I will admit up front that I’m not an undecided voter. The Democratic party basically has me in their pocket, at least until a more liberal national party develops. In theory I’d love to say that I’m an independent who will vote for whomever’s policies I like best. In reality, that’s basically always the Democrats.

I’m also not a low-information voter, being young and all fired up about this stupid election. Thus, I’m not really the intended audience for the Presidential and Vice-Presidential debates. I watch them anyway, obviously biased, yelling things at McCain while peeling apples for apple pie and thinking, Damn! Obama’s presidential. Honestly, it’s boring, I pretty much know what their stances are, and where I don’t it’s about 10-1 that I’ll agree with the guy on the left anyway.

Here, then, are five better ways to watch presidential candidates face off.

Fisticuffs.

You may think that “fisticuffs” is simply an old-timey word for fighting. You would be wrong. Technically it’s bare-knuckle boxing, and dammit, there are rules, just like the debate! You can’t strike a downed opponent, gotta stay in the ring, get up within thirty seconds or you lose, etc. Two people are chosen at random from the audience (undecided voters?) to be the umpires. Plus, it actually causes less brain damage than the gloved version, as there’s less hitting since it hurts your hand more. Finally, it would really increase the likelihood of bringing excellent facial hair back into presidential vogue.

Outcome: Obama. McCain has a slight problem raising his hands above shoulder-level.

Dance-off.

I like this one as something with a Town Hall style format. The candidates would come in, stand on separate dance floors, and audience members would request dances. Some sort of moderator would be there to limit time, and maybe help out the audience with what exactly we should be expecting. Both candidates would have to do the same dance, obviously, and we’d be watching for knowledge, interpretation, and the groove factor.

Outcome: Hard to say. Obama seems like he’s got better moves, but I hear McCain can jitterbug like a fiend.

Pub Quiz.

This one’s my own personal favorite form of competition–trivia plus booze. To those unfamiliar with this best of Satruday night activities, you go to a bar, you get beer, you get five of your friends to be on your team, and then you get to crush all your competition and go home victorious. Not only would the candidates need to know important information like where Shiprock is (New Mexico) or who sang “Eighteen and Life” (Skid Row), they’d need to choose teams wisely. That would get the VP candidates in on the game, finally. Plus, people are always deciding their votes on who they’d rather have a beer with.

Outcome: Obama. Palin all but sinks it for McCain, unless the category is “Towns in Alaksa I used to be Mayor of,” or “What should we do offshore?” Plus, I’ve got a hunch Obama would choose people with a wide range of expertise, while McCain would just choose four other old white guys who know where Vietnam is on the map.

Pistols at Dawn.

“Wait,” you say. “That seems awfully final and, well, violent, even for the American presidency.” Maybe, but the duel is a time-honored tradition with precedent, sort of. Andrew Jackson was big into dueling–mainly for his “wife’s honor”–and had several bullets lodged in him from this delightful pastime, including one in his lung and one two inches from his heart. He shot that guy after having a rib shattered by the bullet, by the way. And no one needs to be reminded about Hamilton vs. Burr. Not exactly presidential, but Founding Fatherly.

Outcome: McCain. Duh, he was in the Navy. Hey, have you heard about how he was a prisoner of war in Vietnam? It’s totally true.

Monopoly.

If the economy’s going to be in the toilet, the least we can hope for is a president who knows how to put a hotel on the Boardwalk. Maybe they could pontificate a little on second mortgages while they play; if you flip over Virginia Ave to pay for Marvin Gardens, when you flip it back you’ll end up paying 150%. Of course, McCain would end up yelling about the free government handouts you get by passing Go, and there would be total pandemonium and accusations of racism the first time Obama landed in Jail.

Outcome: everyone loses in Monopoly.

Hubert–who I keep wanting to called Humbert Humbert–was born in Aquitaine around 656 CE. His grandfather had been the king of Toulouse (this was back when basically every holler and hamlet had a king), and his father was duke of Aquitaine. We don’t know who his mother was because women didn’t matter.

As a “youth” he went off to the court of Theuderic III in Paris, was well-received, and “gave himself entirely up to the pomp and vanities of this world,” as the Catholic Encyclopedia so generously puts it. He married a young lady named Floribanne, but above all else he loved hunting and spent nearly all his time doing it.

