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Photo above: the tabernacle at St Joseph's Basilica, the local cathedral in our archdiocese. Copyright Brian Holdsworth and used with permission, kinda.

Three years ago, I knew almost nothing about Catholicism. I basically thought of the Catholic Church as just another denomination, and one that really liked traditional, old-fashioned practices. Sometimes, I'd hear things ranging from “Not all Catholics are Christian”, to things like “Catholics are call going to Hell because they worship Mary and the Pope”. I didn't really know what to think, but considering that the more trustworthy sources I had tended to stick with a pretty non-damning set of opinions, that's what I settled with, though I wasn't so concerned about the matter.

When my curiosity was piqued, but a combination of interesting events and encounters, I started asking more questions. The non-Catholic sources soon split in to three factions: those who said that Catholics are, in fact, Christians, but their beliefs could be improved; those who said that Catholics are doing certain key things incorrectly, and are therefore not Christian; and the largest group: those who had incorrect information, either because of a lack of research or because of deliberate misinformation, about the Catholic Church's teachings.

…that's not in person, is email. Here's why:

  1. Distributed
    Email isn't based on a central system. If Facebook was to go down, or get hacked, no one using Facebook's messages as their main way to communicate could talk. Sure, Microsoft and Google (combined) run more than half of the active individual accounts (citation needed), but they don't have to be functional for one person to send a message to another.

I was looking at various services that send you the ingredients and recipes for meals, so one doesn't have to think, and I realized what kind of service I really want. I don't mind shopping, and I would rather buy in bulk than pay for individual meal's ingredients, and the tough part is picking out what to make. My dream service would basically be a meal-planning service.

No, it's not.

Bottle of kombucha

I love kombucha. 

Several years ago, I became interested in it, but rarely bought it, as it's in that category of pricey, cool products that are too expensive for this Dutch guy to buy. I mentioned, off-handedly, to my wife once that I wanted to try and make some myself, but never really did anything until Christmas of 2015. That year, we decided to challenge ourselves into trying to find heartfelt gifts for each other with a $10 price limit. I bought her some earthy cosmetics and loose-leaf tea, and she bought me the supplies to start making my own kombucha.

I made a shortlist of my favourite movies.

It was difficult to quantify what makes a movie my favourite. At first, I started out with movies that I wouldn't mind watching again at a moment's notice, but some of these require the right mood, and some I haven't seen for a long time, and don't want to ruin what I enjoyed then.

Here they are, in alphabetical order:

Most Holy Rosary of the Blessed Virgin Mary

This was a question that I started asking early on in my research of Catholicism. I understood the basic reasons why Catholics venerate the Saints and Mary, and why they believed they could be asked for prayer. (The actual process of veneration of the Saints, which involves scientifically verifying that a miracle has occurred because of the intercession of a possible Saint, was a key point here.) Being rather skeptical by nature, I decided to research the topic from the other perspective: why can’t we pray to the Saints?