"Howdy boys, never a doubt you would get this invitation. You did it by believing. Really miss you guys..."

"... and I wish I was there. Things are good. The God Almighty picked me to be on this team up here, albeit [as] the third catcher. It’s a great league, no day games after night games. No shadows, but you got all the sticky you need to have up here. Told the big guy about you guys. Play hard every night. Not afraid to play for each other. He’s obviously very interested with the group with this uncommon goodness. I know you guys don’t really need me, but I’ll tell you guys … I’ll be on the headset every night watching. And don’t forget to take it all in, enjoy, and keep it light, believe in each other."

A message from beyond the grave, from Bob Uecker, to the Milwaukee Brewers, upon their clinching of a playoff berth (MLB).

"Charlie is already in paradise with the angels"/"We take comfort in the knowledge that he is now at peace with God in heaven."

Said RFK Jr. and Donald Trump. 

Questions I asked ChatGPT:

1. Were they attesting to Charlie Kirk's sainthood?

2. If you had to argue that Charlie Kirk should be canonized what would you say?

3. Outside of the Catholic Church how is sainthood talked about?

Answers here.

ADDED: Those questions were posed to ChatGPT, not Grok, as I'd written before. Here, I've given Grok a chance.

AND: This post was written as a serious invitation to contemplate Kirk as a saint. He presented his efforts as for his faith. Asked how he would want to be remembered, if he were to die, he said: "I want to be remembered for courage for my faith. That would be the most important thing."

"I know the president said on Fox News this morning that he's partially seeking peace in order to get to heaven. Was he joking or is there spiritual uh motivation behind his peace deals here?"

Asked Mary Margaret Olohan, of the Daily Wire.

That happened at yesterday's White House Press Briefing. Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt answered:

"I think the president was serious. I think president wants to get to heaven as I hope we all do in this room as well."

Trump's quote was the title of yesterday's post: "I want to get to heaven if possible. I'm hearing I'm not doing well. I hear I'm at the bottom of the totem pole. If I can get to heaven, this will be one of the reasons." Video of Trump saying all that at the link.

Was he serious? The question is how serious?

Was Mary Margaret Olohan serious — seriously hoping that he was serious?

"I want to get to heaven if possible. I'm hearing I'm not doing well. I hear I'm at the bottom of the totem pole. If I can get to heaven, this will be one of the reasons."

Wow. President Trump tells Fox News he hopes his efforts to end wars will bring him closer to Heaven.

This is powerful. Watch:

"I just want to end it. If i can save seven thousand people a week from getting killed, that's pretty good. I want to get to heaven if possible. I'm… pic.twitter.com/jcrQy4ixtT

— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) August 19, 2025

"We talk about the view that the soul exists but can’t do so without the body"/"'Is that what you believe?' he asks."

"'Ah well, I don’t, you see. My body is like a Hillman Imp and my soul is driving it. When I die, I park the car and walk the rest of the way. And I’m thinking that heaven is probably pedestrianised, so I can leave it outside.'"

From "Frank Skinner on faith and finally getting married (she said no four times)/The comedian opens up about his alcoholism, the consolation he finds in poetry — and whether he could succeed Melvyn Bragg as In Our Time presenter" (London Times).

There's a new season of "Frank Skinner's Poetry Podcast" beginning this week, first episode here. I'm a big fan of that.

Hillman Imp? Apparently some sort of car. 

Oh!

That's Frank's idea of the metaphorical body that contains his soul. 

I'm reminded of the George Harrison song: "I got born into the material world/Getting worn out in the material world/Use my body like a car/Taking me both near and far...."

But George didn't name a particular car. Frank named the Hillman Imp. How about you?

"We will never forget the names of precious American souls like Jocelyn Nungaray, Laken Riley, Rachel Morin, and many others who were savagely killed by illegal alien crime."

"Last June, 12-year-old Jocelyn Nungaray was brutally assaulted and murdered by two illegal aliens in her home state of Texas. To memorialize her young life and love of nature and animals, I proudly renamed the Anahuac National Wildlife Refuge in Texas to the Jocelyn Nungaray National Wildlife Refuge. May this be Jocelyn’s little piece of Heaven on Earth."

From "National Sexual Assault Awareness and Prevention Month, 2025," a proclamation by President Trump (at whitehouse.gov).

Things not found on eBay.

