The BBC reports:
An expedition team which set sail from Plymouth on a 5,000-mile carbon emission-free trip to Greenland have been rescued by an oil tanker [emphasis added]. . . .Raoul Surcouf, Richard Spink and skipper Ben Stoddart sent a mayday because they feared for their safety amid winds of 68mph (109km/h)...In one incident Mr Stoddart hit his head and the wind generator and solar panels were ripped from the yacht.
Word today that the Most Reverend R. Daniel Conlon, Bishop of Steubenville, OH, has restored Friday abstinence from meat in his diocese throughout the year. Father Z. has details and observations here, and Amy Welborn has thoughts and historical background here.
This is very hopeful news! Practices like Friday abstinence from meat are very helpful in weaving Christian virtues into one's daily life. Let's hope the practice spreads as bishops in other dioceses follow Bishop Conlon's lead.
As Fr. Z says, "brick by brick..."
Sarah had her post-op checkup yesterday and everything looks good. She's healing up very well (and quickly!).
Before I forget the details, for those interested, here is "the rest of the story..."
Ever since then-Bishop Vigneron was appointed Archbishop of Detroit, we've been praying for a new bishop, and speculating amongst friends about who the new bishop might be. Among our fellow parishioners, one name clearly stood out. Well, lo and behold...
From today's Vatican Information Service Bulletin:
OTHER PONTIFICAL ACTSVATICAN CITY, 23 MAR 2009 (VIS) - The Holy Father appointed Bishop Salvatore Cordileone, auxiliary of San Diego, U.S.A., as bishop of Oakland (area 3,798, population 2,466,692, Catholics 406,947, priests 433, permanent deacons 112, religious 843), U.S.A.
Here's a news release with more details:
OAKLAND, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Pope Benedict XVI has named Bishop Salvatore Joseph Cordileone, 52, as the Fourth Bishop of Oakland. Bishop Cordileone until now has been Auxiliary Bishop of the Diocese of San Diego. His installation as Bishop of Oakland will take place at noon on May 5, 2009 at Oakland's Cathedral of Christ the Light.On January 5, 2009, Oakland's Bishop Allen Vigneron was appointed Archbishop of Detroit and was installed in that office on January 28. At that time priests in Oakland's College of Consultors elected Fr. Daniel E. Danielson as Diocesan Administrator, to manage day-to-day business of the Diocese until a new bishop was named.
Fr. Danielson will introduce Bishop Salvatore Cordileone at a news conference on Monday, March 23, at 10 a.m. at the Cathedral of Christ the Light. Media should enter through the main conference center entrance at 2121 Harrison Street, Oakland.
Bishop Salvatore Cordileone
Bishop Cordileone was born in 1956 in San Diego, California, where he and his family were members of Blessed Sacrament Parish. He entered the seminary in San Diego in 1975, received his B.A. in Philosophy from the University of San Diego in 1978 and went on for theology studies in Rome at the Pontifical North American College. He received the Bachelor's Degree in Sacred Theology from the Pontifical Gregorian University in 1981.
After being ordained a priest in 1982, Bishop Cordileone served as associate pastor in La Mesa, California before again returning to study in Rome. He received the Doctoral Degree in Canon Law from Gregorian University in 1989. Returning to San Diego he held various diocesan positions and from 1991 served as pastor at a parish in Calexico, California until 1995 when he returned to Rome.
For the next seven years Bishop Cordileone served as an assistant at the Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Signatura, the Vatican's highest judicial court. On July 5, 2002, Pope John Paul II appointed him as Auxiliary Bishop for the Diocese of San Diego and he was installed by Bishop Robert Brom the following month.
The Diocese of Oakland
As Bishop of Oakland, Bishop Cordileone will be the chief shepherd for over 550,000 Catholics who reside in Alameda and Contra Costa counties. The Diocese of Oakland was created in 1962 and is comprised of 84 parishes within Alameda and Contra Costa counties. The First Bishop of Oakland was the Most Reverend Floyd Begin who served from 1962 until his death in 1977. He was succeeded by Bishop John Cummins who retired in 2003 and was succeeded by Bishop Vigneron. Bishop Vigneron was appointed Archbishop of Detroit in January of this year and Fr. Daniel Danielson has been acting as Diocesan Administrator since that time.
