The Daily Pope

Here's a webpage that lists all the works of Benedict XVI from the Vatican website, sorted by date. Anyone with a head for web design is welcome to make it look prettier. More details later after I recover from what the kids have.

Update: here's how it works.

The internet and bookstores

Here's an article by David Streitfeld from a New York City "news paper" about how the internet is killing bookstores. Mr Streitfeld mentioned ViaLibri in his article.

It's been a long time

since our last gastrointestinal festival. Two kids have hurled so far. 4 yo Caroline started soon after supper with piles of very well-chewed spaghetti and 6 yo John just blew something across the living room carpet at 12:30am. I can't tell what it used to be (except for the stuff that looks like dry cat food but surely not) so I'm not sure what set him off. My current suspect is the chocolate cake we served for 12 yo Christopher's birthday after supper.

Update: Poor John has been going off about every 2 hours and so far it's just him and Caroline. When I was a kid I just felt tired after an all-nighter; now at 42, I feel drunk.

Alex Beam's Great Books book

For the Mortimer Adler fans out there, here are a few reviews of Alex Beam's A Great Idea at the Time: The Rise, Fall, and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books:

• Wendy Smith in the Chicago Tribune
• Julia Keller in the LA Times
• James Campbell in the New York Times

Adler's Great Books of the Western World is the set of books I'd most like to save from a dumpster.

UPDATE: here's a collection of essays about the Great Books series at the Encyclopedia Britannica blog.

On functional programming

Looks like functional programming is the next big hype in programming - expect to see lots of bullshit-bingo corporate-speak about it in the coming years. Meanwhile, here's a decent overview in Dr Dobb's Journal of a few languages in which functional programming is possible, including a peek at the Mathematica language, which I write in all day every day.

Merry Christmas to emacs users

Or, how I spent my Christmas vacation.

Here are texinfo and info versions of Project Gutenberg's Complete Works of Shakespeare, suitable for use in emacs or with the texinfo program (though I haven't actually tested it with texinfo).

It's a gzipped tar archive. Extracting it will give you a directory named "shakespeare" containing shakespeare.texi (the source file) and a set of info files generated from it via Makeinfo. Find out where info files live on your system, then put these info files in that directory and add the following to the 'dir' file in the directory:

* Shakespeare: (shakespeare).           The Project Gutenberg Complete Works of Shakespeare.

The .texi file is included in case you want to make changes and recompile the info files.

You may also be interested in my info/texinfo editions of the Summa theologiae of St Thomas Aquinas and the Catechism of the Catholic Church. C-u 999 M-x gloria-in-excelsis-deo.

It's like Christmas in December!

TSO added comments and Ellyn at Oblique House activated her RSS feed. It's an historic day in the Catlicker blogosphere.

A day which will live in famy

TSO has comments! And he's an energetic commenter replying to the comment firehose he's opened - I hope that boy can keep up with it. Surely a Guiness or three would help him. I'll start now, seeing as how I've just started a Two. Week. Vacation.

Today's philosophy?

The first sentence in Russell Kirk's The Conservative Mind:

"The stupid party": this is John Stuart Mill's description of conservatives. Like certain other summary dicta which nineteenth-century liberals thought to be forever triumphant, his judgment needs review in our age of disintegrating liberal and radical philosophies.

If liberal and radical philosophies are disintegrating today (Kirk wrote in 1953), what do we call the growing spirit of Leviathan in Washington that claims competence in all areas, great and small, of every citizen's life?

Upon earth there is not his like,
a creature without fear.
He beholds everything that is high;
he is king over all the sons of pride. —Job 41:33-34, on Leviathan

She needs freshly-killed babies

So says Renee A. Reijo Pera, director of Stanford University's Center for Human Embryonic Stem Cell Research and Education. Her comments also highlight the evil of in-vitro fertilization, whose surplus of conceived children she uses as an excuse when discussing the morality of her job.

Time for the O antiphons

Fr Z has the goods.

Inferno; or, prophecy fulfilled

I bought John Ciardi's translation of Dante's Inferno back in my college daze in the mid '80s, picturing the day far in the future when my kids would roam and graze among our groaning bookcases.

I just spotted 10-year-old Sarah reading aloud from Ciardi's Inferno, feeling the language with her lips and tongue as she listens to it. Life is good.

Preparing for Christmas

I haven't yet found Prosper Gueranger's commentary on Advent, but here are his two volumes on Christmas: volume 1 and volume 2; and here are links to the rest of the year.

UPDATE: the long-lost text, found by Mama Loves Coffee! I have been out-googled.

Woo hoo!

It's a beautiful morning in Illinois! The governor of Illinois, Rod Blagojevich, was arrested by the FBI this morning on corruption charges! After hearing the news I courted danger by doing a sort of one-legged Twist in celebration.

Some serious emacs keyboard analysis

I know what I'll be reading today during test runs of the stuff I'm writing in Mathematica: a great discussion and analysis of emacs keyboard commands from Steve Yegge, and another one on the organization of emacs init files. It's always nice to find someone who shares your obsessions.

Homeschooling in Illinois

Here's a great new blog by Susan Ryan and Deborah Niemann-Boehle, mainstays of the effort to keep Illinois homeschooling free. I've subscribed to their rss feed in Google Reader.