Easter Fun: Quiz from the Guardian, warm up your encyclopedias (or is that encyclopaedias?)

Easter in SevilleHere's an Easter quiz from the Guardian, so you know it'll be multi-culti and sprinkled with obscure jokes designed to keep the grad students chuckling knowingly well into the wee hours.

How did I do? Well, not bad for a person who has only been to church once this millennium. Then again, it was for Easter last year and we did the "wait till dawn" thing, whatchamacallit, it's got some obscure Latinish name like everything they do in church. I should adopt that trick; it makes everything sound vastly more impressive. How nifty to say you are "Abluting" instead of going to take a shower.

Anyway. I went to church, as I was saying. Once this millennium. In a vast stone church that does get a little hard on the feet and back, I must say. Not to mention the old fellow in the robes that Carinthia told me to copy was disabled and couldn't do any standing up most of the time, leaving me sitting there like a lump until I realized I looked like I was protesting or sumthin and jumped up. Why couldn't she have told me to copy the bustling lesbian, or the perky Filipino who quite obviously lived for what he could do with his voice, and man-o-man was this ever his day, for lo, main preacherguy was sick and dude had to do most of the reading and all of the singing which I do not remember from my small-town Anglican upbringing.

My mother was Buddhist and my father was agnostic; he'd have been athiest but he always believed in hedging your bets. So I don't know why I ended up at Anglican churches except maybe my mother was socially ambitious for me? I was baptized in a Presbytirian church (sp? who knows?) because that was the only one on the base and my mother would NOT allow me to be baptized in the village Catholic church. Idolators, she called them. But I think that really, she just wanted to be sure she understood the ceremony, and they were French who spoke Latin.

Once she did, ie once the ceremony was actually underway, she was horrified to find herself and my dad promising to raise me in the "fear of God" etc etc. I'm not exactly sure what else she expected from the only Protestant clergy in a hundred miles, and a Scotsman at that, but oh well, she promised, horrified though she was, and I got to go to Sunday School as long as I wanted.

In typical Canadian fashion, I went to whatever was handy: Baptist, United, Methodist (that was fun, if strange), Anglican, Baptist again, Presbytirian again although obviously that didn't go so well or I'd know how to spell it, eh? and finally Anglican again. I think I finally settled on Anglican because when I went to boarding school I stayed in the house of an Anglican minister (don't tell me to call them priests; he wasn't all up on the priest thing any more than me) and he didn't mind answering my questions. Instead of doing it by spouting off bible verses, he actually thought about the answers and discussed them like a rational person would do. Because if religion is, in fact, true, then it's rational. Was it Chesterton who said God doesn't break his own laws? He probably said it better, but you know what I mean.

Anyway, I do not recall, from the distant mists of my childhood memories, any 4th century gold icons, incense, or singing at the Anglican church, which was usually just the Baptist church borrowed for a couple of hours on Sunday or something. So this here big-city Anglican church is quite the eye-opener, I must say.

Quiz. It's a blog post about a quiz. Here's the quiz. And here's a sample of the questions:

Why is Orthodox Easter celebrated at a different time from Easter in the western Christian churches?      

It is based on the Gregorian calendar    

It is based on the date of Passover    

It is based on the Julian calendar    

Following the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, a new socialist calendar was introduced to fit better with the spring harvest 

And here are my results, which aren't bad considering that Polish fertility customs were not taught in any of my Sunday Schools, including the Ukranian one in Winnipeg:

Easter quiz

You scored 5 out of a possible 10

Not bad, but perhaps you should have paid a little more attention in Sunday school

PSA: How to Sleep on a Plane

Courtesy of Traveler's Ed, we present some very useful tips for sleeping on a plane, an endeavor at which I've never achieved any kind of success. With the help of these handy hints, however, I'm looking forward to at least achieving a state of complete, Zen-like boredom, a huge improvement over my usual homicidal Berzerker rage. On planes, I meant.

Sleeps! on Planes!

Sleeping on Planes
A recent study found that the popularity of red eye flights is on the increase. I'm among the fans of the red eye, and explain this phenomenon thusly: in most cases, time inside the tin cans we call planes is utterly lost time. It can be stunningly dull, uncomfortable, antisocial, aggravating, a modern Purgatory for the living.Magazines and light reading offer some semblance of real life. And sure, many try to work, but we all have the nagging suspicion that the person staring into their laptop is a) trying to impress; b) is an inefficient workaholic who can't put it down but isn't getting anything done; c) is just waiting for us to look away so they can alt-tab back to the Solitaire game.An airplane is an atrocious environment for work. Your aisle mate peeks at your email or spreadsheet, cellphones are verboten, airplane phones are prohibitively expensive (and who wants to broadcast their calls to a cabinfull of nosy, trapped people?)

