Back!

Back from working on borrowed bandwidth, camping in the corner of the library where I could plug in my old laptop whose battery won't hold a charge. (A guy came by a couple of times, looked at me intently, and seemed to want to say something -- at my age, you respond to that  by telling him you'll be leaving in a minute and then he can have the electrical outlet.)

Back with the same provider only because they offered Theosebus a ton of free services to make up for the long outage.

Back to being able to send email -- except to people whose email doesn' t accept messages from dynamic IP's.

But all in all, glad to be back.

Charlotte answers all our questions

Here. Very kind of her to take the time, as I realize when I read about her everyday routine (70 miles? Every day? That's a couple months' worth of driving for me.)

Yes, I asked the "are you friends with the neighbors yet" question. I'm always interested in how these processes work, or don't, even though I think it's never the same twice. I'm someone who can talk about our neighbors' "annual big party they never invite us to", and laugh, and mean it, but it took me a long time to get to this point.

(And we've got other neighbors who have an annual big party they always invite us to, who in fact felt they had to drop a card in our mailbox this year to say it was pre-empted because of renovations, just in case we got the idea it was on and we weren't invited. So.)

Char was also asked about having any anger at the Church, and ended up writing also about her anger at some Catholics. God knows there're some I'm mad at -- whether it would be a good idea for me to write about that, or whether it would be the top of the slippery slope into mortal sin via whining, I don't know yet.

Anyway, once again, if anyone's reading this, go read her.

Edith the Inadvertent

Bomb Girls night again, and before I go watch Marco visit his dad in the internment camp (where, it seems from the preview, Gladys inexplicably goes with him and gets threatened with indefinite detention herself), I want to think for a moment about another minor character, Edith McAllum.

Her story, though it's just as dramatic as anyone's -- fired, rehired, widowed, unable to tell her kids their father's dead -- doesn't get much screen time. Instead, she is to Lorna Corbett what Carol (q.v.) is to Gladys -- her friend from before the show, lest the viewer think she had none. Edith is also the inadvertent revealer of devastating things. She's the one who let slip to Lorna's husband, Bob, that Lorna was pregnant -- at a time when he knew it couldn't be his. Last week, she unknowingly introduced Bob to the baby's real father. After she'd left, someone got slugged. Not Bob the disabled veteran, either.

It's about time poor Edith got to see the consequences of her words, so she can learn something. If she unintentionally wreaks havoc one more time, I'll start wondering why none of the major characters got this task.

Line of the day

"Cedric the Entertainer as Father Doug Willliams"!

Came across this as I referred to Wikipedia while editing a review of A Haunted House. It seems Father Williams is an exorcist, and while he's also apparently a druggie and a convicted criminal, hey, at least he's given a real, full name. The New Age guy who also tries to cast out the demon is, by contrast, just called Chip the Psychic. Who says Hollywood has no respect for the Catholic priesthood?

Relics relinquished

Again with relics getting stolen, this time from a parish in Missouri -- the good news is, they've been brought back. In a Zip-Loc bag, but all's well etc. 

The priest is wondering whether it's "devotional" or whether the thief wanted to sell them -- but anybody who'd want them would know such things shouldn't be sold.

Most interesting thing I've got to say this evening

If anyone's out there, please take a look at Charlotte's new blog, Such A Pretty Bubble ("My, my, what a pretty Catholic Bubble you have!") 

I've sometimes wished to live in a Catholic bubble. But it's just as well I don't. Mine would be more like a zorb. This zorb.

Bomb (office) girl

On Bomb Girls night, I'd like to reflect for a moment on one of the minor characters, Carol Demers. If she weren't a fictional character, I'd feel slightly sorry for her -- even though she's young, rich, beautiful, and regularly unpleasant. 

What makes her pitiful is that she exists only to make her old friend Gladys, one of the major characters, look good. She does this, first of all, just by being there to show that Gladys had at least one friend before the series began and is not a complete social misfit. Then, her job is to say all the insensitive rich-girl things Gladys can't say because we're supposed to like her -- and get sassed for them.

When the bomb girls show up for a fundraiser at Gladys', Carol greets them with "This isn't the back door!" to which Vera says, "Damn right!"

Vera has grounds to be sassy -- earlier Carol had stopped her from meeting some visitors to the plant, inspectors or something, because Vera's scar might raise safety issues in their minds. You see what I mean.

No matter how it seems sometimes, no real human being is created to be harsh to others -- or to make someone else seem more loveable by comparison. We're all meant to be the best we can, which is usually better than we think . . .okay, time for TV.