Cobblestones, new vestments, and swag for Zed Heads

The last couple of days have involved a lot of TV coverage.  The person who invented the DVR deserves prayers.  Everything is recorded, so I can blast through commercials and jump around.  Yesterday I tuned in – sort of – to Wimbledon, slightly more to the World Cup Final, and really to the 9th Stage of the Tour de France.

Stage 9 of the TdF involves dreaded cobblestones, 15 narrow stretches involving some 13 miles!  The cobbles are treacherous enough on foot.

Some don’t make it.

That was an amazing stage.

Today, while working in lunch with a priest, I caught the Trump/Putin Presser, read the NYT piece about the disgusting Card. McCarrick, proofed my weekly column, and unboxed our new green Solemn Mass set from Rome.  We needed a Solemn green set so that we would not unevenly wear the rather more precious Pontifical set.  DONATE!

This has bronze trim, rather than gold.  It looks great!

Here’s the antependium.

Oh… and a new item from my online Z-Swag Store came… I saw that they were now offering a “latte mug”, which has angled sides.  I figured it might be good for the live basil plants I keep in the kitchen.

I opted for the Zed-Head version.  Sometime ago, one of the haters at the Fishwrap labelled you regular readers as “Zed Heads”.  I thought that was pretty good, so I asked the the official graphic guy, also the maker of the wonderful Pius Clock, to whip up something appropriate.

This is really a trip.

I also got the mega-mug from the UOM collection.

And now I will join via Facetime my poetry reading group – which I founded many years agin – in my native place.  We are reading Eliot’s “Four Quartets” today.

 

 

About Fr. John Zuhlsdorf

Fr. Z is the guy who runs this blog. o{]:¬)
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7 Comments

  1. MissBee says:

    So a long standing question of mine, as a Grateful Dead fan. The song Friend of the Devil – I have always liked the song a lot but listened with some Catholic Angst and Trepidation. I feel like I can’t listen to it, as a Catholic. What’s your opinion on listening to this song? [Frankly, I don’t remember this song. I don’t have an opinion.]

  2. KateD says:

    Miss Bee,

    My husband is a Dead Head and I CAN NOT STAND THE DEAD. It’s like nails on chalkboard to me. We are of different generations. He on the tail end of one and I on the begining of the next. It doesn’t help that I had a brilliant and beautiful friend in high school who was dosed at a show and was never the same again. It broke her brain. And I blame The Band.

    My favorite was The Red Hot Chilli Peppers. They are undeniably worse than the Dead could ever dream of being….and so, I am very familiar with that Catholic angst and trepidation in listening to them. Luckily, they are so bad, I don’t have to wonder if it’s okay to listen to them, it’s not. Any doubts I had vanished after watching Hells Bells and Hells Bells II. The documentary can be found on YouTube, put out by and narrated by the same people who produced The Abortion Matrix.

    Warning: It’s not for the faint of heart or delicate. Neither series is. It’s pretty rough, actually. Very difficult to ge through. It’s like learning about anything which is loathsome. Personally, I would rather know than not know…so I slog through the material. It is not for everyone and I would never allow my young children to watch it as there are elements addressed which are frightening and just purely evil.

    [So, I’m sure you’ll be ordering several of those great Zed Head mugs.]

  3. KateD says:

    Yes! For the husband :). He has a birthday coming up soon and he thinks they are really cool in a…how would you say “Catholic way” like SuitCase says “cop-ly” in the Jesse Stone series?

  4. MissBee says:

    Hi Kate,

    Thanks for your response. There are so many songs and bands that I simply can’t listen to anymore because I now hear what they actually mean, it’s not some cutesy lyric. And I’m so happy that someone agrees with me that the RHCP are pretty much terrible. I haven’t heard of the documentaries you’ve mentioned – I might be too faint of heart and will take your word for it. I can’t watch many things like that, it’s like accidentally stepping in dog doo and having the smell stuck to you all afternoon (or worse, days).

  5. KateD says:

    I know isn’t it awful?

    My wake up call came as the credits rolled on the movie Fallen with Denzel Washington. The line in the Stones song Sympathy for the Devil about Anastasia caught my attention and I actually listened to the lyrics for the first time sitting alone in the darkened theater. It was pretty obvious who was speaking through that medium.

    Music and dancing are not bad. It’s just the demonically affiliated stuff.

  6. Semper Gumby says:

    The Tour de France is over and a suntanned Tracer Bullet is back from his vacation in France. I asked him if he enjoyed the Tour de France. His eyes lit up and with much arm-waving he went on about baguettes, writing postcards at cafes, smoking French cigarettes, his trusty trenchcoat, and walking his bike on the cobblestones at Stage 9 so he could hear the slap of shoe leather on cobblestone- so he finished last.

    Tracer shrugged and with a grin pulled a thick manuscript out of his trenchcoat pocket and handed it to me. Inspired by the fresh air and exercise, Tracer had an idea for a movie. A French movie, he said, with English subtitles.

    I looked at the top page. “Laissez les bons temps rouler – Let the Good Times Roll.” It occurred to me that the title might be in New Orleans Cajun not French, but I kept that to myself.

    I turned to page 1. The opening scene is an interior shot of a flat in Paris. Through the partly-opened curtains can be seen the dawning sun and the Eiffel Tower. A man is asleep. He has a goatee. He opens his eyes, lights a cigarette, and stares at the camera. “It is dawn,” he says solemnly. “Of course, the day is ruined.”

    I skimmed through the script. A man and woman are shopping at the Monoprix for garlic and onions while smoking cigarettes. A dog is reading Camus while smoking a cigarette. In a cafe the man and woman are eating cheese, quoting Baudelaire, and smoking cigarettes.

    This goes on for 237 pages. A plumber wearing a V-neck t-shirt, Gerard Depardieu, brought the wrong tools to the man’s flat and sulks away into the rain smoking a cigarette. A scruffy philosophy student wearing a beret and a striped t-shirt stares wistfully out of a window, reciting soup recipes, while on the street below the Grim Reaper shuffles by playing an accordion and smoking a cigarette. In the middle of a rugby scrum a grim Sebastian Chabal quotes Sartre. In a narrow lane in Montmarte a monkey paints in the style of Toulouse Lautrec while a tourist lights his (the monkey’s) cigarette.

    I handed back the script and congratulated Tracer on what was sure to be a blockbuster. He beamed. He pocketed the script and strolled away whistling “Le Marseillaise” and dreaming of the Cannes Film Festival. Vive la France!

  7. jaykay says:

    Semper Gumby: well, at least he didn’t feature a bloke with a string of onions around his neck, there is that small mercy to be thankful for (for which to be thankful? Meh, whatever). With or without a pungent Disque Bleu depending from his (sullen) lips.

    I know this is a bit off point (off piste? Meh, whatever) but on the other hand it does mention France and Sartre. Couldn’t resist it – one of my favourite Python sketches evvah!

    https://archive.org/details/montypythonmrs.premiseandmrs.conclusion_201910

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