One Good Friday, when everyone else was headed to a fun day in church, Hubert decided to go hunting. He was pursuing a large stag when it turned, and Hubert saw a crucifix between its antlers. Like Bambi: the evangelical version, he heard a voice say, “Hubert, unless thou turnest to the Lord, and leadest an holy life, thou shalt quickly go down into hell.” He asked what he should do, and the voice told him to seek out Lambert, the bishop of Maastricht.

I like to think he killed and ate the Jesus Deer anyway. Maybe it even counted as communion.

Hubert went to Maastricht and sought out Lambert. He avoided the “douchebags in the name of Christ” tag by waiting for his wife to die before fully committing himself to the priesthood, giving away all his possessions to the poor. As you do.

In 708 CE, Hubert made the pilgrimage to Rome, but while he was gone Lambert was assassinated back in Maastricht. Luckily the Pope at the time had a vision of the death, and also a vision telling him to appoint Hubert Bishop of Maastricht. Convenient.

He spent the rest of his life trying very hard to win the martyr’s crown–ie, trying to get himself killed in battle–and converting the remaining pagans in the region. He had a vision of his own death in 727 or 728, as well as the foresight to be reciting the Our Father when it happened. I hear that wins you big points with the dude upstairs.

Now he’s the patron saint of hunters, even the ones who shoot moose from planes and can’t form coherent sentences, and his seal is also on a bottle of Jagermeister. Jagerbomb for Jesus every November 3rd.

Wikipedia

Catholic Encyclopedia

Patron Saints Index

Hubert, Patron Saint of Hunters

So you may have noticed that the economy is, to borrow a phrase, fucked the fuck up. To people not closely involved in finance, the events of the past week are confusing. You’re probably asking yourself, what exactly is going on? And should I convert my savings to weaponry inspired by George R. R. Martin’s fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire? (They’re only going to go up in value!)

Well, luckily, while waiting in line at the taco truck, I happened to run into nine or ten op-ed columnists and that MBA guy who keeps cornering you at parties. They were generous enough to take the time to explain the whole thing to me. Turns out they’re really smart, and people should ask their opinion more often! I wrote down everything they said. So here, now, and you won’t find this anywhere else, is the complete explanation of our current financial misadventure, as told to me by people who understand this kind of thing:

Alright, Henry, you’re standing in line, waiting to buy a burrito. But what if, instead of buying a burrito with four dollars, you just told the guy in the taco truck that you would pay him four dollars later? Sound like a good idea? Well guess what. You just ruined the economy. And gave four dollars to China, and by the way, I care about human rights now.

This is what happens when you borrow money you can’t pay back. This is what happens when you take out a mortgage with low payments which can quickly rise. My mortgage, by the way - It’s fixed rate. Actually, it’s not really even a mortgage, I have this, uh, it’s kind of an arrangement. Anywho.

It’s a house of cards, built on nothing. There’s no money holding it up, just promises to pay money later. What’s so frustrating is that it’s so. Blindingly. Obvious. My dog could have predicted this would happen. I remember, the first time I heard of a subprime mortgage, I said, this path only leads to one place. And that, I said, is a government loan to a major insurance company in exchange for a controlling stake in the company. Yes, insurance company. Well, no. Not out loud. But it’s just so plainly obvious, I didn’t think it was necessary.

I mean, you’d have to be real idiot not to see this coming. A real out-of-touch, hoity-toity fancy-lad. Anyway, I hope some of that got through to you.

So you there you go. I certainly feel a lot better knowing that so many people are totally on top of things.

Today in the anti-infidel edition of Weekend Obscure Saint Blogging, we’ve got a crusading saint. The Crusades are one of those things I’m always meaning to learn more about–partly, because when I heard about them for the first time (as a kid, from the Disney version of Robin Hood) I thought they sounded great. Then I grew up and actually learned something about them, and realized that not only did they excuse mass killings, they were kind of dumb.

Anyway, Adjutor. There aren’t a ton of sources about him online, which is the way I like it–the better to speculate wildly. He was born in Vernon, in the Normandy region of France, around 1070 CE and educated by a bishop since he was some sort of nobility.

In 1095, he decided it was a good idea to take 200 men and truck off to the Crusades, which were happening over in Turkey, after the Byzantine Emperor had asked the Pope for some help with the Muslims. Near Antioch, his 200 troops were surrounded by a force of 1,500 infidels and faced certain death. Applying a solution common to the saints discussed here, he prayed to St. Madeleine (the French name for Mary Magdalene), who sent a huge storm that scared the enemies off, and then Adjutor’s men charged, killing more than 1,000.

