No sooner had I sung the praises of the Jewish Miami Boys Choir singing “Hinei Ma Tov” [1] than the Israeli government put a portion of the Dead Sea Scrolls on display, with special emphasis on the fragment displaying Psalm 133, from which “Hinei Ma Tov” is taken: “Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity.” The Dead Sea Scrolls are normally kept in a dark temperature-controlled room because the calfskin parchment has been deteriorating, but the government decided to bring out the Book of Isaiah [2] for the first time in 41 years, putting it in a glass case in Jerusalem’s Israel Museum as part of the nation’s 60th anniversary celebration. My question: how come the calfskin parchment was just fine for 2,060 years in a cave jar, but Chosen People scientists can’t keep it from wasting away?

Icons to Make You Feel at Home in East Dallas

Of course you can buy a Bobble Head Jesus [3], who said you can’t? But my favorite religious icon from the Archie McPhee catalogue is actually the vinyl desktop-sized “Bless Your Meat” model of St. Adrian [4], patron saint of butchers, arms dealers and prison guards (knife not included).

Graven Images Out the Wazoo

All those super-Christians who are constantly trying to get Ten Commandments statues put up on courthouse squares should just pony up the $60,000 for the actual tablets carried down from Sinai by Charlton Heston when they’re auctioned off this summer [5] in New York. That seems a little steep for props from a 52-year-old movie that, let’s face it, wasn’t that great. I would pay that, however, for the Fifteen Commandments tablets that Mel Brooks carried down from Sinai [6] in The History of the World, Part 1, and I would probably pay half that for the tablets carried by the greatest movie Moses of them all. I speak, of course, of Soupy Sales, in the 1993 mockumentary The Making of ‘. . . and God Spoke’.

The Vatican Should Publish Its Own Version of People

There must be somebody at the wire services who combs through L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper, every day, looking for Something Wacky, Weird or Wonderful to write about. The latest interview to make the Internet rounds is with the Rev. Jose Gabriel Funes [7], the director of the Vatican Observatory at Castel Gandolfo (the pope’s country house), who says that we can’t rule out the possibility of life on other planets. Funes also answers the inevitable questions about Galileo, who was prosecuted as a heretic for believing in the theories of the Polish Catholic cleric Copernicus, whose books on the heavens were banned by the church. But the most interesting part of the story was nowhere commented on: the Vatican also operates an observatory (and no doubt one that can see much further into the heavens) at the University of Arizona in Tucson. I wonder how many of the priests have Wildcats t-shirts under those cassocks, or, given the new openness to alien life, Star Trek hairshirts.