View from my perch

Trivia Treasure Trove

I stumbled upon a veritable trivia treasure trove at Did You Know????????????????? from "Yahoo! Answers". Some three hundred and twenty trivia tidbits are listed. A particularly funny one is #314.

314. Attila the Hun (invader of Europe, 5th century), Felix Faure (French President; 1841-1899), Pope Leo VII (936-939), Pope John VII (955-964), Pope Leo VIII (963-965), Pope John XIII (965-972), Pope Paul II (1467-1471), Lord Palmerston (British Prime Minister, 1859-1865), Nelson Rockefeller (US Vice President, 1974-1977), and John Entwistle (The Who's bassist) all died while having sex.

Wait a minute, what are Popes doing in that list?! The only possible explanation is that these Popes were Popes before some later Pope proclaimed infallibly that priests -- presumably including Popes -- are to be celibate.

The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara

The Vatican claimed Edgardo Mortara, who was Jewish, had been secretly baptized when he was two years old by a servant who wanted to save his soul. In 1858, when Edgardo was six, the Vatican ordered that the boy be taken from his home in Bologna, then a papal state, to be raised Catholic. In the face of an international outcry, Pope Pius IX adopted the boy.

This story is told in an episode of the PBS mini-series Secret Files of The Inquisition. It draws on the book The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara, by David I. Kertzer.

 

Dinosaur toys

There is something odd about seeing children of fundamentalist Christian parents playing with dinosaur toys. So long as the dinosaurs are terrorizing and/or eating the other toys -- including Bob the Builder -- it makes some sense.

OK, so maybe the dinosaurs did go extinct because of the flood. That would have them contemporaries of, yes Noah. And since dinosaurs were also specially created by God -- God knows why -- they went extinct because they were not on the Ark. Which means that Noah disobeyed his  direct order to put two of EVERY living creature on the boat. Which, besides the difficulty of sexing* dinosaurs, seems a wise as well as practical decision; perhaps he could foresee (or was told by God in some lost Bible-footnote) that the only survivor of the voyage would otherwise have been the largest of the carnivorous dinosaurs. The whole Ark thing would have amounted to adequately provisioning one big nasty first class passenger at the expense of all others.

Thankfully all of that matters not to little children playing with toys and -- perhaps like their parents -- not thinking very much. All kids are FUNdamentalists!

Lesson: Keeping terrorists off cruise ships is still a good idea.

*Sexing: in this usage, meaning to identify the sex of. Remember that dinosaur design in that department would have been along the line of reptiles and birds. Tried sexing your gecko lately?

(Rights to the Ark story for a new mega-commercial-movie are hereby reserved to John Cleese and company.)