The Church has been a special challenge to us all, especially me. The priest sex cases are a terrible stumbling block for millions. And I struggled to find a parish which would sponsor -- give us a meeting room for -- un-programmed Bible study. If no priest or deacon is avaible to mentor the Bible study in a hands-on way, all the Church will tolerate anymore is watching television -- watching Bible study experts giving recorded speeches.
Respecting the priest sex cases, Father Judge High School -- my high school -- in the early 1970s was one of the first cases to hit the headlines with news of cases involving sexual abuses in our era. The football coach, Mr. Degnan, and a priest named Fr. Robert Hermley were arrested for sharing male students between themselves. I at first had trouble believing Philadelphia Bulletin and Inquirer descriptions of case after case in the Phildelphia area, but I finally became a "believer," when it dawned on me that no one is going to falsely volunteer that he dropped his pants and bent over for a priest, in the hope of winning money in a lawsuit. Such a life-changing admission just isn't worth it.
I've tried to talk to priests about the whole phenomenon, but there seems to be a general policy of silence on the subject in place, consistent with diocesan offices' dishonest denials and settlement payments in return for silence -- an overall policy of endless stonewalling with explosive, highly destructive results.
Damage to the Church from the phenomenon seems massive. I have been looked-at like I am crazy when I tell people, "I am Catholic."
During this time, I fell in love with the Bible and with Bible study. I ran Bible study for about 15 years at St. Gregory's Church in Magnolia. The pastor tried to derail our group a few times, but failed. (There were about 30 of us in the group, too many to disrupt easily.) Finally, he simply banned us from the church premises just before a new pastor took over, as though sorely embarrassed at our utterly orthodox program. (The pastor used to sit in on the sessions, waiting for doctrinal errors to crop up. Once, when I said that Mary "died" before her assumption, he thought he had me and he stood and accused me of "heresy" in public, to the Bible study group. I privately read to the pastor the verses from the assumption encyclical verifying that Pope Pius XII affirmatively taught that Mary "died," using that word in the official Vatican translation, and he privately acknowledged his error.) For several years I searched for a parish interested in Bible study, without success. Lying was the chief tool used to put me off while I paid my parish envelope -- "Pete, I'll meet with you next week ..." "Pete, I have to break my appointment ..." One pastor broke his appointment about 18 times.
So, why do I call myself "Catholic"?
Well, first, Christ foreshadowed a few times that the Church would generate evil. He said to Peter, 5 minutes after appointing him head of the Church ("You are Peter and upon this rock etc."), "GET BEHIND ME, YOU SATAN!" When Peter tried to walk on water he succeeded for a few seconds and then sank in. Sinking into water is a typological symbol of being sinful. (Remember the story of demonically possessed pigs drowning themselves.) And then Peter denies Christ 3 times shortly AFTER a clear warning to him that he would.
Also, in 2 Thessalonians 2 Paul warns of "the apostasy" to precede the end of time. Since Paul was surrounded by "apostasies" at the time, Bible commentators assume that Paul is referring to something enormous. In our current day and age, vocations have plummeted. Millions whose faith has been made cold by the media generally and the sex cases in particular are leaving the Church annually. Catholic schools -- the Church's biggest evangelizing tool -- and churches are shutting down everywhere. I believe that we are experiencing "the apostasy" -- what our Fundamentalist brethren refer to as "the great falling away" -- right now, as I write this.
Nonetheless, Christ's purpose, in giving us an imperfect Church, and in predicting its sins and through Paul its eclipse, was to prepare us for the future, not to de-commission the Church. It has to do with the nature of the sacraments. The sacraments can operate despite the imperfections of the Church, even in the process of collapse, despite our era's ignorant, mean-spirited priests. The sacraments are a generous gift, by God, of shortcuts to salvation, administered by His officially commissioned organization, the Church -- as easy as it can get. I have no interest in leaving the "salvation machine" established by Christ.
Saturday, April 29, 2017
Tuesday, April 25, 2017
I NEEDED A GYNECOLOGIST FOR MY EAR
Years ago, the virulent disease MRSA entered our house. I was last in the family to get it. It nearly killed me. The powerful antibiotics given to me at the hospital to save my life killed every germ in my body. When that happens, it opens the floodgates for mold infections -- unaffected by antibiotics. Suddenly, I had a wicked ear infection.
