born live love die

I picked up a book called “Lead Us Not Into Temptation” about 10 years ago.  It was about sex abuse within the United States Catholic church and the response of the church to claims of sex abuse.  It was pretty gut wrenching to read.  In this article about sex abuse Catholic churches in Ireland, there were some unsettling facts.

In Ireland the stakes for the Vatican are tangible. The abuse reports have led to popular demands that the state disentangle the Catholic Church from the country’s infrastructure. More than 90 percent of primary schools are under church patronage — even though they are state-financed — so that parents generally have no choice but to place their children in a school with what is called a Catholic ethos. Most public hospitals are also controlled by the church, which means that certain procedures that would be commonplace elsewhere have been problematic in Ireland. These include not just abortions — which in December the European Court of Human Rights decreed that Ireland must permit in cases where a woman’s life is at risk — but also vasectomies, among others.

What the hell?  Ireland is functioning as a theocracy.

There were those — like the playwrightGeorge Bernard Shaw and the poet William Butler Yeats — who thought that the potential break with England constituted an occasion for Ireland to cut the strings to the Catholic Church and to embrace a progressive, international sensibility. Others wrapped Irish patriotism together with Catholicism, agrarian traditions and the Gaelic language, and they won the day. Eamon De Valera, the political leader, drafted a constitution side by side with the all-powerful archbishop of Dublin, John Charles McQuaid, which gave the Catholic Church a special role in state affairs and which to this day begins with the words, “In the name of the most holy trinity.”

It is time for at least the Reformation to come to Ireland.

New word: pebbledash

I saw it here:

Andrew Madden is one of a relatively new breed of Irish celebrities who would just as soon be less well known. He was among the first people in Ireland to go public about being sexually abused by Catholic clergy — one of those who set off the intense bout of soul-searching that has racked the country lately. When I met Madden last fall in Dublin, the early rumbles of the collapse of Ireland’s economy were shaking the country, and throughout much of a pub lunch he talked about the failures of the government and the banks. It was only later, once we were driving around his old neighborhood, past the pebbledash house where he grew up and where his parents still live, that he began to talk about his childhood. As we sat in his car in front of Christ the King Church, where he spent much of his youth as an altar boy and a choir member, he outlined the four years of torment he suffered in the late 1970s at the hands of the Rev. Ivan Payne, one of the infamous serial sex offenders among the Irish Catholic clergy whose stories have transfixed the country over the past year and a half.

Pebbledash is a kind of exterior covering for a house.  Plaster or cement is put on the outside, then pebbles are thrown against it to cover the plaster or cement completely.

I have these two cats because the kids wanted cats.  I have had cats before, and I didn’t need to relive the experience.

I still laughed at this.

One of the kids said “wazzup”, so I showed them this:

They now have fun play acting it out.

All the time.

“Hey Dad”

“What”

“WAZZUPPPP”

Bookzilla needed examples of stereotypes in media. She said that she wasn’t a media consumer. I told her to google Glenn Beck.

She did.  She pulled up the site and then said, “What now?”  I told her to play some video.  She played one video, one line of it and hit pause.  It was one long sentence, a run on sentence about Marxists, Communists, Muslim Brotherhood, and more right wingtard touchpoints.  She looked at me, aghast.  I cracked up.  She said that I was using this opportunity to have fun at her expense.  I said it was funny that she heard one sentence and her head exploded.