'Lord, won't you bring me some brain dead work'...(sing to tune 'Lord Won't You Buy Me a Mercedes Benz').Every blue moon (once a financial quarter) I have to do repetitive "brain dead" work on the 'puter. In the pre-Internet days, this would drive you certifiable. But now I can listen to podcasts like this one, and this one, and this one. Embarrassment of riches.
Unrelated, I was perusing a book on the Apocalypse by a fellow named Feret, and he quoted Pope Pius XI in 1938 saying that very young children would see, in their lifetimes, the world's glorious return to Christianity. Or words to that effect. I tried to find the full context on the 'net but haven't found it. Seems he was really going out on a limb given that he'd just written an encyclical condemning the Nazis and the threat of war loomed on the horizon. He certainly seemed the optimistic sort. I kind of like his prediction if only because it is/was so refreshingly contrarian. Every tom, dick and harry says the world is ending tomorrow; that sort of pessimism is easy. It seems like you need that sort of optimism in order to be a doer, and Pius was a doer. From Catholic Culture:
Pius XI was before everything else a reformer. Nothing in the Church remained quite the same after he had touched it and it is a paradox that the historian, the lover of things dead and gone, felt no compulsion on him to leave things unchanged merely because they "had always been that way." It was the late Cardinal Cerretti who said that his Pontificate was one of the most personal and individualistic on record. To those about him he seemed possessed of a perfect fury to correct all that was wrong or relaxed in the Church, and to get it all done in a hurry before the shadows fell. There is not a single one of us whose life is the same as it was before he came. He literally shook the Church up.
Time Warner guy came over to try to sell me some premium channels. HBO, Showtime, etc. He looked to be in his mid-to-late '60s, lots of energy; incongruous was his aged face and white hair with the new-fangled bluetooth that matched the color of his eyes. A kindly old gent it seemed. And yet he bragged on Sex in the City, a show which induces vomiting in me despite having seen only half of one episode. Certain pop culture markers become more than the sum of their parts, and that show has become symbolically for me at least a great evil. There was also the fact that HBO was having, on a Thursday evening at 7pm, some pornography sex show. Time Warner guy was amazed I didn't want the channels. How could I explain that Hollywood is synonymous with "crappy movies"? He said he couldn't just give me a price break, but he could give me the channels for free and then I could cancel and receive the price break. Games companies play.
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