Lift Up Your Hearts!

I'm trying to digest and document the genealogical data I gathered during my recent visit to the NEHGS Library in Boston.  There's much too much to handle all at once—and too many other duties calling—but I am focussing at the moment on getting into publishable form some significant progress I made on one of Porter's lines.

This line includes the first set of Welsh ancestors I've found for Porter.  He's happy with them, even though he worries that Wales is uncomfortably close to Ireland.  He's afraid I'll eventually find Irish ancestors in his tree—not that he has anything in particular against Ireland, but because he will no longer be able to blame my quirks on my Irish blood.  :)

These Welsh ancestors are making my head spin.  I have Welsh lines, too, but haven't yet tried to carry them back beyond the immigrants.  This line of Porter's goes much further into the past, well into the time—which actually isn't all that far back—when Welsh names followed a patronymic system rather than having fixed family surnames.  So I am struggling with names like Gruffyd ap Einion of Gwyddelwern ap Gruffyd ap Llewellyn ap Cynrig ap Osbern Wyddel of Cora y Gedol.  Granted, one gets a lot of genealogy worked into a name that way, but entering it into standard genealogy software is a bit of a challenge.

I think I'll go clean the house.

After all the travelling we did in the last quarter of 2008 and in January of 2009, I, the homebody, was really ready to enjoy a few months with nowhere to go. But "the best-laid schemes o' mice an' men gang aft agley," and in this case I'm thrilled.

Ever since we moved away from Boston, I'd been waiting for Porter to get a job assignment back there so I could stay with him while doing research at the New England Historic Genealogical Society Library on Newbury Street.  He's been all over the country, but never to Boston...until now. (More)

Why do I like our church?  Well, for one thing, during yesterday's service there was not one mention of the Super Bowl.  :)

I did afterwards, in the form of a friend who is a florist commenting that she had the day off because no one schedules a wedding during  the Super Bowl, which led Porter to comment that Super Bowl Sunday may be the only holiday truly observed and respected in America.

Although we watched only about 30 seconds of the game, that half-minute included the game-winning touchdown.  Porter feels towards the Steelers only slightly better than he does towards the Yankees, but I send congratulations to all of our Pittsburgh-area, and Pittsburgh ex-pat, friends.

With a hat-tip to Bill H., another Steeler fan, here's the Super Bowl ad you didn't see.  I believe NBC should have the right to choose the ads it shows, but I like this one, so you can see it here.  No ad revenues generated.  :)  It's safer to watch it right from here; if you go to the YouTube site itself, I recommend avoiding the viewer comments, and I don't vouch for any other videos that might be suggested.

I concluded Volume 4 by decrying modern society's "increasing belief that we are entitled to pursue our pleasures without hindrance."   The segue into Volume 5's two articles may not be as clear to you as it is to me, but here they are.

The first is Patrick Deneen's Rational Control.  While I enjoy and appreciate many of Deneen's writings, his attacks on individualism make me nervous, as I've said before.  But I think I may be beginning to understand his point of view better, as being not so much in favor of collectivism and state control as in recognizing the need to make our me-first, me-only, me-now self-indulgence subservient to the needs of the community, particularly the community of family and neighbors.  In this I can agree with him wholeheartedly.  (More)

Casting the Net is where I post various items I find interesting but about which I choose to limit my commentary—because otherwise my  backlog would be even more unendurable than it is, and you'd never see them.

Jennifer at Conversion Diary alerted me to the article she wrote for Inside Catholic, entitled Eight Responses to the Pro-Choice Mindset.   Some of her arguments simply won't fly with ardent supporters of the right to abortion, because they come down to recognizing the unborn baby as a person, which of course is the core issue.

Or is it? (More)

George Friedman's The Next 100 Years:  A Forecast for the 21st Century is not yet available, but there's a long and fascinating excerpt at InvestorsInsight.  If some of Friedman's predictions seem nonsensical, the same cannot be said about his conclusion that the least reliable predictor of the future is our expectations.  In the immortal words of investment prospectuses, "past performance is no guarantee of future return."

Friedman dramatically illustrates his point by imagining what observers standing at each even decade from 1900 to 2000 might reasonably have expected the future to be like.  In most cases they would have been proven wrong within a decade. (More)

There's a reason the Oxford University Press had to include "common sense" in its new Junior Dictionary.  In 2003, a construction worker, egged on by his boss and co-workers, dived into a shallow river.  The not unsurprising result?  He broke his neck.  Now he is paralyzed, his mother cares for him full time, and the company he worked for is bankrupt.  A tragedy all around.

Another, less heart-rending but no less serious tragedy is the further erosion of the notion of personal responsibility for our actions.  In 2007 a judge ruled that the company was negligent, and this week a jury decided that the man

should receive $1.5 million for past medical expenses, $89,000 for lost earnings, $21.7 million for future medical expenses, $583,000 for loss of future earnings, and a whopping $52.8 million for pain and suffering.

He's not likely to collect, since apparently there is no one with deep pockets to bleed for the man's stupidity and that of his foolish coworkers.  For the jury's stupidity we will all suffer.

Rather than hijacking Heather's post, I'll ask my question here.

