As a Catholic, I’m not buying this. Popes don’t just quit because they’re tired. What’s going on here??

— Piers Morgan (@piersmorgan) February 11, 2013

When the most trusted man in America says something like “What’s going on here?”, then something is most certainly going on here. Popes, after all, do not “quit” like some deluded star of a network situation comedy. Popes “quit” in the way the mythological first pope, Saint Peter, gave up the duties of his office: by upside-down crucifixion. Or, more generally, death. As Joseph Ratzinger is not technically dead, he is the pope until death, unless he believes he is mightier than God and Jesus combined. You don’t tell God, “I’m tired, I’ve had it.” You don’t do this! From The Ten Commandments to maybe Mel Gibson’s movie about the Jews torturing Jesus, a constant theme is that the tired servant of the Lord just doesn’t want to do it anymore. And then the Lord says, “I am the Lord God, and thou art my servant, and thou shalt do whatever I say. No quitting.”

From Piers Morgan to the millions and millions of children sexually assaulted by the black-clad ritual magicians of Ratzinger’s global syndicate, people are wondering what’s up with the soon-to-be ex-pope. Today, we hear that Ratzinger has a pacemaker to keep his heart going. Oh big deal, Dick Cheney has dozens of pacemakers and gets a new heart every eight weeks, and that never slowed him down. Here is how God deals with hearts and heart health, when you’re pope: You are pope until God stops your heart. Is that so confusing? Should it be writ in Latin, or the original German?

Because of the pope’s historical power — his political power, not his less-understood magickal powers — the Bishop of Rome has been the focus of every possible conspiracy, Machiavellian and otherwise, since the once humble church assumed the administrative and judicial power of the fallen Rome.

By the Middle Ages, when a succession of comically horrific popes also decided which German tribal strongman would be “Holy Roman Emperor,” the pope’s earthly power was well established. Until the 16th Century, popes were still handing out these titles, and the pontiff was a symbol of terrestrial and supernatural supremacy, wealth and privilege. Today, the pope is CEO of a severely damaged brand. Bankruptcy, both moral and financial, is taking down dioceses around the world. In the Europe that created Catholicism, barely half of the population even believes in a generic God, let alone a specifically Catholic god that speaks through a group of vulgar old mafiosi dressed like cosplayers at a Renaissance Fair.

Still, there’s only one globally recognized bizarrely costumed man in a fish-head hat and a golden dress sitting upon a jeweled Roman throne claiming to speak for Jesus, an illiterate street preacher who was supposedly executed by Roman authorities. As the born-again Christian and observant Jew known as Bob Dylan said after he was summoned to the Vatican to perform for John Paul II, “He’s the Pope. You know what I mean? There’s only one Pope, right?”

So when something weird happens regarding the pope, those who look for Signs are compelled to watch closely — especially when, for the first time since the dueling papacies of Avignon and Rome from 1378 to 1417, there will be two living popes on Earth.

“This is disconcerting, he is leaving his flock,” said Alessandra Mussolini, a parliamentarian who is granddaughter of Italy’s wartime dictator.

“The pope is not any man. He is the vicar of Christ. He should stay on to the end, go ahead and bear his cross to the end. This is a huge sign of world destabilization that will weaken the Church.”

When a World War II dictator’s granddaughter is making noise about “world destabilization,” we might as well all prepare for something.

Writing at Gawker, the occultist and self-proclaimed Rosicrucian Max Read notes that the current papal conspiracy has a modern component more interesting than Ratzinger’s use of Twitter as an anti-homosexual propaganda tool:

Last year’s “Vatileaks” scandal, in which the pope’s butler Paolo Gabriele provided Italian journalists with a number of confidential Vatican documents — revealing corruption, intrigue and infighting at the highest levels of the church. “Knowing that one of his closest aides had betrayed him must have left him very isolated and powerless. The Pope must have felt that power was slipping away from him, his power to govern,” The Table editor Elena Curti told Metro. Did Vatileaks take down the pope? Or were the scandals it uncovered just a taste of what’s to come — and is Benedict’s abdication a preemptory move?

