Fr. Leonard Mary’s trip to Massachusetts sponsored by WQPH 89.3 Radio is coming closer and for those who didn’t hear about it before here are the details and a big change to the Boston by land and by sea event:
First the stuff that hasn’t changed
Note: To reserve a spot at any and all of these events call (781) 391-1396 or email wqph893@comcast.net
Tuesday October 26th
10:30 AM Holy Rosary Church 118 Thresa Street Fitchburg Mass.
Public Rosary followed by Healing Mass and Service
Optional Catered Luncheon in Church Hall $25 per person 50 person limit
NOTE: You do NOT have to buy a ticket to the luncheon to attend the Rosary, Mass and healing service
Wednesday October 27th
9:30 AM St. Bernard’s Parish & St. Camillus Church 333 Mechanic Street Fitchburg Mass.
Public Rosary followed by Healing Mass and Service
Optional Catered Luncheon at Slattery’s Restaurant 106 Lunenberg St. Fitchburg Mass $30 per person.
NOTE: You do NOT have to buy a ticket to the luncheon to attend the Rosary, Mass and healing service
6:30 PM St. Joseph’s Church (upper church) 114 High Street Medford Mass.
Public Rosary followed by Healing Mass and Service
Con Celebrated by Fr. Peter Shen Parochial Vicar
Thursday October 28th
1:30 PM St. Raphael’s Church 512 High Street Medford Mass
Public Rosary in the Courtyard
Healing Mass and Service in the Church Proper
All of the events above are unchanged from a week ago
There have been updates to the Saturday event(s) all changes will be indicated by Bold italics
Saturday October 30th
7:10-7:15 AM Bus Leaves Holy Rosary Parish 118 Theresa St. at 7:7:15 AM for Medford Mass.
8:30 AM St. Joseph church 114 High Street (lower church) Medford Mass
Mass celebrated by Fr Leonard Mary
After Mass proceed by Bus to the Waterfront Boston
Rosary in Boston followed by a Boat Cruse on Boston Harbor with Luncheon & Fr. Leonard Blessing city $150 includes bus transportation (35% off previous price!)
Bus returns to Medford & Fitchburg
Note you do NOT have to buy a ticket if you wish to travel to Medford on your own to attend Fr. Leonard’s morning Mass.
To reserve a spot at any and all of these events call (781) 391-1396 or email wqph893@comcast.net
or email wqph893@comcast.net
I will be at the Fitchburg and Boston events. Hope to see you there.
Late last month a Nordic noir six-episode series, The Chestnut Man, a Danish production began streaming on Netflix. It’s based on the novel of the same name by Søren Sveistrup. It’s an ideal autumn offering on many levels. The Chestnut Man is set in Denmark in October with fall colors at their peak. Halloween–the celebration of it has been spreading in Europe–plays a part in the story, and oh yeah, it’s a compelling crime drama centered on a serial killer who leaves stick chestnut figures, chestnut men, at the scene of each murder. Just as the carving of pumpkins is an old tradition in North America the building of chestnut men is similar a tradition in Scandinavia.
Naia Thulin (Danica Curcic) is a police detective and a single mother whose work keeps her away from her daughter, Le (Liva Forsberg), so the girl spends more time with her quasi-grandfather, Aksel (Anders Hove). By the way Hove was a regular on the ABC soap opera General Hospital.
Thulin is assigned a new partner, Mark Hess (Mikkel Boe Følsgaard). Their first investigation is a chestnut man murder. Hess has a troubled past–he was recently fired from his job in the Hague. The chestnut man case is quickly tied to the disappearance of the daughter of a politician, Rosa Hartung (Iben Dorner), who is the minister of social affairs. Her position puts in charge of foster care and child custody cases.
Obviously I don’t want to give up much of the plot because it will introduce spoilers. Let’s just say viewers will be confronted with twists and turns in the story line. The scars of unhappy childhoods figure in to the plot as well.
I also recently watched two other new Netflix series that I believe any level-headed person should avoid.
