Our new pope is already listed in an online encyclopedia as Pope Benedict XVI.
Granted, this is a quickie re-direct from the original entry as Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, but I still think it’s cool.
Randomly Flexible Modalities
When you are a student at MIT and you are in the mood to play a trick on someone, you can’t just Vaseline their doorknob or fiddle with the settings on their spell checker. People expect a little higher grade of tomfoolery from future code writers. So, when these two MIT chums got more bored than usual they decided to play a hoax on the World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics! No, seriously!
They sat down and wrote this nifty program that randomly generates scientific research papers, including charts and diagrams and tech-speak so jargon-bloated and convoluted that it’s difficult to distinguish from REAL scientific gibberish (I learned a little of this kind of thing myself, when I took a seminar in Grant Writing) and their paper was accepted for presentation at the conference!
They are now trying to raise money to travel to the conference and give a randomly generated talk on their paper. The event organizers aren’t too excited about that, though, and may not let them in. The paper is hilarious to read because you know it’s fake, and the story also has a link you can follow to randomly generate your own scientific treatise!
The Best Defence…
Already conservatives are on the defensive, trying to calm the irrational fears of the fringe (theological) left of the Church, assuring them that Pope Benedict won’t be that bad. Even FOX News has been sucked into this. Just now I saw a piece all about the concerns of "many American Catholics" that the new Pope is too authoritarian and traditional.
Hel-lo-o-o-o? You could just as easily frame the story this way: "Many American Catholics Elated at Conclave’s Outcome" or "Many American Catholics Eager For New Pope’s Likely Reforms". Why let these shrieking harpies set the agenda?
I confess, I did check in at BeliefNet last night just to revel in Andrew Sullivan’s perplexed rage. His most telling comment was comparing Benedict XVI to JPII. How does Sullivan think the new Pope will stack up against the most beloved figure of modern times? He laments that he will be "even more hardline" than JPII.
Let’s hope pray so!
READ SULLIVAN’S RANT HERE, if you can stomach it. I found it most enjoyable.
E-Mail Note
Just a note to let folks know that I have a lot going on this week and may not be able to reply to e-mails in as timely a manner as I’d like. (Not that I’m able to get to them all to begin with, but just wanted to let folks know.)
Hillary: Less Than Advertised?
Hillary Clinton is being treated as if she’s a political supergenius.
Y’know, you hear all those stories in the press about how she’s "cleverly repositioning" herself to fool voters into thinking that she’s not a shieking, hard-left harpy in anticipation of the 2008 elections, in which she will be a virtually unstoppable juggernaut because she’ll have pulled the wool over the American public’s eyes so completely that we won’t remember she was ever a hard-left harpy and won’t notice all the hard-lefties supporting her in 2008 giving each other all the "wink, wink, nudge, nudge" signs as she says things to further her non-hard-left harpy image.
What a supergenius politician!
What A Surprise
BOSTON GLOBE WRITER FABRICATES STORY.
But it was in such a good cause!
The story she fabricated was about baby seals being clubbed to death! Couldn’t let an absence of facts get in the way of a story like that! People needed to be emotionally manipulated by her making up details of a seal hunt that hadn’t happened!
(CHT to the reader who e-mailed!)
Three Unimportant Thoughts
- How proud John Paul II would be if only he’d lived to see the election of Benedict XVI. (Oh wait. He already knows.)
- The Cardinal who announced the election paused dramatically after "Joseph" and before "Ratzinger." What showmanship!
- It’s kind of neat hearing a press conference in Latin and knowing what’s being said before the translation kicks in.
Ratz!
That’s what I’d be saying if I was disappointed.
But I’m not!
I’m delighted!
YEE-HAW!!!
God bless Benedict XVI!
Man, he wasn’t even done with the Urbi et orbi and I was wanting his first encyclical already.
Good money it’ll be on relativism and hook directly into apologetics.
HABEMUS PAPAM!
White smoke and bells ringing in Vatican City.
The right bells this time, and yeah, the smoke is definitely white.
At this writing, we don’t yet know who it is… more soon….
Habemus confusion
So sometimes the smoke, it’s not so clear whether it’s grey like black or grey like white.
Yesterday’s first appearance of smoke led to cheers in St. Peter’s Square until it became clear that the smoke was black.
Back in 1978, the opposite happened, when the white smoke was initially mistaken for black after the election of John Paul II.
So John Paul II, he said, we should do bells now, not just smoke. You don’t hear bells — no habemus papam.
Okay. But there’s this little problem.
The bells in St. Peter’s Basilica, they ring at noon.
Every day.
This morning they rang at noon as the cardinals were breaking for lunch — after another unsuccessful vote.
While smoke was billowing from the chimney.
Nobody at the Vatican thinks, maybe during the conclave we shouldn’t ring the bells at noon, when people are listening for bells to see if habemus papam?