When hooligans Bach down

A recent article from Theodore Dalrymple. Incipit:

Staying recently in a South Yorkshire town called Rotherham—described in one guidebook as “murky,” an inadequate word for the place—I was interested to read in the local newspaper how the proprietors of some stores are preventing hooligans from gathering outside to intimidate and rob customers. They play Bach over loudspeakers, and this disperses the youths in short order; they flee the way Count Dracula fled before holy water, garlic flowers, and crucifixes.

Have you tried to memorize the Psalms?

Or some of them? Or did you manage to get all of them? Why did you do it? How did it go? Which translation did you use?

The internet, 1969

Look ma - no keyboards!

The Bill Awards

And the winner for best use of background keyboards in a song is... Aimee Mann for her song Phoenix. It's a distillation of Everlast's quiet hip-hop-influenced keyboards and a whole lot of beautiful harmonic exploration. You can get a taste of the keys in the video here, but the performance and mix are much better on the album, @#%&*! Smilers.

Reid Buckley on conservatism

Via Jim Curley of Bethune Catholic, an article by Reid Buckley:

Where are our Friedrich Hayeks of The Road to Serfdom, our Eric Voegelins of The New Science of Politics, our Russell Kirks of The Conservative Mind? Where is our philosopher? Meantime, on the practical front, what can conservatives do? The very first thing is to dissociate from the Republican Party, which has become an albatross around the neck of integrity.

It was just a wee little beastie

The 1981 video is funny enough:


but Nancy Nall, a "news-paper" writer, made it hilarious:

Rotary-dial phones! Those old modems with the cups! You’ll notice one of the participating papers was the Columbus Dispatch — that’s because the service provider for all this was Compuserve, based there. I can still summon the sight of the copy editor whose job it was to handle the upload, and Kirk will remember his name, but I don’t. I sent this to someone this morning, who replied: It’s like a slasher movie; THE INTERNET’S IN THE HOUSE!!!! GET OUT!!!! IT WANTS TO KILL YOU AND YOUR PROFESSION. Man, I’ll say.

Fr Neuhaus on Bible translations

Three articles from his magazine First Things in which the good Father rails against our Catholic Newspeak Bible and endorses the Revised Standard Version, Catholic Edition. A tip o' the hat to Dylan, an aficionado of good translations.

• Bible Babel, May 2001
  
• More on Bible Babel, January 2006
  
  • "...it is very difficult to share thoughts when we do not share words."
• 70 or 70x7?, July 27, 2007
  

Noted in passing

Doc Cottle must have brought thousands of cartons of smokes along with him to the dedication of the Battlestar Galactica museum four years ago.

Fr Z's SSPX FAQ

Lege. Basically the only thing that has changed so far is the status of the four SSPX bishops (and perhaps a few hearts). There's a long row to hoe yet.

I didn't realize Nancy Pelosi was Chinese

Pelosi's theory of contraception is just a hop, a skip and a "universal healthcare" act away from China's policy of using economic incentives to control family size. The syllogism goes like this:

• the government pays for your childcare
  
• the government is broke
  
• the government will ensure that you have fewer children

How to lose traffic and alienate people

Amen.

I'd add three items:

• If you make music come out of my speakers unexpectedly I'll never visit your website again
  
• White text on black is unreadable. I can copy the text and paste it into a text editor, but there's only one d*mn white-on-black page I care enough about to do that.
  
• Wordpress's "snapshots" link annoyer. When you accidentally run the mouse over a link, everything stops while some utterly useless preview of the link's webpage appears in a popup. Each popup has a mechanism to disable the annoyance, but it doesn't work. I used to try to disable it every time I visited Jeff Culbreath's otherwise-fine blog, but I've given up - now I just try to navigate carefully to avoid his links since there's a penalty associated with each.