Brand New Cherry Flavor is set in Hollywood in the 1990s and centers on a young Brazilian director (Rosa Salazar) who sees her first movie project stolen by a scumbag Hollywood producer. (Aren’t they all scumbags?) Inexplicably the director consistently barfs up large-eared kittens. Except for the negative portrayal of Hollywood I detested this series. And with a couple of exceptions I hated the characters. Even the kittens disturbed me. And there is a disgusting sex scene I won’t even describe here.
You can judge a book–and a TV series–by its cover. The Netflix graphic promoting Midnight Mass is centered on a main character, a Catholic priest, who has a sinister look on his face. The plot driver of this series is that priest (Hamish Linklater), a mysterious young pastor who arrives at an island parish that serves a tiny fishing community. Let’s just say Midnight Mass has about the same amount of respect for the Catholic Church as The Da Vinci Code, only with tons of gore and blood thrown into the mess. Although to be honest I did enjoy Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code book. The movie? Not so much.
The island’s sheriff, a Muslim, Rahul Kohli, is quite good in Midnight Mass however.
In Midnight Mass the cinematography is beautiful–but The Chestnut Man has that and so much more–I believe you’ll enjoy that series.
The Chestnut Man is rated TV-MA as it contains graphic violence and crime scene photos, foul language, sex, and brief nudity. It is available streaming on Netflix in English, English with subtitles, Danish with subtitles, Spanish, as well as simplified and traditional Chinese. There are bits of dialogue in The Chestnut Man in English and German–with subtitles. I watched it in Danish.
Yesterday I had some time on my hands and watched the Dave Chappelle special and came away thinking these things:
If this had been the days of my youth this special would never had made it on the air, not because of the Transgender jokes but because the absolutely vulgar sexual humor all over the place. It was about as gross and disgusting as you can get and it really says something about how our society has changed that I seem to be the only person who has pointed this out.
What really gets me about the gross stuff is that like Monty Python Chappelle’s humor is actually very intelligent humor and he doesn’t need to go with the gross stuff to be funny. Furthermore a lot of the gross humor wasn’t all that good in the sense that it couldn’t have been more telegraphed if he had been sitting behind a desk in a Western Union office in 1877.
That being said his audience liked it and I’m remined of Eddie Murphy’s famous bit about Bill Cosby calling him on being vulgar and Richard Pryor’s response.
For those who don’t want to hear the whole clip here is what Murphy said Pryor said to him about Bill Cosby chastising him over the dirty humor:
I don’t give give a f*** what every the f*** makes people laugh say that shit. Do the people laugh when you say what you say?
I said Yes
Do you get paid?
I said Yes
Well tell Bill I said have a Coke and smile and shut the f*** up. That Jello pudding eating M*****f*****..
Given what we now know about Bill Cosby this Eddie Murphy clip is a lot funnier and highly ironic, but Bill would answer that he never drugged a woman on stage in front of an audience.
Dave Chapple’s job is to make people laugh and he is very good at it and if people are laughing at the jokes and he’s getting paid millions then he’s doing his job even if he gets too gross for me. As for anything else, that’s between him and Christ and I wish him the best of luck there.
That brings up another thing about Chappelle that reminds me of Monty Python and Don Rickles, he hits everybody and makes fun of Everybody and is gross about EVERYBODY. There were no sacred cows to Monty Python and Don Rickles hit people, including the autocancel to their faces. Chappelle takes this to the Nth degree I mean he was making glory hole jokes about Martin Luther King. MARTIN LUTHER KING!
Can you imagine any other comedian making glory hole jokes about Martin Luther King on a stage? Can you imagine what would happen if I got up on a stage on a comedy night and tried to make a joke about Martin Luther King concerning sleeping around let alone glory holes. I’d be up against a wall.
And you think the transgender stuff is over the line?
One of the reasons why he does these things and also breaks all the other rules (for example smoking in places where I would be fined for doing so) is to distract people as he delivers his message, and his message seems to be:
Don’t be telling black people about how oppressed you are when we were friggin slaves and went through all we went through to get where we are now.
His answer to the Trans community claiming oppression reminds me of a story Tip O’Neill told about a group of black activists who came to congress and was berating a white congressman who had grown up poor in during the Great Depression in the era before government safety nets and answered: “Don’t come to my office and talk down it me. I was poor when poor was POOR!” Go deep into these specials and that, in my opinion is pretty much what Chappelle’s entire standup humor is about, but the bottom line is it’s still humor that makes you laugh and makes him money.
