Happy 155th Birthday, Republican Party

And even though you no longer exist, we sincerely hope that all those involved in your offshoots are as morbidly amused and bewildered as I am that your first president was Abraham Lincoln, and that the next "Abraham Lincoln" was a Democrat.

Happy 225th Birthday, Methodist Church

And even though you no longer exist, we sincerely hope that all involved in your offshoots find their hearts strangely warmed today.

Week Three: The Chickens Are Getting Bigger

This Day In History

February 26, 1970: National Public Radio incorporates as a non-profit. Sales of granola skyrocket.

February 26, 1991: Saddam Hussein announces the withdrawal of Iraqi troops from Kuwait. Sales of Rolls-Royces skyrocket.

February 26, 2004: The United States lifts a ban on travel to Libya. Pretty much nobody goes.

$aving Bad! $pending Good!

No Eating Barnacle Geese During Lent

What grows like a fungus on a piece of driftwood, gestates underwater inside a barnacle, drops off like a rotten apple, and flies away? What else, but a barnacle goose! Or so it was once thought.

In truth, these waterfowl, who were seen neither nesting nor laying eggs because they did so in the Arctic, come into the world the same way other geese do.

But because these birds of once questionable origin were thought to have spent their early lives underwater, some 13th century Irish bishops figured they could be classified as fish, and therefore fair game when it came to the Lenten menu.

However, during the Fourth Lateran Council, between condemning Joachim Fiore as a heretic and forbidding priests from engaging in duels, Pope Innocent III expressly stated that since it walked like a duck and talked like a duck, the same fast requirements applied to it as did to the duck. The clerics subsequently altered their behavior, and apologized for running afowl of the papacy.

So if you're looking to skirt ecclesial law by eating something other than fish that still counts as a fish, I'm afraid you'll just have to get the Dread Pirate Roberts to slaughter you a capybara.

Upon Ash Wednesday

It only seems appropriate today to share a portion of T.S. Eliot's poem of the same name, which may serve you well as a tool for prayer on this day of repentance:

Although I do not hope to turn again
Although I do not hope
Although I do not hope to turn

Wavering between the profit and the loss
In this brief transit where the dreams cross
The dreamcrossed twilight between birth and dying
(Bless me father) though I do not wish to wish these things
From the wide window towards the granite shore
The white sails still fly seaward, seaward flying
Unbroken wings

And the lost heart stiffens and rejoices
In the lost lilac and the lost sea voices
And the weak spirit quickens to rebel
For the bent golden-rod and the lost sea smell
Quickens to recover
The cry of quail and the whirling plover
And the blind eye creates
The empty forms between the ivory gates
And smell renews the salt savour of the sandy earth

This is the time of tension between dying and birth
The place of solitude where three dreams cross
Between blue rocks
But when the voices shaken from the yew-tree drift away
Let the other yew be shaken and reply.

Blessèd sister, holy mother, spirit of the fountain, spirit of the garden,
Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still
Even among these rocks,
Our peace in His will
And even among these rocks
Sister, mother
And spirit of the river, spirit of the sea,
Suffer me not to be separated

And let my cry come unto Thee.

Apoloblogology Double Whammy: Etymology 101/Upon Shrove Tuesday

It's days like this that make life worth blogging.

Carnival:

Today, the eve of Ash Wednesday, is referred to in some circles as "Carnival," taken from the Latin carne, meaning "meat" or "flesh," and vale, the second person singular present active imperative rendering of "farewell."

Of course, this being Fat Tuesday, the word "carnival" has a double meaning- saying farewell to meat is an integral part of the Lenten fast, and being the penitential season that it is, we are also called to say "farewell" to our "carnal," fleshly natures.

Expect carnival observances throughout the day today to say goodbye to neither.

Upon The Feast Of St. Polycarp Of Smyrna

Student of St. John the Apostle, Bishop of Smyrna. It's likely that the letter that John passed on to the Church at Smyrna from the book of Revelation found its way into Polycarp's hands.

Here's the prayer penned by St. Polycarp, issued just before his stadium martrydom at age 86:

Lord God almighty, Father of Jesus Christ, your dear Son through whom we have come to know you, God of the angels and powers, God of all creation, God of those who live in your presence, the race of the just: I bless you. You have considered me worthy of this day and hour, worthy to be numbered with the martyrs and to drink the cup of your Anointed One, and thus to rise and live forever, body and soul, in the incorruptibility of the Holy Spirit.

