Mercies

 Busy Friday and Saturday -- was in a wedding -- so today was sort of a veg-out, in all honesty.  I did finish the one book I was working on (31) and started the next, cleaned out the email box, and got to work on some of the bookmarks I have saved, all of which is good.  I am sort of tired, so the rest is sort of nice, I would say.  Some days the body just needs that.

I really wanted Baker to pull one and stick it to the Browns; I guess we will all have to settle for a close loss.  Somewhere, Jim Tressel is a-flutter at a big special teams win.  Of more interest to me was the scene on the college side; App State doing it again and beating A&M, the Herd beating Notre Dame (God obviously took the weekend off), and Nebraska finally getting rid of Scott Frost (even if it cost them an extra $8 million).  I guess to me the issue should be that good mid-majors/Group of Five teams can win against Power 5 conferences -- they seem to do it every year -- so why are we surprised?  In some ways, it should be (as in hoops) that teams should be rewarded for avoiding (as much as possible) a Little Sisters of the Poor schedule...hell, even the Big Ten is mandating 1-A opponents in football.

https://aeon.co/essays/historical-data-is-not-a-kitten-its-a-sabre-toothed-tiger

Interesting; I have not read the books about slavery mentioned, though I sort of want to... the reason not, of course, is that I have 300 other things to read as it is.  But, the work -- and the responses -- did cause a paradigm shift in Civil War History, sort of like the publication of The Marble Man did to Lee a generation after Freeman.

https://theanchoress.com/on-charles-iii-and-the-value-and-power-of-ritual/

This is a very Catholic take on the matter, but I think it is...quite true, in many ways, which is why I liked it, I suspect.  This would be funnier if the Gospel today at Mass wasn't the Prodigal Son, which, as regular readers know, I dislike immensely.  But, Fr. Eric did address that point in his homily, namely that we need to look at it from the point of view of the Divine -- i.e., that's God grace, once extended to the sinner, is the goal here, not our own sense of justice.  I will try to keep that one in mind, but will still be pissed as hell if I get to heaven and see plenty of Democrats there.