More info on Bishop Cordileone can be found here, here, and here (Bishop Cordileone celebrated a Novus Ordo Mass in the newly inaugurated TAC Chapel ad orientem in Latin).
Well, that was an interesting weekend.
Short version: Sarah's home as of tonight, doing well, and less her appendix.
Long version: read on below...
While the new President was referring to the hand he writes with, I think he also gave us a quick preview of the next four years...
We worship using the Extraordinary Form of the Roman Rite (also known as the Traditional Mass, or the Latin Mass) at St. Margaret Mary in Oakland. We are blessed enough to have a High Mass every Sunday, so this is the form we're most familiar with. Sometimes when we go to Mass during the week, we'll attend a Low Mass. The most obvious difference is the lack of a choir for the Low Mass, or, if you're our children, you might say the most obvious difference is that the Low Mass is shorter.
We very rarely attend the Ordinatry Form of the Roman Rite (also know as the Novus Ordo Mass.) In fact, we pretty much only attend when we travel, so the kids aren't very used to this form of the liturgy.
This past Sunday, while traveling, we attended a Novus Ordo Mass. Only someone who has been to both Masses can appreciate how different they can be, depending upon the manner in which they are celebrated. This particular Mass was celebrated in a very modern way.
This was not the first time we've gone to Mass in this particular church, and in the middle of this Mass, my five year old son, Alex leaned over to his grandmother and said, "Do they always have Low Mass here?" Grandma managed to stifle her laughter and replied, "Yes."
Catching up on old magazines, I caught an article in the August 2008 issue of Physics Today on the physics behind Speedo's LZR Racer swimsuits, which made such a big "splash" at the 2008 Olympics:
Competition in the pool at this month's Beijing Olympics will be not only among world-class swimmers but also their swimsuits. Since its debut in February, the low-drag hydrophobic Fastskin LZR Racer swimsuit from Speedo International Ltd has had more than 44 world records broken in it; critics allege that the $600 "space-age" suit, in part developed by NASA scientists, gives its wearers an unfair boost in buoyancy and amounts to "technological doping." The company claims a 5% decrease in drag over the previous model but no buoyancy increase, and the suit, along with competing models, has been approved for Olympic competition by FINA, the international swimming federation.The LZR Racer is a descendant of the full-body swimsuit Speedo introduced in 2000 to mimic the viscous-drag-reducing denticles on a shark's skin. The shark suit proved that surface-engineered synthetic materials can be made to have lower drag than a swimmer's shaved skin. The next move for Speedo's internal R&D unit was to form a team of external partners led by Barry Bixler, the late Honeywell Corp engineer and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) expert, to further cut the passive drag.
[...]
"There is still debate as to what the primary source of drag is for a shark, but for a swimmer, it is primarily form drag," says Amy Lang, an experimental fluid dynamicist at the University of Alabama. From CFD simulations and studies in a swimming flume, the researchers determined that total drag is reduced when low-drag polyurethane panels are inserted to compress the chest, upper thighs, and other areas of the swimmer's body where form drag is most pronounced. "We spent a lot of time [on the previous model] drag testing anatomically accurate mannequins" in the flume, says David Pease, a biomechanist at the University of Otago in New Zealand. "This time around involved quite a bit more actual athlete testing in order to test differences in compression and support provided by the new suit."
The article goes on to describe some of the work going on in preparation for the 2012 Olympics, extending research from minimizing drag during the glide phase of a stroke to include combating drag during the active phase of each stroke.
Michael Phelps appeared Thursday night, December 11 on FOX News' Hannity & Colmes to talk about his new book, No Limits: The Will to Succeed. He talked about his childhood ADHD and about how many calories a day he really eats. You can watch the interview at FOXNews.com
We all know that windmills kill birds. Now even some homes are not safe:
Ice-Tossing Turbines: Myth or Hazard?By KATE GALBRAITH, New York Times
How do wind turbines fare in winter weather?
Not so well, according to one little town in England. The Wisbech Standard reports a harrowing tale in which "lumps of ice three or four feet long flew through the air" and smashed into a carpet showroom and a parking lot.
They apparently came off the spinning blades of a 410-foot-tall wind turbine.
[...] a 2006 publication by G.E. Energy, a maker of large wind turbines, warns that "rotating turbine blades may propel ice fragments some distance from the turbine -- up to several hundred meters if conditions are right."
