It is only a test.

My work, school and life schedule is keeping me a lot busier than I thought I'd be, so I apologize for the short intermittent posting. And the comments! I'll work on it when I get the chance.

I'm usually a politics nerd. But this year, I'm having a hard time getting really excited about this Presidential race. Barring some unforseen disaster, I'm voting McCain/Palin this year-- and until a few weeks ago, considered abdicating my vote altogether. I can't explain it.

But the political season has been interesting from a Catholic perspective-- some of the most prominent Catholic Democrats are making indefensible statements about the Church and Abortion. Are you watching Madam Speaker Pelosi and Vice Presidential Hopeful Biden crowing about when life begins-- as if the matter is up to some kind of theological debate!

(One day I will tell my story of why I am pro-life. I don't have the energy to do so right now, but I will hammer it out one day. I am not pro-life just because I am Catholic, though it has certainly colored my view on the subject)

In the meantime, you should be following Sen. Biden and Rep. Pelosi step on themselves trying to explain why they see no conflict between declaring themselves Catholics and ignoring one of the Church's most important teachings on human souls. I suggest American Papist as THE BEST blog covering the issue in the blogosphere.

I'll resume regular blogging sooner or later. Outside life is demanding most of my attention lately.

Uncle!

I can't figure out what's gone awry with my comments. It's all jacked up.

Does anyone here speak MovableType? I'm in beyond my expertise level.

I've got a couple of posts in my head, but I'm saving them because I don't feel like we can really discuss them if the combox doesn't work.

The good news is that things are about 80% up and running.

The bad news is that the comments are going to be disabled for a while. I've got some setting locked and I don't know how to unlock it yet. Besides, I'm going to install a captcha system to make sure that y'all aren't spamming robots (not that I think any particular one of you are, of course).

But the lack of comments has been sad for me. Any blogger will sheepishly admit that comments are just about the best reason to write a blog. It's killing me that they're down right now.

We got hit by the big bad spam monster today. In my efforts to head off the monster, something has gone amiss with the site.

Stay tuned.

Luckily, it's still August and no one is reading anyway.

St. Isadore of Seville, patron of the internet, ora pro nobis!

Today is the the feast day of St. Lawrence of Rome. You can read more about St. Larry in this post where I named him patron.

St. Lawrence is the patron of brewers, comedians, barbeque and WhollyRoaminCatholic.com.

Today I'm going to smoke some pork ribs and drink a little beer in his honor. (That's my kind of saint!)

St. Lawrence, pray for us!

August is when readers and bloggers slow down, this site will be no exception. I'll still post intermittently, but it'll be hit-and-miss for a while.

In the meantime, I'd like to share a little gem Slate.com, originally written in 2001.

http://www.slate.com/id/112553/

August
Let's get rid of it.
By David Plotz
Posted Friday, July 27, 2001, at 8:30 PM ET

August is the Mississippi of the calendar. It's beastly hot and muggy. It has a dismal history. Nothing good ever happens in it. And the United States would be better off without it.

August is when the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, when Anne Frank was arrested, when the first income tax was collected, when Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe died. Wings and Jefferson Airplane were formed in August. The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour debuted in August. (No August, no Sonny and Cher!)

August is the time when thugs and dictators think they can get away with it. World War I started in August 1914. The Nazis and Soviets signed their nonaggression pact in August 1939. Iraq invaded Kuwait Aug. 2, 1990. August is a popular month for coups and violent crime. Why August? Perhaps the villains assume we'll be too distracted by vacations or humidity to notice.

August is the vast sandy wasteland of American culture. Publishers stop releasing books. Movie theaters are clogged with the egregious action movies that studios wouldn't dare release in June. Television is all reruns (or worse--new episodes of Sex and the City). The sports pages wither into nothingness. Pre-pennant-race baseball--if that can even be called a sport--is all that remains. We have to feign interest in NFL training camps. Newspapers are thin in August, but not thin enough. They still print ghastly vacation columns: David Broder musing on world peace from his summer home on Lake Michigan? Even Martha Stewart (born Aug. 3) can't think of anything to do in August. Her Martha Stewart Living calendar, usually so sprightly, overflows with ennui. Aug. 14: "If it rains, organize basement." Aug. 16: "Reseed bare patches in lawn." Aug. 27: "Change batteries in smoke and heat detectors."

