Inedible Ink

The venerable Journal stoops to second-guessing fruitcake.

Fruitcake, Long A Holiday Horror, Gets a Makeover - WSJ.com
Bakers have finally found a way to make fruitcake more appealing: Ditch the fruit — especially those ghastly little neon-colored bits.

The answer to heinous fruitcakes suggested in this article is ditching the fruit. Alas, they could scarcely be more wrong.  Lose the neon-colored fake bits, this is certain, but fruitcake less the fruit is like a donut less the hole, it’s no longer a fruitcake, or a donut if you were still on the right hand side of the similequation.

The bottom rung of blogging, and one of the surer signs of desperation, the self-quote:

2.) Dyed, red or green maraschino cherries, anything from the “seasonal fake looking fruit display” are verboten, right out, not allowed, 404 error fruit-not-found.

My fruitcake recipe is here.  It’s based on one stolen from FoodTV’s Alton Brown, his is here.

Somebody call Pixar, I’ve got a script for them, Nemo’s got nothing on these guys.:

From the Telegraph.

Photographer captures trout’s great escape - Telegraph
He pictured the trout making giant leaps out of their pond straight into the metal feed pipe three feet above the water level.

They then fought against the current for 30 feet until they reached the end of the eight inch wide pipe, which emerges underwater in a tributary of the River Itchen near Alresford, Hants.

Rev. Robert A. Sirico, founder of the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty has an article in today’s WSJ.

Liberty Theology - WSJ.com
By ROBERT A. SIRICO
December 31, 2007; Page A12Catholic Church bishops, priests and other Church leaders in Latin America were once a reliable ally of the left, owing to the influence of “liberation theology,” which tries to link the Gospel to the socialist cause. Today the Church is coming to recognize the link between socialism and the loss of freedom, and a shift in thinking is taking place.

Murdered, Martyred this day in Canturbury Cathedral in the year 1170.

Thomas Becket - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

(Source)…The wicked knight leapt suddenly upon him, cutting off the top of the crown which the unction of sacred chrism had dedicated to God. Next he received a second blow on the head, but still he stood firm and immovable. At the third blow he fell on his knees and elbows, offering himself a living sacrifice, and saying in a low voice, ‘For the name of Jesus and the protection of the Church, I am ready to embrace death.’ But the third knight inflicted a terrible wound as he lay prostrate. By this stroke, the crown of his head was separated from the head in such a way that the blood white with the brain, and the brain no less red from the blood, dyed the floor of the cathedral. The same clerk who had entered with the knights placed his foot on the neck of the holy priest and precious martyr, and, horrible to relate, scattered the brains and blood about the pavements, crying to the others, ‘Let us away, knights; this fellow will arise no more.’

Waiting for the movie to come out? Wait no longer, you’re not going to get a better cast than Richard Burton and Peter O’Toole anytime soon. Becket, the film on Wikipedia.

After silent night comes the dawn of redeeming grace.  The child asleep in Mary’s lap is the redeemer.
Merry Christmas all!

The child whose birth we celebrate at Christmas was Mary’s boy, Jesus.

I won’t suggest here and now that you need to give Mary any more honor than you currently do, but I do ask, Do you sing about her at Christmas?

I would think that singing about Mary at Christmastime would make at least as much sense as singing of shepherds, magi, the tree, weather, and King Wenceslas, no matter how good a king he was.

Keep score at your Church service: Do the hymns and carols that are sung refer to Mary as often as the scripture verses that are read? My money’s on the Scriptures. If the hymns come up short, consider why that might be.

FIRST THINGS: Blog Archive Looking for Mary in Christmas Carols

Yeah, part eleven. Did I ever say I was doing them in order?

It is “Common Knowledge” that Christmas is just a Churchy ploy to co-opt a pre-existing pagan feast. It’s just one more instance of The Man coming down on The People and oppressing their True Spirituality.

Isn’t it?

Where did that idea come from? It is so prevalent, at least the pagan feast part, that it is practically taken for granted. The notion has been accepted at face value for 150 years.
What evidence do we have of the “Stolen pagan feast” idea? What evidence would we require to accept December 25th as the Christ child’s real birthday? Are our requirements for proof fair, or do we grant the benefit of the doubt to paganism?