I recently upgraded our blog software to the latest version of MovableType (v.4.23). Not a painless process, and I'm not done yet. To take full advantage of the new version's capabilities, I need to upgrade all our blog templates. That won't happen for a while.
Anyway, the new blog software broke the old CAPTCHA module that I'd been using (SCode). However, the new one (reCAPTCHA) has a nice benefit: its CAPTCHA's come from digitized books. It uses words that were not recognized by OCR software. Basically, everyone who uses this module is helping to get books into digital form. Cool, huh?
Over at the New Liturgical Movement, they have an interesting entry on the origin of the Christmas carol "O Come, O Come, Emmanuel"
The well-known Advent hymn O Come, O Come, Emmanuel belongs to the ever-growing repertoire of popular hymns known, loved, and sung all over the English-speaking world. It made its first appearance as far back as 1854, in Part II of the Hymnal Noted, edited by Thomas Helmore. The English words are based on a free Latin paraphrase of the great O Antiphons, which are sung with the Magnificat at Vespers on the days leading up to Christmas Eve. These antiphons themselves came into existence at least as early as the eighth century. The paraphrase can he traced back to the seventh edition of the Psalteriolum Cantionum Catholicarum, published in Cologne in 1710. The present splendid English translation was made by Thomas Alexander Lacey (1853-1931) for the English Hymna1 (1906), of which he was joint editor.The familiar melody was said by Thomas Helmore to have been "copied by the late J. M. Neale from a French Missal" which he located “in the National Library, Lisbon." But in a letter to the press in 1909, H. Jenner claimed that his father, Bishop Jenner, had copied both the tune and the words in Lisbon in 1853. All attempts to track it down, however, failed: neither a "French Missal," nor indeed any service-book from Lisbon could be produced to justify either claim. The compilers of the 1909 historical edition of Hymns Ancient and Modern drew a complete blank, and, more recently, one scholar even made the ingenious suggestion that Thomas Helmore had perhaps composed the tune himself, coyly hiding his identity behind the pretence that it was an ancient tune gleaned from a Continental source.
I was able, however, in 1966, to vindicate his honor. My attention had been drawn to a small fifteenth century processional in the Paris Bibliothèque Nationale. It was Franciscan in origin and probably intended far the use of nuns rather than friars. Turning the pages I discovered, on folio 89v ff, a number of troped verses for the funeral responsory Libera me in the form of a litany, beginning with the words "Bone iesu, dulcis cunctis.” The melody of these tropes was none other than the tune of O come, O come Emmanuel. It appeared in square notation on the left-hand page, and on the opposite page there was a second part that fitted exactly, like a mirror-image, in note-against-note harmony with the hymn-tune. The book would thus have been shared by two sisters, each singing her own part as they processed.
So it would seem that this great Advent hymn-tune was not, in the first instance, associated with Advent at all, but with a funeral litany of the saints in verse, interspersed between the sections of a well-known responsory. Perhaps it is a measure of Helmore's genius that he detected in this melody an appropriate Advent sound as well, one which conveys an unmistakable sense of solemn expectancy, not only for the Nativity of Christ, but also for his Second Coming as judge and as savior. Helmore was shrewd enough, also, to have been aware that an indubitable link exists between the theology of Advent and a procession marking the passage from death to eternal life.
Seventy years ago tonight, Orson Welles vaulted to fame when the Mercury Theater on the Air broadcast their famous adaptation of H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds.
I remember attending the Fiftieth Anniversary celebration of the broadcast, held near Grover's Mill, New Jersey, while I was in grad school. What a blast! I enjoyed driving through Grover's Mill late at night in the autumn. There was something about the darkness of the place (very few street lights), the thick growth of vegetation, and the fog rising up from the pond. I could see people believing that a strange shadow might be a Martian invader.
Happy Halloween!
Wow. Two video posts in a row. Here's one for you Chess/Grieg fans (Alex is both):
Recently, Lisa and I caught a rerun of Scrubs (if you're curious, Season 1, Episode 23: "My Hero") that featured the lawyer at Sacred Heart Hospital, Ted, and his a cappella group of fellow hospital employees ("the Worthless Peons") singing the theme song to Underdog. Although I never see that cartoon classic in reruns, I loved it when I was a kid. As you can hear in the following clip, it has probably the best cartoon theme song, ever:
| Sun | Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | Sat |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | |
| 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 |
| 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 |
| 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 |
| 28 | 29 | 30 |
