A half century ago the late Monsignor Mike J., yanker of sideburns and maven of the Vietnam war back in the splitting sixties, led off a sermon with a joke about the good Irish lady who came back from Lourdes and had a bag of her luggage displaced by a similar looking one. Where she expected to find wine bottles filled with the legendary water, being the last in on the joke she found someone else's actual fruit of the vine. "Oh, Lord," she sighed, "Another miracle."

Some day I will drag myself into a price-friendly location and buy whatever television just might in the future be littering the highways and by(passed) ways ones related to the specimen in my living room, a Trinitron ransomed from Goodwill, are proliferating. Until then most of my viewing, which is of shows available on production and network sites, is done on another miracle, the "machine" upon which I am pecking this roaming discourse. Soon to be a Rome-related discourse.

Much of this viewing is of talk shows. The wonderful wide open web of yore is gone and is now ramped up with commercials, including ones leading off You Tube videos which last longer than the video sometimes---if you let them.

I have to let the commercials for Dave, the Jimmy's and sundry others run, and in turn they graciously provide a count down timer on the upper left of the screen. Many times I have suspected that very last second of being a long one. This especially applies to the ads which usually end the parade, those for the network itself.

"Ad": In a little joke worthy of a question in one of NPR's "Sunday Puzzle" episodes was a commercial for "A.D.: The Bible Continues." In this A.D./ad, Mary Magdalene was frantically apprising folks near and far about the Resurrection. As this segment was building I saw the timer go to zero, but the merry and reverant course was run.

Oh, Lord, another miracle? "You couldn't kill him," Mary said or something of the like. Evidently M-ad-ison Avenue is made of the same stubborn stuff.