The Ark and The Dove

Another Election Where I Don't Have to Think...

Dear Democrats,

Thank you for making this election so easy for me.

Trying to stay on top of hundreds of policy issues, domestic affairs, international affairs, wars, services, taxes, healthcare, kill lists, religious tolerance or lackthereof, government subsifized contraception, illegal immigration, the personal histories of politicians, fact checking, media bias, economics, education, labor issues, financial regulations, military funding, funding space exploration, civil unrest, affirmative action, the definition of marriage...am I missing anything?

Oh, yeah.

The right to life.

That's the one I was looking for.

If it wasn't for the fact that Democrats were openly in support of allowing women to extinguish vulnerable human life, I might actually have to follow some if not all of those issues above. But, for the life of me, I still can't see how a single one of those issues outweighs killing babies.

Do we need to worry about terrorists getting us? We killed about 3200 kids per day last year (with very rough math). That's 9/11 and then some, every day.

That's about 50% more deaths per day than Americans died during the entirety of Operation Enduring Freedom.

Every three days, abortion claims more than twice the number of lives as American deaths in Operation Iraqi Freedom.

It's almost twice the number of Americans who die each day from heart disease, and more than half the number of Americans who die each day from cancer.

The Guttmacher institute apparently claims there were 1,212,400 abortions annually from 2009-2011. The CDC claims that there were 2,437,163 deaths in the United States in 2009. Note that the CDC apparently doesn't include abortion among those statistics...otherwise it would outstrip heart disease as the number one killer (twice over). It would account for almost one-third of the recorded deaths.

The best argument that Democrats can come up with is that I'm supposed to believe that their economic plan and healthcare package will actually reduce abortions in the future...if it works. It sounds a bit like quackery to me.

 

Worse yet, it sounds like making a pact with Dracula.

"Yes, I'll protect your children from the dreaded Turk," says Dracula.

"Oh, thank you," say the Eastern European villagers.

"But I'll also be eating a very few of your babies, every now and then...in an emergency situation of course," inserts Dracula. "It's sort of what I do."

"Oh."

"But eating a few of your babies is better than having them all killed by invaders, right?"

"And how many babies did you say you needed to eat?" a villager inquires.

"Oh...well...a number...no need to really quibble over details. I'll try to take ones that no one would really have missed anyway."

"And how long do you have to do this for?" another villager asks.

"Forever," says Dracula. "I am immortal, after all."

"With all do respect, a few babies every year forever could add up to a lot of babies, Count," a villager concludes.

"I'd eat them anyway. But you'll all be safer under my protection than some lascivious heathen overlord."

"I guess that's true..."

The Post Wherein I Respectfully Disagree with Diane M. Houdek

My parish bulletin includes weekly inserts from Franciscan Media--making for a kind of Russian nesting egg approach to bulletins within bulletins within bulletins. One feature of this sub-bulletin is "Bringing Home the Word" -- a set of scripture reflections on the Sunday readings by Diane M. Houdek, who, according to her Website, has been doing this sort of thing for 20 years.

The readings for Sept. 2 (as I'm sure anyone reading this recalls) mostly focused on purity and the Law. It all comes to a climax when the Pharisees confront Jesus on the fact that the Apostles are not observing the purification rites that were customary before eating. They don't wash their hands.

That's actually still pretty gross, if you think about First Century sanitation and hygenic practices -- but Christ's point is that physical dirt can't affect one's spiritual purity. We become spiritually impure by what comes out of us, not by what goes in. No thing makes us impure on its own; we make ourselves impure by giving ourselves to sinful thoughts.

It's still generally a good idea to wash your hands before eating. It's just a better idea to worship with a pure heart than to eat with clean fingernails.

Anyhow, the point that Diane M. Houdek takes from these readings is that:

Keeping a strict set of rules can be far easier than dealing with the messiness inevitable in human life and relationships. We don’t have to think, we don’t have to make decisions, we don’t have to take any personal responsibility for consequences. We rely on someone else telling us, “Do this. Don’t do that.” Our Catholic culture has certainly gone through periods of strict rulekeeping through the centuries. But when those rules allow us to hold ourselves apart from the suffering of another person, we have to ask ourselves if this is what Jesus intended.

