The S is for Solomon.

Today's topic is: How Captain Marvel was ruined, phase three. By Captain Marvel I mean the one that comes into being when Billy Batson says the magic word Shazam, not the various Captains Marvel that Marvel Comics has coughed up over the years. (That was phase two.)

Captain Marvel's ruination, phase one, was when DC Comics sued Fawcett, claiming that Cap was a rip-off of Superman, and won in 1951. DC later got hold of the Fawcett characters but sat on them for years. Eventually they started publishing new stories featuring the man called by his foes the Big Red Cheese. 

But today I want to discuss how the character was ruined by DC after I stopped being a regular reader of comic books. It ties into to other issues in our so-called culture, trust me. 

First, as you may be aware, the word Shazam is an initialism. It stands for the fabled personalities from whom Captain Marvel gets his superpowers: 

Solomon (wisdom)

Hercules (strength)

Atlas (stamina)

Zeus (sheer all-around power)

Achilles (courage)

Mercury (speed)

We have here a mashup of Greek and Roman names (like Hercules and Mercury rather than the Greek Herakles and Hermes), but that's forgivable. If all Roman names had been used (like Jupiter instead of Zeus) it would have been Shajam, and that sounds pretty bad. But the one figure that is not from myth, Solomon, is Biblical and historical. He really doesn't go with the others. Athena (in Roman, Minerva) would have been a mythical choice for wisdom. But that would have involved an icky girl, and then the magic word would be Ahazam or Mhazam, and those are pretty bad. 

The problem with Captain Marvel is that, while supposedly having the wisdom of Solomon, he's been turned into a dumbbell. 

This all started in the late 1980s, when DC was doing major reboots to its legacy characters. Prior to this point, Billy and Captain Marvel were two distinct characters -- they shared knowledge (when Billy turned into Captain Marvel, Cap knew what was going on), but they referred to each other as separate people even in their thoughts. Not that Billy was not a clever and resourceful boy; he could often accomplish things that big, conspicuous Marvel could not. It was hard to tell where one began and the other ended sometimes, except that Marvel had the attributes of the seven legendary personas, and Billy did not. 

Veteran writer Roy Thomas and his wife Dann decided it would be better if Billy's mind remained in Captain Marvel's body when the magic transformation happened. The problem is, Billy then cannot have the wisdom of Solomon; he only has his own mental capacity. Ditto, to a lesser degree, the courage of Achilles. Ever since, writers of less talent and respect for source material have treated Captain Marvel like a dopey child -- especially in the recent live-action and animated movies. He's essentially a preteen boy in the body of a superpowered man. 

This does not say much for the value of his supposed wisdom. Wisdom is thought of as an attribute or gift, sometimes gotten through hard experience, and distinct from intelligence. Intelligence helps you do math or learn languages; wisdom helps you know why these are good things and what the best means to deploy intellect and other gifts is. In the role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons, Intelligence and Wisdom have always been separate characteristics, and characters who score high in one or the other will pursue different paths.

In the Catholic faith, wisdom is thought of as one of the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit. (The others are understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety, and fear of God.) In fact, Solomon's own wisdom is definitely recorded as a gift of God. In 1 Kings 5:3, God promises to give King Solomon whatever he asks for. Solomon says: 

You have shown great kindness to your servant, David my father, because he walked before you with fidelity, justice, and an upright heart; and you have continued this great kindness toward him today, giving him a son to sit upon his throne. Now, LORD, my God, you have made me, your servant, king to succeed David my father; but I am a mere youth, not knowing at all how to act—I, your servant, among the people you have chosen, a people so vast that it cannot be numbered or counted. Give your servant, therefore, a listening heart to judge your people and to distinguish between good and evil. For who is able to give judgment for this vast people of yours?

God is pleased by this response, which shows Solomon is pretty wise already. God tells him: 

Because you asked for this—you did not ask for a long life for yourself, nor for riches, nor for the life of your enemies—but you asked for discernment to know what is right—I now do as you request. I give you a heart so wise and discerning that there has never been anyone like you until now, nor after you will there be anyone to equal you.

Does that sound like it would result in the mind of a preteen boy? 

That's not the Captain Marvel we had, but that's the Captain Marvel we got now. Much like a lot of things-- newspapers, Congress, universities -- he looks like the same as he once did but is dumber than he used to be.

🗱🗱🗱

Side note: Don't feel too bad for Athena/Minerva. Billy Batson has a sister, Mary Batson, and she was given the power to use the Shazam word to become Mary Marvel. But she does not get her powers from the same personas. At least, when she made her debut in 1942, her powers came from: 

Selena (grace)

Hippolyta (strength)

Ariadne (skill)

Zephyrus (fleetness)

Aurora (beauty)

Minerva (wisdom)

They've changed a little over the years, but M still stands for Minerva, so there's that. For all purposes, she was considered pretty much the girl version from the beginning -- almost but not quite as powerful as Cap himself, regardless of where the powers came from. 

Upside-down world.

It's hard not to feel like the world has been turned completely on its head. We have a government in the United States that seems to despise its citizens, monetary policy that makes money worth less daily, militaries that can't win wars or defend the nation, government agencies intended to protect Americans that target Americans, fathers who abuse children and mothers who kill them, schools that teach everything but what they're supposed to teach, recycling programs that stuff landfills, and a ruling class that does not rule and has no class. Sometimes it appears that the airheads are all rising to the top by nature of their empty heads, because that's what seems to be in charge. And sometimes that's the optimistic view. The worse view is that only some of them are stupid; the smart ones are all evil. 

We know in our hearts that things are upside-down and have always been, even if it makes no rational sense -- if things always seemed wrong, why would we expect something better, something right? I find the supreme example of this inversion in the Sorrowful Mysteries of the Rosary, where we see that everything is a cruel funhouse image of what it ought to be. The religious class that ought to love God instead persecutes Him. He is betrayed by a kiss, a sign of love, and abandoned by His friends. The Roman authority tries to administer justice by scourging the man declared innocent -- I find no fault with this man, so we'll beat him half to death. The crown Jesus deserves is not the crown of thorns He gets; He is exalted, but by being lifted aloft on the scornful, torturous cross. Everything is a cruel mockery. 

It informs me that while life may get better in many ways, we just can't escape the grip of evil on our own. And now, in this utterly unprincipled era, we find less hope that there is anything to fall back on, any law on the basis of which we can hope for justice among men. 

But we have hope. St. Francis of Assisi, they say, saw the world upside-down, or perhaps right-side up by being upside-down. Writing in The Crisis, Michael Warren Davis notes: 

St. Francis called himself the Jongleur de Dieu—God’s court jester—precisely because his virtue was so absurd by the standards of our own convention. But to say that he looked foolish in the eyes of the world is an understatement. His charity gave as much offense as any sinner’s meanness. St. Francis’s spirituality demands such uncommon virtue it’s offensive to common decency.

