HEAVY LITTLE OBJECTS

#141 :: Prism

When I was six, we all got on the school bus after getting to school one day, and drove away from school we went to this museum with GIANT DINOSAUR SKELETONS and you could imagine them walking the earth shaking the ground with their big heavy footsteps Thunder Lizards dinosaurs means and we got to see a coelacanth I can't even spell it my future self would learn how to spell it decades later but a coelacanth the oldest species of fish on earth it's like a living fossil fish and they had a stuffed emu I think and lots and lots of dinosaur footprint fossils but we couln't touch them and they had this amazing picture, all stretched long of dinosaurs eating and walking in the swamp and eating each other's flesh with huge sharp teeth and claws and I remember all the neato things in the glass case in the museum store this magnifying glass only I didn't have enough money and I only had enough money for a little plastic dinosaur not even a good one I didn't have enough money for this prism ...

I could go on like that for hours. Age six is still very vivid for me, especially as my son approaches age five, gaining wonder and focus and smarts. I've had chandelier prisms and prism creatures and a military surplus tank rangefinder prism (wish I could lay hands on it now) and scientific prisms like this one, which really require direct sunlight to project the spectrum. There is nothing on earth - short of God's holy dance of mist and light - so mystifying and pure as a prism.

#140 :: Rubber Duckling

There's something timeless and iconic about this chubby, vulcanized chunk of cheer. Ernie sang about him. You can buy his childlike optimism in bulk. He's a quiz, an electronics warning, an obsession, an animated irritainment, and a target for black humor. And - oh, phenomenon most rare - he's an unstoppable blight upon the waters of the world. This one's about three and a half inches long, and looks ... earnest.

#139 :: Film canisters

The act of capturing light is intoxicating. Next to the seemingly rational conversion of images to pixels by the average digital camera, shooting on film verges on sorcery. I've shot with just about every still medium available - black and white, color, infrared, ultraviolet, Fuji, Ilford, Agfa, Kodak, noname, 35mm, 126, 127, 2¼x2¼, 6cmx7cm, 4x5in, 5x7in, 8x10in, Polaroid SX-70, stereo - and the potential and power of exposed undeveloped film still amaze me. I've coiled rollfilm onto reels, dipped sheets into tanks and dropped it off at the drugstore - rolls upon countless, processed rolls of it fill my negative binders. I've lost thousands of frames more - images that escaped back into the light when a dropped cartridge broke, melted when it went overboard, fogged beyond use in an airport scanner. An AP photog taught me how to tear these little cartridges open with my bare hands in the darkroom and whip the film onto a reel in about 30 seconds. And he's probably jumped on to surf the digital wave that will leave all this behind in a backwash of colored dots that can't quite approximate the alchemy of an image on film. I don't know what's on these two. Yet.

#138 :: Balisong

This weapon drips with menace, tribal resonance, ghetto cool. It's a big, lethally thin blade with no obvious place in the world other than tucked into a boot, glinting and whirling in the night air beneath mercury-vapor playground lights or jammed between someone's ribs. Brass handles drilled for grip, steel blade serrated at the spine, it's about 10 inches long when open. It came into my hands in a bazaar in Manila, where I found it in a vendor's stall in a tin cup with a dozen more, surrounded by water buffalo skulls, corroded brass deck guns, capis-shell lamps and other (to me) exotica. I haven't mastered that wicked finger ballet that always precedes a balisong-wielding punk's comeuppance in Steven Seagal movies - I can basically get it open and close it without slicing my knuckles (much). You can learn that - and plenty more - at the nearly encyclopedic www.balisong.net.

#137 :: Glass slide - US Mint, Phila.

Silver iodide layered on a 3.25x4.25-inch chunk of glass tells of a time when men made money the old-fashioned way - with machines. A gold-embossed frame on this paper-edged magic lantern slide credits "William H. Rau, Photographer - Philadelphia, Penna. On the other side, written in fine ink, are the words "Penna. Phila. - New U.S. Mint Milling Room." The men perch on stools beside the iron flywheels of massive, belt-driven machines, holding as still as they can for Mr. Rau to close the shutter.

#136 :: Battle Suit

Encased in an armored shell with a clamshell hatch that is probably lined with heads-up displays and chin and tongue controls, the occupant of this suit - from some obscure animé series - would have to be psychologically conditioned against claustrophobia. Picture it - you've just taken a catastrophic hit on the battlefield. Exotic alloys and fluid damping systems have protected your life, but your power is out. The emergency backup has failed, and only a battery-powered trouble light inside the suit is showing you a dim view of dead screens. The suit is too heavy to be shifted without power. YOu lie there, breathing your last few gallons of air now that the AC unit has quit, unable to see whatever it is that is rumbling towards your prone form, unable to defend yourself. Unable to move.

