Web Log

Sometimes, it gives me pause (arf, arf)...to think about what it takes to be a "Saint" of the Catholic Church. I mean, let's just breeze past the first requirement: ya gotta be dead! OK? But, unless you're JP2, whom Benedict2⁴has lately put on the "fast-track" (like the pass you can buy to speed through a toll booth) to Sainthood, it usually takes hundreds of years for the 'process' of making someone a Saint to reach a conclusion.
JP2 made more Saints than any of his predecessors over the past 500 years combined: a total of 476 — plus 1,315 "Blesseds" proclaimed. [For those of you who didn't have this crap tamped down your throat in your bassinet: to be declared "Blessed" means, like Lloyd Christmas in Dumb and Dumber, that 'you got a chance'! See, before you can get to be called 'Saint Somebody', ya first gotta be 'Blessed Somebody'. "Beatification" is the ten-dollar word used by the Church.]

Now...if your goal is to, some day, be a Saint, here are some tips: It helps if you live a dog's life...and it helps even more if you can arrange to die in a miserable and wretched manner...like Jesus. [Not surprisingly, crucifixion is the Gold Standard here but, what with the skyrocketing cost of lumber and some recent collective bargaining victories by the Carpenters' Union...many of us have had to cross it off our list of options.] Take, for example, ole Pierina Morosini, who in 1957, at the age of 26, was "attacked by a man who stoned her to death for refusing to comply with his evil desires." Or how 'bout ole Otto Neurerer, who in 1940 "died in an extermination camp after a long agony having been hanged upside down." [Anyway, that's how a couple of other Saint-wannabe's got their big break. Just some ideas.]
But...you should understand at the outset that living a horrible life and dying a gruesome death will not guarantee that you'll make it all the way! It's not that easy! The 1,315 Blesseds (including 266 martyrs) proclaimed by JP2 will each need to have at least two miracles "attributed to their intercession" before their name can come up for a vote! [By 'intercession' is meant that the Blessed person, after some face-time with God, gets Him to cause something (like a cure for cancer) to happen (in answer to somebody's prayer to the Blessed) that otherwise would not have happened. "Friends in high places!"]
So far, all this makes sense, no? But here's where they lose me: JP2 was said to have made his many choices about who got to be Blessed and Sainted with an eye to the PR aspect of it. So, for example, he might designate a young Spanish woman as a Blessed to encourage the participation of more young Spanish women in the Church...someone to emulate...a Hall of Fame kinda thing. However, reflect on the case of Mercedes Prat y Prat who was "shot, but although mortally wounded..., survived for some hours in extreme pain. Her cry attracted the attention of the militia, who were passing the same spot. They shot her again. She bled to death."

I say...if this is the Vatican's recruitment strategy, then what will they do if they ever decide to scare people away!?!

Uh Oh! I thought I'd exhausted this subject...but lookie here at what's fresh off the wire this afternoon from Reuters! It reads, in part, "Benedict's decision to delegate the first beatifications of his pontificate has raised speculation that he wants to downgrade the significance of the event, which became an important hallmark of John Paul's papacy." [Holy] See? JP2 had progressed a wee too far into the sixteenth century for the more traditional tastes of B2⁴!Time to slow down, dude! And time, maybe, to rethink that hasty apology to Galileo!

"When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

I'm old enough to remember when facts ("the truth") seemed to matter. But any more, half the people in our country simply don't care that they are regularly lied to by our very highest elected officials.

Here's the friendly Graduation message posted today on the Web site of the school in which I was confined during my formative years: "Ticket holders arrive at 5:30pm. Dress code—solid shirt and tie, dress pants, socks, and shined shoes. No dyed hair, body piercings, tattoos on the forehead. No sports jacket –heat. You may not participate if you are in violation."
Somebody help me! What's "heat"? Was the last sentence in the message a threat or a promise?

Once upon a time, I had a rather sad neighbor whose strategy for dealing with bills he could not pay was to leave them, unopened, in the mailbox. While "out of sight, out of mind" is hardly a new concept, I am a bit unbalanced that it has lately been (quite seriously, I think) put forward by a columnist of some standing.

