Tuesday, April 16, 2002

HMFC Calculator

Probably one of the best Auto-financing slide rules (actual slide-rule!) I've seen yet.

Monday, April 15, 2002

Districts cracking down Drug look-alikes will be treated as real drugs, officials say

"Several area school districts want to make it perfectly clear: Substances
that look like drugs will be treated the same as the real stuff.

"That practice recently came into sharp focus when 19 fifth-graders and
one third-grader from Northwest Elementary School in Howell were
suspended for either manufacturing, using, selling or distributing a mixture
of grape Kool-Aid, strawberry Jell-O and sugar packaged in plastic bags."

Manufacturing, using, selling, or distributing KOOL-AID?!?! And for this they ruin some poor kid's academic career at age 8?!

This drug paranoia thing has gone too far.

Sunday, April 14, 2002

Opera Pop and Opera Rap

from Drumbeat, the fine Korean record label.

Ah, yeah.
EWTN News Story

The plot/theme of my second novel or first or second screenplay is starting to gel...
CATHOLIC ENCYCLOPEDIA: Glagolitic

More on Glagolitic.
Croatian Glagolitic Script

Interesting: in the 13th c. the Croats were the only people (in the Roman Church, I assume) given dispensation by Pope Innocent IV to use a language other than Latin in their sacred liturgies: that language was Glagolitic.

I'm listening to Janacek's Glagolitic Mass and was wondering what Glagolitic was. It is very cool script.

Monday, April 08, 2002

Thursday, April 04, 2002

Fawning Critics Don't Say Book Was Fraud
One thing I find a little off-putting is when parents teach their small children "tricks," to look cute at parties or whatever. I was at a party a few years ago and this 2-year-old had been trained to do the dance from Rose Royce's "Car Wash." I found it very disturbing. If you want to teach something cute tricks, get a monkey.

I don't think my parents ever taught me any tricks. I think they respected that I was a separate and distinct human individual with all of the dignity associated with that. They did help me buy magic tricks from the Ann Arbor Magic Shoppe (run by Ann Arbor Magician Daryl Hurst, and located only about 2 miles from my house at the Fox Village Shopping Center -- this was back before such things were called "strip malls,").

Anyway, there's no gaurantee that I would never do such a thing to my own children ("'Xander, recite the first 11 lines of the Aeneid in latin, placing proper emphasis on each of the dactyls!") but at least I'm off to a good start: even little kids, you have to let them be.

Wednesday, April 03, 2002

In exactly 30 days (one month, 'cause it's April), I will have been blogging for exactly one year. Perhaps that would be an opportune time to hang it up for good? My commmittment to blogging (as much as it ever was a committment) really has fallen off in the past three months.

Not to worry, though... Perhaps The Censer will bow within the next month or two.
CATHOLIC LEAGUE for Religious and Civil Rights

The best evidence suggests that the rate of priest pedophilia is about the same as found among the clergy of other religions. It runs
between 2 and 5 percent. The rate in the general adult population is 8 percent. Given this data it is not easy to demonstrate that
celibacy is the problem. Indeed, the Anglican dioceses in British Columbia are going bankrupt because so many ministers can?t keep
their hands to themselves. And these men are married.