#135 :: French road sign

A souvenir from a European road trip, a call to action, a study in French traffic control. Printed black on yellow and stuck to a little plastic road sign, the message is clear, yet vague if you feign ignorance as to its purpose: 500 meters to an exit? 500 million possible variations ahead? An arrow that got lost en route to a Volvo logo? A mutant stick figure 500 meters high? This is a silly game I'm playing, as befits a silly little sign. But it's compelling ...

#134 :: Polaroid SX-70

About 35 years ago, a student of my father's pulled a slick slab of leather and chrome from his overcoat pocket and performed an act of origami sorcery I'll never forget. Polaroid had given the guy one of the first SX-70 instant cameras, a few bricks of film, and marching orders to test it wherever and whenever he could. He pinched, and lifted and the slab unfolded in a slow, balletic explosion of inclined planes, black bellows and pivoting glass. I was completely mesmerized. He aimed, focused, and snapped, and the thing extruded a squarish rectangle that went from a white mist to a full-color photo of my little brother and me. Then with a pop and shuffle, he collapsed the camera into a slab again and slipped it back into his pocket with the slyest grin a recent college graduate could muster. I was used to Flash-Cubed Instamatics that teased and tortured, making me wait for weeks to see my photos until my Dad retrieved them from the drugstore. This - this was miraculous. I got a non-folding SX-70 for high school graduation years later, and spent the better part of my time in photo classes blowing through packs of film, gouging and abusing freshly-shot emulsion in a juvenile attempt to imitate Lucas Samaras and Les Krims. I found this top-of-the-line model in an antique store in Ventura a few years back - to replace an earlier folding model I owned. You can still buy the film - mostly at professional photo stores, though occasionally you'll run across it at drug stores. You can use the crazy-fast 600 film if you don't mind stopping everything way down and just dealing with the overexposure - I had a nice portfolio of stuff I shot at Joshua Tree not long back on the black-and-white stock. The cameras can be had on eBay for a song, and if you're a true 'Roid geek, you'll enjoy the Hacker's Guide to the SX-70."

#133 :: Popsicle Sticks

For 15 cents, you could get a double-Popsicle. Bust it in half and share it with your friend. You lick your sticky fingers, tasting the newsprint from your paper route through the neon-blue goo that leaks down from the melting treat. It's gone too soon, and you shoulder your tattered duck canvas newspaper bag and trudge on up the block. Your tongue is blue.

#132 :: Charm Bracelet

A dense concentration of totemic power - symbols of meaningful events in life strapped to your wrist, proof against ennui, woe and forgetfulness. A long chain of chains leads up to your personalized collection: designers craft molds for cars, tools, creatures, buildings and states of the Union; Manufacturers pour, stamp, cut, enamel and polish hot metal. Distributors pin the charms to little priced cards and wholesale them out to gift shops in foreign cities, national parks, malls and jewelers' shops. And you simply live your life - possessed here and there by a deep, organic need to measure your accomplishment with some tiny shape that you pinch onto the growing strand of icons. Juxtapositions occur unbidden, bat and pencil sharpener, race car and Houses of Parliament, adding machine and scuba diver - the hidden semiotics of trinkets spoken by your heavy metal biography.

#131 :: Rotary Lead Pointer

Before 3D Studio Max, before CG animation, CAD, before Microsoft and Apple, before even IBM and Univac, a man would hunker over his drafting table, scratching away with a little sliver of graphite. Every so often, he'd reach over, stick its tip into one of these, give it a few spins of the wrist, and resume scratching, unaware of the tsunami of technology that would soon wipe away his toils and replace them with new pleasures and woes. This Leitz lead pointer is cast in thick iron - the pencil tip (for it is only used on mechanical pencils) is rubbed pointy against an internal drum that catches the graphite dust. It is coated in one of my favorite old-school industrial finishes - and if anyone knows its name, I'd be most grateful to learn more about it.

