Unexplained traffic

I’m getting a large amount of traffic from what the stat counter is describing rather ambiguously as “WordPress.com.” The last time that happened it was because I had been put in the “growing blogs” section, but I’m not there now and I cannot, for the life of me, figure out where else I could be.

If you’ve come here through some link I can’t find, a comment explaining it would be most welcome.

UPDATE: The traffic has been explained.  A link to the post about Sam Harris’ poll rotates on and off WordPress’ front page under their “Religion News” section.  It’s currently at the bottom of that respective field’s dedicated page, though, so it will probably cycle off soon.

Problem solved; you can go about your business.

Statement of Abp. Thomas Collins on Dr. Henry Morgentaler

His Grace Thomas Collins, Archbishop of Toronto, has released a statement on the awarding of the Order of Canada to Dr. Henry Morgentaler. It is a refreshingly direct and unambiguous document. The full text follows:

Canada’s highest honour has been debased. Henry Morgentaler has been awarded the Order of Canada. We are all diminished.

A community’s worth is measured by the way it treats the most vulnerable, and no one is more vulnerable than in the first nine months of life’s journey. No person may presume to judge the soul of Henry Morgentaler, but it cannot be denied that the effect of his life’s work has been a deadly assault upon the most helpless amongst us.

Canada glories in the names of Banting and Best, and the other medical heroes who selflessly brought healing where there was disease and suffering. Now it honours with the Order of Canada a medical man who has brought not healing, but the destruction of the defenseless and immeasurable grief. This award must not stand.

I earnestly appeal to all who are tempted to resort to an abortionist, or are pressured to do so by those around them. I urge you to contact organizations such as Birthright, and others who will support you and love you and your precious child. Contact your parish. We are here for you. I pledge to you the support of the Catholic Church. Look to our archdiocesan website at www.archtoronto.org for information concerning places where you may find loving help.

For those who have had an abortion, and bear within your heart the fearful grief, I urge you to contact us, to find love and support in your anguish, and in the Sacrament of Reconciliation, to find the gift of inner peace.

I ask the faithful of the Archdiocese of Toronto, and all people of good will, to protest this act of dishonour. Write, phone, or e-mail the Governor General, the Prime Minister, and your Member of Parliament. Ask that this action be revoked.

This coming Sunday will be a day of special prayer in the Archdiocese of Toronto, for an end to the evil of abortion. I have asked that the following prayer be inserted in the Prayer of the Faithful in all the churches of the archdiocese:

“That the scourge of abortion be lifted from our land, that those who promote it may be brought to a change of heart, that all who are tempted to abortion may be lovingly helped to protect the precious gift of life, and that all who have experienced an abortion may be comforted with the healing gift of love.”

Dr. Morgentaler was granted an honourary degree by my university a few years back, an event that inspired no end of protest. It sort of made me wonder why, exactly, I was putting all of that work into earning the degree when I could instead swan around the country performing acts of gross infamy and eventually just be given the thing for free.

Links to three petitions (one for English-speakers, one for French-speakers, and one for those living outside of Canada) requesting that the award be rescinded in this case are available here.

In related news, the Madonna House Apostolate, a Catholic charitable organization and lay community founded by noted do-gooder and gentle legend Catherine Doherty, has returned the Order of Canada once awarded to their foundress to the Governor-General’s residence at Rideau Hall in Ottawa. Their press release on this renunciation of the award can be found here.

Sweet Ermengarde -or- The Heart of a Country Girl

Those familiar with the prose works of Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937) know him best as the creator of grim eldritch horrors and hideous, unfathomable events taking place over many strange aeons. Through classic works such as “The Call of Cthulhu,” “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” and At the Mountains of Madness, Lovecraft developed a wretched cosmogony involving unsettling fungoid creatures, blind elder gods and greater and more terrifying figures like Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos, and Cthulhu himself, a sort of space dragon with an octopus for a head. These are works of grave cosmic terror, often resulting in madness for the human narrator and a sense of unease for those reading along. In spite of his overly-wrought style, and his archaic pretensions, Lovecraft’s works even today maintain their ability to legitimately frighten his readers.

All of this combines to make reading his attempt at light comic satire in the style of a Romantic novel an absurdly satisfying experience.

“Sweet Ermengarde -or- The Heart of a Country Girl,” a short story in seven chapters produced under the pseudonym of “Percy Simple” in 1917, displays the talents of a man who might possibly have done more with himself than he did. The appalling parody of “Ermengarde” is not up to the quality of, say, the various chapters of Canadian humorist Stephen Leacock’s Nonsense Novels, but for its time and place–and considering its source–it tends to impress rather than disappoint. Interesting trivial note: Lovecraft, a great champion of the art of walking around, is reported to have once hiked up to Leacock’s summer home in Orillia, Ontario, whereat he spent a pleasant afternoon in conversation with one of my country’s finest authors. No record remains of that conversation, unfortunately, much as no record was ever permitted of the several-hours-long conversation that passed between Leacock and Chesterton over a game of billiards.

