(This is the second in a series of posts called Why the Latin Mass? I’ve been asked by several people why I like the Latin Mass—why people will drive a hundred miles to get to one, or spend a lot of time and money bringing it to their area. I’ll try to answer that in this series.)

This one isn’t an absolute, of course. There are plenty of new-style Masses being said in beautiful, ornate churches like St. Francis in Quincy. There have also been many Masses of both rites said in basements, barns, or outdoors, when the circumstances demanded it, as in missionary locations or when a church is being rebuilt. That’s all good.

But when people get a chance to build a new church of their choice, then we start to see a difference. Latin Mass devotees, today or pre-1960s, tend to build churches like the first one on the right. People attending the Novus Ordo Mass over the few decades of its use have tended to wander to other concepts, like the two below that.

Call me an old fogey if you like (won’t be the first time), but I want a church to look like churches have for centuries. Styles change, but some things are common to what we’d all instantly recognize as a church. I don’t want to feel like I’m walking into an office building or branch library; nor do I want to feel like I might bump into Klingons while I’m there. If you go to a Latin Mass, you can be pretty sure the church will direct the focus to Christ’s presence in the tabernacle and at the altar during Mass. The first priority of the building won’t be comfort or efficiency or community spirit, but worship and glory to God.

What really awes me about older churches is that most of them were built when construction was much harder than it is now. I’ve done some bricklaying and other construction, and I know how much work it is. Even today, with all our power tools and hydraulic lifts and laser levels, building a church like St. Rose would be a huge and expensive project. When it was built nearly a century ago, it would have involved far more sweat and heavy lifting. They didn’t have to build huge domes and towers way up in the sky, and adorn it inside and out with complicated brickwork and vast windows and paintings. They wanted their church to inspire people to worship and direct their gaze to God. In my opinion, it paid off.

You’ve seen the photos of St. Rose under construction; now here are some of the finished church, courtesy of Paul. The ones with people are from the first Masses on Nov. 9th.

I got my first computer pretty late in life, compared to most people in the business. I gazed longingly at the Commodore systems in the Sears catalog as a kid, but hundreds of dollars for what was basically a toy at the time wasn’t even conceivable. Once I got out on my own and didn’t have anyone around to tell me to be sensible with my money, I hustled down to Sears and spent around $700-800 on a Commodore 128DCR. I didn’t have a printer, so I really couldn’t do anything productive with it. (Nor did I have anything productive to do.) There was no Internet to speak of then outside colleges and military bases, and no home computer software to access it anyway. There was an online service specifically for Commodores called Q-Link, but I couldn’t afford the long distance charges from my small town.

What I could afford was blank disks, and I had Commodore-owning friends with lots of games; so for the few years before I got online, my 128DCR was a glorified C64 game machine. But what wonderful games they were. My current computer has 5600 times the CPU speed and 15,625 times the memory, but I haven’t found many modern games more enjoyable than the ones made for that slow, primitive system. We waited minutes for games to load, we fought with poor interfaces and buggy software, we listened to screechy sound effects, and we got stuck on games because there were no walk-throughs and Internet forums to get help from. But they were fun. Modern games blow them away in audio, graphics, and complexity; but often they forget to be fun.

M.U.L.E. was one of the funnest. It’s the only game I remember that let all four players play simultaneously during some parts, two with joysticks and two with portions of the keyboard. The back-story was that four colonists were dropped on the planet Irata, and would be using Multiple Use Labor Elements (MULEs, basically robots) to mine plots of land for food, energy, smithore (used for making more MULEs) and crystite (a mineral worth lots of money). There were 12 turns representing 12 months. On each turn you could buy plots of land, buy MULEs and send them to develop plots, assay plots for crystite, buy and sell goods at the central store, and hunt the mountain wampus, a beast that would pay to be released if you caught it.

