Mass was never like this! Sadly, not one article I’ve found contains the list.

GROSSE POINTE PARK, Mich. - Sister Kathy Avery won’t put up with swearing on the playground at her school, and she’s not above repeating the offending language to make sure everyone understands which words she won’t tolerate.

The principal of St. Clare of Montefalco Catholic School had students stay after a Mass last month and informed the fifth- through eighth-graders that she has a zero-tolerance policy for cursing.

Just in case anyone wasn’t sure what she was talking about, Avery read off a list of the very words and phrases that she was banning.

“It got a little quiet in church” during her talk, she told the Detroit Free Press.

Some parents were shocked, but others applauded, the newspaper said.

“In a way you would think a nun would shy away from something like that, but she’s very open with the children, very clear in her messages,” said Margaret Roache, chairperson of the school commission.

Roache’s sixth-grade son was there when Avery read the list of banned words.

“When I asked him to give me a sample of it, he said, ‘Oh, no, I can’t say it!’” Roache said. “I thought it was great.”

A representative of the Archdiocese of Detroit declined to comment Sunday.

Cuss words aren’t the only things that set Avery off. She’s also banned the words “stupid” and “boring.”

class … Class … CLASS … SHUT UP!

Now I’m really showing my age.

I can’t help it! I know obesity is wrong, but dammit, he’s so cute.

I’ve never wanted kids and I rarely like them, as you can probably tell from my blogging. But this little feller just cries out “adopt me!” Just think - he could be my very own Arnold Ziffel … much smarter than most children, and I won’t have to worry about him stabbing a sibling over the tv. I’m already picturing the Christmas cards I could make with me as Mary and him as the Baby J!

Stowaway piglet survives toilet roll ordeal

LONDON (Reuters) - A piglet nicknamed Andrex is recovering after being found in the back of a truck full of toilet paper at a supermarket.

The animal, thought to be two or three weeks old, was discovered in a delivery at a Tesco store in Ilkeston, Derbyshire.

Staff wrapped the piglet in a duvet and called the RSPCA, a Tesco spokesman said Tuesday.

He was taken to an animal shelter in Radcliffe-on-Trent, outside Nottingham, suffering from cuts and bruises to his snout.

“We will now care for him until he is fit enough to be found a permanent home,” said Ella Herring, the shelter’s deputy manager.

Tesco said store workers were unsure of how the piglet came to be on the truck, but thought it may have been a prank.

“Staff are used to dealing with the unexpected, but little Andrex’s arrival was a shock,” a Tesco spokesman said. “They took it in their stride, wrapping him up straightaway in a duvet in the manager’s office and calling the RSPCA for advice and help.”

Of course we did, goddammit!

From the NYT:

“Even growing up around it, little shards of the language stayed alive in our mouths and came out as slang,” he said, spouting a string of words that sounded straight out of a James Cagney movie.

“Snazzy” comes from “snasach,” which means polished, glossy or elegant.*

The word “scram” comes from “scaraim,” meaning “I get away.” The word “swell” comes from “sóúil,” meaning luxurious, rich and prosperous, and “sucker” comes from “sách úr,” or, loosely, fat cat.

There is “Say uncle!” (“anacal” means mercy), “razzmatazz,” and “malarkey,” and even expressions like “gee whiz” and “holy cow” and “holy mackerel” are Anglicized versions of Irish expressions, he said. So are “doozy,” “hokum,” “humdinger,” “jerk,” “punk,” “swanky,” “grifter,” “bailiwick,” “sap,” “mug,” “wallop,” “helter-skelter,” “shack,” “shanty,” “slob,” “slacker” and “knack.”

*ahem.

or, “They’ll bond with anything! Film at 11!”

Then again, there’s always the terrifying, “Robots can take us over and we’re just fine with it,” theory, too.

Source

today I got to tell her that she was my hero!

Stripper Mistakenly Sent to School, Whips Teen

Thursday, November 08, 2007

Officials at a U.K. high school were aghast after a stripper visited a student during class and whipped him in front of other students and a horrified teacher, Sky News reported Thursday.

A booking error is to blame after a mother arranged to send a “gorilla gram” to her son on his 16th birthday, an arrangement she cleared with Nottingham’s Arnold Hill School and Technology College. Instead, the agency sent a stripper clad in a policewoman costume, Sky reported.

After whipping the teen, the stripper placed a collar around his neck and led him around the classroom with a leash, telling him he had been a “bad boy” for not doing his homework. She then put on a Britney Spears tune and stripped for the shocked class, witnesses told Sky.

The police were not called and no one was suspended from the school in the incident, and officials said they were investigating.

who was teaching his granddaughter to steal. Check out Reuters video of this Grandma (nice tats!)

Oct. 11 - A 42-year-old grandmother has been caught on tape shoplifting– and also teaching her four-year-old grand-daughter how to steal. Police in Upper Darby say Vitale was supposed to be baby-sitting- but was instead teaching her grand-daughter to shoplift.

Evicted nuns, that’s who! No, not the ones in Santa Barbara, or the other ones from the Army of Mary, or even those feisty Italian nuns, but rebellious, Polish nuns! It’s turning into a regular “Nuns Gone Wild: International Edition” year.

Updated: 2:31 a.m. PT Oct 11, 2007

KAZIMIERZ DOLNY, Poland (AP)- Police evicted 65 rebellious ex-nuns Wednesday from a convent they illegally occupied for two years after defying a Vatican order to replace their mother superior, a charismatic leader who had religious visions.

The defeated nuns walked out in their black habits — some carrying guitars, drums and tambourines — after a locksmith opened the gate to the walled compound and police in riot gear rushed in and arrested the mother superior. A former Franciscan friar who had locked himself away with the nuns also was taken into custody.

