It was inevitable...

... but I didn’t imagine it would happen so soon.

BBC and CERT have been advising people not to use Internet Explorer, but now even Slate (which, BTW, is owned by Microsoft) is telling people it’s time to switch to a decent browser.

It’s nice to see that people won’t put up with crap. For a long time I’ve had little faith in the intelligence of the general computing population for all that people just unhesitatingly accept, but it looks like people are finally starting to wake up. And it’s not hard to see why: Microsoft is recommending that people simply disable Javascript because it has too many security issues! Well, no thanks; some sites require Javascript. If you can’t deliver, we’ll go to someone who can.

The Blood Tides of Lhowonowon

“Count Roland smites upon the marble stone;
I cannot tell you how he hewed it and smote;
Yet the blade breaks not nor splinters, though it groans;
Upward to heaven it rebounds from the blow.
When the count sees it never will be broke,
Then to himself right softly he makes moan;
‘Ah, Durendal, fair, hallowed, and devote,
What store of relics lies in thy hilt of gold!’”

-From The Song of Roland
(Translated by Dorothy Sayers, Viking Penguin, NY, NY, 1957)

Shes been googleds been googled

People can’t spell. Then again, these people are probably a subset googlers on the lower end of the spectrum, considering what they are interested in.

The legend continues.

Everything you’ve heard is true….

Peet’s coffee: coffee so strong, it smells like fish. Helpful for those late night read-a-thons. Can ya dig it?

0.9 has landed

The new Firefox has arrived. I’m already starting to get hits from Firefox version 0.9 in my logs, and I’ve started to play with it myself. If you aren’t using Firefox 0.9 yet, you need to get it (unless you’ve got Safari). The performance increase over the last Firefox is really noticeable on my machine (and the improvements over Internet Explorer are just astronomical….) When 1.0 is released this summer, there will no longer be an excuse to use IE. (Ignorance doesn’t count.)

...and if I had any, I wouldnt give it to you...t give it to you...

“Ian! Hey Ian!

Oh, sorry. We thought you were our friend until we mooned you.
You got any weed?”

You have to be careful walking around Berkeley at night…
There’s no telling who you’ll run into.

Under the Mercy

The first two chapters of A Severe Mercy alone are enough to evoke in me what Lewis described just yesterday as Joy. (How interesting it is that Eros emerges, not merely for my Beloved, but for the story of Lover and Beloved! Even when told in a pagan love…. But I digress.) At first glance I despair—how can I live up to such passion and devotion? Then I remember my distinct advantage: theirs began as a pagan love, while ours is baptized from the beginning.

Still, I feel as if it should make much more of a difference than it has so far.

That’s it, I suppose. Yes, the challenge is not merely how to emulate Van and Davy. It’s how to do them one better! The Shining Barrier is strong—immensely strong—but it must be breached by the Cross for the love to be perfected. How much better if something else is set up—something that furthers the Cause instead of having to eventually yield to it.

Yes, that’s the challenge; I’m certain of it. But as to how…. well I am still bewildered. I would joy over their pagan love, yet I believe something much greater is awaiting me. Christ show His grace to me: I shall search.

Offsite chronicle

I realized some of you may be wondering how my time up here in Berkeley is going, and I really haven’t been mentioning much of it apart from general observations on the reading and praises to Moe’s books.

Well, for the curious, here is the reading list:

• Epistle to the Ephesians by St. Paul


• The Life of St. Antony by St. Athanasius


• The Dumb Ox: St. Thomas Aquinas by Chesterton


• St. Francis Assisi by Chesterton


• The Right Questions by Phil Johnson


• Surprised by Joy by CS Lewis


• Book of Martyrs by John Foxe


• A Severe Mercy by Vanauken


• The Comedy of Errors by Shakespeare


• Through the Gates of Splendour by Elisabeth Elliot


• The Life and Letters of Henry Martyn by John Sergeant


• Epistle to the Ephensians by St. Paul

Like I said, I haven’t really been mentioning much of it. Now, if you really want to follow closely with the events, Joel Watson’s blog is quite informative—he likes to go over things in much greater detail than I. So the events he describes are mostly what is happening to me, though the interpretation of said events I may not necessarily share.

The uninterested may keep reading on this blog. I tend to really only mention the things that really strike me or stand out.

Aperture Wide Open; Enter the Light

Lem’s got a blog now too.

He’s cool. Or so I hear.

All hail the muse

Note to self: visitors stop coming when updates stop.

Check it out: www.mountparnassus.net. Almost ready to go live; it just needs forums. Joel Watson may be helping me out with that. We’ll see. It’ll be interesting to see how well it is recieved by the Torrey blogging community.

Oh, and in closing, Bulgogi is t3h best.

I hate Chesterton

I don’t actually hate Chesterton, but I thought it would be very Chestertonian to say that after just saying that I love him. I realized as I was reading his book on St. Thomas Aquinas that his style is such that he seems incapable of saying anything without a contradiction, a contrast, or a paradox. “On the one hand X does Y to Z, but perhaps in actuality Z does Y to X.” Sentences like that are inextricable from Chesterton’s writing; not a paragraph can finish without one. It is a delightfully entertaining style. The question is that of how instructive it can be for those subjects that are fairly orderly or straightforward and do not lend themselves easily to paradox.

This works out really well in his fiction: for one he is undeniably a master of paradoxes, and in fiction you can put in paradoxes where ever you wish if you are capable (as he is) of working them out to great wonderment. It also works like a charm when he is talking about such paradoxical things as the life of St. Francis.

I’m not sure it is so well suited to the life of St. Thomas though. Chesterton himself admits as he contrasts Thomas and Hegel: “For St. Thomas it is impossible that contradictories should exist together, and again reality and intelligibility correspond [...]” (p. 146) Thomisim is a philosophy of common sense, and in Thomism everything is above all orderly. But Chesterton thrives on apparent contradiction; every paragraph of the book is full of what seems at first glance to be chaotic nonsense. (Needless to say, it turns out not to be so.)

I suppose what I’m trying to say is that Chesterton’s approach is not the best way to approach the Church’s great doctor. However, it is delightful and meshes naturally with most of his subjects. It’s nearly impossible not to like Chesterton. (Especially after what he has to say about Luther and Calvin. Good jolly chap.)

I love Chesterton

They begin to see that, as the eighteenth century thought itself the age of reason, and the nineteenth century thought itself the age of common sense, the twentieth century cannot as yet even manage to think itself anything but the age of uncommon nonsense.

—G.K. Chesterton, The Dumb Ox

Sweet, sweet books

• Penguin Dictionary of Saints: $3.00


• Count Zero: $1.50


• Neuromancer: $2.00


• Stranger in a Strange Land: $3.50


• Sagas of the Icelanders: $6.00


• Weaving the Web: $10.00


• The Mabinogion: $1.80


• Jerusalem Bible: $6.00


• Apocrypha: $3.00


• Going to Moe’s: priceless