At the end of twelve months the colony ship returned, and the colonist with the most stuff was the winner. A nice twist, though, was that the game praised the winner based on the total wealth of the colony. So winning by stomping the other colonists wasn’t as rewarding as winning while everyone else prospered too. The game was created by the late Dani Bunten, who wanted to create a non-violent game that encouraged cooperation but was still fun and competitive. Judging by how many times we played it in the middle of the night after work, despite the 2-3 minute load time and the fact that a 4-human game could take a few hours, it succeeded in those goals.

I still fire it up occasionally in a C64 emulator and play against three computer players, and it’s still fun. They aren’t all that smart, though—AI hadn’t really come very far in those days at one million instructions per second—so they’re easy to beat. There have been attempts to remake the game for online multiplayer, but they always seem to die out. I’ve been kicking the idea of a truly turn-based web version around in my head for about a year now, and I think I’ve worked out the basic structure of it, but we’ll see if I ever get the time and ambition to actually do it. I was starting to think I’d do it in Java, but Jason says Java still stinks, so that’s disappointing. Thinking about doing it all via HTTP makes my head hurt, but maybe it’s doable. It’d sure be fun to be able to play against three real people again—and if I don’t have to huddle around a keyboard with three other drunk guys to do it, so much the better!

All my blogging buddies seem to have done a Thanksgiving post, so I guess I should too. We only had one meal to go to today, and I managed to stay away from the most carbalicious dishes; so I’m not in the usual Thanksgiving evening coma, thank goodness. I loaded up on Josh’s grilled turkey, which was excellent, so I’m thankful for that, too.

Other things I’m thankful for, today and every day:

• My wife, Angel, who puts up with my reclusive nature, and manages to get me to parties like today’s without making me feel like I’m being dragged there. She takes great care of me when I need it, and makes it seem like a pleasure. We complement each other so well that it seems like we’ve been together for ages, and I don’t mean that in the bad way.
• My family, especially my parents, who always give me a point of solidity and sanity to cling to when the world seems to be going nuts. Just by being who they are, going about their lives the way they always have, with their greatest focus on home and family, makes me remember what’s important. Time spent with them always makes me feel centered.
• My faith, which took a beating and was nearly comatose for a while, but has rebounded and grown up over the past couple years, for reasons I’ll save for another post. Also, the people at St. Rose, who have given me a church where I feel like I belong again.
• My clients, who make it possible for me to do something I’m good at and make a living from home, without punching a clock and going to pointless meetings. I’ve had ups and downs in this career, but this year has been the best yet, and things only look to get better.
• Good health and good food. Several years ago, I weighed 290 pounds and climbing, had constant acid reflux and fatigue, and was well on my way to diabetes. Thanks to low-carb eating and some work on healing my adrenals, I’m losing weight and am healthier in every way. Overall, I’m probably healthier than I was at 25, if a little heavier and a little balder. It’s helped to have a lot of real, quality food, both from our own garden and from my family’s farm.
• My dog, Pepper, who gives me a reason to get out of the house and get some fresh air more than once a week. For a few years, she was the only living creature I’d see some days, and she probably kept me from going stir crazy more than once.

After I wrote my Mahjong Safari Strategy Guide, I got to wondering how the different boards really did compare. (If you’re not interested in this game or nerdy statistics, sorry, come back tomorrow.) Certain ones seemed better for scoring than others, but subjective impressions are often unreliable. Real numbers aren’t, so I kept track of my scores for a while. I only kept track of ten games on each board, so it’s not a very large sample, but I thought it was interesting anyway.

(Click the graph on the right to see it full-sized.) There’s a blue square for each score, and the line represents the averages. As you can see, there were big differences between the different layouts. Some things I guessed right about: the three highest scoring boards were three with long straight spaces through the layout. HH and Jail are also that way, though, and they didn’t score as well. They’re just a bit more congested than the others. I was surprised to see Eye so high. In retrospect I realize that it’s not as congested as it looks; if you get a few pieces cleared out of the center, it opens up quickly. Desert is the same way: a couple of early breaks make it much easier. Lightbulb was the biggest surprise; I didn’t think I did that well on it at all.

