Wednesday, August 11, 2010

Please, please make it stop! It's making my ears bleed ...

Damien Thompson is always worth a read, especially when he takes his well sharpened pin to the inflated egos of comfortable ecclesiastical mediocrities. His latest deflation is amusing but also rather distressing. Do the organisers of the Papal Visit to Great Britain really mean for people to listen to aural haemorrhage inducing pap like Urban Pilgrim or Deus Tuus Deus Meus? (MP3s available here.) Mind you, I disagree with some commentators who think that Urban Pilgrim sounds like The Birdie Song. In a sick, sad way The Birdie Song is memorable; it gets stuck in your head like some sort of loathsome mental fungus. Not so Urban Pilgrim, which resembles (and might have been lifted from) the incidental music for a Discovery Channel documentary about the building of the Concorde. Can't you just imagine this lame musical wallpaper in the background as some baritone voiceover artiste informs you that "... even then their technical woes weren't over, as Chief Widget analyst Bob Smith explains ..."?

Well, they may have a new MacMillan Mass for Scotland and even reprised for Birmingham but it looks like the musical & liturgical Babylonian captivity of the Church in England has some time left to it yet. At least, for once, it's not our Bishops and apparatchiks making an embarrassing mess of things but that's small consolation on this side of the Irish Sea and none at all to our Scots or English'n'Welsh Brethern who certainly deserve better.

Monday, August 09, 2010

Dirty Harry



Some years ago, or perhaps 3 weeks ago (it sometimes feels we've been married forever but sometimes like we've only just met) after I met Lowdenclear but before I had the exquisite good fortune to marry her, I listed long lists of favourite things in response to tags and memes and suchlike from herself. Well, in one of them, I listed Dirty Harry as one of my favourite movies - using the excuse that I'm allowed to because I'm a guy! So this is an excuse to post a gratuitous Dirty Harry excerpt and to show what happened when DH met Rain Man!

Saturday, August 07, 2010

Fr Barron & Word on Fire

One of the best contemporary apologists for the Catholic Faith is Fr Robert Barron and his brief episodes on youtube (or better still on Aggie Catholics the superlative site for the Newman Center at Texas A&M) are a model of faithful reason. I have of course a gripe; you knew there was a "but" didn't you? Fr Barron came to Ireland recently and filmed some stuff on Catholicism and never told us!! I mean not us, as in me and my family but us Irish Catholics in general. We'll just have to enjoy the program when it comes out I guess. In the meantime, here is the episode wherein he mentions the Irish Serf and its vicious anti-Catholicism - but given that its character was defined by the Bean King, what else could we expect?