The most famous take on the Jongleur in the English language must be from our old friend G. K. Chesterton from his book about the saint, who explains that the jongleur is not a juggler so much as a tumbler or acrobat, and Francis came out of the darkness of despair from his crushed dreams of being a noble knight as if he'd been turned on his head:

Francis, at the time or somewhere about the time when he disappeared into the prison or the dark cavern, underwent a reversal of a certain psychological kind; which was really like the reversal of a complete somersault, in that by coming full circle it came back, or apparently came back, to the same normal posture. It is necessary to use the grotesque simile of an acrobatic antic, because there is hardly any other figure that will make the fact clear. But in the inward sense it was a profound spiritual revolution. The man who went into the cave was not the man who came out again; in that sense he was almost as different as if he were dead, as if he were a ghost or a blessed spirit. And the effects of this on his attitude towards the actual world were really as extravagant as any parallel can make them. He looked at the world as differently from other men as if he had come out of that dark hole walking on his hands.

This may have given him a unique perspective:

This state can only be represented in symbol; but the symbol of inversion is true in another way. If a man saw the world upside down, with all the trees and towers hanging head downwards as in a pool, one effect would be to emphasise the idea of dependence. There is a Latin and literal connection; for the very word dependence only means hanging. It would make vivid the Scriptural text which says that God has hanged the world upon nothing. If St. Francis had seen, in one of his strange dreams, the town Assisi upside down, it need not have differed in a single detail from itself except in being entirely the other way round. But the point is this: that whereas to the normal eye the large masonry of its walls or the massive foundations of its watchtowers and its high citadel would make it seem safer and more permanent, the moment it was turned over the very same weight would make it seem more helpless and more in peril. It is but a symbol; but it happens to fit the psychological fact. St. Francis might love his little town as much as before, or more than before; but the nature of the love would be altered even in being increased. He might see and love every tile on the steep roofs or every bird on the battlements; but he would see them all in a new and divine light of eternal danger and dependence. Instead of being merely proud of his strong city because it could not be moved, he would be thankful to God Almighty that it had not been dropped; he would be thankful to God for not dropping the whole cosmos like a vast crystal to be shattered into falling stars. Perhaps St. Peter saw the world so, when he was crucified head-downwards.

We can rail against the upside-down world, but we ought to remember that in the end it is destined to be flipped and placed on a firm foundation as it ought to have been from beginning. That is the hope, that is the divine expectation. 

Nimrod.

When I was a kid, if you wanted to call someone stupid and had run through the greatest hits already (stupid, moron, retard, idiot, dumb, dimwit, brainless, dim bulb, dumbass, birdbrain) you might ultimately land on nimrod. We had no idea we were calling him this guy.

Real Nimrod

Poor Nimrod. We don't know too much about him, but in the Book of Genesis (chapter 10), we learn the reputation for which he was remembered for thousands of years:  

8 And Cush begat Nimrod: he began to be a mighty one in the earth.

9 He was a mighty hunter before the Lord: wherefore it is said, Even as Nimrod the mighty hunter before the Lord.

10 And the beginning of his kingdom was Babel, and Erech, and Accad, and Calneh, in the land of Shinar.

Thus Nimrod was a mighty hunter, a king and the founder of great cities. 1 Chronicles 1:10 reiterates his fame, and Micah 5:6 refers to the long-gone king's area as "the land of Nimrod." 

He was probably as famous as Orion the Hunter was in Greek mythology. Orion got in a lot of trouble, but wound up as a constellation, so he had that going for him. You wouldn't imagine someone saying "You're such an Orion!" 

The name Nimrod was even more cemented in the public consciousness than Orion's, back when we were a Bible-studying culture. H. D. Rawnsley's 1903 reminiscences, Lake Country Sketches, mentions Sir John Crozier, who owned a fox-hunting lodge in that bucolic English area. Crozier is remembered as "a North Country Nimrod."

The North Country Nimrod in question

 

Hobart Caunter's book Legendary & Romantic Tales of Indian History (1885) has a chapter called "The Mahomedan Nimrod," concerning "Mujahid, the son of Mahomed Shah, sovereign of the Deccan," who "was remarkable for his courage and amazing strength of body." Not someone to call a Nimrod, if the name was insulting. 

And let us not forget that Ernest Shackleton, a great explorer of the frozen wastes, sailed a mighty whaler named Nimrod on his 1908 expedition to Antarctica -- one of many intrepid vessels by that name.  

So what happened so unjustly to Nimrod? You probably know. As Ken Zurski noted on the site Unremembered History, in the 1940 Looney Tune cartoon "A Wild Hare," "a wise-cracking rabbit named Bugs Bunny called his nemesis Elmer Fudd a 'poor little nimrod,' a sarcastic reference to Fudd’s skills as a hunter." In fact (and was disputed online quite a bit), the line does not appear in that cartoon. It was not Bugs that called Elmer "my little Nimrod" -- that heap of irony apparently came first from Daffy Duck, in the 1948 short "What Makes Daffy Duck." 

Neither I nor any other kid knew who Nimrod was -- even kids from churchgoing families might be expected to miss a name so briefly mentioned in the Bible -- and Daffy's snottiness seals the deal. The phonemes of NIMrod trip easily off the tongue with disdain, so a kid who didn't know better would just take it as an insult. Plus, it rhymes with dimwad, which sounds very much like a euphemism for dickhead.

Fake Nimrod

In much the same way as irony turned "Entrance of the Gladiators" from a thrilling scene -- mighty warriors prepared to face dismemberment and death in battle -- into clown music, so did the ironic use of the name Nimrod in a Warner Brothers' cartoon turn the mighty hunter into a clown himself. 

I very much doubt that anyone will ever film a biblical epic in the English language entitled Nimrod at this late date. Even Merriam-Webster has as a definition for the name "Idiot, Jerk (slang)".

Alas, poor Nimrod! How unfair is life! To start out a mighty hunter and king, and end up as a Fudd due to ignorance and irony. 

Oh, Nimrod! Oh, humanity! 

Opening up a can.

What's the best way to open a can?

Seems like a simple question, but canned food has been around since 1811, and there have been many means to open those cans in the last 212 years. 

Do you prefer the standard handheld opener with the wheel perpendicular to the top of the can? One of the newer variety with the wheel horizontal to the lid, so you can slice the whole lid off? Do you insist that Spam and other ham products had the right idea, including a key with each can for easy opening? Or do you refuse to get anything comestible in cans but liquids? And if so, do you demand pop-tops or do you use an old-fashioned "church key" type opener?

Some will say nothing beats an electric can opener. But even then you have choices. There are the kind my mom used to have that held and rotated the can as the blade bit into the metal. Then there are the mini ones that actually go around the top on their own. 

If you are a purist, you might like the levered handheld item that had a crescent-shaped blade on top to work around the can. This was considered a safety improvement over the real old-fashioned methods. 

A search for "can opener" on Google Patents yields "About 16,520 results". Goodness gracious me, there seems to be a lot of effort and thought put into a simple question of getting the contents of the can from the inside to the outside. 

Why do I bring this up? Because you know and I know that if we had a bunch of people together in a room and had this discussion, there'd be no agreement on the answer as to which can opener is "best" -- we'd be lucky to get a 50% majority for any one type. And that's on a subject that really isn't a big deal. How can we ever expect to agree on anything serious? Between conflicting visions of what is best and conflicting ideas of how to get there, it's amazing we ever get anything decided at all. 

And this is why I firmly believe humanity is incapable of achieving any kind of utopic society: We're just too ornery. 