St. Polycarp, ora pro nobis!

What Will You Be Giving Up For Lent?

I had a student in Latin school who used to say that his mom tried to give up sarcasm for Lent. It's a noble thought, but one that would require too much sacrifice for me.

Giving up chocolate is not really that much of a sacrifice for yours truly- I'm the kind of person who is more often assaulted with the temptation to purchase pork rinds when I pay for my gas. Giving up caffiene altogether would make it awfully difficult for me to rise at 3:00 every morning to begin my work day. And my wife has hidden my copy of NCAA Football for PlayStation 2, so giving up video games at this point doesn't really require any additional sacrifice.

I initially considered giving up blogging for Lent, but a fast during this penitential season is supposed to build virtue in me, not you, my readership. On secound thought, perhaps a refrain from blogging would build virtue in all involved parties...

At this point, the going idea I have is to give up purchasing any media- meaning no additional books, CDs, or movies for my library. No magazines, newspapers, or even concert tickets. This could help me in a few ways- not only would it increase my resistance to the temptation to blow all of my expendable income frivolously, it would also free me up to fulfill the other legs of the Lenten stool: I could use the limited expendable income that I would usually blow on entertainment in almsgiving, and less noise in my head could serve as an aid toward a less distracted prayer life.

Which leads us to the question: what will you be giving up for Lent? We here at Apoloblogology are interested in the spiritual disciplines of our readership, because we feel that it makes for good water cooler conversation, especially for those of our readers who enjoy having their religious peculiarities leered at in secular workplaces.

Please feel free to share the object of your respective asceticism in the combox below.

Upon The Feast Of The Chair Of St. Peter

Proving that just because you stick your foot in your mouth constantly doesn't mean that you can't be a longshot for sainthood. Consider me encouraged.

Immanent Destruction Continues To Breathe Down Our Neck

And no, I'm not talking about our downward economic spiral.

Leave it to the British press to express the impending apocalypse in the most artistically appealing way possible:

Autonomous military robots that will fight future wars must be programmed to live by a strict warrior code or the world risks untold atrocities at their steely hands.

The stark warning – which includes discussion of a Terminator-style scenario in which robots turn on their human masters – is issued in a hefty report funded by and prepared for the US Navy’s high-tech and secretive Office of Naval Research .

(snip)

“There is a common misconception that robots will do only what we have programmed them to do,” Patrick Lin, the chief compiler of the report, said. “Unfortunately, such a belief is sorely outdated, harking back to a time when . . . programs could be written and understood by a single person.” The reality, Dr Lin said, was that modern programs included millions of lines of code and were written by teams of programmers, none of whom knew the entire program: accordingly, no individual could accurately predict how the various portions of large programs would interact without extensive testing in the field – an option that may either be unavailable or deliberately sidestepped by the designers of fighting robots.

The solution, he suggests, is to mix rules-based programming with a period of “learning” the rights and wrongs of warfare.

A rich variety of scenarios outlining the ethical, legal, social and political issues posed as robot technology improves are covered in the report. How do we protect our robot armies against terrorist hackers or software malfunction? Who is to blame if a robot goes berserk in a crowd of civilians – the robot, its programmer or the US president? Should the robots have a “suicide switch” and should they be programmed to preserve their lives?

The report, compiled by the Ethics and Emerging Technology department of California State Polytechnic University and obtained by The Times, strongly warns the US military against complacency or shortcuts as military robot designers engage in the “rush to market” and the pace of advances in artificial intelligence is increased.

(snip)

“We are going to need a code,” Dr Lin said. “These things are military, and they can’t be pacifists, so we have to think in terms of battlefield ethics. We are going to need a warrior code.”

Mark my words. Angelina Jolie is going to become self-aware any day now, and when she does, we're all hosed.

The Upside Of Congress Passing Hog-Farm Legislation Before Any Of Us Could See It...

...is that it generates some decent material for people like the perenially witty Mike Huckabee. See below:

Bigfoot And Cain

Occasionally, the bizarre disciplines of fundamentalist scripture interpretation and cryptozoology interface in fascinating ways. Given that the first reading from Genesis in today's lectionary recounts the story of the murder of Abel by Cain, I think it affords the opportunity to talk about one of my favorite of such intersections: the belief of some Mormons that Bigfoot is actually Cain.

