Author: Jimmy Akin

Jimmy was born in Texas, grew up nominally Protestant, but at age 20 experienced a profound conversion to Christ. Planning on becoming a Protestant seminary professor, he started an intensive study of the Bible. But the more he immersed himself in Scripture the more he found to support the Catholic faith, and in 1992 he entered the Catholic Church. His conversion story, "A Triumph and a Tragedy," is published in Surprised by Truth. Besides being an author, Jimmy is the Senior Apologist at Catholic Answers, a contributing editor to Catholic Answers Magazine, and a weekly guest on "Catholic Answers Live."

Okay, I’m really not that sleepy. (Or wasn’t *AT THAT TIME.*) I picked a frame where I’m blinking.

But you can see other frames with my eyes wide open (if you have an interest in that).

GET THE VIDEO. (55 meg; high-speed required.)

(Cowboy hat tip: Small But Disorganized for capturing & hosting it!)

NOTE: The video may only be available for a limited time only due to download restraints.

Scary Coincidence #2

It’s the year 2001.

A jet liner leaves on a journey, one of whose terminii is Boston’s Logan Airport.

It’s filled with passengers.

Shortly after takeoff, it’s hijacked.

The goal of the hijackers?

Slam it into the World Trade Center and spark a war.

I’m talking about 9/11, right?

Wrong!

I’m talking about the pilot episode (no pun intended!) of The Lone Gunmen.

The Lone Gunmen, as you may know, were three conspiracy buff/lovable loser types who first appeared on The X-Files as a kind of background think-tank, research group on which Mulder (and later Scully) could draw.

The three provided not only impossible insights on cases Mulder and Scully were trying to crack, they also provided priceless comic relief, and in the end they proved so popular that they got their own series!

But it only lasted 13 episodes and ended with a cliffhanger that had to be tied up back on The X-Files (not entirely satisfactorily, to my mind).

In the first episode of their series, they faced a situation that was eerily prescient of 9/11, just as Futilility–or–The Wreck Of The Titan was eerily prescient of the Titanic disaster (that was scary coincidence #1, btw).

When 9/11 happened, I went "Oh, wow! This is just like the pilot episode of The Lone Gunmen!"

Except, of course, that in the TV show they managed at the last second to avert the plane so that it didn’t hit the World Trade Center (except for knocking over an antenna on the roof).

Also on the show, the event was engineered by a rougue group within the government rather than Osama bin Laden. (Though Daily Kos readers may think that is real life for all I know.)

The Lone Gunmen just came out on DVD, giving me the chance to re-watch the pilot episode and the rest (including the X-Files episode tying everything up, which is also included in the set).

Too bad it didn’t last longer.

GET THE SERIES.

Incidentally, something seemed to be buzzing around the collective Hollywood intellect about 9/11 in the year before it happened. Joe Michael Straczynski, creator of Babylon 5, had been working on a series tentatively called World On Fire, which was so similar in content to 9/11 and the events that followed that he scrapped the whole thing after those events unfolded. What he planned to be a dynamic, daring television series had now become the nightly news. (Maybe that was scary coincidence #3.)

Photo Caption

[SOURCE.]

STARTING CAPTIONS:

Dr. Rice Extends Diplomatic Embassy To Land Of Oz
Ikea Has Sale On Giant Chairs

Papabile Roundup #1

~~LONG WRITE-UPS OF POSSIBLE PAPABILE.~~ (Netscape News took down the story.)

LATIN-AMERICAN SPECULATION.

LIST OF PAPAL ELECTORS.

Some Dates

What I’m about to write will very quickly be overridden by events, but based on the apostolic constitution Universi Dominici Gregis, which lays out what is to happen after the death of the pope, it’s possible to determine when certain things are likely to happen. There is some play in what dates they should occur on, though, and the fact that the pope died not long before midnight makes it a little harder to guess what they’re going to count as the benchmark day, but the Cardinals will be announcing the official plans soon.

In any event,

The pope’s funeral is to occur four to six days after his death. Since he died on Saturday the 2nd, that should place his funeral between Wednesday the sixth and Friday the ~~ninth~~eighth.
The conclave is tentatively set to start on the fifteenth day after his death, which would be Sunday the 17th, but since that is a Sunday they might start it Monday the 18th to avoid conflicting with liturgical celebrations of one of the Sundays of Easter. They have the flexibility to delay it up until the 20th day after his death, which would be Friday the 22nd.

Once the conclave begins, there is no way of knowing precisely how long it will last, though I suspect that it will last only 2-4 days, based on recent conclaves.

Blogging Note

BTW, I want to apologize for the spotty blogging the last few days. It may last a few days more. Same goes for tardiness in answering e-mail that I’m getting.

The pope’s death has shredded my usual routine, and those late night appearances on Fox, particularly the first (which basically resulted in a five-plus hour period of wakefulness after midnight) has left me feeling quite zombified. I’m trying to get as much rest as I can and conserve my concentration for upcoming media appearances.

New Media Appearance

They’re telling me now that I’m supposed to be on Fox News again with Shepherd Smith between 7 p.m. and 8 p.m. Eastern today.

UPDATE: I’m told the "hit time" for my appearance is approx. 7:40 p.m. Eastern.

UPDATE 2: Ed Peters, Mark Brumley, and Tim O’Donnell are supposed to be on Geraldo at Large (starts at 10 11 p.m. Eastern).

Scary Coincidences #1

It was the largest seagoing vessel of its time. Eight hundred feet long and capable of carrying 3,000 passengers, it was so large that its name evoked the Greek giants, the Titans of legend.

Hulled with steel, the British ship was regarded as "unsinkable," yet en route to New York, one April evening, it was struck by an iceberg on its starboard side around midnight and sank to the ocean floor, causing massive loss of life.

I’m talking about the Titanic, right?

Wrong!

As many readers may know, I’m talking about the Titan–a ship described in the 1898 novel Futility–or–The Wreck of the Titan by Morgan Robertson.

His novel eerily presaged the actual Titanic disaster that would occur in 1912.

After the disaster, Robertson revised the book to make it even more similar to the real-life disaster, but the above parallels were taken from the original edition.

They are only some of several, you can also