Doomsday Book, V, and Gilad Shalit

- Kyle, the morally challenged mercenary in V

A lot on my mind last night/today:

Stuff in the news, like schismatic SSPX bishop Richard Williamson's latest creepy statements, and the sad putting down of the exotic animals loose in Ohio, and the recent death of Qaddafi.

Stuff closer to home, like the book I'm still reading- Doomsday Book by Connie Willis - in which a young Oxford University historian is sent back in time to 1348 during the Black Death. It's really harrowing to read of all the suffering taking place, and at one point, when the historian is nursing a little girl dying of the plague, her friend the priest Fr. Roche, asks, "Why does God punish us thus?" ... "He doesn't. It's a disease," I said, which is no answer, and he knows it. All of Europe knows it, and the Church knows it too. It will hang on for a few more centuries, making excuses, but it can't overcome the essential fact -- that He let this happen. That He comes to no one's rescue.

And last night I watched the first disk of season two of the science fiction tv series V. I do like that one of the characters is a Catholic priest, Fr. Jack Landry, though I have to admit, my favorite character is a mercenary, Kyle Hobbes (played by Australian, Charles Mesure). I'm not sure, though, that I'm going to keep watching the show - there was a really disturbing scene in one of the episodes of the good guys, including the priest, torturing a captured alien. Oh yeah, they did it for a good reason, and the aliens are really bad, but still, the scene was so illustrative of the ends justifying the means that it made me feel sick.

The one happy note in my day was taking up an offer I saw posted at Jerusalem Hills daily photo to sponsor the (free) planting of a tree in Jerusalem to celebrate the safe return of Gilad Shalit.