You can't get a day off from August, because it is the only month without a real holiday. Instead, the other months have shunted onto this weak sister all the lame celebrations they didn't want. Air Conditioning Appreciation Week, Certified Registered Nurse Anesthetist Week, National Religious Software Week, Carpenter Ant Awareness Week: All these grand American celebrations belong to August. Is it any accident that National Lazy Day, Relaxation Day, Deadwood Day, and Failures Day are commemorated in August?

August is the month of vagueness. October is the 10th month, March is the third month. What's August--bet you can't remember. Does it have 30 days or 31? You have to recite the rhyme to figure that one out. The great writers of history forget August: It rates three mentions in Bartlett's Quotations, compared with a dozen for December and two dozen for March.

The people with August birthdays are a sorry bunch. Sure, Lyndon Johnson and Bill Clinton* were born in August, but the other presidential Augustans are Herbert Hoover and Benjamin Harrison. Film is represented by Robert Redford and Robert De Niro--but also by John Holmes and Harry Reems. Third-raters populate August: George Hamilton, Danny Bonaduce, Rick Springfield, and Frank and Kathie Lee Gifford were born then. August gave us Fidel Castro and Yasser Arafat. In art, August offers Leni Riefenstahl, Michael Jackson, and Danielle Steele. (To be sure, not everything that happens in August is so terrible. Raoul Wallenberg, Alfred Hitchcock, Herman Melville, and Mae West were born in August. Richard Nixon resigned in August. MTV launched in August. And Jerry Garcia died in August.)
August can't even master the things it is supposed to do well. Despite its slothful reputation, it is not the top vacation month, July is. Nor is August the hottest month (on the East Coast, at least). That crown, too, is July's. August is when the garden starts to wither, and when the long summer days cruelly vanish.

We should rage, rage against the dying of the light. The United States desperately needs August Reform. Purists will insist that we shouldn't tinker with the months, that August should be left alone because it has done workmanlike service for 2,000 years. That's nonsense. Calendars are always fluxing. August itself was a whimsical invention. In 46 B.C., as part of a broad calendar change, Julius Caesar added two days to Sextilis, an old 29-day month. In the reign of his successor, Augustus Caesar, the Senate voted to change Sextilis' name to "Augustus" (as the Senate under Julius Caesar had renamed the month before, "Quintilis," "Julius").

August was created by politics, and it can be undone by politics. For too long, bureaucrats in Washington have been telling you how you must divide up your calendar. But these are your months, and you should be able to do with them what you like. Genuine August Reform will be hard. It will require tough compromises to protect the special interests of September and July. (And who better to sponsor this revolution, incidentally, than Sen. John McCain--birthday Aug. 29?)

Here is a framework for compromise. Cede the first 10 days of August back to July, thus extending holiday revelry for more than a week. September would claim the last 10 days of August, mollifying the folks who can't wait to get back to serious work. Labor Day would come 10 days earlier, the school year would run longer, and the rush of fall activity could get jump-started. August itself will keep 10 days. That is just enough: Every summer we'll be able to toot happily, "Gosh, August went by so quickly this year!"

And as for the 31st day, it will be designated a holiday independent from any month. It will fall after the 10th and last day of August, and it will celebrate the end of that most useless month.

I like summer and all, but August is ridiculous.

I'm going to be pretty busy for the next week or two, so I might not get a lot of good entries up for a while. The way that I like to write is pretty time-consuming. Fellow bloggers know how much time it takes to crank out a good post.

So in the meantime, let me recommend some good sites to you:

If you read WRC because you like personal writing from a Catholic perspective, then check out "Et Tu?" - The diary of a former atheist.
If you read WRC because you like commentary on the Catholic Mass, then I cannot speak highly enough about Good Father Zuhlsdorf's What Does The Prayer Really Say?
If you read WRC because you like Catholic news and comment, then spend some time with American Papist.

There are so many other good sites (I'm running out of time before I have to get to a meeting) and I love all the ones in the "regular reads" links to the right. Also check out the "Tagbacks" links below, which are sites I like but that get chewed up by my webserver and I'm not as familiar with them.

See you soon!

I'm working on it. It has something to do with the style sheets, about which I know very little.

Am I the only one having trouble with the comments? Somebody try to comment on this post. If you are rejected, drop me a line: joe at whollyroamincatholic dot com.

UPDATE: My host upgraded their server and now I have to upgrade MovableType, my blog software. *sigh* MT is kind of hard to upgrade & configure, we may be sparse on comments for a while. I'll try to get to it over the next couple days, I don't know how long it'll take me to get it fixed.