The pay toilet has long since disappeared from American public life, but is still common on Europe, a fact which often strikes visiting Americans as barbarous.  I feel similarly about paying high prices to drink water in European restaurants.  Other surprises I have found in my travels—for these are first-world, modern, and wealthy countries—is home refrigerators the size of those in U. S. college dorms (and no separate freezers), severely restricted laundry hours in apartments (sometimes as infrequently as once every two weeks), and the scarcity of clothes dryers.

There are, of course, many more things I've found delightful in all the countries we've visited, but the question of this post is:  What do visitors to the United States find barbarous or bizarre here, that we accept without a second thought?  To some friends visiting from Brazil it was being required to stop at red traffic lights even when there was no visible cross traffic.  To others I'm sure it's the lack of clean and convenient public transportation.  The Swiss must be shocked at the unreliability of schedules here.

What can you add to the list, dear foreign readers and those who have friends from other countries?

For the amusement of our friends and family, particularly those who were in New Hampshire last week, we are under a hard freeze warning.

All persons in east central Florida venturing outdoors this morning... should dress in layers and wear a hat.

Okay, okay—stop throwing things!

What do you expect to find in a public library?  I would like—though no longer expect—to find a large selection of old, unusual, and out-of-print books, music, and videos, the kind I am unable to buy from Amazon or borrow from Netflix.  Shouldn't that be a basic purpose of libraries:  to be a treasure store of valuable materials outside of whatever happens to be popular at the moment, especially those not otherwise easily obtainable?  Unfortunately, most libraries seem to be divesting themselves of these materials in order to make more room for the the latest favorites.  To be sure, this is also a function of libraries, and I appreciate being able to borrow a book when all I want to do is read it; I prefer stocking our own bookshelves with materials I already know are worthwhile.  (One casualty of the libraries' jettisoning old books is that our shelves are overflowing; I can no longer prune our collection of lesser books on the grounds that I can always borrow them from the library if needed.)  Most libraries, I believe, are out of balance in the way they address both functions, and our culture is suffering for it.

Thanks to my sister-in-law, who should have her own blog because she and my brother send me interesting ideas much faster than I can write about them, and to the Percival Blakeney Academy blog, I now know that this phenomenon is not limited to libraries, but has had a major impact on the Oxford University Press Junior Dictionary. (More)

Heather and Jon gave us a gift certificate for the El Bodegon restaurant, because they know we've been mouring the demise of our favorite tapas restaurant.  We thought we'd celebrate our anniversary again tonight (the first celebration having been in Switzerland) and try it out.

Our intentions to use the gift certificate went by the board, however.  We arrived during tapas happy hour, and learned that we couldn't use both discounts.  We couldn't resist two-for-one tapas, so we'll need to return to use the gift certificate.  This is a good thing.  :)  The meal was thoroughly delightful: (More)

It doesn't really matter that Barack Obama was not my candidate of choice (see my election series, Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 for some of the reasons why); as a friend said, "I didn't vote for him, but I hope he's the best president ever."  What boggles my mind is the adulation, ethusiasm, and outright joy that Inauguration Day 2009 brings—it's not all media hype.  I can't imagine any presidential inauguration inspiring that kind of joy in me.  At best I usually manage feelings of relief that the worst candidate did not win.  But perhaps that's just a character flaw:  I find it hard to get that enthusiastic about anything.  We recently returned from our daughter's fabulous wedding to a wonderful man, and though I am pleased and enthusiastic and joyful, even for that event I can't imagine participating in the kind of jubliant demonstration associated with Obama's inauguration.  Be that as it may, I truly wish our new president the best, and pray for him, because he will need it.

And yet my primary commentary on this Inauguration Day is a thank you to outgoing President Bush.  History alone will tell,  but as far as I can see the evidence so far pronounces George W. Bush a good man but an unfortunate and often unwise president, the same judgment I gave to Jimmy Carter.  Nonetheless, he had his successes, and a very important one was highlighted by yesterday's Mallard Fillmore.

Insofar as I care about the Super Bowl, which isn't any distance at all, actually, I did think it would be cool to have an all-Pennsylvania matchup.  Failing that, I'll give condolences to my Philadelphia friends, say congratulations to my Pittsburgh friends, and hope the latter were safely away from downtown last night.  :)

I've noticed a disturbing trend in recent writings condemning individualism and independence, from the oft-quoted "It takes a village to raise a child" (best response to date: "I've seen the village, and I don't want it raising my children") to several of the essays on Patrick Deneen's excellent blog, What I Saw in America, to the many Christian writers who are taking pains to distance their religion from currently unpopular, Western—and particularly American—ideas.  Collectivism is in.

Some of this is a much-needed correction.  Basic human sinfulness (there is no better word for the phenomenon) has bent a respect for the rights and responsibilities of every human being into an excuse for me-first, me-only, me-now self-indulgence that has torn apart community on every level, and especially in our families.  Individual rights without individual responsibility is not a workable equation, and the fault must be addressed. (More)

At this moment, the temperature is the same in Orlando and Basel, which means that Orlando is having a "cold snap" and Basel has warmed up a bit since we were there.  Hillsboro, on the other hand....  Stay warm, all you Daleys!