Unsaintly stuff

This typescript has been sleeping in a drawer at Gamone for two years. It needs to be rewritten, but I haven't found time to tackle the task.

Concerning the true story of Bruno [1030-1101], his official biography contains little factual information. In my novel, I've taken liberties by imagining events that might have taken place, such as Bruno's efforts to acquire metallurgical know-how and mineral resources enabling the Church to manufacture high-quality weapons for the forthcoming First Crusade. I gave a copy of the typescript to the head of the Chartreux monastic order. Later, I learned from a common friend that the Reverend Father (as he's often called) was most dismayed by the fact that my tale describes a brief romantic encounter between my fictional Bruno and a young rural woman, giving rise to the birth of a child. This invention—demanded by the fabric of my story—never appeared to me as outrageous. There was a lot of sexual liberty within the Church at that epoch. Besides, there's even a theory about Bruno himself being the illegitimate son of a high-ranking ecclesiastic and a noble woman in Cologne.

This morning, my small website about Bruno [display] received this amusing spam in French:

Seeing that my Free webspace is named "saint.bruno", the spammer—a pharmaceutical firm called Pharmaxite—imagined that the webmaster's surname is Saint and that his given name is Bruno. So, Pharmaxite started the spam by addressing me as "Dear Bruno Saint". The subject line of the spam might be translated as "Bruno Saint, the end of malfunctions for less than a euro". And the spammer then uses calm therapeutic language in an attempt to get the receiver interested in a pharmaceutical product of the Viagra variety.

In the list of mortal sins, I would imagine that trying to sell sex drugs to a saint, regardless of the fact that the potential customer has been dead for nine centuries, would be just as evil as trying to conjure up a mental image of the Virgin Mary under the shower. Maybe I should forward this spam to the Reverend Father so that he can look into the idea of asking Rome to excommunicate the Pharmaxite firm... if that's theologically possible. It's not unlikely, though, that they would start out by excommunicating me... which might have a negative affect [one never knows] upon my ongoing attempt to obtain French nationality. So, I'll refrain from taking any kind of action, while praying that God and the Holy Spirit are already fully aware of the ugly phenomenon of spam, and are drawing up plans to eliminate it in one way or another.