Tuesday April 16th (aka 🔥⛪💧🚁)

[Greenguy]

Morning!

Leave it to President Numbnuts, who referred to Notre Dame as a "museum", to Tweet "Perhaps flying water tankers could be used to put it out...", only to be bitch slapped by France's version of FEMA (or something like that) in the only Tweet they posted yesterday that was in English: "Hundreds of firemen of the Paris Fire Brigade are doing everything they can to bring the terrible #NotreDame fire under control. All means are being used, except for water-bombing aircrafts which, if used, could lead to the collapse of the entire structure of the cathedral." The best comedy writers in the world couldn't come up with such mind-boggling stupidity.

The Notre Dame fire made me think of Our Lady of Victory Basilica in my hometown of Lackawanna, NY. My parents grew up 2 or 3 blocks away from the church:


(mom, off to the left | dad, right there)

They were also married there. My sister & I were each baptised at OLV (and arguments can be made that all 3 of those ceremonies proved to be pointless down the road). Growing up, I really didn't think about how truly magnificent everything about the building is: the marble exterior & huge copper dome, the paintings/murals on the ceiling/walls, the numerous marble statues (the stations of the cross are amazing), the mahogany pews, numerous stained glass windows...if you have a couple (more) minutes to kill, take a look at this gallery & see for yourself.

Useless Info: Father Nelson Baker was the head priest when the Basilica was built and I have to admit, he did a lot of good for the community. There was (still?) a big push to have the Church make him a Saint, partly based on the "miracle" of a natural gas well being discovered on the Church property in 1891, but that still leaves him 1 short of the 2 miracle minimum. In the early 2000's when all this was going on, I guy I grew up with (not Zippy) told me he bought up all "Father Baker Saint" domain names he could find

Everybody still with me?

Ramster gets a "double bow" today because our next project is a well known BBW site (MrMaryLou would be SOFA KING JEALOUS ) so I'm gonna start on that until I have to run the ASSIL all over tarnation & go to see my chiro, who I desperately need