This was a fun discovery. Next time you make a white sauce, smash up a few juniper berries and mix then in. But be warned: It takes forever for them to develop. The first time I tried this, I put six or eight berries in a Stilton and blue cheese sauce, just enough to give it a subtle hint of conifer. When I ate the leftovers the next day, the juniper had taken over. The sauce tasted like gin. Good, but a little startling.
Problem: I’m in a hotel, shaving for an important job interview, and haven’t brought any oil for the touch-up.
Solution: The complimentary conditioner gives nearly as much blade slip as oil. But it IS water soluble, so apply plenty, and be careful not to rinse it all off before you’re done.
Update: Ditch Dad reports that Grandpa once ran out of shaving cream and used a complimentary pat of butter. He does not say whether this was because conditioner hadn’t been invented yet, or because it wasn’t manly enough for Grandpa’s face.
I’d always wondered why limericks sound so emphatically complete at the end. They shouldn’t. They’re five lines long, already an unstable number, and the last has to reach three lines back for its rhyme. Here’s the trick: A limerick is based on a strict but cleverly camouflaged anapestic quadrameter. The three long lines each begin with three explicit anapests and end with a silent one. The two short lines are actually one long one, disguised by an internal rhyme and an explicit fourth foot. So a limerick is in fact only four lines long, and the fourth rhymes the second, as it would in any less devious poem. Observe: (Square brackets denote silent syllables.)
. . / . . / . . / [ . . / ]
Once an epicure dining at Kew,
. . / . . / . . / [ . . / ]
Found a rather large mouse in his stew.
. . / . . /[.] . / . . /
Said the waiter don’t shout, and wave it about,
. . / . . / . . / [ . . / ]
Or the rest will be wanting one too.
I trust familiarity will not harm affection.
The Liber is full of internal references that join different parts of the liturgical year like secret passages between distant rooms in a mansion. For example, the Gradual of the first Sunday of Lent has the same tune as that of the Mass for the Dead, just with different text. That means both are in mode two, the ‘sad’ mode. They also both have words brimming over with hope.
The Requiem Gradual begins with the text of the introit,
‘Eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon them,’ and continues: ‘The just shall be in everlasting remembrance: he shall not fear the evil hearing.’ (Ps. 111:7)
Today’s Gradual goes:
‘He hath given his angels charge over thee; to keep thee in all thy ways. In their hands they shall bear thee up: lest thou dash thy foot against a stone.’ (Ps. 90:11-12) The Tract (also in mode two) restates most of the same Psalm, concluding with ‘I will fill him with length of days; and I will show him my salvation.’
I imagine the point of the allusion is that Lent is a small death in rehearsal for the real thing. Both involve real sorrow. But the hopeful words say the sorrow is there not for its own sake, but on the path to the great joy of Easter; a small Easter after Lent, and an eternal one after death. In the mean time, don’t cheat yourself by ignoring the sorrow! Instead, sing it loudly, with courage and good cheer.
CaRMS application fee: $485.77
New suit: $700.00
Hotels: $1123.18
Dry Cleaning: $33.30
Taxis: Don’t even ask.
London to Calgary to Edmonton to London to Hamilton to Thunder Bay to Kingston to Halifax to London: $2319.27
“You are matched to: University of Calgary / General Surgery”: Priceless!
“Any man making Rye Haven must first resign himself to the will of God, and consider, especially if the boat is running and a little over-canvassed, that death is but a mighty transition; that it is all sand hereabouts, with no cruel rocks to tear the tender body with their horrid fangs; that nothing is worth calculating in life, because things happen by fate anyhow, or by chance, but certainly not by our direction; and that if, or when, she strikes, it will not be his fault. No man can tell you the deep into Rye harbour, for it shifts with every wind, and at the best it is of the narrowest.”
-Hilaire Belloc, The Cruise of the Nona
In a place like this, at a time like this, the pictures take themselves. It’s like walking in the woods and finding yourself in a clearing full of roses, already tied up in bouquets and ready for the picking.
OK, I think this will be it for a while. The header is from Hall’s Harbour, and the background is a couple of miles from Peggy’s Cove. Come spring, I’ll stop pretending to be a bluenose.
Why is it so much harder to frequent the sacraments on a holiday than any other day of the month? For Catholics, the sacraments are the whole point of the holiday. Hence ‘holi’-day. The thought seems to be that secular holidays are different; they’re a good time for a Catholic to take a break from everything, even the sacraments. That’s completely backward. Even secular holidays are established not for inertia, but for leisure. And before anything else, Catholic leisure is the sacraments. Skipping them on principle because it’s a break day makes as much sense as skipping the fishing trip with the family because it’s a break day.
You know the family is in rough shape when having one day of the year named after it increases its importance. The really scary thing is that in the lead-up to this fourth EVER family day in Ontario, people were already asking one another: “So. Gonna do anything with your family for Family Day?” Just the same, I’ll accept the day off.
