Perhaps the first surprising thing about Don’t Worry Be Happy Day, which coincides this year with Martin Luther King Day, is that it comes out of Wales. Well, that’s not quite accurate. DWBH Day is an invention of the Catholic Enquiry Office, a branch of an agency of the Catholic Bishops Conference of England and Wales. See for yourself, at the bishops’ Web site, here (“Mondays in late January are very often reported to be the worst days in the year; the days most likely to provoke depression. The reasons for this are many, not least because the party season is over and many of us are feeling bloated, strapped for cash and suffering from broken relationships”). The bishops are running a contest, the prize being a one-on-one with a priest or a nun. Not just any old priest or nun, but a priest and a nun who appear on the BBC. But be forewarned: it is an evangelical Web site, and if you turn out to be truly depressed, guess who’s ready to help.
Padre Pio is the unofficial patron saint of Don’t Worry Be Happy Day. He is featured on the site of a spinoff called life4seekers, a popular blend of New Age spirituality and old-fashioned Catholicism, here (“Don’t miss our next Seekers’ event at the Franciscan Friary in North Wales”). The seekers, too, are running a contest, and because I knew the answer to their contest question (Where was Padre Pio born? Pietrelcina), I was tempted to enter to win a CD of music to meditate by. But to tell the truth I find that kind of music depressing. When I am cleaning house on the most depressing day of the year, I’d rather put on tango music, or the new CD by Baby Dee, or even “Rigoletto,” which is lots of fun if you don’t know what they’re singing about.
The Vatican has not officially recognized the feast or Padre Pio's role in it, but in St. Peter’s Square yesterday, on the eve of Don't Worry Be Happy Day, a huge crowd gathered to make the Pope feel better about having had to cancel his speaking engagement at La Sapienza University. The size of the crowd at St. Peter’s, estimated at between 100,000 and 200,000 (which shows you something about the science of crowd estimation), compared overwhelmingly with the mere “dozens of professors and students” who protested the Pope’s appearance. The Pope had to have taken comfort from those numbers. La Sapienza, incidentally, was founded by a Pope—Boniface VIII—in 1303, well before anyone knew how dangerous a little knowledge was going to get. (The university is now public.) The protest was spearheaded by one Marcello Cini, a professor emeritus of physics, who said, according to the Times, that “to have the pope preside over the start of a new academic year would be an ‘incredible violation’ of the school’s autonomy.”
I think the Pope should have gone anyway. He could have taken the opportunity to clear up that misunderstanding with the physicists about Galileo.
Showing posts with label Galileo. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Galileo. Show all posts
Monday, January 21, 2008
Friday, January 18, 2008
Spot from God
I could not have had an easier time parking yesterday if God himself had granted me a spot. It would have been a perfect day to take out a student parker. I could have explained the benefits of the spot I was leaving (Mon. & Thurs. 9:30-11), which I had taken last Sunday night for the obvious reason: it was the first spot I found. If I had already been in an 8:30-10 spot, I’d have had to move at 8:30, and there’d be that tension over the double-parking pecking order and the jostling for curb space after the street sweeper passed. But, as things were, I didn’t have to be at the car till nine, in order to arrive on an 8:30-10 block just after the sweeper had passed but before all the spots were taken, shaving at least twenty minutes off my wait.
I stopped for coffee in the independent coffee shop (not a Starbucks) on the 9:30-10 block, then buzzed the Sanctuary (Mon. & Thurs. 8:30-9), just in case, but the only spot there was too close to the fire hydrant. Then I got stuck behind a truck delivering dry wall and inched my way toward the first eligible block, where I was alarmed to see that all the spots on the left were taken. Fortunately, it was only a spasm of global dyslexia: I was looking on the wrong side of the street. The Mon./Thurs. spot I had just vacated was on the left-hand side of the street, but this was a one-way street in the opposite direction, so all the action was on the right. At the far end of the block there were no fewer than three wide-open spaces. And so it came to pass that at 9:04 I was comfortably ensconced in my spot, with a generous car length in front of me, having suffered a minimum of anxiety. It was too good to be true. I kept thinking there must be a fire hydrant concealed among the recyclables on the sidewalk.
