David Attenborough: We just don't know

Hi again!!
Behold how gorgeous Vermont is:






















^Stowe
Jericho>

If you're not here, that kinda makes you wish you were, does it not? It would definitely make us wish we were here if we weren't already, which we are....hahahahaha!

On to today's topic (and it's a good one!): DAVID ATTENBOROUGH. Man or legend? We just don't know.

You may know Mr. Attenborough from his career with the BBC narrating nature documentaries such as The Life of Birds, Life in the Freezer, and, most notably, Planet Earth (not the Discovery Channel version, but the original BBC version and the DVDs, which are exponentially cooler).

Here he is, doing what he does best:

HE IS CLEARLY A PRETTY COOL GUY. How many people do you know who make a habit of chilling with ridiculous animals and speaking in one of the most recognizable voices in the world? Granted, we don't actually know David Attenborough, but we would invite him over for tea if we could!

In addition to being basically the coolest naturalist narrator we've ever encountered, he is also the inspiration for the BBC parody series Look Around You. If you've never had the amazing experience of watching a Look Around You episode, we highly suggest that you get yourself over to YouTube POST HASTE and check out "Maths," "Water," and/or "Music." Then go to the official Look Around You website and enjoy the highly entertaining periodic table, quizzes, and sweet backgrounds. WE'RE BIG FANS. Like....fangirl fans. It's that intense.

As conservationists, we appreciate Mr. Attenborough's accomplishments. He brings the natural world into people's living rooms, and his educated yet conversational style is pretty darn captivating. Anyone who can make the average person care deeply about kiwi birds or walruses or the spawning habits of Christmas Island red crabs gets the thumbs up from us.

As an added bonus, we direct you to this hilarious clip, also made by the good people who bring us Look Around You. It's the delightful 80s-style "Birds of Britain" and we love it.

What ARE birds? ....we just don't know.

St. Francis and his wind turbines

Did St. Francis of Assisi have wind turbines? No.
If he could have had them, would he? You better believe it.

Pretty much everybody knows who St. Francis is. If you don't, we're happy to take this opportunity to introduce you.

Here he is:

Look how friendly he looks! All surrounded by birds and flowers, chillin' in Heaven, praying for you. What a nice guy.

The basics:
-Born in Italy in 1181 to a reasonably wealthy family
-Had a conversion experience while a prisoner of war
-Embraced the Gospels and started imitating Christ as literally as possible....this included giving up his comfortable life in favor of begging and living among animals and that sort of stuff....which caused his family to disown him
-Cared for the sick, preached in the streets, composed hymns
-People started to follow him because he was cool....and eventually he got the Papal OK to found the Franciscan order
-Received the stigmata (wounds of Christ) in 1224
-Died in 1226 of natural causes....his relics are still in Assisi today
-Canonized in 1228 by Pope Gregory IX
-Feast day = October 4

So now that you know all about St. Francis....you might be wondering why we're ranting and raving about him, fangirl-style, seemingly out of nowhere.

He's the patron Saint of ecology, ecologists, animals, tree huggers, the environment....basically anything nature-related. And that pretty much describes not only us, but also our educational experience and this here blog. Therefore, St. Francis of Assisi is the official patron Saint of Okay Here I Go. w00t!

So let's move on to the wind turbine thing. Why would St. Francis have liked wind turbines? He loved, lived in, and respected nature. Wind turbines are good for nature. We think that sums it up pretty nicely, but we're willing to go into a bit more detail for the benefit of you good people.

To increase your eco-knowledge, we've included this great photo of some wind turbines. Tada!


Wind turbines are pretty sweet. Other than fuel used during maintenance, they're carbon neutral. They have very few other environmental impacts. Sure, there have been claims that they cause bird deaths. But then again, research has shown that these deaths are minimal, about the same as those killed by cars and windows each year. Besides, if you were a goose just flying around and then saw these big blades spinning in the sky, wouldn't you avoid them? Um, yeah...

Besides.....ain't they pretty?

Anyway, we wanted to tell you all of this because......we want to get the Catholic Center a wind turbine! Yes, the CC wants to go green! It's pretty sweet, because in a year or two, a couple wind companies in Vermont want to offer residential wind kits for under $15,000 (= cheap). We will admit that it probably will take a couple years to get it...between dealing with our incredibly bureaucratic university, fundraising, permitting, building the thing...Audrey would like to try to work on it as a senior thesis, which would be pretty sweet. Beats writing a paper about fecal pathogens!

