OPENING SHOT . . .
The Catholic Church is still mulling over limbo?
Pope Benedict XVI signed off on a report Friday suggesting that infants who die without being baptized may end up dandled on God's knee in heaven anyway, as opposed to being warehoused for all eternity in the chilly nowhere of limbo.
I thought they got rid of limbo while scrapping the Latin mass in the 1960s. Then again, most of what I know
about the subject was learned from George Carlin's "Class Clown" album.
"What could limbo be?" he muses, in a spooky mysteries voice. "Wellllcome to limmmmbo."
In 1972, Carlin definitely seems to think that limbo is history.
"I hope they promoted everybody," he says. "Didn't just cut 'em loose into space."
NEWS FOR THE DERANGED
"Not everything is for children," underground artist Robert Crumb once said, "not everything is for everybody."
Lots of e-mail about my assertion that NBC and the media horde were correct to pass along the rantings of Virginia Tech murderer Seung-Hui Cho. Many insist this gives the killer his day in the sun.
"By airing that filth, they glorify and glamorize this evil person, and that spurs others like him into action," reads a typical comment.
We'll find out, won't we?
To me, that fear reflects the lumpen assumption that appearing on TV is the pinnacle of human achievement. Why else would a parade of semi-attractive women prostitute themselves on shows like "The Bachelor"?
But the media can't slant its coverage to the most disturbed (though imagine if it did: "It's 10 o'clock -- have you taken your medications?" "Voices in your head telling you to kill? Tune in Mondays at 6 p.m. to UPN's new series, 'Not Today,' for positive thoughts and stress-releasing exercises designed to help you maintain your grip on reality . . . ")
Sorry. Television is its own punishment. I was going to complain about the syrupy coverage of the Virginia Tech memorials -- now there's something we could do without -- but decided that complaining about the specific content of TV programs is like complaining about the red-velvet flocked wallpaper in a brothel. You shouldn't criticize it, because you shouldn't be there in the first place.
PICTURE DAY
Downtown Northbrook is fairly deserted at 8 a.m. on a Saturday, but a crew is working on the train tracks.
"What position does he play?" a grinning workman in an orange vest calls as we walk by.
The Northbrook Baseball Instructional League actually rotates the boys through the positions, so they learn to play the game. But that's a mouthful to shout back.
"Shortstop," I say.
"Well, good luck!"
We walk on.
"A friendly guy," my younger son observes.
"Everybody loves a baseball player," I say, patting him on the back. It's true. We are on our way to get his picture taken -- the league, an unconscious nod to the nostalgia of baseball, begins its season by taking team photos, the morning of the first game.
At the Village Green are hundreds of people. Boys in dazzling white baseball pants and colorful baseball caps and uniforms -- reds and blues and purples -- trailed by retinues of little sisters in strollers and dogs on leashes and dads, clinging to stainless steel coffee mugs, looking on with unfathomable expressions of mingled pride, concern and anticipation.
The league runs from fourth to eighth grade, and the changes in that time are immediately clear. Fourth-graders such as my son are older versions of kindergartners, chasing each other, punching themselves in the groin to test their plastic cups, resting their mitts on their heads. The eighth-graders are gangly, laconic -- exuding cool, or trying to. Tall as storks, only with acne and the beginnings of mustaches.
The grass is wet with dew at 8:15, the sky blue, crisp and cloudless. Our team -- "Pump Biz" on a bright red
shirt, a lot better than "Thomas Uhland Orthodontics" -- takes up position for the photograph that will rest in a dozen attics for the next century. The four big guys, mine included, stand in back. Another five kneeling in front of them, and then three sitting cross-legged.
The photo is snapped, the boys disperse. Those who knelt have spots of green on their knees, their sparkling uniforms inaugurated, the first dirt of the newborn season.
BOOMSDAY
As an egghead, I don't read much popular fiction. The last novel I finished was Dante's Commedia, and it seems wrong to call it a novel, because readers are left with the firm impression that Dante did indeed go down to hell and see Satan, and is merely reporting the experience.
But I am happily ripping through Boomsday, Christopher Buckley's tale of a tawny young blogger, Cassandra
Devine, and her big idea that the baby boomers should do their nation's crumbling economy a favor by killing themselves.
She's one of those spunky, smart-mouthed lasses -- picture Cameron Diaz in the movie -- who'd be interesting
dozing in a chair, and is captivating whirling amongst a cast of outlandish characters, from Randolph Kumberling Jepperson IV, the effete, one-legged WASP senator, to the hapless President Riley Peacham, whose staff suggests his re-election campaign slogan be, "He's doing his best. Really."
Buckley does put in plenty of winks to the literary set. The title itself is a pun on "Bloomsday" -- June 16, 1904, when all the action in James Joyce's Ulysses takes place. There's even a nudge in the ribs of Dante fans, in the form of Monsignor Montefeltro, the oily yet surprisingly sympathetic cleric. Buckley names him -- I assume -- after Buonconte da Montefeltro, whom Dante encounters in purgatory, a body stripped of its soul. An all-too common occurrence nowadays, though we who yet retain shreds of our souls can find comfort in laughing at the funhouse mirror Buckley holds up to our troubled land.
Today's Chuckle . . .
Mahatma Gandhi s not known for his sense of humor. But I found this and had to passit along:
"What do I think of Western civilization? I think it would be a very good idea."
nsteinberg@suntimes.com
Photo: (See microfilm for photo description).
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