Category: Religion

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The information

I, for one, find it refreshing when a scandal in the Catholic church doesn’t involve the rape of an underaged boy.

This story — about the newly appointed archbishop of Warsaw having to step down because he was informing for the secret police back in the ’60s — reminds me of Timothy Garton Ash’s book The File, in which he checked out the Stasi’s records on him after East Germany’s truth commission made that stuff available. I recall Ash marveling over the sheer volume of reports, and their utter minutiae.

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Cat, cradle, spoon, etc.

Yesterday at lunch, I read some more of Kaddish. The book doesn’t focus too heavily on the writer’s father — I mean, it’s not a Mitch Albom schmalzfest or anything — but it does get me thinking a lot about Dad and what went through during his heart surgery in spring 2005.

I gave my dad a call after lunch, and we shot the breeze for a little while. He filled me in on the Premiership soccer package he gets on satellite, his cardiologist’s advice that he get a defibrillator installed, and how he’s getting his gutters cleaned for $70.

I let him know about some of the goings-on at home. One piece of news that he didn’t know about was that Amy bought a new car. Dad lent us his 1993 Cherokee last spring; Amy drives it down to the bus stop and back each day, a 2-mile round trip and, while it’s not quite on its last legs, it is getting pretty old.

“Now that she’s saved up,” I told Dad, “she’s getting a Mini Cooper S.”

“That’s great!” he said. “How much did you get for the Cherokee?”

“What? The Cherokee? . . . Pop, we didn’t sell your car.”

And that’s when it struck me: my brother & I are going to have a tough time keeping a straight face reading that mourner’s kaddish someday.

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Mourning light

I started Kaddish by Leon Wieseltier this week. It’s about his explorations into that mourning prayer following the death of his father. My brother gave it to me a few years ago.

I’m only starting out — about 70 pages into its 574, but much of it is sorta epigrammatic, so it’s not a long slog — and it’s helping me formulate questions about faith, prayer and language. It also yielded this wonderful paragraph during this morning’s reading:

I have read of people whose lives are transfigured in an instant. I do not believe that such a transformation can happen to me. For what changed those people was not only the instant, but also their subsequent fidelity to the instant. This is the paradox of revelation. It disrupts the order of things and then depends upon it.

Without tradition, a revelation is merely an epiphany. It can inspire nothing more than art.

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All Along the Watchtower

I admit that I’m a little compulsive about checking traffic on my site. It’s not a very significant number, but it helps me feel a little wanted, and sometimes I can figure out if old friends or recent acquaintances are checking up on this blog, via the IP address and other info that SiteMeter shows me. Usually, I can see if the user was referred to my site by an external link, or a search engine. Lately, a lot of people have gotten here by searching for images of Giada De Laurentiis. Some stay a while. It’s a funny world.

This morning, something strange happened. I noticed a significant bump in traffic: about 30 people or so had checked in before 8 in the morning. I decided to look into the details, and discovered that nearly all of them were from the far east, and they were all going directly to a single post of mine, Moon over Malaysia.

Longtime readers who remember too much for their own good may recall this post. It was about how the Malaysian Biotechnology Corp. wanted me to stop by for an interview during the BIO conference in Chicago last April. When I looked up the country’s official policies toward Israel (“it doesn’t exist”), I declined the invite, writing a polite note to the PR rep in New York who was trying to arrange the meeting. I never heard back from them. It’s all in the post.

This morning, and late last night, and all throughout today, I kept receiving hits to that exact post. What was particularly interesting (or scary) was that not a single one of those hits included a “referring URL.” That is, there wasn’t a link on another site that led all these people to my site.

As far as I know, this means that they either all got the link via e-mail (but not a web-based e-mail like Gmail or Yahoo!, which would have left a referring URL), or there’s some site out there that linked to my post and is, um, secret enough not to leave a trace on SiteMeter. And it has users in the following locations:

    Petaling Jaya, Malaysia

    Tanjong Tokong, Malaysia

    Bilit, Malaysia

    Kampong Sinempuan, Malaysia

    Kampong Abu Bakar, Malaysia

    Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

    Kampong Tepi Sungai, Malaysia

    Sungai Besi, Malaysia

    Val D’Or, Malaysia

    Alexandria, Egypt

    Dakar, Singapore

    Coatbridge, UK

    Hull, UK

    Sheffield, UK

    Cardiff, Wales

    Berlin, Germany

    Perth, Australia

    Melbourne, Australia

    Toyama, Japan

    Sterling Heights, Michigan

    Garden City, NY (the user was on a computer at Adelphi University, alma mater of Baba Booey)

Some of these people stayed for only a second, while others hung on for a while or moved around on this blog. No one left a comment.

