To be the new Pope

I am what could be generouly called a lapsed Christian. But even if I become an atheist Budhist with Zoroastrian tendencies, I am and will forever be Agnostic. Even though I was never ordained by the Church of Agnostics, the experience left an indelible mark on my soul none the less. So, with Benedict throwing in the towel, the media getting their Catholic geek on and the election of the new Pope - it´s been an interesting couple of weeks. And my sister knows me very well.
"So what would you do if you were the Pope?" She asks.
"Probably try and figure out how to smuggle hookers into the Vatican." I say.
"Popes have done it before."
"I am sure the Borgias left tunnels somewhere." I laugh.
"No seriously." She goes on. "I am sure you care what happens to the new Pope, but what would you do?"
"Well I wouldn´t call myself Francis for one."
"Why not?"
"Because if any of you guys call me Francis..." Isay with a hysterical shrill in my voice. "I´ll kill you."
She stares at me blankly. "What the hell are you talking about?"
I sigh. I´m five years older than her so we dont share all the same cultural references. I explain the legendary dialogue from the movie Stripes.
"Oh man." She says when I finished. "That´s bad."
I emailed that video clip to a classmate of mine. He wrote back. ´I know. I was thinking the same thing. Psycho!!´

TO DO LIST UPON ELECTION AS SUPREME PONTIFF OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH:

1. When the Camerlengo asks, “Do accept your canonical election as Supreme Pontiff?” Laugh maniacally and shout, “It’s on bitches, Hell Yeah!!!”

2. Pick a name. Pick a scary name. I shall be called Rodus Sixtus.

3. My papal motto will be, “Because I said so.”

4. Remind myself never to look at online porn again. That shit could be traced back real quick.

5. Quickly figure out who’d be the first to poison me. Drink bottled beer only.

6. Call my cigar store and have a couple of boxes sent to “Top Dude, Big Dog at Vatican” post haste.

7. Pull the Vatican out of the Euro Zone. I want my face on the money.

8. Call my banker in the morning to set up a retirement plan.

9. Order the entire Rosetta Stone Language program. I need to be able to say, “Kneel before Rod!” in every tongue.

10. Find some really, really hot nuns.

11. Have my butler totally vetted before hire.

12. Dust off the Spanish Inquisition manual and renovate the dungeon. I have some housecleaning to do.

13. Relaunch the Crusades – as a massive multiplayer online game and reap the profits.

14. Put John Paul II back in the ground – where he wanted to be laid to rest. (I don’t need to worry about my corpse becoming an object of veneration. Something tells me I won’t be buried in The Vatican.)

15. Put in a rule that says a Pope must be dead a hundred years before you can even think about promoting him to sainthood. Right now the whole thing’s a racket.

16. Create the Swiss Navy. Sell The Pieta to the Bellagio in Vegas and buy a fully armed aircraft carrier and rechristen it, The Wrath of God. Stalin once asked, “How many divisions does the Pope have?” Well Uncle Joe, now the Pope has nukes.

17. Move Castel Gandolfo to the Surrey brick by brick

18. Hire Bruce Willis to find those priests who have the stones to make The Fifth Element. With my luck Satan is a monster-sized alien who’ll show up on my first day off.

19. Make my five-year old nephew a cardinal. It’s been done before.

20. Rename the Jesuits “The Jedi” and rename their mother church “St. Obi-Wan Outside the Walls.”

21. Commission Pope Sixtus comic book series. I’ve already got a cape.

22. Make the Vatican energy independent by hooking up the mains to the Ark of the Covenant. I know it’s around here somewhere.

23. Ditch the Popemobile for a Lamborghini.

24. Bring back bingo night at St. John Lateran.

25. Extort cattle ranchers for big payoffs or I bring back of meatless Fridays all year.

26. Have all the other religions of the world pay me for “protection.”

27. No more of this “What time is midnight Mass?” bullshit. Midnight! End of discussion.

28. Say priests don’t have to marry – but they have to raise at least one child.

29. Make waiting tables part of seminary formation. You learn a lot about people serving food.

30. Proclaim no priest shall be ordained until he is thirty-three. By that time, if you’re crazy, we’ll know.

31. Warn Sinead O’Connor she’d better not rip up MY picture.

32. Buy red sneakers. Better yet, launch my own line – Air Sixtus.

33. Tell Puerto Rican mothers to stop naming their kids Jesus.

34. All of Rome’s homeless get to sleep in St. Peter’s every night. Make that mandatory for every bishop’s cathedral in the world.

