Gender identity, eeerggghh

I admit, I use facebook and have weird friends who sometimes come up with weird ideas. It’s so easy to click in the comment box and next thing you know you’ve been introduced to a whole new weirdo consequence of shaky first principles.

So, there’s a fairly vulgar marketing jingle which sort of says only “real” women have a menstrual cycle. Which is apparently offensive to men who dress as women and have weird surgery. So it looks like genital surgery, high heels and false eyelashes are more intrinsic to authentic womanhood. That counts me out then.

The new heresy is that gender has nothing to do with your biological make up. All that thing about X and Y chromosomes is old hat. You are whatever gender you want to be.

Then I had it! I’d respond saying I’d be a gay man trapped in a woman’s body! It was etymologically correct taking the older meanings of the words. I’d be able to keep Peter and he might even get to use the “gay” tag to open more doors to his arty side. He was a bit put off by the whole idea, and fair enough.

But, truth is stranger than fiction, and it turns out that there are very serious biological females out there trying to get into the gay man scene. You might think: woman, attracted to men = no problem. Do these people have too much spare time on their hands or what?

So lets aim for getting our society back in harmony with nature rather than fighting tooth and nail against it. Let’s spend more time weeding gardens and planting stuff.

Everyone feels lonely and out of place – it’s human. We are made with a soul that longs for more than material things – even more than friendship can provide. We are wayfarers and pilgrims here. It’s only in trying to serve others that we find real happiness. Virtue is power – not just etymologically.

And you will say, obviously I am Christian and trying to foist my opinions onto other people. Religion is a private affair and has nothing to do with reality, or so they say. I’ll ask, who’s out of touch with reality here?

Baltimore Catechism Flashcards

For anyone wanting to memorise the Baltimore Catechism.

First, install Anki – a nifty little open source program available for Windows, Mac, Linux, iPhone, Android, FreeBSD and even Nintendo DS.

Next start up the program and go to File > Download > Shared Decks. Type Catechism in the search box and that should bring up “Baltimore Catechism No2″. Install that one and you are ready to go!

Anki defaults to introducing 20 new cards each day, but you can change this to 2 or 3 or whatever you’re more comfortable with. It aims to review each card just before you’re likely to forget it. It’s called a Spaced Repetition Learning System. You can read more about the theory in this Wikipedia article.

The Baltimore Catechism No2 deck has 418 questions. You might be doing it bit by bit in another program such as the Classic Catechism course from CLAA. The cards are tagged by lesson and question number, so you can select which question numbers you wish to work on. Otherwise it just ploughs through from beginning to end.

The deck was made from the Project Gutenberg text of the Baltimore Catechism No 2 – etext #14552. The imprimatur is from 1885 but the fasting rules have been updated in accordance with the 1977 edition.

The text was converted using Vim with much reference to Vim Regular Expressions 101. It only took a few hours but if you find it useful, feel free to drop me a line. If you feel inclined to make a donation, consider Aid to the Church in Need or the Anki project itself.

DIY book binding

One way to bind a book so it can open flattish and look passably traditional. To start with take a stack of paper. Run it through the printer if you like printed books, or leave blank if you like books to write or draw in. Thick books are a great way to learn how to clear paper jams on your printer. Good printers have all sorts of levers and things to open out to access almost any part of the pathway the paper travels. Make sure you get all the pieces if the page is ripped.

Next you might like to trim your paper to size. You can use a ruler and cutting blade but after a while you might find yourself eyeing off a guillotine or paper stack cutter. The one in the picture is said to cut through 40mm of paper which is roughly 400 pages 80gsm or 500 70gsm. Also, as an aside, Kmart sells cheap 70gsm paper. It does tend to jam, about once every 200 pages, but it is thinner and less stridently white – more grey with tiny flecks. Xerox sells a better quality 75gsm paper that doesn’t jam so much and a local paper merchant by the name of Vilensky can get a4 60gsm paper intended for those carbon paper pads, but that costs more and tends to curl alarmingly when coming through the printer – but it didn’t jam.

