Procrastinet

as a recovering catholic (one day at at a time) I would just like to point out that portraits of most saints are just guesses by the artists, since these people are usually long dead when canonized, so Saint Expeditus probably looks like that because of the ponce-hall monitor name. and one more thing, I used to cut this priest's lawn in 1988, and one afternoon he made me lemonade and took his balls out to see if I would do something. I drank the lemonade, it was a humid day.

Scurf is this fungus stuff that grows on potatoes. If you are a potato, or, perhaps a couch potato, you may have cause for concern.

odd list, but it has a counterpart in the lists of pagan gods. the general idea of associating the litanies of saits with these ameliorative effects was to put a human face on those 'specific spirits' and so bring them back to the center.

anthropologically speaking.

of course after the activities of the bollandists (jesuit movement) in the first part of the last century, a lot of that has fallen away.

interesting folks. came across them via a reference in a robertson davies novel.

(everyone involved in the theatre is required to read at least one of his trilogies.)

My birthday (9/29) had several archangels attached--SCORE! Among some of my favorites:

Michael: Patron saint of danger at sea, EMTs, fencing and hatmakers. WTF?!?

Gabriel: Patron saint of television.

Raphael: Patron saint of insanity, mental illness, mentally ill eople, love and sickness

oh and then there was lowly Theodota: the patron saint of torture victims.

September 29th is an important day indeed.

So I hit the jackpot with saints! 60 of them on my day (10/25). Too many to check out, but the most notable I looked at (along with his brother -- Crispin and Crispian-- apparently their parents were deficient in imagination) were patrons of shoemakers, lace makers, saddle makers, etc.

Several others were martyred -- beheading, hanging, drawn & quartering, *pressed.* Two of the women were executed for "harboring priests." Hmmmm. England was hell on Catholics for a while!

So, interesting story about the origin of this particular saint. Don't know if it's true, of course, but what can you do?

So, the story goes that when they were building the Cathedral in New Orleans a long, long while ago, they couldn't find a local artist to do the saint, so they had them commissioned overseas, I believe in France.

The saint statues were shipped over in large boxes with their names printed on the outsides to avoid confusion - since you don't want the saint for protection against drafts on the leeward side of the building, for example. Also, the names were not on the statues themselves, they were to be marked on the niches.

They got most of the saints up and properly labeled - including the one from the box that said, in larger letters than any other "EXPEDITE."

Ahh, New Orleans.