Unshelved
Notable authors on the Vatican's list of prohibited books:
- Francis Bacon
- Honoré de Balzac
- Giordano Bruno
- Nicolaus Copernicus
- Daniel Defoe
- René Descartes
- Denis Diderot
- Desiderius Erasmus
- Gustave Flaubert
- Galileo Galilei
- Edward Gibbon
- Thomas Hobbes
- Victor Hugo
- David Hume
- Immanuel Kant
- John Locke
- John Stuart Mill
- John Milton
- Blaise Pascal
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau
- Jean-Paul Sartre
- Jonathan Swift
- Voltaire
- Émile Zola
George Bernard Shaw said, "Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody reads."
Who Made Who?
DEIFIED is a palindrome.
Memento Mori
Rome's Capuchin Crypt contains the remains of more than 4,000 monks who died between 1528 and 1870, including several intact skeletons wearing Franciscan habits.
Reportedly it inspired the Sedlec Ossuary.
Come Out, Come Out …
That hollow column on the right is a "priest-hole," a hiding place for Catholic priests, who were hunted with Elmer-Fudd-like tenacity when Elizabeth took the English throne around 1560. A "papist" could be hanged for saying mass; converting a Protestant was high treason.
Fortunately, the priests had a Bugs Bunny in the shape of Nicholas Owen, a Jesuit laybrother who spent his life devising secret chambers and hiding places for persecuted Catholics. "Pursuivants" could spend as much as a fortnight fruitlessly tearing down paneling and tearing up floors while the priest held his breath a wall's thickness away.
Ickily, some of these hidden priests starved to death.
Syllogism
Nothing is worse than the Devil.
Nothing is greater than God.
Therefore, the Devil is greater than God.
DCLXVI
Hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia is fear of the number 666, which is linked to Satan and the Antichrist in the Book of Revelation.
Unfortunately, it's rather hard to avoid. 666 is the sum of the squares of the first seven primes:
666 = 22 + 32 + 52 + 72 + 112 + 132 + 172
Also:
666 = 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 567 + 89
= 123 + 456 + 78 + 9
= 9 + 87 + 6 + 543 + 21
= 13 + 23 + 33 + 43 + 53 + 63 + 53 + 43 + 33 + 23 + 13
In 1989, after his second term as president, Ronald and Nancy Reagan moved to a new home in the Bel-Air section of Los Angeles. They had the address, 666 St. Cloud Road, changed to 668 St. Cloud Road.
"Odd Bill for Repairs"
One meets with curious things in the old church registers of England. The subjoined, in the Record Office of Winchester Cathedral, dated 1182, is certainly unique. It is a bill for work done: –
To soldering and repairing St. Joseph, 0 l. 8 d.
To cleaning and ornamenting the Holy Ghost, 0 l. 6 d.
To repairing the Virgin Mary and cleaning the child, 4 l. 8 d.
To screwing a nose on the Devil, and putting in the hair on his head, and placing a new joint in his tail, 5 l. 6 d.
– Frank H. Stauffer, The Queer, the Quaint and the Quizzical (1882)
Bedrock Faith
The Church of St. George in Lalibela, Ethiopia, was cut from a single block of stone in the 12th century.
See also Rock-Cut Architecture.
Oh Well
In the early 1960s, a computer analysis showed that six different authors had written the Epistles of St. Paul.
That would be big news, but it also showed that James Joyce's Ulysses had been written by five people — none of whom had composed A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
"Holiday for Vowels": Solution
Solution to Holiday for Vowels, from Thursday:
PERSEVERE YE PERFECT MEN
EVER KEEP THESE PRECEPTS TEN.