There are always insane secret wars going on within the modern-day Vatican, from these Vatileaks to bizarre Swiss Guard murders and homosexual love triangles and the absurd P2 scandal that involved Vatican-run masonic lodges, international financial crime and the hanged body of Vatican banker Roberto Calvi found swinging from the scaffolding beneath Blackfriars Bridge in London. You could go down an inescapable Internet rabbit hole trying to find all the dirt on the P2 Vatican lodge, or you could just listen to this George Harrison song about it:

In the case of the Pope Who Quit, there are many signs of a major power struggle between the powerful old European and North American protectors of the child rapists and the newer, mostly brown- and black-skinned church leaders, in Africa and Latin America, where congregations are growing rather than dying out. What else could explain double-fired Los Angeles Cardinal Roger Mahony suddenly being called to Rome to elect the next pope? Shouldn’t Mahony be in federal prison?

Cardinal Roger Mahony of Los Angeles says he will help elect a successor to Pope Benedict XVI, who suddenly announced that he’s resigning.

Mahony also participated in the conclave that elected Benedict in 2005 […] Mahony is the former head of the Los Angeles archdiocese, where he has been barred from public duties by the current archbishop because of revelations about his past handling of clergy pedophile cases.

But the most likely scenario is that Ratzinger is/was the “Last Pope” as foretold by various prophecies and GeoCities sites, and this means the Demons shall be released from their chains, deep beneath the New Madrid seismic fault, and the New Oppressor will stomp around the Earth on a road of bones.

“An article on Wednesday about the refusal by Ireland’s prime minister, Enda Kenny, to officially apologize to survivors of a Roman Catholic workhouse system that kept generations of young Irish women and girls in virtual slavery referred incorrectly to Mary Magdalene. When the system, originally known as the Magdalene Laundries, was founded in the mid-1800s, Mary Magdalene was indeed generally thought to have been a prostitute redeemed by the teachings of Christ. But biblical scholars challenged the prostitute interpretation and the Vatican abandoned it in 1969.”

Three Handjobs Is A Trend

by Ben Dolnick

We are now deep into the season in which our cultural critics, like a gaggle of drunk uncles, kick off their shoes, retire to the den, and proceed to discuss, long past the point at which the rest of us would like to go to sleep, what it’s all about.

You see, these shows we’ve been DVR-ing, these Oscar contenders we’ve been risking bedbugs for: they don’t all just happen to have been released recently. No, they, like the birthmarks in Cloud Atlas, have messages for us; they link up. We’re obsessed with the Civil War. We long for superheroes. We are, as ever, deeply confused about race.

To these grand and worthy reflections, I hereby nervously contribute one of my own: We’re preoccupied with awkward handjobs. These manual acts, by turns aggressive, incestuous, and unsolicited, have lately been crowding our screens like pop-up ads. (Very much, in fact, like the pop-up ads that appear on a guy’s computer when all he’s trying to do is research an essay on handjobs.) If our writers and directors don’t get ahold of themselves soon, not even ABC Family will be safe.

With no further ado, a guided tour through our recent epidemic of heavy petting.

THE MASTER

Peggy Dodd (Amy Adams) approaches her husband, Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman), while he washes up in the bathroom. She’s fed up with his womanizing and paint-thinner drinking, and she knows just what to do about it. In the course of masturbating him into the sink, she forcefully explains to him what is and isn’t allowed, behavior-wise, while he grunts and miserably assents.

Notable Characteristics: Punitive, tense, fluorescent-lit

Sample dialog: “Put it back in its pants.”- Amy Adams

HYDE PARK ON HUDSON

FDR (Bill Murray) drives his cousin Daisy (Laura Linney) out into the middle of a field. He places her hand on his leg, and she, after giving him a questioning look, takes the hint. The camera cuts to a shot of his burning cigarette, and then pulls back to show his inexplicably bobbing head.

Notable Characteristics: Incestuous, bouncy, outdoors

Sample dialog: “We’ve never been here before.” — Laura Linney
“No. I have been saving this.” — Bill Murray

“HOUSE OF CARDS”

Claire Underwood (Robin Wright), wife of venal congressman Frank Underwood (Kevin Spacey), goes to visit her former bodyguard, Steve (Chance Kelly), now dying of prostate cancer. Steve, on his literal deathbed, confesses that he always hated Frank, and secretly loved Claire. This, naturally, inspires Claire to reach under Steve’s sheets, wearing an expression of Terminator-like iciness, while he uses the last of his strength to beg her to stop.

