Wake Up Call

Expergiscere, homo! It’s time for Christmas!

…Did Chris Wright score a game-high, career-high 34 points yesterday afternoon? Yes, he did!

Rich Chvotkin had the line of the day: “Whatever your were going to give Chris Wright for Christmas, double it.”

…Pope Benedict’s encyclical on hope is really a meditation on the following dialogue, which occurs before every Baptism:

PRIEST: What do you ask of God’s Church?

CANDIDATE/PARENT: Faith.

PRIEST: What does faith offer you?

CANDIDATE/PARENT: Eternal life.

The Pope explains:

The human being needs unconditional love. He needs certainty…Man’s great true hope, which holds firm in spite of all disappointments, can only be God–God who has loved us and who continues to love us “to the end,” (John 13:1) until all “is accomplished” (John 19:30).

…Washington is unlike other American cities. One of the ways it is different is this:

Back in the 1960’s, the big thing was to build super-highways THROUGH cities. The plan was to build big highways through Washington, just like there are big highways through Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, Boston, etc.

But people rebelled. One of them was Peter Craig, who died last month. There was a nice editorial about him yesterday.

Because of the resistance of local Washingtonians, we DO NOT have the big highways running through town that we were slated to have. This is an ENORMOUS blessing.

I am not familiar with all the projects which the editorial mentions. Nothing interests me more than things like this, so I am going to have to do some heavy-duty research to get a firm grip on all the details of what was to have been built, but thankfully was not.

If the Lord allows me the leisure and resources, you will read a nice, long description of it all here someday.

I acknowledge that this will be interesting only to Washington-geography nerds like myself, but I make no apologies. We will see what I can come up with.

In the meantime, merry Christmas, dear readers!

Credo in Deum Omnipotentem

John A. Wilson District Building

Perhaps you recall: The transformation of the capering Prince Hal into the formidable King Henry V is the new “defining motif” of this humble weblog. (Scroll down if you click the link.)

This same tranformation, however, broke the spirit of Prince Hal’s fellow-caperer, Sir John Falstaff. After the King broke off their friendship, Fallstaff’s dissolute life finally caught up with him, and he died.

In Henry V, when Falstaff’s friend Bardolph hears that the jolly knight is dead, he declares:

Would I were with him, wheresome’er he is, either in
heaven or in hell! (Act II, Scene 3)

As the statement of a Christian, this sentence makes no sense. In hell, it is impossible to enjoy each other’s company. But as the lament of a friend, it is heartbreakingly beautiful.

…John Wilson was a member of the D.C. City Council when I was in high-school. When I was in college, he became the chairman.