Loooong and meandering Post

A grade-school friend of mine was ordained as a Priest this past weekend, and it's about time. I remember as kids he'd recite every word of the Mass along with the Priest, as if he was conducting the service himself. I haven't spoken to him in ten years, so I'm not sure why he delayed enlisting, but all the power to him. Congrats Brad!

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To be honest I'm a little jealous of Brad. As a kid part of me wanted to become a Priest, and I remember playing 'Mass' with my sisters and using the piano bench as an altar. But I knew from an early age it wasn't for me. I've inherited a foul mouth, for one, and I also - let me be blunt - have a decently robust sex drive. During puberty I'd spend a good portion of the Mass staring at the ass of the girls ahead of me as they knelt in prayer. That . . . didn't bode well for celibacy.

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Regarding my last post, I think I'm going to give the guy the benefit of the doubt and say that his statement, while quoted in the correct context, came off more bigoted than he intended. Maybe he's Catholic himself, or was, and was one of the people scarred by the abuse scandals; who knows?

It is creepy that he sought to mail it to my home. That isn't cool, although again I think he was harmless.

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You want real religious bigotry? A guy came into my work wearing a t-shirt that read "So many Christians - so few lions".

You are free to believe what you like, but can you imagine the uproar it would cause if he wore a shirt joking about violence towards Jews? Because of the Holocaust he wouldn't dare (instead, he'd no doubt moan about Israel; I do believe many of the people who hate on that state do so as an outlet for their anti-Semitism). Worse yet, can you imagine if he wore a shirt preaching violence against Islam, especially in the mideast?

He wouldn't - because they'd cut off his head. Literally.

And yet I'm willing to bet he doesn't think twice about the value of the First Amendment that grants him his freedom. It's a shame.

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Speaking of Israel, a word on Hitler, as today was the bitter anniversary of his birth. He was a monster. Period. Why we need to create more reasons to hate the man than those amply provided by WWII is beyond me, but I've seen more than one source in the last few days that sought to do just that.

I picked up a book that took grade school age photos of Hitler and sought to extrapolate intent and evil and malignancy in the eyes of a little kid . Crap like that minimizes the true breadth of his evil and twists it all into a cheap horror film plot. Think The Omen. The book was promptly returned to the shelf.

Then there are several TV specials that seek to establish, somehow/someway, that Hitler was of Jewish descent. I do not comprehend this line of reasoning. They aren't doing it to reason out a new and comprehensive physiological portrait of the man. No, they're doing it because in a twisted way it somehow makes him 'less' than he was, allegedly because if he was indeed of Jewish descent then he was a hypocrite on top of it all. I think we can all agree hypocrisy was the least of his crimes. Isn't that pursuit a dangerous, if unintended slippery slope? Aren't these people saying, in effect, "Hey, guess what? Not only was he an a*hole, but it turns out he was a Jew too! Can you believe that?"

What does it matter??

Maybe I'm too sensitive on the subject. I don't know.

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One last WWII thing that ticks me off: ignoring Stalin's ills and painting his USSR as a besieged, noble country that rallied to stifle Nazism. Bullshit. Hitler killed millions and dragged the world into war. Easily, easily one of the top three human beings of the century. But Stalin was right up there, and unlike his one-time buddy Adolf, Joe went merrily committing mass murder for decades. Millions were murdered under his rule and few people seem to care, perhaps - and I'll grant this is dark - but perhaps simply because he never got around to waging war against American soldiers and grabbing the media's attention.

And uh, 'poor' Russia not only had a friendship pact with Germany, they invaded Poland in concert with Hitler.

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Allegedly a true story of WWII, but probably apocryphal: we of course bit our tongue about all those nasty points and supplied the Soviet Union with anything and everything they needed to fight Germany, as they were the only nation capable of bleeding Germany dry through raw numbers. When I say anything and everything I mean exactly that, right down to birth control. The Russians, as a macho snub against the Americans, requested condoms that measured eighteen inches long.

The Americans promptly delivered them as requested. Across each crate was stamped:

Condoms: size Medium

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In the last few days we marked the tenth anniversary of the Columbine shootings. When it happened I was working third shift. I remember on the night of the attack/early the next morning the newspaper guy came in and dropped off Journal's with the news splashed across the front page. I'd slept through the day itself, never hearing so much as a whisper about the attack.

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Let's end a bleak post with some happy thoughts: while I was at work Monday Lisa took Ginger for her first ever haircut. She did great and didn't fuss a bit :)