
— 1 —
Went to the movies, saw A Quiet Place. If you can handle a bit of a scare and some earned sadness based on themes of love and sacrifice – go see it, too. I wrote about it here.
— 2 —
Various activities this week:
- A Piano Honors Ensemble Recital on Sunday
- Went and watched our young mayor whom I don’t think anyone hates yet jump out of a plane on Monday afternoon – story here. It was a fun community moment out there in our lovely Railroad Park.
- Monday evening, we attended a recital of organ students, including the daughter of a friend of ours. Here’s hoping that our keyboardist will be performing in it next year…
- Homeschool trip/activity at the Birmingham Museum of Art. I always like going to our fine, free museum, but I think we might have aged out of activities like this…even if it was geared towards teens.
- Two music lessons this week – one classical, one jazz.
- Friday promises good weather, so M and will probably go check out what’s blooming in the Botanical Gardens and try out our finally reopened Vulcan Trail. Fascinating updates will probably be posted on Instagram. I thought I had recorded the plane-jumping, but got home and discovered that my phone video wasn’t recording for some reason. A restart fixed it.
—3–
And here you go, Friday: A morning with math (getting through that Art of Problem Solving Pre-Algebra – we’ll finish by mid-May!), some Spanish, some history reading.
Then we set out to visit our just re-opened Vulcan Trail. It’s been closed for probably close to a year as they did something that’s been needed for a while – joining the Vulcan park to the trail below.
If you want to read about who this Vulcan fellow is, go here. He made his first formal appearance at the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis, representing the city.
Then to the (also free) wonderful Birmingham Botanical Gardens to see what’s in bloom. Not anything at the Zen spot, obviously – except enlightenment.
–4––
This weekend:
- Mass serving
- District piano competition (to qualify to play at state in May)
- 17-year old taking the ACT
- 17-year old working
- 17-year old prepping for a college visit to Auburn Sunday night and Monday.
- Oh, and someone looking at a car he’s hankering to buy with his hard-earned grocery bagging cash. My philosophy is: you have use of a car you don’t have to pay for. Why buy one? His philosophy is different. The whole things make me nervous, but the car he wants has excellent reviews and is by a carmaker I trust, so….
- You’d think I’d be used to this by now. But I’m not. Parents of potty-training kids who think it can’t get worse? Oh, yes, it can. Everything about parenting older kids is great and fantastic except the driving part. That’s awful. And it’s awful because it’s not a joke. You don’t want your child to be hurt or killed. You don’t want them hurting or, God forbid being responsible for the death of another person. Over-dramatic? Nope. My prayer life gets a daily revival twice a day – once from 7:15-7:30 and then again from 3:15-3:45. Double revival when I hear sirens during that half-hour.
–5 —
I somehow missed this earlier in the year, but…you know those podcast series centered on a mysterious crime? Like Serial and S-Town (which was centered not too far from here – closer to Tuscaloosa)? I listened to part of Serial, then got impatient with it and fed up with the centrality of the podcaster to the story.
Very dependably, The Onion has come through with its own version: A Very Fatal Murder. It’s in six parts, which total about an hour. It’s pretty funny and absolutely -spot on in the satire of the self-important podcaster, the subtext of contempt for “ordinary” people and the ultimate sense you get of human lives being valuable only insofar as they serve a narrative.
It’s the kind of school where the football field is bigger than the chemistry lab, and kids learn to throw a baseball before they take the SAT’s.
After all, most of the people who lived here had never met a podcast host. Let alone a podcast host from New York City. They weren’t used to stuff like this.
–6–
Speaking of contempt for The Rest of Us, let’s turn to the pages of The New Yorker and “Chick-Fil-A’s Creepy Infiltration of New York City.”
Defenders of Chick-fil-A point out that the company donates thousands of pounds of food to New York Common Pantry, and that its expansion creates jobs. The more fatalistic will add that hypocrisy is baked, or fried, into every consumer experience—that unbridled corporate power makes it impossible to bring your wallet in line with your morals. Still, there’s something especially distasteful about Chick-fil-A, which has sought to portray itself as better than other fast food: cleaner, gentler, and more ethical, with its poultry slightly healthier than the mystery meat of burgers. Its politics, its décor, and its commercial-evangelical messaging are inflected with this suburban piety. A representative of the Richards Group once told Adweek, “People root for the low-status character, and the Cows are low status. They’re the underdog.” That may have been true in 1995, when Chick-fil-A was a lowly mall brand struggling to find its footing against the burger juggernauts. Today, the Cows’ “guerrilla insurgency” is more of a carpet bombing. New Yorkers are under no obligation to repeat what they say. Enough, we can tell them. NO MOR.
My pleasure.
As someone on Twitter said, I thought New Yorkers were supposed to be tough. So why are they so scared of a chicken sandwich?
And let’s imagine the outcry if the Nashville Tenessean or Knoxville News-Sentinel had run a piece fretting about the infiltration of halal or kosher food on the local menu.
Save yourself time – don’t read the article. Just scroll through “chick-fil-a New Yorker” on Twitter and enjoy yourself on this Friday afternoon, maybe with a side order of waffle fries.
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
–7–
Next Monday, April 16, is the memorial of St. Bernadette.
Today (April 16) is her memorial. Loyola has the entry I wrote on St. Bernadette for The Loyola Kids Book of Saints up on their website – you can read the whole thing here.
Bernadette’s life wasn’t easy to begin with. She and her family lived in terrible poverty in a village in France called Lourdes. By the time she was 14, Bernadette had been sick so often that she hadn’t grown properly. She was the size of a much younger girl. She, her parents, and her younger brothers and sisters all lived in a tiny room at the back of someone else’s house, a building that had actually been a prison many years before.
They slept on three beds: one for the parents, one for the boys, and one for the girls. Every night they battled mice and rats. Every morning, they woke up, put their feet on cold stone floors, and dressed in clothes that had been mended more times than anyone could count.
Each day they hoped the work they could find would bring them enough bread to live on that day.
Bernadette’s life was terribly difficult, but she wasn’t a miserable girl. She had a deep, simple faith in God. She didn’t mind any of the work she had to do, whether it was helping her mother cook or taking care of her younger brothers and sisters. There was, though, one thing that bothered her. She hadn’t been able to attend school very often, and she didn’t know how to read. Because of that, she had never learned enough about her faith to be able to receive her first Communion. Bernadette wanted to receive Jesus in the Eucharist, but her days, which were full of hard work, left little time for learning
Like other girls, Bernadette had many friends. She spent time with them in the countryside, playing and gathering wood for their families’ fireplaces and stoves. One cold February day, Bernadette was out with her sister and a friend, doing just that. They wandered along the river until they came to a spot where a large, shallow cave called a grotto had formed in the hilly bank. Bernadette’s sister and friend decided to take off their shoes and cross the stream.
Because she was so sickly, Bernadette knew her mother would be angry if she plunged her thin legs into the icy water, so she stayed behind. But after a few minutes, she grew tired of waiting for her companions to return. She took off her stockings and crossed the stream herself.
What happened then was very strange. The bushes that grew out of the grotto walls started blowing around as if they were being blown by a strong wind. Bernadette looked up. High above her in the grotto stood a gi
For more Quick Takes, visit This Ain’t the Lyceum!
Like this:
Like Loading...
Read Full Post »