#130 :: Thunderbird 3

There was no reason to expect this formula to work: science fiction adventure played wooden marionettes and foot-and-a-half-long balsa-wood rocketships. Yet pound for pound, lovers of high-action melodrama and futuristic equipment could get more thrill out of watching Thunderbirds every week than a year's worth of Star Trek. In the era of once-every-nine-months solo space shots, International Rescue had a personal rockets, six-wheeled cars, a mean, green cargo-carrier the size of a football pitch, a jet-powered submarine a tunnel-boring machine and - god - a SECRET UNDERGROUND HEADQUARTERS,This little trinket wakens my inner fanboy to remember one episode in which the Powers that Be were trying to move the Empire State Building on massive caterpillar platforms during an earthquake. It's all a blur - I can't even remember how Thunderbird 3 helped save the day. But now I cannot bear to remove this die-cast treasure from its blister pack, and risk spoiling the package, so juvenile and deeply rooted is my reverence for this mythology.

#129 :: Microphone

Lines of dialogue come unbidden when this is before your poised lips: "Ms. Dix, letter, date June 18, 19XX, to Oswald Crane, at Crane, Crane and Reynaldo ..." "We're now thpeaking to you from Mr. Hayrick'th garage, where we have just seen the filthy girlth exit the building ..." "I'm ain't sayin' nothing until I talk to my lawyer and ... hey, what's the big idea, HEY -- ! ..." The gold-thread cloth screen behind the two-piece cast-potmetal shell speaks of Chanel, cheap cigars, hand-rolleds, Old Grand-Dad. The cord leads (at the other end) to a heavy middle-sized object - a Weber-Carlson reel-to-reel tape recorder with a multi-tube chassis and enameled cast-metal face, and a green "Magic Eye" tube hooked up as a VU meter. It's part of my very small collection of old-world multimedia tools.

#128 :: Army

I've never bought into the new-Lego ethos - the sort of Harry-Potter-diorama-with-instructions-sheet folderol that passes as a creative plaything these days. I grew up with a sackful of green plates and simple 1x2s, 2x2s, 2x3s, 2x4s and 2x8s in nothing more elaborate than black, white, red and blue. I think we had one set of wheels. But we built airships, houses, fortresses and monsters out of 'em, and they were good enough for us. (Tramps off, stage left, muttering and glowering behind his bifocals.) Anyway, we've been buying odd lots of Lego off of eBay - the sort of weird, grab-baggy assortments that make for some bizarre constructs and brilliant flights of fancy in the hands of a 2½-year-old and a 4½-year-old. My wife built me this little battalion one night. I don't know where they're going, but they're obviously loaded for bear.

#127 :: Japanese Sugar Candy

The only English amid the florid Kanji on the iridescent-lime-green Ziploc foil-plastic container says:

"SUGAR CANDY
KASUGAI (KONPEITO)
Ingredients     SUGAR LAC COLOR FD&C YELLOW NO.5 (TARTRAZINE), YELLOW NO.6 (SUNSET YELLOW FCF) BLUE NO. 1 BRILLIANT BLUE FCF. DISTRIBUTED BY PAXS GARDENA, CA 90248 PRODUCT OF JAPAN"
Then there's the usual nutritional table: 7 of them weigh 28 grams and contain 110 calories, and 0g of total fat, sat. fat, cholest., sodium, fiber and protein, and 27g of sugar including 28g. of carbs, or 9% of the daily values based on a 2000-calorie diet." These are about the size of your fingertips, like tiny naval mines cast in solid sugar.

#126 :: Daguerrotype

With his high collar, white tie and neat combover, he was a lawyer, perhaps. Or a doctor, or a judge. Not a man of action, but a man of words and rules, someone for whom people had grown accustomed to performing as expected, or the devil take the hindmost. The photographer had sat him down in this rather uncomfortable chair, informing him that the best exposures took up to a couple of minutes and were best achieved with the subject in absolute stillness and composure. He sat there, his back against the stiff iron brace of the chair's skeleton back and leveled an even gaze at the lens. Behind it, the photographer huddled beneath the black cloth, looking at him - or a reverse image of him, his head where his sheet would be - and murmured a steady stream of gentle entreaties to keep absolutely still. He stared obligingly and as do all men of good breeding and steel nerve, waited patiently. He blinked once - perhaps twice - something evident in the filmy aspect of his glare, as if the camera captured the brief flash of light reflecting from his eyelids, but every other feature remained as sharp as the edge of the straight razor his barber of 38 years used to shave him that very morn. When the photographer replaced the cap on the lens, slid out the negative carrier with gingerly care, he allowed himself to relax - a bit - then gathered himself and his hat, gloves and stick, and returned to the courts. Or the surgery. A few days later, upon seeing his image so crisply retained by the miraculous chemicals of the dark-room, he was so pleased he paid extra to have the photographer tint the work with a hint of blush and frame it in proper gilt, to make the image and its keepsake case more pleasing to his good wife, who was the mother of their children and the foundation of his home.

