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[ by Charles Cameron — are they talking about shooting for a goal, hitting your target, making a move — or lofting one up the fairway? ]
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As you may have gathered, I really love that quote from the philosopher MacIntyre. Here we go again:

Image courtesy of my friend Oink, aka Peter Feltham. It seems like gameplay gets more risky by the hour…

[ by Charles Cameron — an expat’s nostalgia ]
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While the eye reads the letters of a text the mind’s eye is forming images, and some of them can be startling. From today’s (UK) Metro:

Residents yesterday lost their High Court battle to prevent surface-to-air missiles being deployed on the roof of their apartment block.

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But we don’t need to use our imaginations: the BBC has filmed the building, and the Telegraph has photographed the missiles…

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Taking a look at the BBC’s brief video of the apartments (screen-shot: upper image above) I’m reminded of the British poet John Betjeman‘s famous 1937 lines about a dreadful (from his pastoral point of view) English town whose name, “Slough”, rhymes with “plow” rather than “rough”:

Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough!
It isn’t fit for humans now,
There isn’t grass to graze a cow.

I’m sure, though, that the residents of Slough didn’t appreciate that particular poem, and the people who live in those apartments may curse them at times, but they almost certainly love them too — those apartments are their homes.

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Tenant: But, but — an Englishman’s home is his castle!
High Court: Precisely — and we’re requisitioning the battlements for our archers.

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Sigh. Ah well, we survived the Blitz.

Hat tip to Kanani Fong of Kitchen Dispatch

The award -winning film HIGH GROUND  is due for release in August 2012:

Since 2002, almost 50,000 U.S. soldiers have returned home from Iraq and Afghanistan with their lives radically altered by war. With the improvement of battlefield medical treatments, these soldiers return alive yet not whole, and face long painful paths to recovery.

Full integration back into their community and the civilian world is a treacherous road, fraught with obstacles and pitfalls. After initial rehabilitation, these veterans are often left to fend for themselves, and struggle with physical and mental roadblocks, depression, and alienation.

This issue affects every aspect of society, not just families and hometown communities, but our national character and our legacy. How these wounded soldiers transition is one of the most important repercussions of these wars and an adversity with which we will contend for generations.

igh Ground was a showcase expedition bringing together disabled war veterans with world recognized mountain climbers to demonstrate what could be achieved by climbing a Himalayan giant. A key outcome of the expedition was to produce a documentary film that would tell the inspiring stories of these heroes and spread a healing message to a national audience.

This film, featuring stunning cinematography and capturing powerful emotions, will touch the hearts of concerned citizens, military families, outdoor enthusiasts and most of all, soldiers who find themselves wondering how to face the days and months and years ahead. It is an honest and gripping portrayal of our American warriors, telling an action packed story that unfolds in unexpected ways as the team makes their way high into the mountains, through the villages of Nepal, over raging rivers and up terrifying steep terrain risking injury and death for a chance at the summit.

A second and equally important goal is to continue to impact those thousands of injured soldiers in the midst of their own daunting recoveries through the use of the film at veteran’s hospitals and military bases around the United States. In the fall of 2011, a multi-city nationwide tour will be launched to welcome our soldiers home, celebrate their spirit and sacrifice, and to encourage them to pursue their dreams.

Efforts are currently underway to assess the potential of additional expeditions and to create a long-term strategy as a non-profit organization. By getting involved and supporting this project you can participate directly in this vital process and connect your company to the message that our soldiers can indeed… return home to live again.

[ by Charles Cameron — addendum to an earlier post ]
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Blog-friend Michael Robinson pointed me towards some interesting materials today that are relevant to my earlier post Of dust and breath, and I’m drawing here on his various emails to present them to you.

Each of these stories has more details than can be mentioned here: in each case, the link will take you to further riches.

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As Michael points out, “The ‘celebrity memorabilia,’ ‘sports memorabilia’ market — and also the ‘film memorabilia’ stuff is completely analogous to relics” featuring “individual players ‘worn’ unwashed game shirts or ‘Gone With The Wind Dresses’ and the like”.

His reference here for further reading is to Tim Munby‘s Cult of the Autograph Letter in England (1962), which “traces the rise of these sentimental phenomena in what after all was a Protestant Culture”. Michael notes, “if memory serves I think it simultaneous to the beginnings of Methodism, though from memory Munby draws no parallels”.

