Chapter 6 – In which Dawn leaves, and Harry arrives

“What happens to the world, if all the heroes lose?”
(Jack Kirby – Captain America 211)





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Disgusting

I have already said something about BNFs and the insulting notion that I de-friend people who disagree with me - insulting not so much to me as to the people on my f-list. Now, there just was another; and this one actually chose to defend the utterly indefensible - namely, the management of FA. Make the following experiment, people. Try saying anything about me on the FA forums, never mind how insulting, degrading, hateful, or mendacious. Tell them I rape children. Tell them I eat babies. Tell them that my mother was a whore. If any mod does anything to discourage you, I will pay you dinner in the most expensive restaurant in London, or any other city you want. But what is really ironic is that this idiot actually chose to make her defence of the indefensible at the same time as I was hearing of yet another person - a friend of mine, but nothing to do with me - driven from FA by vicious hostility and mod malfeasance. See, honey pie, it's not only me. And if a person of the natural sweetness and good manners of my friend can be driven out of FA in disgust, I have to tell you that, never mind how hard you work to blind yourself to the obvious, there is something very, very rotten in the state of Denmark.

What the Hell?

Pope Benedict XVI has nominated his successor as Prefect of the Congregation for Sacred Doctrine; and it is, of all people, Archbishop Levada of San Francisco, a man who combines dubious theological opinions with a spectacular record of sheer ineffectiveness and remoteness from his flock. This is a choice whose logic I fail to see, although I do not doubt that it will greatly reassure Newsweek and the BBC.

Friday the thirteenth

Was it an unlucky day? It was a very weird day. It was a day in which I found myself at the same time fighting against someone who found the idea of a forced marriage acceptable in Great Britain in 2005, and at the same time admonishing a homosexualist extremist. A day in which I found that the Pope, famous for being the watchdog of doctrine, had appointed as his successor one of the least qualified candidates in the Church. It was a day in which I found that one of the loveliest women in the world - that is, the woman who had been among the loveliest in the world - is suffering from bone cancer, and that chemotherapy has been devastating her looks; and that at the ripe old age of 39. But you cannot speak of an unlucky day, because the poor lady had known of her condition for years. What it has been is, an emotionally very charged day.