Dr. Todd Schachter, DO, our family doctor, referred me to an ear, nose and throat specialist in Voorhees, New Jersey. The latter doctor's treatment dragged on and on and on, for week after week. I'd come in for my appointment, shell-out my deductible, bend my head sideways for carefully-administered eardrops, and go home with cotton in my ears and a prescription for ear drops at home.
When this went on for 3 months, I became suspicious. Was the ears, nose and throat specialist just running up the tab? I had listened carefully when he said that I had a Candida albicans infection in my ear -- a common yeast infection. I checked the label on my ear drops -- the concentration of anti-yeast medication was 1% of that if my wife's vaginal medication. I thought, "WHAAAAAAT?"
So, I put a single dab of vaginal yeast medication of a cotton swab, spread the medication in my ear canal, and slept on it.
The next day, my Candida infection was cured.
One day after that, I had my appointment with the ear, nose and throat specialist. "Huh!" he said as he examined me, "Your infection's all gone! How?" As though he knew that it shouldn't have been.
When I told Dr. Schachter the story, he burst out laughing and said, "I should have referred you to a gynecologist."
Dr. Todd Schachter, DO, our family doctor, referred me to an ear, nose and throat specialist in Voorhees, New Jersey. The latter doctor's treatment dragged on and on and on, for week after week. I'd come in for my appointment, shell-out my deductible, bend my head sideways for carefully-administered eardrops, and go home with cotton in my ears and a prescription for ear drops at home.
When this went on for 3 months, I became suspicious. Was the ears, nose and throat specialist just running up the tab? I had listened carefully when he said that I had a Candida albicans infection in my ear -- a common yeast infection. I checked the label on my ear drops -- the concentration of anti-yeast medication was 1% of that if my wife's vaginal medication. I thought, "WHAAAAAAT?"
So, I put a single dab of vaginal yeast medication of a cotton swab, spread the medication in my ear canal, and slept on it.
The next day, my Candida infection was cured.
One day after that, I had my appointment with the ear, nose and throat specialist. "Huh!" he said as he examined me, "Your infection's all gone! How?" As though he knew that it shouldn't have been.
When I told Dr. Schachter the story, he burst out laughing and said, "I should have referred you to a gynecologist."
Saturday, February 11, 2017
NATURE STILL AROUND US
Years ago, an angry judge anxious to not let a case in his courtroom go unresolved put the case last on the night's calendar, and forced a full trial of the matter. At 4:00 a.m., the case concluded. I represented Defendant. I don't remember if my side prevailed.
As I tiredly drove through the warm spring darkness up Evesham Avenue and turned into Camden Avenue toward home after the trial, I saw the distinct outline of a quail in the middle of the street in front of me, and I heard a bird sound I hadn't heard in 40 years ... "There's Bob White; There's Bob White ..." The bobwhite quail call.
Back around the early 1960s, each Summer, I and my brothers and sisters would sometimes spend about two weeks on the farm of our grandparents in Evesboro, now part of Evesham Township. The farm was about 7 acres on what was then called Hog Pond Road, now North Elmwood Road between Church Road and Medford-Evesboro Road. I used to enjoy getting up in the wee hours of the morning at the farm, opening the bedroom window, and listening to the sounds of the rural dawn. At a particular point I told my grandmother that I liked to hear the lonely whistle of a bird I heard every morning at the same time -- three tones, "peep, peep, PEEP! Peep, peep, PEEP!"
"Oh," Grandmom said, "That's the bobwhite. It's a quail that lives around here. It's called a 'bobwhite' because when it peeps, it sounds like its saying, 'There's Bob White! There's Bob White!'"
Grandmom's explanation stuck with me. And so I was all the more amazed to hear the bobwhite's dawn call to me that morning in much-more-urban Magnolia.
I let the bobwhite cross the street in front of my car, and went home.
Friday, December 2, 2016
RIGHT CLICK AND ENJOY THE MUSIC WHILE READING
Use headphones if possible. Click on link: Faure'`s Pavane. Right click "Loop" for perpetual looping while reading my blog items ...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpgyTl8yqbw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpgyTl8yqbw
CANCER, THEN A GREEN BURIAL ?
Many reading this blog will have already heard that suddenly I have to face the great modern dragon, cancer. I'm a lifetime non-smoker, though as a kid I was always in the presence of my chain-smoking mother's cigarette smoke, and to a much lesser extent, my wife's cigarette smoke -- she's very careful to avoid smoking in my presence. And while the cancer which I contracted, metastasizing adenocarcinoma, is indeed cigarette smoker's cancer, it is probable that its origin in my case is something totally other than cigarette smoke -- radon gas rising out of the soil in Magnolia.
