Daily Blague

A message from our law school class secretary urged me to sign up at the alumni website. As a Double Domer, I thought I might as well. But the password requirement was, I thought, kinky. Passwords were to be at least eight characters long, with one number, one upper-case letter, and one lower-case letter. My mind stalled; I couldn't think of anything that I'd be remotely likely to remember. I considered just chucking it.

Although I have a few good friends from law school, I have none whatever from my undergraduate days. There's a brilliant guy at, last time I looked, Catholic University in Washington, with whom I've exchanged a few brief notes over the years - and I do mean "a few." Three or four. I have not been back to Notre Dame since Kathleen and I drove off in 1980. The two of us were sobbing about what we knew was the end of a great circle of friends - you had to be there - and, although we had both given up smoking for some time, we must have gone through six packs of cigarettes on the drive to New York.

I was not a practicing Catholic at any time during my two terms at Notre Dame, and since my time there I've grown to be somewhat anti-Catholic, or anti-Church, so I find the university's self-promotion as a Catholic institution seriously off-putting. And I'm offended, although I don't quite know why, by the alumni website's name, Irish Online.

In case you didn't know it, the Golden Dome atop the university's administration building is a gonflement of the spires that grace the church of Sta Trinità dei Monti in Rome, the church at the top of the Spanish Steps. There is an occult connection, I suspect (the French order of Minims?), between the two buildings. Ironically, the Spanish Steps were paid for by an Eighteenth-Century French ambassador. There's a ha-ha for you.