With all due respect, I'm not really sure if this is the most productive message to take from this Gospel right now. In the 21st Century, I don't think many Catholics need convincing that we are called to live the spirit of the law rather than the letter of the law. If anything, too many Catholics have already taken this to the extreme. Houdek observes that Jesus "reminds them that Isaiah and the other prophets warned against claiming divine authority for merely human rules and precepts." But, in our post-Marxist, post-modern age, too many Catholics already think that most if not all of the Catholic moral teachings are just human rules and precepts being passed off as divine authority.

More problematic, Houdek juxtaposes "rules" with "the suffering of another person." This didn't really seem quite the issue in the Gospel. It's a bit of a straw man argument. She emphasizes her point, though, with a little parable about a farmer's neighbor.

A friend who grew up in an extended farm family tells the story of a Sunday morning when his uncle and cousins were leaving for church and their neighbor had an emergency involving a broken fence and escaping cows. His uncle’s response was, “We can’t help you right now. We have to go to Mass.” Their fear of committing a mortal sin by missing Mass that day led them to ignore the needs of their neighbor, who lost thirteen cows that day.

Her parable is a bit reminiscent of Christ's commentary on breaking the Sabbath when he asks who wouldn't rescue an ox if it fell in a well? Obviously, in an emergency situation, you aren't going to fry in Hell for helping a neighbor. Duh. That's common sense stuff. And it isn't like the Pharisees in this particular reading are asking the Apostles to wash their hands at the expense of someone else's livelihood. If anything, the Pharissees (in this particular example) have a better sense of civic duty than the Apostles, since ancient Hebrew purification rites also doubled as a means of limiting the spread of disease and contagion (although I guess Jesus's miraculous powers were the ultimate form of anti-septic).

That being said...does Houdek's parable imply the opposite? Is she arguing that by going to Mass for an hour instead of immediately helping your neighbor who was negligent with their fence maintenance, you are a bad Christian? In the parable of the virgins, the virgins who were prudent don't share their oil with those who were not. In the story of Mary and Martha, we are told it is better simply to be with the Lord than to help our sister.

Obviously, I'm not saying that we shouldn't help people in emergency situations if we are on our way to Church. We don't want to step over Lazarus with his sores on our way to Church. But, frankly, Houdek's example is a bit exceptional and smells of situation ethics. (Does the farmer not have insurance on the cows? Are there no professional emergency services or agencies that farmers can call?)

What I am saying is that Houdek stacks the deck by suggesting the only motivation for the family not helping the farmer is fear of commiting a mortal sin -- which drops out of the equation any other reason for "following the rules."

See, from my perspective, the idea that a family would say, "Sorry, Farmer Bob, we're on our way to Mass...but we'll give you a hand as soon as we get back" -- is just the kind of crazy, out of the box thinking that shows the world just how important the Eucharist is. Really, I sort of wish the family did worse than just abandon Farmer Bob in his crisis. I wish the family had invited the farmer to go Mass with them!

I realize those thirteen cows were probably expensive and important to the farmers livelihood. Maybe they were even hard to replace. (I know surprisingly little about cows, despite having lives across the road from a dairy farm.) What I do know, however, is that the Eucharist offers eternal life.

Did the farmer skip Church as well? Was it worth it, considering he lost thirteen cows anyway?

The family chose the divine; the farmer chose the bovine.

But wouldn't the best possible ending of this story would have been if the farmer had left the cows behind to go commune with God? Isn't the whole point of this Sunday's readings to abandon the physical good for the spiritual good? That idea -- that the Eucharist could be more important than our economic well-being -- is what's truly radical, really far out, and utterly mind-boggling. It's also the message Catholics need to hear today more than ever.

Size Matters Not...or does it...

Kotaku's Tim Rogers makes the observation that

Final Fantasy VII's Wikipedia entry is 6,596 words.The Wikipedia entry for William Shakespeare is 5,999 words. Let's apply One-Hundred-Point Scale Internet Video Game Web Site Score Logic to these two word counts: if we were giving Final Fantasy VII a 10, Shakespeare's collected works would score a 9.7.

It's his intro to an article about Final Fantasy VII, which was recently re-released on new formats in anticipation of the 25th anniversary of the Final Fantasy franchise.

25 years. A lot of those games have hit that mark. (And I sort of wish I never leant our my original FF...I never got it back. Or my Nintendo Power strategy guide. Thank goodness for emulators, eh?)

