Author: SDG

World Misspent Youth Day

Wmyd Now that you’ve missed it, Pope Benedict XVI has allowed The Curt Jester to lift the veil of secrecy on a parallel event to World Youth Day held in Bonn, Germany: World Misspent Youth Day!

"I was lucky enough to be invited to attend the first annual World Misspent-Youth Day that was held in Bonn, Germany. Our event was much more low-key than World Youth Day going on adjacently in Cologne and the Holy Father did not want WM-YD to upstage WYD. The above is the official logo for WM-YD which has St. Augustine pictured on it since he can truly be considered to be the patron saint of misspent-youth. World Misspent-Youth Day was open to those 35 and above who in their youth lead lives not exactly pious, which really means open to all of us 35 and above. This was the first year for this event and of course there were problems and other wrinkles (which only makes sense) that developed. In spite of that I believe it was fairly successful and that we will see future WM-YDs in the future."

GET THE PARODY.

The bad news is that I wasn’t also invited to relive my misspent youth with the Holy Father. The good news is that I’m still too young to attend this event.

Ring Of Mom

Ashring

In our ever more utopian society, not only are people eagerly seeking ways to cull out unproductive human beings from the herd and mark them for warehousing and death, but it is now seeking ways to make even the dead productive.  If you thought that the one blessing of being dead was that you would be safe from such designs, think again.

So, your mother, sister, uncle, grandfather, or child didn’t earn his or her keep and is now "departed this Earth"?  Or perhaps that person was someone you deeply loved who died a natural death and so you want to cling to his remains.  What do you do with the ashes?

If you’re Michael Schiavo, you bury them beneath a marker that acts as an eternal apologist for your agenda. But if you are the more sentimental sort, you might turn your relative’s ashes into jewelry:

"Laura Curtin falls silent as she slowly lifts the jewelry box lid.

"The 1.27-carat yellow diamond inside glistens brilliantly as it catches the sunlight through the funeral home window.

"Curtin’s eyes fill with tears.

"This isn’t just any diamond. It’s a tribute to her mother, created from her ashes."

GET THE STORY.  (Use BugMeNot.com to bypass the Evil Registration Requirement.)

SEE THE SITE OF LIFEGEM.COM.

(Nod to the friend who forwarded to me the links.)

Of course, in this particular case, Laura Curtin’s mother wasn’t particularly helpful to her daughter’s understanding of a dignified means of handling her remains. Curtin reports that when she asked her mother what she thought of the idea of becoming a cultured diamond, her mother said "That’s fine. I’ll be your problem then. You figure out what to do with me."

So, not only did this mother not request a dignified disposition of her body, but she equated the disposition of her remains with being her daughter’s "burden." Just such thinking is what spawns the quest to make human beings productive by any means possible.

Sold! …To Mom, For Chores

Two teens who sold a week of their time on eBay learned, to their evident disappointment, that the winner of the auction was the mother of one of the amateur entrepreneurs. Determined to save the kids from more than they may have bargained for, and seeing possibilities in buying their time, Mom has worked with the other teen’s mother to draft plans for this duo:

"[C]ollege-bound students Chip Davis and Chris Pullen learned the identity of their eBay ‘buyer’: Davis’ mother, Mary.

"’Like I’m going to let some pedophile or whatever win? I don’t think so,’ she said Friday. ‘I would have paid $5,000 for the safety of those two — no question.’

"The auction concluded Monday. Davis, 18, and Pullen, 19, found out Mary Davis’ secret on Thursday, dashing any hopes that they would at least get to travel because of the auction.

"’After finding out the winner was from St. Joseph, I was disappointed,’ Chip Davis said. ‘But now I’m even more disappointed to find out it was my mom.’

"Mary Davis used a screen name the two would not recognize, and checked the family’s computer in secret to make sure she had the winning bid.

"She said she planned to get her money’s worth out of the two, who will start classes later this month at the University of Missouri-Columbia.

"’It’s a legal contract,’ she said, ‘so the longer they put it off, the longer the list of work will get.’

"The list, compiled with Pullen’s mother, Janet, already includes lawnmowing and room-cleaning duties."

GET THE STORY.

I hope the two mothers save clippings of the newspaper article. Sounds like a good story with which to embarrass these two to their own teenagers fifteen or twenty years from now.

B16 At WYD Cologne

When the new pope was announced, Catholic Answers staffers were crammed into the office’s conference room eagerly watching the television reports of the event (and nearly blew the roof off with cheers when Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger was announced as Pope). In the hubbub that followed, I exclaimed that the upcoming World Youth Day was being held in Cologne, Germany, and a coworker commented that perhaps a positive spirituality is developing around World Youth Day.