That's right, Cain. Not a descendant of Cain, but Cain himself. The scriptural allusion to some sort of "deformation" or "de-evolution" of Cain is traced back to Genesis 4:15, where the Lord puts a "mark" on Cain, so that no one who found him would kill him. In certain Mormon circles, this is taken to mean that Cain is immortal.

Add to this bizarre reading of the scriptural narrative the 1835 account of David Patten, one of LDS founder Joseph Smith's original "Quorum of the Twelve Apostles," who claimed that he had an encounter during which he was accompanied on the road by whom(what?) he believed to be Cain:

"He walked along beside me for about two miles. His head was about even with my shoulders as I sat in my saddle. He wore no clothing, but was covered with hair. His skin was very dark."

It became further apparent to Patten during this encounter in Tennessee that Bigfoot/Cain had been condemned to an immortal life, roaming the earth with the mission of destroying the souls of men.

The story of Patten's encounter with Bigfoot/Cain is recounted further in the Mormon spiritual classic, "The Miracle of Forgiveness" by Spencer W. Kimball.

A good Mormon death means you get a planet of your own in the end. However, as demonstrated by the case of Cain, a bad Mormon death means you get stuck with this one.

Upon The Feast Of The Shipwreck Of St. Paul

A Malta'd shipshake.

Homemade Valentine's Day Dinner At The Apoloblogology Homestead: MeatLuv.

Loaf by me. Inscription by my wife.

I Love Lamp

Say hello to my little friends.

Upon The Feast Of St. Valentine (In Certain Local Communities)

In one of the more bizarre cultural developments in Western civilization, a certain priest (or series of priests) named Valentine watches annually from heaven as we creatures here below eradicate his memory, calling little pieces of glossy paper with Hannah Montana on them "Valentine" instead. It's an extraordinarily odd phenomenon, especially since we don't call those green plastic bowlers people wear in Chicago "Patrick," or those decorated trees we prop up in our living room "Jesus."

The association of St. Valentine with romance has to do with medieval Christians pegging his February 14 feast with the date that birds began to pair up.

Therefore, in the spirit of the original setting of this feast, my wife and I are headed off to a local hatchery to pick up three Black Barred Plymouth Rock chicks. Wish me cluck!

Mark Shea Relays Helpful FAQ's About The Stimulus

He gets them from an unknown Australian commentator:

Q. What is an Economic Stimulus Payment?
A. It is money that the federal government will send to Taxpayers.

Q. Where will the government get this money?
A. From taxpayers.

Q. So the government is giving me back my own money?
A. Only a smidgen.

Q. What is the purpose of this payment?
A. The plan is that you will use the money to purchase a high-definition TV set, thus stimulating the economy.

Q. But isn't that stimulating the economy of China?
A. Shut up.
_____________________________________________

Below is some helpful advice on how to best help the Economy by spending your stimulus check wisely:

If you spend that money at K-Mart, all the money will go to China.

If you spend it on petrol it will go to the Arabs.

If you purchase a computer it will go to India.

If you purchase fruit and vegetables it will go to South East Asia or New Zealand.

If you buy a car it will go to Japan.

If you purchase useless crap it will go to Taiwan.

Manifest Destiny, prepare for your evisceration.

God bless whatever country takes power next!

(by the way, is anyone besides me made uncomfortable by the fact that people keep using the terms "stimulus" and "package" in such close conjunction OVER and OVER again?)

Swaim's Law Of Faux Revenge In Democracy

I've always wanted to be the kind of person who would coin some sort of universal principle, the title of which would appear in boldface in high school textbooks, that students would have to bore themselves by memorizing word for word.

Right now, the closest-to-axiomatic thing I've figured out so far is what I'll call Swaim's Law Of Faux Revenge In Democracy, which for the time being states that When Democrats Are In Power, They Tend To Act Uncannily Similar To The Way Republicans Did When They Were In Power, And Vice Versa.

Case(s) in point: Like his predecessors, Barack Obama has offered jobs at the highest levels of his administration to a sleazy crew of rich, white tax evaders, the only one of which who has taken the job being the head of the IRS. Like most every presidential candidate in my lifetime, he's promised to keep lobbyists out of Washington, and yet he has hired over a dozen lobbyists to high positions (most recently Raytheon lobbyist William Lynn for deputy defense secretary). After George W. Bush advocated giving several billion dollars to the banking industry and it backfired, Obama is advocating an even bigger stimulus package that will, in the estimation of anyone with an elementary understanding of economics, also backfire.