Other animals can agree on everything. Every wolf would agree that a piece of meat is good. Every chipmunk might be happy in an identical hole. But it’s not the way we are. To paraphrase from Adam Rex, every cow you meet is the world's greatest expert on being a cow. Every bumblebee knows 100% of everything about being a bumblebee. But people? We have no idea what we're doing a lot of the time. In groups, even less of the time. 

What got me down this road was thinking about Advent, about the Bible, about what we have been given to learn and live by the faith, and I thought maybe it would be nice if we'd had more. But then I figured some people would demand still more, some way less; some would want something different; something more concrete or alternately more artistic; some would want it in blue or black or stripes. In other words, no one thing would seem to be a perfect fit on its face to all of us, even if it really is a perfect fit as we dig deeper into it. 

But man, we sure are malcontents. It keeps us striving for more and better, but it also can get in the way of enjoying what we have.

By the way -- skip the electronics; just more wasted counter space. Handheld classic with the perpendicular wheel. You wanna fight over it?  

Old World craftsmanship.

I was looking through the Book of Esther in the Old Testament. Esther is a fascinating book, a story of a narrow brush with destruction for the Jewish people in exile, a history of the origin of the holiday Purim, and a story of how the courage and faithfulness of two normal people can make an enormous difference. It also shows some amazing carpentry work, if you ask me. 

If you're not familiar with the story, here's the setup: King Ahasuerus of Persia gets a new wife (well, a new #1 wife -- he had plenty) named Esther, whom he does not know is one of the many Jews living in the 127 provinces he controls. The king's top man, Haman, just despises the Jews, especially that old Mordecai who hangs around outside the palace. Haman decides he's going to kill all the Jewish people he can get to, and the date is set for a general massacre throughout the kingdom. 

There's a few things Haman doesn't know beyond the fact that the queen is a Jew. He doesn't know, for example, that Mordecai is Esther's cousin and foster father. He also doesn't seem to know that Mordecai saved King Ahasuerus's life by revealing a plot against him -- not that Mordecai ever got rewarded for it. Oy, such ingratitude! 

Haman's skipping along home, knowing that in a few months' time all the Jews in Persia will be massacred. He sees old Mordecai and thinks: I'm happy as a clam, but that guy burns my bacon! If only I could bump him off now! Haman's wife says, well, so what are you waiting for? Just go ahead and have the old man hanged. 

And here's where the carpentry comes in. 

Haman's wife tells him to build a gallows fifty cubits high, and then tomorrow tell his buddy the king he would like to have Mordecai hanged on it for all the world to see. Haman likes this idea fine, and orders the gallows built. So I asked myself, Self, how high is fifty cubits that the palace crew could knock this together overnight?

Merriam-Webster says a cubit is "any of various ancient units of length based on the length of the forearm from the elbow to the tip of the middle finger and usually equal to about 18 inches (46 centimeters)". So fifty cubits would be 900 inches, or 75 feet tall! You know how many things in an ancient city were seven stories tall? Maybe none. And yet by morning the staff has whacked the gallows together. 

Say what you will against royalty and the lack of rights for individuals, but they could get things done. In the modern era, Haman couldn't have even gotten the forms to fill out for a building permit as fast as it took these guys to shoot a gallows up. When it came to murder machines, they were raring to go! 

Now, one of the interesting bits about Esther's book is that God isn't not mentioned in it. Some Bible scholars and others dislike the book for that reason. And yet, the providence of God is evident. First, Mordecai and Esther fast in preparation for the dangerous act of asking the king a favor (to please not kill us all!), which shows they know they need God. Second, the king is having trouble sleeping -- maybe because some fools are hammering away on a building project all night long, who knows -- and decides that good, soothing reading would be to have his scribes "bring the book of records of the chronicles" and read to him. Maybe it was so dull that it would put anyone out. But what part do the scribes just happen to read that night? The part where Mordecai saves the king's life. The king realizes he never rewarded the Jewish man. He decides it's time to do something about that. Sounds like the hand of God was pointing to the page to me,

By the time Haman gets to the office the next day he is doomed, but he doesn't know it yet. Mordecai becomes a public hero, Esther makes a request of her husband, and guess who winds up hanging from the gallows? Yep, and for centuries "Haman's gallows" was a term either for a weapon that turns on its wielder or a catastrophic reversal of fortune.

Anyway, I was very impressed by the building skills alluded to in this story. I'm told that the author of the book of Esther may have telescoped events for dramatic effect, but I don't know. I'd prefer to think that those Persian carpenters (International Association of Death Machine Workers, Local شش هفت پنج) just knew how to get things done. You want to hang a guy? Such a gallows they'll build! One night, no waiting!

Catch as catch catechism.

This will probably be of no interest to you non-Catholics, so I'll be as brief as I can. The topic says something about the Church, yes, but also about yours truly and his ability to commit. 

On January 1, Ascension Presents started a new podcast/video series called Catechism in a Year. Last year they did a Bible in a Year series, which I had wanted to follow but never did. This year I am all in. 

Everyone knows what the Bible is; the catechism is more easily dismissed as the Catholic Church list of do's and don'ts. Since I was not Catholic growing up and did not have to spend my days being beaten by nuns (we just beat one another up instead), I don't have the dismissiveness toward the catechism that a lot of cradle Catholics I know do. The word catechism comes from late Latin (duh) via the Greek word katēchēsis, or oral teaching. So, the catechism of the Catholic church is a little light reading, 900+ pages of who we are, how we got this way, and what it all means. 

This series is a much deeper dive into the faith than I've ever done, and I sponsored people through the Rites of Catholic Initiation for Adults program for a few years. 

The Ascension series is hosted by Fr. Mike Schmitz, a campus priest with the University of Minnesota in Duluth and what my Catholic school wife and her schoolmates used to call a Father What a Waste. Meaning, he's way too cute to choose a life of celibacy. 

Before getting involved in Catechism in a Year, I'd followed Fr. Mike's own weekly podcast series for a while, and during the Chinese Death Lockdown we would watch his Sunday Mass online. He is a charismatic, enthusiastic priest, who was once on track marry a female person and become an actor. In fact, he was up for the part of Robin in Batman Forever, which means he would have been contracted to play Robin in Batman & Robin with George Clooney and Arnold Schwarzenegger, which means God took mercy on him and gave him the calling. (I don't know what Chris O'Donnell ever did to deserve that.)

Fr. Mike is a dedicated guy. When he says he's doing these series in one year, he means it -- one 15-20+ minute podcast a day, every single day of the year. He reads and comments on a small portion of the catechism in each episode, and a new one appears to subscribers (all free) every morning. 

I don't know how he recorded all that. I'm finding it hard to keep up. Ideas like listening to the podcast while walking the dog -- something I do daily anyhow -- were rejected, because the topic is complex and requires focus. Best that I sit at the computer, have a copy of the catechism out, and pay attention!!!! Which, as I have the attention span of a toddler, has never been easy. Worse, I rely on caffeine now, which I did not as a toddler, so I may be even more scattered as an adult.

Nevertheless, I am enjoying the education. People may think that the Church does things for cruel or arbitrary reasons, but that's never been the case. It's interesting to learn more about why we believe this and that and where we differ from other faiths and denominations. 