Anyway, when (if) we get our lovely turbine installed, we would like to name it after Saint Francis. Because, like we said before, he rocks.

Oh, and Happy Belated Sts. Cyril and Methodius Day!!!!
(And St. Valentine too.....but he's not nearly as cool. Did he create a Slavic written language? That's what we thought. Although they're all in Heaven, so they're all pretty awesome in our book.)

And in honor of our friend St. Francis, who is consistently pictured with birds, here's a Bird of the Day!

Bird of the Day: Cedar Waxwing (Bombycilla cedrorum)


One more thing: if you look to the right, just below our "About Me" section, you'll notice that we've added a poll. The idea here is to see which of these four topics you, our lovely readers, are most interested in reading our ramblings about. The poll closes at 11:59 pm on February 28, so get your votes in!!

(DISCLAIMER: We reserve the right to blog about any and all of these topics at any time, and we will probably cover them all at some point. The winning selection will merely have the privilege of being tackled first.)

Tour de CC

Home, sweet home.

Kinda.

Ah yes, the Catholic Center. Our spiritual headquarters.

We thought that since we do and will do most of our blogging from here, we probably should explain this place. To help give you guys some background info, and so that you'll know where we're coming from.

And being the only place on our campus where you can find Jesus' Body, Blood, Soul AND Divinity at any time (take that Davis Center! Burn!) the Catholic Center (or the CC as we hip Catholics call it) gets a lot of use. It's a pretty busy place..with daily Mass, confession, Bible study, dinners, studying, conversations, movie nights, ping-pong tournaments, and general frivolity...okay, so it's not all spiritual, but Jesus is always here (even for the ping-pong....honestly, what church has a ping-pong table? Um, we do!).

Behold, the exterior:

Pretty sweet, huh? Doesn't it just ooze holiness, even at night? Notice the snowflakes. Holy snowflakes.

Sometimes people study here, but mostly they pretend to study when in reality they're doing other things, like listening to music, talking amongst themselves, or...blogging.... *ahem*

Anyway, behold the study room:

Unlike the study room, the chapel is a clutter-free area with only one intended purpose (though perhaps with a few variations). It's not what we'd call breathtakingly gorgeous, but it works well. And surprisingly, its yellow stained glass, lack of a center aisle, lack of kneelers, and 70s style brickwork (they don't call us Groovy UV for nothing) have really grown on us.

Behold! The Chapel!

So that concludes our tour for now. We hope you enjoyed the ride. We know we promised to talk about the potential Catholic Center wind turbine, but that will have to wait for another day (stay tuned!).

So, while we may not be organic or LEED Gold Certified, have an elevator that runs on vegetable oil, or Vermont's widest staircase, or a New World Tortilla, we do have Jesus. And that OWNS!

Catholic Center: 1
Davis Center: 0

Goodnight.

P.S. We invite all of you good people to leave comments whenever you are so inclined. Just click the "comments" link....you don't even need a Blogger account....no excuses.

Ash Wednesday

We apologize for the lack of new posts, but we've been busy lately....exams and whatnot.

But we want to extend to you our hope that your Lenten season will be blessed, prayerful, and grace-filled.

And to those afflicted by the strange "days of abstinence make me want a cheeseburger/some bacon/a turkey sandwich/a steak more than I've ever wanted a cheeseburger/some bacon/a turkey sandwich/a steak in my whole life" phenomenon, we understand. And look at the bright side: there are countless souls in Purgatory who can really benefit from us offering up our meatless (and in the case of today, which is also a day of fasting, foodless) suffering.

If you're a vegetarian, good for you for saving the planet in your own special way! But Lent isn't about saving the planet so give up something besides meat today and for the next six Fridays. No free passes for vegetarians (but the cows appreciate it!). Sorry.

Anyway, we hope your Lent is off to a lovely start. We'll be back soon.

Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.

The greening of the Vatican

This isn't terribly up-to-the-minute news, but we think it's worth talking about. On July 5, 2007, the Vatican announced that it had accepted an offer from Planktos-KlimaFa (ecorestoration groups) to create a "Vatican Climate Forest" in central Europe. You can read the whole article here.

