Markian Gooley

@UncleFlapjacks I’ve made a fairly good knockoff version of a Melton Mowbray pork pie after eating some real ones. A bit of work but not difficult. One of those protected local specialties that has to be made in a given area in a particular way.

When I go to visit my British friends this summer, I wonder which one of these fine pies they’ll cook for me?

Music connected with today’s gospel (belatedly). Yes, it’s television closing credits music. youtu.be/okLVbx3uxKk?si…

If I get bored with it, I can use the Microplane grater on it that I use on nutmeg and season my food with it.

I think it’s a decoration but it’s a fist-sized egg of pink salt meant to be stuck in a turkey before it’s put in the oven. 90% off, or US$1.35

@frizzydizzyliz I understand. Despite my many blessings in life there are a few things about which I tell even God that IT’S NOT FAIR. For some of them I might think so as long as I live. Foolish of me?

it isn’t fair that my dad died. it’s not fair that I have to live the rest of my life without a dad. it’s not fair that most of his grandkids won’t remember him. it’s not fair. it’s not fair.

@goldenkey112 Amused. It was originally meant to be offensive or perhaps just informative, but it’s quaint really.

Catholics, are you offended when someone calls you a “Roman Catholic”? It seems like it’s mostly used in a derogatory way, and rarely a label used by Catholics themselves. Am I wrong?

@lydiughhh When my sister passed a professional exam I got a Congratulations On Your New Baby card and crossed out New Baby and wrote in Board Certification. Because they didn’t have cards for that and the exam had been laborious…

One of my sisters is dyslexic and bought her boyfriend a Christmas card, she’s just realised it doesn’t say Christmas it says christening. He’s coming over in 15 minutes 😭

@TheresaZoe I mean, my Mom was Prussian and my Dad a Ukrainian Catholic Hutsul from extreme western Ukraine so what do I know of Italian traditions?

@TheresaZoe Couldn’t you get some from cans of sardines, anchovies, brisling sardines (really sprats), herring filets, mackerel, tuna, and salmon? Okay, tuna and salmon would be only tiny bits, herring and mackerel not nearly entire… Don’t know enough about the tradition, me.

Well, we can’t afford 7 fishes for the feast of the seven fishes this year. It’ll be more like 4. Hope this doesn’t make me an asshole

@MSill3 One old priest I know developed during the pandemic a phobia for putting the Blessed Sacrament on anyone’s tongue and wouldn’t. Nobody else seems to mind. Some ordinary extraordinary ministers are very adept.

You who attend the NO Mass and receive--or try to--on the tongue. What's been your experience?

@PetriOP A few years ago it was also some car rental companies. I haven’t rented a car for a few years so that may have changed. It’s because of duplicate carbon or carbon-less forms that work only with impact printers. I think.

Are airports and airlines the only ones using dot matrix printers? Are there companies in business only because this is the case?

@hexclad The fact that I CAN save so much means it’s overpriced. At least overpriced for a cheapskate like me.

Save up to $1,624 on our best-selling cookware sets and exclusive bundles.

I imagine a bar or liquor store offering “the coldest beer in town” by keeping (probably swollen) cans of it in liquid nitrogen. Then I wonder whether a competitor might try liquid helium…

@RCAnnaKate St. Nicholas Ukrainian Catholic Church in Chicago. Now it’s also the Ukrainian Catholic cathedral. Brought up Latin Rite though: Eastern Rite is quite unfamiliar. Dad insisted on Ukrainian Catholic baptism and as we didn’t live in Chicago I was nearly 2 before it happened. Unwise

@EdsPurgatory @CatholicCat8 One year I was living in a townhouse with a small area of 16-foot ceiling so I got a 14-foot douglasfir. Many strings of purple lights and many cheap gold-colored spherical ornaments.

@CatholicCat8 It's very small this year. Katie insisted on small. I wanted gigantic again lol

Tree is in the house and the most important part was out on the top first.

@dlongenecker1 There’s always Galatians 3:1

In a public debate Patrick Madrid had a smart way of dealing with Protestants who objected to Catholic veneration of images. He kissed a crucifix then placed it on the floor and asked if his opponents would come up and spit on the crucifix and stomp on it. Happily they refused, thus proving that the proper veneration of images is a good thing.

Fits the gospel for today: youtu.be/N1JeR5zo8WA?si…

@SamMacD86958750 @AnthonyEsolen My Mom was known for her excellent apple strudel. Made two one day: perfect grocery store apples, small ugly apples from a neighbor’s tree. Of course the ugly ones made for their strudel being better. Maybe a variety better suited to purpose, too?

@AnthonyEsolen Problem: the store apples LOOK great. The ones in the yard don’t. Spots. Small. Splotchy. My wife’s from DC. We moved to Pittsburgh. Had a plum tree. She wouldn’t touch them. She said they looked gross. Looking back she knows it’s nuts. But 26 year old her wouldn’t go near them.

The apples you buy in the store are often remarkably bad: rubbery skins, mushy and tasteless pulp. A lot of our fruit has been engineered for packing and shipping, not for eating or cooking. Now, let's suppose that there's a wild apple tree right down the road next to your house. All it takes for you to have the apples, since nobody else bothers with them, is to go get them. You can take a sack and pick them off the lower branches, or gather them from the ground after a windfall, while they're still good and whole. You will notice right away that it's as if God had concentrated the flavor of five or ten store-apples into one. They will usually be firm and crispy. So why don't people go get them? It's a puzzle to me. You might say, "Well, it's not worth it." But that is another puzzle. People will buy, for example, an exercise bicycle, so that they can pedal from Nowhere to Nowhere for a solid hour in their basement, but it's too much hassle to go get some good food for nothing, and get some fresh air and exercise to boot? I can't say that I'm great at this sort of thing. I do gather wild fruit -- of all kinds, and many gallons, too; but I don't trust my judgment with mushrooms (though I should, in the case of chanterelles, which don't look like anything else and which are abundant), and my brother and I never learned to hunt deer or other game, though our father and our uncles did so, all the time, and we got excellent meat from it. But it does seem to me that both men and women could benefit from home-productive exercise in large-scale gardening and in other work that people used to do, keeping fit (notice how a farm woman in 1940 looks as if she could stiff-arm a football player if she had to), growing and making and preparing and giving good things, and unconsciously but regularly learning about the world? Another thing too, and a considerable advantage: men and women learn to be interdependent. For the man can go traipse around in a bog to gather up gallons of cranberries, and the wife makes them up into cranberry jam or cranberry sauce, and each one is grateful for the other. A dance, this business of husband and wife. And the children grow up as a part of it.

@BruvverEccles It’s a very unchurched continent. The biggest American base, McMurdo Station, was built and initially run by the U. S. Navy and included a chapel. I expect that Mass was celebrated there for a few years until the Navy left. I get the impression the chapel is hardly in use now.

And he's off!

@TheresaZoe Invented in Ontario by a Greek immigrant and maybe his brother. Truly fusion cuisine!

I’ve been converted to pineapple on pizza