Our homes in Magnolia, like much of the rest of Camden County, are situated upon thick layers of Pleistocene marl and sand, laid-down by ancient inundations over an enormous piece of rock called the Reading Prong.
One can actually see outcroppings of the Reading Prong jutting above the surface by looking left while traveling north on Route 95 just after passing over the Delaware River on Scudders Falls Bridge into Ewing Township.
The problem with that enormous slab of metamorphic rock is that it is suffused with huge amounts of highly radioactive isotopes of Uranium, which constantly release a halo of deadly, cancer-causing Radon gas. Underground, north-to-south, the Radon gas halo permeates and saturates the gigatons of thick, wet sands and marls resting upon it, so that the sands and marls of Magnolia and other towns in Camden County have zero shielding effect. They may as well not be there, as far as protection from radiation is concerned.
And so, many will recollect that beginning in the late 1970s and early 1980s, real estate transactions began to warn buyers to beware of Radon gas.
Warnings which I did not take seriously enough -- no, I never installed the little fan to constantly change the air in our basement.
In any event, probably sometimes in 2015, something in my body's 62 year old immune system gave up the fight for survival, and a single Radon gas isotope sticking to a single particle of dust was inhaled by me. It rushed down into the left lobe of my lung and sat there and -- boom -- it spontaneously split into either Thorium or Lead, slamming a neutron into a nearby cell in my lung, altering the DNA in it in a way that mutated it into a single, energetic little bastard which we refer to as a metastasizing adenocarcinoma cancer cell.
Suddenly, the Devil, himself, was on the loose in my body, and my life began to be in mortal danger.
In January and February, 2016, an unhappy coincidence occurred. My wife Rise` got the flu, and she began to cough. I began to cough at the same time, and our coughs sounded the same. The doctor said that she had the flu. Rather than go to the doctor myself, I assumed, "I've got the flu, too." Rise`'s cough stopped. My cough continued -- and changed.
I had made myself the #2 champion stair stepper on the Stair Masters at LA Fitness in Somerdale, second only to an amazing black girl there named Marcella whom Rise` calls one of my "gym wives." My weight was down to 220 pounds from 260. In March, 2016, something changed. My breathing on the Stair Masters was fine, except when I stopped.
Though my flu coughing had stopped, every time I ended my Stair Master sets, I had coughing fits, of at least one-half hour. Here, I should have gone to the doctor.
But then a bad coincidence distorted my understanding of my problem. In an ill-advised attempt to lower my systolic blood pressure -- I argued to the doctor that he should leave my systolic alone, that my systolic was the product of a simple feedback loop in my physiology because my body, probably my brain, demands a high systolic, perhaps to push my blood through decades of residual damage in my brain from years of transient ischemic attacks, beginning in 1978 or perhaps earlier -- the doctor, over my objection, changed me from Norvasc to Benazepril.
I can feel higher blood pressure in my forearm skin, if I have it. I immediately felt my blood pressure skyrocket upwards in response to my Benazepril doses. My new blood pressure medicine was paradoxically increasing, not decreasing, my blood pressure, for some reason. I also began coughing around the clock.
I reported the same to my doctor one morning. He told me that I was "crazy." I said, "Okay. 'Litmus test:' I'll lay off my dosage till I come in for an exam tomorrow. Your staff can do before-and-after BP checks. The effect is nearly immediate. My BP will skyrocket. And, they will see me start coughing, coughing, coughing." The doctor took my dare. He watched my systolic skyrocket after taking Benazepril, as I began coughing, coughing, coughing -- really deep, scary-sounding coughing. Shocked, he took me off Benazepril and put me back on Norvasc.
It was then -- in March of 2016 -- that I discovered, finally, that my cough came from neither the flu nor medication. It got particularly fierce, and it just kept happening, for no apparent reason.
And then the cough mutated again. As I reported above, at L.A. Fitness in Somerdale, where I was #2 champion on the Stairmasters after my "gym wife," that amazing African American lady, I began to cough with genuine ferocity for about one-half hour after one-to-two hours on the Stairmaster. Staff at L.A. Fitness clearly began to think "tuberculosis," and implied that I might want to get a diagnosis before continuing. I.e., "Leave us, if you don't have a doctor's note diagnosing you." Since I had recently awakened in bed at home without my usual cough drop between my cheek and jaw, the thought occurred to me that I had inhaled a cough drop. Finally, when the cough just wouldn't go away, I went to Dr. Schachter, our GP in Somerdale. He arranged for carefully done x-rays and a full physical, called me in, and said, "Pete, with you I know that I need to be direct. There's no doubt about it. You have lung cancer. And it's not just lung cancer. It has already metastasized."