His answer to Trans activists talking about the oppression of their people was to ask if they kidnapped them and dragged them here from Transylvania.
Ironically Chappelle uses his status as one of the richest and most popular living comics to exercise privilege not only do do or say things that others can’t say without being hit by society but to flaunt said privilege, the privilege of wealth, the privilege of celerity and the privilege of race to advance pretty much a left liberal/radical worldview with a streak of libertarianism and a commitment to the 1st amendment . Even more ironically he does this while living in what would be considered a conservative leaning lifestyle in a white small town.
Dave Chappelle is actually is the personification of privilege he knows he has it and intends to make you know he has it and is going to use it. The reason why this said privilege doesn’t get me all that riled up is he earned said privilege with decades of hard work and a lot of nights in small clubs busting his ass to make people laugh and he does it as well if not better than any current living comedian. That is in fact the American dream.
The final irony is the the reason why he has this dream is that hundreds of years ago a black slaver caught one of his ancestors and sold said ancestor to a ship master headed for the new world allowing him the ultimate privilege that the decedents of that slaver can only dream of, growing up in America.
I won’t say catastrophically wrong, but wrong nonetheless. In case you forgot, I predicted Scheller’s court martial would get drawn into obscurity by his defense counsel, who would want some time to pass before anyone passed judgement on Scheller. Any good defense lawyer is going to want distance between alleged crimes and judgement so that emotions can die down and, hopefully, cooler heads prevail. I also figured after getting a light sentence of some kind, which would not include jail time, Scheller would be allowed to retire.
Besides the light sentence part, I was wrong. Lt. Col. Scheller plead guilty to all six charges against him. The judge punished him with a sentence of one month forfeiture of $5,000 and a reprimand. His next stop is a Board of Inquiry, which will likely recommend dismissal from service.
Now, this doesn’t mean he loses all benefits. The Veteran’s Affairs will still assess if he can get disability pay, which could be in the thousands per month depending on his level of disability. Given that he fought in Afghanistan, and the Marine Corps has pounded his body over the past 17 years, he’s almost assured to get some disability pay.
At first I was in disbelief that things went completely different from my prediction. I took some time to read his court martial statement, which made things much more clear. Lt. Col. Scheller couldn’t NOT plead guilty. If he had fought the charges, it would have made him look like a crazy person who suddenly realizes he made a mistake and is trying to quickly sweep it under the rug. Scheller isn’t crazy. He might be depressed, but its understandable, given that both his wife and the Marine Corps are abandoning him. But he’s not crazy. It becomes very apparent near the end of his statement:
…Going forward, I am still demanding accountability from my senior General officers. Since this endeavor began, not a single General officer has accepted accountability. Not a single General officer has contacted me directly in any forum to deescalate the situation. Since this endeavor began, I have acknowledged that I should be held accountable for my actions. I am standing here today pleading guilty. This is me accepting accountability. But it deeply pains me that my senior leaders are incapable of being as courageous.
Without accountability from our senior leaders, the system cannot evolve, and the military will ultimately keep repeating the same mistakes in the future. It doesn’t matter if a SSgt squad leader is highly efficient in distributed operations if the General officers have relegated themselves to ‘yes sir’ responses. We need senior leaders who possess the morale courage to push back when something doesn’t make sense.
– Lt. Col. Scheller
If Lt. Col. Scheller wanted to cast light on the problem, he certainly did so. But where does it go from here? Tackling the military industrial behemoth is a daunting task. Even Mad-dog Mattis, who finally won the war in Iraq, still struggled to make the Department of Defense refocus and change. The revolving door for senior officers still exists, not dissimilar from the revolving door for politicians and lobbyists. Also, given Lt. Col. Scheller’s negative response to help from Donald Trump, I’m not sure where he’s going to start to affect the change he wants to make.
I will say this: this episode is only going to make the 2024 personnel cliff even worse for the military. In less than a month the military threw everything at Scheller over social media posts. Every military member is taking notice. Any that agreed with him will be quietly quitting, and the slow drip of lost manpower is going to accumulate into a river.
This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency. If you liked what you read, why not buy my book on Amazon and help me out!
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