Mid-Week Post

Sorry for the backlog. I was too busy having fun.


For those who believed I had a chance of winning the World Cup, thanks. It means a lot. I'm nowhere near South Africa but I can dream, can't I?


Canada Day occurred and- as was pointed out- we are still not Obama's America.


American Independence Day occurred and it is Obama's America. Sorry, guys. This might cheer you up, though.


Michael Ignatieff proves once more how pitiful a leader he is.


Spain is going to the finals.


Interesting:

A new book by a leading group of linguists has bolstered a controversial theory that the language of Canada's Dene Nation -- along with those of the Navaho and Apache in the United States, and numerous other "Athapaskan" dialects -- is rooted in an ancient and endangered Asian tongue spoken today by only a few hundred people in Western Siberia.

This has been said before but no one is listening:

Pope Pius XII, the controversial wartime pontiff, may have saved thousands of Jewish lives by secretly securing visas so they could escape Nazi Germany, a historian claimed yesterday.

Pope Pius, who has been labelled "Hitler's Pope" because of his silence during the Holocaust, may have arranged the exodus of about 200,000 Jews from Germany just three weeks after Kristallnacht, when thousands of Jews were rounded up and sent to concentration camps.

The claim was made by Dr. Michael Hesemann, a German historian carrying out research in the Vatican archives for the Pave the Way Foundation, a U.S.-based inter-faith group.

He said Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli -- the future Pius XII -- wrote to Roman Catholic archbishops around the world to urge them to apply for visas for "non-Aryan Catholics" and Jewish converts to Christianity who wanted to leave Germany.

Don't forget tanabata.


Oh yes- stay cool, everyone. Really.