#125 :: "The Chariot"

The 1960s saw pop culture reinvent itself in the coruscating glare of television. Cars became celebrities - the lesser luminaries that orbited starlike Kustom gods like Big Daddy Roth and George Barris. Some designs flew parabolic arcs - the Batmobile, the MonkeeMobile, and the Munsters' Koach all achieved the summery perigee of fame, then receded to cold obscurity as their shows died out, and languished in dusty garages until someone decided they needed restoration. Hot rods turned my impressionable head, but what really turned my crank were science fiction vehicles - the Seaview and its spawn the Flying Sub, the USS Enterprise and the Galileo and - most wondrous of all - the Jupiter 2 and the Chariot. In real life, the Chariot was a factory-modified 1965 Snow Cat fitted with plexiglass cage and futuristic coachwork. In the television fantasy realm, it was a small boy's mechanical id - dream object and avatar rolled into one terrain-chewing, raygun-and-monster-proof hero. Batmobile, schmatmobile.

#124 :: Deadly Sterling Pin

By the time goth became Goth, I was too old for black velour, Docs and kohl. Besides, while Halloween may be my favorite holiday (as well as my boy's birthday) the kinds of people who employ me generally don't celebrate it year-round in the office and, hey, the palette is pretty limiting. Still and all, when jutting from a dark lapel, this fiendish device gets jaded nods from passing nighthawks and helpful remarks from bouncers such as, "You can't wear that in here."

#123 :: Platypus

Ornithorhynchus anatinus is the poster child for creationism. How in the name of Dodo could such a freak result from natural selection? Platypi hatch from eggs, all fur, claws, webbed feet, daffy duck bill and (on the females, anyway) mammary glands. Poison found in the foot spurs of male platypi is among the most excruciating toxins known to man - and may also be the key to treatment for common pain. Think about all that, packed in miniature, into a 2.25-inch-long molded-plastic toy with malevolent, red eyes.

#122 :: Ball Compass

Nevada's Black Rock Desert is a trackless waste - 400 square miles of parched alkali lake basin undisturbed most of the time by anything but flies and the occasional land sailor or land-speed monster. Without a good compass, you could could get the kind of hopelessly lost that leaves McTeague wandering mad with blood on his hands through Death Valley at the end of Erich von Stroheim's Greed. That's why we took about three or four of them with us to Burning Man the first of the three years we went (accounts and photos are here and here for anyone not yet completely saturated with BM lore. Long ago, before festival organizers kowtowed to BLM's demands and shoved the whole festival up at the west end of the playa, you could get in your car and just drive in any direction you cared to. We piled in, loading up with oil-can-sized Fosters' and cigars and the like, cranking up the air conditioning against the 104-degree heat and just cruising - 4 miles, veer left, 200 feet, swerve right, 2 miles more, drive in a giant circle - twice, because you can. The miracle of the earth's magnetism kept paranoia from swallowing us as we became completely detached from our own navigational senses - floating around this vast, dusty white plain at 60 miles per hour, untethered and alone. It was as close to exploring the surface of another planet as any of us have ever come - to date. A good compass can save your life, your ship, your mission. This is not necessarily a good compass, but as good as any so long as you keep it away from other metal objects. Here's how it works.

#121 :: Soviet Souvenir

In the silicon age, few first-world nations turn out mechanical watches anymore. Thick, graceless, manly, stiffly assembled, it bears the shield-and-dagger logo and Cyrillic characters of the KGB, the former Soviet Union security agency. If this were genuine, it might explain help explain why we won the cold war: advancing the date means twirling the hands twice around the dial for every single day (no simple click function here); the bezel spins in both directions - meaning certain doom to anyone relying on it as a diving watch; and though it is but a few years old, the chrome is already peeling off. Instead it is likely a factory-made trinket, offloaded to eastern European souvenir shops and sold at a heavy markup. My wife brought it back for me from Prague. It keeps excellent time, when wound.

#120 :: Projectile

This flew out of the armory of MegaMan X, who in turn sprang from MegaMan X the anime series, which spawned MegaMan X the game, MegaMan X the obsessive image archive. Were this not the age of instant information retrieval, I could honestly say that I do not know who MegaMan X is. Instead, I must say that I'm wilfully ignoring him in favor of other obsessions. But his bomb remains.

