what if a catholic priest were to just bless the entire ocean would it turn the entire thing into holy water or do priests have an effective blessing range? does that range increase based on your level? can the pope bless the entire ocean?
so technically any priest could, but shouldn’t for pooping reasons.
source: my brother is in his 4th year of study at a catholic seminary, and referred to one of his professors.
So if there’s an emergency where you REALLY NEED to bless the entire Earth water cycle, you’d just need to make sure everyone knows about it and has a self-contained recyclable water supply somehow? If humanity ever gets reduced to a few besieged survivors, the vampires aren’t gonna know what hit them.
But what’s the expiration date on holy water? If you’ve just blessed the entire water cycle, you’re gonna run out of water pretty soon even with your own water supply. What do you do then? You can’t collect rainwater. If the rain killed the vampires, it must be holy, so now what?
On second thought, I’m not sure how much of a problem this even is. If it’s a life-or-death emergency (unlike in the original question) then there better be an exception to the improper use thing. That’s canon. But everyone would still have to use confirmed non-holy water for everything short of that. If civilization ever gets rebuilt afterward, it’d definitely need a completely new sewer system.
Wikipedia says that holy water is disposed of directly into the ground to avoid the sewer system, and this feels like it might imply that it stops being holy then. (Anyone who actually knows want to confirm?) So I guess even if you could see to bless ALL THE WATER, it’d be temporary. On the bright side you can collect some rainwater, eventually all of it, depending on where it evaporated from and how many times. Does anyone have the number of an emergency hydrologist?
senior staff: oh no there is an emergency we need chief obrien
chief obrien: but i need somebody to watch my tiny children oh no
everyone: looks around
everyone: oh no there is nobody to watch the chief’s tiny children
garak: i could watch the tiny children *innocent face*
everyone:…
everyone:…
everyone: no
No, everyone’s forced to say yes, because emergency. And it’s heavily implied that he has some nefarious aim, and we get a build up when the emergency is over and we return to the room where Garak and tiny children are supposed to be. The door opens, and…
Garak has taught them a Cardassian song, and they’ve done some crafts stuff and made a picture. And Garak is all like “what, you don’t trust me? What must you think of me?”
Can you imagine how differently their lives would’ve gone if Ron, in trying to transfigure Scabbers, had actually transfigured him back into a human? Just take a moment to imagine McGonagall’s reaction if Peter Pettigrew had abruptly appeared in her classroom from Ronald Weasley’s rat. Take a moment.
Or if Ron had fucked it up a little worse and couldn’t get ‘Scabbers’ back and McGonagall had take him to disenchant him and next thing we know there’s a naked Peter Pettigrew sitting on McGonagall’s desk and the kids in that class learn six new swear words, a hex they will never dare to use, and a fear of Minerva McGonagall’s wrath that will be with them until the day they die.
Ten and twenty years later first years are being pulled aside and warned never mess around in Transfiguration seriously the last time a kid mucked something up in that class Professor McGonagall used two semi-legal hexes, took down a Death Eater and sabotaged the rise of the Dark Lord before Potter had time to get his wand out.
What most of Hogwarts learned first on that otherwise-unexceptionable day was that Professor McGonagall could sure scream loud.
Professor Flitwick’s Charms 5th-year Charms class was close enough to catch the full effect, and the door had been left open besides; en masse the students recoiled with shock and a miscast Hiccuping Charm broke one of the windows (out which the entire flock of ravens they were practicing on escaped to the Forbidden Forest where they only had to worry about centaurs, rather than annoying young humans with wands).
Up in the Divination Tower, Sibyl Trelawny preened over her foresight to have warned her students of an unprecedented catastrophe likely to occur before the hour was out.
#Harry Potter #fanfic #oh look an update #I don’t remember whether I reblogged the earlier version of this or not #but anyway here’s a version with a fic attached
when i was very small i assumed this song was about some lady who literally kept a human face in a jar by the door and since father mckenzie buried her that meant that he also killed her and basically i thought eleanor rigby was about zombies until i was like 12 years old
Given how many times I had to play this song in my college instrumental ensemble class, this had breathed new life into this for me. And imagining the look on my professor’s face if she ever saw this given her Beatles obsession is kind of making me giggle.
