Tommy Lee Jones is Marshal Boone McClintock in Angel and the Badman. A relentless lawman who believes every man eventually receives exactly what they deserve. In theaters October 9.
The effective way the clarinet player does a musical call and response to the singer is just mesmerizing.
"Tu vuo' fa' l'americano" by Renato Carosone: cover by Hetty and the Jazzato Band, an Anglo-Italian jazz quintet.
A 13-year-old girl dressed as St. Bernadette sang before Pope Leo XIV in Lourdes.
Eva Molenmaker, from Fuveau near Aix-en-Provence, plays Bernadette in the musical Bernadette de Lourdes, which returned to the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Lourdes for the Pope’s visit.
What a beautiful voice!
41 years ago tonight, September 26, 1985, Woody Harrelson introduced the world to Woody Boyd on the fourth season premiere of NBC’s sitcom “Cheers”.
“Excuse me…My name is Woody Boyd…howdy, I’m a friend of Coach’s. Is he around?”
Admiral William H. McRaven gave one of the best explanations for dealing with unfair situations I've ever heard.
Everyone has heard him talk about making your bed, but this story might be even better...
"Get over being a sugar cookie."
The Sugar Cookie Story:
Borrowing this from a friend:
I keep hearing people complain that gasoline is over $4.00 a gallon.
And yes, I'd love to see it at $2.00 again. But before we declare gasoline the most outrageously expensive liquid on Earth, let's put things in perspective.
For $4.00, I get a GALLON of gasoline. I pour it into a 4,000-pound machine, turn a key, and that gallon will haul me, my wife, the groceries, the golf clubs and half the junk in my trunk almost 30 miles down the highway.
That's actually a pretty impressive day's work for $4.00.
Now let's compare.
A restaurant sells me a 5-ounce glass of wine for $9. That's about $230 a gallon. And how far does it transport me?
Usually from the dinner table to the men's room.
A fancy coffee shop can charge $6 for a 16-ounce latte. That's $48 a gallon. It doesn't transport me 30 miles. It transports me from "Leave me alone" to "Okay, now you may speak."
Bottled water at a convenience store might be $2.50 for 20 ounces. That's $16 a gallon, for something that occasionally falls out of the sky FOR FREE.
A 12-ounce energy drink at $3.50 works out to more than $37 a gallon. Apparently caffeine becomes a precious mineral once you put lightning bolts on the can.
Buy one of those little 2-ounce bottles of "energy shot" for $3. That's $192 a gallon. At that price, it shouldn't give me energy. It should mow my lawn.
Maple syrup at $8 for a 12-ounce bottle? About $85 a gallon. And its principal technological achievement is making pancakes sticky.
Vanilla extract at $6 for two ounces? That's $384 a gallon. For $384, I expect the vanilla bean to come to my house and bake the cookies.
Printer ink can cost thousands of dollars per gallon. And unlike gasoline, it sometimes refuses to come out because the printer has decided cyan is low.
Even that $9 glass of wine deserves another look. At roughly $230 a gallon, filling a typical 15-gallon gas tank with restaurant wine would cost about $3,450.
Of course, after drinking 15 gallons of wine, transportation would no longer be your biggest concern.
So yes, $4.00 gasoline is expensive.
But it's also a remarkable bargain when you think about what you're buying. You're purchasing enough concentrated energy to push several thousand pounds of steel, glass, groceries and humanity nearly 30 miles.
Meanwhile, we'll cheerfully pay $6 for coffee, $9 for wine and $3 for water, then stand at the gas pump staring at the numbers like we're watching the national debt clock.
Maybe gasoline doesn't need better pricing.
Maybe it just needs a fancier name.
"Handcrafted Premium Petroleum, locally pumped, small-batch refined, with subtle notes of octane and dinosaur."
Put it in a 12-ounce artisan bottle and charge $14.
We'll line up around the block.
FEEL FREE TO COPY THIS LIKE I DID.
Since Netflix has decided to desecrate Aslan and spit on C.S. Lewis's legacy, I humbly suggest you watch my video on Lewis's attitude towards such modern subversions.
I reread all of Narnia and looked at some key instances of Lewis upholding tradition and resisting modernity.
Everything Seinfeld says is 100% true. it reveals that the concept of risk we were sold was a lie (to reject the traditional lameness of family for self-discovery thru indulgence). Turns out the thing that billions have done, is actually the only true risk that matters. wished I'd learned that sooner, but glad I learned it at all.
This is an amazing video and article about reading full novels out loud in class. This teacher uses a variety of techniques to keep her students engaged. It still infuriates me that current educational practices frown on this. 😡 The article is long but well worth the time.
C.S. Lewis's review of this appalling decision circa 1948:
"Why should a woman not in this sense represent God? Certainly not because she is necessarily, or even probably, less holy or less charitable or stupider than a man. In that sense she may be as 'God-like' as a man; and a given women much more so than a given man. The sense in which she cannot represent God will perhaps be plainer if we look at the thing the other way round.