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Moving on to religious collectibles (assuming for a moment that sports memorabilia don’t qualify, not a necessary assumption), he points us to an article in the Toledo Blade today titled Ex-Toledoan sleuths out biblical relics for collectors, which discusses Scott Carroll‘s work in putting together the Green Collection, selections from which are currently on display at the Vatican:

Former Toledoan Scott Carroll doesn’t break into dusty tombs or dodge poisoned arrows, but the charismatic professor’s globe-trotting adventures in amassing the world’s largest private collection of rare biblical texts and artifacts have earned him the reputation of “the Indiana Jones of biblical archaeology.”

Mr. Carroll … has purchased nearly 50,000 ancient biblical papyri, texts, and artifacts since November, 2009, for the Green Collection, funded by Steve Green and the Green family. The Oklahoma City-based owners of 499 Hobby Lobby retail stores in 41 states, the Greens have been bankrolling Mr. Carroll’s collecting with the ultimate goal of having the items displayed in a nonsectarian Bible museum.

“I tell the Greens that I trust them to know where to put a store, and they need to trust me to stock the shelves,” Mr. Carroll said in a telephone interview he gave The Blade from Rome, where the Green Collection this month opened an exhibit at the Vatican called Verbum Domini, or Word of the Lord. The exhibit, which is free and open to the public, features 152 artifacts displayed contextually in settings ranging from re-creations of the Qumran caves where the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered to a monastic scriptorium and an excavation of a Roman garbage city in Egypt.

I liked this passage, too…

Mr. Carroll said he has to laugh at opening an exhibit in Vatican City, seat of the global Roman Catholic Church, when he thinks of his childhood run-ins with the church.

“It’s kind of ironic because I was suspended and expelled from several Toledo Catholic schools in my upbringing,” he said. One of the expulsions, he added, was for setting fire to a church when he was in grade school.

“I chuckled at length talking to cardinals about my expulsions,” he said. “I was an athlete and rather rambunctious as a child — and that is putting it mildly. I was too active, not very self-disciplined, and ran into trouble.”

Reminiscing about one’s setting a church on fire as a youth sounds like an intriguing was of breaking the ice with their Eminences.

3.

Michael also drew my attention to this account of Rabbi Menachem Youlus [depicted above], “a self-described ‘Jewish Indiana Jones'” according to the New York Times – Indiana lookalikes seem to be cropping up all over! – who for years “told stories of traveling to Eastern Europe and beyond to search for historic Torahs that were lost or hidden during the Holocaust” but recently admitted he had lied (NYT, Rabbi Admits Torah Tales Were a Fraud, February 2):

“Between 2004 and 2010, I falsely represented that I had personally obtained vintage Torah scrolls — in particular ways, in particular locations — in Europe and Israel,” he told Judge Colleen McMahon of Federal District Court. “I know what I did was wrong, and I deeply regret my conduct.”

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Finally, from the world of Islamic art, Michael brings us another tale of collectors and their sometimes disreputable practices — this time from The Economist and having to do with the 16th-century illuminated version of Ferdowsi‘s epic Shahnameh, with its “lyrical calligraphy on gold-spattered pages” and “258 painted miniatures”, purchased at auction and “broken up” [as also depicted] – to the horror of collectors and bibliophiles – by Arthur Houghton :

In 1976 Houghton auctioned seven of its paintings at Christie’s for £863,500 ($1.6m): nearly four times more than the $450,000 he had paid for the whole book. He gave 78 pages to the Metropolitan where he was chairman of the trustees. When he died in 1990, 120 pages remained in the manuscript. These went back to Iran in 1994 in a swap for “Woman III” by Willem de Kooning, an abstract expressionist painter. Each side of the swap was valued at $20m.

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Hypothesis: all collectibles are talismans, all talismans are sacred.

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Further addendum:

I’d intended to post this as a comment, but the comment function seems to be off — will try to fix that — but Michael’s most recent post to me included a pointer to a still current offer of a highly-collectible Americana twosome:

Available for order today from The Historical Shop, Metairie, LA

ADDENDUM:

Zen here – dealing with an internal server error as it relates to comments and pings on Charles’ post. Unable to turn comments back on at the present time – only this post seems to be encountering problems. Trying to fix.

ADDENDUM to the ADDENDUM:

Comments are now open.