One last selfie

What can I say? The lighting was just ethereal and really flattered me, making me look wise beyond my years, I think.

Cliff notes on the Synod on the Family so far

Here's the half-time report. Here is my "cliff-notes" excerpt:

In the report, the Synod Fathers also reaffirm that same-sex unions cannot be considered equal to matrimony. And it is unacceptable that pressure be brought to bear on pastors or that international bodies make financial aid dependent on the introduction of regulations inspired by gender ideology.

Finally, stating that openness to new life is essential part of married love, the Synod Fathers affirm the message of Paul VI’s Humanae Vitae regarding the need to respect dignity of person in moral evaluation of methods of birth control.

There you go.

What does Tom Waits mean by the Marley Bone Coach?

I was driving in to work today and this song popped into my head. Probably due to the drab fall weather.



What does he mean when he states "So I will take the Marley Bone Coach"? There is a bit of speculation from a major Waits fan here. But I think the best explanation comes from Michael Quinn on this page. Quinn's stuff is fascinating to me.

To go by Marylebone stage meant to go on foot. It appears in a novel by Mary Elizabeth Braddon called Charlotte’s Inheritance of 1868: “‘The cabmen are trying it on, anyhow, just now,’ thought Mr Sheldon; ‘but I don’t think they’ll try it on with me. And if they do, there’s the Marylebone stage. I’m not afraid of a five-mile walk.’” There was indeed a stagecoach which ran (staggered would be a better term — a contemporary writer said it “dragged tediously”) the four miles from Marylebone to the City of London, taking two and a half hours to get there and three hours to come back, this duration being partly accounted for by the extremely bad roads of the period but mainly by an unnecessarily long stop at an inn along the way. The earliest reference I can find to it is in a court case at the Old Bailey in 1822, in which a young man was found guilty of stealing two handkerchiefs from a passenger.

It was quicker to walk. This may have been part of the allusion, since Marylebone stage was either a joke based on, or perhaps a corruption of, marrowbone stage, known from the 1820s. John Black tells me that two centuries earlier Marylebone was often written as Marrowbone by Samuel Pepys among others; Pepys wrote in his Diary on 31 July 1667: “Then we abroad to Marrowbone, and there walked in the garden, the first time I ever was there, and a pretty place it is.” This makes the connection even easier to understand.

Marrowbone was a figurative term meaning the shinbones, hence the legs. So marrowbone stage has the same meaning as Shanks’s pony or Shanks’s mare. (There was also the obvious going by Walkers’ bus, which Dr Cobham Brewer mentions in early editions of his Dictionary of Phrase and Fable.) The first two expressions are equated in a book by George Augustus Sala with the title Twice Around the Clock, dated 1859: “The humbler conveyances known as ‘Shanks’s mare’, and the ‘Marrowbone stage’ — in more refined language, walking.”

Seems like maybe he's talking about both walking and dying, like he's slowly walking off to his own grave all alone. The song is very sad and beautiful at once, and it always reminds me of my friends who have never gotten married.

On a less somber note, check out Quinn's write-up on the word banana. It always cheers me up.

Etymology of goozlepipe

Here the top hit for goozlepipe when performing a search with Googlepipe. Excerpt:

The first thing that Steve Flores said he wants people to know about Goozlepipe & Guttyworks, the extension of his Kickbacks Gastropub, is that it’s not all about the beer.

Instead, he talked about its steampunk look, full of art and bits of old machinery, the basement patterned after a Belgian dining room. He talked about the expanded menu with 100 new items. And he talked about the new bigger kitchen that it will share with Kickbacks.
.....
“We won’t really advertise the beer,” Flores said. “We won’t have any beer signs. If you come in, it will be like ‘By the way, we have the world’s largest selection of beer.’ ”

Yeah, there’s lots of beers. The main floor of G&G will have 72 taps coming out of a 500-pound coffee urn that dates back to the Civil War and another 24 coming out of specialty towers.

When the Belgian room is completed later this summer, it will have 24 taps pouring nothing but beer from Belgium.

And then there’s Kickbacks itself with 84 taps.

That’s a total 204 drafts along with about 1,000 beers in bottles.

It goes even further. The one actual beer display will feature 99 bottles of Sam Adams Utopias on the wall, available in small pours. That hard-to-get beer sells for about $140 a bottle and is often sold for several times that on eBay.

So it's a steampunk-themed bar that has lots of beer. See how much we learn here. Maybe C3P0 and R2 will finally get served there.

Paper Airplane Machine Gun / Papierflieger-Maschinenpistole

Keith thought I would like this. And he was right.



What can I say. I'm a tech-nerd. But this guy is a tech-wizard. He mostly designed this with printed parts which he then sent to a contract 3D printer.

A little tinkering from me that shows what you can do with 3D printers today. Most parts of this paper airplane machine gun had printed by fabberhouse.de (the rest of them are to buy via Internet or hardware store). By the way, I use a cordless screwdriver from China for driving.

boom

Can you believe it? Rod Dreher's Theology not only has its own church in his backyard. It has it's own internet meme.

The above was my favorite. The Benedict Option will serve Alsatian Riesling. Nice pairing. I think there should be a lot more of these. Now that we know about them I expect the shortage will be over soon.

The Human Toggle Switch

One of my favorite scenes from one of my favorite movies. I've been planning on doing a post about a topic and using this as an illustration. But I haven't gotten around to the post, so I decided just to put this out there for now. It has a vast amount of applicability to people and situations.

Ed FitzGerald and the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad Amanda Bynes retweet

This latest episode finds Ohio Democrat Gubernatorial Ed FitzGerald descending further into punchline territory. Now Ed FitzGerald can belly up to the bar with Anthony Weiner and commiserate about how it was Twitter that wrecked their political career, not that thing swinging between their legs. Here's the really important paragraph:

One thing to keep in mind about Twitter and politics: The politicians themselves rarely control their Twitter accounts. Those accounts usually end up in the hands of aides, who often keep personal accounts, too.

Keep in mind also that everyone serious has left the FitzGerald campaign at this point and what is left is the B-team. So there was a B-team aide taking care of FitzGerald's twitter messaging and he/she decides to favorite a tweet by Amanda Bynes, but he/she accidentally faves it as Ed FitzGerald. What is the content of the tweet? Is it "Legalize pot NOW!"? Is it "My dad put a microchip in my brain"? No. Try "Help a n*gga out and hop off ma d*ck". So that fits in perfectly with the booty call theme of the Ed FitzGerald campaign. (Nota: Amanda Bynes is rich white woman, but I suppose because she's a rapper she gets to be an honorary n*gga as well as use the word with impunity. I suppose she gets a honorary d*ck, too, as part of the deal....)

I hereby offer $10 to anyone who can identify this B-team re-tweeter. I'd love to do an interview, or at least go to their house and peak in the windows.* Maybe I'll do some real journalism a la Jason Matera.

Tom Suddes wrote today that "This could be the year Ohio Democrats hit bottom". But this is the modern-day Democrat party, Tom. I don't think there is a bottom.

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* - Not really.