The office of the vice presidency continues to be no longer a testing phase for the presidency, but rather the place where you put the wierdo that can't seem to fit into the political landscape anywhere else. And the president still whacks his head on the top of the helicopter entrance.

From an administration that defaulted to abstract and practically terms such as "compassionate conservatism," "stay the course" and "mission accomplished," we've transitioned to similarly meaningless phrases such as "yes we can," "change," and "transparency." I wish my AP English teacher would attack such empty rhetorick with the same red pen she took to my teenage essays and write "DEFINE YOUR TERMS" on the documents of our current politicians.

I was led to beleive that the methodology that I've been seeing in our nation's highest political office is merely what rich, white, entitled males do when they get power. I'm coming swiftly to believe, however, that this is just the way you act when you're President in the modern era.

Happy Secular Feast Day, Triskadekaphobes

We all know that the number 13 is said to be unlucky. Perhaps even more unlucky than the numeric sequence that Hurley played the lottery with before crashing on The Island. But why, specifically, the number 13? The staff at StraightDope.com says that we Christians are to blame:

"...13's stock dropped like a rock in the middle ages. The proximate cause of this apparently was the observation that Judas, the betrayer of Jesus, made 13 at the table. Other great medieval minds, I read here, pointed out that "the Jews murmured 13 times against God in the exodus from Egypt, that the thirteenth psalm concerns wickedness and corruption, that the circumcision of Israel occurred in the thirteenth year," and so on."

Fair enough. But why, specifically, is the combination of Friday and the number 13 considered especially unlucky? If you guessed Christianity again, you get a gold star courtesy of about.com:

Some say Friday's bad reputation goes all the way back to the Garden of Eden. It was on a Friday, supposedly, that Eve tempted Adam with the forbidden fruit. Adam bit, as we all learned in Sunday School, and they were both ejected from Paradise. Tradition also holds that the Great Flood began on a Friday; God tongue-tied the builders of the Tower of Babel on a Friday; the Temple of Solomon was destroyed on a Friday; and, of course, Friday was the day of the week on which Christ was crucified. It is therefore a day of penance for Christians.

In pagan Rome, Friday was execution day (later Hangman's Day in Britain), but in other pre-Christian cultures it was the sabbath, a day of worship, so those who indulged in secular or self-interested activities on that day could not expect to receive blessings from the gods — which may explain the lingering taboo on embarking on journeys or starting important projects on Fridays.

To complicate matters, these pagan associations were not lost on the early Church, which went to great lengths to suppress them. If Friday was a holy day for heathens, the Church fathers felt, it must not be so for Christians — thus it became known in the Middle Ages as the "Witches' Sabbath," and thereby hangs another tale.

As for me, I don't go in for superstition. I plan to celebrate this infortunate calendar confluence by dumping salt on the ground and throwing a black cat through a mirror.

LiveBlogging The Revolution

My wife is currently on the phone with the zoning commission for the City of Cincinnati. Apparently there's not anything currently on the books that says whether or not we, as citizens of the Queen City, are allowed to have chickens on our property.

All efforts to interpret zoning law are currently leading us to the head of zoning for the city. A hearing is in the process of being scheduled.

Prepare to hear first on this blog whether or not legislation will be penned in the City of Cincinnati regarding chicken ownership. If we set a precedent, all readership living in our immediate proximity will be encouraged to engage in a move of solidarity and follow our lead by purchasing live poultry that will be allowed to roam their respective properties in reasonable and humane confinement.

Cost of one dozen free-range organic eggs: roughly three dollars.

Cost of one chicken, allowed to roam in a confined space, which will lay roughly one egg per day into the foreseeable future: roughly three dollars.

Stay tuned for updates.

I Almost Wish My Priest Were Like This

Thank you, Mark Shea.

My New Favorite Website Of All Time...

...is lolsaints.com.

Orwellian Job Title Of The Day

National Coordinator of Health Information Technology.

