Call me Savonarola, but the outdoor blender powered by a two-stroke gasoline engine might be something you don't really need.
Recently in Odds & Ends Category
Kathy Shaidle blogs about the Sisters Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, a washed-up teaching order whose 200 remaining members have an average age of 86. They haven't let that statistic stop them from undertaking a $56 million eco-renovation on their headquarters near Detroit.
At this point, they owe $37 mil on the construction costs, and Heaven knows if they can ever foot the bill. I certainly wouldn't want to be their creditor.
The sisters seem to be very progressive-minded, but may have overlooked a possible justice issue somewhere: taking on debts that you know you can never repay. Or is this a sort of reverse mortgage, where the sisters get to enjoy the loan now and pledge to give up the property later?
Eventually the building can be sold and converted into a Museum of Dead Religious Movements or a John Cardinal Dearden Cultural Center. (Oh; same thing.)
Update: Here's another angle on this: if you have $56M to spend, consider the option of not spending it. Conservatively invested, it would generate about 10% a year, or $5.6M. You can do a lot of building maintenance with that, and still have money left to buy some carbon-credit indulgences.
Here's an audio transcript of the event:
[The Saturday afternoon Mass is in progress, and the congregation is singing.]
Cantor and congregation: Here I am, Laud...
[SUDDEN NOISE: CRRRAACCCKKK!]
A motorists' association in Portugal is writing to the Pope to complain about a priest with a souped-up Fiesta. Offhand, I doubt the letter will get much sympathy in Rome. Isn't driving fast practically mandatory in Italy?
LISBON (Reuters) - A Portuguese group campaigning for safe roads has asked the Vatican to ensure that a priest who owns a souped-up Ford Fiesta "resist the temptations of speed."Father Antonio Rodrigues, Portugal's only owner of a 150-horse-power Ford Fiesta 2000 ST, has boasted of his car's rapid acceleration to 130 miles per hour and "thanked God" for never being fined, the Association of Motorist Citizens said in a letter to the Pope.
"I am no speed freak," daily Correio de Manha quoted Rodrigues as saying Monday. "I have a car that I like but I drive with prudence."
The association's letter, which was published on its Web site (www.aca-m.org), cited the priest as saying he uses the car to take youngsters for spins and to zip around to "arrive on time to the three parish churches."
"We ask Your Holiness to help this unfortunate priest to ponder the gravity of his acts and the immodesty of his words and to resist the temptations of speed and boasting," the letter to the Pope said.
Well, this is just a tool shed in the development, but you get the idea.
I suppose that makes it, ahem, a Roman Catalytic Converter....
Stopping by the local Giant supermarket yesterday, I saw this curious juxtaposition:
(Click to see a slightly larger view.) It's a warning about tainted spinach that has sickened hundreds and even killed at least one person. Next to it is a Halloween decoration with a pile of skulls. I don't think it was a warning or a joke. But it sure is funny, at least in a macabre kind of way.
A few weeks ago, the NYT offered the fascinating story of a group of jungle-dwelling people in Colombia that decided to give up its nomadic life and come out of the bush.
Alas for the Nukak, introducing aboriginal people into settled life brings risks to their culture, their health, and even their mental health. They came out to "join the white family" for their own safety, as Communist guerrillas and coca growers are operating in their area.
(via The Confessionator)
The well-known homilist Fr. Robert Altier is under orders from his Minnesota bishop to stop distributing his talks via internet. We don't know the rationale for this yet, so I have snapped up a copy of his audio files (without his knowledge, of course) and saved it at my home machine (subject to change). I haven't listened to much there, but I'm favorably impressed so far. The audio files use a proprietary commercial format called DSS, so you'll probably need to install the "Olympus DSS Lite" player.
Note to downloaders: Limit your downloading to one connection at a time. A guy in Florida is currently reading five files at once and eating my home machine's entire bandwidth.