Several nuns, many of whom appeared to be in their 20s, screamed at police, calling them “servants of Satan,” as they were escorted out and into waiting buses.

“They were disobedient,” said Mieczyslaw Puzewicz, a spokesman for the Lublin diocese of the Roman Catholic Church. The Vatican formally expelled the women from their Sisters of Bethany order last year, but has revealed almost nothing about the dispute.

About 150 police in riot gear went into the compound to find the ex-nuns defiantly singing religious songs and playing instruments, Puzewicz said. Lublin Archbishop Jozef Zycinski called the police operation a last resort meant to help the ex-nuns.

Well, that’s an interesting approach to “helping.”

Mother Jadwiga is a charismatic figure who claimed to have religious visions and was reportedly attempting to transform the convent into a contemplative order. The Lublin diocese hinted at that portrait in a statement on its Web site that said: “Mother Jadwiga’s private revelations, and the fact that she made it a guideline to stick by them, caused unease to the Congregation.”

The Vatican, which has authority over all convents, has traditionally been wary of people claiming visions, in part fearing others could be drawn in. When the Vatican formally expelled the nuns from their order in 2006, the women refused to leave the convent and cut themselves off from the outside world.

The church eventually sought legal action to remove them, and a court in nearby Pulawy ordered their eviction. The convent’s electricity was cut off earlier this year, but sympathetic local residents secretly funneled them food at night.

Aww! The underground nun railroad!

From the LAT obit:

The Rev. Carol L. Scott, an Inglewood minister who was known for her Friday night hip-hop church and her campaign to bring peace to violent neighborhoods, which included a symbolic burial of guns, died Sept. 25 of lymphoma at Santa Monica-UCLA Medical Center. She was 50.

At Holy Trinity Evangelical Lutheran Church, where she was an associate pastor, Scott practiced an activist in-the-streets form of theology. She insisted that Christians needed to take off the veil of “elitism.”

She wanted Christians to “roll our sleeves up and get some grass-roots work going so we can actually do what the gospel has called us to do,” Scott told a reporter for the Columbia News Service last year.

For Scott, answering the call meant not only tending to the spiritual needs of those in the congregation but also reaching out to some of the most troubled populations and places, including the now-defunct Martin Luther King Jr.-Harbor Hospital, where she volunteered as a chaplain.

After the riots of 1992, she began working with New City Parish, an organization composed of seven Lutheran churches in Los Angeles County that offers tutoring, food distribution, small-business loans and other services to the community.

In 2004, after learning that an elderly member of Holy Trinity had been duped into becoming a “poster girl” for Wal-Mart in its bid to build a store in Inglewood, Scott became a vocal opponent, rallying the church and the community.

“Here’s one of my seniors being used, and I’m angry,” Scott said in an LA Weekly article published that year. “I see this as a church issue, and I’m going to take the gospel out to the people.”

In recent years, Scott participated with other activists in an annual mock funeral procession to bring attention to the high rate of homicide in some local communities. The event features a multi-car funeral procession that includes hearses and participants with bullhorns calling the community to action. Afterward, a mock burial is held in a park. Handguns are placed in a coffin, symbolizing the death of violence. Scott presided over the mock burial.

During a 2005 prayer at the event, Scott called on “advocates and peacemakers to raise the consciousness of our community and show solidarity with families and friends who’ve lost sons and daughters in this continuing war against urban terrorism,” according to a 2005 BlackAmericaWeb.com article.

Scott was born in Los Angeles and raised in Compton and Inglewood. Her father, Loyd Webb, sat on the Inglewood school board for more than a decade. The call to the ministry came early in Scott’s life.

“She started preaching in the backyard when she was a little girl, 9 years old,” said Scott’s mother, Lois Webb. “I’d go out there and say, ‘What are you out here yelling for?’ She’d say, ‘I’m preaching the gospel.’ ”

Life first took her down other paths: college, marriage and motherhood.

In addition to her mother, Scott is survived by daughters Portia Thurmond, a medical student at Brown University in Rhode Island, and Lauren Thurmond, 17, of Inglewood; son Asa Scott, 9, of Inglewood; sisters Sylvia Webb of Lawndale and Sherri Webb of Colton; and a brother, George Webb, of New Boston, Texas.

After graduating from Morningside High School in Inglewood in 1974, Scott studied at Pepperdine University and Immaculate Heart College. In 2002 she received a certificate in theological education for emerging ministries from Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary in Berkeley and was ordained at Holy Trinity.

Hip-hop church, which meets the first Friday of every month, was created because “her passion was to preach to this new generation,” said Kenneth Henderson, who worked closely with Scott.

“As far as hip-hop culture, she acknowledged it as a culture,” said Henderson, also known as Kenney Z.

“She expressed to me that the needs weren’t being met in the traditional church. She wanted to broaden the church to receive the younger generation, so she started on this quest to minister,” he said.

Scott had witnessed the senseless loss of young lives, particularly young black men, and her aim was to save them — body and soul.

At the church, hip-hop is the draw, but the gospel of Christ is its heart. It offers poetry, dance, music and artists such as hip-hop pioneer Kurtis Blow. Scott preached sermons of uplift and encouragement, urging young people to pursue education and high aims.

Since Scott’s death, many of the youths from hip-hop church have called her mother, including one young man who was in tears, asking, “What will I do now?”

“I told him, ‘The best way you can remember her is to remember the things she told you, and do them,’ ” Webb said. “He said, ‘I will.’ ”

A memorial service will be held during hip-hop church on Nov. 2 at 7:30 p.m. at Holy Trinity. Memorial donations may be sent to Holy Trinity Evangelical Lutheran Church, 9300 S. Crenshaw Blvd., Inglewood, CA 90305.