We all want to die and go to Ireland

As is clearly demonstrated by this joke I found at the Catholic Answers forum:

George Bush is flying around the world making visits to other countries. He goes to the Vatican and notices a gold phone on the Pope's desk. He asks about the phone and the Pope tells him it's a direct line to God.

Bush asks if he can call. So he gets on the phone, talks to God for about 5 minutes and hangs up.

As Bush is leaving to get on the plane he gets a bill for $543 for his phone call to God. He pays the bill and then takes his plane on over to Ireland.

While in Ireland he finds himself stopping into a small rural parish. There on the priests desk is a gold phone. Bush asks if this phone goes straight to God. The priest says it does and allows Bush to make a call.

Bush is on the phone for about 5 minutes and hangs up. As he is getting ready to leave the priest hands him a bill for $1.79. Astonished, Bush asks why he had to pay $543 for a call to God from the Vatican and only $1.79 from this little parish in Ireland.

The reply..."It's a local call here of course."

Vladimir and the cat

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin poses with a two and a half month female tiger cub, no name yet given, looks at, at the Novo Ogaryovo residence of outside Moscow, on Thursday night, Oct. 9, 2008. The cub was presented to Putin on Oct. 7, when he was celebrating his 56 birthday.(AP Photo/RIA Novosti, Alexei Nikolsky, pool)

Misc. stuff I like...

Lolcats - I guess I am the last person on the Internet to discover them. I can has a gud time laffing at the pickshures?

The Bovril Shrine, For the Love of Bovril - You probably don't know what Bovril is. Shame on you. I didn't know what Bovril was, either, until a little while ago. Shame on all of us.

Strange Maps - Scroll down and check out the Map of Heaven, especially. Strange indeed, and interesting.

Heh, heh

From my sister's blog:

Yesterday my sister and I went zooming about in our little tin can Hyundai Elantra with one mission in mind: find the Party Station. Our Mother has reached that age whence birthdays are of Particular Significance. We therefore wanted it to be custom coordinated. The party section at the local grocer would hardly do. We needed the specialists.

First, we called Free 411:

Computer: "City and State?"

Me: Hudson, Ohio

Computer: "Hobson, Ohio."

Me: Hudson.

Computer: "I'm sorry. Can you repeat that?"

Me: Hudson.

Computer: "Hobson, Ohio."

After about twenty minutes of wailing, hair-pulling and hollering into the cell phone, we extricated driving directions. They led us to a windowless building wrapped in beige siding. An electric sign out front announced: "Congratulations Erica and Dave!"

Yes. Free 411 gave us directions, not to The Party Station, purveyors of balloons, streamers, and birthday candles, but to a party station, which had been rented out that very afternoon to celebrate the great day in which Dave and Erica became one flesh.

Having wasted three-fourths of the afternoon in a fruitless hunt for celebration supplies, we decided to give up being Independent Women. Our father guided us to the correct location, and we made it 15 minutes before closing.

Mission accomplished. Moral of the story: Pay for 411.

Roger that.

Current favorite LOLCATS

I can has cheezburger

My mother is getting older and funnier

"The back pain, it's hungry. It yearns for food. It's like a tapeworm."

- My mother, explaining her desire to tear open the Mr. Chicken box and start eating right in the car

A tradition

I always repost this every once in a while. My favorite poem, by Fr. Gerard Manley Hopkins, S.J., an English priest:


Spring and Fall

To a young child

Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?

Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep and know why.

Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow’s springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

Reading it always makes me sad and happy at the same time.

The poem makes specific reference to the melancholy of the change of seasons, which we actually just experienced a month ago or so. Even small children recognize the alteration in the environment and can even be moved to regret the fading of seasonal warmth and light.

Similar to the quarters of the year, life has its seasons which pass. In our culture, we don't like to acknowledge this - eternal summer is the goal; hence our emphasis on youth and our denial of the reality of aging and death. The reality, of course, is that we, like the leaves of Goldengrove, pass away. The important thing is to be ready when the time comes.

Yes, it's hard knowing that mortality is in our future; life is a beautiful gift from God, and there's a reason we grieve in the face of death. But the Christian can know that life with Him will be still more wonderful, and best of all, there will be no "unleaving" or other change in season: Heaven will be one long springtime of praise.

Dude, where's my car?

Dude, it's like, totally over there in the ditch.

Anyone in Northeast Ohio today knows that we got our first Nasty Snow Spell this morning. For reasons unknown, the state salt trucks never manage to make it to our part of town before, oh, seven o'clock at night. In spite of this, one is still obligated to go to work.

Therefore, I left ten minutes early this morning, hoping to crawl to work and still make it on time; my crawling was apparently not slow and pathetic enough, and so I was punished by going into a spin. It felt rather like a dream, and so I wasn't too freaked out until I careened into a ditch and glided right into one of the massive bushes in Connecticut Colony, which is the subdivision right down the street (I didn't get too far, ha ha ha). The bush was so huge and I was in so tight that I couldn't force open my driver's side door, and I had to crawl through my car and get out of the passenger door. Lovely and scary.

The car looks to be fine, and I'm fine, other than feeling like an idiot. The wonderful thing about being at home is that my dear father came and is "taking care of it," i.e. he is staying with the car and waiting for the roadside assistance to come. That's what fathers are for! Rescuing their young daughters from driving mishaps! ;) I got to go home and nurse my wounded vanity... I got called off of work. One day's wages, pffft.

Happy Name Day to Me!

Today is the feast of my patroness, everybody's favorite Queen, St. Margaret of Scotland. We celebrated St. Gertrude at daily Mass (it's her day, too) but oh well!