Anyhow, Rogers is obviously being ironic. At least, I hope he's being ironic. I don't think he is seriously suggesting that Final Fantasy is somehow bigger or more important than Shakespeare. At least, not bigger or more important in the area of transcendent truth and beauty.

But there are two points that I would make (that Rogers doesn't).

First, perhaps the most important reason why Shakespeare's entry is probably smaller than Final Fantasy's is simply that we know more about Final Fantasy VII than we know about Shakepeare. Pretty much every Shakespeare biography begins with an apology that most of the book will be speculative and conjectural. Shakespeare lived before the age Byron--the age of literary superstardom, and, of course, before mass markets and newspapers. There were no papparrazzi to record his every move, and no hugely lucrative demand to know it. London was big, but it wasn't the city it is today. If you were that curious about Shakespeare, it probably wasn't that hard to find the guy. But, really, what would be the point? From what we know about his life, it wasn't particularly remarkable. And it's not like he was going to talk to you in iambic pentameter.

Which leads me to my next point. In our post-Shakespearean, post-Byronic age, we put far more value on entertainment and entertainers. Not only do we have 24 hour news...and have 24 hour printed newspapers, we put incredible value on the media itself. Comic books that sold for a nickle can fetch millions of dollars--and so now there are people (geeks, mainly, but sometimes just regular ol' psychologically impaired hoarders) who are hyper conscious of preserving every little scrap of paper, every picture, every receipt, every advertisement, every thing about a new franchise. They wonder if this could be the next big thing...the thing that future generations will wish had been put in an acid-proof baggie 400 years earlier.

What amazes me is not that Final Fantasy has a longer entry on Wikipedia, but that the entry isn't longer. A well-known video game will reach more audience members in its first night of sales than Shakespeare probably reached in his lifetime. A well-known video game probably requires a staff of programmers, developers, marketers, artists, directors, producers, playtesters, and interns that would outnumber every English Renaissance acting troup combined. I would not be surprised if the coding for a game like Final Fantasy VII probably filled more pages than the First Folio, or if there are more characters in FFVII than all of Shakespeare's plays.

The real question is how Shakespeare (with perhaps a little help from his cohorts), could have produced something more meaningful, deeper, and more beautiful than any video game with its huge budgets, vast resources, and countless hours of labor

What I Did This Summer: Video Game Edition

What I played...

Airmech – A really fun little online multiplayer homage to Herzog Zwei, the greatest Sega Genesis game ever made and an early stage in the evolution of the real-time-strategy genre. You pilot a giant mech that transforms into a jet and lead an army of fabricated robots to take over factories and blow up the enemy base. Loads of fun. Highly recommended.

Assassin’s Creed II – I thought it would be more fun jumping on rooftops and stabbing Renaissance Italians. I got bored about eight hours into the game and still haven’t finished it. Not recommended.

Ben There, Dan That – A pretty clever if sometimes offensive point-and-click adventure. It’s very invested in a British identity that lampoons America and the contemporary video game industry. Not much to look at visually, but the game is just a platform for witty banter between the characters. Recommended with a parental advisory.

Cthulu Saves the World – A brilliant parody 8-bit/16-bit era Japanese role-playing games like Final Fantasy. I was at first concerned that the developers were merely exploiting the recent, trendy Cthulu Internet meme...but I was impressed by how aware the game really was regarding its Lovecraftian source material. Runs about nine hours to beat the main quest on a respectable difficulty level. Very highly recommended.

Dear Esther – A beautiful but very slow-moving and possibly pretentious example of what happens when people take a video game engine and try to make art out of it. You listen to a narrator recite mostly incomprehensible metaphors while moving at a snail’s pace across a well-rendered British isle. There is no pointing, no clicking, and certainly no running, jumping, shooting, or stabbing. Not recommended unless you have an academic interest in non-linear spatial narrative.

Gundemonium – An impossible Japanese shoot-em-up. There’s even a fancy Japanese word for the genre that I can’t remember. It also features disturbing little girl robots. I gave up on level four. Not recommended.

Gunman Clive – A nifty little Mega Man homage using old-timey, sepia-tinted Western style. You play a little cowboy rescuing a gratuitously kidnapped damsel from all sorts of baddies. It’s high concept, and very, very short. I highly recommend it if you find it for cheap.