Schachter is a good doctor. I knew that he was right. I said, "Ah, f - - k." And then, "Poor Tiny. Poor Tiny. Poor Tiny. Poor Tiny. Poor Tiny." "Tiny" is my nickname for my wife Rise`.
I went home and told Rise`.
Since then, I have gone through full-skull radiation for the growing brain tumors. On 10 occasions, my head was bolted to a table in a radiation machine in a plastic mask
and inundated in radiation highly destructive to brain tissue, and hopefully more destructive to brain tumors. The radiation treatments were extremely difficult to endure. Though my head was bolted in place for my protection -- so that the radiation struck targeted areas only -- I could tell that the powerful flesh-eating radiation was also eating my plastic mask. Every time the machine turned on, I could smell some kind of ionic gas streaming off the mask into my nose and mouth. Yeeech!
And now I have begun Chemo for all cancer below the neck -- carcinomas in the left lung, right adrenal gland, liver, and all through my bones. The bone cancer is the worst so far. On three occasions, cancerous bone tissue in my upper left quadrant spontaneously snapped during absolutely necessary coughing -- I simply absolutely, positively have to clear the bloody, cancerous discharge which slowly gathers at the top of my left lung and trachea, with coughing. The first break was the worst. It completely disabled the coughing function -- each cough generated absolutely astonishing pain -- and the stuff gathering in the lower quadrant of my left lung clogged things up and gave me "walking pneumonia." The medical assistant who first saw the bloody discharge of cancerous lung tissue in a test in a doctor's office freaked-out in response. I angrily said, "Calm down ! It's why I'm here ! It's why people come to doctors ! What -- do you only want to test healthy people ?! Just bag the gauze with the bloody tissue on it, note the discharge in your notes, and continue the test!"
The other breaks in the same area generated almost the same pain, although I developed a technique of coughing very difficult "gentle coughs" voluntarily all day long to clear the cancerous crap out of my lung at keep it from gathering. This gives me some sleep at night.
However, the lung cancer and bone cancer breaks generated a second less obvious problem ...
We are pre-wired -- well, at least I am pre-wired -- to flip over in my bed at night in my sleep about 10 times, left to right, right to left -- for comfort.
Suffocation from the lung cancer makes it impossible to sleep on my right side or back. Crappy, cancerous lung tissue in my left lobe touches other lung tissue, when I lay right or on my back, in my sleep, and I get less O2, and I'm up in a flash. (One pulsox check caught the plummeting O2 in action, so far.)
Also, the breaks in my upper right quadrant of my back are comfortable only when I sleep in my left side.
So, I'm stranded. I had been sleeping on a hard floor in the family room at night to escape as much as possible the increase in the suffocation sensation when I lay on a mattress, but bone breaks made it too difficult for me to climb to my feet from the floor unassisted to get up in the middle of the night, as the urges to flip sides (or to pee) awakened me. So, I had to return to my proper place, in bed next to the most wonderful woman in the world, my wife, "Tiny-ness." But that meant foisting my cancer problems on her, too -- helping me in-and-out of bed in the middle of the night, coughing jerkily next to her, and so on and so on.
Yech!
At any rate, this is the kind of thing which drives sane people to "putting things in order."
Among other things, Rise` and I have done something fascinating in connection with preparing for our -- and especially my -- death and burial.
A few years ago, one of Rise`'s beloved nephews, a smoker, died, of lung cancer. His family happened-into and chose for burial a cemetery in Cape May County, New Jersey called Steelmantown Cemetery where green burials are permitted. A green burial dispenses with all but basic biodegradable (non-formaldeyde) embalming, with casket and concrete sarcophagus, and transports the body in a shroud to the point of burial by wooden cart. We -- well, at least I did -- went a little bit afraid that the burial would comprise "something funky."
I was dead wrong (an approriate pun !). Instead, I found the burial, divested of modern accoutrements of human burial, to be HOLY, to be MORE BIBLICAL !
So, BE BALLSY ! Pre-purchase cemetery lots for yourselves and your families at Steelmantown Cemetery, at
http://www.steelmantowncemetery.com/
Our homes in Magnolia, like much of the rest of Camden County, are situated upon thick layers of Pleistocene marl and sand, laid-down by ancient inundations over an enormous piece of rock called the Reading Prong.
