Our Pope In Habana

Well, whether we like him or not, he is the Pope we have, these days...! (Which may well be the end days indeed - but that is another story.) And, as he is our Pope, the leader figure of our faith and Church, we have to endorse his actions; especially when he walks on the footsteps of John Paul II...
Pardon. I mean, Karol Jozef Woljtyla!
;-)

So, Cuba gets the official visit treatment - again.
Fourteen long years after the last papal trip there...
(Hmm... And I was just reminded that one Frances died exactly fourteen years older than another Frances - her namesake and cosmic twin of misfortune, verily. Should I see some synchronicity in this re-occurrence of the number 14...? At least it's not the number 23, but still... Anyhow - all that is another -sad- story for another sad blog - so let's just move on...)

Karol met Fidel, in 1998.
This time, Palpatine could meet Raul - and that's it...!
(Sorry - couldn't resist with the Star Wars reference there; I promise I'll behave from this point on!)

Why, we could wonder - why go to Cuba now?

Is it because the Pope hopes to be able to give Fidel his Last Rites - convert and save his soul all at once, giving the ailing Roman Catholic Church quite the boost that it sorely needs on the international front?

Officially, Cuba was still an atheistic country not all that long ago - do we need to remind the world of that? What about the communist thing - need we refresh anyone's memory about that, too?

Fidel, a man of many sins, who could go any minute now - the wish for the higher ranked priest of them all to give such a prime candidate for repentance the Last Communion is entirely justified.

It's not going to happen though, most likely...

Then why - why got to Cuba now, Benedict XVI?

Probably because it is his own last chance to do so, too! And he wants to seize every last chance he has to make an impact, make of his papacy more, much more than a mere ''transition papacy'' as it has been labeled since the very beginning.

There is yet another possible reason WHY CUBA NOW: because the Pope, somehow, has gotten wind that Luminous Luciano has gone to Cuba recently...!

Where Luminous goes, so does the Papacy!

One of his underlings, envoys or whatever elses, or the Pope himself, must have read how I raved about the musical talent in Cuba, trapped in the antithesis of a star system there, with practically zero hopes to ''make it big'' as Americans understand and define it...

They must have read about my sympathy with the plight of the common Cuban, my growing admiration for Che and the other Ernesto (Hemingway) - not to mention Tropicana!

They must have heard, through careful eavesdropping only a Brown-nosed Danny Boy could conceive of, they must have listened when I was raving about cigars, Romeo Y Julieta, MonteCristo, Ciego Montero, Cohiba, cerveza, all the rum, Calidad Sonera, drinks called anything from ''Zombie'' to ''Sex-On-The-Beach'' and my lookalike, Bucanero, of course...!

They could have seen, heard or read all about all of these topics and moi on and from a variety of sources: including, not in any particular order either, my co-workers, colleagues, friends and acquaintances, family, Picasa, Blogger right here, Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Vimeo, YouTube...!

(I am all over the place, y'know; but that is, also, another story...)

Speaking of YouTube though - here is something I uploaded there about Cuba indeed:

Some great Cuban music, indeed -  however, the name of the band is misleading, somewhat. for, LIVE, the quality (CALIDAD) is there  but the quality of their CDs leaves somewhat to be desired... Sad, but true... If you see them perform, give them pesos  (that special form of peso: the tourist currency,  where one peso equals a dollar...!)  but do your own recordings... if you can! 

Now do you see what I am, er, speed-typing about here, hmm?

I guess I inspired Rome to do this; dispatch O Papa there,  at this precise point in time, this exact conjuncture, a mere month after I was there (give or take a few weeks) - my name being Luciano, it could not be any other way!

I am flattered, really - but that is about it.
In closing, some brotherly advice (as I am, also, ''in solidarity with the sacerdoce'' - oath oblige...! But that is another story...)
Don't tan, Pope: and may you not want to have to spend Easter with the communists/mostly-atheists now, if anything goes wrong and your papal plane gets grounded indefinitely (it could happen...!)
That time spent with the fans of la croix gammée in your youth was damaging enough - for a lifetime.

Sempre Por O Melhor
+++

Ripping R.I.P.

Gone too soon - notwithstanding the fact that
he never aged, really...


