30 Days of Night

What a terrible film. I watched it in two parts between reading sprees. Terrible Terrible, I didn't expect it to be intelligent but I did expect it to have jumped the bar set by Buffy The Vampire Slayer , incredibly however it failed even that. I am not a harsh person when it comes to movies and I like most that I see. I was scared out of my mind by 28 days later and figured that it would be on those lines . A pretty simple formula. Ah well Off to LBC library .

Character Building

As a young boy there was nothing I looked forward to more than being able for a week or so at a time to visit my uncle. His parishes were always far enough from home that I could feel relaxed but not so far as to make the visits too infrequent. Many of the visits were indirectly brought about by my need of escape from my punishing adolescence . I really hope that those visits shaped me more than the rest of my time at home. At that time I boy without direction or inspiration except when I was with him. I felt happiest when I knew I was with someone that I could learn so much from. The new interests given to me then I am still passionate about to this day and did not feel any struggle within my personality. He is owed a lot, especially for the words he would so frequently administer to me when I was feeling hopeless "It's all Character building." When he said that I would take it to mean that I would learn from the things which troubled me. That somehow like in the Beatitudes I would be made better by mistreatment. I was pondering his statement earlier and realized that It now sounds more like a warning. Could these miseries build a horrible character? I worry this because no one to their self is horrid. Perhaps the negative has out weighed the positive in me. I am leaning toward the negative view of myself lately because although I love mankind I find myself less engaged with friendships and have less in common with those whom I used to socialize with apart from the very person that issued that statement/warning and the one who I love. Maybe I am just on holiday with another person I love all over again and this time it took me longer to really feel like myself.

With love

Books I need To Study

Homer: Iliad, Odyssey
Aeschylus: Agamemnon, Libation Bearers, The Eumenides
Sophocles: Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone, Philoctetes
Thucydides: History of the Peloponnesian War
Euripides: Hippolytus, The Bacchae
Herodotus: Histories
Aristophanes: Clouds, Birds
Plato: Meno, Gorgias, Republic, Apology, Crito, Phaedo, Symposium, Parmenides, Theaetetus, Sophist, Timaeus, Phaedrus
Aristotle: Poetics, Physics, Metaphysics, Nicomachean Ethics, On Generation and Corruption, Politics, Parts of Animals, Generation of Animals
Euclid: Elements
Lucretius: On the Nature of Things
Plutarch: Lycurgus, Solon
Nicomachus: Arithmetic
Antoine Lavoisier: Elements of Chemistry
William Harvey: Motion of the Heart and Blood
Essays by: Theophrastus, Galen, Archimedes, Blaise Pascal, Gabriel Fahrenheit, Amedeo Avogadro, Joseph Black, John Dalton, Cannizzaro, Virchow, Edme Mariotte, Hans Adolf Eduard Driesch, Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac, Hans Spemann, Stears, J. J. Thomson, Dmitri Mendeleev, Berthollet, Joseph Proust
Aristotle: De Anima, On Interpretation, Prior Analytics, Categories
Apollonius: Conics
Virgil: Aeneid
Plutarch: Caesar and Cato the Younger
Epictetus: Discourses, Manual
Tacitus: Annals
Ptolemy: Almagest
Plotinus: The Enneads
Augustine of Hippo: Confessions
Anselm of Canterbury: Proslogion
Thomas Aquinas: Summa Theologiae, Summa Contra Gentiles
Dante: Divine Comedy
Geoffrey Chaucer: Canterbury Tales
Josquin Des Prez: Mass
Niccolò Machiavelli: The Prince, Discourses on Livy
Nicolaus Copernicus: On the Revolutions of the Spheres
Martin Luther: On the Freedom of a Christian
François Rabelais: Gargantua and Pantagruel
Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina: Missa Papae Marcelli
Michel de Montaigne: Essays
François Viète: Introduction to the Analytical Art
Francis Bacon: Novum Organum, New Atlantis
William Shakespeare: Richard II, Henry IV, Henry V, The Tempest, As You Like It, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, King Lear, Coriolanus, Sonnets
Poems by: Andrew Marvell, John Donne, and other 16th- and 17th-century poets
René Descartes: Geometry, Discourse on Method
Blaise Pascal: Generation of Conic Sections
Johann Sebastian Bach: St. Matthew Passion, Inventions
Joseph Haydn: Quartets
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Operas
Ludwig van Beethoven: Sonatas
Franz Schubert: Songs
Igor Stravinsky: Symphony of Psalms
Miguel de Cervantes: Don Quixote
Galileo Galilei: Dialogues on Two New Sciences
René Descartes: Meditations on First Philosophy, Rules for the Direction of the Mind
John Milton: Paradise Lost
François de La Rochefoucauld: Maximes
Jean de La Fontaine: Fables
Blaise Pascal: Pensées
Christiaan Huygens: Treatise on Light, On the Movement of Bodies by Impact
George Eliot: Middlemarch
Baruch Spinoza: Theologico-Political Treatise
John Locke: Second Treatise of Government
Jean Racine: Phèdre
Isaac Newton: Principia Mathematica
Johannes Kepler: Epitome IV
Gottfried Leibniz: Monadology, Discourse on Metaphysics, Essay on Dynamics, Philosophical Essays, Principles of Nature and Grace
Jonathan Swift: Gulliver's Travels
David Hume: A Treatise of Human Nature
Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Social Contract, Discourse on Origins of Inequality
Molière: The Misanthrope
Adam Smith: Wealth of Nations
Immanuel Kant: Critique of Pure Reason, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, Metaphysics of Morals
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Don Giovanni
Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice
Richard Dedekind: Essay on the Theory of Numbers
Leonhard Euler
The Declaration of Independence
Articles of Confederation
The Constitution of the United States of America
The Federalist Papers

