The Pope is coming to Philly in September you know,

and the city is going to literally shut down for nearly a month beforehand: construction sites, roadways, manhole covers, postal boxes, the whole frigging city is going to be stopped...no parked cars for some radius of the Ben Franklin Parkway and Center City...the list goes on and on. The fact that he's angered the RWNJ's apoplectically before his arrival isn't gonna make things easier for the security people here who are shaking their heads in disbelief over what is expected in terms of crowds (some estimates approaching five million), the already huge convention of the World Meeting of Families present at the same time, and here's a neat factoid: I have been made to understand that we have rented the largest number of Porta-Potties in the history of the USA - 40,000 of them at a minimum. That, as they said during the Woodstock Movie, is a gigantic "shit detail" for those who will drive those trucks around emptying them...or will they even be allowed to drive those trucks around - you get the idea, right?

We who have businesses in Center City have been placed on notice that we will need to stay in town or forget about easily getting in for a number of days; the hospitals are on Defcon 1 Alert during this, and I have already had people in City Government and law enforcement tell me that they need to get their dental work completed NOW...YESTERDAY, because there is so much to do before the end of September. It is gargantuan in nature and will be something to behold. Several weddings were displaced from the hotels which had contracted with the brides and grooms, and it was TS for those folks and believe me, it isn't easy to get accommodations for rescheduling within 100 miles of here for the week. Several postponed their nuptials because of this with really not all that much time left (according to the 'wedding calendar', if you get my drift.) and there are some really upset families out there.

Now those of you who have never been here: we're not like D.C. or Chicago, or even New York: our streets are really narrow, colonial in size even our major East-West thoroughfares are at most three narrow lanes assuming there is no on-street parking, which there won't be. Don't bother to tell me about Broad Street: it's gonna be for official use only. Remember, there isn't for rush hour every day and we're a mess: traffic jams everywhere all the time. My assumption is that traffic will be forbidden in the critical areas at the critical times. We have some of the least competent drivers in America: picture Bostonians without the competence and the "courtesy". We're all holding our breath and will be relieved "just" to have the Democratic National Convention next year - that'll be a piece of cake compared with this. We had no problems really with the 2000 Rethug Convention which gave us W.: a permanent blight upon the City which is NEVER referred to in polite discussion. It's like it never happened, so this is really our first local national political convention, excluding Atlantic City in 1964, since 1948, when all three were held here.

It's gonna be quite a ride...I saw the Pope the last time he came here in 1979 - before the Internet and social media. As a person of the Jewish persuasion it rankled a lot of my Catholic friends that they couldn't even get near the Parkway but here I was about 100 feet from the stage. I don't think I'm doing that again...