St Benedict devotes a large part of his Rule to laying out which psalms should be read when. Aaron Orear of the University of Toronto has distilled all that into a handy table, which I printed out and stuck between the pages of my new CTS bible.

As a followup to the preceding post, here’s Democritus, fragment 169 as translated by Kathleen Freeman:

Do not try to understand everything, lest you become ignorant of everything.

From the Laudator: George Gissing, The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft, XVI:

I HAVE BEEN DULL to-day, haunted by the thought of how much there is that I would fain know, and how little I can hope to learn. The scope of knowledge has become so vast. I put aside nearly all physical investigation; to me it is naught, or only, at moments, a matter of idle curiosity. This would seem to be a considerable clearing of the field; but it leaves what is practically the infinite. To run over a list of only my favourite subjects, those to which, all my life long, I have more or less applied myself, studies which hold in my mind the place of hobbies, is to open vistas of intellectual despair. In an old note-book I jotted down such a list—“things I hope to know, and to know well.” I was then four and twenty. Reading it with the eyes of fifty-four, I must needs laugh. There appear such modest items as “The history of the Christian Church up to the Reformation”—“all Greek poetry”—“The field of Mediaeval Romance”—“German literature from Lessing to Heine”—“Dante!” Not one of these shall I ever “know, and know well”; not any one of them. Yet here I am buying books which lead me into endless paths of new temptation. What have I to do with Egypt? Yet I have been beguiled by Flinders Petrie and by Maspero. How can I pretend to meddle with the ancient geography of Asia Minor? Yet here have I bought Prof. Ramsay’s astonishing book, and have even read with a sort of troubled enjoyment a good many pages of it; troubled, because I have but to reflect a moment, and I see that all this kind of thing is mere futile effort of the intellect when the time for serious intellectual effort is over.

A disquisition upon the Old English interjections la and wa and their many friends. Wa survives even today—who among us has not, in childhood, exclaimed “Whoa!” upon seeing a funny car crash and explode halfway down a racetrack? (And who knew that Keanu Reaves was such a master of Old English?)

I can’t get enough of this arrangement of The Saucy Sailor by Blue Moose and the Unbuttoned Zippers. That’s a homemade nyckelharpa that Bronwyn Bird is playing.

Here’s a piano arrangement from Cecil James Sharp’s 1916 book One Hundred English Folksongs. This book places the song in Yorkshire in the 1760s.

Some links as I find them:

• Fr Kirby, Genesis and Dame Aemiliana Löhr, O.S.B.
• Fr Hunwicke on Septuagesima and Rome
• The prayers and readings for today’s Mass
• Fr Zuhlsdorf with background and his usual excellent translations of today’s Mass prayers
• From the old Catholic Encyclopedia
• Septuagesima in the pre-’62 books, with today’s Gospel illustrated by Jerome Nadal, S.J. (1507-1580)
• Septuagesima in the Marquess of Bute’s pre-Pius-X breviary
• From Mike Fieschko, Dom Johner’s commentaries on today’s chants
• A collection of Septuagesima links
• Dom Prosper Guéranger on Septuagesima
• Three sermons of Newman on Septuagesima:
  • Many Called, Few Chosen
  • Present Blessings
  • The Work of the Christian

Did you know that Francis Patrick Kenrick (+1863), the sixth Archbishop of Baltimore, published his own translation of the Bible, with explanatory notes and comments? I'd never heard of it til I read a mention of it this evening in the Marquess of Bute's notes on his Breviary translation. Here's what's available at the Internet Archive:

• The Pentateuch
• The Historical Books of the Old Testament (unavailable online)
• The Psalms, Books of Wisdom, and Canticle of Canticles
• The Book of Job and the Prophets
• The New Testament
• The Four Gospels
• The Acts of the Apostles, the Epistles of St. Paul, the Catholic Epistles, and the Apocalypse

And by the way, check out the Internet Bible Catalog! It lives up to its name.

I could read Ben Franklin all day.

YOU MAY REMEMBER, my dear friend, that when we lately spent that happy day in the delightful garden and sweet society of the Moulin Joly, I stopped a little in one of our walks, and stayed some time behind the company. We had been shown numberless skeletons of a kind of little fly, called an ephemera, whose successive generations, we were told, were bred and expired within the day. I happened to see a living company of them on a leaf, who appeared to be engaged in conversation. You know I understand all the inferior animal tongues. My too great application to the study of them is the best excuse I can give for the little progress I have made in your charming language. I listened through curiosity to the discourse of these little creatures; but as they, in their national vivacity, spoke three or four together, I could make but little of their conversation. I found, however, by some broken expressions that I heard now and then, they were disputing warmly on the merit of two foreign musicians, one a cousin, the other a moscheto; in which dispute they spent their time, seemingly as regardless of the shortness of life as if they had been sure of living a month. Happy people! thought I; you are certainly under a wise, just, and mild government, since you have no public grievances to complain of, nor any subject of contention but the perfections and imperfections of foreign music. I turned my head from them to an old gray-headed one, who was single on another leaf, and talking to himself. Being amused with his soliloquy, I put it down in writing, in hopes it will likewise amuse her to whom I am so much indebted for the most pleasing of all amusements, her delicious company and heavenly harmony.

