Sunday, December 06, 2015

Notable Links, Linkably Noted

* A hundred years of Orson Welles

* The Turks & Caicos National Museum has a collection devoted to messages in bottles -- given the location of the islands relative to the currents, a lot of things wash up on their shores, so it's one of the places messages in bottles are most likely to end up, if they survive at all.

* C.S. Lewis’ Greatest Fiction: Convincing American Kids That They Would Like Turkish Delight

* Olga Lizzini, Ibn Sina's Metaphysics, at the SEP

* A review of some new letters by Iris Murdoch, with some brief but interesting comments on her reading of Tolkien.

* Terence Blake discusses Neal Stephenson's Anathem

* An interesting discussion of two languages that have massively richer dedicated olfactory vocabularies than most languages.

* Richard J. Ross, Binding in Conscience: Early Modern English Protestants and Spanish Thomists on Law and the Fate of the Soul

* An account of what a professional quarterback has to do to get ready for a game.

* Mar Ignace Youssif III Younan, Patriarch of the Syrian Catholic Church, has some sharp words for how the West has handled the Syrian situation.

* A significant number of Iraqis think that the United States is actively backing ISIS. Of course, one has only to look at the comments to see that you can find Americans who think this, too.

* I mentioned last year that there was an English translation of the official Ukrainian Greek Catholic catechism coming out at some point; it is currently on track for release in early 2016.

* I've been doing a poem cycle on the Maronite liturgical year. If you're interested in the Melkite liturgical year, the Eparchy of Newton has placed some excellent easy-to-use commentaries on it online.