Saturday, August 15, 2015

Interesting folks are all over

Galla Placidia, Christian Roman Empress.
A new book on her life. WIKIPEDIA link

---------------------------

Ex Astronaut Edgar Mitchell thinks the Aliens visited to view the Atomic bomb testing at White Sands and to keep us from blowing ourselves up. (Via Belmont Club)

Except, of course, Trinity site is northeast of White Sands, closer to the Apache reservation where I used to work than to White Sands... And Roswell? Well, where the "UFO" was found was actually north west of Roswell, over the mountain pass from Mescalero/Ruidoso, although it was closer by air to the Trinity site than to White Sands.

Apparantly they aliens had bad GPS systems and got lost.

The Apaches always saw UFO's but figured they were just experimental aircraft from Alamagordo (or maybe lost Wehrmacht pilots, who trained there).

-----------------------------

Speaking of Ruidoso, where Bill the Kid escaped from jail. One nun who saved the life of his buddy when the docs refused to treat him (and convinced Billy not to kill the docs) is being investigated for Sainthood. From NCR

After that incident, Sister Blandina and Billy the Kid became friends. She once visited him in jail, and he once called off a stage-coach robbery as soon as he realized she was one of the passengers.
When she wasn’t calling off outlaws, Sister Blandina was founding schools, building hospitals, teaching and caring for orphans and the poor and advocating for the rights of American Indians and other minorities. All in a day’s work.

She was born in Italy. More in Wikipedia.

so why was she wearing a bonnet and not a veil?



Because it wasn’t in our founding charism to wear habits. St. Vincent de Paul and St. Louise de Marillac, who began the Daughters of Charity back in the 1630s, told them that they were to dress like the ordinary peasant women of the day. St. Vincent wrote that the Daughters of Charity were to have “no cloister but a rented room; no veil but holy modesty.”
When St. Elizabeth Seton adapted St. Vincent’s Rule for the American Sisters of Charity in the early 1800s, she and her sisters wore the black dress and bonnet that widows wore in those days. (Mother Seton herself was a widow with 5 small children.)

something to remember when the traditionalists insist nuns should go back to their habits.

Headsup TeaAtTrianon.

----------------------------

 Brian Sibley  reminisces about children's writer Tove Jansson, the inventer of the Moomins.



What captivated me about the chronicles of Moominland was the combination of fantastical storytelling with exquisite black-and-white illustrations that evoked feelings of warmth, happiness and security, shadowed by a hint of sadness, longing and regret, and tinged with a kind of yearning that is both nostalgic and elegiac.
In Moominvalley, everyone - however curious or odd – an invisible child or a cross-dressing Hemulen - was welcomed and accommodated somewhere in the tall, tower-like, Moomin House. It is tolerant world in which love is unconditionally guaranteed and where every individual is allowed - encouraged - to be themselves without criticism or censure; a world where home is the safe, centered heartbeat of life to which the inhabitants always return but from which they are also free to set off on adventurous quests in search of whatever might lie over this mountain or beyond that sea…

------------------------------------

Botanist hunts the rarest flower on earth, high in the Himalayas.







No comments: