A Carpe Diem Snapshot:
This leopard-print pajama wearing firecracker is keeping us on our toes these days, and this photo captures her exuberance and expressiveness well. I was hoping to snag a portrait of a serenely sleeping child to match the quote of the day, but in a way the smile on her face does speak to the refreshment we all feel after a good night's sleep, particularly if we get to sleep as much as the toddler (which never happens, by the way!). One can dream...
Liturgical: Saturday of the First Week in Ordinary Time
The word of God is living and effective,
sharper than any two-edged sword,
penetrating even between soul and spirit,
joints and marrow,
and able to discern reflections and thoughts of the heart.
No creature is concealed from him,
but everything is naked and exposed to the eyes of him
to whom we must render an account.
Bishop Barron's Gospel reflections today.
Sanctoral: Prisca, who is also known as Priscilla, was a child martyr of the early Roman Church. Born to Christian parents of a noble family, Prisca was raised during the reign of the Roman emperor Claudius. While Claudius did not persecute Christians with the same fervor as other Roman emperors, Christians still did not practice their faith openly. In fact, Prisca's parents went to great lengths to conceal their faith, and thus they were not suspected of being Christians.
Prisca, however, did not feel the need to take precaution. The young girl openly professed her dedication to Christ, and eventually, she was reported to the emperor. Claudius had her arrested, and commanded her to make a sacrifice to Apollo, the pagan god of the sun.
According to the legend, Prisca refused and was tortured for disobeying. Then, suddenly, a bright, yellow light shone about her, and she appeared to be a little star.
Claudius ordered that Prisca be taken away to prison, in the hopes that she would abandon Christ. When all efforts to change her mind were unsuccessful, she was taken to an amphitheatre and thrown in with a lion.
As the crowd watched, Prisca stood fearless. According to legend, the lion walked toward the barefoot girl, and then gently licked her feet. Disgusted by his thwarted efforts to dissuade Prisca, Claudius had her beheaded.
Seventh-century accounts of the grave sites of Roman martyrs refer to the discovery of an epitaph of a Roman Christian named Priscilla in a large catacomb and identifies her place of interment on the Via Salaria as the Catacomb of Priscilla.—Excerpted from Ordinary People Extraordinary Lives.
St. Prisca's relics are in the Church in Rome named after her, Santa Prisca. Wikipedia has a few more details.
Human: Today is the birthday of physician and philologist Peter Mark Roget, born in London in 1779. He was a physician, trained at the University of Edinburgh, and he helped to found the University of London as well as a medical school at the University of Manchester. He was also a Fellow of the Royal Society, served as its secretary for over 20 years, and invented a slide rule that was widely used until the invention of the pocket calculator. He was interested in optics, and published a paper in 1824 called "Explanation of an Optical Deception in the Appearance of the Spokes of a Wheel Seen Through Vertical Apertures." He was the first to notice something called "persistence of vision" — the illusion of movement when looking at a series of still photographs in rapid succession — which formed the basis for future motion picture technology.
But we remember Roget for his thesaurus — which is the Greek word for "treasury" — a little project he started in his retirement. It took 12 years to complete, but Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases Classified and Arranged so as to Facilitate the Expression of Ideas and Assist in Literary Composition has been in print continuously since its publication in 1852.
The Writer's Almanac edition today.
Natural: The X-ray machine was exhibited for the first time on this date in 1896. Heinrich Joseph Hoffmans, a Dutch headmaster and physicist, developed the machine just a month after Wilhelm Röntgen had discovered (and named) X-rays in Germany. An X-ray machine could be constructed out of materials common to most science labs: iron rods, a glass plate, a battery, electric wire, and a glass vacuum bulb. Hoffmans built his out of spare parts in his classroom.
The quality of the images in 1896 was pretty impressive, but they came at a cost. Exposure time was about 90 minutes, and the total dose of radiation was 1,500 times greater than what is used today. Subjects and experimenters received radiation burns, suffered eye problems, lost their hair, and developed cancer. Many people ended up having to amputate the hands that had been X-rayed. Hoffmans' original machine quickly became obsolete, and was abandoned on a shelf in a warehouse in Maastricht until a documentary film crew discovered it in 2010. Dr. Gerrit Kemerink, of the Maastricht University Medical Center, put Hoffmans' machine to the test, and was able to produce an image of a cadaver hand on the 115-year-old machine. Kemerink said, "Our experience with this machine, which had a buzzing interruptor, crackling lightning within a spark gap, and a greenish light flashing in a tube, which spread the smell of ozone and which revealed internal structures in the human body was, even today, little less than magical."
Italian: 29 Money-Related Idioms in Italian
Quote: "Natural men have conceived a twofold use of sleep; that it is a refreshing of the body in this life; that it is a preparing of the soul for the next." --John Donne, Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions
I read these lovely lines in a post from "Revolution of Tenderness" on Instagram today, which were part of a longer quote from "Sleep Therapy" by Lauren Winner
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