"ABC is insane over its lame story about Paula Abdul allegedly sleeping with a contestant on the second season of "American Idol." Nobody who lives in a world where sanity is prized cares one whit about this, but ABC is acting like it found out the Pope is a transvestite stripper." Tim Goodman

"...the attorney who prosecuted Wilbanks for shoplifting in 1996 is the same lawyer who is now representing her in her dealings with police..." It has not been much noted that Jen's fiancé's father, Claude Mason, is a municipal court judge in Norcross, Georgia. It would have been a simple matter for him to conduct a (quiet) background check on his future daughter-in-law. So it seems unlikely that the old man was unaware that Jenny had not only been arrested three times (one, at first, charged as a felony), but had even done some jail time (in 1998) for these (seemingly compulsive) thefts.

"This kid was awesome. He quit an office job and probably took a huge pay cut. But...he enjoyed...coming to [Fenway Park] and helping us." Kevin Millar, commenting on the tragic death of Bernie Logue.

A few weeks ago, some tree-hugging do-gooder went up to Anna Nicole Smith and attempted to pique her social conscience by saying, "Do you realize those diamonds you love to wear were mined by a man in South Africa who works twelve hours a day underground in hellish conditions for the American equivalent of less-than-minimum wage?" Wide-eyed, she answered, "No...I didn't realize it! That is SO sweet of him!"

While it might not, precisely, be a "new bottle"...it is, certainly, the old wine.

"Those who know me know how excited I've been, and how excited I was about the spectacular wedding we planned, and how I could not wait to be Mrs. John Mason," the statement said.

[What I had assumed to be] my realistic hopes of mixing it up with Paris Hilton some day were dashed when someone alerted me to an interview she did this past Tuesday with an Associated Press reporter:

AP: Do you read blogs?
Hilton: What's that?
AP: Um, they're these things on the Internet where people write about news and stuff.
Hilton: No, I don't really read anything on the Internet except my AOL mail. I don't like people who sit on computers all day long and write about people they don't know anything about.

So this woman goes into a tattoo parlor and asks for two tattoos: one on each inner thigh. "I want the left one to be Robert Redford and the right one to be Paul Newman", she said. When the tattoo artist had finished, the woman looked at the results with a hand-held mirror and shrieked, "These don't look a bit like either one of those guys! I'm not gonna pay you!"

"Whaddya mean?", said the parlor owner. "Anyone could recognize these faces! I'll tell you what", he went on, "I'm SO sure of my work that I'll make a deal with you. We'll bring in the next person who walks by the store and we'll ask him if he can tell whose faces those are. And if he can't, then you don't owe me a thing!" The woman agreed.
So they waited in front of the parlor and the next person who walked by was an old drunk. They invited him in and asked him to identify the faces tattooed on her thighs. The drunk looked at one tattoo...and then turned to look at the other. Slowly back and forth. Finally, he answered, "Well...I don't know who those two guys are...but the one in the middle with the beard and the bad breath? That's Willie Nelson!"

Yesterday's decision by Judge Col. James Pohl in the Lynndie England prosecution recalled, for me, the actions of U.S. district Judge John Sirica.
John took a dim view of the tight ("we acted alone") guilty pleas from the guys who broke into the Democratic National Committee's headquarters in the Watergate complex on June 17, 1972. "I had no intention of sitting on the bench like a nincompoop and watching the parade go by", he wrote years after the "third-rate burglary" that led to the resignation of Richard Nixon.
Am I naive to hope that, some day, a US military court might assign blame for the prisoner-abuse-in-Iraq-scandal where that blame belongs? It surely does not belong at the feet of a poor dumb kid who has been persuaded by her own lawyers to "Say what we want you to say and then shut up (and we'll try to get you off light)!" Could it be that Judge Pohl (also) does not intend to watch this "parade go by"?

...if a man lives many years, let him rejoice in them all;
But let him remember the days of darkness, for they shall be many.
All that comes is vanity. (Ecclesiastes 11:8)

An aspect of the Georgia bride case that will doubtless be noted over the next few days is the manner in which the media came to assume (a la Scott Peterson and Mark Hacking) that Jennifer's fiancé was responsible for her disappearance. For many observers, the fact that he retained an attorney and had begun 'negotiations' (rather than leap at the chance) to take a police-administered polygraph exam seemed to confirm his guilt!

Calling Alfred "...a half-baked man in terms of morality and a philistine whom we can never deal with", a spokesperson for North Korea went on to observe that "no one can expect to hear reasonable words from Bush, once a cowboy at a ranch in Texas. His remarks often stun audiences as they reveal his utter ignorance."