In honor of Holy Trinity Sunday, another excerpt from the book of Wicked Words, under 'wench':

Athanasian wench, "a forward girl, ready to oblige every man that shall ask her" (Grose, A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, 1769).... the reference being to the first words of the Athanasian Creed, quincunque vult (whoever desires).

See, this is why I love being a Christian. :D

In the sermon today (which I actually stayed awake for, since I don't have to get up early for Sunday School any more) the Pastor was talking about politicians and pastors who claim they have a special knowledge of the Word of God, and how unwise (and unChristian) it is to listen to them without first engaging your own knowledge of Scripture and of the Holy Spirit. And how Martin Luther liked say that such people, who claimed to hear God speak to them, really probably had only been listening to bees trapped in their bonnets.

... the next time somebody gets evangelistic with me about Our Only President, I'm going to say 'he's just got a bee in his bonnet' and change the subject to the Peasants' Revolt.

Also: Happy day at church! My little Sunday School kid's dad is home from Iraq after nearly a year away! We had cake and decorations and (courtesy of Mom's hoarding tendencies) flag pins for everybody to wear! Hooray! (Of course, one of his brothers wasn't there to welcome him home, because his unit left Friday morning. They're trying to arrange for him to get to visit for a day or so first, but the standard procedure for that is for his brother's unit to call his unit and ask, but his brother hasn't *got* a unit any more, because the *five* of them that were left at the end of the deployment ended up attached to a Kentucky unit, that can't do that sort of thing for the Maryland guard, so they're all like chickens without heads at the moment.... I think the brother who decided to spend his weekends at M:tG tournaments instead of National Guard training is not at all regretting the choice.)

Oh, and completely unrelated: to a certain five of you who answered my poll: the penalty box in soccer is the marked area of the field near the goal where a foul results in a penalty kick rather than a free kick. So there!

I have basically quit worrying about national politics; I lost hope in the democratic process on a national scale *years* ago, and now I mostly sit back and kibitz and wait for the revolution.

Here is a graphic example of why:

Googling "Net Neutrality" + "Interstate Commerce Act" gets me 7 unique results. 7. "Sherman Anti-Trust" does slightly better, with 19. "Clayton Anti-trust" only rates 9, even though the House actually tried to pass an amendment to it in May.

I shouldn't have to explain how wrong this is, should I?
Or perhaps there's something I'm missing that somebody else can explain to me.

A democracy requires an educated citizenry which cares enough to understand basic political history. This we manifestly haven't got.

Dr. Patrick, I weep with thee.