Saint Isidore of Seville, Patron of Computers and Patron of the Internet, pray for us!

UPDATE 2: I was able to upgrade MT and everything works. Thank you Saint Isidore!

Wolftracker's Kansas City Catholic has hung up his keyboard.

That really stinks.

So I know this is another lame post, but I'm still in the middle of a big project and haven't had the time to get in the writing frame-of-mind. In the meantime, I'd like some suggestions for what other blogs that people are reading while they're waiting for me to put together a post of value. They don't have to be expressly Catholic blogs, though those are of particular interest.

Extra credit goes to people who suggest good personal writing, blogs that are frequently updated, and ones that are not hosted by blogspot or typepad, both of which give my server trouble (it's a long story).

So what are your internet diversions?

A couple of years ago, I started a now-defunct political blog with a friend of mine. Quite often, he'd start a post and never finish and publish it. Either he ran out of time to develop it all the way or it wasn't going the way he wanted it to go or he put it aside to chase some other thought instead-- he'd gotten too far in to give up on it, I'm sure he planned return to it later to re-edit them or finish where they were going.

But he never did. It was funny, really. For every 2 or 3 posts he put on the blog, there was at least one half-finished one saved on the account but never put up for viewing. That was never my style. I was better at producing content then, I could crank out post after post without stopping for more than a day or so.

Heh. Those where the days. That's when I used to laugh at someone else's half-finished posts, hidden from the public behind the closed doors of the blog factory. Gentle reader, in the young history of this website, there are about a half-dozen posts that I started and never finished. Truthfully, I doubt I'll ever finish them. But I don't delete them, because I've done 2/3rds of the reading and writing to produce the post. So they sit. Alone and ignored.

Mom always said I had a hard time finishing what

I'd like to kindly welcome whomever found this page searching for the phrase "passover lamb priest butcher afternoon".

Whatever you were looking for, I'm sure I didn't help. Sorry.

Over the years, I've owned a number of websites and blogs. I've never reached 1000 visitors so quickly-- so thank you for being a part of it!

This number would be quickly dwarfed by the big blogs, but that part doesn't matter to me. I'm happy you spend a little part of your day with me.

Of course, I'm not posting enough. It begs the question: why are you visiting this site?

On the second thought: don't answer that.

-NUNC EST BIBENDUM-

I keep my traffic stats public, because I don't have anything to hide. Scroll to the end of the content in the right column and see the "Over ### people served". If you click the number, you see my traffic stats. Most of it is kind of dull to most people, but fairly interesting to me.

The item that is the least important to me (other than its novelty factor) is the Recent Keyword Activity, which lists the words people search for to find this site-- current to the last 10 searches.

Looks like I'm holding at #6 for "altar server snot".

Hopefully I'll crack that top 5 soon.

I hate to lessen the amount of writing for a while, but I'm going to be away from my desk for big blocks of time and won't have a lot of time at the keyboard.

This is particularly ill timed. With the pope on US soil, this should be high-time for Catholic bloggers. Additionally, a young blog needs a LOT of content, and stepping away now leaves this site with some sparse content.

Fiddlesticks. Thanks for your patience.

Don't be shy! Emails are for winners!

Over the years, I’ve had a number of blogs and websites. Some of them were reasonably popular, some of them were basically unknown and unheralded.

Though I’ve only had WhollyRoaminCatholic.com up for a few days, I get the modest impression that this site might attract some traffic & interest.

So let’s discuss cross-posting or reproduction of this site: basically, if you want to quote on your blog, go ahead. Frankly, the World Wide Web is basically the Wild Wild West and it’d be hard to enforce a “don’t quote me” policy. And really, who writes a blog and asks for no recognition? I mean, really?

But if you’re going to quote from this site, just attend to these two basic rules:
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0/us/

(1) Attribute it correctly
Blog: a link to the permalink would be satisfactory. For example: if you were quoting this site, you would also include a link to <http://whollyroamincatholic.com/2008/04/wherein_we_discuss_attribution.html>.
MLA: Walberg, Joe. “Wherein we discuss attribution.” Wholly Roamin’ Catholic. 7 Apr. 2008. WhollyRoaminCatholic.com. (date accessed). <http://whollyroamincatholic.com/2008/04/wherein_we_discuss_attribution.html>.
APA: Walberg, Joe. Wholly Roamin’ Catholic. (2008, April 7). Wherein we discuss attribution. Retrieved (date retrived), from <http://whollyroamincatholic.com/2008/04/wherein_we_discuss_attribution.html>.
Chicago: Walberg, Joe. Wherein we discuss attribution. [updated 7 April 2008; cited (date accessed)]. Available from <http://whollyroamincatholic.com/2008/04/wherein_we_discuss_attribution.html>.

