Last Week In Life: June 7, 2021- June 13, 2021

Last Week’s SPECTACULAR STORY OF WEEK

Harness My Zebras

One of the best things about cyberspace is the immediate access to all types of interesting, intriguing and dazzlingly fascinating articles about ordinary everyday things exposed as the truly amazing realities that they are.

Articles such as the one dealing with the many colors of  French Alp snow.  It comes in a variety of creative colors such as Deep Red, Rusty Orange, and Lemonade Pink. Perfect for those who like to eat snow. The Locals who live in the Alps affectionately call this non-white fluffy stuff the “sang de glacier,” or “glacier blood.” Non-Alps folks sometimes go with “watermelon snow.”

Articles such as the one where An Apple Detective has Rediscovered 7 Kinds Of Apples Thought To Be Extinct.  Jettisoning his life as a criminal investigator for the IRS and the FBI,  David Benscoter now searches abandoned farms and orchards in the Pacific Northwest to locate old varieties of apples. Since 2014, The Lost Apple Project  has discovered 29 apple varieties previously lost to history, including the Streaked Pippin, the Sary Sinap and the Nero.

And then there is this piece on Why zebras were never domesticated.

Some of the reasons include

• Having a good amount of Highly Unfriendly Qualities.
• Zebras have a hardwired ducking reflex, which greatly hinders their capture by lasso or other methods. Sorry cowboy.
• They can be tough little Equidaes. Despite their poney-like size and interesting stripes, some zebras have managed to kill attacking lions with a single back kick. Their not to be messed with, just like Chuck Norris.
•  Zebras won’t submit easily to humans. They like to live life as nature intended: always on their own terms. So back off would be riders.
• They are deeply upset they’re at the end of the alphabet. Donkey’s and Horses are higher up.

Sometimes there are abnormalities in the Zebra kingdom such as this guy.

Spotted in Kenya: A Baby Zebra With Polka Dots | Smart News | Smithsonian Magazine

Wondrous articles about wonderous things can lead to wonderous online conversations such as this one….

Steven: Mary Magdalene: “Harness my zebras—gift of the Nubian King!”

—Worst line in Cecil B. DeMille’s silent 1927 Jesus movie THE KING OF KINGS, and possibly in any religious film in history. (In spite of this, the movie as a whole is DeMille’s best and most authentically religious film!)

Robert:  “Well harness my zebras!” sounds like something a southern belle would say when surprised.

Steven : She literally has a zebra-drawn chariot, Robert.
In this telling, Mary Magdalene is a high-rolling courtesan introduced at a bacchanal at Herod’s palace, toying with a leopard while lecherous nobles leer at her.
She, however, is fretting over the absence of her lover—Judas Iscariot! Someone mentions having seen him in the company of a mysterious Carpenter said to have great powers, even making the blind see.

Mary haughtily proclaims that her great beauty has struck seeing men blind, and this Carpenter will not keep Judas from her!
Then comes the thing with the zebras.
It’s the worst scene in the film—and it doesn’t help that it’s also the first scene—but as soon as Jesus shows up, he takes the devil out of not only Mary Magdalene, but DeMille himself too. It really is a very good movie! �

Mark Wilson: Steven  I want to rewatch it if not just to see the Zebra scene.

Steven : Come for the zebras, stay for the actually really good silent Jesus drama!

Ordinary Life can lead to Extraordinary conversations of wonder relating back to the origin of all wonder.

Don’t look for boring dull conversations that get people’s blood pressure boiling about polarising politics or why this Catholic sucks look for conversions that wow the heart, mind, and soul with the truth, beauty, goodness and wonder of God’s world.

My son is gaming in the other room and they are engaged in an animated discussion of sentient cybernetic broccoli. Also, they are discussing whether Goofy is a dog. And he just announced that Mickey Mouse’ full name is Michael Theodore Mouse. As a father, I am so proud–and so ashamed.Mark Shea

What’s black, white and red all over?
The slowest zebra in the herd.