The commitment thing is tough. I've already missed a couple of days and had to double up to get back on track. No idea if I can make it through the whole month, let alone the whole year, but I'll keep trying. I'm much better about staying on mission than trying to regroup and restart later. Wish me luck! 

Why trespasses?

Friend and correspondent Mr. Philbin weighs in on Sunday's blog entry concerning the enduring popularity of the Olde Englishe thys and thines ("and you forgot Art," he adds, "as in who ART in Heaven"). He writes:

"Fred: You gave us the KJV translation, but I notice it asks for forgiveness of our debts as we forgive our debtors. BUT THAT'S NOT WHAT PEOPLE SAY. They say 'forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass.' So if that didn't come from the KJV translation, why is it so ingrained in us?"

To which I say, Well, you dirty dog, Philbin! You ... that's actually a darned good question. 

And thank Heaven it is one dealt with online by someone more knowledgeable than I am. 

Richard Beck on the Experimental Theology blog addressed this in a short item ten years ago,  The source of the popular version of the Lord's Prayer, which includes that King James Version thees and thys, is the Anglican (i.e. Episcopalian) church's Book of Common Prayer, the compilation of prayers and rites going back to 1549. The translation of debts as trespasses, Beck notes, came from the 1526 William Tyndale translation of the Bible, a translation that predated the original King James Version by 85 years. 

No doubt Tyndale had a great influence on the KJV editors, but they did not use his same translation of the word for Aramaic words for debt and debtors. 

As for the Book of Common Prayer, that was a step I should not have let out when I addressed this topic. It is impossible to overstate the importance on that book on our culture, especially the 1662 edition that held sway for more than three hundred years. That's where we get the version of the Lord's Prayer people in America know best to this day (although God is said to be "Who art in heaven" not "Which art in heaven" as in that book). 

The Book of Common Prayer is also where we get the marriage rites seen in all the movies ("Dearly beloved, we are gathered together here in the sight of God, and in the face of this congregation, to join together this Man and this Woman in holy Matrimony; which is an honourable estate, instituted of God in the time of man's innocency...") as well as the graveside rite ("Forasmuch as it hath pleased Almighty God of his great mercy to take unto himself the soul of our dear brother here departed, we therefore commit his body to the ground; earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust; in sure and certain hope of the Resurrection to eternal life, through our Lord Jesus Christ" as dirt is shoveled on). You'd think everyone in the movies who dies or gets married, who is not specially designated something else, is an Episcopalian, although only about one percent of American adults identify as such. 

Okay, Mr. Philbin, you got me on that one; I hope you enjoyed your trespass on this blog. Now hit the road before I'm led unto the temptation to smack ya one!

Missing thee.

It's never going to stop being strange to me, how in American churches we spend 99% of the Mass speaking like twentieth-century humans, and then the Lord's Prayer comes up and we're back in the 1600s. "Hallowed be Thy name...."

I think about this from time to time, mainly because I wonder:

1) How did "thee" and "thy" and "thine" and "thou" get shoved aside by "you" and "your" and "yours" and, uh, "you"? You was once the plural form of thee. Nowadays if we want to do a plural version of you we're forced to say youse, you lot, y'all, all y'all, and even sillier things, depending on where you are. (Contrary to popular belief, even the Amish don't use thee, thou, and thy when speaking English.)

2) Why have we stuck with the old construction on the Our Father (and some other ancient prayers like the Hail Mary), but not elsewhere in Mass? I don't know of any churches that use "thee" and "thy" except in the Lord's Prayer, and more modern ones have broken the tradition. Not Catholics! 

3) Is it dumb to keep theeing and thying when we don't speak that way normally? 

Courtesy of BibleInfo

Okay, so, first: What happened to thee? Merriam-Webster asked that musical question, "Why Did We Stop Using 'Thou'?" To quote from their piece:

Formerly we used thou as the second person singular pronoun (which simply means that we would use thou to address another single person). Thee was used in the objective or oblique case (when referring to the object of a verb or preposition), and thou was used in the nominative (when indicating the subject of a verb).

The thing is, one couldn't go saying to the king, "Hey! Thou king!" For some reason the privilege of office -- maybe to stress that one was not just talking to the king, but to everyone in his army sworn to defend him as well -- required the plural. Ah, but as Old English became nuttin' but a cheese and Middle English took over, the democratization of the language brought You to the masses: 

Initially you was used to refer to a person of high social standing (such as royalty, who would be addressed as “your majesty”) but soon came to be used as well when speaking with a social equal.

While dabbling with the Society for Creative Anachronism in college, I learned the classic insult: "I do not bite my thumb at you, m'lord, I bite my thumb at thee." Thee's fightin' words! 

Aside from insults, thou was mostly used for either servants or the socially intimate, but that faded over time as well. 

Okay, so why do we still use the form for the Lord's Prayer? Tradition! 

In the original King James Version, in Matthew 6:9, when Jesus is preaching the Sermon on the Mount, it's rendered in English this way:

After this manner therefore pray ye: Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.

In Luke 11:1, the prayer is slightly different: 

And he said unto them, When ye pray, say, Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done, as in heaven, so in earth. Give us day by day our daily bread. And forgive us our sins; for we also forgive every one that is indebted to us. And lead us not into temptation; but deliver us from evil.

The King James translation was not the first translation of the Bible into English, but it was the premiere English-language Bible available between 1611 and 1769, so its impact had staying power. It was the Bible brought to the American Colonies. Further, when Benjamin Blayney created a revised translation for the Oxford University Press in 1769, he retained the thees and thous. In many houses, if there was any book at all, it was the KJV; if anyone heard any book read aloud anywhere, it was in church. So that's one way to nail down a particular manner of speech, even if the language is changing rapidly outside, by having the language reflected in the most crucial point of culture. 

As modern versions have arisen, using the current idioms such as you and yours, we have found that the thees and thys are so stuck in us culturally that it's hard to change. Even the US Conference of Catholic Bishops uses an updated text, and yet it's almost certain any American Catholic you know will go for the thees and thys. Heck, even people who know nothing of the Bible but have some cultural awareness of the faith will be theeing and thying when they think of the Our Father. 

So: Are we being dumb by using thy for the Our Father? If anything, is it an insult to call God by the singular pronoun, when we wouldn't have done that to Old English kings?

I'm not so sure, actually. We testify that there is "One God, the Father, the Almighty," who although the first of the Holy Trinity, is one God, not a pantheon. In that case, since His Son taught us the prayer to address His Father, it makes sense to not only use but insist on the singular pronoun for the Lord's Prayer. On the other hand, a prayer that addresses the entire Trinity would need to have the plural pronoun. The most prominent one of those is the Glory Be, or Gloria Patri, which names Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, but uses no pronouns. 

I've decided not to argue with anyone either way about this. People have gotten awfully weird about pronouns lately. 

Yes, we should use the updated language used in the very authorized Bible upon which our English-speaking church relies. But tradition is more important than ever in this era, an era that wants dearly to take every possible tradition, everything from longer ago than the nineties, burn it, and take a dump on the ashes. 

In England, the country that gave us the great King James Version of the Bible, Christians are a minority for the first time in 1500-odd years. What follows when a nation turns from faith in Christ is never good. At this juncture, we'd better hold on to all the great traditions we have. 