He fought for seventeen more years without incident that I can find. One webpage I found says he was fighting the Moors in Spain, not in Turkey, which would also kind of make sense. I mean, Spain’s a lot closer, and they were also in the throes of Christianizing or kicking out the non-Christian people. I’ll never know, though.

Eventually Adjutor was thrown in Muslim jail and bound with chains. His peacefulness and piety annoyed the jailers, so they put more chains on him and threw him in a deeper dungeon. There he prayed to Madeleine again, this time offering her some of his land in France for her convent if she helped him out. She showed up along with St. Bernard, and the two of them airlifted him, chains and all, back to Vernon overnight. Like UPS, but holier.

Back in Normandy he settled down into a holy life, giving Madeleine the land he’s promised and hanging out with bishops. Since his land was right on the Seine, he took it upon himself to fix some rapids that occurred naturally in the river: he and Bishop Hugues set out in a tiny boat, and while the bishop prayed he threw holy water and his chains into the river, which miraculously calmed.

One webpage I found did say he turned back the flames at the Siege of Vernon by prayer, destroying the enemy, but that same webpage says he died 1131, and Wikipedia says the Siege of Vernon by Louis VII happened in 1153. So that would be super miraculous.

St. Adjutor is the patron saint of dockworkers, yachting, swimmers, and generally anyone who does stuff on boats. Go sailing without a life vest on April 30th; you’ll be fine!

Our Lady Collegiate Church of Vernon

Lives and Legends of the English Bishops and Kings

St. Adjutor’s Life Realities (flimsily translated from French)

St. Adjutor’s Miracles

First, some ground rules. We’re not talking about songs which make reference to movies. Breakfast at Tiffany’s song from the mid-90s – there’s no place for you here. Same goes for jokes. Maybe you could argue that Jonathan Coulton’s Re: Your Brains takes place in the world of a Romero movie, but it’s not about the movie. We are looking for songs based on movies, earnestly, or ambiguously ironically at the least.

The Drive-By Truckers The Monument Valley

Strange that on an album of slice-of-life character studies, the most heartfelt song turns out to be about westerns. But then, who doesn’t love John Ford movies?

“It’s all about where you put the horizon / said the great John Ford to the young man rising.” The opening lines describe the act of moviemaking. On the one hand, nothing is more irritating then meta-art. If I have to read one more book which equates writing with physical creation, I’m going to punch a wall. And an artist’s desire to put on display his or her influences is understandable, but tedious. Yes, I’m sure you’re very well-read and that you know a lot about 1920s wax cylinder recordings or 1970s summer camp movies, but show me what you’ve got.

That said, this song pulls it off - mostly because it so accurately captures the long quiet landscapes of the best westerns. And by the final verse, the lyrics tangle John Ford the person with the famous line from The Man Who Shot LIberty Valence. “It’s where to plant the camera and when to say action / When to print the legend and when to leave the facts in.”

In the end, far truer to what makes westerns so enduring than Burt Bacharach’s song The Man Who Shot LIberty Valence. (Sample lyric: “Cause the point of a gun was the only law that Liberty understood / When it came to shooting straight and fast, he was miii-ghtyyyy good!”)

Daniel Johnston King Kong

This might be the most straightforward film-to-song adaptation. It’s a chanted summary of the film, told from the point of view of the titular monkey. Daniel Johnston’s childlike lyrics make for an interesting version of the story, full of straightforward descriptions like “He stripped his woman / he stripped her bare / but there was a pterodactyl / there.” It’s more of a description of individual things which happen in the movie, rather than a story.

The Jimmy Castor Bunch King Kong

Here’s another musical take on the same film, but where Daniel Johnston’s focuses on the obsession and fall of creature, The Jimmy Castor Bunch celebrate his power, size, and restraint, apparently. “He didn’t dance or party,” they tell us. But like Daniel Johnston’s song, a good chunk of time is devoted to straight up summary. Regarding Kong’s fight with a Tyrannosaurus, Jimmy Castor sings “He stretched the creature’s mouth until it split / Then like a child, began to play with it.”*