A word of warning about Guillotines. They generally come with a perspex guard around the cutting area which makes it very difficult to see where the blade is going to cut the paper. The guard can come off easily and makes it simpler to align the paper – BUT IT IS THERE FOR A REASON. Even with the blade stationary in the air just hitting your finger against it can cause a significant cut. This picture shows the nice swoosh sort of pattern which is where the blade caught my thumbnail while I was lining up the paper. This is two days after the injury, but it did bleed at the time and was quite painful. If it can cut through the nail so easily I don’t want to try it with skin. So the perspex cover is back on.

Once the paper is trimmed you can add folded endpapers and put it in some sort of clamp or book press ready to glue. I’m using red paper for the endpapers. Here I’ve used two types of PVA glue – Selley’s Aquadhere and a cheap EC brand PVA glue. The Aquadhere is very strong and dries very clear. The cheap stuff is more dilute and ends up more flexible. The cloth is a seaside print, probably poly-cotton. You shouldn’t be able to see the print once the book is all put together. There are great videos on this step at Temper Productions. Those instructions say to “fan glue” by bending over the pages to fan the edges out a bit and get more glue on the edges. It didn’t seem to be so good for these books – simpler just to brush on plenty of glue and it makes enough contact with the edges of the pages. Only time will tell.

I leave the book in the press for a few hours to let the glue dry before taking it out. The glue is supposed wait 12 hours before stressing the join so do try to resist the temptation to open up the book and see how the spine bends. It should be better to wait a day or so before opening the book right up.

Next its time to make the case or cover for the book. Here I have two boards made of some self-adhesive cardboard that my husband happens to have. It is a bit thinner than the 1.8mm box board I was using before. Theoretically the self adhesive-ness makes it easier, but it has its own drawbacks and I’d say you don’t miss much if you can’t find it.

The board is cut to the size of the book. About the same width as the book but a little taller. The board will sit just a little in from the spine so should stick out over the other three edges.

The spine piece is a slice of 80gsm paper. Any writing on it does tend to show through the spine so its best if at least one side is blank. Here I should have the blank side of the spine and the adhesive side of the cardboard face up.

This is 72mm Tenacious cloth tape. I got it from Qualtape. It’s the matt variety which seems more suited for laying out lines on wooden floors where you want to be able to peel it off again without leaving any residue behind. They do have a semi-gloss and a gloss version which sound like they would stick better. That said it sticks very well to the self-adhesive board and the uncoated paper and to itself. The tricky bit here is to get the tape aligned right first try. It won’t peel off the board once its down (unless I’ve forgotten to peel the backing off the self-adhesive board, in which case it comes off very easily). This is where regular box board might be better – but you use what you have. The tape is stuck down another 14cm or so below the book to make triangles to bind the corners. A book with just the spine covered in cloth or leather is called “Quarter Bound”. With the corners as well it is called “Half Bound”.

So once the triangles are stuck on the corners then the brown paper is lined up with the edge of the spine tape to cover the spine tape by 2mm or so. This is where the self-adhesive boards help because you can smooth down the paper straight onto the boards without having to apply glue first. If you have regular box board though you might brush PVA glue over the boards first. Then time to trim the brown paper back from the corners so the red tape shows through. Slip an offcut of cardboard between the red tape and the brown paper and lay the ruler along the place to cut – again about 2mm over the edge of the tape, but its hard to tell so there’s a bit of trial and error here.

This is how it should look. Well, it should look a little straighter, but it looks a lot neater once the edges are folded in.

Next, turn the whole thing over.

Next you trim the corners of the tape. You don’t cut right to the corner of the board, but leave a little distance so the tape can cover the corner. This is another trial and error bit. This also leaves you with four little triangles of cloth tape. If you stick these on the side of the table, someone is sure to come along and find a use for them – or maybe that’s just where you have preschoolers around. They do come in handy for some things. I should have got a photo of my youngest with red triangles on each of his fingers. Hmmm, I wonder where they ended up…

You fold over one edge of the corner then sort of squish in the corner a bit – something like an origami squash fold. Then fold up the other edge and it should look something like what you see in regular cloth-bound books.

