Category: Odds & Ends

The well-known homilist Fr. Robert Altier is under orders from his Minnesota bishop to stop distributing his talks via internet. We don’t know the rationale for this yet, so I have snapped up a copy of his audio files (without his knowledge, of course) and saved it at my home machine (subject to change). I haven’t listened to much there, but I’m favorably impressed so far. The audio files use a proprietary commercial format called DSS, so you’ll probably need to install the “Olympus DSS Lite” player.
Note to downloaders: Limit your downloading to one connection at a time. A guy in Florida is currently reading five files at once and eating my home machine’s entire bandwidth.

Even our prime minister has admitted that Canada’s government will likely fall within the next month, if not weeks. I’ve been asked to take on some pretty heavy local responsibilities in this election. This comes as I am putting the final polish on lectures for a distance education course on canon law that Catholic Distance University invited me to write (and for those who are interested, teach this January — there are still some open spaces if you sign up before December 1st). Therefore, I would ask you to please spare any prayers you can send Canada’s way. Additionally, this also means a leave from blogging as well as day-to-day private emails over the next couple of months. Thanks for your understanding.

Where might one purchase a clicker? Not a neon-green dog trainer’s model, you understand, but a real real-nun certified version?
(I’m not planning shenannigans at the local Trid Mass, by the way, or, for that matter, shenannigans anywhere.)

A co-worker overheard this dialogue in a Las Vegas casino:

Wife: Let’s go find an ATM.
Husband: What do you need money for?
Wife: I need to win back what I lost.

At a two-day training class I attended a couple of weeks ago, the students were mostly civilians, but there was a large contingent of Navy medical officers. In one session, groups of students had to hammer out a strategy for a fictional company we supposedly worked for. In the course of the discussion, one of the officers suggested that “indoctrination” would be a good idea for line workers.
The civilian half of the group assumed he was either joking or revealing himself as a crypto-fascist, but he was doing neither. “Indoctrination” is often used as a pejorative, but that is not its primary definition:
in·doc·tri·nate
1 : to instruct especially in fundamentals or rudiments : TEACH
2 : to imbue with a usually partisan or sectarian opinion, point of view, or principle
Or as one weapons instructor said to us in boot camp, “Indoctrination doesn’t mean brainwashing.” Immersing yourself in “fundamentals or rudaments” doesn’t mean you have to amputate your faculties of reason; if you’re really ingesting what you’re learning, the opposite is true.
Fear of “indoctrination” is, I think, at the heart of why adults today are reluctant to teach kids firm principles. But the only way you can get kids to learn something is to repeat it until they understand, and then reinforce it frequently. Kids don’t want, much less need, fine distinctions — they crave clarity. When they want a fuller explanation as to why it’s wrong to clobber your brother with a mallet, you can provide it when they are ready. Until then, mallet-clobbering is bad because it’s wrong to hurt people, period.