Abraham.

Advent begins today. It has me thinking of a much more ancient section of the Bible, though. 

When I was a young uneducated moron, the only thing I knew about the Sacrifice of Isaac from Genesis 22 was a Saturday Night Live sketch and Bob Dylan's song "Highway 61 Revisited." I learned more later. 

For what is a key moment in the history of human and divine relations, the whole story is quick, only 10 verses in any standard Christian Bible: 

Some time afterward, God put Abraham to the test and said to him: Abraham! “Here I am!” he replied.

Then God said: Take your son Isaac, your only one, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah. There offer him up as a burnt offering on one of the heights that I will point out to you.

Early the next morning Abraham saddled his donkey, took with him two of his servants and his son Isaac, and after cutting the wood for the burnt offering, set out for the place of which God had told him.

On the third day Abraham caught sight of the place from a distance.

Abraham said to his servants: “Stay here with the donkey, while the boy and I go on over there. We will worship and then come back to you.”

So Abraham took the wood for the burnt offering and laid it on his son Isaac, while he himself carried the fire and the knife. As the two walked on together,

Isaac spoke to his father Abraham. “Father!” he said. “Here I am,” he replied. Isaac continued, “Here are the fire and the wood, but where is the sheep for the burnt offering?”

“My son,” Abraham answered, “God will provide the sheep for the burnt offering.” Then the two walked on together.

When they came to the place of which God had told him, Abraham built an altar there and arranged the wood on it. Next he bound his son Isaac, and put him on top of the wood on the altar.

Then Abraham reached out and took the knife to slaughter his son.

But the angel of the LORD called to him from heaven, “Abraham, Abraham!” “Here I am,” he answered.

“Do not lay your hand on the boy,” said the angel. “Do not do the least thing to him. For now I know that you fear God, since you did not withhold from me your son, your only one.”

Abraham looked up and saw a single ram caught by its horns in the thicket. So Abraham went and took the ram and offered it up as a burnt offering in place of his son.

Depending on who's doing the reading, the sacrifice of Isaac may the craziest or greatest action ever contemplated. We know at this point in the Bible that Isaac is the long-hoped-for son of his father and mother, one granted by God in their old age, when all hope had been lost. And now God wants Abraham to kill Isaac? And Abraham goes right along with it, right up until his hand is about to strike the killing blow? 

Surely anyone doing that now would be thought crazy, and rightly so. (Those of us who believe in the story think that it's very unlikely God would do the same exact challenge twice.) 

After thinking about it for a while, a few years ago I came to a realization that undoubtedly many before me had as well. God wasn't testing Abraham here; He knows everything, and He knew Abraham would follow God's command in this greatest test. But Abraham had to know that his obedience would go to any lengths. After this, Abraham never need doubt his devotion, or the strength of it, again. Most of us do, and a lot.

As the Bible is intended to recount a history rather than tell a modern tale, we don't know much about Abraham's (or anyone's) inner life during such tribulations. What was he thinking? If it were me, I might have thought, I will do as God commands, but I will lie down next to Isaac as the fire rises and be a second sacrifice. 

Or I'd just leave it to my wife to kill me when I got home after I told her what I had done. Sarah was no mouse.

Jesus's followers show again and again how hard it is when God calls one to complete obedience. Andrew is not known for much, but when called he dropped his nets immediately and followed. Peter needed proof. The rich young man followed the Commandments, but when told to sell all he had and follow Jesus, he turned away, devastated. When Jesus told his followers they would have to gnaw on his flesh and drink his blood (!!!!), there was mass desertion. These stories make perfect sense to us, and they also throw Abraham's devotion into stark relief. He became the father of a great people, because he was completely obedient to God.

What, I wonder, am I do say if I'm being called to give up something I truly love -- maybe the only thing I truly love? 

I don't know the answer, and I've been thinking about it a lot.

The five tools.

A visiting priest gave an interesting homily in our church a few weeks ago. In addition to a hair-raising story of possession, he told us the five tools the Devil uses against us. I was all ears—with my history, it’s not surprising that I believed in the existence of the Devil before I believed in the existence of God.

The tools are:

Apathy: It doesn't matter, nothing matters, or at least nothing has to be done today.

Temptation: What will one [dangerous thing] hurt? YOLO! Sure, you said [promise] but aren't there extenuating circumstances? Just this once. You're worth it!

Accusation: You're a piece of garbage, just give up, nothing you do is right, might as well go all in. (Satan is known as the accuser, and loves this one.)

Deception: Just flat-out lies to make the bad look good and the good look bad. Betrayal is good, selfishness is the highest virtue, truth is what you make of it, there is no devil, and so on. The father of lies indeed. 

Discouragement: After this, you should just give up all hope.

As you can imagine, the road to perdition involves these five in countless combinations and shadings. Anyone who has read Lewis's The Screwtape Letters has had a good education in how these tools can be used to attack, twist, blind, and mangle a human soul. 

Catholics, among others, are bound to believe that humanity is faced with this enemy who seeks our destruction. We can't outsmart him, we can't overpower him. With all due respect to the late Charlie Daniels, it is exceptionally unlikely one can beat him. And yet, we have no choice but to do battle or lose without a whimper.

Fortunately, we do not go into battle alone. And that, as you know, is a much better story with a much happier ending. 

Twenty-one.

 Psalms

Chapter 137

1  By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.

2  We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof.

3  For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song; and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion.

4  How shall we sing the LORD'S song in a strange land?

5  If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning.

6  If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy.

7  Remember, O LORD, the children of Edom in the day of Jerusalem; who said, Rase it, rase it, even to the foundation thereof.

8  O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed; happy shall he be, that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us.

9  Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.

Baby feets!

We were very happy the other day to meet our friends at the dog park. Our dogs were also happy to see their dog, who has been close with Tralfaz for years, was a great friend to the late Nipper, and now is like an auntie to baby dog Izzy. 

And speaking of babies, it was our first chance to meet their new human baby!

The baby, of course, was the pinnacle of cuteness, riding on her mom in a front carrier. When last we'd seen this baby, she was still doin' time on the inside. Now she's a free baby, and all is well. 

I'm not sure that the baby was happy to see us, though. The problem was, the mom is not especially tall, but our dogs are large, and they both are able to reach the baby's feet dangling down out of the carrier. And as we all know, baby feets are indescribably delicious. 

I'm happy to report there was no biting or nibbling, but there were a number of licks on the bottom of baby's socks, and I don't think she cared for the experience. Did it tickle? Did she even notice it? Was she just feeling fussy for no reason relating to the feets? What babies are feeling is often mysterious, at least until they erupt in one fashion or other. 

Anyway, I think we can agree that of all the things in the animal kingdom, mammal babies got the best feets. Bug feets, not so cute. Some bird feets are quite excellent, especially those of the world-renowned blue-footed booby, but on the whole, mammals are tops. 

Maybe that's part of the serpent's curse from Eden in Genesis 3:15 -- 

I will put enmity between you and the woman,

and between your offspring and hers;

They will strike at your head,

while you strike at their heel

And you got no cute feets!

The Bible and broccoli.

I suspect most husbands find themselves cast into the outer darkness (i.e., the guest room or equivalent) from time to time, due to the unpleasant experience of -- dare I say it? -- gas. 