My Chrismation

These are from a while ago.

Getting over the flu

It was dreadful but since I couldn't move too much I read two books I've been meaning to for a while. The books were,
Child of God by Cormac Mcarthy and One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. I am pleased that I read them they were both pretty short which was a nice change from the mammoth books of church history and theology I usually pass my time with. I am currently reading Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad which is just starting to hold my attention after the first few pages. I can't wait to see NiN on Saturday ,I really think that Lauren and I could go on mastermind together chose NiN as our subject and win with ease.. I suppose the only things I really know a lot about are NiN,Manson,Insects and Star Wars oh and James Bond I suppose. What a nerd I am. I will surely be an incredibly boring old man. The sparrows outside the kitchen window are lookign in and are holding their beaks open simulating a mute scream, It reaminds me of that unnerving scene in Jurassic Park with the Velociraptors in the kitchen. Incidentally Velociraptors weren't much like those created for the movie at all and were more similar to the Deinonychus . Velociraptors weighed even less than Snow Chubbs.
Heres a picture of what a velociraptor should have looked like. And the Deinonychus..
So there you go no more need to have nightmares about the Velociraptor (but probably about the Deinonychus instead)

A new Martyr

Carmelite Priest Brutally Martyred in India
By Nirmala Carvalho
8/19/2008
Asia News (www.asianews.it/)

Fr. Thomas Pandippallyil was martyred on his way to celebrate Sunday mass, severely tortured with his eyes pulled from their sockets.


This newest martyrdom reflects an emergence of militant Hindu extremism with a particular hostility toward Catholics and other Christians.
NEW DELHI (AsiaNews) – “Father Thomas is a martyr: he sacrificed his life for the poor and marginalised. But he did not die in vain, because his body and his blood enrich the Church in India, particularly the Church in Andhra Pradesh”.

Those are the words of Msgr. Marampudi Joji, archbishop of Hyderabad and secretary of the bishops’ conference of Andhra Pradesh (a state in South East India), commenting the barbarous killing of the Carmelite priest Thomas Pandippallyil, 38, assassinated on the night of August 16th in Mosalikunta, on the road between Lingampet and Yellareddy, 90 km from the regional capital.

On the night of August 16th his body was found on the roadside by a group of people, not far from the village of Balampilly; the body of the Carmelite of Mary Immaculate carried wounds to the face while the hands and legs had been crushed and the eyes gouged out. His motorbike was found one kilometre on from the body.

According to witnesses, Saturday afternoon Fr. Thomas celebrated mass in Burgida, before setting out for another village in the district where he was to have celebrated Sunday mass. The last people to have seen him alive were religious sisters from Lingapetta convent, where the priest had stopped for supper before continuing his journey.

“Fr. Thomas is a martyr – said Msgr. Marampudi, archbishop of Hyderabad, on hearing of the brutal murder. The Indian Church is shocked and deeply saddened by this barbarous killing, the result of a growing climate of intolerance and violence against Christians in this country”. The prelate immediately made his way to the area where the massacre took place and speaks of a “traumatized” Christian community. He forcefully denies accusations of “proselytism and forced conversions”. Given that there are “five families of Catholic faith” in the parish where Fr. Thomas was murdered.

Msgr. Marampudi Joji maintains the crime is the result of a climate of “jealousy of the Catholic Church”, whose only fault is that of trying to help develop the abandoned rural areas of the country and support and aid those who are “victims of violence and oppression”. “Priests and nuns – continues the archbishop of Hyderabad – have for decades been at the service of the least fortunate in India, and this makes them targets of forces of evil who do not want the marginalized and impoverished to become empowered”.

The remains of Fr. Thomas Pandippallyil will be laid to rest on Wednesday in the Carmelite provincial house in Balampilly: the priest was actively involved in educational field. He joined the Chanda mission of the CMI on 24th June 1987. He was ordained a priest in 2002. He was the rector for the Chanda mission province of the CMI, and also worked as hospital administrator, school manager and mission centre director.

Nothing can describe this