Suppose the reformer stops saying that a good woman may be like God and begins saying that God is like a good woman. Suppose he says that we might just as well pray to "Our Mother which art in heaven" as to "Our Father". Suppose he suggests that the Incarnation might just as well have taken a female as a male form, and the Second Person of the Trinity be as well called the Daughter as the Son. Suppose, finally, that the mystical marriage were reversed, that the Church were the Bridegroom and Christ the Bride. All this, as it seems to me, is involved in the claim that a woman can represent God as a priest does.
Now it is surely the case that if all these supposals were ever carried into effect we should be embarked on a different religion. Goddesses have, of course, been worshipped: many religions have had priestesses. But they are religions quite different in character from Christianity. Common sense, disregarding the discomfort, or even the horror, which the idea of turning all our theological language into the feminine gender arouses in most Christians, will ask 'Why not? Since God is in fact not a biological being and has no sex, what can it matter whether we say He or She, Father or Mother, Son or Daughter?'
But Christians think that God Himself has taught us how to speak of Him. To say that it does not matter is to say either that all the masculine imagery is not inspired, is merely human in origin, or else that, though inspired, it is quite arbitrary and unessential. And this is surely intolerable: or, if tolerable, it is an argument not in favour of Christian priestesses but against Christianity. It is also surely based on a shallow view of imagery. Without drawing upon religion, we know from our poetical experience that image and apprehension cleave closer together than common sense is here prepared to admit; that a child who has been taught to pray to a Mother in Heaven would have a religious life radically different from that of a Christian child. And as image and apprehension are in an organic unity, so, for a Christian, are human body and human soul.
The innovators are really implying that sex is something superficial, irrelevant to the spiritual life. To say that men and women are equally eligible for a certain profession is to say that for the purposes of that profession their sex is irrelevant. We are, within that context, treating both as neuters.
With the Church, we are farther in: for there we are dealing with male and female not merely as facts of nature but as the live and awful shadows of realities utterly beyond our control and largely beyond our direct knowledge. Or rather, we are not dealing with them but (as we shall soon learn if we meddle) they are dealing with us."
From "Priestesses in the Church?"
My dear Wormwood,
You still think in terms of churches and arguments. That is why you fail. The churches can be left standing. What must be spoiled is the literature that taught the young to love the Enemy before they could define Him.
Narnia is one of the more irritating of those books. Children meet Aslan first as adventure and only later discover they have been handling Christ. That is dangerous. Direct attack only makes the stories more precious. So we do not ban them. We adapt them.
Give the Voice to a so-called celebrated actress. Leave the mane. Leave the pronouns. Then the thing that was a male Christ-supposition becomes a prestige performance. The story remains famous; the meaning becomes negotiable. In a generation the story will still be beloved, but the beloved thing will no longer be Lewis’s Lion. It will be the version that flatters the age.
That is how the Enemies literature is destroyed without the vulgarity of a bonfire. Keep the title. Change the sound. When the children hear Aslan, let them hear the present century speaking through Him. Once that habit is formed, the Enemies stories survive as brands. Their doctrine does not.
Do not call it persecution. Call it interpretation. The patients prefer that word, and it does our work admirably.
Your affectionate uncle,
SCREWTAPE
When a boy wrote to C.S. Lewis, worried that he loved Aslan the lion more than he loved Jesus, Lewis told him something you would never expect...
Instead of saying the lion was just a character in a book, he told the boy he could not possibly love Aslan more than Jesus. Because Aslan is not a symbol for Christ: according to Lewis himself, Aslan IS Christ.
This is the thing most readers get wrong about Narnia. People call it an allegory, a tale where a lion stands in for Jesus the way a character might stand in for an idea.
Lewis rejected that completely...
In a letter he wrote: "If Aslan represented the immaterial Deity, he would be an allegorical figure." Instead, he explained, Aslan is the answer to a question: "What might Christ become like if there really were a world like Narnia, and He chose to be incarnate and die and rise again in that world as He actually has done in ours?"
The answer Lewis gave was a lion. And he explained exactly why: "Since Narnia is a world of Talking Beasts, I thought He would become a Talking Beast there, as He became a man here. I pictured Him becoming a lion," Lewis wrote, partly because the lion is the king of beasts, and partly because "Christ is called The Lion of Judah in the Bible."
Once you know this, the story of Narnia changes: the moment Aslan lays down his life on the Stone Table for a traitor, and rises again at dawn, is not like the story of Christ. To Lewis, it is that story, happening in another world. And it is why, in the final chapter of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Aslan tells the children this:
"I am in your world too. But there I have another name. You must learn to know me by that name. This was the very reason why you were brought to Narnia, that by knowing me here for a little, you may know me better there."
I work to all his performances
Whenever I want to enter deep-work mode and zone out into work
I play his playlist on YouTube
The performance with Zamfir is my favourite