Notable Characteristics: Cruel, unwelcome, medically inadvisable

Sample dialog: “Is this what you wanted? Is that the way you wanted it?” — Robin Wright

There’s more — the pilots of both “Homeland” and “Breaking Bad” involve scenes of sad manual sex — but I figure I’ve made my point: there’s something about an awkward hand-job that’s as distinctly of-this-moment as bands that dress up like carnies. But what is it?

There are, I think, two explanations for the handjobs’ present vogue: there’s the zeitgeist explanation, that it simply matches the current fashions, and there’s the artistic explanation, that it actually represents something of a technical breakthrough, like Renaissance painters figuring out perspective.

First, the zeitgeist. The awkward handjob is a mumblecore sex act, the erotic corollary of a restaurant with mismatched tableware. It’s like the pop and hiss on a vinyl record — a bit of actual grass under feet that have spent too much time on AstroTurf. Nature has provided no lubricant. The recipient’s sensation is, at best, ashamed relief. These are sex scenes that have spent some time alone in the woods, reflecting.

But the awkward handjob is not merely fashionable — it’s also, for our film and TV-makers, a significant discovery. It extracts the maximum transgressive-ness from the minimum of actual graphic material. Without showing anything more than a forearm and a pant leg, you can have moviegoers wincing as if they’d stumbled into Ken Park.

And the handjob, unlike a great many other sex acts, can arrive at least somewhat reasonably out of the blue. No need for a warm-up of passionate kisses or involved undressings and beholdings. Instead — and this allows the filmmaker to retain the great narrative advantage of surprise — the handjob, thanks to anatomical mechanics and the relative perma-readiness of the male sex, can arrive at a moment when you might expect nothing more than a bit of tense argument, or pleasant scenery-watching, or sincere conversation.

Finally, and most importantly, the handjob leaves both actors’ faces visible and available for all manner of stage business. There’s none of that sloppy-interlude feeling, in which the audience squirmingly accepts that for the next forty-five seconds they’re going to have nothing to watch but Angelina Jolie and Antonio Banderas (or their body doubles) breathing heavily and bucking sweatily in dim light. Instead Amy Adams can, coterminously, administer her handjob and deliver a monologue about Philip Seymour Hoffman’s perfidy. Robin Wright can reach under her poor dying Secret Service Agent’s sheets without so much as breaking eye contact. These are sex scenes that have been mined for efficiencies as ruthlessly as any Six Sigma corporation.

This last artistic virtue, incidentally, become clearer when you consider the relative paucity of cinematic acts of male-on-female digital dealings. The only instance that comes to mind (and, for a certain generation of teenager, this instance spent a great deal of 1996–97 coming to mind) is Marky Mark and Reese Witherspoon on the rollercoaster in Fear. The emotional voltage of that scene — tender, ecstatic, full of oceanic universe-merging and wild horse crooning — helps to clarify, I think, why our screens have to this point been so full of women reaching into men’s pants, rather than the reverse. Cultural conventions (or male insecurities) dictate that Reese Witherspoon must not just welcome Marky Mark’s attentions but ride them into nirvana. There’s no room for character development when you’re busy levitating. It will be up to the filmmakers of the future to right this wrong — to give us the fingering scene in which the woman’s eyes, rather than rolling back in her head, remain moodily fixed on the middle distance. Happily, Lena Dunham seems with Sunday’s highly digital episode to be heading in that direction.

So: we’re in a handjobby moment. But cultural moments, like exotic birds, have a way of disappearing as soon as you point at them. Surprise is a quickly diminishing resource, and I have a feeling that we may, with “House of Cards,” be approaching the end of this particular line. Just as novelists, ninety years after Ulysses, can no longer count on muddled grammar to make their characters’ minds seem authentically busy, filmmakers won’t be able for much longer to depend for their frisson on the discretely pulsating shoulder.

Maybe as a culture we, like Benjamin Button (and what a different movie that would have been, had Cate Blanchett reached into old-man/baby Brad Pitt’s wheelchair!), are destined to age in reverse. From Mickey Rourke and Kim Basinger emptying the fridge onto each other in 9 1/2 Weeks to Chloë Sevigny kneeling before Vincent Gallo in Brown Bunny to our current spate of handjobs… and onward, perhaps, to a 2014 in which our best actors will be reduced to feeling each other up. There is no manual.

Ben Dolnick does not usually write about this sort of thing, honestly. He’s the author, most recently, of Shelf-Love, a Kindle Single about Alice Munro.

