Drama at the check out counter!!!!!!

At the check-out counter yesterday, as a young lady helped put my groceries into the cart, she suddenly exclaimed, "You have a huge, freakin' bug in your bananas!"

Sure enough, when I leaned over, I saw---inside a plastic bag thankfully---what looked like a cockroach about two inches long.

"I'm not taking those bananas," I said and a young male employee scooped the bag from my cart and the young lady who had spotted La Cacuracha promised to bring me another bag of bananas, since I'd already paid for them.

As I waited, another drama ensued. I saw a red-faced, dark-haired young woman carrying a plastic bag sans bananas that I realized still contained the bug, who was, "too big to kill" and would have created the giant squishing sound all the way to Mexico or the Dominican Republic or Costa Rica, wherever the bug came from.

"This is murder," she said, striding purposefully towards the exit, her shoulders hunched to protect her death row victim from the hands of a male employee who was trying to get it from her.

For a moment I wondered, gee, what if Mama Cucuracha did get loose and dropped thousands of eggs to be an invasive species. (It is then when you thank God for Canadian winters.) And ugh, what if the eagle-eyed young lady had not spotted the bug and I had brought it home? It was definitely even bigger than Igor, the centipede or millipede? who lives in my basement, could handle as a snack. I like Igor and let him live because he is like a "cat" to other insect "mice" and does a good job as a carnivore. Igor is shy and pretends he is a fake mustache if I catch him by turning on the lights. Then he scurries away.

Thankfully, the male employee was successful in grabbing the bug-bag away from the young woman. Hmmmm. She was definitely pro-life when it comes to cockroaches. Would she have the same public concern for unborn children?

If this kind of thing doesn't provoke fire and brimstone . . .

Unbelievable. But! Coming soon to a school near you, I sadly predict. (h/t John Smeaton's blog)

A ‘sex box’ for primary school aged children which includes a wooden penis and a fabric vagina has sparked a storm of controversy in Switzerland.

The box is to be used as part of a radical new sex education programme for primary school aged kids in Basel.

A teachers’ guide says that teachers should “show that contacting body parts can be pleasurable”.

Massage

It also suggests that they should get pupils to massage each other or to rub themselves with warm sand bags, all accompanied by soft music.

When girls start serving the supply of altar boys dries up

Father Z has a poll on whether an all-male sanctuary fosters vocations to the priesthood. You might have guesse that I voted yes. Go on over and vote.

And he also has a link to this most interesting article by William Oddie at the Catholic Herald.
The bolds are Father Z's but I too was struck by the emphasized paragraph and it does describe, in a way, the feminization of the Church, a feminization that drives men out of the pews:

" . . . as soon as girls appear, the supply of altar boys tends simply to dry up.

The first time this occurred to me was in the house of friends with whom I was staying in France. One of the guests at dinner one evening was Archbishop André Vingt-Trois of Tours (now Cardinal Archbishop of Paris). The subject of conversation at one point was the way in which, in the local Parish Church, presumably in an attempt to involve women in the celebration of the Mass, not only were all the readers women but so also were all the servers girls; my wife (not I) compared it to a farmyard, with the priest as the cock strutting about in the middle of a flock of hens. Archbishop Vingt-Trois said that the priest may have had no choice over the all-girls serving team: “Once the girls arrive, he said, the boys disappear: you can’t see them for dust” (his explanation was much more graphic in French). And he was adamant that though there were, of course other factors contributing to the decline in priestly vocations, the decline in the number of all-male sanctuaries was certainly one of them.

You know, I have been a leader and the boss of men during my long career as a journalist and television producer and communications advisor in government, but I love it that in my church, the bells ring, the men process in (maybe a boy or two) and they take over.