Bob Dylan Brownsville Girl

Even the most unappealing Dylan album has something to recommend it. Knocked Out Loaded, marred by weird 1986 production, and mostly uninteresting songs, has Brownsville Girl, Dylan’s collaboration with playwright/actor/former Holy Modal Rounder Sam Shepard. Clocking in at close to eleven minutes, it’s a winding, half-sung, half-spoken song about, um, something probably. Dylan mentions a girl, a trial, a bunch of places in Texas. Mainly, the song seems to be about this movie Dylan seen one time, ’bout a man riding ‘cross the desert and it starred Gregory Peck. As Dylan ruminates his way across the song (”The only thing we knew for sure about Henry Porter is that his name wasn’t Henry Porter”, he sings at one point, and at another, “Oh if there’s an original thought out there, I could use it right now”) he returns to his Gregory Peck movie again and again. He thinks he sat through it twice.

*I would’ve included The Jimmy Castor Bunch’s Dracula as well, but in fairness, that’s probably based on the novel.

Zap!

St. Rita–possibly short for Margherita, better known as a delicious type of pizza–was born to somewhat elderly parents in Cascia, Italy, near Umbria. Antonio and Amata Lotti, her parents, were quite devout and known as “peacemakers of Jesus,” and that’s why they managed to have a kid at an advanced age. There’s a tale about how, as an infant, bees flew in and out of her mouth without harming her at all. Yum.

Being peacemakers of Jesus didn’t prevent her parents from forcing her to marry the abusive Paolo Mancini at age twelve, even though she repeatedly told them she’d much rather go into a convent. Soon after they married (so, at age thirteen or fourteen), she gave birth to twin boys. Interestingly, even though all the sources focus on how great Rita was, some seem to go out of their way to apologize for her husband’s abuse. A few claim that, as a town watchman, he got “sucked into” a family feud and took the stress out on his wife, and more say that due to her sweet and holy temperament she miraculously changed his demeanor and he became an absolute delight. Sure he did. That’s exactly how abusers work!

Rita and Paolo were married for eighteen years, until he was murdered, probably because he was such a jerk. Their sons, who took after their father, began planning revenge–remember, everybody, the word “vendetta” is from Italian. Selecting the most logical route, Rita prayed for their deaths so that their immortal souls wouldn’t be stained with such an egregious sin. Given that the Catholic church puts so much emphasis on intent, I’m not really sure how that works since they wanted to murder someone, but I assume it’s been convolutedly explained away.

With her family dead, it was finally time for Rita to achieve her dreams: the convent. She applied to join the Augustinian convent that had been the object of her youthful dreams, but was denied since one had to be a virgin to qualify. Long story short, she asked really nicely a bunch of times, and ended up getting in by breaking and entering with St. Augustine, John the Baptist and St. Nicholas of Torentino offering their holy help. When the sisters discovered her miraculously there in the morning, they couldn’t turn her down any more.

One day while meditating in front of a crucifix, she asked Jesus to be permitted to suffer like him. In response to this request, a thorn shot off of the statue’s crown and wounded her in the forehead. Lots of saints are credited with having stigmata, but according to the article on it in Catholic Online, she’s the only one known to have a bad smell emanating from the wound.

She died in 1457, and is now the patron of impossible causes. Pray to her on May 22 and maybe the Redskins will win the Superbowl.

Catholic Encyclopedia

West Coast Augustinians (from the Book of Augustinian Saints)

St. Rita of Cascia: Saint of the Impossible (excerpts by Fr. Joseph Sicardo, OSA)

Dictionary of Miracles

Life of St. Rita of Cascia

Wikipedia

EXTRA SPECIAL GRAMMATICAL BONUS: the world’s most mixed metaphor, courtesy of Fr. Whatever.

ST. RITA, before and especially after her marriage, had made a honeycomb of her heart, so to speak, filled with the odor and sweetness of virtues. Each virtue represented, as it were, a beautiful and fragrant flower, bound together by the girdle or cincture of charity, and formed the most exquisite bouquet she could offer to her Divine Lord after she had calmed the boisterous winds that had howled threateningly around her, during the time her husband was an easy prey to the ungovernable impulses of his violent passions.

So, there’s a honeycomb in her chest, except it’s full of flowers that are also tied together with a girdle into a sort of honey-underwear bouquet for Jesus, presented by Rita who is also a ship in a storm, married to a rabbit or other small game, chased by a pack of hunting dogs or something. Yes.

I hate to do a nothing post which is really only a link to someone else’s blog post, but Sam’s guest post at Feministe on mistranslation and the virgin birth (of Jesus) is a good read on something I’d been meaning to mention here.

