A Random Assortment

~ I regret not finding and buying some Miss Lassie Christmas stamps while I was in the Cayman Islands.

~ 7-year-old Joseph Ratzinger's letter to Baby Jesus:

Dear Baby Jesus, quickly come down to earth. You will bring joy to children. Also bring me joy," he wrote in the 1934 letter, published on the Church-affiliated Italian website Korazym.org.

"I would like a Volks-Schott (a Mass prayers book), green clothing for Mass (clerical clothing) and a heart of Jesus. I will always be good. Greetings from Joseph Ratzinger," he wrote ...

~ A photography project about Albania's "sworn virgins"--quite interesting from the perspective of gender and men's and women's roles.

~ Miss Self-Important on Brideshead Revisited:

I begin with the sheepish admission that I had long thought this book was a sequel to some never-discussed earlier work, which would have had to be entitled simply Brideshead.

~  "Wright's Law"--This is a wonderful video about an innovative physics teacher whose concern with teaching his students extends to sharing with them about his life, including the challenges and joys of raising his son, Adam, who has Joubert Syndrome (via Ilana). I've watched this video twice so far and cried both times.

~ Alan Jacobs argues that Christian poetry isn't suffering. This:

You   

Solve nothing but the problems that I set.

 and

blade of lightning
harvesting the sky.

and

a stranger paints
the air with his midrash of pigment and time ...

Caravaggio once punched a drunk in the head
and saw Jesus as the man's flesh dented

 beneath his fist like a warm loaf.

  and

The stars! the stars have fled the sky!—
Scratch that—the stars have skyed the flood, the sea
glimmering in pale beneath a starless black.

 ~ We need to figure out how birth control actually works. I feel very strongly about this--science doesn't always know how or why particular medicines work. But in this circumstance, I don't think that the knowledge that we have of how birth control works is sufficient to allow people to make informed ethical decisions: People who are pro-life and who believe that life begins at the moment of conception are uncomfortable with a contraceptive that makes the uterus inhospitable--this means that there's a possibility that, if the egg is in fact fertilized, it can be prevented by the birth control from implanting.

~ A Matt Damon fracking movie!! Ahhhh! (via Francisco)

~ This article sets Keynesian economics in its historical and philosophical context. Fascinating:

Allowing for a doubling of output per person, that would be consistent with a reduction of working hours to 15 hours a week or even less. This, Keynes thought, would be sufficient to satisfy the ‘old Adam’ in us who needs work in order to be contented.

~ On Downton Abbey and period dramas:

The inevitable Lady Mary exhibits her spoiled nature and then learns her lesson several times in each season, and the irredeemably wicked footman and his spiteful lady’s maid accomplice get their comeuppance and revert to type so frequently I wondered if the Road Runner cartoons weren’t the original template for the show. (via Maud Newton)

~ "A little urban rural brigadoon":

i almost feel that humanity as a whole suffered a great loss when cartographers stopped writing ‘here there be monsters’ at the edge of ocean maps.

~ This woman sounds like she was a character. About the Kennedy Center, she writes:

The building is a national tragedy. It is a cross between a concrete candy box and a marble sarcophagus in which the art of architecture lies buried.”