On the Importance of Fantasy

From Big Think:

The snobbery of those who look down on fantasy has a long pedigree — so much so that, in 1947, J.R.R. Tolkien felt the need to defend the genre in his work, “On Fairy-Stories.” For Tolkien, fantasy and fairy stories are not simply stories about fairies. They are stories that take place in a land of fairies. They exist in their own created land, where any number of wondrous things can happen, but they are always treated with the utmost seriousness by the reader. To enter Faërie is not to enter a world of simple make-believe; instead, we perform an act of “sub-creation,” in which we form a world within our wider “reality.”

This imaginary world we create always will go beyond the words given to describe it. The fantasy realm “cannot be caught in a net of words; for it is indescribable.” Words alone will never be able to conjure up a fully realized land of magic. For this, we need the ability to sub-create. When we sub-create a world, we “make a Secondary World which the mind can enter.” This world has its own internal logic, laws, and systems. We see, feel, and live in this world in a way far beyond the words on a page can alone provide. We color in background details and add sights, smells, and wonders that go beyond the narrow bounds of the words in the book. It is why movie adaptations can feel so hollow, at times. (Read more.)

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How to Create a Formal Interior

 

From House and Garden: 

This amazing apartment was a love gift for a wife whose dream is to live in the greatest refinement and sophistication. We indulged her desire for all things formal and pushed that idea right to the brink. The result: palace perfection with a modern twist. This place is proper with a capital P, just the way she likes it. Most of the apartments in this landmarked Art Deco building were remodelled to be contemporary, but we took things in a different direction. We started by adding architectural touches like crown moldings and wall mouldings, cornice details, and built-in cabinetry. Everything had to be impeccable. If we’re going to go formal, let’s be excessively formal. Start by silver-leafing everything. Roll out the silk carpets and panel every wall imaginable. Polish the dark brown floors in the living room to a high sheen. You will know right away that you are some-where dressy—a place where delicate, light-reflecting silk velvet fabrics don’t seem impractical at all! A place where you can head to bed in silk pyjamas and wake up to breakfast served on fine china in an exquisite kitchen.

I like clients who are brave enough to fully own who they are and go for it. I like to pull out all the stops and let them live like royalty. But I am always going to be fearless in my approach and my use of colour. For this apartment, we chose a watery palette with shades of periwinkle and aqua that blend into one another rather than pop. It sparks newness because it’s a pale wash of hues. This home is all about light and reflection. The living room is an airy, cloudlike fantasy...if clouds were made of silver leaf, that is! (Read more.)

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Distributist Principles and Catechetical Formation

 From The Catholic World Report:

People who are serious about handing on the faith to the next generation, whether they are in Catholic parishes or schools, have been frustrated by the same problem: the widening gap between faith and the daily lives of their students.

To be sure, this is no novel issue. Back in the 1950s, Joseph Ratzinger diagnosed it as a new paganism lurking beneath the Catholicism of the time. He says, rather frankly, “she is no longer, as she once was, a Church composed of pagans who have become Christians, but a Church of pagans, who still call themselves Christians, but actually have become pagans.” At the time, Ratzinger conjectured that “the modern man today, when he meets someone else anywhere, can assume with some certainty that he has a baptismal certificate, but not that he has a Christian frame of mind.” The latter is certainly true, but the former is becoming less certain.

Discouraged parish ministry leaders or school personnel need not despair. They can, I believe, bridge the gap by drawing inspiration from 20th-century distributist economists Hilaire Belloc and G.K. Chesterton and their call for a redistribution of the “means of production.” In the case of catechesis, formators need to redistribute the “means of formation” to parents. (Read more.)

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The Five Wizards vs. Sauron

 From Gamerant:

For those who haven’t heard of the term before, a ‘maiar’ is basically a powerful being or spirit with Tolkien’s legendarium. The maiar have been around for thousands of years, and some of them even chose to take physical form and come across to Middle Earth. There are many characters in the Lord of the Rings trilogy who are actually maiar, including the 5 wizards, of whom the audience can see Saruman the White, Gandalf the Grey and Radagast the Brown in Peter Jackson’s film adaptations. Interestingly though, Sauron, the supreme dark lord that is trying to overtake the world and fill it with his malice and scorn, is also a maiar. In contrast to each of the aforementioned characters, who are all pure maiar that use their power for good (except Saruman in later years, because he is twisted and corrupted by the promise of power) Sauron is an evil character, and used his substantial powers to dupe and deceive those around him. But many fans have begun to question, if all of these characters are maiar, and started with similar origins before Middle Earth, why does Sauron seem so much stronger than the others? Why do they all greatly fear and revere him? (Read more.)