For more mistranslation fun, check out Zechariah 9:9. That last couplet is a really common rhetorical device in the Hebrew Bible called parallelism, which basically underscores the point. Here, it means that the messiah’s gonna come into town on a donkey, emphasized because that’s probably not how people are expecting him.

Now check out Matthew 21:4-7. Most academics tend to agree that Matthew was probably the Jewish gospel writer, and pretty interested in convincing Jews that Jesus was the awaited messiah who fulfilled prophecies such as Zechariah 9:9. Unfortunately, he wasn’t too in tune with the nuances of Hebrew poetry, so Jesus is somehow straddling two donkeys while riding into Jerusalem. Maybe one was a footrest.

Here’s a fun author factoid: my parents almost named me Alexis, but for the character of the same name in Dynasty, which was super popular around the time I was born. (Video hint: it gets great around 1:50. Alexis Carrington Colby, in case you are my age or younger, is in the white pantsuit-thing.)

I got the second-choice name, so St. Alexis of Rome, also known as Alexius or Alexios, isn’t my namesake but it’s close. He was born to a wealthy Christian family in Rome sometime in the 5th century CE. He was an only child and into Christianity from a young age. His parents, on the other hand, wanted their only kid to have a normal secular life rather than one devoted to the church. As he was agonizing over these decisions, he had a vision of St. Paul, who quoted Jesus the Gospel of Matthew and told him, “He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.” (Matthew 10:37, KJV) Christ: no so much a family man.

Alexis did something that’s always a good idea and ignored what Paul had said in his vision, agreeing to a marriage with a young woman from a wealthy family despite his numerous misgivings. The versions I’ve read differ slightly on what happened next: according to one, immediately after the church marriage ceremony, he looked up at the statue of Christ above the altar and walked out of the church without saying a word to anyone. In others, he left “on his wedding night,” in one explaining his disappearance to his wife. Either way, he’s getting a “douchebag in the name of God” tag.

He escaped off to Edessa, selling his possessions along the way and giving the proceeds to the poor, keeping only enough for himself. He either joined an ascetic monastery or became a beggar right next to a monastery, giving away his earnings to the poor and keeping only enough for himself to stay alive. His poor parents sent many people looking for him, including his former servants, but none recognized him and he even begged money from his own servants, which sounds too New-Testament-feel-good to be true.

He carried on this way for seventeen or eighteen years, news of his holiness spreading ever farther. The head of the monastery he was living in / in front of had a vision of Mary, Mother of God in which she singled out Alexis as a “Man of God,” a big holy deal. Not enjoying the attention, he set sail for Tarsus, birthplace of St. Paul.* On the way, a storm blew the ship far to the west, so they decided to head for Rome, and Alexis would stay with his family.

Meanwhile in Rome, his family had grieved over his loss for seventeen years, including his wife who was now living with his parents. The modern retellings want this to be because of how much she loved him, but I for one am skeptical. Arranged marriage, people. Instead I spent an hour looking around the internet for info on divorce laws in the late Roman Empire. I couldn’t find anything exact, but it looks like the Christian emperors made divorces pretty hard to get, especially if you were a woman. She might have stayed with his parents more out of necessity than anything–being jilted at the altar couldn’t have been good for your reputation back then.

When he arrived, nobody recognized him, but they granted him a cell in the courtyard where he continued to do holy stuff for a while. Before he died–I guess asceticism shortens your lifespan–he wrote a note to his family, telling them who he was. The bishop of Rome at the time interred him in St. Peter’s, and the family home became a church.

Along with OG obscure saint Wilgefortis, Alexis was taken off the worldwide saint roster in 1969, because his legend is weird, confused, and doesn’t show up in the West until the tenth century. There’s a church in Rome, on the Aventine, named after him, and my best guess is that he was originally a Syriac ascetic who someone decided was actually Roman after his church there went up.

I recommend running away BEFORE the wedding on March 17.

*No, the geography does not really make any sense. Some version say he was in a Syrian monastery, which would be ok, but Edessa is landlocked. I gave up.

