D Cusco

[D Cusco @dcusco56]

@uiyui_jk Stay there and make your country great. We love you, but that is your duty. You have our full support

[D Cusco @dcusco56]

@HHSGov Bobby, thank you for serving our country. You make us damn proud @RobertKennedyJr

[Rosary Quotes @RosaryQuotes123]

A bulbul created a snug nest for its babies in the hood of a Franciscan friar's habit. The friars also put up a little flyer cautioning everyone to not disturb the birds.

St. Francis of Assisi is also the patron saint of birds and animals.

Video: jkurianmoolayil

[U.S. Interior Press @interiorpress47]

The advanced nanobubbler technology very effectively killed the algae that has plagued every Lincoln Reflecting Pool reopening—most infamously Obama's reopening—since 1922.

The Reflecting Pool water is crystal clear, and our National Park Service team is now vacuuming up the dead algae resting on the bottom of some parts of the Reflecting Pool—just like the destroyed Iranian Navy resting on the bottom of the Persian Gulf.

[D Cusco @dcusco56]

@RonDeSantis @CollinsWarRoom Gov, are we, the voters, going to get an endorsement for a candidate from you?

[Piro @piroabrazo]

Estados Unidos de America.

Mundial de Fútbol.
Finales de la NBA.
UFC en la Casa Blanca.
Todo el mismo fin de semana.

Digan lo que quieran de los yankees. Pero que se divierten, se recontra divierten.

[UFC @ufc]

🫡

[KG @interstatejuche]

Chattanooga's new courthouse. The style is called "Greco-Deco". We're taking this worldwide. We're taking this to Mars. This is the answer.

[CatholicVote @CatholicVote]

This is incredible.

A statue of the Sacred Heart of Jesus remained unscathed as a Catholic church in Wayne County, Pennsylvania, was consumed by fire on the very day the U.S. Bishops consecrated the country to the Sacred Heart.

Sacred Heart of Jesus, I place my trust in You.

[Pope Leo XIV @Pontifex]

Every human being is worthy by the mere fact of having been willed, created, and loved by God. There is no situation that causes the Lord to turn His gaze away from us. It is a consoling truth that accompanies us at all times and reminds us that His merciful love always outweighs whatever good or evil we may have done. #ApostolicJourney
https://t.co/W0PUAtuB92

[Courtney Mares @catholicourtney]

The incredible music and light show at the inauguration of the Sagrada Família’s Tower of Jesus Christ.

The Escolanía, the oldest boys choir in the world, performed live.

[Catholic Sat @CatholicSat]

Barcelona, you win. Sagrada Família. Just incredible.

Watch the whole thing with the sound on

[Today in History @TodayinHistory]

The choir in the Sagrada Família is putting on the performance of a lifetime.

The vocals perfectly complement the stunning visuals of Gaudí’s cathedral!

[D Cusco @dcusco56]

@japan_nobunaga Hopelessness

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

They booed during the national anthem.

Not after.
Not before.
During.

The President of the United States stood up in Madison Square Garden.
The first sitting president to ever attend an NBA Finals game.

They booed.

Donald Trump came as a guest of the Knicks owner.
A born-and-raised New Yorker.
A Knicks fan since Queens.

They booed.

This is the same league that takes a knee.
The same league whose champions refuse to visit the White House.
The same arena where the cheap seats now decide which Americans count.

In 2024, New York City gave Trump 839,000 votes.
Kamala Harris got 1.9 million.

This wasn't a basketball crowd.
It was a political crowd in basketball jerseys.

The Knicks had won 13 straight playoff games.
The second-longest unbroken playoff streak in NBA history.

The night the President walked in,
the streak died.

Spurs 115. Knicks 111.

There is a word for what happened in that arena.
It isn't free speech.
It's contempt.

Contempt for the office.
Contempt for the flag.
Contempt for the country that lets you sit in those seats.

You can boo a man.
The anthem still plays.
The flag still flies.
America still stands.

But a kid in Kansas was watching last night.
He saw grown men in 400-dollar sneakers
turn the national anthem into a sneer.

He learned exactly what the cities did
the night their team forgot how to win.

[D Cusco @dcusco56]

“I want to ding the universe” really took on a whole other meaning

[vittorio @IterIntellectus]

"Overall, the diffusion of the iPhone explains 33–52% of the decline in the general fertility rate among women aged 15–44."

grim

[James Lucas @JamesLucasIT]

The most famous religious song in the world was not written as a prayer.

You have heard Ave Maria a thousand times. Everyone assumes Franz Schubert wrote it as a setting of the ancient Catholic prayer, the Hail Mary, but he did not...

This melody was never composed for the Latin prayer at all.

In 1825, at the age of 28, Schubert was working his way through a German translation of a poem by the Scottish writer Sir Walter Scott, The Lady of the Lake. It is an adventure story, set among the warring clans of the sixteenth-century Scottish Highlands. In one scene, the heroine, a young woman named Ellen Douglas, is in hiding with her father in a mountain cave. Alone and afraid, she sings a song asking the Virgin Mary for help.

Schubert set seven songs from that poem to music. Three of them were sung by Ellen, and this was the last of her three. He called it, plainly, Ellens dritter Gesang — 'Ellen's Third Song.' Its opening words were the two she would naturally cry out in her prayer: Ave Maria.

That was all it took...

The melody was so achingly beautiful that, in the years that followed, people began fitting the full Latin text of the actual Hail Mary prayer over his music. The fit was so natural, and the result so moving, that in the popular imagination the song became the prayer.

Schubert died in 1828, at thirty-one. He had written more than six hundred songs, and much of his work was still unpublished and little known beyond a small circle in Vienna.

He never knew that one melody, written for a fictional girl in a cave, would become one of the most beloved pieces of music in human history.

It is a strange and beautiful thing. The most famous prayer ever set to music began as a song about someone who was simply afraid, and reaching, in the dark, for something to hold onto. Perhaps that is exactly why it has never stopped moving people. It was a real prayer before it was ever a holy one...

If you enjoyed this, I write a weekly newsletter read by over 50,000 people who love rediscovering the beauty of the past. You can join us here:

https://t.co/hgJUdR0jlx

If you'd like to support my work, a paid subscription is what makes it possible.