I was surprised to see Windows so low; that’s one of my favorites to play, and I thought I usually did pretty well at it. Not so much, it turns out, in these ten tries anyway. The 4-5 worst ones are all very poor for scoring, and you can see that the first three resulted in a lot of “stuck” games that weren’t possible to finish at all. If you’re looking for high scores and plenty of Pogo tokens, you should probably skip those first five every time they come up. To really maximize your scores, stick with the top three layouts and just mix in some of the others for variety.

I’ve been doing this webmaster/sysadmin/programmer gig for over ten years now, with varying degrees of feast and famine. One thing I was always able to avoid until recently was SEO—trying to get people to the top of the search engine results. Whenever a client would ask me how to get to #1 on the search engines, I’d patiently explain that search engine positioning is total voodoo, and there was nothing I could do. If they pressed, I’d offer to find them companies they could pay big bucks to do it for them. If they didn’t like that idea, I’d change the subject and hope they’d forget about it.

Well, now I’ve gotten roped in. Those clients were all brick-and-mortar businesses that provided a web site as a service for their customers. They would have liked to get higher rankings and more traffic, but it wasn’t life and death for them. Now that I’ve picked up some client sites where the owners make a living from the sites and 85% of their traffic comes from search engines, I can’t avoid the SEO stuff anymore. It drives everything else: page design, what software we use for different things, what features we should add, and so on. If their search engine traffic doubled, their profits would nearly double, and I’d get paid more. If they dropped way down in the rankings, I might not get paid at all.

Eventually, after dodging the topic and letting them hire real SEO “professionals” that failed to accomplish much, I gave in and started tackling it myself. It’s just as bad as I thought it would be. I should like it, in a way: SEO work involves a lot of numbers, figuring percentages and odds and stuff that I do enjoy. There’s a lot of research involved, figuring out what keywords are best, and testing to determine how best to use them. I enjoy all that lab-work type stuff, and it’s kind of a game.

The problem is, we’re all playing without a rulebook. If I need to rebuild my truck engine, I get a Chilton’s shop manual for 1993 Dodge pickups, and it’ll give me step-by-step instructions with pictures. If I want to fix my Google rankings, there’s no such manual. Oh, there are tons of books and web sites that claim to be able to tell you what to do, but they’re all making educated guesses, and they disagree with each other often as not. There’s no “shop manual” from the search engine companies themselves, to break the engine down and say, “Look, here’s exactly how it goes together, piece by piece.”

So the job ends up being 3/4 archaeology, digging through your own pages and seeing how the search engines react to the elements that make them up, and comparing your findings with those of other people exploring in the same field. The other 1/4 is doing the actual work of making your pages fit the rules you came up with—if you ever get that far. To top it all off, the search engines are constantly changing, trying to keep us all guessing. It would all be kind of fascinating if I were doing it as a school project; but when I’m doing it for a client who is paying for results and wants straightforward reasons why page X is only ranking #52 when a competitor’s similar page Y is ranking #4, fascinating isn’t the word for it. Frustrating, maybe. Teeth-grindingly, head-poundingly, take-ten-deep-breaths frustrating.

Fortunately (or not), I seem to be getting a handle on it. It’s always going to be a moving target, but I suspect I understand it about as well as any one person who’s doing SEO part-time along with other webmaster duties. For anyone starting a new web site, the key is to write your content as naturally as possible. It’s fine to use key phrases suggested by keyword research, but don’t stuff pages with them. And don’t come up with schemes to create a web site with thousands of pages that have no content but plenty of ads. That kind of thing used to work, but the search engines are getting smarter, better at knowing what real people want to see. Publish for real readers, and the search engines will bring them to you.

I play in a Sunday-night 8-ball pool league. Last night, my opponent made the 8-ball on the break, which in our league is an instant win. That’s not why I lost the match, though; I lost because I beat this guy 4-0 last time we played, so I got sloppy and let the second game get away. Then in the final game, when I was almost certain to win on my next trip to the table, he ran out five balls and the 8-ball to beat me 3-3. A 3-handicap player won’t often sink that many balls in a row even on an open table, so I have to tip my hat to him: he stepped up when he absolutely had to and beat me fair and square.