One can actually see outcroppings of the Reading Prong jutting above the surface by looking left while traveling north on Route 95 just after passing over the Delaware River on Scudders Falls Bridge into Ewing Township.
The problem with that enormous slab of metamorphic rock is that it is suffused with huge amounts of highly radioactive isotopes of Uranium, which constantly release a halo of deadly, cancer-causing Radon gas. Underground, north-to-south, the Radon gas halo permeates and saturates the gigatons of thick, wet sands and marls resting upon it, so that the sands and marls of Magnolia and other towns in Camden County have zero shielding effect. They may as well not be there, as far as protection from radiation is concerned.
And so, many will recollect that beginning in the late 1970s and early 1980s, real estate transactions began to warn buyers to beware of Radon gas.
Warnings which I did not take seriously enough -- no, I never installed the little fan to constantly change the air in our basement.
In any event, probably sometimes in 2015, something in my body's 62 year old immune system gave up the fight for survival, and a single Radon gas isotope sticking to a single particle of dust was inhaled by me. It rushed down into the left lobe of my lung and sat there and -- boom -- it spontaneously split into either Thorium or Lead, slamming a neutron into a nearby cell in my lung, altering the DNA in it in a way that mutated it into a single, energetic little bastard which we refer to as a metastasizing adenocarcinoma cancer cell.
Suddenly, the Devil, himself, was on the loose in my body, and my life began to be in mortal danger.
In January and February, 2016, an unhappy coincidence occurred. My wife Rise` got the flu, and she began to cough. I began to cough at the same time, and our coughs sounded the same. The doctor said that she had the flu. Rather than go to the doctor myself, I assumed, "I've got the flu, too." Rise`'s cough stopped. My cough continued -- and changed.
I had made myself the #2 champion stair stepper on the Stair Masters at LA Fitness in Somerdale, second only to an amazing black girl there named Marcella whom Rise` calls one of my "gym wives." My weight was down to 220 pounds from 260. In March, 2016, something changed. My breathing on the Stair Masters was fine, except when I stopped.
Though my flu coughing had stopped, every time I ended my Stair Master sets, I had coughing fits, of at least one-half hour. Here, I should have gone to the doctor.
But then a bad coincidence distorted my understanding of my problem. In an ill-advised attempt to lower my systolic blood pressure -- I argued to the doctor that he should leave my systolic alone, that my systolic was the product of a simple feedback loop in my physiology because my body, probably my brain, demands a high systolic, perhaps to push my blood through decades of residual damage in my brain from years of transient ischemic attacks, beginning in 1978 or perhaps earlier -- the doctor, over my objection, changed me from Norvasc to Benazepril.
I can feel higher blood pressure in my forearm skin, if I have it. I immediately felt my blood pressure skyrocket upwards in response to my Benazepril doses. My new blood pressure medicine was paradoxically increasing, not decreasing, my blood pressure, for some reason. I also began coughing around the clock.
I reported the same to my doctor one morning. He told me that I was "crazy." I said, "Okay. 'Litmus test:' I'll lay off my dosage till I come in for an exam tomorrow. Your staff can do before-and-after BP checks. The effect is nearly immediate. My BP will skyrocket. And, they will see me start coughing, coughing, coughing." The doctor took my dare. He watched my systolic skyrocket after taking Benazepril, as I began coughing, coughing, coughing -- really deep, scary-sounding coughing. Shocked, he took me off Benazepril and put me back on Norvasc.
It was then -- in March of 2016 -- that I discovered, finally, that my cough came from neither the flu nor medication. It got particularly fierce, and it just kept happening, for no apparent reason.
And then the cough mutated again. As I reported above, at L.A. Fitness in Somerdale, where I was #2 champion on the Stairmasters after my "gym wife," that amazing African American lady, I began to cough with genuine ferocity for about one-half hour after one-to-two hours on the Stairmaster. Staff at L.A. Fitness clearly began to think "tuberculosis," and implied that I might want to get a diagnosis before continuing. I.e., "Leave us, if you don't have a doctor's note diagnosing you." Since I had recently awakened in bed at home without my usual cough drop between my cheek and jaw, the thought occurred to me that I had inhaled a cough drop. Finally, when the cough just wouldn't go away, I went to Dr. Schachter, our GP in Somerdale. He arranged for carefully done x-rays and a full physical, called me in, and said, "Pete, with you I know that I need to be direct. There's no doubt about it. You have lung cancer. And it's not just lung cancer. It has already metastasized."
