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  6. Alright. So first I hear that Pope Francis has more or less condoned gay marriage (although I don’t think he’s allowing the priests to conduct services, and God forbid a woman should be up on the altar doing it) but now I just read that there’s a patron saint of hangovers!

    Do you think this is true? Or just a restaurant marketing hoax? From what I know there are patron saints of everything. This is one of the many examples of how the Catholic Church mirrors the “heathen” Roman practices that they were so quick to condemn. It’s barely a monotheistic religion, what with the Trinity and the saints and all. And even the structure of the Church. For centuries the small cities around Italy and other parts of Europe had Cardinals because the Roman bureaucracy had consuls and pro-consuls there. Meanwhile, huge cities like New York, with vast numbers of Catholics, it took forever to elevate the religious leaders to Cardinals.

    That said, happy 2024 everyone. I will see you tomorrow. I hope.

    • I cannot, I CANNOT, recommend the Poseidon Adventure highly enough. Not the sequel, and not that dreadful remake with Kurt Russell. But you know what’s even more excellent is Paul Gallico’s novel, which is quite long and is this existential enterprise that the movie sharply curtailed to cut down on the number of characters and to move the plot along.

      Try to find a copy if you can/want. This wiki entry doesn’t do justice to it. What do people do in desperate circumstances? The novel has quite a few not-so-savory characters, and this plot twist at the end…no spoilers.

      But the movie: it’s always nice to see Shelley Winters and Gene Hackman and Roddy McDowell (who had an incredibly prolific career. He was up there with Sean Connery in the number of roles he took on.) And all the others. Ernest Borgnine. You would think that McHale of “McHale’s Navy” would know a little bit more about how a ship operates and where things might be, but no, it’s left to clergyman Gene Hackman to do all the heavy lifting.

      Fabulous. The whole thing is fabulous. Plus, after ceaseless pestering, it was the first non-G-rated movie my parents ever took me to, and of course my youngest sister had to come, too, because we were inseparable, and I was barely 9 and she was 7. Good times. Imagine bringing a 7-year-old to a screening of The Poseidon Adventure. But we survived. We weren’t exactly helicopter-parented, I’ll say that much, but no one really was. My father used to wake me out of a sound sleep so that I’d watch “Saturday Night Live” with him. I was 12 when it debuted and I’d go to school the following Monday and talk about the skits and one busybody teacher got wind of this and called my parents in for a little chat. My mother said, “He’s already read Fear of Flying, I can’t imagine that that show, whatever it’s called, is any more inappropriate.” Ah, my freewheeling, flea-market going, widely read mother.

      WHICH REMINDS ME, when I took my AP English exam I really wanted to talk about Fear of Flying but that wasn’t an option in the essay section so I wrote about religious symbolism in Faulkner instead. Not nearly as interesting, but I got a 5, the highest mark you could get, and it exempted me from two semesters of mandatory English classes when I got to college.

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