In this morning’s New York Sun:
‘Enough Is Enough’: Lawmakers Seek To Halt Federal Aid to Colleges That Boycott, Divest From Israel
After a bit of editing, an improved headline:
Enough Is Enough’: Lawmakers Seek To Halt Federal Aid to Colleges
There, that’s better.
Horrid music will continue to blight Holy Mass. Regular readers may recall an earlier post where Bickerstaff congratulated Bishop W. Shawn McKnight of the Diocese of Jefferson, Missouri, for banning some of the particularly egregious hymns often used in the mass. Your Tatler, a former Episcopalian having some knowledge of hymns, praised His Grace on the bold action and urged him to continue the purging of Muzak hymns. There certainly is a plethora of them.
Naturally, there was an enormous outcry from tone-deaf musical ignoramuses who, believe it or not, consider “Gather us in” and the like the ne plus ultra of hymnody, not that complicated stuff protestants like to sing. Unfortunately, Bishop Mcknight caved and withdrew his order. Mediocrity triumphed.
Coming from the Anglican tradition, Bickerstaff rejoiced when after seven months of intense cathechizing, he embraced the fullness of the faith on Easter Eve years ago.
Just the same, the awfulness of contemporary Catholic church music and liturgy was and is something of a let down, especially considering the glorious musical tradition of our Church in the past.
Bickerstaff has an easy solution to the woes of poor liturgy and music in Holy Church today, though he knows full well they would never be implemented. It is presented below, nevertheless.
And now, for your reading pleasure/displeasure, presenting an absurd fantasy:
For the poor liturgy in the US, the Church should chuck the modern English of Novus Ordo and replace it with a wholesale cribbing of the 1962 Episcopalian Book of Common Prayer, after changes are made in it to conform with Catholic teachings. The 1962 Prayer Book contains some of the most glorious English ever written. Yes, it was mostly written by the heretic Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, but so what? He expropriated much of the Prayer Book’s text from the Latin Mass and translated it into beautiful English.
Regarding upgrading the music of the mass, that would be far easier. Whoever is given charge of the project only needs to get hold of the Episcopal Hymnal of 1940, considered by many the finest compilation ever of hymns and service music. It should be flipped through and a fair number of its superb hymns in it poached. The only caution would be to avoid some of the mid-century hymns commissioned by the Hymnal committee at the time; there is a small chance they may still be under copyright, and besides, most of them aren’t very good anyway. All the Vaughan Williams hymn settings, for example, would be grabbed.
And there you have it, a relatively cheap and easy way Holy Church might address the flat and dull English of Novus Ordo, as well the uninspiring, boring hymns in present use Too bad it will never happen.
His crime? He decided he did not want to “transition” to a woman.
Simon B Amaya Price (above), a student at the Berkelee College of Music, who successfully deals with the difficulties of autism, has met with an even greater challenge. After being in a confused state Amaya Price decided he wanted to become a woman. Naturally, being in Boston, he was applauded and congratulated by the usual suspects, including higher ups at Berkelee, who invited him to give a talk about his upcoming joy at leaving manhood.
Then Amaya Price made a serious error in the eyes of Boston’s cultural elites (and boy, are there a lot of them there). He changed his mind and decided he was a man in a man’s body after all. (Bickerstaff wonders if the prospect of having his penis lopped off gave him pause for thought as well).
Amaya Price then announced to Berkelee officials he wanted to give a different talk bearing the title “Born in the Right Body: Desister and Detransitioner Awareness (what god-awful neologisms those two words are, but they are probably necessary in these times). Showing their own special kind of “awareness,” Berkelee brass decided to simply ignore Amaya Price’s request.
The Daily Signal has more.
After Amaya Price received almost 1,000 negative comments on social media, including messages threatening his physical safety and recommending he drop out of school and commit suicide, the administration of the liberal arts college forced him to cancel the presentation, Boston-native Amaya Price told The Daily Signal.
Happily, across the Charles River, the MIT Open Discourse Society invited Amaya Price to give his lecture at their college.
