Good Food Newz!

The AMA had it wrong when they issued their "Food Pyramid". It has been determined that there is a new hierarchy of good foods and I'm the first to announce it. Here is the list of the 5 Basic Food Groups:

Fat - Hey, if it don't taste good don't eat it!
Sugar - Needed for a sweet disposition
Caffeine - If you ain't wired you're fired. Espresso counts as being doubly good for ya.
Salt - So that you'll be well preserved
Chocolate - I know this is covered by at least two of the groups above, but it is soooo good that it deserved a category of its own.

Worthy of honorable mention: Alcohol, but I'm on so many medications that interact with it that I couldn't verify test results, so you'll have to decide on your own!

From This Blog to God's Ear...

You Should Drive a Porsche

Flashy and a bit of a show off, you can't help but love a car that shouts your high status.

What Sports Car Should You Drive?

1 of the 5 Basic Food Groups...

What Your Latte Says About You

You are easygoing and pretty simple to please. You don't put up a fuss... ever. You can be quite silly at times, but you know when to buckle down and be serious. Intense and energetic, you aren't completely happy unless you are bouncing off the walls. You're addicted to caffeine. There's no denying it. You are responsible, mature, and truly an adult. You're occasionally playful, but you find it hard to be carefree. You are deep and thoughtful, but you are never withdrawn.

What Does Your Latte Say About You?

I Knew I Was "Spaced-Out"

Which Author's Fiction are You?

Robert Heinlein wrote you - your stranger in a strange land, you.
Take this quiz!

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A (Friday) Morning Prayer

Blessed are You, O God of Creation,
Through Your Goodness, we have this doughnut to offer
Born of the fat, and loaded with sugar,
It shall add pounds to the thighs.

Blessed are You, O God of Creation,
Through Your Goodness, we have this coffee to offer
Fruit of the bean, and brewed by human hands,
It shall be our “heavenly” drink.

Query: if Christ used the basic foodstuffs of His time to institute the Eucharist, would He use coffee and doughnuts if He came today? (Inquiring minds want to know….)

On Being Vulgar

I used to teach in the RCIA program, and was trained as a Chemist in college (although I had enough units of Theology and Philosophy through the original St. Ignatius Institute at USF to have qualified for a minor in those subjects anywhere else). So I have the (some might say bad) habit to try and look at any subject from as many angles as possible. That does not mean I am a relativist. There has to be an objective reality before one can have a discussion on any subject. One of the greatest disservices done to Einstein was to take relativity out of the physics lab and to apply it to everything else.

Whoops! Got lost there for moment. What I meant to say is that I like to look at things from ail sides, like taking a die to see that each face is numbered differently. Now many Catholic blogs have been discussing the Pope’s allowing greater access to the “Latin Mass”. I, for myself, prefer participating in the vernacular, in the vulgar tongue. While I love the language contained in the tradition (the Papal “we”, “Pope So-and-so of happy memory“, etc.); I have no facility for languages and so have no desire to learn Latin. Those coming into the Church through the RCIA program have enough difficulties (inadequate preparation from bad RCIA programs, pressure from family and friends, etc.) learning the “big-“T” Tradition without having to handle the minor small-”t” traditions (there are some important small-”t” traditions which border on being big-”T” traditions like the celibate priesthood) but I digress again.

It was a bad decision by many bishops to remove access to the Latin Mass, no doubt. Many were alienated because the means by which they were able to commune with God was taken from them. In addition, many, in the name of reform, went far beyond what was outlined by Vatican II (like substituting Jonathan Livingston Seagull for the Scripture; beautiful prose but not God’s Canon according to the community of the Church).

I take a historical (or maybe hysterical) point-of-view. The Last Supper was probably in Hebrew and Aramaic, and there are Catholic rites, which still use those languages. As the Church got more international, the languages of Egyptian (probably used by St. Augustine), and Koine Greek (the commonest language and the language of commerce at the time of St. Paul through to the end of the Roman Empire) became the language of liturgy. Latin became the language to know when Catholicism came out of the Catacombs and entered the courts of the nobility. I have not researched this, but I suspect the purists of the time bemoaned the loss of the Greek (in fact, the term vulgar came into the vocabulary at this time, which is why the official translation of the Bible is called the Vulgate). Latin remained a common tongue in Europe and the America’s until the Second World War (at least among the educated classes). After that, due to end of colonialism, the growth of commerce, and the Internet, English is becoming the common tongue.

Who knows, maybe in the far, far, FAR future someone will be bemoaning, in Esperanto, the loss of English as liturgical language