Wow - they killed Johnny Storm last year - and I never even knew, until now? That shows how much uninterested in fourth-color unevents I am, these days... But let me guess why they dared to commit such an atrocity now: is this the price to pay for daring to have the same actor (Chris Evans) portray both Johnny ªandª Captain America? Once he portrays the latter, the former has to be sacrificed in order to free the thespian up so that he can devote his acting chops now solely and completely to the star-spangled or striped (with chain mail scales!) patriotic hero that was considered so passé, just a short time ago? Never mind that problem now...

Or was this rather the price to pay for another sin: that of having allowed the same actor to portray, back-to-back, a Marvel (Johnny here) and then a DC character (one of the members of The Losers - it is truly needless to name him) to, afterwards, wind up as the Captain of her heart. And, so, Johnny here became tainted beyond repair after this dirtiest form of symbiosis...? There has to be a cleansing, a sacrifice, a bleeding! By that reasoning, Ryan Reynolds will soon be causing the demise of... Deadpool. Not the throwaway character he played in Blade III - but indeed Deadpool; because, after all the trouble in the world in bringing back Hal Jordan, we just know that they won´t be killing Green Lantern again anytime soon...!

Speaking of ol'GL does brings something else to mind - something specific to the four-color world and its view of what death is. Will they ever go through all of these troubles (bringing back Hal Jordan was complicated, I tell ya!) in order to bring back Johnny Storm as well? Personally, I really don't think so...! The old Invaders´ Human Torch can readily step in and fill this gap, methinks. He is the real deal - Johnny was the copy-cat! Johnny was more human, though: and never dealt with the horridness of war, as the other Torch did, so he was easier to identify with for the common reader. Still, to have a walking, talking INCINERATOR to confront the Nazis (one that was cold-blooded to the extreme simply due to the fact that he was really an ANDROID) was truly the great irony and a perfect touch, in the circumstances. The cold cruel world we live in these days is all the more reason to bring him back, back from the repairs department, and insert him into the line-up of the FF to replace Johnny - a line-up that has gone terribly soft in the last decade or so (what terrible timing; but no fault is being imputed here to Rocky Ben Grimm, at all - it is all Stretcho's fault, we all know it! Wait - I think Reed is dead too! It's still his fault, nonetheless!)

But see if I care - heck, I am pretty sure that even Ben Grimm doesn't care anymore either, at this point...! What with the treatment they've been giving him as of late, from what I've heard, why should he care?

Everybody knows what death means in the four-color realm: absolutely nada! Johnny Dead Today - Johnny Back Tomorrow! Yes, he most assuredly will be back, in one form or another... And they`ll be using that insane Cosmic Radiation schema as an excuse for it - with Reed`s blessing...! Ben's sneezing! And Sue`s weeping? Oh joy! Maybe Herbie can be brought back too, now?

Not bad for someone who`s been out of the loop for a while, eh?
Granted, it took me an unusual shopping spree on the web (looking for a wacky t-shirt to add to my collection - one never has enough of those) and a stopover at superherostuff.com to notice this (what - you thought I actually read it on marvel.com or, worse yet, actually read a comic-book again -my first since the naughty nineties- in order to find out about this so-called demise? No way!) but once you know the inside workings of these four-color, two-dimensional machines, you don't need to read any more of it, for it is not rocket science to guess where they are going with all that crap! That's right, Marvel & DC - carry on trivializing death like that, as you've done without a break since the mid-90's ''death'' of Stuporman... Meanwhile, as so many comic-bookie captions used to say, back in the day, at the other end of the cosmos, in the extremely real end of it, people will still be really dying - and not coming back from it three months later as if nothing happened to them.  The real problem is, of course, that none of the bozos who pen this crap care, believe or even know that there was only One Who ever triumphed over Death and came back from the Great Beyond: and it wasn't Superman, it wasn't Aquaman, it wasn't Hawkman and it sure as heck wasn't Forbush-Man - it was Jesus Christ! Only The Christ Ever Came back from the dead!  Nobody else! So stop bringing back dead characters: let them rot in hell!  Or in whatever limbo it is that they are meant to go: being 100% fictional and one-dimensional to boot, in most cases, one should never really a flying hoot where they'll wind up; or how they finally do kick the proverbial bucket...!


Stay Dead, Johnny - stay!  See if I care...