Pontiff-icating...
Regular readers of my babble will know that I'm not a very religious person. Religion makes people blow up babies, fly planes into buildings and shoot doctors, and that's really not my scene. Makes it kind of hard to be a Republican this day and age without religion, but oh well. I'd put myself on the spirituality scale at somewhere between apathetic agnostic and downright atheist.
For some reason though, I've always had nothing but admiration for Pope John Paul II though. I mean talk about a guy who's just serene and likable. A friend of mine had an audience with him 4 or 5 years ago, and said tearfully when I asked him about the picture he had of it "you look into his eyes, and I swear God is looking back at you.
JP II burst on the scene in the late 1970s, and no one had ever seen a skiing Pope before. No one had ever seen a globetrotting pope quite like him before either...and he only intensified his travels after the assasination attempt, tooling around in his Popemobile. His serenity and charisma overwhelmed everyone he met, and even as his health began to fade, he kept on smiling and kept his schedule up.
Now it looks like the end is nigh. I'm not sure exactly where folks go when they die, but wherever it is, the Pope deserves top-notch accomodations.
On a lighter note, the NY Times ran a piece today about the 20th anniversary of one of the greatest hoaxes in sports, Sidd Finch. Fun reading. I still have the original SI somewhere...
Regular readers of my babble will know that I'm not a very religious person. Religion makes people blow up babies, fly planes into buildings and shoot doctors, and that's really not my scene. Makes it kind of hard to be a Republican this day and age without religion, but oh well. I'd put myself on the spirituality scale at somewhere between apathetic agnostic and downright atheist.
For some reason though, I've always had nothing but admiration for Pope John Paul II though. I mean talk about a guy who's just serene and likable. A friend of mine had an audience with him 4 or 5 years ago, and said tearfully when I asked him about the picture he had of it "you look into his eyes, and I swear God is looking back at you.
JP II burst on the scene in the late 1970s, and no one had ever seen a skiing Pope before. No one had ever seen a globetrotting pope quite like him before either...and he only intensified his travels after the assasination attempt, tooling around in his Popemobile. His serenity and charisma overwhelmed everyone he met, and even as his health began to fade, he kept on smiling and kept his schedule up.
Now it looks like the end is nigh. I'm not sure exactly where folks go when they die, but wherever it is, the Pope deserves top-notch accomodations.
On a lighter note, the NY Times ran a piece today about the 20th anniversary of one of the greatest hoaxes in sports, Sidd Finch. Fun reading. I still have the original SI somewhere...
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