Yeah, I was never really very clear on what the face-in-the-jar-by-the-door was supposed to mean as a kid, but the idea of a priest conducting services for no one at all didn’t really jibe. And then somewhere along the way I read enough Tom Clancy or watched enough James Bond to realize that, y’know, some people just don’t officially exist… they might not be down on paper but spies have spiritual needs too. Or at least the need to talk to someone who understands, even if they don’t necessarily believe. Armies and prisons and hospitals have chaplains; why shouldn’t the spooks? Eleanor Rigby was a spy with a talent for disguise; Father Mackenzie was the only priest the intelligence agencies trusted.
If Father Mackenzie takes individual confessions I suspect he goes through an awful lot of brandy, because I can’t imagine having someone like 007 show up with something bad enough to actually weigh on his conscience can be an easy thing to hear about. And the seal of the confessional wouldn’t just be a religious/moral thing under those circumstances, but one that also came with the knowledge that if he did let anything out, there was a bullet with his name on it.
(I’m also reasonably sure that the funeral he conducts towards the end of the song is actually pretty jam-packed. It’s just that Mackenzie is the only attendee who officially existed; the others all came because nobody outside the agency even knew the assignment number, let alone the name, of the poor sod in the box. But the spies take care of their own.)
Tags:
#oh look an update #hadn’t seen the spy one before
Well, while the chocolate orange was good as always (we buy one almost every Boxing Day), the mint truffles were gritty. (And no, it wasn’t the cocoa powder. It was gritty on the inside, which is not normal for truffles.) Might have just been a bad batch, but as it stands I don’t recommend buying Cemoi truffles.
Tags:
#oh look an original post #New Years #oh look an update #posts that I enjoy when *other* people make them #so why shouldn’t I? #food
#Brin plays Mass Effect #alas poor Jenkins #we knew him barely at all #oh look an original post #(the following category tag was added retroactively:) #reactionblogging
My first plan for this post was to have the entirety of the text body be “Massss Effffectttt”, tagged #I’ve finished my #adventures in University Land #for the semester.
My second plan was to acknowledge the first plan, then say that I was instead off to go have that quality time with my new phone, and I’d get around to Mass Effect later. (Possibly after hunting down an external mouse, as I’m finding this trackpad to be rather finicky on Windows.)
This is the last plan:
Finals were hellish. I’d say I understand now why people get so freaked out about finals, but I’m only going half-time. If two classes are like this, I can’t begin to imagine four.
(Why did I have to be someone whose psychosomatic stress-response is gut problems? Why couldn’t it have been…I was going to say headaches, but rumour has it that sufficiently severe headaches can induce vomiting. Surely there must be some set of physical symptoms stress can manifest that doesn’t involve nausea, is what I’m trying to say here.)
(No, I didn’t puke, but it was a close thing.)
But. All of the dice have now been cast, and enough of them have landed high enough that no matter what the remaining dice land on, I won’t lose either game. (Though I still want them to roll high, of course.)
It’s bedtime now, so I can’t play with my phone just yet. Tomorrow morning, I will. Maybe then it will start sinking in that it’s over. It’s finally over.
Tags:
#adventures in University Land #oh look an original post #emetophobia tw
Finished the geology project. It almost reflected the geology of Ontario. No idea where the hematite (real hematite, not artificial magnetic hematine) came from. Not confident it even is a hematite. I decided to speculate that perhaps it made its way over here from New York or Michigan, acknowledge that “mis-identification is also a possibility”, and move on.
That was the last geology assignment (I did the exam on Tuesday, after confirming that I was allowed to complete the project after the exam), but for comp-sci I still have fifteen textbook chapters to review, an exam to complete (and get up early for, because the invigilator* only does mornings), two articles to write (they’re not full-on formal essays, at least), and a set of linked HTML documents with embedded Java to create. (This being an introductory course, they don’t expect you to write the Java code, but I haven’t gone through the tutorial on how to embed it yet. And I’m “encouraged” to “create an original ‘look and feel’” on the HTML pages.)
I have ten days. They are shaping up to be very long days, but I think they will be long enough.
*“Proctor”, in American.
Tags:
#oh look an original post #oh look an update #adventures in University Land #after this I’m taking two months of winter vacation #(my longest consecutive break since November 2011) #but I can’t use that to motivate me because then I just get distracted thinking about how I would rather be playing video games
Brinens and Things 