Why Wear A Swimsuit When You Can Walk On Water?

Back in the day, when I used to read--and even subscribe to--Sports Illustrated,  I so looked forward to the two or three weeks after the annual "swimsuit edition" was published (and yes, I read  Playboy for the articles).  Each of those weeks would appear, and probably still do, outraged letters from parents, librarians, ministers,  generic prudes and general guardians of morality and Public Good.  "Cancel my subscription," they would say, and "How can you publish such smut?"  Understand, this happened or happens every effing year.  Where were these people last year, or the year before,  or the year before that?  How could they not know, and thus continue to be outraged by the fact that, every February or March, there would be an issue which featured scantily-clad and nubile young and lovely women in exotic tropical locales,  selling the same mag that, in the other 51 weeks, featured grass-stained,  bloody, broken-toothed missing links?

I bring this up to ward off that same sort of firestorm of anger and outrage that could be directed toward this nascent and innocent blog, for what I am about to write.

Each year at this time an event occurs whose significance I have trouble remembering.  Which is it:  If Jerusalem Jesus (it has to be somehow catchy and alliterative, doesn't it, to really sell the product?) sees his shadow, we have six more weeks of eternity, or is it if he doesn't see his shadow...?  There, it's out there, and it's juvenile and puerile and offensive and, really, shockingly funny (funny because it's shocking), and I hope that those who I love who are offended by it also have a large enough sense of humor and forgiveness that they'll give me a pass on it.  It's Easter, after all, and that dying-and-rising-god (a metaphor from all agricultural societies to explain crop cycles) did his thing to absolve me of my sins, right?

So, anyway: Eternity.  It's, like, a wicked long time, huh? Six weeks here or there probly doesn't add up to much.  Then again, after 2,000 years....  Like most of you, I suspect, I have trouble wrapping my head around the idea of Eternity, as I do several cosmic concepts or physical manifestations whose very existence seem impossible:  The Higgs boson, for instance, and the Hardon (did I transpose letters there?  Oops....) Collider, which my friend Leon Skillings recently wrote about to very amusing effect, (and I have stolen it back, you bastard!) or Infinity, or a sensible politician willing to face Reality head-on, or Sofia Vergara.

Anyway, I'm gonna try to find enough songs to play to cover many of these issues, and maybe more: like baseball, f'rinstance, as the season (a long one for the Red Sox, I fear) has just commenced.  But mostly Time and Space; as Robert Frost had it, "our place among the infinities."

Tuesday, noon-till-two eastern, 100.1FM, wool.fm on the webs.

Was Mary Baker Eddy's Casketophone (TM) really only able to make outgoing calls?  If only she'd died after the invention of Skype.  Now that would be interesting.  "Call him up and tell him what you want...."