Well, Pope Benedict XVI is now in Cologne, Germany, and accounts of his first return to his homeland following his election are upbeat and joyful:

"Standing on the bow of the boat so all could see his white cassock from afar, [the Pope] sailed past crowds of young people lining the bank, many standing thigh-high in the river.

"’To all of you I appeal: open wide your hearts to God. Let yourselves be surprised by Christ! Let him have the right of free speech these days,’ he told them in an address from the boat as his white hair blew in the wind.

"Benedict is on his first foreign trip since he was elected and he appeared to have a successful first day of charming the young people, nearly all of whom had known no other Pope but his charismatic predecessor John Paul.

"He told his fellow countrymen he was happy ‘to be in my beloved homeland, in Germany.’

"The young people chanted ‘Benedetto’ in a football chant cadence as his boat sailed down Germany’s longest river in a snake-curve pattern so more could see him."

GET THE STORY.

Reading this account, I could almost hear a Polish-accented voice also chanting "Benedetto!" and picture John Paul the Great’s mile-wide grin.

As an aside, I loved Pope Benedict’s call for Christ to be allowed the right of free speech. In this politically-correct age, it seems that Christ and his followers are the only ones of whom it is doubted that they should be allowed to speak freely.

Attack Of The Blue Blogs

Now here’s a bit of good news: Did you know that liberals believe that they are a repressed minority? That there is a need to recapture America from those awful Red State conservatives? Evidently so, despite all objective indicators that America is culturally and politically a Blue State society temporarily clinging to Red State voting blocs. Exhibit A: The "mission statement" of LeftyBlogs.com:

"There are a lot of great blogs out there — and it can be tough to track them all, even just in your home state. Here at LeftyBlogs, we’re building the one place you can go to stay on top of all the latest action alerts, news, gossip, and important info that every progressive activist needs.

"Remember, think global and act local. Together, we’ll take back America."

Amusing side note: If you’ve fallen for the myth that only political conservatives are prone to bouts of paranoia, I’m here to explode that myth. LeftyBlogs.com is so protective of its material that I had to literally transcribe the excerpt from LeftyBlogs reproduced above. LeftyBlogs apparently does not allow visitors to copy material through the standard copy-‘n-paste procedure that most bloggers use to post brief excerpts of Internet material.

UPDATE:  Since there are some users who are able to copy-‘n-paste from LeftyBlogs — see the combox — my guess is that it is a technological glitch that prevented my copying, not leftist paranoia.  Thanks to the readers who corrected my error.

Starbucks’ New Quest

Starbuckscup

Trivia for the Day: The coffee chain with a franchise on every corner — and even a few drive-thrus, one of which I was both stunned and amused to see near my home — takes its name from the first mate in the Great American Novel Moby Dick by Herman Melville. In the novel, Starbuck tries his best to stop Captain Ahab from pursuing the great white whale, a quest Starbuck apparently realizes is doomed.

Starbuck’s namesake now has its own futile quest: To normalize homosexuality by advertising the musings of a homosexual writer on its disposable coffee cups:

"The world’s most famous coffee shop chain has begun a program called ‘The Way I See It,’ which is a collection of thoughts, opinions and expressions provided by notable figures that now appear on Starbucks coffee cups, according to the chain’s website.

"But one particular quote — #43 — blatantly pushes the homosexual agenda. It’s by Armistead Maupin, who wrote ‘Tales of the City,’ a bestseller-turned-PBS drama advocating the homosexual lifestyle, and it reads:

"’My only regret about being gay is that I repressed it for so long. I surrendered my youth to the people I feared when I could have been out there loving someone. Don’t make that mistake yourself. Life’s too [expletive] short.’"

GET THE STORY.

Aside from wondering what the fictional Starbuck — or his creator, Herman Melville — might have thought of his namesake’s doomed quest, it occurred to me that it is both sad and utterly appropriate that these "thoughts" are being disseminated on disposable cups destined to be tossed into the nearest litter receptacle once the coffee is gulped down. Rather apropos of the ephemeral nature of false ideologies, isn’t it?

Future Shock

In his book How The Catholic Church Built Western Civilization, author Thomas E. Woods Jr. tells the story of how English monks were on the verge of introducing the Industrial Age to Great Britain when King Henry VIII closed the monasteries and destroyed Catholic religious life in England. As a result of a monarch’s greed, the Industrial Age may well have been postponed some three centuries.

It got me to thinking: What breakthroughs has our modern culture of death prevented us from accomplishing? Although we have accomplished a great deal in the realm of modern science, much of it has been devoted to both fighting and perpetuating the culture of death. The search for cures for deadly venereal diseases, caused in large part by the unchaste lifestyle of modern man, and the fascination with manipulating human life has taken up much of our time, energy, and resources. What if it had been possible to devote those resources to furthering the culture of life?