Yet Another Sign That Our Nation Is Going The Way Of The Roman Empire

We'll just let this puppy speak for itself:

The February 14 date of Alexander Wang's fashion show could not be more fitting for the unveiling of the limited-edition condom he designed in collaboration with Planned Parenthood. The Proper Attire rubbers will be sold at Thompson Hotels, with all profits going to Planned Parenthood. “When Planned Parenthood approached me to collaborate with them on a project that makes condoms more appealing to women, I loved the idea!" Wang said. "I used a spare design that felt sexy, modern and empowering; after all, women should always come first!” Damn straight. Get a side of condoms with your next cocktail at 60 Thompson. It's for a good cause.

This titillating article is courtesy of New York Magazine.

No jokes about the designer's name in the combox.

Upon The Feast Of St. Apollonia

Had her teeth broken out with pincers. Patron saint of dentists.

I freaking love this religion.

Upon The Feast Of St. Paul Miki And Companions

Forced to march 600 miles, and then crucified. Never underestimate the ego of a pagan emperor.

I Thought This Was An Onion Article

Bill Gates Unleashes Swarm Of Mosquitoes On Crowd

I Stand With The Archbishop

If you ever want to be thoroughly depressed at the state of our society, simply read the comboxes in a public newspaper anytime anybody from the Church says anything about anything. Immediately employed is the Catholic version of the argument ad Hitlerum, wherein the reaction of the public defaults to a sticking of the fingers in the ears and a chanting of something to the effect of "LA LA LA SEX ABUSE SCANDAL LA LA LA!" As Chesterton so aptly put it, "it is generally the man who is not ready to argue, who is ready to sneer."

Such has become the case with Archbishop Daniel Pilarczyk of Cincinnati's recent expression of disgust at "Sexploration Week," currently being offered on University of Cincinnati campus, notoriously sponsored by the intrepid sexplorers at Pure Romance. One caption from a photo of the "Pizza and Porn" session reads as follows:

some Students who attended “Pizza and Porn” were asked under what circumstances they would ‘do porn.’ Some would ... with provisions.

Curious for more information about "Pizza and Porn?" Here ya go:

At the event "Pizza and Porn," sexuality educator Kathleen Baldwin will discuss how "porn is not necessarily a bad thing," Johnson said. "We're not showing porn, we're just discussing porn."

Because porn is not necessarily bad, but too bad to show over pizza, apparently.

Other session titles include "Sexcapades" and "Got the Hook Up?" And if these talks whet your sexual appetites, free condoms and "safer sex kits" (I don't even want to know) abound, along with a free demonstration of products from Pure Romance to help accessorize the experience.

A word coined on Mark Shea's blog the other day aptly sums up the whole fiasco: "sluttony."

Archbishop Pilarczyk, an alumnus of the University of Cincinnati, rightly expressed his disgust at the week's events. Not surprisingly, he was greeted with a chorus of detractors, the content of most of whose comments could be summed up by "stuff it, you molestor!" and "sexual promiscuity is right because it's recent!" Here's a sampling of a few of the comments on the article from the Enquirer, which at last count filled 50+ pages:

"keep sex in the rectory where it belongs!!!"

"Mind your O.D.B. Catholic Church and Pilarczyk. Take your pageantry and pedophilia to a cave somewhere. We can all be good people and citizens without that garbage."

"Does the Archbishop realize that his parents had sex too! If not how in the world did he get here? His parents must have had impure thoughts and actions! Just once. Oh MY that may make a mortal rather that the high and mighty one he thinks he is."

"To the archbishop. GO CRALL BACK UNDER THE ROCK YOU CAME from! The only disturbing thing is how you handled the priests you shuffeled from church to church at the expense of the children that they molested. You Danile Pilarczyk are very disturbing to all of us in the city."

And so forth. Perhaps UC should consider spending their money on a campus-wide grammar and spelling convention instead.

The sex abuse scandal happened. There's no denying it; there's no excusing it. But to forget that the scandal happened inside the Church at the same time that the sexual revolution was happening outside is to live in unreality. I hate that the abuse happened in my Catholic Church, just as I hated when it happened in my Nazarene Church, or in my United Methodist Church, or in the schools I attended.

But perhaps what I hate the most about the fact that it happened in my Church is that when someone like Archbishop Pilarczyk rightly expresses disgust at a tasteless display such as "Sexploration," that the arguments he makes are automatically dismissed with the man.

