Are cats and dogs learning how to use sleds? Well, don’t worry until you see them on skis.
I’ve grown used to hearing humans complain about snow (not that it snows that much around here: we’re mostly coping with mud). Maybe we can learn from dogs and cats how to enjoy it. Well, I still enjoy it, but I just can’t get any.
Somethin’ tells me this video wasn’t filmed anywhere near by neighborhood. It almost sounds like the set-up for a good old corny joke: “A fox, an eagle, and a cat are standing on a snowy porch, and the fox says…”
Would anyone like to try to finish the joke?
There’s something special about this scene, don’t you think?
Another little treat for those of you who made it here today: God Bless Us Every One, by Nick Bicat, the theme music for A Christmas Carol with George C. Scott as Scrooge, 1984–wonderful treatment of the story, and packed with good, old-fashioned, robust Christmas music.
That’s old Shrewsbury Cathedral, down at the end of the street.
Look at that–no Christmas hymn requests today, no carol contest entries. Guess I’d better provide one myself.
This is the English melody that goes with Away in a Manger, sung here by the King’s College Choir at Cambridge. Same hymn, different tune. Just as beautiful either way.
It’s a little late to start posting entries now, but tomorrow is another day.
Proclaim the joy of Christmas–and its truth.
Bob Knight, who has been a friend and mentor to me over the years, thinks the culture war is increasingly revealing itself as Christianity’s struggle–not against modern atheism, but against old-hat paganism that just won’t go away.
https://townhall.com/columnists/robertknight/2018/12/18/having-a-merry-pagan-christmas-n2537612
We know from St. Paul, in Romans Chapter 1, that we’re up against those “Who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed for ever. Amen.” (v. 25) Indeed, the older I get, the more and more this chapter seems to describe the totality of what we’re up against.
Astrology, ouija boards, hexes, crystals–all this tired old crapola, old as the hills–is easy to laugh at. Sally Quinn, widow of Washington Post honcho Ben Bradlee, seems convinced that she has acquired the power to hex people to death, implying that it’s really hard for her to resist the temptation to voodoo President Donald Trump into an early grave.
Meanwhile, assorted celebrities and their followers natter about “the universe” as some kind of deity in its own right, about god-ness residing not in any Creator but in all created things: serving the creature more than the Creator. Oh–and we’re all little gods and goddesses, too. Unless were Biggits.
It’s so easy to dismiss this as simple-minded twaddle; but it’s twaddle that’s hung on for literally thousands of years, despite huge advances in science: it seems to take science in its stride. What pagan wouldn’t say, “Oh, sure, I believe in science”?
“Science,” unless the word is thrown around so carelessly as to mean virtually nothing at all, cannot support the absurdities of Far Left Crazy ideology–all that “transgender” slop, to name just one. But paganism can. It always has. Whenever we need support for our most extravagant depravities, paganism is right there to provide it. Mixing it with “science” yields a particularly toxic brew.
Moses cried out, “Who is on the Lord’s side? let him come unto me” (Exodus 32:26). And what occasion had provoked this cry? The people of Israel had lapsed back into paganism, and were worshiping the golden calf.
God already knows who’s on His side–but do we know?
It’s not a question for Him, but for us.
In 2013 Chalcedon’s vice-president, Martin Selbrede, explained our move into fiction–after a long history of publishing works on theology and Christian analysis of society and culture.
https://chalcedon.edu/resources/videos/christian-use-of-fiction
As exemplified by Our Lord Jesus Christ’s parables, fiction is “a vehicle for conveying ideas” and showing how Christian principles play out in real life, often accompanied by spiritual and personal conflict: “If there is no friction, there is no fiction,” Martin says, and he’s right. And that, of course, is the difference between a story and a sermon.
“We waited 45 years before we turned to fiction,” so as to lay a strong theological foundation for everything published by Chalcedon. We didn’t want mediocre fiction built on weak theology.
It was time to move into fiction, Martin says, because with fiction, “You can suddenly get people thinking.”
Martin has written a Christian novel, Hidden in Plain Sight, which explores the nature of reality; and we also have my Bell Mountain fantasy novels, with ten of them in print so far and No. 11, The Temptation, just about ready for publication.
Well, if you’ve ever wondered why a Christian educational foundation decided to publish fiction, this will explain it for you.
“Dirty sink? What dirty sink?”
The news cycle seems to have missed this when it came out in 2014, but it’s being reported now.
According to an international team of scientists at Virginia Tech University, your reaction to disgusting images is almost certain to reveal your political ideology (https://www.biospace.com/article/around-the-web/liberal-or-conservative-brain-responses-to-disgusting-images-help-reveal-political-leanings-virginia-tech-study-/). In fact, one reaction to one disgusting image is 95% predictive of a person’s politics. How about that!
Simply stated, Republicans and conservatives react adversely to images of maggots, mutilated carcasses, or a sinkful of rotting garbage, but the same images don’t much bother Democrats and liberals.
Well, really–if the imagined (thankfully!) image of Hillary Clinton as president isn’t going to turn you off, what is? If only Chuck Schumer were as easy to get rid of as a sinkful of garbage.
It’s fun to watch the scientists trying to explain this in Darwinian terms, with fairy tales about long-ago cavemen learning not to eat stuff that the maggots had already started in on.
Look–if you like transgenderism, two guys getting “married,” San Francisco sidewalks heaped with human feces, Barak Obama as a sage, and the whole idea of global government, you already like disgusting things. A bunch of roadkill rotting away in the sun is hardly going to put you off.
I hope we didn’t have to pay a lot to find out this scientific thing that everybody already knew.
But now, at least, it’s Settled Science! And you libs have got to embrace it, or else be revealed as hate criminals and anti-science biggits.
Love that government!
Until Common Core is actually repealed–and that’s never going to happen, with Democrats owning the House of Representatives–we will never be safe from “When the government speaks, the people must obey!”
https://leeduigon.com/2013/11/08/more-crap-from-common-core/
In case you had any doubts that we are living in a fallen world.
And y’know what’s the scariest part? That our country, these United States–we are the Rolls-Royce, the gold standard, the Faberge Easter Egg of human dignity and liberty in this so badly fallen world. No other country even comes close, except for maybe Costa Rica, although I’m not so sure about them lately.
Freedom is not natural in a fallen world. Tyranny is. Rending each other is.
For as long as we stand under God, we stand.
Out from under God… we fall like the rest of ’em.
It’s become my yearly custom, at Christmas-time, to present you with this, My Love’s an Arbutus, sung by the Fairhaven Singers, for no other reason but its simple sweetness.
If it sounds familiar to you, and yet you can’t quite place it, you probably heard it as background music in Scrooge (1951, the one with Alistair Sim), as Alice’s theme.
Anyway, here it is. Merry Christmas, everybody.
I think I’ve learned something from this video: if you’re standing on ice and you can see fish light-heartedly swimming around–well, you’re on thin ice! Literally as well as figuratively. Good luck getting back to terra firma.
Or, if you’re a cat, you ignore it and just keep on playing on the ice. If you do fall in, the gavone with the camera will have to rescue you.