Schachter is a good doctor. I knew that he was right. I said, "Ah, f - - k." And then, "Poor Tiny. Poor Tiny. Poor Tiny. Poor Tiny. Poor Tiny." "Tiny" is my nickname for my wife Rise`.
I went home and told Rise`.
Since then, I have gone through full-skull radiation for the growing brain tumors. On 10 occasions, my head was bolted to a table in a radiation machine in a plastic mask
And now I have begun Chemo for all cancer below the neck -- carcinomas in the left lung, right adrenal gland, liver, and all through my bones. The bone cancer is the worst so far. On three occasions, cancerous bone tissue in my upper left quadrant spontaneously snapped during absolutely necessary coughing -- I simply absolutely, positively have to clear the bloody, cancerous discharge which slowly gathers at the top of my left lung and trachea, with coughing. The first break was the worst. It completely disabled the coughing function -- each cough generated absolutely astonishing pain -- and the stuff gathering in the lower quadrant of my left lung clogged things up and gave me "walking pneumonia." The medical assistant who first saw the bloody discharge of cancerous lung tissue in a test in a doctor's office freaked-out in response. I angrily said, "Calm down ! It's why I'm here ! It's why people come to doctors ! What -- do you only want to test healthy people ?! Just bag the gauze with the bloody tissue on it, note the discharge in your notes, and continue the test!"
The other breaks in the same area generated almost the same pain, although I developed a technique of coughing very difficult "gentle coughs" voluntarily all day long to clear the cancerous crap out of my lung at keep it from gathering. This gives me some sleep at night.
However, the lung cancer and bone cancer breaks generated a second less obvious problem ...
We are pre-wired -- well, at least I am pre-wired -- to flip over in my bed at night in my sleep about 10 times, left to right, right to left -- for comfort.
Suffocation from the lung cancer makes it impossible to sleep on my right side or back. Crappy, cancerous lung tissue in my left lobe touches other lung tissue, when I lay right or on my back, in my sleep, and I get less O2, and I'm up in a flash. (One pulsox check caught the plummeting O2 in action, so far.)
Also, the breaks in my upper right quadrant of my back are comfortable only when I sleep in my left side.
So, I'm stranded. I had been sleeping on a hard floor in the family room at night to escape as much as possible the increase in the suffocation sensation when I lay on a mattress, but bone breaks made it too difficult for me to climb to my feet from the floor unassisted to get up in the middle of the night, as the urges to flip sides (or to pee) awakened me. So, I had to return to my proper place, in bed next to the most wonderful woman in the world, my wife, "Tiny-ness." But that meant foisting my cancer problems on her, too -- helping me in-and-out of bed in the middle of the night, coughing jerkily next to her, and so on and so on.
Yech!
At any rate, this is the kind of thing which drives sane people to "putting things in order."
Among other things, Rise` and I have done something fascinating in connection with preparing for our -- and especially my -- death and burial.
A few years ago, one of Rise`'s beloved nephews, a smoker, died, of lung cancer. His family happened-into and chose for burial a cemetery in Cape May County, New Jersey called Steelmantown Cemetery where green burials are permitted. A green burial dispenses with all but basic biodegradable (non-formaldeyde) embalming, with casket and concrete sarcophagus, and transports the body in a shroud to the point of burial by wooden cart. We -- well, at least I did -- went a little bit afraid that the burial would comprise "something funky."
I was dead wrong (an approriate pun !). Instead, I found the burial, divested of modern accoutrements of human burial, to be HOLY, to be MORE BIBLICAL !
So, BE BALLSY ! Pre-purchase cemetery lots for yourselves and your families at Steelmantown Cemetery, at
http://www.steelmantowncemetery.com/
Thursday, December 1, 2016
A SIN WHICH I SHOULD CONFESS ???
I just discussed the following moral question with my family. They laughed and said that I acted properly. This is a good place to seek public comment.
I have always been a library-goer. One night years ago -- maybe 30 years ago -- I was kay-ing my vehicle out of my place in the lot at the library when there was an unexpected "CRUNCH" in back. I jumped-out and walked back and saw that I had backed-into the already ripped-up fender on the already essentially demolished car body of the vehicle behind me. No exaggeration at all, I promise, the vehicle really did look like a survivor of a dozen demolition derbies. No part of the body was undented. It was the kind of car where a cop called to the scene by me, if I were scrupulously honest, would think that I was crazy for reporting it, risking entanglement with a nut-case vehicle owner trying to finance total body reconstruction with a fraudulent massive claim.
