Martin World News 'n' stuff

BREAKING NEWS:  Isaiah Martin and Scrappy Beagle to star in new movie!  Watch the trailer...

Breaking, hell. That was shot Friday...

ITEM:  I had, as a former Catholic, to wonder at this story- "Vatican bans gluten free communion bread"-


Bread used to celebrate the Eucharist during Roman Catholic Mass must not be gluten-free - although it may be made from genetically modified organisms, the Vatican has ruled.
In a letter to bishops, Cardinal Robert Sarah said the bread can be low-gluten.
But he said there must be enough protein in the wheat to make it without additives.
The new rules are needed because the bread is now sold in supermarkets and on the internet, the cardinal said.
Roman Catholics believe bread and wine served at the Eucharist are converted into the body and blood of Christ through a process known as transubstantiation.
Glossary of Roman Catholic terms
The wine used must also be "natural, from the fruit of the grape, pure and incorrupt, not mixed with other substances", said Cardinal Robert Sarah of the Vatican's Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments.
The ruling was issued at the request of Pope Francis, the letter said.


So if you believe in Transubstantiation the physical conversion on some level of the bread to the Body of Christ- what part of Christ are you taking out with the gluten?  Not trying to be crude here (for a change), but if you truly believe the Host is changed, does it really make a difference if you make it allergen-free?  I would get it if it were a purity issue, but if you are allowing GMOs, haven't you kinda crossed that bridge?

ITEM:  Now returning to an expected level of crudity, we find this story on the BBC:

Norway 'troll penis' restored to its former upstanding glory

In a headline that supplies its own innuendo, a famous rock formation called "the Troll's Penis" was given a bad case of ED by a vandal.  So, a crowd-funding effort raised the equivalent of $27,000 to give it a dose of viagra.

Before and after the act

ITEM:  From the "stuff we might not need" file:

Ghana has successfully launched its first satellite into space.


For those of you going, "WTH is a Ghana?":

Ghana is not alone in being a podunk country that has had some help getting a piece of metal future trash put into orbit.  At this point, nations such as Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, Ecuador, Estonia, Iraq (!), Iran, Laos, Peru, Turkmenistan (in conjunction with, of all places, Monaco), and Uruguay also have a satellite in space- and that's just the guys that have only ONE.  Now, most of these have to go somewhere else to launch them- China, Europe (from a base in French Guiana, South America), Iran, Israel, Italy (from a base in Virginia, no less), both Koreas, India, Japan, and Russia.  Ghana got a lift to the ISS by the Japanese who basically pushed it out a window and let it go.  Nevertheless, does a nation ranking 144th in per capita income (they make on average in a year what I make in a month) REALLY need to be a SJCN (Space Junk Contributing Nation)?

ITEM:  Trending on Twitter this morning was "#RuinSexIn3Words".  Skipping the hopelessly crude, there were some clever responses:

IM YOUR FATHER (with appropriate Star Wars gif)

 I'm a Feminist

Call me Donald

I am Groot

put on Nickleback

Hillary Rodham Clinton

Think Rachel Maddow

 'Honey, I'm home!'

Can we talk (actually submitted BY a woman)

 two bean burritos

ITEM:  And now, a closing flash round of somewhat more serious topics:

1- The latest G20 fluff up involves- what're the odds?- a goof up on a White House Press Release:

A press release following Donald Trump's meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping at the G20 summit called him president "of the Republic of China".

That is the official name of Taiwan. Mr Xi is, in fact, President of the People's Republic of China.

A gaffe, which while common on local media, certainly would elicit a response along the lines of, "Well, flunked the Carnegie course, didya?" from the Chinese.

2- Next, courtesy the Japan Times:

 Bhutan, one of the world’s smallest nations, has protested that the Asian colossus, China, is chipping away at its territory by building a strategic highway near the Tibet-India-Bhutan trijunction in the Himalayas. Bhutan has security arrangements with India, and the construction has triggered a tense standoff between Chinese and Indian troops at the trijunction, with the Chinese state media warning of the possibility of war.

This reminds me that I wanted to do a post on some of the odder hot spots around the world of late.  For example, Italian and Austrian troops are meeting near the Tyrol border over Austria not wanting any more refugees coming from Italia; or, Eritrea getting uncomfortably close to their border with Djibouti (yes, that's a real country, about 2/3 the size of Indiana) after Qatar, who recently became the Pan-Arab Terrorist Scapegoat, pulled their peacekeepers out in a huff.  But the best website I found to track such things down couldn't tell the difference between a budding war between nations, a terrorist attack, or a handful of Seattle layabouts protesting over why they can't find jobs after passing the $15 an hour minimum wage.

3-  When did the USA and Russia get so mixed up?  From the Moscow Times:

Attention has focused on a video uploaded to YouTube in August, in which the 22-year-old (Ruslan) Sokolovsky filmed himself playing the Pokemon Go virtual reality game on his iPhone in the Church of All Saints in Yekaterinburg. The church was built on the spot where Tsar Nicholas II and his family were believed to have been killed by the Bolsheviks.

In a short speech at the beginning of the video, the 22-year-old Sokolovsky dismisses media reports that playing Pokemon Go in churches could result in a prison sentence.

“This is complete nonsense,” Sokolovsky says in the video, right before entering the church. “Who could get offended if you’re just walking around with your smartphone in a church?”

But several weeks later, on Sept. 2, Sokolovsky was detained on charges of extremism and insulting the feelings of believers.

Prosecutors claim to have found “elements of incitement of hatred” in nine videos uploaded by Sokolovsky to YouTube and his so-called "atheist" video blog, between May 2013 and September 2016.

He has been slapped with nine instances of inciting hatred and seven instances of breaching the right to freedom of religion. A separate charge of using special equipment to illegally obtain information was added to the list after police found a ballpoint pen with a hidden camera during a search of his home.

Now, let me frame this properly.  Russia HAS been strong in defending slights to the Orthodox Church- just ask the Jehovah's Witnesses (now considered a terrorist organization).  And this dude was purposely playing a dare, is a place of worship.  But it still boils down to he's in jail for playing Pokemon Go in a church.

But Ruslan is right- people are getting enraged over stupid stuff.  In the serious news Sunday morning, I found a kid who got in trouble at his cookie shop for paying for an on-duty officer's brownie- when the next family (obviously black) demanded he should buy them a cookie and he's a racist, etc.  And you wonder why BLM has ZERO credibility!  Or, conversely, the family in Florida who reported a driver with road rage issues who pointed a gun at them- and when pulled over, he was an Episcopal PRIEST from North Carolina!

Gang, I realize this is a highly charged, highly divided world we live in.  But sometimes you just have to LET. IT. GO.  Ask CNN.  Because they couldn't just laugh at a gif of questionable humor- no, they had to get all bent about it, and actually threaten the gif maker- NOW they have thousands of similar gifs out there, most of them even funnier than the original, and they look even less credible, if that was even possible.  It's not worth it, guys and gals.