Here's a sentence you might not have been expecting: The Petersham RSL yesterday cancelled the Black Mass it was to host on November 27. That's right. RSL. Black Mass. Black Mass. RSL. Until yesterday you could buy tickets to a Black Mass Music Festival to be held at the branch of the Petersham RSL known as @newtown. The event was not going to be a real black mass involving an invocation of the Cloven Hoof'd One. Rather it was a death metal gig featuring bands called Astriaal, Sanguinary Misanthropia and Wardaemonic. The poster for the event did feature a pentagram on the skull of a goat above an RSL address - a bad look for an institution with firm Christian values, and a catastrophic misjudgment by the booking agent. Warren Burr, a spokesman for Petersham RSL, said in a statement yesterday that ''the language and images associated with the event where [sic] rhetorical and not intended to cause any harm or serious offence'' but that the show was now canned due to ''widespread negative reaction from the community''. Siobhan Reeves was one who helped spread that negative reaction wide. Her father served as a peacekeeper, and both her great-grandfather and step-great-grandfather fought during WWII. When an ad for the event came to her via Facebook, she was appalled, and wrote a strongly worded letter. ''I take the point it was not going to be [a] black mass,'' she told us. ''But I think the advertising for it was offensive to what the RSL stands for. And Remembrance Day was only last week, so its principles were still very much in my head.''
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BETTER RED THAN DEADAlcohol and your health - it's hard to keep up, isn't it? Every day it seems as if we're being told something different. One day a study tells us that two glasses of red wine every day is good for us. The next day we're told the same two glasses of red will do us in. Well, today we can tell you that Italian researchers have complicated the good for you/bad for you dichotomy: now drinking is good for you - it's medicine, in fact - but only if you've been deathly ill first. Associated Press reports that a study by the University of Rome has found that ''compared with non-drinkers, men who consumed light to moderate amounts of alcohol were 25 per cent less likely after bypass operations to have strokes or heart attacks or need further procedures''. The researchers who studied more than 1000 patients for 3½ years, concluded alcohol consumption saved lives because it ''lowers inflammation and blood pressure, and helps blood vessels function in the wake of surgery''. (Please note: it's important to get the order right: cardiac bypass first, then grog. Not the other way about.) Meanwhile, AP also reported that a study with 13,961 participants, by researchers in Boston at Brigham & Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School, found that women who consume two to four drinks daily in midlife may have better health at age 70 or older … if they live that long; and a third study, from the same institutions, found that women who took one drink a day had a 20 per cent lower risk of stroke compared with non-drinkers. We know. It's enough to drive you to you-know-what.
CASTRO COUNT
The Cuban government puts the number of plots to kill the Cuban President, Fidel Castro, at 638. That number is about to go through the roof and into orbit. Agence France-Presse reports that in the most recent version of the videogame Call of Duty, the last edition of which sold 20 million units, the first mission is to assassinate Castro before the 1962 missile crisis. AFP characterised the Cuban response as ''not amused'': ''What the United States government did not manage to do in 50 years, now it attempts to accomplish by virtual means,'' said comments on the Cubadebate website last week. This was in reference to the fact that the US officially tried to knock off Castro at the behest of Presidents Dwight Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy, though, as the article also noted, ''it was Cuban exiles who were responsible for most attempts on Castro's life, starting in the 1970s''.STAY IN TOUCH . . . WITH THE EXORCISTS
DUE to popular demand, the Catholic Church in the US conducted a two-day exorcism conference at the weekend. ''Possession is really a very rare thing,'' Bishop Thomas Paprocki of Springfield assured viewers of ABC News in the US. ''It's not contagious. It's not like people have to worry like somehow I'm going to get possessed by a devil.'' The Catholic News Service reports the church's handful of exorcists have been overwhelmed by requests from around the country, and Paprocki believes every diocese should be equipped to handle its own demons - something that many critics of the church believe the organisation, well, struggles with. Describing the process as akin to a complex baptism, Paprocki said it is not as dramatic as has been depicted in popular culture, such as in The Exorcist, pictured. He pointed out that even Jesus cast out evil spirits in scripture. But R. Scott Appleby, a professor of American Catholic history at the University of Notre Dame, told The New York Times the conference intended to restore the church as a supernatural organisation. "It's a strategy for saying: 'We are not the Federal Reserve, and we are not the World Council of Churches. We deal with angels and demons,'" he said. Like Dan Brown.
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