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Choosing the Perfect White Paint

 From Stone Gable Blog:

I love white walls! For me, they are the perfect background for furnishings and white paint makes a room look bright, airy, and even bigger. But white paint can be tricky! The undertones that make white paint so beautiful can also make it hard to choose the perfect white paint for your home! But, of course, we CAN choose the perfect white paint for our homes by learning a few things that unlock white paint’s secrets! Let’s chat about how you can confidently choose the perfect white paint and how to get the nuances of undertones right! Here’s what we will cover in this post…we will learn about selecting the perfect white paint for the walls in our home

• white is a beautiful choice
• how lighting affects white paint color
• paint finishes and how they affect white paint color
• unlocking the secrets of undertones
• how white paint works with the color palette in your home
• when to choose warm or cool white paints
• why choosing the perfect white paint color is all about undertones
• popular white paint choices

(Read more.)

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'Groomers'

 From The Federalist:

It’s absolutely absurd. Conservatives aren’t abandoning their principles by abandoning needless throat-clearing about teachers’ alleged good faith and the left’s intentions. We all know the left’s intentions because they’ve made them perfectly clear. The most recent go-around started with them maliciously branding a bill protecting parents’ rights — which are an absolutely necessity for societal survival — as a bill that banned mention of the word “gay” in schools. It was a lie; the legislation seeks to keep leftist dogmas about gender identity and sexual orientation away from 5-9-year-old kids.

When the left lost and the bill got signed into law, furious executives at Florida-based Disney began ranting about their quests to inject sexual deviancy into children’s entertainment. In a video call leaked to investigative journalist Christopher Rufo, Disney executive Latoya Raveneau bragged about her “not-at-all-secret gay agenda” and attempts at “adding queerness” wherever she could in kids’ shows. Another employee talked openly about his attempts to “explor[e] queer stories” and introduce enough “gender non-conforming characters.” There was more where that came from. (Read more.)

From FrontPageMag:

“Our greatest natural resource is the minds of our children," Walt Disney once said.

Walt’s unique strategy of building an entertainment empire for kids once made Disney a trusted source of family entertainment. That didn’t last long after Walt's death as Disney started releasing R-rated movies and adult television programming under the Touchstone label.

A decade later, Disney bought Harvey Weinstein’s Miramax. During the 90s, while Disney's more family friendly brand was releasing animated cartoons, Miramax featured Pulp Fiction, Trainspotting, and the Scream sequels. During this time Weinstein was accused of sexual harassment and assaults. Some of this was taking place even as Disney’s “family friendly” brand released The Hunchback of Notre Dame with its depiction of a lecherous Catholic villain praying before a cross while ranting about his lusts. This was what Disney had become.

In the new century the barrier between the two schizoid faces of Disney has come down.

Disney isn’t for kids anymore. Its movie business is dominated by Marvel blockbusters. Half of Disney+ subscribers, its big bet on the home streaming future, are adults with no children. ‘

What about the theme parks?

60% of Disneyland visitors were adults with no children. Only 36.7% of Disney World visitors had children under 18. The largest demographic for the theme parks, like the movies, are millennials. They are also members of the fandoms who are likeliest to spend money on licensed merchandise, and on toys and movie tie-ins that are Disney’s bread and butter.

And Disney is rapidly adapting with theme parks and resorts that emphasize its Marvel and Star Wars properties more than classic fare. Its Galactic Starcruiser hotel, aimed at Star Wars fans, costs $4,809 for two adults. Why bother with kid stuff when you can sell $13 beers?

Disney may have started out feeding the imaginations of children, but now its business model is acquiring intellectual properties with active fandoms and milking the adult fans for every cent.

Its political opposition to a Florida law barring teachers from pushing sexual issues on kindergarteners might be out of tune with the old family values Disney, but the company’s actual base, like that of virtually every entertainment corp in the country, is a narrow slice of upscale urban millennials with lots of disposable income and no families. Wokes are Disney’s base.