 FEAST DAYS ,HOLIDAYS AND LAST WEEK IN HISTORY

 Mon  June 7,  2021

• 1099– First Crusade: The Siege of Jerusalem
• 1494– Spain and Portugal sign the Treaty of Tordesillas which divides the New World between the two countries.
• 1892– Homer Plessy is arrested for refusing to leave his seat in the “whites-only” car of a train; he lost the resulting court case, Plessy v. Ferguson.
• 1899– American Temperance crusader Carrie Nation begins her campaign of vandalizing alcohol-serving establishments by destroying the inventory in a saloon in Kiowa, Kansas.
• 1906– Cunard Line‘s RMS Lusitania is launched from the John Brown Shipyard, Glasgow (Clydebank), Scotland.
• 1909 – Jessica Tandy, English-American actress (d. 1994) is born.
• 1837– Alois Hitler, Austrian civil servant (d. 1903) is born.
• 1940– Tom Jones, Welsh singer and actor is born.
• 1944– World War II: The steamer Danae, carrying 350 Cretan Jews and 250 Cretan partisans, is sunk without survivors off the shore of Santorini.
• 1955– Lux Radio Theatre signs off the air permanently. The show launched in New York in 1934, and featured radio adaptations of Broadway shows and popular films.
• 1958 – Prince, American singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, producer, and actor (d. 2016) is born.
• 1962– The Organisation Armée Secrète (OAS) sets fire to the University of Algiers library building, destroying about 500,000 books.
• 1965– The Supreme Court of the United States hands down its decision in Griswold v. Connecticut, prohibiting the states from criminalizing the use of contraception by married couples.
• 1977– Five hundred million people watch the high day of the Silver Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II begin on television.

 Tuesday June 8 2021

World Oceans Day

• 632– Muhammad, the central figure of Islam, widely regarded as its founder (b. 570/571) is born.
• 1789– James Madison introduces twelve proposed amendments to the United States Constitution in Congress.
• 1887– Herman Hollerith applies for US patent #395,781 for the ‘Art of Compiling Statistics’, which was his punched card calculator.
• 1809 – Thomas Paine, English-American theorist and author (b. 1737) dies.
• 1889 – Gerard Manley Hopkins, English poet (b. 1844) dies.
• 1899 – Mary of the Divine Heart, German nun and saint (b. 1863) dies.
• 1910 – John W. Campbell, American journalist and author (d. 1971) is born.
• 1912– Carl Laemmle incorporates Universal Pictures.
• 1949– Helen Keller, Dorothy Parker, Danny Kaye, Fredric March, John Garfield, Paul Muni and Edward G. Robinson are named in an FBI report as Communist Party
• 1949 – George Orwell‘s Nineteen Eighty-Fouris published.
• 1953 – The United States Supreme Courtrules in District of Columbia v. John R. Thompson Co. that restaurants in Washington, D.C., cannot refuse to serve black patrons.
• 1959– USS Barbero and the United States Postal Service attempt the delivery of mail via Missile Mail.
• 1966 – The National Football Leagueand American Football League announced a merger effective in 1970.
• 1972– Vietnam War: Nine-year-old Phan Thị Kim Phúc is burned by napalm, an event captured by Associated Press photographer Nick Ut moments later while the young girl is seen running down a road, in what would become an iconic, Pulitzer Prize-winning photo.
• 1984– Homosexuality is declared legal in the Australian state of New South Wales.

Wednesday June 9,  2021

Saint Ephrem, deacon and doctor of the Church – Optional Memorial

Coral Triangle Day

• AD 68 – Nero commits suicide, after quoting Vergil‘s Aeneid, thus ending the Julio-Claudian dynasty and starting the civil war known as the Year of the Four Emperors.
• 1928– Charles Kingsford Smith completes the first trans-Pacific flight in a Fokker Trimotor monoplane, the Southern Cross.
• 1951 – James Newton Howard, American composer, conductor, and producer is born.
• 1959– The USS George Washington is launched. It is the first nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarine.
• 1961 – Michael J. Fox, Canadian-American actor, producer, and author is born.
• 1968– U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson declares a national day of mourning following the assassination of Senator Robert F. Kennedy.
• 1973– In horse racing, Secretariat wins the S. Triple Crown.
• 1978– The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints opens its priesthood to “all worthy men”, ending a 148-year-old policy of excluding black men.

Thursday June 10,  2021

• 1539– Council of Trent: Pope Paul III sends out letters to his bishops, delaying the Council due to war and the difficulty bishops had traveling to Venice.
• 1838– Myall Creek massacre: Twenty-eight Aboriginal Australians are murdered.
• 1944 – In baseball, 15-year-old Joe Nuxhall of the Cincinnati Reds becomes the youngest player ever in a major-league game.
• 1964– United States Senate breaks a 75-day filibuster against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, leading to the bill’s passage.
• 1997– Before fleeing his northern stronghold, Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot orders the killing of his defense chief Son Sen and 11 of Sen’s family members.
• 2001– Pope John Paul II canonizes Lebanon‘s first female saint, Saint Rafqa.
• 2009– James Wenneker von Brunn, who was 88-years-old, opened fire inside the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and fatally shot Museum Special Police Officer Stephen Tyrone Johns. Other security guards returned fire, wounding von Brunn, who was apprehended.867 – Emperor Uda of Japan (d. 931)