Amaya Price’s reaction to the Techies invite: “It was one hell of a vindication.” Indeed, it must have been. Might it be possible we are witnessing the beginning of the end of “wokeness?”
But how dare we criticize the press! Those little flying monkeys work so hard to achieve so little. They could not get Hillary elected and she spent a billion bucks on her campaign. They could not get Kamala elected and she spent a billion-and-a-half bucks on her campaign.
Read it all. You don’t want to miss it.
A. They both came to the attention of bureaucrat thugs and were thwarted by them, the former fatally.
The latter, the good Amish communities, at no profit to themselves, but seeing it as their Christian duty (when was last you heard those words?), loaded 56 busses with themselves and tools and travelled the long ride to North Carolina to build small but sound temporary dwellings for North Carolina residents whose houses were demolished by Hurricane Helene.
North Carolina bureaucrats, like most bureaucrats , incapable of doing anything useful in this crisis, nonetheless sprang into action, by declaring the temporary homes “not up to code,” and booted the recipients of Amish charity out of those dwellings, though helpfully posting on their website, in wordy bureaucratese, justification of their actions. Details may be found on this worthy website.
The Amish, who traditionally show little to no interest in politics and declining to vote in elections, this past election showed up in force to vote for Donald Trump, helping to push Pennsylvania into a Republican victory. Any wonder why?
A professor [sic] at Georgetown University (formerly Catholic), after learning of the stress and upset her students were experiencing after Donald Trump’s re-election, decided to take action, sort of, which took the form of what you see below: a day long therapy session for her traumatized children.
Which begs the question, after these babies are handed their diplomas, what are they going to do with their lives? And since so many students at so many of our institutions of higher learning [interim sic] share the same emotional distress of their comrades at Georgetown, and with their minders reacting similarly, one wonders (in a different context from the phrase’s original intent), who will make the trains run on time?
We’re producing in this country a spoiled upper-class with zero capability. What’s to become of them? History teaches us a pampered and idle aristocracy eventually meets with an unpleasant end. Will that happen here?
h/t For What it’s Worth.
David Strom of Hot Air on the possibility of Elon Musk buying the wretched MSNBC.
This idea is pure Elon Musk, mixing his quixotic sense of humor with a serious musing about something he could do to solve a problem he sees. Throw my head in a boatload of F-you money, and you get a pure Elon Musk idea.
Read the whole thing.
He can’t be thrilled by headlines like this, even if it’s Fox News.
One of the advantages a parliamentary system like Canada’s has over our constitutional federal republic is, an unpopular leader can be booted from office more quickly. If PM Trudeau were to lose a “no confidence” vote from the Canadian Parliament in Ottawa, out he goes. No putting up with four dreary years of a senile dolt in the White House.
From the NY Post: the excellent columnist Rikki Schlott writes on how social media has contributed to the social ills of America.
I was probably about 9 or 10 years old when, on a summer night in a friend’s basement, a pal suggested we log onto a website called Omegle.
You can guess where this is going.
[W]e were . . . served up images of people cutting, adult men in dimly lit rooms telling us we were “cute” (we quickly hung up on them), and — a first for all of us — a guy masturbating.
Yuck. A marvel of our age, the Internet, concomitantly gives sexual perverts a convenient avenue on which to spread their filth.
Of course there are digital filters and the like available to block those god-awful souls, but they’re not foolproof and worse, more often than not block websites that are a far cry from being pornographic.
Ms Schlott continues:
That’s because, no matter how many parental controls and blockers you apply, filters are always porous enough to let the dark underbelly of the internet in through a laptop or cellphone screen.
Exactly. Read her entire column, it’s disturbing, but it illustrates and reminds us of our fallen nature. Matters might improve somewhat at least if laws against these gross-outs were toughened, so when busted and convicted of doing their thing publicly (including on the Internet), received long sentences. Counseling of course should be administered, but it doesn’t seem likely many of these lost souls will be cured of the perversions deep down inside of them. At least they will least be off the streets.
And to end on a lighter note, the late Tom Lehrer offered his take on this dreary subject some time ago.
THE TAOS TATLER. 