(2) Don’t change stuff
Please don’t put words into my mouth, er, text. It’s one thing to notate a blog in the style of good Fr. Zuhlsdorf with (emphases and comments), but please don’t change the original text when you share it. I carefully compose most of the posts on this blog and usually go through a fair amount of re-writing to get things to say what I want them to say.

I should also note that I am not a theologian or formally educated in Catholic issues. So, take care with what you post and how you use this site. It’s mostly my impressions of the world, and of questionably academic value. But I’ve learned that when you put something up for the Google to find, people use your work indiscriminately; hopefully I can minimize the damage of misuse and still be a good voice of a lay Catholic’s view from the pew.

St. Lawrence (also called St. Lawrence of Rome, St. Laurence, Saint Larry, San Lorenzo) was a third-century martyr, a Deacon of Ancient Rome, a caretaker of the poor, and a reputed wise-cracker.

In the first few centuries of the church, it was pretty dangerous to be a Christian. The Romans had a habit of persecuting, torturing and killing any person who admitted or was accused of being a Christian; even meeting with other Christians was strictly prohibited by Roman law. The Church rapidly expanded despite this, and some of the most vigorous champions of the Church come from this era.

Lawrence was one of the people in charge of administering the church budget, and was chiefly in charge of ministering to the care of the poor. Roman emperor Valerian demanded that all the assets of the Church be turned over to the Roman prefect and that Lawrence must surrender the wealth of the church. Lawrence agreed, but said he’d need a few days to gather the money together—in the meantime, he gave all the Church’s money to the poor and hid the Church’s documents with other trustworthy Christians. Then he called together all the sick, aged, widowed, orphaned and poor Christians he could find, bringing them to the Roman prefect declaring “These are the treasures of the Church!”

Predictably, the Romans were pretty mad about this stunt. He was tortured for information and then promptly executed.

St. Lawrence was martyred by being burned alive on a gridiron. According to legend, St. Lawrence defiantly refused to surrender to the Romans, and just before he succumbed to death he shouted to his torturers “Turn me over! I am done on this side!”

It’s wise to note that the stories of the Church from this era are often unreliable (from a history point of view), and some of the accounts are closer to legend than journalism. In fairness, St. Lawrence’s life and death was one of the most attested stories of the early church—though a historian would be smart to accept some stories with a fair amount of skepticism. But nonetheless, if it wasn’t for these traditions, all the stories would have been lost; here, I will not parse fact from fable.

St. Lawrence is considered one of the great saints of Rome, his feast day is August 10. He is the patron of brewers, comedians, and barbeque and generally my kind of guy. Saint Lawrence, pray for us!

Over the years, my internet interests have changed a lot. Stuff I spent a lot of time reading in 2002 is pretty irrelevant to my life these days-- at least the sites that are still online and active. Two or Four years ago, I was knee-deep in at least a dozen political sites or blogs, these days I only visit one with any regularity. Likewise for sites I'd (broadly) categorize as "Culture" sites-- there are only two that I can think of off the top of my head. At one time, I think just about most of my friends had a site or blog or something-- but like most of the discretions (and indiscretions?) of youth, a lot of people have shed their blogs and sites as they fell into neglect.

This has caught me off guard. I really thought my tastes were more diverse than that! I wonder if I'll discover a few that aren't coming to me as I continue to frame up WhollyRoaminCatholic.com.

Hello!

I've been wanting to start a new blog for a while now, so welcome aboard. WhollyRoaminCatholic.com will best be described as a "Religion, Culture, Politics" blog from the point of view of me. Who am I? I'll address this further later on, but in short: I'm a cradle-Catholic adopted in a post-Roe v Wade world. I'm a quasi-traditionalist Catholic, which is kind of hard to explain, except that I love the Tridentine Rite and my Novus Ordo spaceship parish in the suburbs. Being bi-formal (Ordinary and Extraordinary forms) makes my head swim occasionally, but here I am nonetheless.

So thanks for joining me. I hope this turns out to be a mutually-fruitful blog where we can learn from each other.

But please be patient with me over the next several days while I configure this blog. I like to work in real-time, so if you're lucky enough to be viewing this site while I'm editing it, your refreshes might be sort of unpredictable.