The beginning of the Great Easter Vigil at St Patrick’s Co-Cathedral with Bishop Michael Warfel presiding. Lots of baptisms and confirmations and eucharistic celebrations.

Oratory in middle of central piazza

About 25 miles to the east of Naples and Fort Myers, really a long way out in the boondocks, there is a new town going up. In Florida that may not be such big news but this town is being built around a new university rather than a golf course or a riding stable or even an airport: a new Catholic university called Ave Maria. This is the first new Catholic university in the USA in about 50 years, a dream that Thomas Monoghan, of Domino’s Pizza fame, first imagined into being along with the Barron Collier family of Southwest Florida. The latter provided the land and Monoghan provided much of the money.

From the altar end

From the balcony looking toward the altar

That oratory has some distinctive architecture, reminding me of a lovely stone-trimmed missile silo on first glance. Then, when you walk around it a little it starts to grow on you, especially when you go inside. It is still unfinished as is most everything around here.

The university now has about 600 students, not sure how many it will eventually support, though the Wikipedia article on the town mentions 5000.

I will be home to Billings soon. Have they started playing baseball there?

I had thought it was a fairly recent word describing a genocidal calamity; but Wikipedia says that is only the meaning since the 19th century or so. It may be peculiar to the New American Bible translation as other translations use words like”burnt offering” and “sacrifice.”

Apparently coming from the Greek meaning “completely burnt” and though having a pagan background that seemed a useful word for the kinds of sacrifice that Jews offered so the NAB translators do have a point but time has a way of moving on, sometimes quickly and sometimes slowly. Roger of Howden and Richard of Devizes, 12th century chroniclers, both used the word to refer to a massacre of Jews.

These days it almost always refers to the extermination of around six million European Jews in the 1930s and 1940s by Germans led by Hitler. The more common word among Jewish writers is Shoah or “calamity.”

It may be that some of the lesser known aspects of Nazi killing may be rightly called to mind by the use of the term holocaust to describe not only genocidal but also eugenic killing as in this poster. “Dein geld” translates fairly easily as “your money.”

I think I have heard some argument like that from Planned Parenthood.

Dead Robin

Sometime last week both Maggie the Dog and I were startled while she was snoozing under the breakfast table and I was on my 2nd cup of coffee and 1st Sudoku puzzle. It sounded like a bird had run into one of our sunroom windows, which seems to happen a lot, summer or winter, though we have tried to warn them away by various means. I did see a bloody spot on the window but we have several of those and when I look for the bird I usually don’t find them. During the summer I’ve heard them run into a window, then I’ve seen them shake their head, get up and after a short rest, they usually fly away. Occasionally a cat gets them before they have recovered their wits.

So then, as a consequence of the chinook winds for the last few days the snow on my back porch has receded and revealed this dead bird. I don’t know if it died from a broken neck or from hypothermia after being incapacitated from blunt force injuries. In any event, the manner of death would appear to be accidental.

Yellowstone Park is a couple of hours away by car in the summer and even further away in the winter, but even so, when a very low probability catastrophe looms just over the horizon, it seems reasonable to pay attention. I remember my first visit to the Park, just after we had moved our whole gang out here in the summer of 1980, and just after we bought the house which may have still had a little dust on the windows from the earlier eruption of Mount Helen. The ranger giving us the introductory talk mentioned straight-facedly that we were due for another gigantic eruption one of these days, and fairly soon in geologic terms. And that this might mean that all the rivers flowing east in Montana might just start flowing in the other direction. We were all a little discouraged though we, of course, didn’t say a word.

Now come the seismologists and volcanologists telling us that there has been an unusual series of small earthquakes, barely felt even in the Park, just after Christmas and centered in the northern part of Yellowstone Lake. Now that we commoners seem to be relaxing a little with regard to global warming, perhaps the alarmists will switch their worry beads, if they can that is, from ice and polar bears to closer to home.

There are some websites that seem reasonable in discussing the meaning of this seismic activity. Watts Up With That? seems like one of the reasonable ones. the image above is taken from an entry yesterday. There are other leads mentioned in the article. Have a slightly less worry-free New Year anyway.

It’s a chatty, but interesting entry. One thing I found interesting; Mrs. Roosevelt lists what she feels makes a hotel comfortable and it seems the Northern fit the bill. Who would have thought washcloths, waste baskets and reading lights would be so important. I guess it just reinforces the belief that it’s the simple things in life we miss the most when they’re gone.

While heading to the beach in Billings may seem impossible today, it wasn’t so far fetched 80 million years ago.
Governor Brian Schweitzer helped unveil a new geology sign to better showcase one of Montana’s oldest wonders.
Kids of all ages turned out Wednesday to see what used to be a seaway in Billings.
Governor Schweitzer and his wife Nancy have teamed up with the Montana Department of Transportation to try and get young people more interested in science.
The new sign, Shore of an Ancient Sea, can be found on the Black Otter Trail overlooking Billings, and it helps explain the history of this area millions of years ago.
Children even received a brief history lesson on how the ocean actually helped form the Rimrock’s.
But, Governor Schweitzer pointed out that water wasn’t the only thing here, “We had sharks. We had plesiosaurses. We had dinosaurs that were occupying the land above the ocean. It was an exciting place, but that was before I was here.”
The new geo-signs are one of the ways that Brian and Nancy Schweitzer are helping promote math and science awareness in Montana.
The sign is one of 32 new geologic signs across the state.

The Billings Post Office is established.

From Montana Dateline by Ellis Roberts Parry.