I see Pete Townshend recently said, "Four and a half weeks ago, I had my left knee replaced.... Maybe I should auction off the old one."

Quoted in "The Who singer Roger Daltrey going deaf and blind at 81: ‘The joys of getting old’" (NY Post)(I think Daltrey was just setting up a "Tommy" joke: He still has his voice or he'd "have a full Tommy.")

Do they let you take your old knee home with you after a replacement? I'm picturing Pete Townshend's knee in a glass case at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame labeled with some riff on "hope I die before I get old." It would be like those relics of saints you might see in an old cathedral. I'm not Catholic, but I've wondered about the inconsistency with the visualization of Judgment Day of bodies rising up out of graves — as depicted in the "Last Judgment" mural in the Sistine Chapel.

Isn't this why some people don't want to donate their organs — they think they might need them in the afterlife? Wouldn't it be a kick in the head if failing to check the organ-donor box on your driver's license turned out to be the shortcoming that barred you from heaven?

Lex Fridman does a distinctive interview with Donald Trump...

... and even provides a transcript and a Table of Contents:

"As members of the Church founded by Jesus Christ, it is our duty and ultimately privilege to be authentically and unapologetically Catholic."

"Don't be mistaken, even within the Church, people in polite Catholic circles will try to persuade you to remain silent.... Our Catholic faith has always been countercultural. Our Lord, along with countless followers, were all put to death for their adherence to her teachings. The world around us says that we should keep our beliefs to ourselves whenever they go against the tyranny of diversity, equity, and inclusion. We fear speaking truth, because now, unfortunately, truth is in the minority. Congress just passed a bill where stating something as basic as the biblical teaching of who killed Jesus could land you in jail.... We must be intentional with our focus on our state in life and our own vocation. And for most of us, that's as married men and women.... [I] reflect on staying in my lane and focusing on my own vocation and how I can be a better father and husband and live in the world but not be of it.... It is essential that we focus on our own state in life.... Each of you has the potential to leave a legacy that transcends yourselves...."

My excerpts from that Harrison Butker commencement speech people are talking about.

But they're talking about this part, where he addresses "the ladies present today":

Joyce Carol Oates casts aspersions on Donald Trump's visualization of his mother-in-law in Heaven.

beautiful sentiment, beautifully expressed. very like Tony Soprano's chosen resting-place for much-loved Richie: "....in a woods by a babbling brook." https://t.co/WQbFMVEWTN

— Joyce Carol Oates (@JoyceCarolOates) January 11, 2024

Here's the relevant "Sopranos" clip:

"Born in 1943 to a New York family of tactile pragmatists (her father helped invent the X-Acto knife), Glück, a preternaturally self-competitive child..."

"... was constantly trying to whittle away at her own perceived shortcomings. When she was a teenager, she developed anorexia — that pulverizing, paradoxical battle with both helplessness and self-control — and dropped to 75 pounds at 16. The disorder prevented her from completing a college degree. Many of the poems Glück wrote in her early 20s flog her own obsessions with, and failures in, control and exactitude. Her narrators are habitués of a kind of limitless wanting; her language, a study in ruthless austerity. (A piano-wire-taut line tucked in her 1968 debut, 'Firstborn': 'Today my meatman turns his trained knife/On veal, your favorite. I pay with my life.') In her late 20s, Glück grew frustrated with writing and was prepared to renounce it entirely...."

From the NYT's annual roundup of short essays about people who died in the past year — "The Lives They Led" — I've chosen a bit of Amy X. Wang's essay on the Nobel Prize-winning poet Louise Glück.

I loved the X-Acto/exactitude theme — the whittling away, the meatman and his trained knife, and the potential to end up with nothing.

ADDED: I wondered if — in 20 years of blogging — I had ever before used the word "exactitude." It's a great word, and I thought, perhaps I'd never used it. But I see I've used it twice, both times in 2018.

"The American Civil War began in 1861, and people were 'dealing with so much death and warfare in unprecedented ways'..."

"... [said Mandi Shepp, 38, Lily Dale’s former library director and an archives coordinator at the State University of New York at Fredonia]. Many turned to Spiritualism to help cope with the mass sense of loss.... 'Spiritualism offers this very nice, comfortable ideology that these sons that were lost in battle aren’t really gone forever,' she said. In the 1870s, Spiritualists and Freethinkers camped out in what would become Lily Dale during the summertime.... The pursuit of mediumship was particularly appealing to women because 'it was a way for them to create independent careers for themselves and have a job at a time where it wasn’t really seen as a thing you could do,' said Ms. Shepp. Since women were already seen as 'the religious center of their household,' becoming a medium was more socially acceptable than following other career paths. Giving readings in public also allowed for women to speak independently and in front of audiences...."