“From a military perspective, Hoth should have been a total debacle for the Rebel Alliance…. The defenses the Alliance constructed on Hoth could not be more favorable to Vader if the villain constructed them himself. The single Rebel base (!) is defended by a few artillery pieces on its north slope, protecting its main power generator. An ion cannon is its main anti-aircraft/spacecraft defense. Its outermost perimeter defense is an energy shield that can deflect Imperial laser bombardment. But the shield has two huge flaws: It can’t stop an Imperial landing force from entering the atmosphere, and it can only open in a discrete place for a limited time so the Rebels’ Ion Cannon can protect an evacuation. In essence, the Rebels built a shield that can’t keep an invader out and complicates their own escape.

When Vader enters the Hoth System with the Imperial Fleet, he’s holding a winning hand. What follows next is a reminder of two military truths that apply in our own time and in our own galaxy: Don’t place unaccountable religious fanatics in wartime command, and never underestimate a hegemonic power’s ability to miscalculate against an insurgency.”
 — When you’re finished arguing about whether or not the dude on “Girls” was way too attractive to hook up with Lena Dunham, you can move on to this.

“Tesco tonight became the latest firm to drop a major supplier after discovering a range of spaghetti bolognese ready meals contained more than 60% horse meat.” Perhaps it is time we refine this recipe to reflect modern British tastes.

Looking to lose a few pounds before whatever holiday season is approaching? You’ll certainly fit better into that Valentine’s Day costume if you ingest a lot of broken glass and then spend a month in the hospital being fed through a drip. Sadly, the accurately named Nestle Prepared Foods Co. has recalled its popular Lean Cuisine Mushroom Mezzaluna Ravioli With Glass Shards entrée.

Officials say affected packages of Culinary Collection Mushroom Mezzaluna Ravioli have productions codes of 2311587812 and 2312587812. Both codes have a “best before” date of December 2013.

Experts say you might also want to throw all similar garbage out of your freezer, and just eat out of the trash can behind your building.

Photo by by Paul L Dineen.

Oh, hey, it’s Mardi Gras! Why not get drunk in your office and listen to this playlist to pretend you’re in New Orleans? If you actually are in New Orleans, I hate you.

“Drinking large quantities of Coca-Cola was a ‘substantial factor’ in the death of a 30-year-old woman in New Zealand, a coroner has said. Natasha Harris, who died three years ago after a cardiac arrest, drank up to 10 litres of the fizzy drink each day…. ‘The fact that one or more of her children were born without enamel on their teeth, should have been treated by her, and by her family, as a warning,’ said Coroner David Crerar.”
 — “Fifty million times a day/At home at work or on the way/There’s nothing like a Coca-Cola/Nothing like a Coke….”

Do kids read Judy Blume today? Or is it all vampires and British wizards and whatever? I don’t know, but for most of the people born roughly around the time that I was and for at least few years after she was an indispensable guide to the horror and dread that awaited us once our bodies changed. She was also a lot more than that; I’m not sure there’s been enough acknowledgment of just how funny a writer she is. I would wager that more people in their 30s and 40s today owe at least a part of their sense of humor to Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing and some of her other, more lighthearted works than even they know. And I would just like to note on a personal level that reading Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret instilled in me at a very tender age a lifelong sense of gratitude that I do not have a vagina. Anyway, she turns 75 today, and we wish her many happy returns.

Remember how bleak everything seemed in 2003? How the very thought of getting up each morning caused near paralysis as you mentally cataloged the humiliations you’d be forced the face during the course of the day, and how even attempting to think about the future plunged you into a slough of sorrow dug so deep down that the mere contemplation of what you’d need do to somehow start digging your way out proved so exhausting that you eventually decided it was easier not to consider it at all? So you put your head down and went about your life and here we are ten years later and now when you look back at 2003 it is with a sense of shame and spite: shame because you cannot believe that you thought things were so difficult back then, when everything was actually remarkably easy; spite because you hate the you of ten years ago, for whom each day was actually a marvelous jaunt through a magical forest compared with the grim march through fire you now begin barefoot each cursed moment your eyes open and you find that, despite your dreams, you are still here. If you are now in that place where you skip shaving most days because you don’t trust yourself around a razor, I have some good news: It’s not going to last forever. You will eventually die. I can’t say when, but rest assured it is coming. Until then, listen to this new song from the Postal Service. It sounds just like 2003! For three minutes you can trick yourself into thinking that life is only marginally miserable again. Enjoy!