So what does that mean?

The forest initially offset Vatican City's total CO2 emissions, making the Vatican the world's first carbon neutral sovereign state. Not only that, it's also a long-term way for the Vatican City State to continue neutralizing its carbon footprint. Huzzah!

It comes as a surprise to a lot of people that the Church is actually really into the whole "green culture" thing. Maybe we don't have the most tree-hugging, bunny-loving reputation, but in recent years we've been stepping up to the proverbial plate.

In his first encyclical, Redemptor Hominis (published in 1979), Pope John Paul II said:

"Man often seems to see no other meaning in his natural environment than what serves for immediate use and consumption. Yet it was the Creator's will that man should communicate with nature as an intelligent and noble 'master' and 'guardian,' and not as a heedless 'exploiter' and 'destroyer.'"

AMEN!!

Pope Benedict XVI has also encouraged green culture. Russ George, who is the Planktos CEO and the KlimaFa managing director, said that "the Holy See's increasingly creative environmental leadership is both insightful and profound." That's quite the compliment.

See? We like trees and bunnies just as much as the next guy.

Being environmental students at a school that's trying to become the country's premiere environmental University, we've noticed that our simultaneous love for both Jesus and nature makes us kind of a minority. Most of the purpose of this blog, besides it being a great outlet for our ridiculous musings, is to shed light on the fact that the terms "Christian" and "intense tree-hugging granola-eating forest-frolicking environmentalist" aren't mutually exclusive. Sorry about the stereotype, but it's more or less true....we do actually hug trees, eat granola, and frolick in the forest. Or maybe it's not so much "frolicking" as "doing research," but you get the idea.

Next time we're going to tell you about the Catholic Center at UVM and how awesome it is, and how Audrey wants to get it a wind turbine. SWEET.

Tree of the Day: Tulip Poplar (Magnoliaceae Liriodendron tulipifera)

We'll have none of that!

Hello, and welcome again....

We all have hobbies. Some of us out there in the great world enjoy knitting. Others could include, bowling, gardening, playing the guitar, reading, whatever. Hobbies. You get the picture.

Well, we've got a new hobby too.

We like reading old sketchy religious books we find laying around the Catholic Center.

Last weekend we found this gem for instance: The Single Catholic and the Church, circa 1977.

Here's our review:

The intent is noble, but the execution leaves something to be....desired? (no pun intended) Yes, the book tries to be sincere, but we feel like they were trying way, way too hard to get a young audience. Take this quote for example:

"When the Beatles sang in Eleanor Rigby, "Ah, look at all those lonely people," images were conjured of isolated, unmarried, unattractive men and women."

Yes, they managed to pull a quote out of Eleanor Rigby. The sad thing is, they didn't even get it correct (Kristin is what you could call, a Beatles afficionado). It should just be "All the lonely people".

Not to mention the fact that they seem to infer that unmarried people are ugly social-phobes.

Throughout the book, they keep bringing up all of these stereotypes about single people, and yet don't try to disprove them (which was supposed to be the book's intent we think). Apparently, if you aren't married, you are the following:

ugly
old
lonely
have no friends
your parents are really, really worried that you're a freak
weird
anti-social
a school teacher (as indicated by a photo)
play the guitar

You get the picture.

It's a rather screwed up book.

Not to mention the photos, which we think are supposed to be consoling, but are really far from it. Like the photo of a middle aged man and woman playing the guitar together and singing. It falls under the chapter "Reaching Out". Because "Single men and women don't have the luxury of sitting back and taking relationships for granted." Really? Because we just love neglecting our friends....but apparently since we're single we don't have any....

There's another gem photo of two people laying on the grass in a park. The guy has his shirt off, the girl has some flimsy dress, and they look very....friendly? The best part is, it's under the chapter "Sex and the Single Catholic"

We didn't know that exists.

Though the whole chapter could probably be summed up in one word: no.

Though it is good that they put some effort in attempting to put some reasoning behind the Church's stance.

We agree that the subject should and needs to be addressed, but this book takes it way in the wrong direction. Which we guess is why we have yet to find a second edition.

Though we imagine a 1980's version would be pretty funny too....

What we can't figure out is.....why it is on our Catholic Center's book shelf. Um.....