The Telegraph memorialized recently a colorful priest remarkable for the soundness of both his political and ecclesiastical views.
Father Jean-Marie Charles-Roux, who has died [August 7th] aged 99, brought the mystical aura of French royalism to London as a Roman Catholic priest of the Rosminian order; he was devoted to the divine nature of monarchy and the Tridentine liturgy.
Tall, elegant, and with a theatrically silky voice, Charles-Roux wore buckled shoes and medallions commemorating martyred sovereigns, and used an eyeglass to read a newspaper during more than 40 years at the medieval church of St Etheldreda at Ely Place, off Holborn. There he celebrated the Latin Mass every morning with his back to the congregation. Sought after as a confessor, he preached lively and eloquent sermons, flattering and shocking his listeners in equal measure.
He would emphasise the Christian duty to the poor while maintaining that the parable of the talents proved that capitalism was not only acceptable but also a moral imperative. He made clear his abhorrence of the Allied bombing of Dresden by celebrating Mass for its victims. And once, comparing the transformation of the soul to cooking, he described how it was more likely to be successful in black saucepans (meaning priests) than in grander copper ones (casting a glance at Cardinal Hume sitting nearby).
In conversation with even the humblest, Charles-Roux assumed a shared familiarity with the families of the Anjou claimant to the French throne, the King of Spain and members of other European royal families; and he championed the canonisation of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, Mary Queen of Scots and even Charles I of England who, he maintained, should be acknowledged as a saint by the Roman Catholic Church.
As communism tottered in Eastern Europe in 1989, the ambassadors of Poland and Hungary (possibly hedging their bets) were to be seen on their knees at a memorial service for the Empress Zita of Austria while Charles-Roux led them in prayers for the restoration of the Holy Roman Empire.
Jean-Marie Charles-Roux was born in Marseille into a French diplomatic family on December 12 1914. His first memories were of Rome, where his father was a member of the French embassy to the King of Italy.
For many years he was based at the Rosminian church of St Etheldreda’s, Ely Place, where he celebrated only the Tridentine Rite.
‘When the New Mass came in I tried it in English, French, Italian, even in Latin – but it was like a children’s game,’ he told me. ‘So I wrote to Pope Paul, whom I had known when he was Cardinal Montini, and said, Holy Father, either you let me celebrate the Old Mass or I leave the priesthood and marry the first pretty girl I meet.’
Isao Machii is so skilled with the Japanese sword that he can draw his blade and cut a BB fired at him in two.
Even Iaido Masters evidently have to live, unfortunately and so we find the same man cutting up thrown fruit and starring in an inane commercial for Pillsbury. Sploid
My favourite World War II story is of the Highlander who, observing the rout on the beaches of Dunkirk, tells his sergeant: ‘If the English give in, too, this could be a long war.’
The Times reports that the renowned Scottish folksinger Jean Redpath succumbed to cancer recently in a hospice in Arizona at age 77.
Redpath, in the course of her career, released forty albums. She was made a Member of the Order of the British Empire, and her portrait hangs in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery.
Three Scottish songs with comical texts from an album of Scottish song released in 1962. The first one is the best.
The Telegraph has a story of the tables being recently turned.
A man in central India killed a venomous snake by biting it after he saw the blue krait slithering towards him in bed.
Rai Singh, from Chhattisgarh, told a local television channel he feared the venomous blue krait was about to bite him and decided to bite the creature.
“At nine o’clock in the evening while I went to sleep on my bed, I saw a snake and tried to shoo it away with a stick but it attacked me. I bit itâ€, he told a local television channel.
His neighbour R.S Singh described the incident as “astonishing†and said it was a “miracle that he survived since this snake is highly venomousâ€.
Kraits are one of the four poisonous snakes which account for the most attacks in India where 50,000 people are killed by venomous bites every year.
The krait is nocturnal and often wriggles into homes at night during the monsoon season to keep dry. Its bites rarely cause pain and often go unnoticed by their victims as they sleep.
They are, however, highly venomous and up to 80 per cent of their victims die after suffering progressive paralysis.
The British Embassy in Washington commemorated the recent 200th Anniversary of the Burning of Washington by tweeting a photo of a cake in the form of the White House with the witty message:
Commemorating the 200th anniversary of burning the White House. Only sparklers this time!
Some Americans were appropriately amused, like Joanna Tompkins who awarded a: hat tip for the sheer ballsiness of this post!
But there are sufficient numbers of the pious and easily-offended out there that, before very long, the Brits were issuing an apology. At least, they did not remove the original tweet, though.
An already decapitated cobra head was still able to bite a chef twenty minutes after the head was cut off from the snake’s body. The chef died immediately before being given an anti-venom medication.
In preparing for a specialty menu, known as the Snake Soup, chef Peng Fan severed the cobra’s head, left it aside while he diced its body.
Twenty-minutes after his preparation, he picked the cobra’s decapitated head and plans to throw it in the garbage can. This was when the head bit him, and injected its poisonous venom into the chef’s body.
The incident took place in a high-end restaurant in Guangdong province, southern China.
Restaurant guests said that they heard commotion from the kitchen. The staff at the restaurant then called for a doctor but the chef was already dead when the medical assistance arrived.