We can now routinely save premature babies as early as 24 weeks gestation, and have had spotty success as early as 20 weeks. That is no small accomplishment. But will future generations remark that if we hadn’t been consumed with finding ways to murder first-trimester babies in their mothers’ wombs, we might have been able to routinely save first-trimester babies in danger of miscarriage?

If we hadn’t had to focus resources to fighting the worldwide HIV/AIDS pandemic, could we have found a cure for cancer, multiple sclerosis, influenza, or the common cold? Would we have been able to reliably export to the developing world the medicines needed to cure childhood diseases that devastate youngsters in the Third World but are merely a rite of passage in First World countries?

If we hadn’t been diverted by the Cold War and the "need" to compete in the arms race, could we have redirected money used to stockpile weapons of mass destruction into helping developing nations reach maturity on the world stage?

If we hadn’t been consumed with an alleged "right to privacy," "freedom of choice," and "right to die," would we have turned our efforts to the rehabilitation (where possible) and comfort care (where not) of our disabled, elderly, and otherwise dependent citizens? Could Terri Schiavo have been rehabilitated, perhaps even cured, if our society hadn’t been more interested in warehousing and eventually murdering her and those who suffer from similar catastrophic disabilities?

How will future generations judge us? Somehow I doubt they will be impressed with our ability to clone sheep, walk on the moon, and treat (but not cure) venereal disease. They will be more likely to sigh, shake their heads, and note a lot of similarity between our society and that of Tudor England during the Protestant Reformation.

The Conversion Of Shane Paul

From teenage terrorist, to married man, to a late-vocation seminarian, Shane Paul O’Doherty’s story shows that radical Pauline conversions are not merely biblical tales but still happen even in this day and age:

"Before [Shane Paul O’Doherty’s] arrest, he’d become the most wanted man in Britain, a hero for the Irish Republican Army whose letter-bomb campaign had maimed a dozen people and terrorized all of London. We had walked the streets of Derry, his hometown. At that time [of his previous interview with the journalist Kevin Cullen], we paused at the rooming house for British soldiers where he had planted his first bomb in 1970, when he was 15. We passed the spot in the Bogside where Barney McGuigan’s brains spilled out onto the pavement on Bloody Sunday in 1972, when British paratroopers shot and killed 14 civil rights demonstrators. We walked by the apartment in Crawford Square that O’Doherty used as a bomb factory, the one that blew up, killing Ethel Lynch, his 22-year-old assistant.

"He was given his middle name because he was born on the Feast of the Conversion of St. Paul [January 25], who was a zealous killer of Christians before his own conversion on the road to Damascus. But O’Doherty’s story is not about a miraculous religious conversion as much as a gradual spiritual evolution. He had a tug of war with God, and God won. His odyssey, from teenage revolutionary to middle-age seminarian, is a story of redemption.

"’Hell,’ he says, shrugging. ‘If I can be saved, anyone can.’"

GET THE STORY.

Planned Parenthood’s Caped Assassin

Ppsuperhero

Screwtape must be getting a little worried that the diabolical activity at work in our nation’s largest abortuary, Planned Parenthood, is becoming more and more apparent to the casual observer. Planned Parenthood in San Francisco recently unveiled a "superheroine" named "Dianisis" (anyone remember their Greco-Roman mythology?) whose mission is to rid the world of chastity advocates and anti-abortion demonstrators.

EXCERPT:

"The eight-minute [animated video] ‘A Superhero for Choice,’ posted on the Planned Parenthood Golden Gate website, has a bespectacled black woman in San Francisco morphing into a red-suited flying enforcer, bent on making the world safe for the organization’s values.

"Viewers see three teenagers talking with an ugly green-faced man sporting a top hat and bow tie who tries to tell the kids abstinence is the only sure way to protect against sexually transmitted diseases and unwanted pregnancy. The teen girl rebuts the man, naming several birth-control methods.

"Retorts the little green man: ‘Those are instruments from the devil’s toolbox!’

"The superhero arrives in time to fill a trash can with water and dump the pro-abstinence character into it, slamming the cover down. After the man’s muffled voice eventually dies off, the superhero tosses the teens a ‘safe sex kit,’ reminding the kids: ‘Safe is sexy!’

"The ‘Superhero for Choice,’ dubbed Dianisis, next confronts a group of protesters in front of a Planned Parenthood facility. They, too, are ugly and have green faces, carrying signs that say, ‘Pray for thy sins.’

"The superhero character uses a ‘condom gun’ that catches each protester in a prophylactic bubble, which subsequently explodes. Though she admits the protesters have a First Amendment right to picket, she glories in the fact that people can now visit the Planned Parenthood facility unimpeded."

GET THE STORY.

(WARNING: The second image taken from the cartoon and posted with WorldNet’s story is quite graphic.)

ANOTHER WARNING: Surf through the San Francisco Planned Parenthood site at your own risk. Some of the materials that are marketed for teenagers are unmentionable in polite company.