In 1966, the idea that a single adult would spend more money on Disney merchandise than a family of four would have seemed ridiculous. In 2022, it’s just the new normal. If you doubt that stop by a theme park and see how many of the adults with no children wearing every single piece of Disney merchandise on sale would love to lecture you about queer theory.

These are the people Disney caters to now. Not little girls who want to be princesses. That’s why its theme parks will no longer address little girls as princesses. That’s also why rides like Pirates of the Caribbean or Jungle Cruise are being revamped to be more politically correct. Disney’s new woke demographic is much pickier than even the pickiest child could be.

It’s also sexually creepy. (Read more.)

From The American Mind:

The 2020 Democratic platform endorsed the propagation of “medically accurate, LGBTQ+ inclusive, age-appropriate sex education” in Kindergarten. This has had predictable effects. Sexualizing childhood and sowing gender confusion destabilizes sexual identity among children, compromises childhood innocence, and prepares children to be advocates for future, even more revolutionary changes. That is the Democratic agenda that America voted for, and we are getting it, good and hard.

Across the country, libraries are stocking shelves with graphic children’s books promoting, among other things, kinky sex, sexual deviancy, and early sex among children. Many librarians are, no doubt, happy to push Love Makes a Family (targeting children under 4), or George, a novel about a transgender girl named Melissa whom everyone perceives to be a boy named Geo (for grades 3 through 6), or I am Jazz, the memoir of Jazz Jennings, whose genital mutilation and subsequent despair was the subject of an adulatory television program. (Read more.)

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Premature Aging

 From Neuroscience News:

A new study from the lab of an adolescent psychologist at the University of Virginia has found more evidence that teens who are not adept at managing relationships will show physical signs of premature aging as adults.

“Teenagers who don’t learn to manage the give and take of relationships with their peers, who can’t handle disagreements in a way that also preserves relationships, and also don’t stick up for themselves, their bodies have aged more by age 30,” said Joseph Allen, the Hugh Kelly Professor of Psychology.

Allen said some young people immediately get angry and hostile when struggling with their peers during a disagreement, while others back down repeatedly, unwilling to express their own preferences or point of view. Both approaches, he said, are unhealthy.

“The kids who do well, in contrast, are kids who are able to disagree without being disagreeable and to look for common interests and to sort of manage the fact that people have different interests,” he said

He added that the ability to cope starts at home, based on how parents manage disagreements with their children, cueing the child’s behavior. (Read more.)

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The American Revolution and the Habsburg Monarchy

 From Current:

Jonathan Singerton is Lecturer of Global and Comparative Histories of Central Europe at the University of Innsbruck. This interview is based on his new book, The American Revolution and the Habsburg Monarchy (University of Virginia Press, 2022).

JF: What led you to write The American Revolution and the Habsburg Monarchy?

JS: The past is often most interesting when viewed differently or from an unfamiliar perspective. How did the American Revolution appear to contemporaries living under one of Europe’s oldest dynasties? This question became an obsession as I lived in Vienna many years ago and wandered its famous streets and perused its various coffee houses. The quest to find out prompted me to write a history of the American founding from a central European perspective and happily led me down a meandering path filled with characters more unforgettable than any of Vienna’s charming cobbled streets. (Read more.)

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Taking Vitamin D

 From Martha Stewart:

Vitamin D and omega-3 fatty acid supplements are known to contribute to bone strength and heart health—but that's not all. Research presented at the American College of Rheumatology's ACR Convergence 2021 found that people who ingested these nutrients over the course of five years actually lowered their chances of developing autoimmune disease by 25 to 30 percent, Eating Well reports.

To conduct this study, researchers followed 25,871 adults who were put on four different regimens for nearly five-and-a-half years: The first group took both an omega-3 and vitamin D placebo, and the second took 1,000 milligrams of omega-3 fatty acids and 2,000 international units of vitamin D. A third group of participants took an omega-3 placebo and 2,000 international units of vitamin D, while the fourth group took 1,000 milligrams of omega-3 fatty acids and a vitamin D placebo. If a participant experienced any autoimmune complication, it was noted by the researchers.


The result? Those with autoimmune diseases, such as psoriasis and rheumatoid arthritis, lowered their risk of relapse by up to 30 percent if they took either or both supplements. "The effect of vitamin D3 appeared stronger after two years of supplementation," Costenbader said in the study's abstract, adding that risks can decrease in less than five years. "The more pronounced effect after two to three years of use with vitamin D makes sense biologically and supports long-term use." (Read more.)

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