Parrots can eat with spoons?

http://petoftheday.com/archive/2005/June/08.html

Creepy. And they can talk! Could you eat mush while standing on one foot?

Frustration fantasies

After a hard day, a strange thought ran through my mind last night: "Boy, if I hit the lottery, or had a terminal illness, I could call all the people who drove me crazy and let them know. There's probably a better chance of getting sick than ever nailing the Powerball numbers, and I could on top of it all could make them feel terrible."

A cancer fantasy? Probably the most juvenile thought that's run through my mind since leaving the stroller. But this blog exists so that those thoughts I can't express in "real life" have an outlet, so ...

"Hi, Dan? This is Guy." ... "Yep, high school. You gave me a pretty hard time back then." ... "Oh, yeah, you weren't serious, sure. Well, I just wanted you to know what a rotten piece of filth you are." ... "Why am I telling you this now? I've got a brain tumor the size of a baseball."

"Dave, hello, it's Guy formerly with your insurance provider." ... "You'll have a new agent soon. Remember a few years ago when you used me for two sessions of two-plus hours each to basically give you a free insurance lesson and get you some loans because you were unemployed? Yeah. Then you got that great job as a VP at the bank, and I asked you to take a small policy on your daughter, who has no insurance?" ... "Well, you said it was reasonable, but then you looked at me like some kind of jerk because I had the nerve to actually try to sell big important you a policy?" ... "Sure, you're my best friend when you need me, aren't you?" ... "I just wanted you to know that you are the biggest skinflint cheapskate I have ever encountered in my career. You'll be happy to know that I'm riddled with lymphatic tumors and will never bother you again."

"Hey June - Guy Haraldsson." ... "You interviewed me this year. For a Catholic company, you sure blew me off in a cruel way. I took it pretty hard." ... "Well, I'll be sure to remind Jesus of your behavior when this blood disease I have kills me in six months."

Amexica II: The Anglophone Catholic

I: N.Y., U.S. Aesthetic theory
III: Hot Savages and Cold Decadents (to be linked)
IV: Amexican Ups and Downs (to be linked)

English-speaking U.S. Catholics are a rootless nation. In the common parlance of classical political science, a nation is "a people who share common customs, origins, history, and frequently language; a nationality." This definition in the mind of most persons and at www.dicitionary.com has been demoted to third, and has become synonymous with the "nation state," which has also been linguistically devalued.


Pope Hadrian IV (Adrian IV).
Nicholas Breakspeare.
The lone English-speaking Pope.

Let's compare how the average Romish Anglophone matches up against these criteria:

• Common Customs: 90% still share a liturgy, even if it's widely different from church to church. Our secular customs are a mishmash of whatever genetic groups we and our neighbors come from patched on WASP culture.
• Common Origins: None. Zip. Zilch. Zero. Our blood is mixed and re-mixed and has little connection to the other three benchmarks.
• Common History: Ditto. Three to six generations does not a common history make.
• Common Language: Yes, but again only for a few generations. It is in no cases, save the Irish, of the worship language of our peoples ... which, at second thought, was Latin anyway. And few are familiar with the secular literatures and usages of their blood's mother tongues.

Your humble host, case in point, is a Norwegian-Mohawk "half-breed," Anglophone, raised in the Roman Rite, and practicing in the Ukrainian Byzantine Catholic Church. The roots are thin. English is not the language of my backgrounds, nor Ukrainian, and 75% of my blood is not of this soil and has only been here since about AD 1860. At least 25% of me lives on the ancestral land of my Iroquois ancestors. There is no other person with my peculiar combination.

To American ears, that makes me "an individual." (Tangentially, the word "individual" used to be an adjective, and not a dehumanized Enlightenment-tinged synonym for "person.") But it really makes me a foreigner, which is almost all that the U.S. is comprised of anymore.

If, as HH John Paul II has said, the family is the root of society, what family do we really have? Traditional cultures understand that a "nuclear family" is the building block of the extended family, which flows into clans or tribes, several of which then comprise a Nation. The Nation is an extended family of its own.

This disconnectedness is the direct cause of our atomized identity politics and the American yearning "to belong." And it contributes to the void in many people's hearts that they try to fill with consumerism, sex, or drugs.

Is it any surprise then, that as a Nation, we North American Anglophone Catholics are in shambles? In the context of our larger discussion, adding Hispanics into the mix will only make matters more muddled.

There is very little we can do proactively to improve the mess: Close the borders, keep our marriages to other Anglophone Catholics, and improve our offsprings' appreciation of the little common history that we have. We must also impose our standards (English and Catholicism) as the standards of the state. Other than that, only time will gel us together, as it eventually turned a disparate collection of Celts, Saxons, Danes, and Normans into Englishmen.

Advocating that cultural types keep to themselves in marriage is a heresy to most Melting Pot believers, but if we don't, we will follow the Iceni, the Jutes, the Ainu, the Latini, the Tocharians, the Dorics, and countless others into nothingness.