 Friday  June 11,  2021

THE MOST SACRED HEART OF JESUS

 Saint Barnabas the Apostle – Memorial

• 323 BC – Alexander the Great, Macedonian king (b. 356 BC) dies.
• 1770– British explorer Captain James Cook runs aground on the Great Barrier Reef.
• 1963 – Buddhist monk Thích Quảng Đức burns himself with gasoline in a busy Saigon intersection to protest the lack of religious freedom in South Vietnam.
• 1963 – John F. Kennedy addresses Americans from the Oval Office proposing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which would revolutionize American society by guaranteeing equal access to public facilities, ending segregation in education, and guaranteeing federal protection for voting rights.
• 1979 – John Wayne, American actor, director, and producer (b. 1907) dies.
• 2018 – 3 World Trade Center officially opens.

  Saturday June 12   2021

The Immaculate Heart of the Blessed Virgin Mary

Loving Day(United States)

• 1240– At the instigation of Louis IX of France, an inter-faith debate, known as the Disputation of Paris, starts between a Christian monk and four rabbis.
• 1939– Shooting begins on Paramount Pictures‘  Cyclops, the first horror film photographed in three-strip Technicolor.^[14]
• 1939 – The Baseball Hall of Fameopens in Cooperstown, New York.
• 1943– The Holocaust: Germany liquidates the Jewish Ghetto in Brzeżany, Poland (now Berezhany, Ukraine). Around 1,180 Jews are led to the city’s old Jewish graveyard and shot.
• 1944– World War II: Operation Overlord: American paratroopers of the 101st Airborne Division secure the town of Carentan, Normandy, France.
• 1954– Pope Pius XII canonises Dominic Savio, who was 14 years old at the time of his death, as a saint, making him at the time the youngest unmartyred saint in the Roman Catholic Church. In 2017, Francisco and Jacinta Marto, aged ten and nine at the time of their deaths, are declared saints.
• 1994– Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman are murdered outside Simpson’s home in Los Angeles. Her estranged husband, J. Simpson is later charged with the murders, but is acquitted by a jury.
• 2016– Forty-nine civilians are killed and 58 others injured in an attack on a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida; the gunman, Omar Mateen, is killed in a gunfight with police.

Sunday June 13,  2021

Saint Anthony of Padua, priest and doctor of the Church – Memorial

• 313– The decisions of the Edict of Milan, signed by Constantine the Great and co-emperor Valerius Licinius, granting religious freedom throughout the Roman Empire, are published in Nicomedia.
• 1525– Martin Luther marries Katharina von Bora, against the celibacy rule decreed by the Roman Catholic Church for priests and nuns.
• 1625– King Charles I of England marries Catholic princess Henrietta Maria of France and Navarre, at Canterbury.
• 1774– Rhode Island becomes the first of Britain’s North American colonies to ban the importation of slaves.^[7]
• 1805– Lewis and Clark Expedition: Scouting ahead of the expedition, Meriwether Lewis and four companions sight the Great Falls of the Missouri River.
• 1893 – Dorothy L. Sayers, English author and poet (d. 1957) is born.
• 1977 – Convicted Martin Luther King Jr. assassin James Earl Ray is recaptured after escaping from prison three

Bishop Barron’s Homily of the Week

 Last Week’s News of the World

I Wonder as I Wander

Archaeologists wonder why a Girl was buried with finch in her mouth | Live Science

Archaeologists are trying to solve the mystery of a girl who was buried with the head of at least one finch in her mouth hundreds of years ago.

 Although the skeleton was discovered by archaeologist Waldemar Chmielewski in southern Poland in Tunel Wielki Cave during excavations in 1967 and 1968, the burial had not been analyzed in detail until now. New radiocarbon dating indicates that the girl died around 300 years ago.

People in Europe stopped burying their dead in caves during the Middle Ages, making the burial of this girl highly unusual.

“Cave burials are generally absent from historical periods in Europe,” a team of researchers wrote in a paper published online May 29 in the German journal Praehistorische Zeitschrift (Prehistoric Journal). “Consequently, the discovery of a post-medieval inhumation of a child buried with at least one bird head placed in the mouth in Tunel Wielki Cave is an exceptional find.”

