A reason to visit Sweden

It's about danged time!!! Woohooooooooooooo!!!

 

What took them so long?

Talk, talk, talk

According to a new book written (naturally) by a woman, women talk three times as much as men.

It is something one half of the population has long suspected - and the other half always vocally denied. Women really do talk more than men.

In fact, women talk almost three times as much as men, with the average woman chalking up 20,000 words in a day - 13,000 more than the average man.

[snip]...

Women also speak more quickly, devote more brainpower to chit-chat - and actually get a buzz out of hearing their own voices, a new book suggests.

Honestly, is this really a surprise to anyone? I get my buzz from a bottle of lager, and communicate by grunting. OF COURSE women talk more than I do!

Dr Brizendine, a self-proclaimed feminist, says the differences can be traced back to the womb, where the sex hormone testosterone moulds the developing male brain.

The areas responsible for communication, emotion and memory are all pared back the unborn baby boy.

The result is that boys - and men - chat less than their female counterparts and struggle to express their emotions to the same extent.

"Women have an eight-lane superhighway for processing emotion, while men have a small country road," said Dr Brizendine, who runs a female "mood and hormone" clinic in San Francisco.

I was going to argue about this point with this "doctor", but it would involve using really big words that I can never remember, and to be honest I just really am not emotionally compelled to do so. She's dead to me. I'll be over here with my Matchbox cars driving in the little dirt roads I've created in my dirt driveway.

Which lead, by the way, to my super-duper huge airport. Read on:

Dr Brizendine says the brain's "sex processor" - the areas responsible for sexual thoughts - is twice as big as in men than in women, perhaps explaining why men are stereotyped as having sex on the mind.

Or, to put it another way, men have an international airport for dealing with thoughts about sex, "where women have an airfield nearby that lands small and private planes".

Here the good doctor makes a lapse in reasoning however and actually disproves her main point due to her zeal in composing her man-hatred-filled screed:

There are, however, advantages to being the strong, silent type. Dr Brizendine explains that testosterone also reduces the size of the section of the brain involved in hearing - allowing men to become "deaf" to the most logical of arguments put forward by their wives and girlfriends.

Guess what dearie...you talk twice as much because we are ignoring you! You have to say it twice. Or more accurately, we're not ignoring you but fantasizing about landing our big airplanes on a small airfield somewhere. Maybe on Wisteria Lane.

I need a beer. Where do I keep that stuff? <---all monosyllabic words  <snort>

Chesterton, PETA and resolutions

As this is the final week of the year in the Church, and Advent marks the start of the new year next weekend, it's a time of resolutions. Among mine is to finally read the multi-volume set of the collected works of Chesterton I've acquired, having spent this past year on Tolkien; while perhaps slipping in some Milton as well. And so I began early this morning on Christ the King Sunday and when I read the following I had to chuckle. After reading yesterday in the paper about how PETA is once again challenging nativity displays across the country and even right here in town, GKC's article in the Illustrated London News from Dec. 4, 1908, brought a smile to my world-weary lips. He writes:

Meanwhile, it remains true that I shall eat a great deal of turkey this Christmas; and it is not in the least true (as the vegetarians say) that I shall do it because I do not realise what I am doing, or because I do what I know is wrong, or that I do it with shame or doubt or a fundamental unrest of conscience. In one sense I know quite well what I am doing; in another sense I know quite well that I know not what I do. Scrooge and the Cratchits and I are, as I have said, all in one boat; the turkey and I are, to say the most of it, ships that pass in the night, and greet each other in passing. I wish him well; but it is really practically impossible to discover whether I treat him well. I can avoid, and I do avoid with horror, all special and artificial tormenting of him, sticking pins in him for fun or sticking knives in him for scientific investigation. But whether by feeding him slowly and killing him quickly for the needs of my brethren, I have improved in his own solemn eyes his own strange and separate destiny, whether I have made him in the sight of God a slave or a martyr, or one whom the gods love and who die young--that is far more removed from my possibilities of knowledge than the most abstruse intricacies of mysticism or theology. A turkey is more occult and awful than the angels and archangels. In so far as God has partly revealed to us an angelic world, he has partly told us what an angel means. But God has never told us what a turkey means. And if you go and stare at a live turkey for an hour or two, you will find by the end of it that the enigma has rather increased than dimished.

In the womb

And to think after watching this video, that it wasn't two weeks ago that in the halls of the Supreme Court attorneys were arguing with justices over the "line of demarcation" at which point the baby would be too far out of the womb to allow you to puncture its skull and suck its brains out.

Lincoln Diocese article

On Saturday I opened my city newspaper to Section C (Values Section) when what did appear? A photo of our bishop along with a large headline: Lincoln Diocese attracts conservative Catholics. I braced myself for the usual hit-and-run type of article that our paper runs that consists normally of the following template: 2-3 paragraphs of lukewarm description followed by paragraphs of quotes from the usual 2-3 heretical "Catholics" the LJS reporters keep in their rolodex: Call To Action, Voice of the Faithful, etc., etc.

That group must have been on vacation last week, because I was pleasantly surprised with the mostly positive article that followed. They did get a quote in from the president of Call To Action-Nebraska, but it was nonsensical and whiney. The other dissenters spoke of "feelings" and "voice of the liberal Catholic." What IS the voice of a "liberal" Catholic, or a "conservative" one for that matter? The labeling of all things in that manner is ideologically lazy and quite frankly arrogant. Isn't it the height of hubris to see God through the prism of American politics? I grew up Protestant and one of the things that attracted me to the Catholic faith was that there was ONE faith...or appeared to be. Not until I became a Catholic did I notice that the disease that's tearing apart Protestants (and America for that matter) has infected the Catholic Church, especially the American Catholic Church.

In the photo that accompanies the article there is a young red-haired man following to the right of Bishop Bruskewitz. He is a parishioner at St. Johns, and a former "Godteen" of ours who met in our home every Wednesday during his time in high school. Craig is in his 3rd year of minor seminary at St. Gregory the Great and after this year will finish up his seminary studies for a few years on the east coast. He is wonderful young man whom we were blessed to know since he was fourteen, and he is but one example of the many young priests we are blessed with here in southern Nebraska.