Why do broccoli and similar vegetables call forth Maria? VeryWell Health says "The fiber in them is not completely digested in the small intestine. When the good bacteria in the large intestine go to work digesting it, gas is created as a result." Lying down on the job again, eh, small intestine? This will come up on your review. 

Of course, it all could be much worse. We could be Antiochus.

Antiochus IV Epiphanes was a typically arrogant Hellenistic king, enemy of the Jews, just the sort of schmuck destined for a bad end in the Old Testament. According to 2 Maccabees 9, he found himself being attacked on many sides, and having been chased out of Persia at one point, decided to take it out on Jerusalem. He said, “I will make Jerusalem the common graveyard of Jews as soon as I arrive there.”

Spoiler alert: This did not happen.

So the all-seeing Lord, the God of Israel, struck him down with an incurable and invisible blow; for scarcely had he uttered those words when he was seized with excruciating pains in his bowels and sharp internal torment, a fit punishment for him who had tortured the bowels of others with many barbarous torments.

It's important to keep Antiochus's cruelty in mind as the chapter continues, because his punishment is one of the nastiest in the Bible:

The body of this impious man swarmed with worms, and while he was still alive in hideous torments, his flesh rotted off, so that the entire army was sickened by the stench of his corruption. Shortly before, he had thought that he could reach the stars of heaven, and now, no one could endure to transport the man because of this intolerable stench. At last, broken in spirit, he began to give up his excessive arrogance, and to gain some understanding, under the scourge of God, for he was racked with pain unceasingly. When he could no longer bear his own stench, he said, “It is right to be subject to God, and not to think one’s mortal self equal to God.”

Hope you weren't eating! 

Antiochus sets his affairs in order by naming his son successor, and then, "this murderer and blasphemer, after extreme sufferings, such as he had inflicted on others, died a miserable death in the mountains of a foreign land," stinkin' all the way. 

Now, perhaps it is a bit extreme to compare someone who has been ingesting broccoli, or White Castle sliders, or huge amounts of garlic, or beer, or anything pungent to the vile, diseased doom of a vile regent. That all depends on how the people you live with react. 

It's probably best to go outside and let the breeze blow away the eau de ugh, then take a shower. It beats a miserable death in the mountains of a foreign land -- or sleeping on the sofa every night.

Christmas +1.

Whew.

So, Chinese Death Virus Christmas was okay. Santa was very good to me. I got some AirPods for the iPhone, a Batman T-shirt (not that I'm in danger of being confused with Batman), a FitBit, and some Black Rifle coffee, among other awesome things. 

All the same, it was weird. Mass was attended online. And it was sort of an anti-white Christmas, by which I don't mean there was a BLM rally outside the house. The temperature got up to almost 60, and the rain was heavy enough to cause flood warnings, so all the snow we had last week is completely gone. Even the mound at the end of the driveway, which had been more than three feet high, vanished within 24 hours. The ground got all muddy and squishy. 

It was also one of the most windy days I can recall here, and we've had a couple of hurricanes come by since we moved to suburbia. The roof I spent a fortune on this summer shed shingles like my dogs shed hair, leading me to spend Christmas morning cursing like a truck driver as I picked them up off the lawn. Up the street, a guy who put up a big PVC privacy fence at the corner saw it blown to bits, which was 100% predictable given our weather history; a cheap and lightweight fence with no windbreak and no means to allow airflow was going to get it. It just happened sooner than I expected. Meanwhile, so many reindeer cutouts on various lawns got flattened and jumbled that it looked like Santa's air traffic control had suffered a catastrophic screwup. 

In other news, while using the mandoline on some vegetables for Christmas dinner I managed to slice off a tiny bit of my right index finger, just about the time I was thinking how careful I was being. The Bible wins again. Bled like crazy and hurt like heck. So now I have to type without my right index finger, and have discovered that it pretty much does all the heavy lifting when I type. This entry is taking twice as long to write as it normally would. 

All the same, it was a lovely day, and a fitting end to the strange Advent of a strange year. Today it's two turtle doves and off toward the new year we go!

Rating Jacob's kids.

We're getting biblical here, folks! By that I mean we are looking some personages of the Bible and rating them by what could possibly be the dumbest criteria available -- their names.

Specifically I'm focused on the twelve sons of patriarch Jacob, who has name issues too, as he was also called Israel. What's up with that? Run out on the landlord and change your name? Har har. Okay, that's even too dumb for this blog entry.

Here are the boys, in their birth order. Now, remember, we're not ranking them based on who they were or what they did, although that may get a mention; this is all about how cool or dumb their names are to our modern ears.

1. Reuben
2. Simeon
3. Levi
4. Judah
5. Dan
6. Naphtali
7. Gad
8. Asher
9. Issachar
10. Zebulun
11. Joseph
12. Benjamin

Now, the examination:

Reuben: Eldest son of Jacob and Leah. Made one crucial error: forced himself on his dad's concubine. That cost him Dad's blessing, as it will. But then again, when the brothers planned to kill Dad's fave, Joseph, Reuben tried to save him. As for the name, many Americans may associate Reuben with the manager of the Partridge Family. Not as old-fashioned as other Genesis names, but not popular either. Great sandwich, though, even if the origin of it is disputed. Ranking: So-so.

Simeon: Also called Shimon, but we're only looking at the Simeon version. And I think we can all agree that through no fault of Simeon's or any one else named Simeon, it sounds like the adjective for apes and monkeys (simian), which is inviting playground horror, especially on the monkey bars. Also, Simeon was a vengeful boy, along with brother Levi, but we'll get to that. Ranking: Poor.

Levi: Best known now as the name of Mr. Blue Jeans himself, Levi Strauss. Interestingly, Levi Strauss's name at birth in Germany was Loeb; he thought it didn't sound American enough when he emigrated to the states, so he changed it to Levi. And yet Levi sounds olde-tyme and foreign now. I think there used to be a lot more Levis in America. The original Levi and his brother Simeon pulled a fast one that got them in Dutch with Dad: When their sister was raped, and the villain's father wanted to make things "right" in the Old Testament way by arranging their marriage, Levi and Simeon insisted that it could be so if their whole town agreed to be circumcised. Owie! "While the men of the city are incapacitated by the pain of the surgical procedure they have just endured," says My Jewish Learning, "Shimon and Levi swoop down and massacre one and all. Jacob has been deceived into complicity with the diabolical and immoral behavior of his hotheaded sons. He has been duped into inclusion in a council of lawlessness bent on the angry slaying of men." Doesn't have much to do with the ranking of the name, but maybe it's why Levi isn't more popular. And I'm glad I don't live in Old Testament times. Ranking: Below average.

Judah: Nothing wrong with Judah, but since a portion of the nation of Israel became known as Judah in 930 BC and was referred to that way in the New Testament, it tends to be thought of as a name properly used by Jewish people rather than goyim, which limits its popularity. Place names can be that way. The names Jude and Judd likely come from Judah, but we're not concerned with derivations today. Ranking: Just okay.

Dan: Hey, that's a fine name. Usually a nickname for Daniel, but if you named your boy just Dan, most people would never know he wasn't Daniel. But you would know. Ranking: Goodish.