Like that.

Now we’re almost there. Fold over the brown paper too and wrap it around the text block – that’s the stack of paper with the cloth stuck to one side.

Open out one side and slap lots of glue around. Glue down the brown paper edges while you’re at it. The inside of the cover should be all gluey to a few mm of the edges. You can slip in a bit of glue to finish gluing the spine cloth to the endpapers. The backing from the self-adhesive sheets comes in handy to slip in the folded endpaper to stop to much moisture and/or glue getting into the text block. In the photo I’m using some rejected A4 sheets folded in half.

Shut the book, carefully aligning the cover. Then turn the book over and repeat on the other side.

Stack up the books to dry. A regular book would be put in a book press to get it good and flat and make the little grooves along the side of the spine. I just put them under a stack of books, maybe putting some extra paper in there to help soak up any pesky moisture.

Choose a picture to mark which side is front. Hardback books are often stamped with their name or some other design. A punch is made good and hot and pressed down onto some special gold foil to leave a gold design impressed into the cover. In the absence of gold foil or hot punches, I’m cutting pictures out of old calendars and magazines. The Christmas pictures were used to make Christmas Cards, but there are lots of other pictures left for applications like this.

Next I glue the pretty picture on the front with regular stick glue and cover with some sort of clear self-adhesive covering – PVC or polypropylene – A generous benefactress gave me a few rolls of each. The PVC is more matt and the polypropylene is clearer. I think the PVC is a little quieter when opening the books, but both are pretty good if covered tightly. Except for a cheap and nasty roll from the junk shop – life’s to short to buy cheap self-adhesive book covering. I’d half like to try out RAECO‘s range of library book coverings, but there’s heaps here to use up first.

You could glue ribbons into the spine to act as bookmarks. They usually go in between the spine cloth and the headbands – which I don’t have. Some missals have removable tags with ribbons attached that are inserted into the spine. Right now I don’t have much ribbon so I’m putting in holy cards as markers.

Here are the finished books. Some pages got a little stuck to gether at the edges from stray drops of glue. The PVA really soaks into the paper – not much chance of pages falling out. A blade is handy to separate pages.

Now to enjoy having new hymnbooks! What shall we sing this Sunday?

Why we were late today

Yesterday afternoon some a neighbour knocked on our door to let us know there was a young possum on our front lawn – unusual for that time of day. Eager boys went out to see and the possum hid in the engine bay of our car. This morning we got ready to go out to Mass – about a half hour drive away. I popped the bonnet to check and there was the sleepy possum on top of the engine. I sent off boys to get a cloth to try grab the possum and a camera. The cloth arrived as the little possum was heading for cover and I managed to pick him up – soft furry struggling thing. I took a few steps from the car but the possum wriggled free and went straight back into the engine bay. So we got this picture.

Book binding

Ah, back to the actual physical side of making books – paper, glue, bits of cloth.

Here we have my fancy bindery. The wooden book press came mostly from Hamish MacDonald’s bookbinding blog. It was my biggest woodworking project ever. Then I asked my husband how to do some modifications and he took it and smartened it up a lot.

The other inspirational website was Temper Productions book binding howtos. Although I’m not completely sold on the fan glue technique, his in-depth analysis of what goes on in the spine of a book is great stuff.

His idea is, instead of making the spine stronger and stronger, make it more flexible instead. The strong stitched spine made sense in the days when they used vellum, but thread bites through paper and today we have different glues available. His binding uses PVA glue and some cotton cloth – not loosely woven cheesecloth as some binders use, but more tightly woven.

Here you can see one of my home binding attempts. It’s my Draft Hymnal. See how the spine bends so the pages can open out flattish? The fan gluing seems to get more glue into the gaps between the pages which tends to tear the pages a little when you go to open it out flat. I think Mr Jermann of Temper Productions was using different paper and glue so that might explain the different results. Mr Macdonald’s technique of using folded 4 page signatures glued together without fanning them out from side to side seems to work better on photocopy paper.

