In your Tatler’s youth, long, long ago, it was the tradition of the family to alternate yearly the locales where Thanksgiving was celebrated; in CT where we lived, and NY where relations lived. At either locale, it was also the tradition after Thanksgiving Supper to play Handel’s Messiah, the version you see above.
There were precious few recordings of Messiah available where we lived back then, only two coming to mind: Sir Thomas Beecham’s glorious extravaganza, with its wholesale re-orchestrations of it, with huge forces, and Eugene Ormandy’s relatively conservative approach to it, the one preferred by the grownups in the family.
Listening to it today for the first time since youth, it sounds remarkably good for its time. Ormandy, as was his wont, made the work his own, with additional instrumentation and large cuts, but to these ears it holds up just fine. The yearly tradition of listening to it on this most American holiday may just have been revived.
Who knew, there are multiple pronunciations of this most American of holidays, though we big-hearted Americans also permit our Canadian neighbors to celebrate it, but on a different date (25 October in ’25). The New York Post, as is its wont, decided to look into the matter of pronunciation of the word and turned up some surprising results, at least to this dyed-in-the-wool easterner, even though he lives in the West now.
While a great majority of Americans, 74%, pronounce it Thanks-GIV-ing, a sizable minority, 16%, mostly living in the South, pronounce it THANKS-giv-ing. There is also a small number of lazy folk who cannot be bothered to pronounce the “K” sound and pronounce it THANGS-giv-ing (members of that group are obviously communists and should be driven from our shores posthaste).
However you pronounce it, this blogger wishes you a Happy Thanksgiving. Whatever problems we face in our country, we are still blessed to be living here and have much to be thankful for.
From the Daily Signal,”As part of mandatory diversity training, NYC firefighters are lectured about ‘The Genderbread Person’—a cartoon that explains the ‘spectrum of countless identities’ people can have.”
This fireman hits it on the nose: “The Genderbread Person looks like the FDNY got a contract with some activist group who specializes in children’s propaganda.”
The only possible correction your Tatler would make to the fireman’s statement is, while the figure indeed looks if it were intended for children, to the woke left, all of us are regarded as children, no matter what age, and recalcitrant children at that, requiring constant monitoring to ensure we are towing the line of woke correctness.
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 DailySignal 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.
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?
THE TAOS TATLER. 