Does the name Grzegorz Kaszak mean anything to you? Half of the letters are K, G, and Z. Anyway, Grzegorz is the ex-bishop of Sosnowiec in Southwestern Poland who quit on Tuesday on account of a sex scandal. I know, right? — Hard to imagine a sex scandal involving the Church even making the news anymore, — if a day goes by without one it’s a miracle — but this one is juicy. One of the priests organized a gay sex party during which a male prostitute lost consciousness from an overdose of erectile disfunction pills. [We’ve all been there, right fellas?] So one of the priests called an ambulance but the others prevented the paramedics from treating the poor unconscious guy. So the paramedics called the cops and finally the priests relented. “Okay, Okay — go ahead and save his sexy little ass if you’re gonna get all pissy about it.”
The priest who set it all up defended himself by quibbling over how many priests were present and stated: “it is worth reading what the definition of an orgy is.” Jeez Louise: even the Giants can come up with a better defense than that.
According to the NYT, the resignation came less than a month after the Polish Catholic Church, in a lengthy report on the state of its affairs, warned that priests needed to get a grip on “crimes of sexual abuse of minors by some clergy” and other misbehavior.
You tell ’em, Polish Church!! Get a grip, guys!
Here’s our hapless Bishop, who still hasn’t quite gotten his game face on yet.
Chatting with a nurse in a doc’s office today, we casually mentioned seeing Taylor’s concert movie and it unleashed a torrent. Turns out she is a major-league Swiftie. Saw the ERAS Tour concert live twice and movie once. Has been a fan since TS was 16. Has a tattoo (on upper chest) of a song verse in Taylor’s handwriting, another tattoo (on leg) of some insignia with TS significance, won a contest sponsored by Pepsi years ago that netted her a trip to Nashville for a concert and a personal brief meeting with TS herself (showed us the photo on her phone), and almost flew to Norway for a concert but the pandemic hit. I think that may be about it.
Hi Taylor — remember Chelsea? An RN — dark hair?
Headline in The Onion: Exhausted Doctors Pronounce Patient Dead Enough.
This unusual poem is today’s Poem of the Day from the Poetry Foundation. It’s by Thomas Lux and is called “The People of the Other Village.”
The people of the other village
hate the people of this village
and would nail our hats
to our heads for refusing in their presence to remove them
or staple our hands to our foreheads
for refusing to salute them
if we did not hurt them first: mail them packages of rats,
mix their flour at night with broken glass.
We do this, they do that.
They peel the larynx from one of our brothers’ throats.
We devein one of their sisters.
The quicksand pits they built were good.
Our amputation teams were better.
We trained some birds to steal their wheat.
They sent to us exploding ambassadors of peace.
They do this, we do that.
We canceled our sheep imports.
They no longer bought our blankets.
We mocked their greatest poet
and when that had no effect
we parodied the way they dance
which did cause pain, so they, in turn, said our God
was leprous, hairless.
We do this, they do that.
Ten thousand (10,000) years, ten thousand
(10,000) brutal, beautiful years.
In the puzzle today “Bottoms out?” was MOONS. (Get it? Tee hee.)
And “Curriculum overhaul triggered by the Sputnik crisis,” was NEW MATH. Remember that? Part of it was learning bases other than ten. An uproar from parents and teachers (never mind the poor students) resulted in its rapid abandonment.
Wikipedia explains: In his book Why Johnny Can’t Add: The Failure of the New Math (1973), Morris Kline says that certain advocates of the new topics “ignored completely the fact that mathematics is a cumulative development and that it is practically impossible to learn the newer creations, if one does not know the older ones.” Furthermore, noting the trend to abstraction in New Math, Kline says “abstraction is not the first stage, but the last stage, in a mathematical development.”
“New Math” is now used as a phrase to describe any fad that burns out quickly.
Here’s a shot of Niece Tamar with the birds and us. We had a blast. See you tomorrow!
The Wellington Files 