One of our astute readers in the Diocese of Richmond sent me a very amusing, very telling email today:
...thought you might get a kick out of it since you seem to be following our travails in the Richmond Diocese. TQ's comments, which you linked, reminded me of the funniest thing I've seen this year. Some brief background:
TQ mentioned "a manual" that was discussed in Bp. DiLorenzo's homily. The "manual" was a document prepared a couple years ago by Bp. Sullivan and his cronies that deals with the goals, strengths, weaknesses, etc., of the diocese. (They mostly get the strengths and weaknesses backwards, as you might expect). Supposedly, they got input from the parishes in preparing it, but at the parish level very few people seem to have heard of it.
They seem to have presented it to Bp. DiLorenzo with great fanfare -- "this is the course the diocese wants/needs to follow" -- so Bp. DiLorenzo talked a lot about it in his homily.
Then he went on the road, meeting lay leaders, and discovered that very few had heard of the document. The diocesan newspaper, reporting on the meeting, quoted him as asking "Is this document relevant, or is it a house job?"
I figured that by "house job" he meant, like, an "in-house" thing by the diocesan staff that wasn't really relevant to the situation "on the ground" in the parishes -- which is true enough.
But Tuesday, the new edition of the diocesan paper arrived with this correction, which gave me one of those wonderful diet-Coke-through-the-nose moments:
"Corrections: The term used by Bishop Francis X. DiLorenzo ... was "hose job," and not "house job" as was printed in the June 21 issue..."Hose job, of course, means snow job. As though blowing sunshine in the direction of the Bishop will distract him from the real work of the Church.
I'm really starting to like Bp. DiLorenzo. A lot.
Thank you, anonymous reader, for your email and a Diet-Coke-through-the-nose moment.
I haven't heard the term "hose job" before, so I looked it up on the 'net. Famed auto mechanic Tom Magliozzi says it's the art of "sweeping" one's driveway with a spray of water from a garden hose: a lazy man's substitute for doing the chores one should be doing. Could this be how the bishop meant it?
Well. That was the funniest thing I've read in a long time.
Check this out:
http://snipurl.com/7nt3
Cacciaguida linked to this story, which is how I found it.
BTW, is there any way your MT install could be modified to make hyperlinks in comments work? When I try to make a hyperlink, it makes a empty non-functional link, hence my use of a snipurl.com address to link to the story.
If things are working right, PFKAAC, you should be able to use HTML tags. Let me add a link using that URL you cited.
RC,
Okay, I'll give it a try. I'm entering:
<a href=http://snipurl.com/7nt3>Here.</a>
Here.
Hmm. Mine still didn't work, even though the HTML I entered is exactly as it is displayed above and is correct. I used the pop-up comment box in the above post; I'm trying from the archive page now:
Here.
TPFKaAC,
you need to put quotation marks around the URL when you're writing the tag. The quotes go right after the = sigh (no spaces) and before the close brackets.
Here.
It worked! Thanks, Peony! I forgot that I was supposed to put quotes around the URL, since other commenting systems (Haloscan, Blogger's native comments) work without them.