On Tuesday, We All Go Green (or Else)!

If you recognise something of an Irish theme in my last few posts, you're on the beam and off the caught-in-the-nap map mode, especially if you're up this early on a Saturday morning. Although I myself am not Irish at all — I'm half-Swedish, half-French, BION; and, I didn't even know that until 1977 when I found my birth father, a fact which may explain, partially, why I had to quit drinking since, natch, I could no longer blame it on the Irish Curse although, FTR, I did do exactly that for the next five years — I still appreciate this page on mottos attached to Irish names muchly.

And, speaking of the Irish, allow me to inform you (better late than never, Art D.), thanks to Joyce scholar Dr. Eric McLuhan, first-born son and right-hand man of Dr. Marshall McLuhan, we now know the origin of the media-maestro's aphorism, "The name of a man is a numbing blow from which he never recovers."

Dr. EM reveals, in an e-nlightening email from which he authorises yours truly to quote, his father's inspiration came from none other than James Joyce: "We got it from Finnegans Wake. Joyce wrote, 'Who gave you that numb?' We noticed that one's name forms an invisible environment that surrounds one the entire of one's life; and, like all environments, it has a numbing effect."

Fair enumb. When I e-corresponded with Dr. EM, I also asked him how he thought his dad would respond to the cover on the December issue of the Mexican edition of Playboy, particularly in view of the fact Dr. MM had given the famous-for-its-articles mag an extensive interview concerning his life and theories.

According to his son, Dr. MM would NEVER have consented to this enterprise if he had seen such an incendiary image on the cover of Hugh Hefner's baby. "No secret there. It is deliberately blasphemous, goes far beyond simple provocation or naughtiness. Not much news there; so, no. Absolutely not."


What else is news? That's exactly what we already thought (since, it is a truth universally acknowledged converts to Catholicism practise their faith much more stringently and stridently than those born into it, for the most part).

Personally? I think the model's beautiful; but, she most certainly doesn't match my mental image of the BVM. (I can think of several painterly renditions that come much closer to my own conception, Andrea del Verrocchio's Madonna with Child., e.g..)