Soooooooooo, I looked around carefully. I saw no security cameras, and I was in the darkest part of the lot. I climbed into my driver's seat and drove home.
Technically, I violated the New Jersey Hit & Run Laws by leaving the scene of a very minor accident in which I re-damaged a severely damaged fender of an empty, already-badly-damaged car, already not much better than this close facsimile ...
I never got caught. Did I sin? As a Catholic, should I have confessed it? As a lawyer at the time, should I have been disbarred?
We all know what the internet is like ... every anonymous nut-case comes crawling out from under his or her rock in response to something like this and screams, "DISGUSTING !!!" Are you one of the nutcases ? Am I disgusting ? How will God respond to this ?
We all know what the internet is like ... every anonymous nut-case comes crawling out from under his or her rock in response to something like this and screams, "DISGUSTING !!!" Are you one of the nutcases ? Am I disgusting ? How will God respond to this ?
Monday, August 1, 2016
A REALLY BIG SINKHOLE IN MAGNOLIA SOMEDAY ?
The subject of "sinkholes" -- sometimes, really, really big sinkholes -- is everywhere in the web these days. They suddenly seem to be swallowing cars, homes and people, worldwide.
Self-proclaimed sinkhole skeptics claim that the coming of cell phone cameras and The Web is the reason for the increase in news about sinkholes. In other words, it's not that there are more sinkholes, but rather that there are new ways of easily taking photos of sinkholes and publishing them everywhere in an easily-accessed "Google-able" format, resulting in more news of sinkholes instead of more sinkholes.
But is this really true?
Some areas -- for example, in Florida, where there are more sinkholes than anywhere else in the continental United States -- are experiencing a doubling of insurance claims for sink holes in just a few years -- not just more news of sink holes.
Skeptics would blow off statistics like this by attributing them to a greater awareness of the right to make such claims, also resulting from more news of sinkholes, not more sinkholes, or to an increasingly litigious culture.
But if those rationalizations -- which come down to "nothing at all special is happening" -- how does one explain something like the following? ...
Harrisburg, the capital city of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, has been suffering from an astonishing rash of 40 new sinkholes in the last several years, in a rectangular area roughly bordered by Route 81 on the north, Route 83 on the east, Route 83 on the south, and the Susquehanna River on the west. There are now so many of them, so suddenly, in one time period, that Harrisburg can't afford to fix them. In looking at the map, one gets the feeling that we aren't just looking at a "pesky new problem," but rather a prelude to crustal collapse -- a collapse of the section of the Earth's crust which Harrisburg itself is sitting on.
Something like that happened in China many centuries ago, where what used to be level ground as high as the surrounding peaks was punctuated with so many sinkholes over the centuries that the whole area collapsed and the debris became the valley floor between peaks which you see here ...
The difference between Harrisburg and the China example is that the Harrisburg phenomenon is occurring in only a few years -- since 2010.
Skeptics say, "It rained in Harrisburg a lot in 2011 and 2013." Or, they say, "There must be mines down there!" Yes, it did rain a lot, as claimed. But -- come on -- it's next to a river! And, no, there are no reports of mines under Harrisburg. The skeptics' claims motivate one to ask, "Why should heavy rains during 2 of the last 6 years suddenly succeed in opening up so many sinkholes over so huge an area in so short a time -- about 36 square miles -- when a river, and heavy rains over the last thousand centuries have not been able to produce such a frightening result?"
And Harrisburg is only about 320 feet above sea level. I.e., there are no deeply-located underground torrents between Harrisburg and the ambient water table. Further, the map of south-central Pennsylvania karst regions -- areas where the quarternary soils of the surface lie upon a deeper limestone base subject to erosion by water -- shows that Harrisburg is situated upon non-karst -- non-limestone -- rock. I.e., Harrisburg's founders chose a good locale to lay down their city's foundations. It should not be looking like a giant piece of Swiss cheese right now. Hit-up Map 68, here ...
... to verify for yourself that Harrisburg's foundations were situated upon non-karst rock.
Two giant sinkholes recently swallowed up parts of Guatemala City in Guatemala. One of them is the first sinkhole pictured above at the top of this blog piece. There are enormous new sinkholes all over the world. Multiple sinkholes have have suddenly begun plaguing Washington, D.C., including near the White House and Congress. ("Praise the Lord"?)
