Prayers on a Christmas night

God keep and protect the Pope and poor Cardinal Etchegaray.
God be by the side of the heroic Liu Xiaobo.
God help the unhappy Iraqi people in this time of violence, and lead the African countries shaken by cruel wars to peace.
In the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, Amen.

The next rulers of the universe

I have been thinking about something inverarity said a few weeks back. It occurs to me that if I were to produce some sort of secret conspiracy to rule the world, in this day and age, there is a group that would be more credible than any other: young Asian ladies with university degrees. If you ever brought together tashmania, kikei, hermoinejean7, and cette_vie, you would definitely have enough brain-power and working capacity to take over the world with ease, not to mention enough charm to make the rest of us like it. They certainly would be a hundred times better than the present shower. Add dustthouart and expectare as honorary Easterners, and helixaspersa as honorary mistress of the world, period - she definitely has the brainpower, charm and hard work down pat, and I already promised once to cast her as a super-villain.

Merry Christmas, everyone, and have fun!

And so this is Christmas...

I had a relaxing day, exactly as I wanted it, though with less things getting done than I wished. One silly individual picked Christmas day to criticize me for calling Philip Pullman a hater of Christianity - which is not unlike criticizing someone for saying that basketball players are tall. Well, never mind. Other than that, I had the quiet, relaxing day I wanted.

Now there is something I want to say. I already said in an e-mail, but I don't have the e-mail addresses of every one of you. I just want to say that the best of many good things the Internet has done for me is to allow me to know so many good, and interesting, and precious people. Even the ones I had fights with. Thank God for making each and every one of you, and thank you all for what you add to my life. It may be an obvious thing to say, but it does not stop being true for all that.