Don't Say Anything-- It's Just Ashes on Their Forehead

This picture is my desktop right now. It's the cutest mac n' cheese picture and I realized I didn't post it before. Mac n' Cheese is appropriate, because I've discovered reading Catholic blogs that it's a big item eaten during Lent.




In case you did not live in a Catholic town when you were in high school, don't say anything when you see people with stuff on their forehead this morning. It's Ash Wednesday, so good Catholics have been to church and have gotten a smear of ash on their foreheads. I think most of them feel silly enough about it without having to field Protestants chasing them with a wet-nap (ask me how I know).

The concept of having a season set aside for repentance is actually a wholesome one; the various weirdnesses of Lent have to do with the medieval Catholic Church's odd ideas of how to prove to the world you were repenting. Ashes on the head has some Biblical precedent (though to be consistent you should also, I suppose, rip your clothes), but interpreting "fast" as "abstain from meat--oops, we only mean four-legged meat, you can have fish" is a bit of a stretch. Especially since the "you can have fish" part was added in after the Pope realized nobody was listening to the "abstain from meat" part.

Anyhoo, yesterday was Fat Tuesday, and appropriately enough PBO's address to Congress contained an awful lot of spending proposals. Given that PBO is discovering what Bill Clinton discovered (i.e., you can't make Congress do what you tell them), we'll see how much of it actually comes to pass, but his plans are.... ambitious to say the least. At one point during the speech I turned to the Husband and said, "Maybe the people who bury gold coins in their yard aren't so crazy after all."

My point was not that I think we should buy gold coins--I think that's a stupid reaction to the idea of currency collapse, and that if you really thought your money was going to be valueless you should invest in things that have value in a barter economy, like chocolate, booze, and cigarettes--but that it sounds as though we're going down an even more foolish road than we went down with the first Depression. Either PBO doesn't understand how bad things are and how they got this way, or he truly believes that the best way to get the economy going again is to spend money that we don't have. In other words, go even further into debt to other nations. This sounds like a recipe for disaster to me, but what do I know? I'm just someone who has to balance a checkbook and who thinks the lesson of the current depression is "don't put things on your credit cards that you can't afford".

On a less serious note, I caught a couple of errors in the speech last night. One was when PBO said the U.S. government laid the coast-to-coast railroad during the Civil War. Um, no, that was the Union Pacific, although the government did sell bonds to support it. The other was when he said the U.S. invented the automobile. Um, no, that would be Mr. Benz in Germany. As in, Mercedes-Benz?

These items are easy to check on Wikipedia. I wonder if the speech writer got fired, or just got a stern look and his coffee privileges revoked?

On the plus side, the speech was very inspiring and PBO's snazzy red-and-white-striped tie has, I notice this morning, become all the rage among news anchors. I predict red-and-white patterned ties are going to be The Next Big Thing. And Mrs. Obama looked very nice too. (Nancy Pelosi's dress was the color of bile, but presumably that wasn't her fault.)

Enough politics; I have to go buy canned tuna today. Hope you all have a solemn and repentant Ash Wednesday. Try a "buy nothing but food" challenge during Lent; you will probably need all the money you save sooner than you think.

Cheers anyhow,

Breanna