 The fact that she has at least one bird head stuffed in her mouth is also unusual, and no other examples are known from this time in Europe, the researchers wrote in the journal article.

China’s wandering elephants becoming international stars (apnews.com)

Already famous at home, China’s wandering elephants are now becoming international stars.

Major global media are chronicling the herd’s more than yearlong, 500-kilometer (300-mile) trek from their home in a wildlife reserve in mountainous southwest Yunnan province to the outskirts of the provincial capital of Kunming.

Twitter and YouTube are full of clips of their various antics, particularly those of two calves who slipped into an irrigation ditch and had to be helped out by older members of the group.

“We should be more like the elephant and be more family oriented, take family vacations and help and care for and protect each other,” read one comment on YouTube signed MrDeterministicchaos.

The elephants have been trending for days on China’s Weibo microblogging service with photos of the group sleeping attracting 25,000 posts and 200 million views Monday night.

Aliens and the Moon Hoax

Theology can help guide speculation about aliens, professor says (catholicnewsagency.com)

Fundamental theological principles provide the framework for any doctrinal questions over the discovery of extraterrestrial beings, a theologian claimed in a lecture on June 5.

While the Church does not have any specific teachings on extraterrestrial life, theologians can speculate on the existence of these beings and their nature due to the “underlying principles” which influence Church doctrine, said Dr. Christopher Baglow, director of the Science and Religion Initiative at the University of Notre Dame’s McGrath Institute for Church Life, on Saturday.

If rational life existed outside of earth and were to be discovered, it would not be theologically inconsistent to believe that the extraterrestrial rational beings were creatures of God in need of a savior to achieve salvation, he said. Baglow referred to this as “incarnational plurality,” adding that God would not be limited by constraints

.

The Great Moon Hoax: The Birth of Fake News? (interestingengineering.com)

In 1835, The Great Moon Hoax convinced people around the world that the Moon wasn’t a barren wasteland but actually a rich landscape full of ruby caverns and towering amethyst crystals, populated by intelligent humanoid bat-people, two-legged badgers, and unicorns.

While this seems ridiculous in hindsight, at the time, everyone from Ivy League students to middle-class professionals were roped in by the six-part series in The New York Sun newspaper. Claiming to be a supplement to a serious scientific journal in Scotland, the series played on the era’s excitement over a steady stream of revolutionary scientific discoveries, and an increasingly literate audience hungry to be “in the know.”

Whales and Dental Pregnancy Tests

Humpback whale gulps and spits out Present Day Jonah who happens to be Cape Cod lobsterman – BBC News

You better brush your teeth because a Dental Student Claims She Can Tell if  your Pregnant by Looking at your Teeth (newsweek.com)

“Your dentist may be able to tell that you are pregnant. This is not only due to nausea and enamel erosion but also from something called ‘pregnancy gingivitis,’ which is seen in about 30 to 50 percent of patients.  The gums become inflamed, tender and more prone to bleeding.”-Sukhmani Singh:Dental Surgery Doctor

The American Dental Association (ADA) reports that pregnant women have a higher chance of developing gingivitis, characterized as an “infection of the gingivae [gums] that can cause swelling and tenderness.” If left untreated, it “can affect the supporting tissues that hold your teeth in place.”

In some instances, pregnancy gingivitis can appear as “lumps…along the gum line and between teeth. Known as “pregnancy tumors,” they are not cancerous and typically disappear post-pregnancy, but can be surgically removed if deemed medically necessary, according to the ADA.

Protection of Natural Cheese

The CURD Act Would Define What is Cheese. This is important for our society.

 Wisconsin lawmakers prepare a bi-partisan measure intended to protect the definition of “natural cheese.”

The Codifying Useful Regulatory Definitions act or CURD act introduced Friday by  representative Ron Kind.  He says the intent of the CURD Act is to define “natural cheese” as that which is made from milk.

Kind says the bill will provide consumers with the knowledge that cheeses produced in Wisconsin fall within the “natural cheese” category.

 POPE FRANCIS’S FAMOUS LAST WEEK’S WORDS 

Remember folks, Pope Francis is not a heretic. I state the obvious because to some people it is not so obvious.

Pope Francis encourages ecumenical meeting in brotherly love (catholicnewsagency.com)

“Love has no need for profound theological knowledge, which is however necessary. Love is an encounter of life, first with the Lord Jesus, with the person of Jesus, and from there on, from that encounter of love, friendship, brotherhood and the certainty of being children of the same Father are born. Life that is shared and dedicated to a higher purpose: love can change the world! Everything starts there, from a fraternal encounter, love can change the world, but first it changes us. Together in love, we Christians can change the world, we can change ourselves, because God is Love!”