 
From "This Community Welcomes Mediums, but First You Have to Prove Yourself/A lawsuit against the nonprofit that runs Lily Dale, a New York haven for Spiritualists, has put a spotlight on the hamlet where residents believe death does not exist" (NYT).

"Well, the funny thing is he can’t imagine any celebrities bigger than, like, people from northern Italy at the time. "

"You’re, like, Come on... what about the people who don’t die near the Tiber River? How are they going to get to Purgatorio? It never seems to occur to him. In all three of the Divine Comedy works, Dante’s always hanging out with the big names. Helen of Troy. Even in Hell, Virgil’s like, Boy, I wish I was baptized, but I know you love my work, so I’m going to show you around. And then, in Paradiso, he’s hanging out with the apostles and King David and the Virgin Mary."

Says Ken Jennings, quoted in "Ken Jennings Has Some Questions About Death/The 'Jeopardy!' host on the meaning of trivia, the awkwardness of personal anecdotes, and his new book—a travel guide to the afterlife" (The New Yorker).

"Find the Place You Love. Then Move There. If where you live isn’t truly your home, and you have the resources to make a change, it could do wonders for your happiness."

The Atlantic suggests an article for me — from a couple years ago — that's right in my zone. It's by Arthur C. Brooks, The Atlantic's happiness expert, who — I'd noticed — has a new article in The Atlantic that I'd seen but chose not to click on: "Think About Your Death and Live Better/Contemplating your mortality might sound morbid, but it’s actually a key to happiness."

Did the Atlantic somehow see that I looked at the death article but decided not to read it and calculate that I might want to contemplate falling in love with someplace other than home and moving there? 

The "Find the Place You Love" essay begins with an anecdote about a man who grew up in Minnesota, moved to Northern California, and then missed Minnesota. When I read the title, I thought the idea was to cast a wide net, consider everywhere, and fall in love with something. But if it's just look back on your life and understand what was your real home, that's a much more restricted set of options. There's a good chance you already live in what is for you the most home-like place, and if you were to leave, thinking you'd found a better place — Northern California is "better" than Minnesota — you'd become vividly aware of the feeling of home. 

"[T]he Hyksos had a custom known as the Gold of Valor, which involved taking the hands of enemy combatants as war trophies...."

"'The amputations were a safe means to count slain enemies,' said Manfred Bietak, an archaeologist.... 'They also made the dead enemy incapable of raising his hand again against Egypt in the Netherworld.'... 'Dismemberment was anathema to the ancient Egyptians, who wanted their bodies whole for a materialized afterlife existence,' Dr. Cooney said. A relief in the mortuary temple of Rameses III, at Medinet Habu, shows the pharaoh standing on a balcony after a victory not far from heaps of his enemies’ severed phalluses (12,312, according to one translation of zealous army scribes) and hands (24,625). In the temple of Amun at Karnak, a chronicle of a 13th century B.C. battle details prisoners being brought back to the pharaoh Merneptah with 'donkeys before them, laden with uncircumcised penises of the Land of Libya, with the hands of [every] foreign land that was with them, as fish in baskets.' If the tally of fatalities is to be believed, the Egyptians collected the penises of 6,359 uncircumcised enemy dead and the hands of 2,362 circumcised enemies. 'The stink must have been awful, and thus the "fish in baskets" comment,' Dr. Cooney said."

From "In Ancient Egypt, Severed Hands Were Spoils of War/Archaeologists offer a new explanation for one of the century’s grislier finds, 'a carefully gathered collection of hands' in a 3,500-year-old temple" (NYT). 

"Each time Ed had another encounter with his 'pal, the surgeon'—whom he did not begrudge for having 'to maintain his skills'..."

