Lethal Dose

… doesn’t mean you can’t be well groomed! “Do you want a manicure to go with that stigmata?”

ROME (Reuters) - The body of the mystic monk Padre Pio, one of the Roman Catholic world’s most revered saints who died 40 years ago, has been exhumed to be prepared for display to his many devotees.

The body of the Capuchin friar, who was said to have had the stigmata — the wounds of Christ’s crucifixion — on his hands and feet — is to be conserved and put in a part-glass coffin for at least several months from April 24.

A Church statement said the body was in “fair condition”, particularly the hands, which Archbishop Domenico D’Ambrosio, who witnessed the exhumation in the southern Italian town where Pio died, said “looked like they had just undergone a manicure”.

A spokesman for the monastery at San Giovanni Rotondo said he believed morticians would be able to conserve the face of the bearded monk well enough for it to be recognizable.

Let’s call him and ask him!

My name has gotten on the mailing list of doom. First the slut-bikini catalogs, now, just plain ugly swimwear and clothing like this:

and now - horror of horrors - Us Weekly.

It arrived two weeks ago in a safe paper wrapper, sparing me mailbox shame. It claimed it was a “gift issue,” or some such nonsense, and begged me to subscribe. I put it in the bathroom along with our far more interesting powder room reading (a bio of Jayne Mansfield; some grammar books; Pat Boone’s “Twixt Twelve and Twenty” and Mr Lethal’s music mags.) It looked out of place … it needed a crocheted doll-toilet-paper-cover or something to complement it.

“Um, that magazine? I didn’t buy it - it came in the mail!” I told the mister, afraid that he’d take the “The Littlest Victims of Britney” as proof of my disintegrating mental state.

Today I opened the mailbox and openly gasped. There they sat: Jen and Angelina, battling it out for all to see, with my name on the address label. No trial edition, no nothing - I swear, I did not subscribe.