Here are my tips for sleeping on planes, whether they be all-night red eye flights, or midday puddle jumpers.

Best seats for sleeping
Avoid completely the last row in the plane, and any seats just in front of the exit row. Think twice about bulkhead, exit row, and aisle seats.

Good Seats
Go for window seats near the front of the plane

More seat tactics:
If you know what kind of plane you'll be flying on, check airline Web sites for seating charts for the specific plane. Here are a few more resources for this information:

Seating Charts, by airline
Airline Seat Maps
Carry-ons: one (or none), then make two.
If you have two full carry-ons, one might end up under your feet – goodbye sleep. Try this: take one carry-on.

Blankets and pillows – stake your claim.
There are never enough blankets and pillows to go around. Board early and stake your claim.

Neck pillows
I've found few neck pillows really work…I turn them around; this works like a charm.

Footware suggestions:
This is a controversial subject.

Far more at the actual site. Click on the link for all you need to know about flying away to Dreamland.

back again?

Jesus Returns, Look Religious!

Pope h8s Judas

Battle Pope!Pope Rat lays one down on Judas, who is dead and thus unable to defend himself effectively.

"The money was more important than communion with Jesus, more important than God and his love," he told a congregation in the Basilica of St John Lateran. The Pope said the renegade apostle's lies had cast him into a hopeless, downward spiral. "He became hardened, incapable of conversion, of the trusting return of the prodigal son, and threw away his ruined life." Vittorio Messori, who wrote a book with the Pope, said the pontiff's approach was "the strictest interpretation of the mystery of the betrayal". Even his predecessor, John Paul II, had seen some hope for Judas in his book Crossing the Threshold of Hope, published in 1994.

As any decent theologian knows, the abandonment of hope is a definitively anti-Christian act, and specifically condemned by prophets from the Old Testament to the church next door. Da pope better watch his back.

Slightly OT: Anyone looking for cheap, vicarious religious thrillsBuddy Christ! Duuuuuude, what would I do? (and aren't they the best kind?) should rent the movie Dogma and show it in a room full of Catholic theologians. When I showed it to Carinthia (doctorate in theology, Trinity College Dublin) she watched the first act with amusement, pointing out obscure transgressions and citing relevant passages from the Old Testament, but when it came to the central theme of the movie, she leapt out of her armchair, cocktail flying. Pointing at the screen as they once must have pointed at Hester Prynne, she postively bellowed.

"The Plenary Indulgence! That goddam Plenary Indulgence! I knew it was nothing but trouble! NOTHING but trouble."

She then went on to slander, in baroque and glorious terms, the pope who came up with the stupid scheme and every band of roving cardinals who'd ever supported it. By name. Quite impressive. Even though I had spent a pretty penny on the brandy for that Sidecar, it was still worth it. Nothing like watching people Godspell, everybody's favorite Crucifixion Musicalget all riled up over obscure metaphysical references. I am reminded of a letter to Miss Manners; she was asked what she would have done at a dinner party given by the writer…it seems that several people got into heated discussion of whether or not the existence of angels depended upon the existence of God, to which Miss Manners, ever sensible, replied, "Where was this dinner party and why was Miss Manners not invited? She always ends up sitting between people who live to discuss the price they got for their condos, or the price they paid for their cars."

Word.

Eagle Update: they’re everywhere!

Bald Eagle in CanadaEven California! Imagine that, bald eagles in the US! I know, it's crazytalk, but in this case it happens to be true. While they have almost attained the status of nuisance birds up here in BC (yeah, I'm annoying, ain't I?) and a friend of mine once counted 53 in one tree watching the salmon run, down in the US they're still quite rare, although they are making a comeback.

A new eagle chick has hatched on Santa Cruz Island, just off the coast of Southern California. Expect Paramount to have the film rights tied up and pre-production under way within days. I'm seeing a comeback vehicle for Stephen Segal, I'm seeing Michael Bay directing, I'm seeing Nicole Richie as the eagle chick once she gains a few pounds.

It's the first known natural birth of a bald eagle on the huge Pacific island in more than 50 years, it was reported Thursday night.

The pair of bald eagles managed to bring the little eaglet to the world with no help from biologists, who have been trying to re-introduce the proud raptor to the island for several years.