Pope Joins Instagram to the Delight of Online Believers
Pope Francis lives in his own city-state inside of Rome, so he can easily avoid the world’s trivialities to focus on preserving thousands of artifacts representing Catholicism over the years. But even the Pontifex can’t ignore the power and influence of social media these days — there is a prayer-hands emoji, after all — which is why he joined Instagram last week using the handle @Franciscus. Within three hours, Pope Francis had amassed more than 400,000 followers, which was a good sign for Catholicism as a whole considering the sad and lonely recent efforts to rebuild the religion’s IRL-following via a campaign called “Catholics Come Home.” The Pope also tweeted a message from his @Pontifex handle about the new Instagram account and shared it to Facebook where it was ignored by dozens of family members enamored by photos of a new baby.
GOP Will Not Consider SCOTUS Nominee or Anything Else Obama Wants
In spite of how it might appear, we at WWE! try not to be uber partisan in yon weekly news column — we don’t particularly like Democrats (or ourselves) any more than the perverted neocons running the GOP into the ground. But sometimes it’s difficult to ignore the delightful fumblings of today’s Republican Party, especially during a time when a megalomaniac celebrity is trolling its establishment harder than Stephen Colbert ever could. During a time when the GOP might consider grasping onto any shred of dignity it once had, Republicans such as Ohio Sen. Rob Portman and Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell are steadfastly refusing to hold a hearing on President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, a seemingly unpolarizing white guy named Merrick Garland who has never even said anything nice about abortion. In an interview with NPR, Obama downplayed how hard he screwed Republicans with the nomination and declined to rank on a scale of 1 to 10 how great it will be for him to travel the U.S. during election season pointing out how 70 percent of the electorate believes congressional Republicans are acting like petty assholes.
Scientists Believe Dogs Are More Intelligent Than We Give the Little Bastards Credit For
Ten years ago, scientists had not delved very deeply into the “dog psyche,” generally assuming it to be the equivalent of a red light or green light inside a dog’s mind telling him whether or not he should eat, hump something or go hide under a bed. Proving how little the world’s brightest researchers have to do these days, scientists have gotten pretty far into the mind of man’s best friend during the past decade, recently determining that dogs are actually smarter than they’re given credit for. Dogs can reportedly learn hundreds of words (“good”/”bad”), understand social cues (“poop here”/“go outside, idiot”) and the significance of a gaze (“Do not eat my sandwich or I’ll kill you!!!”). Ultimately, researchers found that dogs can operate at the same mental level as two-and-a-half-year-old human babies, though some warned not to overplay the animals’ intelligence by noting that the “guilty look” owners believe they can identify after their dog eats a whole loaf of French bread is really just the same dumb look dogs have whenever they don’t know what’s about to happen.
Georgia Republicans Want to Have the Super Bowl and Discrimination, Too
Certain Republicans are always talking about how important it is to preserve religious liberties, even though what they really mean is that they’re willing to undertake the very un-Christian effort of discriminating against gay people. In response to the Supreme Court’s decision to legalize same-sex marriage last year, such legislators in Georgia have announced that they’re “leading the way” for the country via a new law that would bar the state from “handcuffing” a person’s exercise of religion (forcing them to marry same-sex couples) or penalizing an organization that denies services based on a “sincerely held” religious belief (no wedding cakes for gays). Unfortunately for the new law’s supporters — who are probably huge football fans for any number of stereotypical reasons — the NFL has taken a page out of its 1993 playbook (yanking the Super Bowl from Arizona for refusing to recognize MLK Day) and threatened to boot Atlanta from the running for the 2019 Super Bowl.Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal has hesitated to sign the law because the Falcons will never make it to the big game again and residents would like to see one.
Local Sports Fans Feel the Familiar Pain of Defeat
Cincinnati sports fans are uniquely qualified to suffer painful defeat — since the 1990 Reds won the World Series, local sports enthusiasts have born witness to dozens of heartbreaking losses under most unfathomable circumstances (one time, in a playoff game, the Reds went all nine innings without getting a single hit!). Having witnessed last weekend’s disappointing NCAA Tournament losses by the University of Cincinnati (game-tying dunk waived off for being .1 second too late) and Xavier (buzzer-beating game-winning 3-pointer against them), local sports media have put together their own lists of the worst losses they’ve seen and felt as fans. Common recollections included UC basketball player Kenyon Martin breaking his leg when the team was a favorite to win the NCAA Championship, the Reds blowing a 2-games-to-0 lead in a best-of-five series in 2012 and last fall’s Bengals meltdown, which brought everyone full circle to the UC and Xavier basketball seasons, leaving the local sports world feeling normal once again.
CONTACT DANNY CROSS: letters@citybeat.com
This article appears in Mar 23-30, 2016.