#119 :: Brass deities

What drives you to render your gods in lost-wax process brass? Faith? Profits? Tradition? Hunger? When the wholesaler offers you but a rupee or two apiece for a thousand of them, and you think of the laborious work pouring the wax, the splatter-burns on your fingers and toes from hot brass, of the hacking cough you've had for 20 years caused by burnoff of impurities in the metal, do you haggle? Refuse? Strike him? When you remember that your teacher told you 19 years ago that the ones you allow the wholesaler to export are stacked in upperclass gift shops in upperclass American and European cities and sold for enough money each to feed your family for a week, do you shrug? Spit? Smile? Pray? And is there a special prayer each time you cast your preferred god? Is it Vishnu? Krishna? Shiva? Ganesha? Ah. The brass is hot enough now. Back to work.

#118 :: Peruvian ocarina

A lonely shepherd am I, trudging across my mountain's terraced emerald flank. The sheep reek. It is raining. Consuela wants to shear them tomorrow. This rain will go on forever and the shears will stick and slip and the children will quarrel if they spend another day indoors. The rain grows heavier and the two youngest rams nip and butt heads. Clouds the color of intestines. I finger this little toy on the neck-cord, give it a tug. The dog yaps and nips. The herd turns and surges uphill out of the corral. The rain falls and falls and falls.

This ancient, much-copied design came from some jungle-themed Disneyland gift shop. At $7, it was a cheap, if overpriced addition to our music crate. It is quite loud and, played correctly, sweet.

#117 :: Brownie Hawkeye

Before any lens, a performance takes shape the instant the shutter is opened. It lasts a few milliseconds, so quickly as to not exactly "happen" at all and then the camera shuts its one good eye, sinking into blissful ignorance of what it has witnessed, the actions, people, places and things lurking inside the dark box until you release them for capture in silver iodide, complex dyes or 1/0 bits. Your camera is a portable proscenium - whatever transpires within that bright rectangle is art, or drama, history or evidence, love or crap. The picture is whatever you say it is - until someone else looks at it, and then the the reviews come in, the script is scrapped in favor of new interpretations, and your quicksilver vision goes into the tall, moldering, mountainous stack with the rest of the already-consumed media the human race has made.

Made by Kodak and marketed in the U.S. from 1950 to 1961, the Brownie Hawkeye feels like the iPod of its day. Cubical, yet streamlined all over, its fluted surfaces invite your grip, a vinyl handle surges up out of its body, and a screw-on bulb-flash unit with a fat parabolic reflector blooms on its lapel. This is a damn simple camera - point-and-shoot, with single meniscus lens boasting a focus range of 6' to infinity. You can try to re-roll 120 film onto Kodak's proprietary and obsolete 620 reels, and if you succeed and you shoot something slow like Plus X, you can get wonderful low-contrast BnW images, square and rustic. It is not a camera for grand moments, nor surreptitious bursts of creative blood. It is a camera for standing in front of a thing or a person, and pressing the square, grey button to help you remember.

#116 :: Pixelblocks

Pixelblocks are the toy equivalent of pruno, the alcoholic beverage inmates brew under their prison beds from raisins or surplus sugar: They're fun, intoxicating and in the end, something of a headache. Imagine Lego blocks were divisible - and assemblable - not the multi-cell 2x4 or 4x12 kind sold now, but true single-celled plastic organisms capable of breeding by accretion. Imagine they came in psychedelic transparent colors, and could be mated not only peg-to-hole, but also slid together side by side, in reverse mitosis. You could manufacture entire pixel art cities in three actual dimensions, bring your Zaxxon world to life. But then you realize that it takes a long time to build a world one pixel at a time, and your ambitions and enthusiasm run afoul of your patience and the teensy little grooves you're supposed to use to build with them but can never seem to line up correctly so you're often separating misaligned and jammed-together blocks with your teeth. But you've got boxes and boxes of them, and you're going to by-god make something cool. And it winds up the size of a baby's fist, but at least pleasing in its own right. And now that you've done it, you'll never drink pruno again until you've been really dry for a really long time. Pixelblocks are like that.