"... he’d promise to quickly 'be back with fervor at the drawing board, conjuring up malevolent, wicked delights and pleasures for your eyes.' And sure enough, his shaggy Vermonters and Manhattanites, his farmers’-market devotees and NPR donors—by way of ​​Snuffleupagus by way of Daumier—whose pretensions and obsessions he affectionately lampooned, would soon be parading into my in-box. In his final months, he didn’t have the energy to draw as large, or with such obsessive, scratchy detail, as before, but he still couldn’t resist reworking one final cartoon—featuring the Grim Reaper, as a poet—before sending it off to me last week.... On a recent call with Ed, when I expressed awe at the fact that he was still sending in cartoons for me to review, he quoted Mark Twain: 'The secret source of Humor itself is not joy but sorrow.' Neither of us mentioned the second half of that line—'there is no humor in heaven.'"

Writes Emma Allen in The New Yorker's "Postscript" — "Edward Koren, the Cheery Philosopher of Cartoons/The artist, who was first published in The New Yorker in 1962, never stopped marvelling at the miracle of a cartoon’s creation."

Here's the NYT obit: "Edward Koren, 87, Whose Cartoon Creatures Poked Fun at People, Dies/For six decades in The New Yorker and elsewhere, his hairy, toothy, long-nosed characters offered witty commentary on the foibles of the American middle class."

"I never watch anything foul smelling or evil. Nothing disgusting; nothing dog ass. I’m a religious person."

"I read the scriptures a lot, meditate and pray, light candles in church. I believe in damnation and salvation, as well as predestination. The Five Books of Moses, Pauline Epistles, Invocation of the Saints, all of it."

Said Bob Dylan, asked if he streams movies on Netflix to relax.

But that word "relax" did not resonate with him. He's already relaxed — "too relaxed... like a flat tire; totally unmotivated, positively lifeless." So he says. But that doesn't mean he's looking for things to stimulate him, because it "takes a lot to get me stimulated" and he's "excessively sensitive," so he's liable to go from totally inert to "restless and fidgety." There's no "middle ground." 

On or off. One extreme or the other. Maybe that works for someone who performs on stage and then must spend so much time in a travel routine. He can fall asleep "at any time." He also says "I can write songs anywhere at any time."

He muses — comically — about songwriters who have a routine: "I heard Tom Paxton has one. I’ve wondered sometimes about going to visit Don McLean, see how he does it."

"I felt cornered and powerless as law enforcement officers began questioning me while the last of my mother’s life was fading."

"I wanted to be comforting her, telling her how she was about to see her daddy and younger brother as she 'went away home,' as we say in Appalachia. Instead, without it being indicated I had any choices about when, where and how to participate, I began a series of interviews that felt mandatory and imposed on me that drew me away from the precious end of my mother’s life. And at a time when we ourselves were trying desperately to decode what might have prompted her to take her life on that day, we each shared everything we could think of about Mom, her mental illness and its agonizing history. I want to be clear that the police were simply following terrible, outdated interview procedures and methods of interacting with family members who are in shock or trauma and that the individuals in my mother’s bedroom that harrowing day were not bad or wrong.... This profoundly intimate personal and medical information does not belong in the press, on the internet or anywhere except in our memories. We have asked the court to not release these documents not because we have secrets."

Writes Ashley Judd, in an essay in the NYT.

"Afterlife conversation - extremely booooring.... stopped watching about half-way through."

Said Whiskeybum, in the comments to the collection of TikTok videos I posted last night, here. 

There's an easy riposte: You think that's boring, wait 'til you see the actual afterlife, and try stopping halfway through. What's half of eternity?

But I commented earnestly over there: "My favorite might be the conversation, and not because of the particular things they say about the afterlife, but because of the interesting interior where they are sitting and the way each of them is reading a different book and has a different style mug in front of them. It's just a nicely set up, gentle contrast between the 2, who ultimately have hit it off, despite taking somewhat opposing positions on the afterlife. There's a gentleness to it that I find very appealing. Both roles played by one person, Baron Ryan. As a commenter says [at TikTok] 'Your chemistry with yourself is amazing.'"

Here's that video. Here's a collection of all of his videos. And here's a well-made video about Baron Ryan, explaining what he's doing and showing exactly how he does it:

Take a break from the political drama and watch these 9 TikToks I've curated for you. Let me know what you like.

1. A baby reacts to thunder.

2. What the long-distance runner eats in a day.

3. What to name cats and dogs in the Middle Ages.

4. How to cut your hair in North Korea.

5. Advice from the dandy.

6. A conversation about the afterlife.

7. Why can't you people of a certain age and income level understand what's so good about working at home?

8. Rufus Wainwright at home, playing piano.

9. Mountain biking in Marquette, Michigan.