Left 4 Dead – A pretty exhilarating, cinematic four-player zombie-apocalypse game. Each level involves getting from one safe house to the next, while trying to avoid being eaten by zombies or shot by your teammates. Each campaign ends with the four players trying to defend an area under siege by zombies until a rescue vehicle arrives. It is not the most realistic zombie-apocalypse game out there right now, but it’s fun and addictive. It also gave me chronic nightmares, so I’m taking a little break from it. Recommended, but only if zombies don’t freak you out.

Noitu Love 2: Devolution – A really snazzy, retro-styled side-scrolling fighting game that incorporates a neat-little mouse-clicking interface. You’ll click. A lot. Then you’ll click some more. The graphics are very Game Boy Advance, and the game only takes about an hour and a half to beat. Highly recommended.

Rayman: Origins – A neat, 2D reboot of the old Rayman franchise. There’s lots of jumping and punching, and the multiplayer mode is like a zanier version of Super Mario Bros. Wii. There is a reason why the game doesn’t even bother with lives though. A lot of the levels requiring speed runs get frustrating, but that frustration merely yields greater satisfaction when you beat them. The ending was very unsatisfying, though, and the unlockable characters are mostly just palette swaps. I played this on the Wii and found that the graphics were usually too small to actually recognize anything. I was mostly just moving blobs of light around the screen – but that was fun enough. Recommended if on sale.

Realm of the Mad God – Extremely addictive and pointless massively multiplayer shoot-em-up. It’s like World of Warcraft had an affair with Space Invaders and made a baby. The addictive part for me was unlocking all of the character classes. The graphics are extremely minimalistic. I wasted more time on this game than anything else I played this summer. It stopped being fun and just became a grind to unlock characters I didn’t even play as. Not recommended for people with OCD.

Sideways – This was a truly great side-scrolling platform with a clever street artist (i.e. graffiti) theme. The main characters is sucked into a wall of street art, so you move two-dimensionally across three-dimensional buildings, with pieces of graffiti serving as platforms and enemies. You unlock special paint-based abilities as the game progresses...but then it repeatedly started crashing on me, so I stopped playing it. This was a shame because I was having a lot of fun. Not recommended unless it is fixed.

Superbrothers: Sword and Sworcery EP – A mildly pretentious meta-game that examines the conventions of video games while being a fairly entertaining parody of Zelda. The art style evokes an artistic C64, and the game follows a musical album theme. There is also a concurrent theme of psychoanalysis and a Freud character. The whole thing consists of about four hours of game time, but one part relies on lunar phases...which appear to be synchronized with the actual lunar phases...of the real moon...and the game detects if you try to change the date on your computer. So those four hours can get stretched out over several weeks. I sort of recommend this game, but I wouldn’t pay more than $5 for it.

Wolfenstein 3D – This was much harder than I remember it being. And there were lives. And you have to start back at the beginning of the level when you die. I didn’t get very far. Recommended only as a nostalgia impulse buy.

Wizorb – This is a fantasy-themed Breakout / Arkanoid with a retro, SNES, Link to the Past look and sound to it. Unfortunately, the game uses lives and limited continues, and so it is very unforgiving as far as modern games go. I never made it past the first world. Not recommended.

 

What I Did This Summer: Literature Edition

What I read...

Milestones: Memoirs 1927-1977, (then) Cardinal Ratzinger – Interesting to get a glimpse at his domestic life under the rise of Nazism; more helpful to get the inside scoop on what happened during Vatican II. The man is a teacher, though, and can’t turn his brain off—he barely pulls his punches when he gets to theology (gives a distilled rundown on his understanding of revelation). Highly recommended, especially if you find yourself surrounded by liberals or ultra-conservatives.

Gammer Gurton’s Needle – Tudor comedy in which a town trickster causes mischief when an old woman loses her needle. Yep. It’s a big deal about something very little. That’s the point. Get it? Point? See what I did there. It’s pretty funny, but probably funnier to see than to read. Fairly entertaining, but I don’t recommend seeking out a copy unless you are really into Tudor drama.

 

The Four Ps – A Tudor entertainment in which four characters each of whom has a career that begins with “P” (Pilgrim, Pardoner, Pedlar, Pedant) have a conversation. To make things interesting, the Pedlar challenges them to tell the biggest lie. It’s pretty slow going until the misogynistic humor kicks in towards the end. I got by without reading it by now, you could probably skip this.

