simont | General update

General update

Back at work today, after two days of a cold. Except that when I came in this morning I had a horrifying sneezing fit which made it quite difficult to drive: I hope that's hayfever (for which this is roughly my peak season) rather than the remaining cold, in which case it should go away now I'm in the air-conditioned office. If it's the cold I might have to go home again, and I was getting restless.

Being off work with a mild cold is terrible for guilt, because I sit on the sofa, do nothing, and feel fine, making me feel bad that I'm at home. Fortunately (ish), at one point I ran out of food and had to go out shopping, and then I felt headachey and dizzy and that reminded me that I really was ill; but it's difficult to remember that when you're sitting on a comfy sofa and feeling OK.

In other news … the other day mpinna sent me a draft of the puzzle he's working on for my collection, which is worryingly good fun; I can tell it's a good one when my code review goes slowly because I keep stopping for just one more go. Then I sent back a mail which said ‘I'll be happy to accept this into the collection provided the following corrections are made’, which made me feel worryingly like a PhD examiner. Perhaps I should award a qualification for successfully submitting a puzzle. Puzzle Developer, or PzD for short :-)

At the weekend I watched cjwatson and ghoti get married, which was nice. The wedding was disturbingly Catholic; the congregation kept being expected to mutter ‘amen’ and ‘and also with you’ and similar miscellaneous stuff at various points, and in the absence of the usual cheat sheet I had absolutely no idea when it was appropriate to do any of this. Then they said the Hail Mary, of which I know virtually nothing beyond a vague feeling that I can guess the first two words. Then the Lord's Prayer showed up and I thought ‘thank goodness, something I do know’. Except that I didn't even know that, it turned out, because their version was two lines shorter than the one I knew. All of which, I think, conclusively demonstrates me to be a Protestant atheist.

Still, that wasn't a big problem. And there was a silly photo session, a mead-enabled reception, caterers who had specially provided gluten-free food for me (and a terrifying quantity of it too!), and all the usual good stuff. At one point my umbrella became filled with confetti, which was odd.

Anyway. Now I need to wade through a rather scary quantity of e-mail backlog from the two days I've been off work.

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Mmm; I kept having to distract myself from getting apoplexy at the sheer Catholicism of it by trying to see if I could stillr ead music enough to recognise the hymn tunes (I can). I had an earworm of 'White Christmas' for two days though, because one of them reminded me of it..

The doxology (the 'thine is the power' bit) is usually included in Catholic services these days, so that shouldn't be a way to distinguish Catholic from Protestant atheists any more.

*snort* I'm also starting to regret having ranted about never knowing hymn tunes: every wedding I've been to since then has come with sheet music, and the effect of this is that I now no longer have any excuse to cover the fact that I can't sing :-)

(I think it's a feedback problem. Playing the violin was a matter of making the hand motions that caused a particular note, and trusting that that note would come out; there was some auto-correction for fine tuning, but by and large you corrected a wrong note by not doing it again next time. With singing I don't really know how to produce the right note from the instant my voicebox goes live, so I have to fall back to the next best thing which is to start with an initial approximation and correct it by auditory feedback. This is very hard when the people around me are drowning out my voice even to my own ears...)

You should try it with a full PA and several heavily amplified instruments! There are times when I don't so much need my ears as the soles of my feet to tell me Carl's bass amp is in perfect working order..

Damn, dude - I didn't see you there! :/

Being unable to read music myself, I was not expecting to hear the tune of the german national anthem, and therefore had unexpectedly to suddenly restrain myself from singing “Coughs and sneezes cause diseases, Stop them with your hankerchief!” I blame Tony Hancock.

<snaps fingers> That's what it was! I knew the tune sounded familiar from somewhere, but I assumed it must just have been a particularly famous hymn which even I had managed to hear of. You're quite right; it was of course "German, German Overalls".

Betrand Russell had a theory on Protestant and Catholic atheists. The idea was that a Catholic atheist was an intellectual rebel, breaking away from his firmly established tradition to think freely. The Protestant atheist wasn't - to them, atheism was merely Protestantism taken to its logical extreme.

Put a fingers in one ear, Spinal Tap stylee. Looks ridiculous, works a treat.

Hmm, I wonder if my noise-reduction earplugs would work too.. the beauty of having long hair to hide 'em ;)

Yeah, but it has more lines in the Protestant version.

Yeah, that works too, and also has other advantages like still being able to hear the next day.

Err, no it's not. At least, it never was at my dad's church, and it wasn't at Col and Kirstens wedding. OK, that's a small sample size, but it's 100% of all catholic services I've been to. What makes you say it's "usually" included?

"And also with you" confused the hell out of me too. It's Modern for "and with thy spirit."

I suspect the congregation was full of atheists muttering about it being too Catholic, and Anglicans muttering about it being not Catholic enough.