Margaret was an English princess. She and her mother sailed to Scotland to escape from the king who had conquered their land. King Malcolm of Scotland welcomed them and fell in love with the beautiful princess. Margaret and Malcolm were married before too long.

As Queen, Margaret changed her husband and the country for the better. Malcolm was good, but he and his court were very rough. When he saw how wise his beloved wife was, he listened to her good advice. She softened his temper and led him to practice great virtue. She made the court beautiful and civilized. Soon all the princes had better manners, and the ladies copied her purity and devotion. The king and queen gave wonderful example to everyone by the way they prayed together and fed crowds of poor people with their own hands. They seemed to have only one desire: to make everyone happy and good.

Margaret was a blessing for all the people of Scotland. Before she came, there was great ignorance and many bad habits among them. Margaret worked hard to obtain good teachers, to correct the evil practices, and to have new churches built. She loved to make these churches beautiful for God's glory, and she embroidered the priest's vestments herself.

God sent this holy Queen six sons and two daughters. She loved them dearly and raised them well. The youngest boy became St. David. But Margaret had sorrows, too. In her last illness, she learned that both her husband and her son, Edward, had been killed in battle. Yet she prayed: "I thank You, Almighty God, for sending me so great a sorrow to purify me from my sins."

From Catholic Online.

The Finns love Elvis in Latin

From the BBC:

Finland is one of the quieter members of the EU. But now its turn at the EU presidency has thrust it into the spotlight - and exposed an unusual passion.

Like the boy at the party with cheese straws stuck up his nose, it has been caught doing something vaguely disturbing -indulging a penchant for Latin....

..."The legend of Elvis Presley lives for ever, and it's of course very important to sing Elvis Presley's songs in the Latin language, because Latin is the eternal language"...

Lurking within the world of EU Latin, which is only marginally more difficult to comprehend than EU English, is one delightful statistic - more people subscribe to the newsletter in Latin than to the one in French.

...The news in Latin on national radio gets 75,000 listeners, which may not sound like much, but on a per capita basis is more than some BBC Radio 4 programmes get...

Full article, "Finland makes Latin the King."

If the Finns can do it, than why can't Catholics? ;)

A little Catholic bookstore

I've been sitting on this for several days (reason: laziness), but I thought folks might appreciate a link to The Little Way, a division of Corpus Christi Book+Store, which is located in John Steinbeck's hometown of Salinas, California. The Little Way has lots of books, gift items, and hard-to-find images of St. Therese.

If you've never encountered Carmelite spirituality, I really encourage you to find out more about it. It has produced three Doctors of the Church, many great saints and mystics, and some awe-inspiring poetry. I once thought I might be called to Carmel, although for awhile I have realized that if I am called to the religious life it is probably not to a contemplative vocation. Still, Carmel and her saints are incredibly beautiful and probably a must for anyone looking for spiritual growth (St. Juan de la Cruz, anybody?).

I haven't bought anything from The Little Way yet (reason: college student brokeitis) but I certainly encourage my readers to do so.

Genealogy

Interesting article from the WaPo on what we all share with Brooke Shields (descendant of Charlemagne, El Cid, and William the Conqueror):

Star Is Descended From Kings. Of Course, Most People Are

By Matt Crenson
Associated Press
Sunday, August 13, 2006; A07

...Even without a documented connection to a notable forebear, experts say, the odds are virtually 100 percent that every person on Earth is descended from one royal personage or another.

...Take King Edward III, who ruled England during the 14th century and had nine children who survived to adulthood. Among his documented descendants are presidents (George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Quincy Adams, Zachary Taylor, both Roosevelts), authors (Jane Austen, Lord Byron, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning), generals (Robert E. Lee), scientists (Charles Darwin) and actors (Humphrey Bogart, Audrey Hepburn, Brooke Shields). Some experts estimate that 80 percent of England's present population descends from Edward III...

...The longer ago somebody lived, the more descendants that person is likely to have today. Humphrys estimates that Muhammad, the founder of Islam, appears on the family tree of every person in the Western world.

Full article.

Fascinating. If it's true that everyone is related to kings, our family must be one with a "lost in the mists of time" connection to royalty. 'Cuz we got nada!

The only connection we have to anything of the sort is that my Austrian grandmother, Oma, was herself the granddaughter of the Baroness Marie Mottl, who was in turn the daughter of the Baron Rudolf Sohinga de Rostenfeld and the Baroness Johanna Sohinga de Rostenfeld. But that's it.

(And "Baron" is a title you could pretty much buy in the old country, if you were wealthy. So I suspect that they were probably just a bit nouveau riche. "Baron" really wasn't a royal title back then, in the same way that knighthood isn't really knighthood anymore in England.)

Great headline

At AOL news this afternoon:

Car Slams Into Store, Missing Man (Don't click if your computer can't handle video)

This is one of those can't-look-away video news clips about a car which smashes into a store and narrowly misses a bystander. But the headline doesn't quite make that clear. You could be forgiven for thinking that the errant auto had been caught on tape actually taking out someone on the "missing persons" list.

"I have good news and bad news, ma'am. The good news is, after alll this time, we finally found your husband. The bad news is..."

HA!

I know there are people at Scripps who have huge collections of even greater gems, such as "Something Went Wrong in Plane Crash, Expert Says" or my favorite, "Lung Cancer in Women Mushrooms" which ostensibly headlines an important health story but which gives the impression that a certain kind of fungus has somehow acquired not only gender but also lungs and a vulnerability to cancer cells.