Memento, homo, quia pulvis es, et in pulverem reverteris
Remember, man, that thou art dust, and unto dust thou shalt return.
Welcome to the 2012 Lenten season! A season that starts today, Ash Wednesday. For you non-Papists out there, that’s why you’ll see a number of folks walking around with smudge marks on our foreheads. These ashes are traditionally made from the blessed remains of burnt Palm Sunday palms from previous years and your parish may not collect palms to burn in order to make their own. A word on your old palms, they are blessed and should be burned when they have reached the end of their days in your home. The ash may be sprinkled in your yard or garden.
Oddly enough, today is not a Holy Day of Obligation in the Roman Catholic Church. Catholics are encouraged to attend Mass and receive ashes. Catholics between the ages of 18 and 60 are called to fast – eating only one full meal with up to two other smaller meals (some believe that the sum of the two smaller meals should not exceed the size of the large meal to provide a scope to the meals). Catholics who are 14 years of age or older are required to abstain from meat today (and on subsequent Fridays until Easter).
Worth noting, Lent is said to be 40 days which confuses some. First, let’s start with the date of Easter. It is the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox as set by the Council of Nicaea in 325 A.D. This is why its date varies in the Gregorian calendar. But that gives us 46 days between Ash Wednesday and Easter Sunday – what gives? Well, Sunday is the sabbath, so Sundays are removed from Lent leaving 40 days. Now there is one wrinkle: St. Joseph’s Day (once the Solemnity of St. Joseph, but it has been relegated to a simple Feast Day) is celebrated on March 19th in the Roman Catholic Church (or moved for specific calendar circumstances). If that day falls on a Friday, the abstinence requirement is lifted. In some dioceses, bishops may grant dispensations from abstinence on St. Patrick’s day as well.
So, when you see someone with ashes on their forehead, wish them a good Lent rather than the: hey, you’ve got dirt on your forehead or is that dry erase marker on your forehead or the plain eyes darting back and forth from your eyes to your hairline.
GorT is an eight-foot-tall robot from the 51ˢᵗ Century who routinely time-travels to steal expensive technology from the future and return it to the past for retroinvention. The profits from this pay all the Gormogons’ bills, including subsidizing this website. Some of the products he has introduced from the future include oven mitts, the Guinness widget, Oxy-Clean, and Dr. Pepper. Due to his immense cybernetic brain, GorT is able to produce a post in 0.023 seconds and research it in even less time. Only ’Puter spends less time on research. GorT speaks entirely in zeros and ones, but occasionally throws in a ڭ to annoy the Volgi. He is a massive proponent of science, technology, and energy development, and enjoys nothing more than taking the Czar’s more interesting scientific theories, going into the past, publishing them as his own, and then returning to take credit for them. He is the only Gormogon who is capable of doing math. Possessed of incredible strength, he understands the awesome responsibility that follows and only uses it to hurt people.
