Ditch Doc

Next time a cow with BSE shows up in your country, kill all the cows you have to to make yourself feel safe. Don’t burn them though. Send them to African villages dying of starvation. But make sure that each crate has this warning on it:

Warning! Eating this meat will result in a 1 in 17,000,000 chance of developing a fatal brain disease. Consume at your own risk!

Maybe there should be a separate warning as well:

Warning! No matter how hungry they look, don’t feed this meat to cows!

I was just starting to think that I was having a pretty successful violin practise when I took a break and noticed that the kids playing on the grass outside had started howling like dogs.

The ancients thought of music as a branch of mathematics, which makes most of us say: “What a boring, stilted way to look at music.” But why not: “What a sublime way to look at math!”

Sometimes I tell people they should learn about Christianity, if for no other reason, then at least so they can understand their own cultural background. I still think that’s true, but I’ve just been reading St. Thomas a Kempis, and now I wonder, if your cultural learning about the idea of Christ doesn’t lead you to worship the man Christ, what was the point?

When I interviewed at Dalhousie, I had somehow managed to be one of 50 applicants from a pool of 400 who interviewed for 9 out-of-province spots. With stats like that, Dal gets to pick the absolute cream of the out-of-province crop, and for the whole weekend, I didn’t meet a single person besides myself who wasn’t either working on or in possession of an M.Sc. or a Ph.D. It seemed like everyone had done AIDS work in Africa, or at least putzed around South-East Asia on a motorbike. What’s hardest to believe, they were mostly articulate, funny people with wide interests and good taste in beer. I don’t recall ever having been so humbled.

At Queen’s, we got a campus tour, provided by a couple of first year meds. Here’s how it started:

Student 1: Uhh… Here are some pretty buildings… That one’s the theology building…

Student 2: Wait, theology’s, like, religion studies, right?

S1: Well… Um… It’s part of the arts faculty…

Revelation: “Did I interview better than you two? Yes I did.” I hope they thought I was smiling at the pretty buildings.

I grumble about Chapters, Starbuck’s and Walmart as much as the next guy, but that doesn’t prevent my appreciating a clever turn of physical marketing when I see one. For example, when you enter the Barnes & Noble on Broadway in Manhattan, the escalators are lined up in sequence to shoot you straight to the fourth floor cafe and magazine section. On the way down, though, the escalators are disjointed, so that you have to walk past a few hundred feet of bookshelves to get to the exit. Brilliant.

It will do your soul great good to go and see this movie. The filmmaker waited sixteen years to be allowed into the Carthusian monastery of la Grande Chartreuse to film the lives of the monks. The result was 162 nearly silent minutes of footage, all filmed without a crew or artificial lighting. There’s no soundtrack and no narration, and only one short interview, from which the interviewer’s voice has been deleted so as not to spoil the Carthusian-ness. You might leave the theater with a better understanding of monastic life, and I’ll bet you’ll go through your whole next day a lot more slowly and quietly.