Today the sun rose at 06:02. This evening the sun will set at 20:18.
The Ave Maria Bell will not ring at 20:15, though it should.
In the Novus calendar it is the Feast of Sts. Philip and James the Lesser. Their relics are preserved at the Basilica of the Twelve Apostles. I suppose there are – I dunno – candles or something by their tomb today, the Franciscans go to such lengths, after all. In that church is also the tomb of Pope Clement XIV of very happy memory.
In the Vetus Martyrology and in the appendix in the Missale Romanum for Mass in “some places (“aliquibus locis”) we see it is the is the Feast of the Finding of the Cross. In church today there was a chance after Mass to venerate a fragment of the Cross. A taste.
Here’s some priest stuff. Two ways to lay out vestments. Today I read a Requiem Mass for the FSSP priest who died recently, Fr. Terrance Gordon. RIP.
You can guess which way is my way.
If I were the Monsignor Illustrissimo Presidente delle Strade, I would impose not only fines but also severe public corporal punishment to the morons who did this.
This is a price poster from 1927 during the fascist era (6th year) for an officially sanctioned brothel.
In 1927, the lira was pegged to the U.S. dollar at a rate of 1 dollar = 19 lire. So, in 1927 1 lira was worthy just a bit more than US .05.
The 1927, the US dollar had roughly the equivalent buying power of $17.53 in one account, and $16.77 in another. Let’s call it $17.00. Hence, a 1927 lire would be, today, about .89. An hour for genteel colloquy, perhaps playing chess or discussing a blog post, at a house of tolerance in 1927 would cost you $6.41. There would be no upcharge for soap and towel for washing, because any discussion of Jesuits would have to be avoided for the sake of decency. You wouldn’t want to be a abusive client and get unceremoniously thrown out into the street by Luca and Pino.
Houses of Tolerance were finally disbanded in 1958.
Speaking of another kind of lie, this is the Communist Party place near the Campo de’ Fiori.
Look what they are advertising.
Agere sequitur esse, I guess.
A butcher shop. I stopped to see if they had rabbit.
Here’s some rabbit stuffed with veal, ready to go, whole or by slices.
I adore rabbit.
The same with lamb.
Tripe for Saturday!
I like retro signs.
Beautiful zucchini flowers. Above them is some stuff called colloquially, “priest’s beard … barba da prete” or “monks beard”.
Meanwhile, chessy news. This is very cool.
For the past few weeks we’ve been playing chess, ISS vs Mission Control. We each make about one move per day, and flight controllers help us with physically moving our pieces on the board at @NASA_Johnson. We are very much amateur chess players, but we were nevertheless… pic.twitter.com/ZPl7N2lxAv
— Woody Hoburg (@Astro_Woody) May 1, 2023
This is too good not to share.
There is an illuminated English medieval manuscript which describes, among other things, the life of the Herinacius. As you know, that’s the Latin for “hedgehog”.
How to be a hedgehog in Latin? Apparently, according to our medieval forebears, the hedgehog would knock grapes (there were grape vineyards because it was warmer then!) off vines and then roll on them to get them to stick onto their spikes. They would then take the grapes back to their young to feed them.
I’ll bet you didn’t know that.
Shades of Spiny Norman.
Here’s a puzzle.
White to move and win.
NB: I’ll hold comments with solutions ’till the next day so there won’t be “spoilers” for others.
I have a chess.com affiliate now, handled by House of Staunton. There are some really good discounts available. For example, there is a Set Combination with triple weighted regulation pieces, and thin mousepad board and a “quiver” bag for $23. Good deal.
Please remember me when shopping online. Thanks in advance. US HERE – UK HERE
I ask for your continued prayers for my project. Please ask the intercession and guidance of St. Joseph and St. Philip, and also Ven. Mary Ward who lived in the neighborhood. Please pray.
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Fr. Gordon was my spiritual director for a brief time. His kindness, mercy, and wisdom in the confessional were instrumental as I came back to the Church after a long detour down what Our Lord calls the wide and easy path to hell. May he rest in peace, and may God bless all those he served in his priestly ministry.
The medieval Muslim caliphs kept “Houses of Wisdom” were philosophy and theology were read and discussed. The hope was that all of that wisdom would spill out an effect society, which it did. (until the Mongols made the Tigris run black with ink when they sacked Baghdad.) The architects of modern day Italy made “houses of tolerance.” I suppose there was no point in keeping them open once the “tolerance” had soaked into ever facet of society.
Anyways, I’m always over-awed by the reading competence our literate forebearers would have had in the middle-ages. The number of abbreviations in the manuscripts is astonishing. You have to have a good handle on cadence and word usage to follow along. I find that even reading the late 16th century printings, which are usually pretty sparing of the more extreme abbreviations, really challenge my basic interpretive skills. If we did this kind of thing nowadays, people would be quite confused.
“Pe? wo?d be qu? cñf?.”
We’re definitely so much smarter than those silly dead people.
[Alas, from the beginning the blog hasn’t liked special characters… and I don’t mean odd balls. That’s why some letters were aced out with a ?. I use unicode. HERE]
i remember you posting a wonderful recipe for rabbit on here a few years back. i made that preparation with chicken several times since my late wife would have flipped her lid had i cooked bunny while she was present. it had since slipped my mind. i ought to look up that recipe and make it right this time.
As a server, I was taught to lay out the back of the chasuble folded up, so you could see the inside and the priest could just throw the back over his head, the stole as an “H”, the maniple in the middle (“I”) and the cincture as an “S”; “IHS”, you see. The ends of the stole and maniple were always at the edge closer to the priest. These were then covered by the alb (again, with the back opened up) and finally, the amice with its strings folded neatly on top.
T.H. White, in his Bestiary translation, further points us to William Caxton’s Mirror of the World which adds, of the Hedgehog, “whan he feleth him selfe laden as moche as he may bere he goth his way with them syngynge and makyng his deduyt” (‘when he feeleth himself laden as much as he may bear, he goeth his way with them singing and making his deduit’ – ‘deduit’ the Oxford English Dictionary tells us being ultimately derived from deducere in the sense of ‘divert’ and meaning “Diversion, enjoyment, pleasure.” (We can see it for ourselves in the 1481 copy in the Library of Congress scanned in the Internet Archive – uploaded as ‘Here begynneth the table of the rubrices of this presente volume named the Mirrour of the World or thymage of the same’, in the opening “108 of 200” in the last lines of the left-hand page: Caxton calls the Hedgehog “hyrchon” and tells how he collects apples in this way.)
My own eggs guy here on the French Riviera has 15 for €4.