In the picture to the right the spine is rigid. This is a perfect bound paperback from Lulu (another Draft Hymnal). Mr Macdonald’s paperbacks might have a similar look as he finishes the spines with hotglue, similar to POD publishers like Lulu. The hotglue forms a hard spine that joins the case to the spine. The hotglue dries quickly so makes book production much quicker. It is quite strong unless people force the book open flat.

It is amazing how many people apparently oblivious to the structural integrity of the book will try to open it flat. Watch next time. Especially when they are singing something under duress. All that pent up energy seems to go into that little area at the base of the valley of the open page. Watch for the little rips in the cover there and the way the book will open to that page again. Such books need extra protection from a plastic adhesive sort of covering.

So after having made a few books, here is the question. Shall I endeavour to make 200 copies of the Draft Hymnal at home? Or shall I outsource this work to a place like SOS Printing and pick up the ready bound books in boxes? Is the celloglazing, offered by the binders, enough protection for the books, or will I need to apply a plastic adhesive covering to each book?

In the meantime, I have a new craft, just in time for making Christmas presents.

Mystery hymn writers – SOLVED!

This is why I like the internet.

The first was F W Wetherell. He wrote “Mary Immaculate” – a rousing hymn often sung to Bach’s tune Liebster Emmanuel. But the hymnbooks had no dates for him. This sometimes indicates that he is contemporaneous with the hymnbook – but surely if he was published in a hymnbook in the late 1800s he couldn’t have been alive in 1964 when the same hymn appeared in the Living Parish Hymnbook, with his name misspelled as “Weatherell”?

See his tombstone.

In loving memory of Emma Jane Wetherell
wife of the Reverend F W Wetherell
who entered into rest the
27th day of February 1893 aged 50 years
also of the Reverend F W Wetherell
who entered into rest the
11th day of February 1903 aged 74 years

Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord

F W Wetherell (1829-1903)

So, he wasn’t even Catholic! A clergyman of the Church of Ireland – a sort of Anglican/Episcopalian thing. His name also comes up in Irish Archaeological journals, maybe a clue as to his affection for old things. What F W stands for is still a mystery, but having dates is a huge step forward.

Next is J. O’Connor, another mysterious contributor to the 1964 Living Parish Hymnbook. He translated lots of hymns, but nowhere is there a date. But in 2007 Wiley-Blackwell scanned in an old copy of the journal “New Blackfriars” John O’Connor. Unfortunately my curiousity tonight has not been sufficient for me to hand over the $35 for 24 hour access to the article, but the info on that front page – ie. that he passed away on the same night as King George VI in his 82nd year – gives me these dates:

John O’Connor (1870-1952)

Also he was a Monsignor, friends with Fr Vincent McNabb, Fr Bede Jarrett and Fr Hugh Pope.

He is also said to be the model for G. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown detective novels.

He also wrote lots of articles for New Blackfriars. Here is the one I stumbled upon first.

But, of course, this wealth of easy access has its downside – someone beat me to this one. See the Wikipedia entry.

And thus concludes my night of working on the hymnbook. I’m finally fixing up pagebreaks and judiciously adding in extra hymns to cover the pages nicely. If I get this done, then its time to print and bind a copy for the Bishop. Then figure out how to print and bind books for the rest of us. But that’s another story.

Whether to capitalize relative pronouns referring to God?

Note: relative pronouns are “who”, “whom” and “whose”.

For example, some books would write “Lamb of God Who takest away the sins…” or “Our Father Who art in heaven”.

As far as I can tell, it is a matter of style. The Liturgical Press, Collegeville Minnesota has a style guide that puts pronouns referring to God in lowercase except in the case of quoting sources that do otherwise.

My interest comes from my current pet project Draft Traditional Hymnbook and earlier work on the Christus Rex Pilgrim’s Primer back in 2004. So far I have been inconsistent and the time has come to make a stand one way or another. So first I pull out all the books I can lay my hands on (in person or via google books).

