More 'this & that' from 'Oldest Living Blogger'....

Instead of nodding off at the computer this evening, I went to bed. I put on my wireless headphones, tuned in the comedy channel, and got comfy. That was around suppertime. I woke up just a few minutes ago, just after midnight, still wearing the headphones. Usually those fall off when I go to sleep.  The comedy channel was showing the Montreal Comedy Festival's reruns, quite funny.  One guy was from Iran, and joking about travelling. He ought to meet my Iranian neighbors. They are just like the rest of us here - they think Iran is a great place to be from, and they don't want to go back, except for a fast visit, and to maybe collect their shares of the oil revenues to which all Iranians are entitled. 

This looks a lot like the container ships that visit us here in Vancouver. After retiring from our provincial electrical utility here, I worked as a security guard at a bulk terminal on the waterfront for several years, and got to know the sailors and longshoremen who inhabit that part of our world. I had to check in and out every vehicle through the main gates, and call cabs for the longshoremen as they went off duty and got their free rides back to the union hall across town.
I asked one "How-come you guys get thirty bucks an hour for this know-nothing job, and I'm minding the store here for a lousy $10.23?" And he replied, "Because we're shoveling shit up to our knees all shift long, and you have a nice clean booth, with closed-circuit TV, and three phones, and you can wear a nice uniform and stay civilized while doing your thing. That's why." He had a point.

And China's economy is picking up, perhaps because they haven't yet had to repossess the USA for its overdue loans. But it was close lately.... and for the curious, a Mandarin Chinese phrase book and dictionary costs about fifteen bucks. Mine was only $11.95, but that was in 1998. Speaking of the cost of books, I checked a Catholic bookstore on line today for a new Daily Missal, and
the one I had back in the 1950s was a beautifully-bound leather one with gold edging on the pages. Its modern equivalent in now just over a hundred bucks with the taxes added. Going to Heaven is getting a lot more expensive, Kiddies.

While on that website, I checked out the latest book of Christian Prayer, which is a revised title for the book we used to call Liturgy of the Hours, the daily morning and evening prayers for every day of the year. It's quite expensive now too. I was babbling a while back about how I suspect our Catholics 'borrowed' a lot of their liturgy from the ancient Egyptians, and that Liturgy of the Hours is one of the reasons I think so. The ancient Egyptians divided the day and night into individual hours, and each had its own traditional mythology and prayers for the sun god's journey across the heavens during the day, and through the Tuat or underworld during the night, while being reborn for the next day's journey.
The divisions of time into hours, days, months, and the year aren't something from the advent of modern times. That's been around since the time of the ancient Egyptians. They had days and nights of 12 hours each, and they divided the year into 12 months of 30 days each, each of which contained three decans of ten days each. The difference between that and the actual year of three hundred and sixty five and one-quarter days was made up with five 'extra' days tacked onto the end of the year, and usually devoted to special celebrations of a religious nature. So, from all that, we see that having an organized prescribed set of daily and hourly prayers wasn't something the Catholics invented. It was the Egyptians who gave us all that. We've simply 'improved' on it....

Here's an illustration which goes along with the Second Hour of the Night, showing events for that particular time, and suggesting the devotions to be done during it. Like I said, all this is very old.... it predates Catholicism by thousands of years.

What the writer says here about the howls of wolves being the glue which holds the pack together, the same might be said of politicians... they define their own territories with a lot of howling too, and like the wolves, we very seldom actually see them in action.