Here’s one thought: ‘Pagan’ means little more than not Christian, Jewish or Muslim. Some take it to infer polytheism, but in any case it is not a technical term. Which pagan group, exactly, had their feast stolen? Was it the Roman cult of Saturn worshippers? Probably not, they had no doings on the 25th of December. Was it Egyptians worshipping a Sun goddess? Solstices would be important there, but what feast was stolen, and were you ready to claim that this theft occurred in Egypt?

building your own personal Stonehenge.

If the claim is that early Roman Christians stole a feast day, the stolen feast would need to exist not only before Christian celebrations of Christ’s Birthday on the 25th of December but also before Christian observations of The Annunciation on March 25th exactly 9 months prior.

Read more: Calculating Christmas

When we try to understand what we’re preparing for during Advent, when we ask ourselves this question “What Child is this?”, when we sing the songs of the Christmas season, one word keeps coming up: “Angel”

Angels appear to Daniel in a vision Dan 9:21, to Zacharias in the temple Luk 1:19, to Mary at the Annunciation Luk 1:26, to Joseph in a dream Mat 1:20, to the shepherds tending their flocks Luk 2:8, and to Joseph again sending the Holy family to Egypt Mat 2:13. Angels, angels, angels, angels, angels.

I saw a box of Christmas cards on display yesterday that made me want to return to the subject of angels. The image was of an angel on a cloud, and as the Home Depot selection went it was one of the least secular, most “Christian” of the available cards. However, this portrayal of the angel revealed a sad underestimation by this artist of angels. This angel was a doe-eyed, pouty-lipped, airbrushed, winged blonde who looked like she had just finished a senior portrait photoshoot at the Glamour Shots Studio down at the mall.

She looked very earthly, fully corporeal and, actually, she looked kinda sexy.

I have never seen an angel, but I don’t expect angels look very much like teenage girls. Artists taking angels more seriously through the ages have been stuck doing their best renderings of these supernatural creatures with earthly symbols as approximations. Trumpet blasts, blinding beams of light, fine asexual facial features, and yes, wings are some of the clues we’re given to try to understand angels.

I think these symbols make sense as a visual shorthand for supernatural, flying messengers of God who are overwhelming to look upon. But how can a painter do better justice to the vision which made the prophet Daniel faint?

A stand-up comic says: “You can’t make this stuff up.”

By this the comic means that the funny story he’s telling must be true, because no one in their right mind would’ve fabricated such a thing.

The Gospels tell a story of God, become man, conceived in the womb of the virgin Mary.

If you were going to fabricate the story of a god out of your own imaginings, would you include a part where he’s an unborn baby totally vulnerable but for the protection of a teenage girl? Would you think to write the chapter of painful, humiliating, self-sacrifice of scourging and death on the cross?

If your job was to illustrate an all-powerful being, would you begin your story with the utterly helpless form of a human infant lying in the livestock’s feed trough?

Jennifer Roback Morse on Christmas on National Review Online
Many gods obviously have been created by man. The gods of the Greeks, for instance, get jealous, commit adultery, fight among themselves, kill humans, take revenge, and occasionally fall in love. Very human characters who happen to be immortal and have superhuman powers. It’s easy to believe people invented these gods.But the god of Christianity is something different altogether. Christians believe God is love. They hold that God is a communion of three persons: the one who loves, the one who receives love, and the love itself. That union is so intense that it is One God, just as the Hebrews had already insisted. What other religion has ever invented such a god?

Christians believe that in the fullness of time, God, the one who loves, sent His only Son, whom he loves, to live on earth among human beings. And God did not choose to flaunt his power over his creatures, nor did He demand adulation. Instead, He humbled Himself and allowed Himself to take on the most vulnerable and dependent form. Christians believe that the Holy Spirit, Love Itself, came upon a humble girl from Nazareth, and that “the Power of the Most High overshadowed” her. The creator of the universe allowed himself to be formed within a woman’s womb, carried for nine months, and then born as a helpless child to impoverished parents, weary from travel, who had only a stable for shelter.

Who ever heard of a god doing something like that?

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