A small, but profound video hit me in just the right spot this week, and I’m sharing it with you all. You can look at the video here.

The images are grainy and hard to see, so take a look at this on your computer if you can’t see it well on your phone or device.

Its clearly something someone took on their phone while driving. A hedgehog has stopped in the road, intransigently, unwilling to get out of the road. Maybe he was too scared. Maybe he didn’t know what he was doing. Maybe he was confused.

A bird, noticing what is happening, takes it upon herself to move this hedgehog along. She pushes, and shoves, and pokes. …

The above was widely shared across social media. But in doing so, it created a lightning rod around an issue that we are ALL sharing in and suffering through during the year of COVID. This year SUCKS for birthdays.

If you’ve had a birthday, you know what I mean. If you are waiting to have a birthday, you might be getting ready for the same experience. It is impossible to celebrate, to memorialize, to congratulate or even to observe someone on their birthday, unless they are in your pandemic pod. And I say this having brought folding chairs to a parking lot on a recent evening in order to celebrate a birthday. I have attempted to find meaningful plans to do SOMETHING special for numerous birthdays and anniversaries. …

Turkish Film Pioneers

I tend to think of French or American silent films when I think of the beginnings of the medium. It was a technology that, clearly, still shapes the world, but the ability to capture things happening in the world and playing it back later was even more profound when it first appeared. The story goes that the first time a film portrayed a train coming at audiences from a first-person perspective, the people screamed in horror, unable to imagine that the train was not real and in fact coming at them.

But it turns out that early film was quite global, and the technology shaped all kinds of people across the world. Among these early pioneers, I was just learning about, were the Manaki brothers, who were Turks living in the then-Ottoman empire. These brothers did a great deal to advance the medium, but they were also around for some of the most profound events of the early 20th century and they were thoughtful enough to capture them. …

So this blew me away in a “huh! I didn’t think that was possible” kind of way.

The story is from biologists studying the fauna of the Seychelles. Like many islands close to continents, the Seychelles have a history of ships landing on the islands and being exploited to the ends of their resources by sailors and others who landed there. As a result — like the proverbial Dodo — many extinctions followed in the aftermath of the ships. One example was a species of white throated rail that was flightless (this often happens on islands to species that evolve to exploit the island’s unique ecosystem.) About 10,000 years ago, when human beings were navigating around East Africa, these birds went extinct. We have some of their remains. …

The idea of the sad clown was put on stage in the famous depiction of Pagliaccio in Ruggero Leoncavallo’s opera of the same name. It’s probably the operatic image that most non-opera-goers might know — imagining Pavoratti in clown make up singing the famous aria:

Laugh, clown, so the crowd will cheer!
Turn your distress and tears into jest,
your pain and sobbing into a funny face — Ah!

It’s the kind of thing that you might see on the Loony Tunes while growing up even if you never saw it in your adult life. And because of that formative image, the idea of a tragically depressed but outwardly comical clown has shaped how we see comedians and the relationship between laughter and mental health. There’s an unspoken, maybe only half-realized assumption: comedians are supposed to be tragic and slightly depressed, and their “neuroticism” (there’s a word!) …

In preparation for the coming church year, I’ve been looking at some older books on class in America. (You have to look for older writings because, with a few notable exceptions, we seem to have stopped thinking about class in America.) While reading from Paul Fussell’s Class: A Guide Through the American Status System I came across his reference to a common houseplant I’ve seen my whole life — the Aspidistra. It looks like this in the ground:

I’m certain that I never spent a day in my house growing up without the company of this plant. But what I didn’t know was its extraordinary history as part of peoples’ households and its association with class and status in Europe and America. …

Something about Summertime always makes me whimsically nostalgic. It is a season in which I will eat food that isn’t reasonable to consume for someone who isn’t 12 or under. It is a season in which I will intentionally drive long distances at night just to put the windows down and turn the volume up. It is a season where I don’t mind that watermelon has seeds. It is a season when I love to lean into every cliche/stereotypical/ordinary aspect of warm weather in America.

One aspect of this that has an extra-special place in my heart is minigolf. Because, how much fun is mini-golf? It goes especially well with ice cream. It’s competitive but completely unserious. It is an excuse to be outside, but also just fake enough to feel like you might be in a John Hughes movie. …

I talked to a friend of mine (he’s a Catholic theologian and a long time lover of comicbooks) about my thoughts about comic books after I posted about it on this blog. He told me that he’d been thinking a lot about comic book movies himself. Specifically he’d been thinking about the famous essay by Catholic fantasy writer and linguist J.R.R. Tolkein, “On Fairy Stories.” I asked him to write up his thoughts, and I’m very glad I did. Here they are.

The box office success of the MCU — defying the repeated warnings from critics about (their own) ‘superhero fatigue’ — hints that the draw and fondness for these films extends beyond their mix of superstar celebrities, endless special effects, and promises of a shared universe. As DC/Warner Bros. and Universal Studios (they had plans for a shared universe for their classic monsters) know, these elements do not guarantee enduring affection from audiences (e.g., Batman v. Superman, Justice League) or even sound financial return (e.g., Green Lantern, The Mummy). The MCU matters because of both what it has accomplished (see Allan’s post) and how and why it was accomplished. At its root, the success of the MCU tells us about our hunger for certain kinds of stories and their theological character. …