Going to at least 10 churches in 2 dioceses in the UK, and two churches in France over a period of 20 years. This is a slightly larger sample size, though not huge ;)
The doxology wasn't included in the UK services until I was in my mid-teens (so, 10-15 years ago), as it was considered 'too Protestant' (err, this isn't the official way of saying it, but it's fairly true).
Weddings may be considered special liturgy (i.e. different from the usual liturgy of the Eucharist), and may therefore include the truncated version of the Our Father. I haven't been to a Catholic wedding in the UK ever, as far as I can recall, so that may be an exception to usual procedure.

It didn't appear to at the CofE Christening I was at on Saturday.

So what were the words you were actually singing?

Mm. Well, when, after Vatican II, masses in English were permitted and the liturgy was reformed, the first version was rejected in the UK for being too suspiciously Protestant. No Hail Mary, less random genuflection ...

Er, um. Remind me this evening and I'll check in the service booklet. It's gone right out of my head, I'm afraid.

LOL. There certainly are a lot of cases where someone's athiesm could be expressed as "not foo." It's a bit like people who are culturally Jewish.

"And also with you" to "peace be with you" I've got fairly used to these days, and isn't just Catholic, so I coped with that and the Amens. Though they're harder to spot without a crib sheet. But I didn't know the Hail Mary or the Allelujah and the responses to Becky's prayer asking for blessings caught me out too.

"too Catholic" would be a daft thing to call it though, since it was in a Catholic church. Just because it's unfamiliar doesn't make it bad.

I certainly consider myself as "culturally christian" despite not believing in God. This wedding definitely emphasised that the culture I've grown up in wasn't a Catholic one though! I'm mildly curious as to rjk's reaction actually, given he *doesn't* consider himself culturally christian.

I thought Becky's prayer was the one thing that was given in the cheat sheet?

I was mostly being flippant. But 'Catholic' is not the same thing as 'Roman Catholic'. It is not daft to say that my Anglican church is more 'Catholic' than the average Roman Catholic one. Though some people might quibble about the size of the 'c'.

... so that a Catholic church might be one which still does everything in Latin? :-)

Interestingly I went to a CoE service (a normal Sunday service) in August that used the truncated version.

What does 'catholic' mean when in sentences like 'I believe in the holy catholic church' used in a CoE service?

:)

It was still being excluded at my local catholic church (which was remarkably low, with lots of bearded men playing guitars) about 4 years ago. Maybe it's just up to individual priests?

I was rather disappointed that the service contained no Latin whatever. But, now that I think about it a bit more clearly, I would in short order have been driven potty by the pronunciation grating against my strictly Classical sensibilities.

Well, there's probably an official line. But half of Catholicism is about ignoring the official line.

Praise the Lord! Ye heavens, adore him;
Praise him, angels in the height;
Sun and moon, rejoice before him;
Praise him, all ye stars and light:
Praise the Lord, for he hath spoken;
Worlds his mighty voice obeyed;
Laws that never shall be broken
For their guidance he hath made.

Praise the Lord, for he is glorious!
Never shall his promise fail;
God hath made his saints victorious;
Sin and death shall not prevail.
Praise the God of our salvation;
Hosts on high, his power proclaim;
Heaven and earth, and all creation,
Laud and magnify his name!

Worship, honour, glory, blessing
Lord, we offer unto thee
Young and old, Thy praise expressing
In glad homage bend the knee
All the saints in heav’n adore Thee
We would bow before Thy throne,
As Thine angels serve before Thee
So on Earth Thy Will be done.

Foundling Hospital Collect (c. 1796), based on Psalm 148.

The tune was slightly different from how I remember the German national anthem to go: The notes from the first two lines of each verse were repeated for the third and fourth lines, before carrying on as I expected. But maybe I remembered the tune wrongly.

You wake me up this morning with a deeply tasteless joke about snot, and then you complain about how nobody understands the finer points of Latin pronunciation any more.

That's one of the things I love about you, you know :)

"universal" or suchlike — the whole church, in an inclusive way.

Mmmm, in RC churches I've been to here the Lord's Prayer runs out too early, but the last couple of lines appear later in the Mass.

IME the missalette at RC church seats is very non-obvious to people who might actually need it: it jumps around all over in a very poorly explained way, such that I just shrug and give up. No wonder people aren't converting to RC'ness - the uninitiated wouldn't stand a chance.

evensong tends to use the truncated version, IME.

-m-

am i being dreadfully evil for using ancient language at SMM? it does bother me quite a lot that it's all in modern language. (don't suppose i'll ever dare say that to fr groves though).

-m-

oooh, i appear to be making progress ;-)

(correct me if i'm wrong, but i believe that i told you that a couple of weeks back!)

-m-

And at least one Methodist who thought it wasn't any more confusing than any other service he'd been to based on a different litergy than the ones he grew up with.

Then they said the Hail Mary, of which I know virtually nothing beyond a vague feeling that I can guess the first two words.

Ave Maria…

You are absolutely correct. (-: I do appreciate the window into such matters that you can give me!

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General update

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Praise The Lord, Ye Heavens Adore Him

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