#115 :: Earthquake Screws

The California's Building Code is meant to protect you from the three horsemen of the apocalypse - fire, flood and earthquakes. Rioting - the fourth, unofficial rider and a much less frequent destroyer of lives - is not provided for in the code. Fire and flood-preventative designs have been around for years, and but for a few structural improvements and new cites in the code for things like fireproof shake-style rooves, I'm guessing the greatest leap in technology has been in the realm of earthquakes. Two architect friends of mine are now learning all about it by slogging through the arduous year-long state licensing process, which has something like nine exams. But you don't need to know any of that to buy earthquake-proofing hardware such as foundation bolts and galvanized steel truss straps for strengthening your rafters. Like other Venice homeowners, mad for jury-rigging new structures in their back yards just under the radar of the generally tolerant, or perhaps ignorant code enforcement department, I did a little DIY earthquake-proofing in our last house. That's when I discovered my favorite screws. Stout, sharp, versatile and cheap. They're self-drilling and magnetic. You can stick one on the Philips bit of your screwgun, reach overhead or below where you'd care to crouch, and poke it onehanded into anything that needs fastening. Zzzzzzip. The thinking man's duct tape.

#114 :: Dot-com Relic

In the boom years, you'd think nothing of spending $2 million a year on billboards - in one city alone. LAinsider.com was pushing its restaurant guides and live traffic maps on hundreds of billboards around town simultaneously - big, graphic messages exhorting people to use the site's terrifically useful tools. But with the collapse of the Internet ad economy - the foundation of our business model - the site eventually folded, leaving behind a few relics: Wall-sized blueprint posters (now faded and buckled) that adorned our studios; Huge sheets of billboard material, printed in four-color process with stochastic screen dots the size of leSeur peas; trunkfuls of logo'd t-shirts; And miniature billboards like this one - gifts to the marketing department from billboard companies hoping to retain our business. Perhaps it's the cinematic dimensions, maybe it's the visual syntax of a billboard frame around an image I watched for as I drove around town, just to confirm my custodianship of something with a Known Brand. But this trinket exerts a magnetic pull on my line of sight whenever I glance at that corner of my office, and commands attention among the scholarly journals, robot miniatures, Altoids empties and HTML texts.

#113 :: Rangefinder Film Camera

It's begun. Pentax denies it but you know it's only a matter of time before film technology vanishes. With it will go shirt-pocket axes like this Olympus XA, a little fistful of Swiss-watch precision. Designed and built in the early 1980s, it's about the size of a pack of cigarettes, comes with a teensy little flash unit and has a quirky 35mm lens that captures crisp, bright images, then viciously vignettes their corners like a bad case of cataracts. Shooting with it reminds me of my Dad's old 1950s-vintage Zeiss Ikon 35mm rangefinder, which he bought in the Navy PX and let me use. Two images appear - a yellow ghost of your picture floats in the viewfinder and you shift the focus ring back and forth until the images reconcile - and you squeeze the button in a split-second flood of excitement, anticipation and hope.

#112 :: Prayer Card

Faith is an odd, powerful force - a combination of yearning and belief in the unbelievable. Prayer cards are little faith amplifiers, allowing you (if you believe) to draw on the faith of dead saints whose faith was more powerful, and to ask for them to help. They're tools for bootstrapping yourself to grace with more effective prayer. Here's what you're supposed to say to St. Francis Xavier (namesake of my Catholic high school) when you want something in the world:

Prayer of Saint Francis Xavier (attributed to Fr. Marcello Mastrilli, S.J (17th cc.)

Most amiable and most loving Saint Francis Xavier, in union with thee I reverently adore the Divine Majesty. I rejoice exceedingly on account of the marvelous gifts which God bestowed upon thee. I thank God for the special graces He gave thee during thy life on earth and for the great glory that came to thee after thy death. I implore thee to obtain for me, through thy powerful intercession, the greatest of all blessings - that of living and dying in the state of grace. I also beg of thee to secure for me the special favor I ask. In asking this favor I am fully resigned to the Divine Will. I pray and desire only to obtain that which is most conducive to the greater glory of God and the greater good of my soul.

Feast Day: December 3.

And maybe that's one of the problems I've had with organized religion - people believe that God can change their lives on earth. I'm cynical enough to believe in an observant God rather than an interventionist deity. (S)He went to all the trouble to set this huge, complex organism in motion, and sat back to watch. You're on your own in the world, blessed with the family and friends you deserve, and you have to make the best of them and everything else. A little four-color, gilt-edged card of a long-dead saint waving a cross around may be an anchor of faith for some folks, but it's just an artifact to me.