 

Friar Bacon, Friar Bungay – Isabel sold me on the amazing talking brass head...which ended up being a pretty brief scene. Anyway, this is about a Friar who challenges the world’s necromancers and scholars to outdo him in magic. To be honest, I don’t really remember much besides for the brass head. I’m pretty sure there was a distracting love plot between an aristocrat and a farm girl that seemed forced in there to pad out the magic bits. A fun gem for Renaissance enthusiasts and scholars.

 

Tom Thumbe – The story of Tom Thumbe, a teeny-tiny boy who, for the most part, repeatedly gets eaten and excreted since everything is bigger than him. Possibly a social satire. Not recommended for general consumption.

 

The Prose Edda (selections) – So I knew Tolkien used the Prose Edda...but I didn’t realize that just about every name from the Hobbit came from the Prose Edda. Check out the list of Dwarf names. Fortunately, my used edition had handwritten margins that even translated some of the untranslated names so that I could recognize the appearance of Oakenshield. Oh, and Thor gets seriously smacked around. Highly recommended.

 A Death in the Family – This trade paperback collected the infamous death of Robin story arc in the old Batman comics. It’s not Shakespeare, but it did create a little time capsule of late 20^th Century society. Batman confronts Ethiopian hunger and takes down Shiite terrorists. The Joke meets the Ayatollah and becomes Iran’s UN Ambassador. Robin finds out his mother fled the country after performing back-alley abortions. Holy relevance, Batman! Recommended, but only for pop culture enthusiasts.

 Usagi Yojimbo, Vol. 1 – A trade paperback of the early U.Y. comic appearances. It was a bit uneven, possibly because it hadn’t quite figured out the tone for voice for this cartoon-animal samurai Western. It was a bit like reading storyboards if Akira Kurosawa had direct animation for Walt Disney. Get it on sale if you are curious.

 

Star Wars Omnibus: A Long Time Ago..., Vol. 4 – If you think Star Wars got bad with the prequels, try reading this collection of 80s comics. They make George Lucas look like freaking John Milton. The stuff gets really weird when what was more a less a kids’ series introduces an entire race of crimson-skinned nymphomaniacs (who make Jar Jar Binks look like Sidney Poitier). Recommended for historical value.

Transformers Armada Omnibus – These are not comics about my Transformers. These were comics about Transformers for kids growing up in the early 21^st Century. This iteration of Transformers featured the minicons, which were basically the robot equivalent of Pokemon—you had to catch ’em all. The plot got really rushed and confused. Characters seem to drop in and out. Artists would change, and all the characters would look different. By the end, I had no idea what was going on and no idea why I should care. It did make me run to eBay to see if I could find any mini-con toys cheap, though. I couldn’t. Not recommended.

It's Summer Movie Time: THOR Edition

Isabel and I missed all of the major summer blockbusters this year. I don't think we made it to a single showing...but thanks to the miracle of motion-picture-by-post, we can bask in the summer cinema straight through this frigid fall.

First up was Thor. This movie was...okay. It's kind of like Iron Man meets John Travolta's Michael...I wouldn't be surprised if that's how they pitched the film.

I give Kenneth Brannagh credit for spreading out Asgard scenes. It would have been very easy to make the mistake of the live action He-Man movie and give us five minutes of another dimension and then trap us in a California suburb...even for the climactic battle scene.

The movie also had a much more evenly distributed humor than the Ed Norton Hulk movie. That film took itself so seriously that every punchline felt like a suckerpunch instead. Thor recognized the absurdity of its premise and, for the most part, kept detraction in check by anticipating the audience's incredulity.

Really, the main problem I had with this movie was Natalie Portman...or maybe it was just her character. She was reduced to an object for Thor to fall in love with so he could learn humility...even though Thor already has a perfectly reasonable and much more plausible love interest back in Asgard.

I never got a sense of Portman's character. I never understood why she fell in love with Thor other than the fact that he has a Nordic track body and can fly. Maybe that's sufficient reasons for a young woman to fall in love with a pagan god...but I would have liked some kind of character-based attraction. Maybe she was a myth-geek when she was a kid...maybe she has a deceased lover who had similar quirks...maybe her last boyfriend was really pompous, so Thor's newfound humility restores her faith in men...er...male beings.

Personally, though, I would have done away with her character altogether. Thor's problem is that he is too immature to be a good king. Good kingship is modeled in the film by Odin -- the All-Father. Odin banishes Thor because Thor has endangered the Asgardians by instigating a war with the Frost Giants. Innocents will suffer, Odin warns.