Pope Francis: Priests, bishops, and married couples ‘co-responsible’ for the family (catholicnewsagency.com)

“The family is ‘a domestic Church,’ the place in which the sacramental presence of Christ acts between spouses and between parents and children. In this sense the experience of love in families is a perennial source of strength for the life of the Church constantly enriched by the life of all the domestic Churches. Therefore, by virtue of the Sacrament of Marriage, every family becomes to full effect a good for the Church. Co-responsibility for the mission therefore calls upon married couples and ordained ministers, especially bishops, to cooperate in a fruitful manner in the care and custody of the domestic Churches.

Pope Francis at the general audience: ‘Prayer is the breath of life’ (catholicnewsagency.com)

Referring to the 19th-century Russian spiritual classic “The Way of a Pilgrim,”

“The spiritual journey of the Russian pilgrim begins when he comes across a phrase of St. Paul in the First Letter to the Thessalonians: ‘Pray constantly, always and for everything give thanks’ (5:17-18). The Apostle’s words struck the man and he wondered how it was possible to pray without interruption, given that our lives are fragmented into so many different moments, which do not always make concentration possible. From this question, he begins his search, which will lead him to discover what is called the prayer of the heart. It consists in repeating with faith: ‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.’”

Pope Francis: Rigid priests are a manifestation of clericalism (catholicnewsagency.com)

“Clericalism is a perversion of the priesthood: it is a perversion. And rigidity is one of the manifestations. When I find a rigid seminarian or young priest, I say ‘something bad is happening to this one on the inside.’ Behind every rigidity, there is a serious problem, because rigidity lacks humanity. Within the walls of the seminary, expand the boundaries of your heart — the expanded heart — extend them to the whole world. Be passionate about what ‘draws near,’ what ‘opens,’ what ‘brings together.’

Be steeped in the Word of God, not only internet chatter.

“Do not be satisfied with being skilled in the use of social media and digital media to communicate. Only transformed by the Word of God will you be able to communicate words of life. The world is thirsty for priests who are able to communicate the goodness of the Lord to those who have experienced sin and failure, for priests who are experts in humanity, for pastors willing to share the joys and labors of their brothers, for men who allow themselves to be changed by the cry of those who suffer. ”

 BLOG/ARTICLES POSTS OF THE WEEK

Balthasar’s “Dare We Hope That All Men Be Saved”: A Defense. – Gaudium et Spes 22

Superficial readings of the Tradition can be deceiving and even though the Church at first glance seems to have favored the Augustinian view, a closer inspection reveals that even though the Church taught the Augustinian view as an authoritative theological opinion, it never proposed that view as the only possible interpretation of the Gospel.  The Church has always rejected the view that we can know for certain that anyone in particular is in Hell and has even included prayers for the salvation of all, without qualifications, in both her Eucharistic liturgy and in the Liturgy of the Hours.  Furthermore, what has most definitely not been condemned is the notion that we can hope for the salvation of all. Thus, the real debate in these matters resides in the breadth and depth of what it is that we are allowed to hope for with regard to salvation. Along these lines it is unfortunate that Balthasar’s book on the topic was given the English title “Dare we hope…” since the actual German title – – “Was dürfen wir hoffen?” – – should actually be translated as “what are we allowed to hope for?” The English title gives the impression that Balthasar is engaged in a bold and daring stab at envelope-pushing theological speculation, when in reality the title implies a serious theological investigation into what Revelation allows us in these matters.  As such, far from being an esoteric exercise in rogue speculation, it is rather a humble attempt to place his speculations under the judgement of the Church.

What happened before the Big Bang? – Big Think

To ask from science to “explain” the First Cause is to ask science to explain its own structure. It’s to ask for a scientific model that uses no precedents, no previous concepts to operate. And science can’t do this, just as you can’t think without a brain.

The mystery of the First Cause remains. You can choose religious faith as an answer, or you can choose to believe science will conquer it all. But you can also, like the Greek Skeptic Pyrrho, embrace the limits of our reach into the unknowable with humility, celebrating what we have accomplished and will surely keep on accomplishing, without the need to know all and understand all. It’s okay to be left wondering.

Curiosity without mystery is blind, and mystery without curiosity is lame.

Pondering Podcasts OF THE WEEK

Ep 210: The True Story Behind “The Conjuring” Part 1 — Astonishing Legends

 Book Em, Dano on your reading list