By Las Vegas standards, New Orleans' Super Bowl victory yesterday was an upset.
But from this religion journalist's point of view, how could anyone be surprised that a team named the Saints would be victorious?

Next year I'd like to see the Saints take on the New Jersey Devils in a caged battle royale.
We'll see who's side God is on and whether He really cares about trivial matters like the outcomes of sports matches.

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Trivia for the day:

The word "plumber" comes from the Latin plumbum, for lead (the chemical). The danger of working with lead was known at least since the time of the Romans, when the architect Faventinus observed the "deformity" and "dreadful anemic pallor" of plumbers.

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Got a press release today about a new band called the Cancer Bats. Brings up some bizarre images, in my mind.
Band names are often meaningless anyway.
What does a band name mean, anyway? As Paul McCartney once said, the Beatles is just a name, it could have been the Shoes, and the music would have been the same. Or as Shakespeare put it, A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.

One time when I was covering the music beat there was a new band coming to town called the Ass Ponys (raise your hand if you ever heard of them... didn't think so.)
I was going to write about their upcoming concert in town but was concerned about whether my button-down editor would allow me to print the name in our newspaper.
After consulting with him about it, I could see he was very uncomfortable and struggling to find a way to accommodate my request without seeming either draconian or priggish.
On the spur of the moment, I came up with this crazy compromise: "How about if I just call them the Ponys?"
He let out an audible sigh of relief. "Can you do that? That would be great!"
So the Ass Ponys were renamed the Ponys just for one night, in one newspaper.
But their music was the same -- with or without the Ass.
(Hey, the word's in the Bible, don't be so judgmental!)

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I got a phone call from someone today who went to seminary with Bishop Leonard Paul Blair of Toledo. He did not have very nice things to say about his classmate and future bishop. It was nothing scandalous, just very unflattering, and I won't repeat them in this space.
He did have something positive to say about Bishop Blair, however. He said he was "a real egghead" who got a 4.0 plus.
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I received a separate phone call today from a reader complaining about the diocese's decision to rename some Fremont Catholic schools after the late Bishop James Hoffman. (Here is a link to the story).
I always liked Bishop Hoffman as a person, and he was good to the local news media. But he led the diocese during the worst crisis in modern memory for the Roman Catholic church, when the clerical sexual abuse scandal broke, and that crisis caused a lot of grief for a lot of people. The pain and suffering are still very real for many people, as I often hear while making my daily rounds.