/2006 5:06:56 PM
Posted By: Mandi Bishop
This story is available on your cell phone at mobile.woai.com.

Talk about a wild night near Seguin. A cow came flying out of its trailer, sent DPS and police scrambling, and left two police cars going up in flames.

"It was almost hard to believe," said Detective Sergeant Maureen Watson. She has been in law enforcement for 15 years, and says she "never had a day like this. I mean the best way to characterize this it, is it's bizarre. It's really really strange."

It's strange because it started out with a truck towing cattle, and ended in fire.

Watson told News 4 WOAI, "We believe the gate of the cattle trailer came open, and the cow, for lack of a better phrase spilled out onto the Interstate. It was pretty
chaotic for a while."

Several cars hit some of the cows. One cow died. DPS troopers called for backup.

That's when one officer was nearly run down by a speeding truck, carrying two illegal immigrants inside.

Seguin Police were out looking for those illegal immigrants. They parked their cars in the hot grass, burning two of them including that brand new 2006 Crown Victoria.
Watson said, "Well, all of a sudden, another officer who'd arrived on the scene,
alerted the sergeant that there was a fire."

Everything inside was destroyed, including tens of thousands of dollars worth of equipment designed for the patrol cars.

"You start off with kind of a bizarre accident with these cows spilling onto the interstate. That leads to other accidents, that leads to a car chase, that leads to a foot chase," Watson recalls.

The two mexican immigrants, ages 21 and 23, are in custody for illegally entering
the country and evading arrest. Watson says they have replacement cars for now,
but hope the city council will vote to get new cars soon.

Movie Review: Elizabethtown

Worst movie ever. Well, maybe not, but still abysmally bad. I can only liken it to a really bad, hour-longer version of the truly excellent Garden State.

Book Review: The Cube and the Cathedral

The Cube and the Cathedral, written by George Weigl, is an extended essay rather than a book dealing with the current troubles of Europe. The Cathedral from the title is Notre Dame, while the Cube is the modernist monument the La Grande Arche de la Defense, in which Notre Dame could physically fit. The analogy is simple enough.

Weigl spends a great deal of time on the squabbles over the prologue of the European Constitution, which constitution has since been voted down. What he objects to is not a lack of invocation of God but rather a lack of any acknowledgement of Christianity's contribution to European civilization, since the accomplishments of the Ancient World and the Enlightenment are specifically cited. Weigl's most effective chapter is a simple list of names including everyone from Gustavus Adolphus to Ambrose of Milan. All those listed were practicing Christians. Europe as we know it would not exist without them.

The cure that Weigl sees for Europe's problem (suicidal birthrates and an inability to defend itself) is a return to Christianity. I don't really see any problem with his thinking. He lists some possible alternatives if Europe continues on its current course (the EU succeeding in its current secularist project, a fundamentalist Muslim takeover via birthrates, or a patchwork Europe of secularist, Christian and Muslim civilization). He thinks the third option most likely. I also agree with that estimate but would posit a fourth that he missed. That alternative would be a Europe united under a transcendent ideal that is not Christian. Needless to say, this ideal would probably be promulgated by a Le Penn type figure and would not do well by anyone on the continent, unless you are into that fascist kind of thing.

What I think Weigl's (sound) argument comes down to is that a civilization needs a goal to strive for if it is to continue. Europe currently doesn't have a goal and is thus foundering. If we leave the truths of the religions aside for the moment, based on utility alone a neo-Christian Europe would be far more conducive to human rights than a fundamentalist Muslim Europe.

Weigl does a little too much quoting in Cube and I don't like him using the Peter Brown theory of the end of Rome, but these are small nits to pick. Also of interest is Phillip Longman's article in yesterday's USA Today.

Politics: Homosexuality and Islam

Mark Steyn does a wonderful job in an article for the Western Standard in revealing the fundamental disconect involved in supporting gay groups and fundamentalist Islamic groups. Something has to give in the end. Steyn opens his column with a comment on some reviews of Brokeback Mountain, which suggested that the Right's effort to fight gay marriage is futile. He then points out that it is folly to thing history is an inevitable progression by bringing up a recent Canadian government report, headed by one Martha Bailey, calling for an end to the ban on polygamy, which suggests that the removal of said ban would result in an influx of skilled Muslim workers, to which Steyn responds:

But let's say Ms. Bailey gets her way and legal polygamy succeds in attracting more skilled Muslim men and their legions of wives to Canada. What proportion of the population has to be Muslim before Nicole Langlois notices that "the rising tide of cultural acceptance for gays" is beginning to recede.

The relevant hadith of the Prophet on "cultural acceptance for gays" is pretty straightforward: "Kill the one who is doing it and the one to whom it is being done"--a distinction which suggests Mohammed doesn't subscribe to Ms. Langlois' line on the "beautiful complexity" of "gay love." How would a Human Rights Commission rule if you put that hadith up on a billboard? Not all Muslim societies kill the sodomites--some just toss them in jail--but, oddly enough, punishing homosexuality by death correlates more with polygamy than a "highly skilled" workforce does. For example, under the Taliban, pretty much the only construction work in Afghanistan was the building of brick walls for the purpose of crushing homosexuals. Possibly all those polygamous masons will now be attracted to our decadent Dominion.