Naphtali: I think you'd have to be pretty hard-core to name your son Naphtali, either hard-core biblical or hard-core pretentious. The name means "My Struggle," which might appeal if his mother was in labor for three days with him, but so does Mein Kampf. Plus, it sounds way too much like Natalie. Ranking: Rock bottom.

Gad: Gad, on the other hand, means "Fortune" or "Luck," which is good. But it sounds like W.C. Fields taking the Lord's name in vain. Also, the name may have come from a pagan goddess, which makes it stranger. And it is a verb meaning to move around restlessly and pointlessly, which makes it a poor name for a man with a serious career, like mortician or septic tank engineer. Just seems a little silly. Ranking: Meh.

Asher: I'm not crazy about Asher, but I feel like it has more modern acceptance than most of the others. I've heard of boys named Archer and Fisher, and those seem like career-defining names, or hobby-defining games anyway. How does one ash? Well, that's not what the name is about. It means "Happy," which is nice. Ranking: Above average.

Issachar: Got to tell you, I like Issachar. As names go, it may be my favorite of the twelve. Dramatic. Manly. It lends itself to Izzy, which is a better nickname than most. But while it can sound cool and interesting, it can also sound fusty and weird. Maybe it depends on the kid. Still, I'm in Issachar's corner, although I am sure I would never be allowed to name a son of mine Issachar Key. Ranking: Good.

Zebulun: And this is my second-favorite name. Jacob clumped the best near the end. To anyone not versed in the Bible, this could seem like the name of a planet from Star Trek. "Stardate: 8137. Tuesday. We arrived at the planet Zebulun V to retrieve the Federation ambassador. Then it all went to hell." Zebulun means "Dwelling," which sounds kind of homebodyish, and its obvious nickname, Zeb, calls to mind a wacky old toothless farmhand. Then again, so did names like Zack and Zeke not long ago, and they've had a renaissance. Ranking: Needs improvement.

Joseph: Now we come to Mighty Joe Young, the hero of the closing chapters of Genesis, the interpreter of dreams and Pharaoh's BFF. Of all the sons' names, Joseph is the most normal and even boring to modern ears. Joe Six-pack, Good ol' Joe, Joe Bloe, Average Joe. But was this the case before the twentieth century? There's never been a Joseph I, King of England; the Roman church has never had a Pope Joseph; we've never had a president named Joseph (not yet, anyway!). It's still a grand name, the name of my Confirmation saint, but maybe a little too common even now. Ranking: Way up there.

Benjamin: Benny's original name was Benoni, "Son of My Pain," from his mother's agony at giving birth to him, the act that killed her. Naturally, Jacob preferred something less horrible, especially since he was fond of Benjamin's mother, so he changed it. Ben was the only full-blood brother of Joseph, for what that's worth. Anyway, yes, great name. Ben Franklin made it an American classic. It works in multiple ways, too: Ben is great for a serious leader, Benny for a wily jokester, Benjy for a cute kid brother, Benjamin for a stuffed shirt, Jamin for ... Ska improv? French ham? Ranking: Top drawer.

All right! Let's put the names in the processor and see what we got:

1. Zebulun
2. Issachar
3. Joseph
4. Benjamin
5. Asher
6. Reuben
7. Dan
8. Levi
9. Gad
10. Judah
11. Simeon
12. Naphtali

There you go! Now if anyone asks you which name was the fifth-best among Jacob's sons, you will know. Be here next time when we sort out everybody in Judges 2! 

Two fires.

On Friday, the Great Lileks of Minneapolis closed his blog to comments for the first time I can remember since he began allowing comments. He had written a heartfelt entry about the riots racking his beloved city. I think he knows how much his regular gang of Bleatniks feels for him and his town, but I think he didn't want to have to deal with trolls. Maybe he didn't even want to deal with sympathy. When something hurts to a particular degree and there's no means of relief, sometimes you have to endure it in solitude.

Today is Pentecost Sunday.

When the time for Pentecost was fulfilled, they were all in one place together.
And suddenly there came from the sky a noise like a strong driving wind, and it filled the entire house in which they were.
Then there appeared to them tongues as of fire, which parted and came to rest on each one of them.
And they were all filled with the holy Spirit and began to speak in different tongues, as the Spirit enabled them to proclaim.

The description of the visible effect of the Holy Spirit's descent, tongues as of fire, is particularly powerful. Fire burns, but energizes; it gives life; it gives light. Before the nineteenth century we lived in a world lit only by fire. But it is dangerous.

The other fire we see today is lit by rioters who mostly don't care about the initial cause of their anger. I don't think the arsonists just want to see the world burn, although the high spirits of destruction adore that sort of thing. This is the spirit of the other kind of fire, born in hate, not in love as on Pentecost. The kind born in love endures all things, turns the other cheek when struck, forgives its persecutors. The kind born in hate despises its own nation and people, destroys the homes and livelihoods of innocents. The authorities could take a page from those who have us COVID-19 and do a Tienanmen Square on them, but they won't even take reasonable responses let alone unreasonable ones. 

This insane year has seen plenty of fevers, but is now reaching a fever pitch. I think our friend PLWoodstock surmised on Lileks's Thursday page that a lot of this destruction may be fueled by quarantine frustration too, and I agree. Violent, greedy, foolish actions are what we can always expect from a mob, but this is another level, the fire fueled by insanity as well as anarchy. And it started in the state known as the nicest in the country.

I know that people are legitimately angry about the issue that sparked this whole thing, and many may cite the famous but anonymous maxim popular with abolitionists: Fīat jūstitia ruat cælum, "Let justice be done though the heavens fall." But who will dole out justice to those who are burning businesses, homes, low-cost housing that belonged to or was meant for their neighbors?

Nothing much can be done from my desk but pray. Come, Holy Spirit, and renew the face of the earth.

Fred's Book Club: Itty Bitty.Books.

Welcome back to the Humpback Writers, the book feature that has little to do with humps or backs, or sometimes even writers, but always falls on Wednesday.

This week we have a twofer -- two miniature books from the great year of 1995 that are very different indeed. Actually it should be a fourfer, but I'll explain.

In 1995, the Penguin publishing company was celebrating its 60th anniversary, so they decided to do a run of little tiny books called Penguin 60s. In Penguin's ancestral home of the UK they released two sets of these, each with 60 books (a "black" set and an "orange" set, based on the spine colors), but in the US/Canada they just had one set of 60 in orange. I think they all retailed for 95 cents ($1.49 Canadian!) and were usually found near the cash registers, which is how I came to own these. I'm a sucker for impulse buys in bookstores. The books were either self-contained pieces (stories or essays) or excerpts from longer works. Writers included modern and past luminaries like Goethe, Will Self, Poe, Robertson Davies, Kipling, Patricia Highsmith, and so on. Penguin, of course, made its name beginning in 1935 as a publisher of paperback versions of good literature, intended to make the benefits of quality books available to all. You can see their original ten books here.

The company seems to have done similar anniversary series for their 70th and 80th anniversaries, but I think only in the UK. Whether they will do a 90th anniversary series in 2025, who knows. Impulse buys in bookstores don't move the way they used to, because there are fewer bookstores. I would doubt it anyhow. Penguin merged with Random House in 2013, and now the fabled publisher is a mere imprint. Nothing like a merger to wipe out a company's culture and history.