The movie wants to suggest that Thor's romantic love for Natalie Portman is what humbles him. I suppose that works...but it seems to me that the film could have made this point more elegantly by having Thor befriend a child. Thus, Thor would have learned the paternal care...the patriarchal worry that Odin expriences. This would have given Thor a taste of what it is to be the All-Father. It would have also eliminated countless ridiculous scenes of Portman ogling Thor and getting all girly-girly on screen.

I think Isabel at one point asked Natalie Portman to get some self-respect.

Maybe she didn't say that though.

It seems like something she might have said.

The kid story arc would have also reinforced issues of faith -- the kid who immediately believes in Thor even while the adults are skeptical would have modeled only a child-like trust. Plus, a good-hearted kid would have enabled the film to contrast an honest child-like sense of awe with Thor's childishness.

Final assessment: Thor was okay. It didn't reinvent the super-hero movie, and it didn't break the super-hero movie. To put it another way, Isabel didn't fall asleep.

We Must Allow Coaches to Marry; Eliminate Athletic Infallibility

BreitbartTV linked to a story about a Penn State coach who has been charged with sexually assaulting underaged boys. His Athletic Director has also been charged with perjury for failing to notify the police while investigating the matter. Worse yet, the pedophile was running a program for at-risk kids. He found a way to work one-on-one with potential victims.

This really is a tragedy for those who were abused, and I don't want to exploit their plight in this situation...but I also think this story can serve a larger, religio-political argument.

So...evidently...a secular, state institution has been found guilty of the same exact kind of crimes that Church leaders have been accused of. When do we start calling for the complete dismantling of Penn State Athletics? When do we start blaming the strict, austere demands of an outdated, medieval, patriarchal coaching for the leading this man to his perverse appetites? When do we demand the Pennsylvania governor to resign for his horrific oversight?

And another thing about #Occupy...

I've said it before, and I'll say it again...1% of 300,000,000 is 3,000,000.

Does this mean there are 3,000,000 people living in the 1% in this country?

That doesn't sound so bad.

Heck, if the odds of becoming a millionaire by playing the lottery were 1:100, I'd play that thing every day!

About the #Occupy Movement...

I can't stop watching these Occupy videos. It's like some kind of circus sideshow. But after awhile, I started thinking...could all of these people have missed religious vocations?

I don't like the idea of missed vocations. I prefer to think that if God's calling you, He's going to get you at some point. Maybe the idea that a person would perpetually reject a bona fide call just seems too sad to me. We have free will, sure...but I'd like to think people would eventually choose the right vocation.

Looking at the Occupy protestors, though, is sobering.

The group seems quite heterogenous...so the following generalizations will have exceptions...but the narrative seems to suggest that these are people who think:

1) people shouldn't pursue private property
2) people should sacrifice their lives to help others
3) people should submit their individual wills to a superior collective, a common good
4) there is a higher moral law
5) that pursuing this higher moral law is worth abandoning all of your personal belongings and living with the poor
6) that people with wealth should donate money to the people without wealth so that the latter can live unburdened lives in pursuit of this higher morality

So...how is this not compatible with, say, a mendicant order?

If these people could just get off the drugs and the sex, they'd probably make great missionaries.

The real kicker is this -- nobody wants to just give money to a stoner-hippie-wannabe or a whiny college graduate. We don't want freeloaders. But a lot of people will gladly provide for the needs of religious because people value what the religious do even if it is just to sit in a cloister and pray (and most religious I know do more than that).

I'm not saying that every freeloader should sign up for Holy Orders just so they can get fed. We've had enough problems with people entering religious life with ulterior motives...but I wonder if convictions these people feel to live free of the bondage of personal possessions and to serve the needy might actually be the residue leftover from an even higher...and more dignified calling.

One Miracle Down, and about Three More to Go...

Once again, the rolling Prayer Machine seems to have averted tragedy...so I just wanted to post a little shout out to God and all the folks who have been praying for us.

Of course, if things hadn't worked out in the most immediately comfortable way, that wouldn't have meant the Prayer Machine had failed. It's just a relief to know that things worked out the way they did. There are plenty of people for whom things take the most tragic turn, but that doesn't mean Providence has left them.

Now, if I could only land a permanent job...we'd get a little breathing space.