I like to win but I don’t obsess about it, because the whole point of the handicap system, like Jason says, is to even the playing field as much as possible. Ideally, everyone has an even chance of winning every night, no matter whom they play. It doesn’t work out that way in practice, because there’s simply too much range between the best and worst players to fit in a 2-7 handicap system—a typical 7 would probably beat a typical 2 100 games in a row—but it helps. For us in the middle 3-5 range, it does pretty well. I do care whether I play my best, which I haven’t done consistently lately, so that’s aggravating.

I enjoy playing league, but mostly because I enjoy pool. When I have my own table at home so I can shoot a little every time I need to step away from the keyboard and think a little, I don’t know if I’ll feel the need to play in a league anymore. (Note to self: make sure pool room and office are neighbors on all future house plans.) Most of the people are friendly and fun, but there’s the usual smattering of dorks and people who take it too seriously, who fret about their handicaps or try to game the system. (I have to admit, they’re nothing compared to the poker players who actually care about cutting the cards, though.)

The bars sometimes don’t make it easy to enjoy. For many bars in Quincy, pool seems to be an afterthought. They need pool for the people like me who would go stir crazy without something to do while we watch everyone else talk over the noise; but it’s not a big money-maker, so they squeeze a table or two into a corner somewhere. Case in point: last night at the Twilight Zone. Nice little neighborhood bar with friendly people and good drink prices, typical of Quincy. But they have two pool tables squeezed into a space that would be nice and roomy for one. So the only place to sit near the action is in the corners, two people per corner, and you have to move every time someone shoots from that direction. The whole team can’t sit together and be team-like unless they go to the other part of the bar, and then they can’t see the game or encourage the one who’s playing.

We run into a lot of that: places where it just isn’t very convenient for a dozen people to show up and play and hang out as teams. Nice bars, just not good pool halls. I’m getting too old for the “When I own my own bar I’ll do it right!” fantasy that every guy has at some point between the ages of 25-35; but if I did, you can be sure everything else would have to adjust to make plenty of room for the pool tables. It’d be glorious, for the few months it stayed in business with that focus.

(This is the first in a series of posts called Why the Latin Mass? I’ve been asked by several people why I like the Latin Mass—why people will drive a hundred miles to get to one, or spend a lot of time and money bringing it to their area. I’ll try to answer that in this series.)

Everything’s Better in Latin

One thing I always tell people is it’s not just about the language. There are many other differences between the TLM and the Novus Ordo (the new Mass said in most churches today). But the Latin is an important part of it, for a variety of reasons. When you hear someone speaking in a foreign language, it gets your attention, whether you can understand it or not. It’s an immediate sign that something unusual is happening here. That helps me focus and want to know what the speaker is saying and why.

Latin is also important because it’s a dead language, so it isn’t changing anymore. The meanings of the words are the same as they were centuries ago. Modern languages are always changing, and the meanings of words can change quite a bit in a short time. The sentence God Is the End of Man is inscribed over the door of a school near here. When that was written, the “final purpose” meaning of the word “end” must have been more commonly used. But now, I picture those kids looking up at that and thinking of God as a sort of Terminator character who will come “end” them someday.

If our prayers are in English, we’re going to have to keep tweaking them over the years to keep the meaning the same. (Anyone know what “vouchsafe” means? It was all over English prayers a century ago.) If you’ve ever studied a foreign language, or just used an online translator to translate something to a foreign language and back again, you know how quickly the meaning can vary with each translation. By sticking with Latin, we don’t have to worry about that. We may use different English words than they used 500 years ago to get the same meaning, but the essential prayers themselves and the meanings of the words won’t have changed.