35. Watch the first two Godfather films for guidance – because the Curia is the original Mafia.

36. Have nuns constantly praying to St. Anthony so I can always find my Keys to the Kingdom.

37. Add “Ecclesiastical Shogun” to my extensive list of titles. Get accompanying samurai sword from the Emperor of Japan. Wicked cool.

38. Make Latin hip again.

39. Bishops will no longer be allowed to reside in mansions. Of course, this does not apply to me. It’s good to be the Pontiff.

40. Bring back the Sedia Gestatoria. I am the Man!

41. Make L’Osservatore Romano a tabloid and add sudoku.

42. Turn the Bark of St. Peter into a macked out yacht.

43. Start selling stuff. Start selling lots of stuff.

44. Have my attorneys send Dwayne Johnson a cease and desist letter and tell him the use of the name “The Rock” has been copyrighted for two-thousand years. “Tu es Petrus et super hanc petram aedificabo Ecclesiam meam.”

45. Bind less. Loose more. In all seriousness, we don’t get a new Pope every day. Even I teared up when I heard the words “Habemus Papam” Good luck Papa Bergoglio. The hopes of the world are with you.

Big Brother is watching, rant

I have had to change my beloved, oversized and pointless Government Identity Card for the so called Citizens Card. So I grudgingly head over to the most feared bureaucracy in Portugal – the Citizens Shop or Loja de Cidadao. When I get there, I discover the line just to get into the building is a 15 miles long. The book I brought almost manages to kill the three hours I spend waiting. Almost. “Number 242!” the clerk calls out. “Number 242!” “Here,” I say, almost running towards the counter. “ID and proof of residency, please,” the clerk says, not looking up from her terminal. I hand over my passport, social security card, driver’s license and a copy of my electric bill, gas bill, cable, water and a letter from my mother. Satisfied I am who I say I am, the clerk punches some numbers into her computer and says, “Okay, stand in the box to get your picture taken.” Freshly shaved with a new haircut and wearing a nice shirt, I take up position in the box and smile. “If you’re wearing glasses take them off,” She continues without looking away from her computer screen and not noticing that I don’t wear glasses. “And you can’t smile.” “Why not?” I ask in my really bad Portuguese. The clerk taps a sign next to the camera that reads “Facial Recognition System.” “Are you kidding me?” I say to myself. “If you smile it throws off the computer.” “Jesus. Talk about Big Brother.” “You want the Citizens Card or not?” I know the moment my picture is taken, it will join millions of faces in a system accessible to law enforcement personnel. The rationale behind such programs is to root out identity thieves and insurance fraudsters, hunt down Al Qaeda operatives and catch bank robbers who forget to wear a ski mask. I also know it will enable the government to track every move I make. A guy who used to work for the transport Authority told me that when I drive onto the 25th of April bridge, cameras are not only reading my license plate and comparing them to a list of wanted automobiles, but are also capturing an image of my face. “The cameras are so good,” he said, “They can count the change in your cup holder.” So, even if I leave my Via Verde Card at home, rip out Car Insurance disk and take the battery out of my mobile phone, the government’s electronic gauntlet will still detect me going into the city. Not that I want to do anything nefarious, mind you, but does the Portuguese Intelligence Agency need to know I crossed the Tagus river to grab a 10 euro burger menu at Mackie D´s? It’s a brave new world. Credit card companies can count the change in my pocket, Google Maps has a picture of my house, for-profit companies dissect my forays online, the post office scans my mail and, thanks to Mr. Snowden, whatever you think of him, I know all my phone calls and Internet searches are stored in some kind of vast database. Now the President of the Republic knows I have an affinity for MILFs in cheerleading outfits. Just great. But if I want to work, sleep, drive or spend some quality man time in the toilet, I have to acquiesce yet again to the power of The State. “Take the picture,” I tell the clerk, and the results are monstrous. I’m usually told I look younger than my forty-two years, but the grumpy guy on my new picture looks sixty – and has been absorbed into an PSP/GNR/PJ/PIDE biometric super snooper program to boot. Depressed, I go to my local cigar shop where I strike up a conversation with the local police officer. ”Rod,” he says, after I tell him about my run in with the burgeoning security state, “In five years, you will have no expectation of privacy anywhere but your home.” After hearing that, I wonder if noon