Judging from this experience, a novice would get the impression that alternate-side parking was a breeze. Up ahead, a shadow of staggered rooflines falls on a high modern shed of a building that looks like it’s clad in aluminum. A FedEx guy pushes his high-piled cart from building to building, making deliveries. A guy with an ear of Indian corn stands on the sidewalk feeding the pigeons a few kernels at a time. This is a more residential block than the one I usually end up on, with its Chinese laundry and its barbershop and copy shop and parking lot and Greek diner. The only businesses on this block are a pub, a psychic, and a dog-grooming parlor. It’s like parking in a parallel universe.
At 9:17, a Hyundai Sonata finds a spot in front of the car in front of me. A Chevy Express, a big blocky van with vertical doors in the rear, pauses at the space in front of me, but the driver apparently can't see well enough to back that monster into it and moves on. Finally, at 9:26, a silver-gray Honda from Rhode Island claims the spot. This is about as late as you can expect to find a parking spot that will be good at ten.
I would, of course, point out to my student that our spot is good for a week. Yesterday I received an e-mail from the DOT (Department of Transportation) reminding me (as if I needed reminding) that alternate-side parking will be suspended on Monday, January 21st, for Martin Luther King Day. I don’t know if a bulletin will arrive before every holiday . . . This one had an ulterior motive: “PLEASE NOTE,” it said. “The 2008 calendar as originally posted erroneously included February 21 as a holiday. That was incorrect. February 21, 2008 is NOT a holiday and all parking rules will be in effect. The Web site has been corrected.”
I never saw the erroneous listing, but I suspect we have not heard the last of it. Although I do not like having a holiday taken away, it helps if I never knew it existed. And I have to say that I admire the DOT’s willingness to admit error. It’s so refreshing, so different from, say, the insistence on infallibility of the Roman Catholic Church. Just this week, there was an item in the Times about the Pope cancelling a speech at Sapienza University, in Rome, because students and faculty were protesting his hostility to science, specifically in a speech about Galileo that he gave in 1990, when he was just fallible old Cardinal Ratzinger and the church had not yet forgiven Galileo for his heresy in observing, back in the early 1600s, that the earth moved around the sun. “Cardinal Ratzinger did not argue against the validity of science generally or take the church’s position from Galileo’s time that heliocentrism was heretical,” the Times correspondent Ian Fisher wrote. Well, that’s a blessing. Cardinal Ratzinger did, however, quote an Austrian philosopher, Paul Feyerabend, as saying that the church’s “verdict against Galileo was rational and just.” (The church finally forgave Galileo in 1992.)
Now there’s a guy who deserves a holiday: Galileo. We could celebrate his release from Hell after four hundred years. Meanwhile, the effect of having a roomy spot on a pleasant street is waxing paradisiacal. Surely this is the loveliest block in the city. Notice the birds, the gingko trees, the pansies still blooming in flower boxes. Fire escapes zigzag down the fronts of the buildings: brown, beige, brick red. There are bas-reliefs in the sandstone above the first-floor windows of the building to my right: men’s heads with sort of colonial-looking wigs. Across the street are bas-reliefs in brownstone: evil-looking men with big mustaches, their foreheads sprouting acanthus leaves. I feel blessed. O.K., my feet are a little cold, but after all it is January in the Northern Hemisphere.
