April 21, 2005

These are the days of miracles and wonders.

I guess everyone's going to link to Peggy Noonan's essay about the new pope, and I wasn't going to pope-blog, but this line jumped out at me:
It is an age of miracles and wonders, of sightings of Mary and warnings, of prophecy, graces and gifts.

Didn't you think of two things?

1. Paul Simon's "Graceland." Was that on purpose? Google says yes. Search for "Paul Simon" and "miracles and wonders" and the first thing that comes up is this old article by none other than Noonan.

2. "Sighting of Mary"? Is Noonan excited about the salt stain on the Chicago underpass? Too bad we can't get a miracle in the form of improving the flow of traffic on the Kennedy Expressway.

UPDATE: Argonautical Ramblings is photoblogging the underpass stain and the assembling crowds. The link is to the blog itself. Each photo is a separate link, unfortunately, but here's the post that begins the series. Thanks to the commenter here who pointed out this site.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

One of the members of my blog circle has some good photo-blogging of the mary-stain - http://argoramb.blogspot.com

Wade Garrett said...

Last week, an Australian couple claimed to see an image of the virgin Mary in their child's soiled bedsheet. I am not making this up. Jon Stewart did a great bit on it on The Daily Show.

Does anybody remember that Cheers episode where Norm finds the potato chip that looked like Richard Nixon? That has always been one of my favorite episodes. In that episode, the joke was on Norm. When I see these real-life alleged virgin Mary sightings, I can't help but wonder, who the joke is on now . . .

Anonymous said...

In Clearwater, FL where I grew up, there was a 60 foot tall image of the Mary which appeared in 1996. Quite the tourist attraction. Evidently it was damaged by vandals (broke the glass). I guess it didn't "recover" as the panes of glass were replaced by a picture of Jesus. Get this; the building was formerly the offices of Ugly Duckling used car company.