“It was,” said he, “the opinion of learned philosophers of our race, who lived and flourished long before my time, that this vast world, the Moulin Joly, could not itself subsist more than eighteen hours; and I think there was some foundation for that opinion, since, by the apparent motion of the great luminary that gives life to all nature, and which in my time has evidently declined considerably towards the ocean at the end of our earth, it must then finish its course, be extinguished in the waters that surround us, and leave the world in cold and darkness, necessarily producing universal death and destruction. I have lived seven of those hours, a great age, being no less than four hundred and twenty minutes of time. How very few of us continue so long! I have seen generations born, flourish, and expire. My present friends are the children and grandchildren of the friends of my youth, who are now, alas, no more! And I must soon follow them; for, by the course of nature, though still in health, I cannot expect to live above seven or eight minutes longer. What now avails all my toil and labor in amassing honey-dew on this leaf, which I cannot live to enjoy! What the political struggles I have been engaged in for the good of my compatriot inhabitants of this bush, or my philosophical studies for the benefit of our race in general! for in politics what can laws do without morals? Our present race of ephemera will in a course of minutes become corrupt, like those of other and older bushes, and consequently as wretched. And in philosophy how small our progress! Alas! art is long, and life is short! My friends would comfort me with the idea of a name they say I shall leave behind me; and they tell me I have lived long enough to nature and to glory. But what will fame be to an ephemera who no longer exists? And what will become of all history in the eighteenth hour, when the world itself, even the whole Moulin Joly, shall come to its end and be buried in universal ruin?”

To me, after all my eager pursuits, no solid pleasures now remain, but the reflection of a long life spent in meaning well, the sensible conversation of a few good lady ephemeræ, and now and then a kind smile and a tune from the ever amiable Brillante.

Or something. All my blogging energy is being taken up by a couple of other blogs - one at work detailing the stuff I’m working on, which has dozens of users to keep informed, and another blog I’ve started at home as a long-term memory and reference.

My cousin Amanda has a blog about the great stuff she finds in thrift stores and the cool things she does with them, and she has an awfully nice “blog voice” - each post is like a letter from an old friend. Check it out.

I’ve finished my nm4ny list of the best songs I've discovered or rediscovered this year. The idea comes from a former cow-orker, who wrote each year:

Here's the tradition: everyone assembles a mix of whatever music caught their fancy during the year and distributes it to their friends and family. Then, assuming we all listen to different things, we are each left with a batch of New Music for the New Year.

Here’s the collection of songs in mp3 format (beware: it’s 115MB!)

1. My new CTS Bible (Jerusalem Bible/Grail Psalms) is great, but I still turn sometimes to my hefty old 1966 Jerusalem Bible (the burgundy hardback edition). Its large noble pages are beautifully designed - they provide lots of open space for contemplation and scads of notes and cross-references for dot-connecting. It's a pain to hold for long, though. That ancient cove who said a big book is a big headache may have been on to something.

2. The weather outside is frightful - lotsa snow and temps forecast to dive below zero tonight, so it's time for my annual “worrying about the garage heating system” post. Which I won't actually post unless catastrophe strikes.

3. Usually at this time of year we're balanced somewhere among bankruptcy, foreclosure, and living in a cardboard box in a ditch. Not this year, though, for some reason. The mystery of it made me install gnucash to track our spending. If we can keep spending as if we're broke, we might end up saving something.

4. I'm putting together a “nm4ny” list of the best songs I've discovered or rediscovered this year. I borrowed the idea from a former cow-orker, who wrote each year:

Here's the tradition: everyone assembles a mix of whatever music caught their fancy during the year and distributes it to their friends and family. Then, assuming we all listen to different things, we are each left with a batch of New Music for the New Year.

Ohioans take note: my list of 14 songs includes 4 from Over the Rhine. I'll post a note here on the blog when it's finished - the playing order is still being ironed out, though I know that Chet Baker's last recorded performance of My Funny Valentine is the last song.

5. Tom of Disputations posts snippets of the daily Mass readings under #lectio on twitter. Now when I hit the readings, I try to pick out the verse Tom will tweet. Usually anything about prayer is a good bet.

6. This space intentionally left blank.

7. Jerry Pournelle is a good read on the news and events of the day:

• current view
• current mail

THE CTS BIBLE arrived this morning, Christmas Eve, wrapped in swaddling cardboard and laid on our doorstep (in the rain! Good thing I checked the mail soon after it was delivered). My wife bade me buy it as a Christmas present from her based on TSO’s recommendation - what a gal! This bible is very well done, though if I get any older I’ll need a magnifying glass to read it.