But the Penguin 60s series was fun, and played on the publisher's mixed history of classical literature and new books. Take for example the Milne Pooh book on the right; it takes pages from Winnie-the-Pooh, When We Were Very Young, and Now We Are Six. The Teachings of Jesus book contains excerpts from the King James Version of the New Testament written out as essays. I also have The Lives of the Saints, excerpted and translated from Fr. Omer Englebert's encyclopedic biography. These books are all 50 to 90 pages long, and fit in your shirt pocket or the palm of your hand.

I used to have a fourth book in the series, a story published previously by Stephen King in his 1993 collection Nightmares & Dreamscapes: Umney's Last Case. It's an interesting and weird detective novella. God knows what I did with it. Could be with the box of books in the cellar, or maybe I lent it to someone like an idiot. The story was adapted for TV in 2006 for TNT, starring William H. Macy.

So those are some of my small books, but these are not the smallest books I own; that pride of minuscule place still belongs to the baseball book I profiled here back in January. And, as I said earlier this month, aren't miniature things fun?

Camp songs.

My wife and I got into a scriptural disagreement the other morning, because we are highly educated Catholics and do that sort of thing, you know. I made a passing reference to the fact that some Bible translations of Genesis say it was gopherwood from which Noah built his famous ark, although other scholars are uncertain what gopherwood is, and some think it was cypress. Mrs. K disagreed; in her studies she was informed that the ark was actually built of "sticks and barky barky."

Her source for this was, of course, sleepaway camp, where she was taught the following 'round the ol' campfire:

So Noah, he built him, he built him an arky arky
Noah, so Noah, he built him an arky arky
Made it out of sticks and barky barky
Children of the Lord

You can see how difficult it is to argue against evidence like that. But it didn't end there. When I mentioned that in the book of Jonah, chapter 2, the reluctant prophet was swallowed not by a whale but by a "great fish," I was rebutted again with a different song:

Jonah Jonah Jonah
In the belly of a whale...

Obviously camp songs have a lot of misinformation about scripture. So I decided that I would write a biblically accurate camp song.

I don't have the melody -- heck, we don't know if anyone's actually going to a summer camp this year -- but I came up with lyrics about King Saul and his anger at David. It goes a little something like this:

Old King Saul was jealous
Because David was so zealous
And he saw him as a rival to the throne (boom boom)
Saul's son Jack said "You should beat it
Or my pop will make you eat it"
David thought he would leave well enough alone (boom boom)

(Chorus) And Saul chased David here
And then Saul chased David there
From Keillah down to Nob 
King Saul he chased that little slob
Mighty Saul chased little David everywhere! (boom boom)

Angry Saul he then killed thousands
As he pushed through towns and mountains
Hoping that he would at last chop David's head (boom boom)
But then David got the jump and
As old Saul, he took a dump, and
David cut a piece of kingly robe instead (boom boom)

(Chorus)

Then once more they went to Ziph
And David had a great epiph-
-Any to scare off Saul by leaving him his spear (boom boom)
When Saul saw it by his head
And realized Dave could leave him dead
He said, "Okay, Dave, I'm buggin' out of here" (boom boom)

(Chorus)

There. I hope at least the kids will get this story right.

Next up, my camp song about how David arranged for Uriah to get killed so he could make whoopee with Bathsheba. Arky arky indeed!

For all those who work, or want to.

Just last year I dedicated my May 1 blog post to St. Joseph, patron saint of all who work. May 1 is the day we celebrate the feast of St. Joseph the Worker, a much better celebration than May Day, which is enjoyed in dictatorial nations like the one that recently gave us all the deadly virus that has caused some to be horribly overworked and many more to be completely jobless.

It's funny that St. Joseph is so important, since he doesn't get a word in edgewise in the Bible. Really, no dialogue recorded. But that means when he is called on to do something, he does it without comment or question, unlike almost every other figure in the Bible, including Mary at the Annunciation and Jesus Himself in His agony in the Garden of Gethsemane.

Also, something that only occurred to me this year: When Jesus was brought as a baby to the temple for dedication, St. Simeon declares to Mary that “Behold, this child is destined for the fall and rise of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be contradicted (and you yourself a sword will pierce) so that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.” He says nothing about Joseph, which had to make Joseph think, And where will I be when all this is going on? And I'm sure he knew what it meant.

To those so inclined, it would be a good day to ask St. Joseph to intercede for all workers affected by this horrible COVID-19 virus -- those who have been stricken with it, those who have died, those who have worked long hours to help the sick, those who have seen their jobs or businesses evaporate or trickle down to nothing, those who have no idea what the future will bring and see only bleak horizons. Individually the value of work is crucial to our mental and even spiritual well-being, not to mention our survival and that of our families. Together, we desperately need to get back to work to lift our nations and our civilization back from the brink of economic ruin. Most of us are trying to do whatever we are asked in this quarantine, but the price is getting steeper by the day.

As I've said before, St. Joseph, the Protector of the Holy Family, really comes through for us, at least in my experience, although maybe not in the ways we expect (or even want). He's my Confirmation saint, because I love his stoicism in the face of peril and struggle -- unlike me -- and because he was a hard worker -- and at heart I'm lazy and need someone to kick my behind.

I hope we can get past this soon and get back to our jobs. As the saying goes, pray for potatoes but pick up the shovel.

Armageddon! Ragnarok! Apocalypse!

Well, it felt a little like that yesterday with that storm that raged through here. We're used to a lot of bad weather, but gusts in the fifties are pretty unusual for New York. You can definitely feel that kind of wind in the skyscrapers, and it can scare the crap out of you. But in fact, things were much worse at ground level in the southern states, with more than thirty deaths reported as of this morning.

Along with the worldwide pandemic, things are feeling a little end-of-the-worldish, are they not? There's even a plague of locusts in Africa. So the four horsemen -- Pestilence, Famine, Death, and War (with China) are ticked off, along with a fifth one, Terrifying Weather.

Which included a plague of dill pickles on my
front lawn last night.

I'd add my own personal sixth horseman of the apocalypse: Hospital Bill.

I got a call from the hospital billing department yesterday to inform me, very pleasantly, that I owe them more than four thousand bucks from my little visit last February. Now, this was stunning, but more so because I've already paid bills totally close to two grand, including a few hundred for a strange foreign gentleman named (honest!) Zoltan, who came to my bed of pain in the ER to whack me in various spots with a reflex hammer. So I was expecting more billing, but not on this scale. 

You just never know when it's over with hospitals. 

In my mind, every episode of House would have ended the same way. 

"Your brilliance has once again saved another patient, Dr. House! None of us could have known that his Cushing's syndrome was masking his Sjogren's syndrome! But when he got the fifteenth bill he hanged himself in the garage."

"Okay. So what's going on with the fat slob with the creeping crud on his junk?"

Oh, well. I am told that there's a handy interest-free payment plan, so I can go broke over the long run rather than right away. So I got that going for me. 

Honestly, I could even take all that on the chin if I only knew for sure that there'd be no more bills. But who knows -- Zoltan might send me an invoice to buy a new hammer. 

Maybe I'll send him a nice jar of dill pickles.