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You might know the name Cabrini – Cabrini-Green in Chicago is pretty infamous for being a rough public housing development. I’m sure the development’s namesake, Frances Xavier Cabrini, AKA Mother Cabrini, would be pretty disheartened to know this if she were still around today. Today is the day Mother Cabrini was canonized (made into a saint) by Pope Pius XII and was made the patron saint of immigrants due to her work with Italian immigrants in the Cabrini-Green area. This particular designation makes sense, but some of the occupations, places and ailments that are assigned patron saints are pretty obscure (and some are almost humorous). I thought I would share a few.
Little 14-year-old Lidwina of Schiedam, the Netherlands, was ice skating when she fell and broke a rib. She never recovered and became increasingly paralyzed until nothing would work except for her left hand. Also, she apparently shed pieces of herself, including skin, bones and intestines. Her parents kept these bits in a vase (obviously). She was officially canonized on March 14, 1890, and became the patron saint of ice skaters.
Albinus had a big heart (as saints tend to have) and couldn’t resist a call of distress. He used church money to free hostages from pirates. Obviously, pirate attacks aren’t very common today, but in the 10th century, St. Albinus came in handy for the people of the walled town of Guerande. They had gotten word that pirates were on their way to attack the village and immediately started to pray to St. Albinus. The attackers were mysteriously deterred and the town was saved.
Legend says Domninus died in 304 A.D. when he was beheaded for converting to Christianity and carrying a cross through Piacenza. Supposedly he picked up his head and left it on the site where he wanted his cathedral to be built. This doesn’t explain why invoking his name is thought to cure rabies, but nonetheless, this information would have been really helpful when Michael Scott was planning the Michael Scott Dunder-Mifflin Scranton Meredith Palmer Memorial Celebrity Rabies Awareness Pro-Am Fun Run for the Cure.
AKA Saint Elpidius, Expeditus was also beheaded in the early 300s. He decided to become a Christian and the devil showed up in the form of a crow, telling him that he could wait until tomorrow to convert. Expeditus stamped the crow under his feet and insisted that he would become a Christian today. That’s it; as of tomorrow I am going to start sending prayers up to Expeditus.
I have a bit of an aversion to dentists, so Apollonia’s story makes me cringe: when she was tortured for her Christian beliefs, part of the torture included having all of her teeth either pulled out or smashed out. Ugh. When you see her represented in artwork, it’s usually with some pincers holding a tooth. The tooth glows as if holy.
Rumor had it that Drogo could bilocate – be in two different places at the same time. People saw him hard at work in the fields at the same time others saw him at church. At some point he came down with an illness that left him incredibly deformed and the villagers were scared of him. They built him a cell attached to the church and Drogo stayed there for about forty years, with nothing to sustain him but the Eucharist, barley and water, which I think must be the connection to coffee.
Saint George is a busy guy. He is the patron saint of agricultural workers, archers, armorers, boy scouts, butchers, cavalry, Crusaders, equestrians, farmhands, farmers, field hands, field workers, Freemasonry, horseman, husbandry, husbandmen, knights, riders, Rover Scouts, saddle makers, saddlers, scouts, shepherds, soldiers, Teutonic Knights, Canada, England, Georgia, Germany, Greece, Lithuania, Malta, Moldova, Portugal, Russia, Serbia, Montenegro, Ethiopia, Aragon, Catalonia and Moscow.
For you Harry Potter readers, there really was a St. Mungo. Well, officially his name was Kentigern. “Mungo” was a nickname that meant “dear one”. That’s him lording over the Glasgow coat of arms, and the coat of arms is actually made after four miracles Mungo performed – bringing a dead bird back to life, starting a fire with tree branches, bringing a bell from Rome and saving a Queen from death by finding her ring inside a fish in the river. I guess that’s why he’s the patron saint of salmon. Update: Reader aristan says Glasgow was a salmon-fishing village pre-Mungo, so there you have it. My guess was wrong!
What is it about bacon that is so awesome and why do Americans love bacon?
