Month: March 2004

  • The Hairy Palm Academy


    The previous two entries were prompted by a picture in the Washington Post of Spain's Interior Minister, a member of the secular arm of the Legion of Christ.


    Both entries mentioned a school run by the Legion of Christ, the Royal Palm Academy.  As the following excerpt from my March 20 entry indicates, a different sort of palm might also be honored by the Legion -- the hairy palm.


    "Los Legionarios de Cristo...  es una organización fundada en 1941 en Méjico por el padre Marcel [Marcial] Maciel (rehabilitado por el Vaticano en 1958 tras ser acusado de ayudarse en sus visiones con ampollas de morfina; también fue acusado de pederastia, le gustaba masturbar a jovencitos y que ellos le masturbaran a él)."


    -- PPnuncamas.org


    Related readings from The New York Review of Books, issue dated April 8, 2004:


    God in the Hands of Angry Sinners, by Garry Wills, on the Legion of Christ and on Mel Gibson flogging his God,


    and a related article, a review of


    Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation.

    It seems the founder of the Legion of Christ, like many other Catholic priests, may have regarded masturbation as a group sport rather than solitary recreation.


    For further details, see an ABC News 20/20 story dated April 26, 2002:


    Priestly Sin, Cover-Up



    When approached by ABC News's Brian Ross in Rome with questions of allegations against Father Marcial Maciel, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger became visibly upset and actually slapped Ross's hand. -- ABCNEWS.com

  • Quid Pro Quack


    (Headline of today's
    Maureen Dowd column)


    Quiddity:

    The essence, nature, or distinctive peculiarity, of a thing; that which answers the question, Quid est? or, What is it?

    -Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913)













    Quid


    Cross Window


    Pro


    Royal Palm Student


    Quo


    Dream of Heaven


    The above rather cryptic sequence of pictures may be regarded as a memorial to Queen Juliana of the Netherlands, who died at about the time I found the central picture, "Royal Palm Student."  For further details, click on the individual pictures, each of which is taken from a past log24 entry.  Also of some relevance: the palm at the end of A Mass for Lucero and the Stevens poem on The Palm at the End of the Mind.

  • Christendom Today


    From PP Nunca Mas! --


    20M: contra la guerra
    20 de marzo:
    Todas contra la guerra


    From today's Washington Post:


    EU Taking Up Terrorism Issues


    Security Officials Try to Forge
    'Europe-Wide Response' After Attacks


    By John Burgess
    Washington Post Foreign Service
    Saturday, March 20, 2004     


    European Union officials acknowledged Friday that mistrust between intelligence agencies posed a serious challenge.


    "We have to build trust."


    -- Michael McDowell, Ireland's justice minister


    _______________________


    Reasons for distrust, from a page on Ángel Acebes, Spain's Interior Minister, at PP Nunca Mas! --



    Acebes
    (today's Washington Post)


    En cuanto a su faceta espiritual, Acebes es miembro de la inquietante organización religiosa Legionarios de Cristo (de su brazo seglar, Regnum Christi).


    Los Legionarios de Cristo...  es una organización fundada en 1941 en Méjico por el padre Marcel [Marcial] Maciel (rehabilitado por el Vaticano en 1958 tras ser acusado de ayudarse en sus visiones con ampollas de morfina; también fue acusado de pederastia, le gustaba masturbar a jovencitos y que ellos le masturbaran a él).


    Those who distrust members of Opus Dei (so memorably described in the recent bestseller The Da Vinci Code) may also distrust members, like Acebes, of the secular arm of the Legion of Christ.


    If, on the other hand, one applies the "by their fruits ye shall know them" test to the Legion of Christ, one finds, for example,


    The Royal Palm Academy in Naples, Florida. 


    This school seems to excel both academically and spiritually.



    Royal Palm Student

  • Geometry of the 4x4 Square:


    http://log24.com/theory/geometry.html


    "There is such a thing as a tesseract."
    — A Wrinkle in Time

  • Rainbow's End


    From the
    Norma Ballistics Calculator:



    See also
    Readings for St. Patrick's Day.

  • State of Grace


    Saint Mercedes McCambridge, who won an Oscar for "All the King's Men," died on March 2, 2004.


    From an entry for that date:






    O the days of the Kerry dancing....
    When the boys began to gather,
        in the glen of a summer's night.
    And the Kerry piper's tuning 
        made us long with wild delight.


    For further details,
    see April 16, 2003.


    From today's New York Times:


    Charlotte Mercedes Agnes McCambridge was born on March 16, 1916, in Joliet, Ill. ... She began giving her birth date, though, as St. Patrick's Day 1918. In explaining the discrepancy, a spokeswoman said, "She's an actress," adding: "She was a little bit Irish. And she decided she wanted to be two years younger."



    What the hell, she's younger now.

  • William H. Pickering,

    Dec. 24, 1910 - March 15, 2004









    For details,
    click on the
    black monolith.

    At
    Heaven's
    Gate


  • Readings for
    St. Patrick's Day

    Books:

    Finnegans Wake (1939)

    Gravity's Rainbow (1978)

    Masks of the Illuminati (1981)

    Quotations:

    "Nature does not know extinction;
    all it knows is transformation.
    Everything science has taught me,
    and continues to teach me,
    strengthens my belief in
    the continuity of our
    spiritual existence
    after death."

    -- Wernher von Braun

    "I faced myself that day
    with the nonplused apprehension
    of someone who has
    come across a vampire
    and has no crucifix in hand."

    -- Joan Didion, "On Self-Respect,"
    in Slouching Towards Bethlehem

    "For every kind of vampire,
    there is a kind of cross.    "

    -- Thomas Pynchon,
    Gravity's Rainbow

    Inscribed
    Carpenter's Square:

    In Latin, NORMA

    Multa renascentur quae iam cecidere, cadentque
    quae nunc sunt in honore uocabula, si uolet usus,
    quem penes arbitrium est et ius et norma loquendi.