It was a little troubling, I admit. Fortunately, when I got home tonight, I received some reassurance.

It seems that, while the Malaysians were creeping around my site, the Jehovah’s Witnesses were busy driving through my neighborhood. They left a flyer in my door proclaiming “The End of False Religion Is Near!” So, y’know, I got that going for me. . .

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Swingers

Not that anyone comes here for political wisdom, but I sure am glad to see the pendulum swing this morning. It’s gratifying to me not because of any leftover leftist tendencies from my college years, but because it demonstrates what it is that works about our democracy: our ability to throw the bums out, or at least to wrest power from one group of bums and bestow it on another.

In the gratifying / infuriating department, it’s good to see that the 2004 sentiments like “we live in a permanent Republican majority,” “right-wing Christian fundamentalists have hijacked the country,” and “gerrymandering has rendered all elections meaningless” have proved to be utter bullshit. I never take it well when someone takes the present moment and decides that it’s an indicator of how everything will be for the rest of time.

Which gets me back to that pendulum. It swings. In my opinion, which is likely wrong, the end point of the pendulum’s arc (is that called its period?) was the moment at which the federal government intervened in the Terry Schiavo case. Plenty of other people will contend it was the Iraq war, while others will contend it was “the economy.”

So the pendulum swung in one direction, and now it’s swinging back. Let’s see some gridlock-induced compromises in the next two years! Go, Team America!

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Throw the Jew, etc., etc.

Ron Rosenbaum prefers the HBO-Borat to the movie version:

[T]o me the original Borat segments were more than stupid-funny; they were extremely smart-funny, occasionally even off-handedly profound, as the fake Kazakh newsman “personality” managed to tease out moments of appalling honesty from ordinary Americans with a light touch and brilliant comic timing that made it not about him, about Borat, being a clueless foreigner, but about us being clueless Americans. Not even clueless so much as naively blind to our own implicit smugness.

While Borat One [the HBO version] gave you brilliant comic intelligence, Borat Two [the movie version] gives you ass-in-your-face (and I mean that literally) grossness from an aggressively, smugly dumb foreigner. Borat One had at least a touch of the sweetness of Andy Kaufman’s Latka, his “Foreign Man,” incarnation. Borat Two, alas, is more Yakov Smirnoff hammily exploiting his accent. They botched the joke.

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The Living Thank You, Too!

Happy Day of the Dead, all you zombies and zombettes!

To commemorate the event, I was too exhausted this morning to write up more NBA previews, so the next update will be this evening. But I decided to make this blog easier for readers who don’t give a crap about the NBA (and the humorous takes Tom Spurgeon & I provide) by moving the hoops previews to a separate page!

So head over to the Official VM NBA Preview page to check out the new postings, and come back here for my other wacky ruminations. I promise to get a good Unrequired Reading together tomorrow morning!

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USA Tomorrow?

One of the aspects of This Travelin’ Life that I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned is the complimentary copies of USA Today that hotels distribute. While it’s not a paper I read under typical circumstances, it’s kinda comforting to find the issue waiting outside my door when I head out for breakfast during these trade show trips. This morning, I took my copy down with me and read it over migas and coffee. Lots of coffee.

The lead article in today’s Life section was “Mainline pulls in Protestants,” discussing a trend that may or may not be occurring among christians. I wasn’t interested in reading it until I noticed the headline for the story on its second-page jump: “Like television, religion is now ‘highly fragmented'”.

Those editors sure know how to get my attention.

This almost got trumped by the two articles on page 2 of the business section: “Flat wages, rising key prices a double whammy” and “After trailing inflation, wages rise at fastest rate since 2004.”

Fortunately, the absurdities and contradictions of USA Today’s headline writers was beaten by a giant ad in the News section:

How To Be $1,835,360 Richer
Win 95.12% Of All Trades
And Still Lose Nothing . . .
Even If You’re Absolutely 100% Wrong

On the plus side, the paper did tell me that PW Botha died.

The conference wraps up today, and I’ll be flying back into Newark Airport tonight. Which airport is that? Oh, you know: the one where they had a 90% failure rate in finding knives & explosives in check-in bags during a test, where two jets just “bumped wings” on the taxiway, and where an incoming plane from Orlando landed on the taxiway instead of the runway.

Oh, and I’ll be flying to Orlando next week.