Sarah Hepola wrote this interesting Salon article about some possible reasons for bacon mania:
Sarah Katherine Lewis recently wrote a book called "Sex and Bacon: Why I Love Things That Are Very, Very Bad for Me." It’s a series of funny, outré personal essays, with a title meant to transmit a kind of wanton lustiness. Bacon is the perfect food with which to do so. "Sex and Lamb Patties," after all, doesn’t quite have the frisson.
To love bacon is to sink your teeth into life, to refuse to nibble at the side salad or sip on the seltzer with a twist of lime. "Nobody wants to be wholesome, boring Betty when they could be sexy, hot-to-trot Veronica," Sarah Katherine Lewis says. "Pour me a drink, light me a smoke, fry me up a pan of bacon, and let’s get it on."
A recent Taco Bell commercial has played up this idea of bacon as an aphrodisiac. In order to lure male attention at a bar, a woman hides the new Bacon Club Chalupa in her purse. It’s absurd; no one with hair that glossy would suffer the indignity of diced chicken in her handbag. But the spot has prompted at least one male viewer to suggest bacon perfume. And why not? It’s probably a more seductive scent than lilacs and roses.
"Bacon is sex in a skillet," says Dan Philips of the Grateful Palate. "It’s the ultimate aphrodisiac for all living things. Except pigs, of course."
Link – Thanks Judy!
We’ve seen examples of people putting Wiimote in unusual places (like the WiiSpray), but this is different: Ausome Candies [pdf] has put a candy dispenser into a Wiimote!
Okay, okay, it’s a candy dispenser that looks like a Wiimote, but that’s close enough: Link – Thanks Damon!
In the 45-year history of the BBC science-fiction series Doctor Who, ten different actors have played The Doctor (not counting movies, one-off charity specials, stage shows or audio dramas). Can you name all ten before time runs out?
You have three minutes. I didn’t even attempt this, since I don’t know the answers. You will, no doubt, do better. Link
Who are these people eating apples at the Apple Store in the Big Apple? A week before the product is available, a line began forming Friday for the new 3G iPhone at the Apple Store in Manhattan. Who would stand (or sit) in line that long? It’s not so much Apple fanboys. Ten people from the group Waiting For Apples began the line, but after a rainy night, only five are left. Their goal is -get this- to set a record for waiting in line. Link
If you’ve read Neatorama for a long time, you’ve heard of the Wife Carrying Contest and the World Beard and Moustache Championships, but did you know about the Gumboot Throwing Festival? And who knew there was a thing called competitive sauna? Listverse has a rundown of 8 Crazy Championships. Who knows, you might want to enter one someday! Link -via the Presurfer
All those hundreds of TV channels may lead you that there’s a true diversity and variety in today’s television … but you’d be wrong. A handful of large companies control what you see, hear, and read every day.
Let’s take a look at who owns what on television – here are the TV channels owned by 6 of the largest companies in media, as depicted by their logos:
Hey, any publicity is good as long as they spell your name correctly, right? Well, maybe not so much with this one:
From the very funny Fail Blog – via Miss Cellania
An aboriginal man … in Japan? The 1920s photo to the left is that of a chief of the Ainu, an indigenous people of the island of Hokkaido, whose tradition and culture was completely different from that of the Japanese.
The Ainu was virtually destroyed during the Meiji Period in an attempt to (forcibly) assimilate their people into the rest of Japan.
Scribal Terror blog has a neat synopsis about the Ainu People:
The Ainu inhabited an island called Ainu Mosir before the Japanese colonized it, changed its name to Hokkaido, and "decimated" the population. The origins of the Ainu were a subject of speculation until genetic studies determined that they were “the descendants of Japan’s ancient Jomon inhabitants, mixed with Korean genes of Yayoi colonists and of the modern Japanese.”
The New York Times reports (via Japundit )that just this year, Japan has finally recognized the rights of the indigenous Ainu. This recognition was apparently timed to coincide with Japan’s hosting of an international conference of indigenous peoples on the island of Hokkaido (formerly the home of the Ainu) but it comes a little late for this rapidly disappearing culture.
Link | Photo: Old Photos of Japan
Photo: origami madness [Flickr]
Flickr user origami_madness created that awesomely simple yet brilliant "crumpled" paper origami titled "Frustration" – I wonder how many pieces of paper got tossed before just-the-right expression was successfully folded?
Link | Origami_madness’ blog – via Super Punch