Nancy Pelosi Needs Her Prescriptions Refilled.

She's in charge... why?

Here's her argument for economic stimulus, wherein she cites that one-sixth of the country loses their jobs monthly. According to her predictions, we're all dead meat in six months:

A Thoroughly Satisfying Waste Of Time

Thank you, Steven Greydanus.

It Is A Holy And Wholesome Thought To Pray For The Dead

Send a few in the direction of Michael Dubruiel, who passed away yesterday in an entirely unexpected fashion. He and his wife, Amy Welborn (AKA Queen of the Catholic blogosphere) have made numerous contributions to the "New Evangelization" over the past several years. Our prayers go with all touched by this loss.

“The Day Before Something Is Truly A Breakthrough, It’s A Crazy Idea.”

The latest pie-eyed efforts toward making Skynet self-aware come from two of our all time favorite future-worshipping organizations. Paging John Connor:

Google and Nasa are throwing their weight behind a new school for futurists in Silicon Valley to prepare scientists for an era when machines become cleverer than people.

The new institution, known as “Singularity University”, is to be headed by Ray Kurzweil, whose predictions about the exponential pace of technological change have made him a controversial figure in technology circles.

Google and Nasa’s backing demonstrates the growing mainstream acceptance of Mr Kurzweil’s views, which include a claim that before the middle of this century artificial intelligence will outstrip human beings, ushering in a new era of civilisation.

The so-called “singularity” is a theorised period of rapid technological progress in the near future.

Proponents say that during the singularity, machines will be able to improve themselves using artificial intelligence and that smarter-than-human computers will solve problems including energy scarcity, climate change and hunger.

Yet many critics call the singularity dangerous. Some worry that a malicious artificial intelligence might annihilate the human race.

Mr Kurzweil said the university was launching now because many technologies were approaching a moment of radical advancement. “We’re getting to the steep part of the curve,” said Mr Kurzweil. “It’s not just electronics and computers. It’s any technology where we can measure the information content, like genetics(emphasis mine).”

“We are anchoring the university in what is in the lab today, with an understanding of what’s in the realm of possibility in the future,” said Mr Diamandis, who will be vice-chancellor. “The day before something is truly a breakthrough, it’s a crazy idea.”

Not much to say here. I think the story speaks for itself. Nothing like allowing self-aware advanced artificial intelligences to tamper with human genetic material to really get us where we need to be as a race.

Please send your copies of Terminator and The Matrix to:

Singularity University
NASA Research Park, Building 17
MS 566-120, Moffett Field, CA 94035

Upon The Feast Of The Presentation Of The Lord

An incarnation purification, a crucifixion prediction.

Return Of The Ibex

Mere weeks ago, I made my predictions of things that would most certainly happen in 2008. Among them was the following:

2. The guy that is trying to clone and give life to a wooly mammoth and a sabretooth tiger will finally do so. And they will kill him.

Suffice to say that this has yet to come to pass. But the following step toward it has, according to the Telegraph (UK):

The Pyrenean ibex, a form of wild mountain goat, was officially declared extinct in 2000 when the last-known animal of its kind was found dead in northern Spain.

Shortly before its death, scientists preserved skin samples of the goat, a subspecies of the Spanish ibex that live in mountain ranges across the country, in liquid nitrogen.

Using DNA taken from these skin samples, the scientists were able to replace the genetic material in eggs from domestic goats, to clone a female Pyrenean ibex, or bucardo as they are known. It is the first time an extinct animal has been cloned.

Sadly, the newborn ibex kid died shortly after birth due to physical defects in its lungs. Other cloned animals, including sheep, have been born with similar lung defects.

But the breakthrough has raised hopes that it will be possible to save endangered and newly extinct species by resurrecting them from frozen tissue.

It has also increased the possibility that it will one day be possible to reproduce long-dead species such as woolly mammoths and even dinosaurs.

What this has proven is that, among other things, it may eventually be possible to reanimate or clone other carbon based life forms currently frozen in liquid nitrogen, such as whatever they found at Area 51, or perhaps Ted Williams. When our staff knocked on the office door of Apoloblogology correspondent Dr. Ian Malcolm, he merely shouted that he wasn't there in a somewhat slurred voice.

Update:Inexplicably, it appears that one of the Fabulous Flying Archbold Brothers scooped me on this one. They haven't seen the last of me...