All posts by Rondi Adamson

Australia, F*** Yeah!

Delighted to read about the (unexpected) results of the Australian election. Theory and media favoured the Left, but reality did not. Here are a few links: The Aussie Revolt Against Social Justice, from Spiked; …the Left’s Empathy Deficit Came Home to Roost, from Quillette’s Aussie founder; and A Climate-Change Drubbing in Australia, from the WSJ. (The latter might have a subscriber wall.)

Only Connect…

…as E. M. Forster wrote.

I am from a family full of addicts (food, alcohol, drugs) and issues – perhaps we are not so different from other families in that regard. I am also from a family which has always lacked emotional connections (unless you count vicious bullying as a connection). I am certain this is why Johann Hari’s Ted Talk about addiction caught my attention. It’s a tad simplistic, but his main point is a good one: “The opposite of addiction is not sobriety. The opposite of addiction is connection.” But of course it’s a vicious cycle, because the worse an addiction becomes, the more the addict isolates from other people, either by choice or because friends/family can’t stand being around the addict. Addiction creates deep mistrust, deep guilt, and constant dishonesty. It is difficult to connect with those things in the way.

Not unrelated – a fun link and blast from the past about Ted Talks.

Queen Victoria

She was born on this day, 200 years ago. Here are 20 fun facts about her. A great quote – I hope she truly did say it:

The important thing is not what they think of me, but what I think of them.

I have finally learned to adopt this as my philosophy – though when I was younger I did indeed waste time worrying about what other people thought of me.

Miracles Happen!

Such as: pro-life and pro-choice advocates calmly discuss abortion. One could be forgiven for thinking this would never happen, especially given reaction to Alabama’s new abortion law, a law that will surely be overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court. One thing I keep reading and hearing from pro-choicers is that men shouldn’t decide laws about women’s reproductive rights – and yet it was an all-male Supreme Court that ruled in Roe v. Wade. And plenty of women are pro-life.

People just need to remain sane here, right? Fat chance.

The Clothes of my Youth

As a teen and young woman in her 20s, I used to absolutely live in Sarah Clothes. The latter was a store in Ottawa – in the Glebe, the ‘hood of my youth – where I used to shop when I first began to spend my meager babysitting earnings. I adored the styles on offer there – one part hippy, one part Victorian, one part British colonial India. I still remember a perfect quilted Sarah Clothes jacket I owned. It was in lovely shades of blue with a floral print and I wore it with jeans or dresses or skirts (Sarah’s made the most divinely perfect crinkly cotton skirts). The clothes were such excellent quality, as well – I shopped there in the ’80s, primarily, and I was still wearing a couple of their blouses in the mid-aughts. Seriously! I just loved that store. I applied for a job there once and they did not hire me. Sigh.  A disappointment to my 18-year-old self.

For some reason I’ve been thinking about Sarah Clothes and I did a search on the internets, which turned up this link, as well as a link to the website of Sarah’s talented daughter, Andree.

Ah, nostalgia.

Seven Stanzas at Easter

Really lovely – and yes, late for Easter – by John Updike.

Seven Stanzas at Easter

Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers,
each soft Spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled
eyes of the eleven apostles;
it was as His flesh: ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes,
the same valved heart
that-pierced-died, withered, paused, and then
regathered out of enduring Might
new strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping, transcendence;
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the
faded credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mâché,
not a stone in a story,
but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow
grinding of time will eclipse for each of us
the wide light of day.

And if we will have an angel at the tomb,
make it a real angel,
weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair,
opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen
spun on a definite loom.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are
embarrassed by the miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.

George Washington’s Code of Civility

Washington copied out these 110 rules of civility as a schoolboy and while they are based — it would seem — on a 16th-century set of precepts, they are almost all (with some updating, naturally) applicable today. Don’t kill vermin, fleas or lice in front of people (I might even say “do not kill vermin”); do not express joy before a sick person (tacky!); be not tedious in discourse (yikes! Most of us should stop speaking then). And so on.

There is even one about eye-rolling (don’t do it), making one wonder if teenaged girls have always been as snarly and disrespectful. And what am I saying, “teenaged girls”? Heck, my parents used to roll their eyes at me, pretty much whenever I spoke.

The Suicide of the West

This week marks the 71st anniversary of Israeli independence and so, predictably, Hamas has to try to ruin the party. What was also predictable, sadly, was the reaction of so many in the West. Melanie Phillips has written a long blog post about it. Choice quote:

The Jews are often referred to as “the canaries in the mine.” With Western civilization in existential free-fall, the symbiotically linked contagions of Israel-bashing and antisemitism are both the cause and effect of this crisis.

Subscribing to the Arabs’ murderous falsehoods about Israel has destroyed the West’s moral compass – leaving it open to the murderous falsehoods about the people who gave it that moral compass in the first place and further blinding it to the forces threatening its own continued survival.

Read the whole thing here.