Random thoughts on a Saturday afternoon

• The Assumption Mass at St. Rita's was awesome, not in the teenage sense of the word but awe inspiring. The line for confession was so long that Fr. wasn't able to leave the confessional until Mass was almost over and the crowd was large and young. 
• 1964 Blog very interesting and useful for statistics.
• One Peter Five is a newly launched project of Steve Skojec and so far it's excellent. Except for Hilary White at Orwell's picnic, I don't think any Catholic media outlet or blogger has mentioned it at all.
• I've  been reading Regina Magazine and just noticed that they have a blog 
• I really had no intention of writing anything about Robin Williams but the tweet from the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences is really disturbing. The genie isn't free. He's dead and it was not a gauzy movie death like Gary Cooper in  Beau Geste or Bette Davis in Dark Victory. This was slow and painful and ugly. My mother was a housekeeping supervisor for nearly 30 years. She's told me the story of how a guest hung herself one night back in the 70s. The maid and the houseman who found her were horrified and the houseman just moaned and fell back out of the room when he saw her. I don't know who cleaned up the bodily fluids and solids but someone had to in order for the room to be usable again. Unlike that woman who hung herself from a closet door and jumped, Robin Williams's death  was probably slow and painful. The Academy sugar coated poison and I hope no person suffering from depression decides that killing themselves will set them "free". 

• Have you noticed that the cries of support for the Iraqi Christians from American Christian (I'm including Catholics in this)  leaders have been pretty weak? Have you ever noticed how  Protestants seem to find the Catholics and Orthodox of the Holy Land particularly embarrassing and never mention them when they talk about Israel? A young Protestant blogger wrote something that I could dismiss as the folly of youth except for the fact that it tracks perfectly with the thought of Evangelicals that I have known. She thinks the Christians of Iraq aren't really Christian because they are Catholic. I doubt that she even knows these people's ancestors were practicing the Faith 1000 years before her sect was even invented.