Philosophers ponder the idea of identity: what it is to give something a name on Monday and have it respond to that name on Friday....
-- Bernard Holland, The New York Times of  Monday, May 20, 1996

Today is Friday, June 28, 2002.  Monday, June 24, was Midsummer Day.

Page 162 of Saints Preserve Us!, by Sean Kelly and Rosemary Rogers --

Most Saints are commemorated on the anniversaries of their deaths -- their natales, or "Heavenly Birthdays." But on June 24 -- Midsummer Day -- we celebrate the earthly birth of John the Baptist.

Page 162 of the May 2002 issue of Vanity Fair Magazine--

NIGHT  TABLE READING--

MICHAEL GERSON
Head White House speechwriter--

God's Grandeur and Other Poems, by Gerard Manley Hopkins (Dover)

"In the last two weeks, I've been returning to Hopkins.  Even in the 'world's wildfire," he asserts that

'this Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,
Is immortal diamond.'

A comfort."

Page 162 of Orthodoxy, by G. K. Chesterton (1908), reprinted in 1995 by Ignatius Press,  San Francisco --

The man who lives in contact with what he believes to be a living Church is a man always expecting to meet Plato and Shakespeare tomorrow at breakfast. He is always expecting to see some truth that he has never seen before.

Cover of Vanity Fair Magazine, May 2002 issue--

"It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window."
-- Raymond Chandler

From "Some Like It Hot," screenplay by Billy Wilder and I. A. L. Diamond--

"Like Jello on springs!"
-- Saint Jack Lemmon

For more on St. Jack, Diamonds, and blondes, see previous entries.

For more on the significance of 162 as a page number, see Notes from a Journal.

"It is a very difficult philosophical question, the question of what 'random' is."
-- Herbert Robbins, co-author of What is Mathematics?,
in The New Yorker Magazine of March 2, 1992 (Page 64)

June 28, 2002 shc759