But I digress. The first paragraph of “Ermengarde,” to lift your spirits:

Ermengarde Stubbs was the beauteous blonde daughter of Hiram Stubbs, a poor but honest farmer/bootlegger of Hogton, Vt. Her name was originally Ethyl Ermengarde, but her father persuaded her to drop the praenomen after the passage of the 18th Amendment, averring that it made him thirsty by reminding him of ethyl alcohol, C2H5OH. His own products contained mostly methyl or wood alcohol, CH3OH. Ermengarde confessed to sixteen summers, and branded as mendacious all reports to the effect that she was thirty. She had large black eyes, a prominent Roman nose, light hair which was never dark at the roots except when the local drug store was short on supplies, and a beautiful but inexpensive complexion. She was about 5ft 5.33…in tall, weighed 115.47 lbs. on her father’s copy scales – also off them – and was adjudged most lovely by all the village swains who admired her father’s farm and liked his liquid crops.

Who could not read on after that?

This is hardly the only time Lovecraft bursts out of his eldritch box to try something different, and future posts will deal with other astonishing efforts. The poetry alone (a six-hundred-page volume in the complete edition, much of it having been written with perfect seriousness in the style of eighteenth-century occasional verse) would be enough to bewilder this blog’s readers for months. We’ll see what transpires.

The Hamilton Spectator drops the bomb

The Spec has announced a triumphant victory in a battle I never hoped to see won (and that, in truth, I had only vaguely understood to be in progress). McMaster University has abandoned its efforts to prevent access to the contract of the university’s president, Peter George. The office of the Information and Privacy Commisioner of Ontario has ordered the school to fork it over, and, lo and behold, they have.

But they weren’t the only school to do it. No, not by any means.

The short article now has links to .pdf versions of the contracts for the presidents of almost every major university in Ontario, including that of Paul Davenport, president of the University of Western Ontario, my alma mater. The schools listed in the article are:

• McMaster University
• Wilfrid Laurier University
• University of Guelph
• York University
• University of Toronto
• University of Western Ontario
• Ryerson University
• Brock University
• Trent University
• University of Waterloo
• Laurentian University
• Nipissing University
• Lakehead University

My future home, the University of Ottawa, seems to be absent from the list. They recently appointed former Justice Minister Allan Rock to the presidency, so perhaps the contract is still being drawn up.

Chesterton on Racial Superiority

While we’re on the subject of Chesterton, race and whatnot, it might be instructive to read some of his own words on the subject. What follows comes from an essay in his newspaper, G.K.’s Weekly, of April 25, 1925:

About all those arguments affecting human equality, I myself always have one feeling; which finds expression in a little test of my own. I shall begin to take seriously those classifications of superiority and inferiority, when I find a man classifying himself as inferior. It will be noted that Mr. Ford does not say that he is only fitted to mind machines; he confesses frankly that he is too fine and free and fastidious a being for such tasks. I shall believe the doctrine when I hear somebody say: “I have only got the wits to turn a wheel.” That would be real, that would be realistic, that would be scientific. That would be independent testimony that could not easily be disputed. It is exactly the same, of course, with all the other superiorities and denials of human equality, that are so specially characteristic of a scientific age. It is so with the men who talk about superior and inferior races; I never heard a man say: “Anthropology shows that I belong to an inferior race.” If he did, he might be talking like an anthropologist; as it is, he is talking like a man, and not infrequently like a fool.

I have long hoped that I might some day hear a man explaining on scientific principles his own unfitness for any important post or privilege, say: “The world should belong to the free and fighting races, and not to persons of that servile disposition that you will notice in myself; the intelligent will know how to form opinions, but the weakness of intellect from which I so obviously suffer renders my opinion manifestly absurd on the face of them: there are indeed stately and god-like races- but look at me! Observe my shapeless and fourth-rate features! Gaze, if you can bear it, on my commonplace and repulsive face!” If I heard a man making a scientific demonstration in that style, I might admit that he was really scientific. But as it invariably happens (by a curious coincidence) that the superior race is his own race, the superior type is his own type and the superior preference for work the sort of work he happens to prefer.

Thanks to Nancy Brown at the ACS Blog for posting it. I’ve edited the last sentence slightly by putting brackets in place of commas at one point and removing a superfluous comma at another. What was acceptable grammar in his own time today runs the risk of appearing to be only the first half of a thought. Those who read the original version on the ACS Blog will likely notice the trouble immediately.

Crisis Possibly Averted

With the expiration of the AFTRA (American Federation of Television and Radio Artists) contract and rumblings of a strike, Hollywood seemed set for another drawn-out labour battle between producers and talent, especially as a collapse of talks between AFTRA and the producers’ equivalent organisation would have tacitly given the go-ahead for a strike on the part of the SAG (Screen Actors’ Guild), whose contract also expired on June 30th.

However, it is now being reported that AFTRA has ratified its new contract with an approval of 62.4%. SAG would have needed the moral support of other strikers, plus at least a 75% favourable-to-strike vote from its own members, to feasibly call a strike of its own. This seems highly unlikely now.

In a more cosmic sense this was never a crisis at all; in fact, anything that further disrupts Hollywood’s ability to work the way it does could broadly be called a good thing. But not everyone in show business is a soulless monster, even among the producers, so it is good to hear that work will very likely be able to continue.

And before anyone asks (who knows? someone might have), the Battlestar Galactica crew will be wrapping up for good sometime this week, if they haven’t done so already, and as such will not likely be affected by any strike developments one way or another. This is the case for the show proper, naturally; when it comes to whatever TV movies they may have planned, that’s another story entirely.