I have been addicted to the YouTube clip of Horace Silver playing Senor Blues that I found via Orin Kerr. I currently have Song For My Father, The Jody Grind, The Cape Verdean Blues, In Pursuit of the 27th Man, and Blowin' The Blues Away (and somewhere a copy of Rockin With Rachmoninoff that I never got around to putting into iTunes) and have been debating what to get next, but Tokyo Blues and Six Pieces of Silver are strong contenders.

It really is impossible to be too stressed while listening to Song For My Father or The Jody Grind.

Once they ditched the surprisingly competent Pierce Brosnan and failed to pick the utterly cool Clive Owen, I was all set not to like Daniel Craig, or his debut as the new James Bond in Casino Royale. But after seeing it yesterday my expectations were very pleasantly dashed. Craig is a great Bond.

I'm not saying that I like him, exactly: it's a little bit errie that he goes so many minutes into the film without ever cracking a smile, and when he gets that pale look in his blue eyes, he looks like a killer first and a playboy second. But those aren't at all bad things for Bond to be. It's not as if the movie is devoid of sex and other fineries, but it's about time for a violent exploration of Bond's origins as the quasi-psychopath that the series has made into.

And the homages and allusions to classic Bond moments are also great. My favorite is Bond's one martini of the movie. In reponse to the bartender's "Shaken or stirred," Bond replies, "Do I look like I care?"

No, not at all. Which is just as fascinating in Bond as it was in Veronica Mars.

Before I write anything else, my thoughts too dwell on Gerald Ford. Unelected or not, he was one of the few people who've served as our president.

More to the point, I was sitting in church on Christmas day thinking about sin. These days, church isn't a terribly common occurence for me, although I think it would be better if it was. I wish I could say I was having a theological crisis, but in reality, it's a matter of convenience and the general cynicism of being a lawyer in a large law firm, having graduated from a great den of academic cynicism only recently. But there I was, and the familiar rhythm of the catholic service is a wonderful background for thought. Indeed, only last night, rereading my volume of Tolkien's letters, I came across several stories Tolkien himself (to his evident embarassment) had thought of while sitting in church.

As I say, though, I was thinking about sin rather than fantasy. My non-catholic friends often ask me, when we're arguing about such things, why I think the church should generally not liberalize sin. That is, why I think things like premarital sex, homosexuality, and so on, should continue to be designated as sins, even while society has grown entirely tolerant of those things, and, indeed, believes them not to be sinful. Certainly, speaking for myself, I really don't care at all as to what people do in their private lives, nor do I find many of the things I have in mind particularly objectionable.

I'm sure there are a lot of theologically correct answers to that fundamental question - the truth of the bible, traditional morality, the idea that the church should set a high standard of behavior. But the way I've thought about it for a while, transferred into lawyer speak, is that the church is simply offering safe harbors by being possibly over-inclusive with the definition of sin. Put it this way: we don't know what God thinks is sin or not. It might be that everything we think is sinful is actually not, and vice versa. The church, operating in that state of uncertainty, has done its best to divine what God thinks. If you follow those rules, and it ends up that the church was wrong, then the church represents that it will intervene on your behalf. But, that's no reason for you to agree with the church. As an independent moral agent, you're welcome to act however you like. The risk you run, however, is that you are wrong about what God thinks is sinful, and you won't have the church to back you up. Sin, to me, isn't so much restriction as liberation. If you keep to the relatively simple rules the church sets out, then you don't have to do much of the moral spade-work in trying to figure out what God might think. Otherwise, you're afloat in an unfathomable world.

I realize that a lot of this sounds like I've been spending too much time reading SEC regulations. And this is all probably theologically blasphemous. I haven't spent much time reading the proper authorities. Nonetheless, all this is basically my answer to why sin ought to be kept relatively static, all the while even a believer's behavior liberalizes. Sin demarcates a baseline. Where a catholic with free will goes from there is up to her.

Gerald Ford, the longest-lived former President, is dead.