Can any of our readers suggest the best Spanish course on tape? Please email me if you can! Tape, CD or Tape/CD/Software combination is fine. Thanks a million!

Has some great stuff today. See the link at the right. Or if you are facing the other way it’s on your left.

G. Thomas Fitzpatrick has joined our burgeoning virtual parish with Verus Ratio. Who doesn’t like a former lawyer who quit because the professional is “too liberal?” He even writes for the New Oxford Review! Read the following:
Liturgical Abuse, part 1 – I can’t wait for subsequent posts on this.
Cigar time – I gave up those railroad spikes of death but I know what he means.
Israeli/Palestinian Conflict – I am in complete agreement with you, Counselor!

to tell me about a drug that will cure the common cold. The reason the FDA won’t approve it is disturbing. From the Touchstone Magazine website.

Infobeat News reports that the FDA has rejected a medicine, called Picovir, that will cure the common cold. Americans, it says, suffer one billion colds each year. Why would the FDA reject a medicine that will make nearly every American feel a lot better, keep people working untold thousands of days, make social contact much less, um, sticky, and keep millions of children in school? The FDA says that “the drug’s potential side effects . . . make it unacceptable to treat what is mostly a nuisance illness rather than a serious medical condition.” Does it cause cancer, hurt the heart, ruin the kidneys, what? Reports the story: “Most notabl[e]” of the side effects is . . .
Wait for it.
You’re not going to believe this.
Really.
“cutting the effectiveness of birth control pills.”
Because some women with a cold might not pay attention to the warning label, the rest of us — all 200 million-some of us — have to sniffle and snort and ache and lay in bed feeling awful when we could be doing something useful. It is more important to the FDA to ensure that some people can have sex without having babies than to let everyone else feel a lot better and do a lot more. We live in a very strange world.

The Cathedral of St. Thomas More has a stunning architectural feature. High above the altra is a huge glass dome. Not stained glass, just your average window glass. Today during the consecration with the Bishop and five newly ordained priests at the altar the sun was shining brilliantly on all of them straight down from the dome. What kind of miracle is that that on exactly this day at this time the sun would be lined up in that manner? It was like Heaven poured out on the altar at that moment. When the bread and wine became the body, blood, soul and divinity of our Lord it was as much of Heaven that we can experience on this Earth.