    -- Horace, Ars Poetica

    Many terms will be born again
    that by now have sunk into oblivion,
    and many that are now held in respect
    will die out if that is what use should dictate
    in whose power is the judgment and the law
    and the rule of speech.

    All, all must perish -- but, surviving last,
    The love of Letters half preserves the past;
    True -- some decay, yet not a few revive,
    Though those shall sink, which now
         appear to thrive,
    As Custom arbitrates, whose shifting sway
    Our life and language must alike obey.

    -- Hints from Horace

    "Norma was the latin word for what we now call a carpenter's
    square. It was used to construct lines which were at right angles to
    another line, so the created line was said to be 'normal.'  The norma
    was also used as a standard to compare if objects, like a wall, might
    be erect (perpendicular to the ground) and so those that met the
    standard were called 'normal' and this use extended to the 'typical'
    element of any type of set. Eventually normal came to mean anything
    that 'met the standard.' "

    -- Pat Ballew on mathematical usage

    "317 is a prime,
    not because we think so,
    or because our minds are shaped
    in one way rather than another,
    but     because it is so,
    because mathematical reality
    is built that way."

    -- G. H. Hardy,
    A Mathematician's Apology

  • Anschaulichkeit


    In memory of John W. Seybold, who died at 88 on Sunday, March 14, 2004....


    Seybold is said to have originated the application of the phrase "what you see is what you get" (WYSIWYG) to computerized typesetting.


    The date of Seybold's death was also the date of Einstein's birth.


    The entry "Clarity and Certainty" for that day contains a discussion by Einstein of the fact that the altitudes of a triangle have a point in common.



    A March 14 search for a clear diagram of that fact yielded the above illustration, to which I returned today after reading of Seybold's WYSIWYG philosophy.  The illustration is taken from an article by a British teacher of geometry that contains the following:


    "Dick Tahta wrote... of geometry as involving the direct apprehension of imagery, gazing as into the eyes of a beloved and a certain intuition-seeing (Anschauung).....


    His sentences have tremendous power, and yet the terms he uses are slippery and seem unexplainable. What is, or what might be, 'direct apprehension of imagery'? What is evoked by the powerfully metaphorical 'gazing as into the eyes of a beloved'? 'Intuition' is a tremendously difficult term.... The combination 'intuition-seeing' seems to represent an attempt to convey a meaning for the German 'Anschauung,' and echoes the original title of the text Anschauliche Geometrie by Hilbert and Cohn-Vossen which was published in English as Geometry and the Imagination."


    From the same article:


    "... for Lacan 'mathematics ... is constantly in touch with the unconscious'....


    Commentators on Lacan frequently write that... he argued that the human being is captivated by an image....


    The object, in a sense, gazes back."


    From a discussion group:






    "Anschaulichkeit" is in my Cassell's German-English dictionary, with the meanings "visual or graphic quality, clearness, vividness, perspicuity."


    For "anschaulich," this dictionary gives "visual, clear, vivid, graphic, concrete; (Phil.) intuitive, perceptual."


    For "Anschauung" it has



    1. visual perception.....
    2. mode of viewing, way of looking at or seeing, idea, conception, notion, opinion, (point of) view, outlook
    3. (Phil.) perception.....
    4. (Theol.) contemplation.

    The final meaning above, theological contemplation, suggests that the altitude-intersection diagram above may be used for a meditation on the Trinity.  This is, of course, silly†, but no sillier than the third-rate lucubrations of the damned charlatan Lacan.

    And so let us pray that Einstein on his birthday was joined by Seybold in rapturous contemplation of the Trinity as revealed‡ in the physicist's "holy geometry book."


    † For a less silly geometrico-theological metaphor, see "Scalene Trinities" from The Mind of the Maker, by Dorothy Sayers.


    ‡ For a related revelation, see A Contrapuntal Theme.

  • The Spaniard






    Madrid Bombs
    Shook Voters
    Anger at U.S. Fueled Upset
    In Wake of Terror Attacks
    By Glenn Frankel
    Washington Post Foreign Service
    Tuesday, March 16, 2004


    MADRID, March 15 -- The hand-lettered sign at the sidewalk memorial for the 200 victims of last week's deadly train bombings starkly summed up a sentiment of many who came to pay respects Monday afternoon. It read: "They Died to Support Bush."


    Sunday's stunning electoral defeat for the ruling party of Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar, one of President Bush's closest European allies, reflected a late surge of public anger over the government's support for the U.S.-led war in Iraq triggered both by the attacks and by the sense the government had sought to exploit the bombings for political gain, according to political analysts and voters.


    Several added that it also reflected a sense of alarm and despair that seems to cut across the political spectrum over the way the United States is wielding power in the world.


    "We love America -- Faulkner, Hemingway, Coca-Cola and Marilyn Monroe -- but we have something against your government," said Luis Gonzales, 56, a high school Spanish literature teacher, as he stopped to view the rows of candles, flowers and makeshift signs at the central Puerta del Sol. "Aznar took us into a war that wasn't our war but only for the benefit of the extreme right and the American companies."


    On Opus Dei in Spain:


    "Two of Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar's children went to Opus-run schools.


    Notable Opus members include Defense Minister Federico Trillio, Justice Minister Jose Maria Michavila, Attorney General Jesus Cardenal and former National Police Chief Juan Cotino."


    -- AP report, Oct. 3, 2002, according to a web page at rickross.com


    Those who prefer their religion in fictional form may enjoy the following related reading:


    The Da Vinci Code.