It’s the un-mucked-about-with 1966 Jerusalem Bible with two major changes: the psalter is the Grail edition used in the Liturgy of the Hours, and (thank the Lord) they’ve changed the JB’s Yahweh to Lord throughout. It’s a sturdy little thing that’s the perfect size to hold and read. I recently got caught up in the first chapters of 1 Samuel in my hefty old 1966 JB; now that the CTS Bible has arrived, I’m backing up to Joshua to get all the judges-era backstory.

LISA SPENT THE day getting the upstairs “classroom”, as we call it, cleaned up and usable as a guest bedroom for Mamaw and Papaw, who will arrive the day after Christmas. The room is set up as an upstairs kitchen with a sink, cabinets and wiring for a stove, and when we settled here we thought we might use it as a classroom. That never happened, somehow, and til now it’s always been an extra room full of stuff. After Mamaw and Papaw leave, the kids might turn it into a playroom or something. Or did you have plans for it, Lisa?

On my first day of Christmas vacation I’ve been upgrading the kids’ computers all day. The goals are to get the same operating system on each machine, set up a standard browser homepage with links to what everyone needs, and set up an old machine given to me by a sysadmin at work because it was too obsolete to upgrade. After all that, I might set the kids up with chat clients and facebook pages (viewable only by us & the grandparents) and get them into the habit of checking their email regularly. Hmm... a family page at google calendar might be handy, too. I guess that’s all covered by google apps. And I need to import all our old mediawiki pages into “Whitopedia”, our family’s wikipedia. And there’s the new domain to set up if I can figure out an easy way to get files to it (I’d prefer scp to ftp). And I could add a dozen other things...

I posted a bit to facebook this evening: “Christmas vacation = home sysadmin time” and all my geek friends replied with the home sysadmin projects they’re working on this week - upgrade networks, build a hackintosh, reformat and reinstall the parents’ computers, etc.

A search for the old Catholic publisher Pustet at the Internet Archive reveals some interesting books:

• The Mother of Jesus in Holy Scripture - 1913
• The Little Office of Our Lady; a treatise theoretical, practical, and exegetical - 1903
• Explanation of the Epistles and Gospels for the Sundays, holydays and festivals throughout the ecclesiastical year, to which are added the lives of many saints - 1880
• Homiletic and catechetic studies, according to the spirit of Holy Scripture and of the ecclesiastical year - 1912
• The Pastor: a monthly journal for priests - 1882 - many obscure details of daily Catholic life in the 1880s
• American ecclesiastical review, Volume 1 - 1889 - ditto

For future reference on Christmas morning while preparing the crockpot for supper. Beer = Guinness.

      Title: Crockpot Italian Beef From Dave Pritchett's Mom
 Categories: main dish, crockpot
      Yield: 6 servings

      4 lb rump roast
  1 1/2 ts garlic powder
      2 ts oregano
    1/4 ts pepper
      2 ts dried minced onion
      8 oz jar pepperoncini with juice
      4    beef bouillion cubes
           -dissolved in 10 oz water
      1 cn beer
    1/4 c  whiskey
      1    salt to taste

Put in crock pot on high for 8-10 hours. Remove meat and peppers, chop finely. Serve on sourdough sandwich rolls, or any firm buns (NOT hamburger buns). Put a tablespoon or two of juice over meat, and serve with container of "au jus" from the crockpot on the side. As leftovers, you can add BBQ sauce to the beef and serve it as BBQ, or do a Philly cheesesteak thing.

Daniel Mitsui has a fine essay on the development of perspective in drawing and painting and why medieval artists got along fine without it.

The other day my manager sprung for a new high-end desktop system for me to use at home, and I think I have everything set up now. Let’s see if blogging works from here.

So I've started reading the Project Gutenberg edition of War and Peace. A guy I trust (he had scifi stories published in the ’50s and ’60s - he’s a heck of a writer) claims it's the best historical novel ever written, and I'm willing to dive in on his word. Finished chapter one last night - I knew of the French influence in Imperial Russia, but I didn't know that the French language was so widely and deeply used among the trendy aristocracy. (I'm assuming Tolstoy didn't make up cultural details like that.)

I've started writing a simple blog engine in Mathematica — the idea is to take a directory of tagged plain-text files and turn them into an entire bloggy website with date archives, tag archives, flexible css layout, etc. If it pans out, I can add it to my suite of Mathematica programs that run every night at work and use it to report results on an autogenerated blog.

Lisa's off on a big shopping trip this afternoon, and the kids have been astonishingly peaceful. Doesn't happen often.

Psalm 51, againt lechery:

• St Augustine
• Neale and Littledale
• St John Fisher
• Sidneian Psalms