is too early to start drinking. As I puff on my Maduro, the television news starts squawking about Anthony Weiner and his affinity for posting his penis online. For some reason, men love sharing pictures of their dicks with the world. I’ve never done so and I’m not sure what dark corner of male sexuality powers the compulsion, but if you look at sites like Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr and Snap Chat, you’ll realize the Web is veritable sausagefest. Then an idea free-associates with my paranoid mind. If facial recognition is going to be part of our daily lives, why don’t we have penis identification software? Cockidentifcation? Men already think their penises are special, but I’m sure the phallus of the human male had enough biometric identifiers that make it as unique as a fingerprint, iris or strand of DNA. So if we analyse the data I’m sure there’s enough variances in length, girth, lack thereof, tapers, angles, shapes and bends to assemble a searchable database of dicks. Obviously, we’re talking about cataloging erect penises here. Flaccidly and shrinkage would only confuse the system – like glasses and smiling flummoxes facial recognition now. So how do we get all this tumescence online? We already have an impressive collection of dick pics lurking on the world’s data servers. Putting names to those penises might be a start. Perhaps aggrieved females could put names to the unwanted cock shots they get and forward them to some future government agency. On second thought, I can see this being abused by pissed off drunken women nationwide. “Don’t call me back will you? I’m sending your prick to Guantanamo or Siberia!” I’m afraid we’d have to mandate some kind of cold and clinical nationwide dick inventory. Of course we’d have to use machines – no busty nurses with analog tools like tape measures, sorry. Too many dicks, too little time. Maybe when a young man signs up for Selective Service, he’ll have to go to full mast for his country and stick his unit in the Federal Wangometer and register his johnson. Perhaps future trips to the Loja de Cidadao might involve porno mags and dropping your shorts. Or we could finally put those detested full body scanners in airports to good use. I’ll leave the logistics to others. So what’s the benefit to this system? What’s the value of having every guy’s dong digitized and searchable? Glad you asked. 1. If you’ve ever used a dating website, you know that people send misrepresentative pictures all the time. If you send a picture of a penis that’s not your own to impress some woman on a sex hook up site – the computer will label your fraudulent weenie and boot you out of the system. That’ll prevent a lot of female dissatisfaction. 2. National security. Terrorists are invariably perverts. Remember all the porn they found in Osama’s bunker? Two minutes after these guys wrap up their You Tube rants about miniskirts and Western decadence, they’re spanking it to Girls Gone Wild. It’s not much of a stretch to imagine them posting pics of their dicks. Well, once the World Wide government Agencies penis sniffing algorithms spot a terrorist schlong getting Tweeted from an IP in The Hindu Kush, time to send in the Predator Drones. That’s what I call a hard target. Whacking tangos was never so much fun. Oh I could go on forever…… 3. Could be used as an alternative ID – a guy never leaves his penis in his other pants. Maybe it could even be used as a passport. Like being able to pee standing up, just another advantage to being a dude. Who knew Visa stamps could be so kinky? 4. Scientists could crunch the numbers and finally tell us if all those ethnic/racial stereotypes are really true. 5. Aid in prosecutions. Think how much faster the Bill Clinton thing would have gone. 6. Interpol and their special separate department Interpole (sorry), would have a 10 Most Wanted Dicks Poster. And you wonder why your girlfriend always volunteers to buy stamps? 7. It would make life easier for porn producers. “Jimmy Wad’s got the flu. Check the database for local talent!” Like all sensitive information, a national dick database will have to be protected. God forbid the government uses it for illegal purposes. Cops will need a warrant before doing any search and uh, seizures, but let’s face it; the court will find a way to pervert the Constitution. And I’m sure some whistleblower wannabe will get a job with the National Penis Data Initiative to “see what’s really going on,” steal the information, release it to the press and then seek asylum in Russia. Putin. What a dick. An hour later, my cigar has gone cold and I finish typing this post on my tablet. I’m exhausted from thinking about so many synonyms for wieners. “What are you writing?” the police officer asks. “Sir,” I say. “You don’t want to know.”.