I stopped for coffee in the independent coffee shop (not a Starbucks) on the 9:30-10 block, then buzzed the Sanctuary (Mon. & Thurs. 8:30-9), just in case, but the only spot there was too close to the fire hydrant. Then I got stuck behind a truck delivering dry wall and inched my way toward the first eligible block, where I was alarmed to see that all the spots on the left were taken. Fortunately, it was only a spasm of global dyslexia: I was looking on the wrong side of the street. The Mon./Thurs. spot I had just vacated was on the left-hand side of the street, but this was a one-way street in the opposite direction, so all the action was on the right. At the far end of the block there were no fewer than three wide-open spaces. And so it came to pass that at 9:04 I was comfortably ensconced in my spot, with a generous car length in front of me, having suffered a minimum of anxiety. It was too good to be true. I kept thinking there must be a fire hydrant concealed among the recyclables on the sidewalk.
Judging from this experience, a novice would get the impression that alternate-side parking was a breeze. Up ahead, a shadow of staggered rooflines falls on a high modern shed of a building that looks like it’s clad in aluminum. A FedEx guy pushes his high-piled cart from building to building, making deliveries. A guy with an ear of Indian corn stands on the sidewalk feeding the pigeons a few kernels at a time. This is a more residential block than the one I usually end up on, with its Chinese laundry and its barbershop and copy shop and parking lot and Greek diner. The only businesses on this block are a pub, a psychic, and a dog-grooming parlor. It’s like parking in a parallel universe.
At 9:17, a Hyundai Sonata finds a spot in front of the car in front of me. A Chevy Express, a big blocky van with vertical doors in the rear, pauses at the space in front of me, but the driver apparently can't see well enough to back that monster into it and moves on. Finally, at 9:26, a silver-gray Honda from Rhode Island claims the spot. This is about as late as you can expect to find a parking spot that will be good at ten.
I would, of course, point out to my student that our spot is good for a week. Yesterday I received an e-mail from the DOT (Department of Transportation) reminding me (as if I needed reminding) that alternate-side parking will be suspended on Monday, January 21st, for Martin Luther King Day. I don’t know if a bulletin will arrive before every holiday . . . This one had an ulterior motive: “PLEASE NOTE,” it said. “The 2008 calendar as originally posted erroneously included February 21 as a holiday. That was incorrect. February 21, 2008 is NOT a holiday and all parking rules will be in effect. The Web site has been corrected.”
I never saw the erroneous listing, but I suspect we have not heard the last of it. Although I do not like having a holiday taken away, it helps if I never knew it existed. And I have to say that I admire the DOT’s willingness to admit error. It’s so refreshing, so different from, say, the insistence on infallibility of the Roman Catholic Church. Just this week, there was an item in the Times about the Pope cancelling a speech at Sapienza University, in Rome, because students and faculty were protesting his hostility to science, specifically in a speech about Galileo that he gave in 1990, when he was just fallible old Cardinal Ratzinger and the church had not yet forgiven Galileo for his heresy in observing, back in the early 1600s, that the earth moved around the sun. “Cardinal Ratzinger did not argue against the validity of science generally or take the church’s position from Galileo’s time that heliocentrism was heretical,” the Times correspondent Ian Fisher wrote. Well, that’s a blessing. Cardinal Ratzinger did, however, quote an Austrian philosopher, Paul Feyerabend, as saying that the church’s “verdict against Galileo was rational and just.” (The church finally forgave Galileo in 1992.)
Now there’s a guy who deserves a holiday: Galileo. We could celebrate his release from Hell after four hundred years. Meanwhile, the effect of having a roomy spot on a pleasant street is waxing paradisiacal. Surely this is the loveliest block in the city. Notice the birds, the gingko trees, the pansies still blooming in flower boxes. Fire escapes zigzag down the fronts of the buildings: brown, beige, brick red. There are bas-reliefs in the sandstone above the first-floor windows of the building to my right: men’s heads with sort of colonial-looking wigs. Across the street are bas-reliefs in brownstone: evil-looking men with big mustaches, their foreheads sprouting acanthus leaves. I feel blessed. O.K., my feet are a little cold, but after all it is January in the Northern Hemisphere.
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