Wednesday, October 13, 2010

Up in the Air....

Good Wednesday morning, church -- lest anyone's curious, while today's General Audience catechesis saw B16 focus on yet another Great Saintess (the 13th-century Italian Franciscan Bl Angela of Foligno), yet again, the PopeTalk was not followed by Red Dawn... and truth be told, out in the fields, skepticism about the odds of a 20 November consistory doesn't just linger, but increases as the countdown wears thin.

Either way, before a fresh round of chaos breaks out -- and scarlet or otherwise, trust that it will -- your narrator's taking a short stretch to breathe, take soundings, and above all, share the State of the Buzzmill with the good folks among us who keep the lights and phone on, the net wired in, the bills paid and, all around, these pages coming your way: that is, all of you who've lent a hand of late to the "guitar case" that, barring something more stable, remains the only way your daily feed plugs along (...and, on the personal front, makes starting the workday -- at least, this one -- at 3am that much more bearable).

Admittedly, such is the pace of the days that it's been a while since the last digest went around; it took a good while to pile the e.mail addresses into one batch... not to mention that the briefings tend to be anything but brief. Especially these days, though, there's way more stuff moving than you'd ever find on Page Three.

Bottom line: fun as it is to do, such is life that the best job in the world can't always be free; if anything, behind the scenes, the freedom of tackling the beat in this form comes with quite a price. Ergo, both to those who've already pitched in and anyone else able to join, thanks a million (or, by the tracker, 20 times that). For the meantime here, let's just say that it's "Crunch Time" again in the office -- a stack of the usual billage awaits, and only once it's "in the can" can the prospect of covering another "Fall Classic" can even be broached.

So to help that end along....


...and for all the rest, for as long as this readership allows it, stay tuned.

-30-