One very interesting form of sinkhole is the underwater variety. Though such sinkholes are always hidden by the water itself, visually, you can sometimes use your computer to successfully "google" places on Earth where the crustal plate beneath water -- in one case a river has broken through, and and begun flooding down into a sinkhole so that incredible quantities of water, hundreds of cubic miles of water, are simply going someplace "down there"!
What in Heaven's holy name is happening "down there"? And, could this ever happen in Magnolia, New Jersey?
Eight (8) years ago, two of the men working upon the completion of the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland suddenly "freaked-out" and filed a lawsuit in the United States District Court in Hawaii to stop the other scientists at the Large Hadron Collider from turning it on.
They had two arguments. The more comprehensible of the two arguments is this ...
The Large Hadron Collider fires two streams of protons toward each other at fantastically high speeds, and then photographs the "junk" emerging from the collisions.
These streams are so powerful that if you were to walk through the Collider beam as it is accelerating the beams, it would cut you in half.
The Collider scientists admit that their own figures showed that there is a certain ongoing risk that two colliding protons could form what they call a "mini black hole." They said that, possibly, the black hole could smash into the cave walls surrounding the Collider, and immediately gather enough mass from molecules in the cave wall to commence a net downward trajectory toward the center of the Earth, where the Earth's own gravity would force feed the Earth itself to the black hole.
In college, I had a brief love affair with relativistic physics and quantum mechanics.
So when one of the Collider scientists pooh-poohed the lawsuit to keep the thing from turning on by arguing that "mini black holes" would "evaporate" from Hawking radiation emissions "in a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a second," I knew that he did not have even the most elementary understanding of Einstein's Theory of Relativity. I called him up on the telephone and I told him, "First, technically there is no such thing as a black hole, because each forming black hole's own forming event horizon keeps the object from completing its formation into a black hole, forever, relative to us. That same slowed formation process prevents mini black holes from finishing their formation, also, relative to us. If they're not fully formed, and if time is effectively permanently stalled for them, relative to us, then they can never 'evaporate.' Voila -- mini black holes last forever."
"But if you're right," he objected, "then mini black holes forming in the upper atmosphere due to the collision of a proton-variety cosmic ray and an atom of hydrogen or helium in the upper atmosphere should occasionally strike the Earth."
"Maybe," I said, "Maybe not. If they retain the electron of the atmospheric atom after the collision, they would probably retain their Brownian Motion potential, and float up, into space. Let's say they can occasionally strike the Earth."
"Yeah!" he answered, "When did that ever happen?"
"Tunguska," I responded.
"Okay," he said, "Let's assume that Tunguska was one. Where did it come out the other side of the Earth?"
I thought, "Huh! How could this guy be a spokesman for the Collider? He has a kid's understanding this stuff!"
I asked, "Why would it 'come out the other side'? Every time the object slams into another atom or molecule in the Earth, it loses more of its forward momentum. Pretty soon, the only thing pulling it into the Earth is gravity -- not momentum. It's gradually going to work its way into the center, and stop!"
He hung up.
In any event -- the judge decided in favor of letting the Collider be turned on.
And so here's my question ...
Is the Large Hadron Collider manufacturing vast quantities of mini-collapsars -- "mini-almost-black-holes" -- and dumping them into the Earth, where they become super-heavy and eat-up the inside of the Earth?
Is that the reason for sink-holes everywhere?
In any event, regardless of the fundamental reason for what appears to be an increase in sinkholes everywhere, it can't be denied that most occur in water-soluble karst rock. Perhaps the process of penetration of and erosion of karst rock is greatly accelerated when a mile-wide tunnel cut by a Collider-generated collapsar travelling sideways through the crust appears beneath it.
Could such ever happen in our little town, Magnolia, New Jersey?
The answer appears to be "maybe," under a small corner of the town which happens to lie over a narrow karst rock line, running northeast-to-southwest, in the ground near Davis Road and Shreve Avenue in Magnolia.
Let's say that someday, a mile-wide tunnel being drilled sideways through the bedrock by a collapsar from the collider in Switzerland happens to pass beneath Magnolia under the karst rock under FedEx. Suddenly, water in the karst rock has a place to go, and it begins to flow and to dissolve-away the karst rock. Finally, boom, the surface gives way to gravity, and Magnolia has its own giant sink hole.
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