Different languages lend themselves better to different uses. English is a very blunt, stripped-down language, great for quick dialogue and technical writing. Latin, with its more complex structure, has a formality that works well in the liturgy. Many prayers were originally written in Latin, so they flow better in it than when translated into another language. The Ave Maria (Hail Mary), for example, is awkward in English, but it flows like poetry in Latin, even if you don’t know what it means.

So it’s not about stubbornness, or using something old for oldness’s sake. The Latin language itself adds something to the Mass, especially when combined with the things I’ll talk about in the next articles.

In the last few years, I’ve started walking a lot more. Not just walking for exercise, but walking to actually get places, although my dog often goes along. Last time I lived in Quincy several years ago, I don’t think I walked anywhere. At one point I lived five blocks from work, and I don’t think I walked there once unless my car was broken down. Another time I lived two blocks from the grocery store, and never walked there either. I don’t know why; I guess I just had the drive-everywhere mentality that’s so common. (And maybe driving on Broadway wasn’t so painful back then.)

When I moved to Barry, some businesses were as close as where I parked, so it just made sense to walk, and I had to walk the dog anyway. After living several years in the country where I had to drive 15 miles for groceries, it was a nice change, and it saved a lot of gas. Now that I’m in Quincy, I still walk to the grocery store and a few other places that are close enough. I don’t suppose I’ll be walking the 20 blocks to church any time soon, but maybe once in a while in the spring.

I notice different things walking than driving. There’s a lot of interesting architecture in Quincy; not just in the big houses in the historical areas, but scattered everywhere. Just east of 24th street on College, there are four tiny houses right in a row that are sort of a box-shaped adobe-style, painted in white and bright primary colors. They almost look like toy houses or something from a cartoon. It’d be interesting to hear the story behind those, since they were obviously built at the same time, probably by someone who thought that particular style was the coming thing. There are stuccoed houses, steel houses, houses with cool chimneys, and plenty of other things to see. There are tiny offices and home businesses tucked away here and there that don’t catch the eye at 30mph. You have time to admire flowerbeds, lawn decorations, and chalk drawings kids make on the sidewalk.

I smell different things too. In a few places, I’ve caught the unmistakable odor of sewer gas. I wonder if that’s normal in town, or a problem the city should be notified about? People complain about the smell from neighboring hog farms when they move to the country; I can’t imagine they wouldn’t complain about that smell in the middle of town. Just west of 24th on Oak, across from County Market, there’s a nasty whiff of it there. If I lived in that stretch of houses, I don’t know how often I’d want to spend time in my front yard. Then there are much better aromas: walking past Spring Street Bar the other day started my mouth watering. I don’t know what they serve there, but it sure smelled good. I’ll have to walk over there with my pool cue one of these days and find out.

When I stop at the store, I tie Pepper up outside. I think she gets a lot of attention out there, because once in a while I come out and people are talking to her or petting her—usually kids. Most of the time she’s sitting and watching the door for me, though. I haven’t seen anyone else leave a dog outside while shopping, but it just makes sense to me: if I’m going to walk a dog, why not make a couple stops along the way? Now I just need to get her a backpack and have her carry some groceries for me, like Cesar Millan does.

I saw unleaded for $1.85 today, and I’ve heard it’s a lot lower than that in some places. Whenever gas prices are high, I hear, “Grumble-grumble oil companies grumble monopolies grumble robber barons grumble set the prices high as they want.” Well, if the oil barons can set gas prices however high they like, then any drop in price must be out of the goodness of their hearts, right? Maybe they got so rich they just don’t need profits anymore. Thank you, Misters Cheney and Bush and all you other old white guys with top hats and monocles who “control” gas prices, for taking pity on us.

As you probably noticed unless you’re very new here, I changed my blog theme. The old one was pretty, but had some odd quirks that made it hard to customize. This one is cleaner and seems like it’ll work a little better for me. If not, I’ve got a few others ready to try out. Apparently search engines really like theme changes; they’ve been storming the site ever since I changed it yesterday. Bring on the random traffic!