Zing! The same, of course, can be said regarding basic rights for women. I've never understood why some on the far left have determined that national sovereignty trumps basic human rights. Multiculturalism, when faced with real evil, quickly becomes incoherent.

Fish--Not a Fish?

I'm going to have to go with "Not a Fish," despite the threat to my immortal soul.

As John J. Miller explains:

The season of Lent, which began on Wednesday, brings to mind an odd request the Vatican received from South America in the 17th century. The faithful sought permission to eat capybaras on Fridays during the six weeks before Easter, when Catholics are supposed to avoid the meat of birds and mammals.

The priests who puzzled over this petition certainly had no inkling of capybaras. Even today, most non-zookeepers outside South America have never heard of them. But these critters spend lots of time in water, they swim and dive well, and their feet are slightly webbed. Kind of like
fish, right?

Close enough for the Vatican, apparently, because Rome sent out the word that it was acceptable to consume capybaras during Lent. Today they are considered a delicacy in many parts of South America, especially Venezuela. Eating capybaras there during Lent is about as traditional as eating turkeys at Thanksgiving here in the U.S. Technically, though, capybaras are mammals--the largest members of the rodent family, with adults weighing more than 100 pounds. The food they provide is meat.

Higher Education: Lemann on Harvard

Nicholas Lemann (dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia) has an interesting take on Summers' resignation, which coheres nicely with some ideas about education that I've been kicking around recently (spurred on mostly by The Closing of the American Mind). The general gist of the article is that Summers was trying to rectify (in an admittedly acerbic fashion) some major instutional problems endemic to Harvard and the other elite universities. He notes that this disatisfaction is not limited to Summers alone:

Bok [Summers' replacement and thus "safe"] has just published a book titled Our Underachieving Colleges, which follows a similarly downbeat book in 2003. One of the Harvard deans pushed out by Summers has a book about the university coming out soon called Excellence Without a Soul. The new book by former Princeton president Harold Shapiro is called A Larger Sense of Purpose--implying that universities don't have one.

This lack of purpose is further reflected in the undergraduate curriculum:

When Summers announced early on that he wanted to remake the undergraduate curriculum to ensure that Harvard graduates knew more, especially about science, he set off a direct conflict with the faculty, whose incentive is to spend as little time as possible designing and teaching undergraduate courses. Summers then made his goal harder to achieve by picking fights with faculty members, making disparaging remarks about entire categories of academics (such as women in science) and, probably most important, vetoing tenure cases that had been elaborately assembled by individual departments. It looks as if the collapse of his curriculum-reform effort, which ended with a report calling for almost no core requirements, led to the bitter departure of yet another dean, which set off the endgame of his presidency.

Summers was right that Harvard and other universities need to provide a more structured education for undergrads. But the institutional tides push powerfully in the other direction, and the credential value of the degree is so high that there's no penalty to Harvard for placing the needs of its faculty over the best interests of its students. McKinsey and Goldman Sachs will come calling with $90,000-a-year job offers regardless of what's in the curriculum. Harvard's next president will face the same pressures and have a difficult time standing up to them.

As I did not attend an Ivy League school, it is hard for me to know whether Lemann makes an accurate assessment; however, his thesis rings true from what I experience in my own undergraduate education and what I've read about the Ivies. My reaction was one of hope, just not for the Ivies. The problem seems to be a lack of a common focus--a seemingly unsurmountable difficulty. But this difficulty is only unsurmountable in a secular school (public or private). If, say, there were a Catholic university ranked in the top twenty, maybe it could seize this chance to offer students a coherent education of the highest caliber. Now I'm not too excited, afterall it was during my tenure at said instituion that the last remnant of what once a two semester Great Books class required of every student irrespective of major devolved into a required one semester discussion class--topic of the professor's choosing--with the full blessing of the faculty. The replacement of Monk with Jenkings does give me hope though. We shall see. Notre Dame has a chance to become something truly great, I hope it doesn't botch it.

Movie Review: Cinderella Man

Cinderella Man was a movie that I was all that eager to see, but I did end up glad that I watched it. It is important to note that I was glad rather than thrilled. This review will be not be very in depth mainly because I don't think the movie particularly merits my attention that way.

First of all the setting is a lot of fun. I really enjoy period pieces, even if that period is the Great Depression. The story is quite amazing. I wonder how true it actually is. That Braddock triumphs is the most implausible part of it, and yet also the part most certain to be accurate. That movie centered on Braddock and his struggles rather than throwing around metaphors for our current situation was comforting. Not all movies need be political.
I think movie probably went on to long. An hour forty-five probably would have served the story better. The boxing scenes were quite intense, though that intensity was justified by the story. I think we can all agree that it's never fun to see a nose break.

My primary thought upon finishing the movie was that Russell Crowe is a phenomenal actor. Each time I see him he seems made for that particular role, whether it be an insane math professor, a British sea captain, or a Depression boxer. I read in the Time issue dealing with Master and Commander that he had been given first choice for both Morpheus and Aragorn. He would certainly have given Fishburne a run for his money, albeit with a very interpretation. I really can't see how he could have failed to surpass Mortensen, who excelled primarily in the physical aspects of his character. Whether the whole venture was worth giving up my reading of First Things for is debatable.