Yeah, but did Saint Jerome ever bat .400? “Shared memories hold us together as families, as baseball fans, as Catholics,” writes Cathy O’Connell-Cahill in U.S. Catholic (November). “Our history of Catholic heroes and heroines–saints, I mean–is much more fascinating and a lot longer than the history of major-league baseball, but while baseball makes better and better use of its own history (witness last year’s 50th anniversary commemoration of Jackie Robinson’s entry into the major leagues), we seem to have let the power of our own Catholic stories slip away. As a parent, I can tell you that it’s a lot easier to find an interesting kids’ biography of a baseball player than an interesting kids’ book on Catholic saints.”
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Excuse me, ma’am, but our comptroller says you need to bulk up. According to a press release on a recent study led by the corporate medical director of First Chicago NBD, “Health care costs were lowest for workers with a BMI [body mass index] of 25-27. This is equivalent to a body weight of approximately 155 lbs. for a woman 5 ft. 6 ins. tall, or 174 lbs. for a 5 ft. 10 in. man.”
“There is no longer much question, it seems, of mobilizing actual working people into the ranks of the nonexistent left,” laments Chris Lehmann in In These Times (October 18). “Instead, there is endless, anxious self-examination over the staggeringly hypothetical question of who gets to speak on behalf of such unmobilized constituencies, and why.”