Wikipedia

Catholic Encyclopedia

Orthodox Wiki

The Orthodox Church in America

Matthew 10

Before I bought At Mount Zoomer, I read reviews about how they recorded it at the church owned by the Arcade Fire. My heart caught in my throat. The Arcade Fire treatment, I thought, was the last thing my lovely Wolf Parade ever needed, because Wolf Parade is all rough edges and the Arcade Fire is all sandpaper. To sort of mix a metaphor, I like the Arcade Fire okay, but I feel like they’re in third gear all the time and need to push it to overdrive. I realize this is not a popular opinion among the skinnypants-and-ironic-shirt wearing crowd.

It’s not as bad as all that. Actually, that’s not fair to say–At Mount Zoomer is downright good. It’s full of the howling synth and vocals, both always sounding a little off key, that I loved on their first album. It’s downtempo, it’s got melodies and hooks. It jams. It has lots of those driving grooves that make you tap your foot and nod your head and you don’t even realize it, along with my favorite rock & roll trick, which is the mid-song tempo change. Lots of eighties-style singing along the lines of New Order (see also: Modest Mouse, Interpol) that some other blogger doesn’t like but I do.

The thing is, though, that I can’t talk about this album or the show I went to a few weeks ago without comparing it to their first album, Apologies to the Queen Mary. Calling that one frenetic and raw wouldn’t be amiss, and that’s something that’s just not there in Zoomer. It doesn’t have the same wild, screaming-at-the-rafters energy of the first, the near desperation you can hear in all their best songs. And who knows, maybe they really were desperate. Maybe the sound of Mount Zoomer is the sound of relief.

The concert crowd agreed with me, though. They cheered for the new songs, but they went berserk for the older stuff. Hell, I went berserk, sitting up in the balcony in my padded seat I was waving my arms, singing along and probably looking a little like a lunatic. I felt like a lunatic, and it was great.

I couldn’t really find a decent concert video of these guys (although they were amazing), so here’s a great regular video.

At Mount Zoomer: ★★★★☆

(Apologies to the Queen Mary: ★★★★★)

Painted in 1531 by a German painter, apparently before they discovered perspective, since the tooth and her head are the same size.

Way before a dude named Prince was making Purple Rain, there was a martyr in Alexandria, Egypt, named Apollonia.

Nothing, apparently, is known of her life, besides the fact that she was a Christian virgin who lived in Alexandria. Some sources say she was an older lady, but other sources say that’s a mistranslation, and what the letter it’s from actually says is that she was a deaconess. Either way, she was doing her thing in 248 or 249 CE, right after Rome’s first millenial celebration (it was founded in 753 BCE), and during one of the most intense persecutions.

The Emperor Decius, who ruled for all of two years (which was an admirable stretch at the time), decided that Christians were a big threat to the empire because a) they had weird customs, b) they weren’t worshiping the proper gods, and c) they were more loyal to the Christian god than the Emperor. Seeing an opportunity to unite the rest of the Roman people by joining together to beat up the Christians, they all got rounded up and told to convert or die. That’s the point I tried (and failed) to make last week: this is how most organized religious persecutions go, more or less.

A whole lot converted. You don’t hear about this much, because instead of getting sainthood they got to live out their lives, but it’s true. Here and here are some certificates saying former Christians had sacrificed to the Roman gods. Many went back to the church a little later asking to rejoin, which caused a big fuss, but that’s for another day.

That’s the deal they offered Apollonia. She refused, so they beat her, and either punched her and knocked out her teeth, or extracted her teeth as a torture method. When she wasn’t deterred, the mob (remember, it was a family activity) made a fire and told her to change her mind or she’d be burned alive. By pretending to consider, she got the crowd to unhand her, and then jumped in the fire herself.

You may think that this counts as suicide, which is totally a sin. St. Augustine, early father of the church, says it wasn’t, though. Clearly, as a holy person, she was told by the holy spirit to jump in the fire. Since she was just obeying God, it wasn’t suicide, so she was a martyr and therefore holy. It’s a little circuitous.

Apollonia became a saint, and Decius dealt with a huge smallpox pandemic (5,000 people PER DAY died in the city of Rome) right before being the first Roman Emperor to die in battle with barbarians.

Unsettlingly, Apollonia is the patron saint of dentistry, usually pictured with a tooth and sometimes pliers. She has relics all over the place, but her head is in the Basilica di Santa Maria in Trastevere, which is totally near where I lived when I did a semester in Rome, and I went there a couple of times because I was just as crazy then.

Her saint day is February 9, but I recommend the nitrous oxide.

Catholic Encyclopedia

Wikipedia

Butler’s Lives of the Saints