Monday, May 21, 2007

Okay, since y'all are so insistent...

Bombay is in da house....

So my local baseball team spent today touting their obscenely extravagant, tax payer funded abomination of a renovation for the dumpy facility they currently play in. (I've been inside this baseball stadium on numerous occasions. It's a hideous eyesore. And a several hundred million dollar paint job is not going to make it any prettier.)

Anyhoo....where was I? Oh, yeah. Baseball stadium improvements. So-called. I note this peculiar phrase from the propaganda page of the team web site. "Expanded vomitories to field level concourse." What??? "Expanded vomitories????" Yes, after a bit of research, I discovered that back in the day, when the Catholics were being fed to the lions in the Coliseum, spectators who had seen enough headed for the tunnel to exit the stadium and, more often than not, tossed their cookies on the way out. Hence, those tunnels were called vomitories, and still are apparently. You think I make this stuff up? HA!

The fact that such a word is still being used would seem to be a delicious bit of irony for those of us who study history so as not to be doomed to repeat it. Sadly, I'm afraid it's lost on most of the mouth-breathers who believe taking money out of my pocket to fund vomitories for millionaires is a nifty idea. Bread and circuses.

I've often argued that if certain people gain enough power, they'll happily load me and other traddy Catholics in boxcars and ship us off to the ovens. But now, I'm not so sure. More likely, they'll ship us to taxpayer funded sports palaces to be mauled by wild beasts, in front of thousands of paying savages. Most of whom, I believe, will feel little urge to vomit at the spectacle they witness.

See how neatly I can tie baseball, history and Catholicism together? This isn't as easy as it looks.

There's your post. That's all I got. Now I have to get back to my disaster. The devil is giving me a fit. A fit, I say.

4 comments:

Unitas said...

Ya think they have vomitories in Our Lady of the Angels in Los Angeles?

;)

--Unitas

Simon-Peter Vickers-Buckley said...

The famous Roman vomitories.

I like the ones used during "parties" where the reclining guests, 'pon having fill of food and wine, could spew forth thereby making room for even more, and so on.

Anonymous said...

If the devil is giving you fits, send him through the vomitory straight back to Hell!

Karin said...

Thank you Dr. B...

It is a wonderful post (would not expect anything less from you)...sorry for pestering you by the way...but it really was worth it!!!