Missals/books that DO capitalise relative pronouns referring to God. Who/Whom

Missals/books that DON’T capitalize relative pronouns referring to God. who/whom

1868 Sarum missal in English (Thee/Thy) (funnily enough it has “Our Father which art in heaven and Lamb of God that takest…”) 1961 St Joseph’s Daily Missal (but has You/Your) same as 1966 St Joseph Sunday Missal 1962 Official Handbook of the Legion of Mary (Thee/Thou) 2004 1962 Roman Catholic Daily Missal, Angelus Press 2008 The Parish Book of Chant CMAA (Thee/Thy)

1815 The Roman Missal (thee/thy) 1848 The Missal for the use of the Laity (thee/thy) 1914 The Roman Missal (R&T Washbourne Ltd.) (also does Thee/Thy) 1959 St Joseph’s Children’s Missal (2000 edition, Neumann Press) (You/Your) 1962 St Andrew’s Daily Missal (You/Your) 2000 Pilgrim Prayers – Official Vatican Prayerbook (you/your) 2007 Daily Missal 1962 Baronius Press (Thee/Thy) 2008 The Order of Mass Michael Sternbeck (you/your)

Inconsistent:
1958 St John’s Sunday Missal. A G Younes, Melbourne (Australia!) but made in Belgium – “who” in the ordinary, “Who” in the propers
1959 My Catholic Companion, Good Will Publishers – “Who” in the ordinary, “who” in Last Rites and Various Prayers
2002 Sacred Triduum Missal by Neri Publications and Opus Mariae Mediatricis

So what do you think?

Altar boy cassocks and surplices

Today we have two cassocks and surplices in size 8. And you can see the four year old modelling the prototypes. He’s eager to be an altar boy, but we think he should wait.

Things learned:

• Admiral Gaberdine is a bit heavy. A straight broadcloth sort of fabric seems to work better.
• Following the instructions in the right order really helps.
• Getting a little bit of black thread stuck in a french seam in white poly-poplin is frustrating. I left it there as unpicking and resewing may have made it worse.

Just sharing an illustration

I’m browsing for cover art for the September edition of the Draft Hymnal which you can find at the Brandt Bookshop – well, it’s the August Edition at the moment, but hopefully soon will be a September version.

I like this picture, but it’s fuzzy and why is there a dog right in the middle? But you can see lots of books which is good when you’re concentrating on making a book.

And the New Book of Old Hymns has been updated – no big changes, just fixing up little mistakes. Now, after almost ten years of proof reading it must be almost perfect. For more on that see Swell the Mighty Flood, my other wordpress blog dedicated to hymns.

And stay tuned for more diy altar boy cassock updates.

CLAA one year on

The days are long, but the years are short – that about sums it up. The Classical Liberal Arts Academy has been very helpful here. Reading the Family Forum has been a regular wealth of new ideas and food for thought.

The boys are all learning, but all very differently. They are all very capable of amusing themselves with drawing, making paper models, as well as just plain running around like, well, like boys. Getting coursework done takes effort, but you see the benefits, not only in the content they are learning, but the very process of learning. Each new lesson they start again – reading, memorising, doing exercises – and slowly what seemed impossible becomes manageable. Then when a younger brother is struggling with an earlier lesson they can see the process from the outside. Hopefully as this repeats they’ll get the message and be able to tackle these lessons more independently.

And it helps me too. Stability is important for getting anything done – whatever you do. Music is important to me and this perseverance is the thing I have really lacked – you’ve all heard the cop out “I can’t sing/play/dance” – you can, you just need a whole lot of practice. A good teacher helps too. Does anyone know of a good organ teacher in the Blue Mountains/Western Sydney?

With CLAA, I’m on the second last lesson of the Praeceptor course, the three older sons have 4 courses each and the youngest has 3. We’re still in the core courses, but with all these “enrichment courses” available hopefully we’ll be able to take up some of them too. All in good time.