We mackerel snappers embrace Lent. By simply giving up TV or chocolates, we can fool ourselves into thinking we're atoning for our many sins. (Kind of like carbon credits for the soul. Centuries before Al Gore, we came up with indulgences. Coveting your neighbor's wife? No prob. Buy some indulgences and the books are squared. Private jet producing CO2? Cold cash, via Carbon credits expiates all guilt).

Lent is also a great excuse for men to overindulge on Fat Tuesday and for women to earn beads on Bourbon St.

Ash Wednesday comes 46 days before Easter. Easter Sunday is always the first Sunday after the "Paschal" Full Moon-but you knew that. I had to Google it.

Lots of folks think Lent is 40 days long. Actually, it's 46. Sundays are considered "mini Easters." I'm no Biblical scholar, but the number forty has many Biblical references: the forty days Moses spent on Mount Sinai: The forty days and nights Elijah spent walking to Mount Horeb: Forty days and forty nights of rain before the flood: The Hebrews wandered forty years in search of the Promised Land: Jonah gave the city of Nineveh forty days in which to repent: And forty days is the average amount of time one is left on "hold" after the recording tells you all lines are busy and "one of our service operators will be with you in just a moment."

During lent one must give up something--sweets, sodas, TV are standard fare. My friend's wife planned to give up sex, but he said that didn't count. "You have to give up something you like." No doubt in 40 days they'll start speaking, again.
The good news is that whatever you give up, you can do it on Sundays.

At 15 I gave up TV. During basketball season I came down with Mono. Not being able to watch TV while home in bed was tough. That year the Beatles were to make their debut on Ed Sullivan. Luckily, good ol' Ed was on Sunday night. I didn't miss history in the making.

My New York friend, T.C., an Irish bachelor, took the Sunday thing to a whole new level. He always gave up booze during lent. One year he announced that there were 6 Sundays in Lent, and each Sunday had 24 hours. He divided 144 by 40. That meant that he could "give up" drinking by quaffing only 3.6 hours each and every night.

Saloon keepers up and down 3rd Ave. toasted his perspicacity.

Often, I too give up booze during lent-in the State of California and under 3,000 feet. One never knows when he's going to hold a "yard sale" while trying to traverse Head Wall at Squaw, and will need a hot tottie at the end of the run. And Spring Training? It would truly be a Cardinal sin to watch America's pastime sans suds in the bleachers. Wine, of course, is food-not booze.

The Napa Valley has a special affinity with Carnival and Fat Tuesday. In more pagan times those nights of revelry were once dedicated to Dionysus and the "clearing of the wine;" a final stage in the fermentation process occurring in the first cold snap after the Winter Solstice, when Dionysus was reborn. It was said that on Epiphany (January 6th) Dionysus turned water into wine. Women and slaves were the original revelers.

Wikipedia notes: "the Dionysian Mysteries came to be seen as not only as a recognition and casting off the repressive over civilized masks we all wear, and the realization our true nature, but with the creation of new more authentic masks as well, arguably also the deeper function of drama and comedy too. In other words the development of genuine character rather than socialized persona."

Hence the importance of masks from Venice, to Rio.

The Romans indulged in a livelier version they called Bacchanalia. The essence of these religious rites was to regard nothing as impious or criminal. Why can I never choose the right church?

Lent requires that we take up with renewed vigor prayer, fasting, and almsgiving.

I suppose the Stimulus Package could be considered almsgiving--in spades--an appropriate Lenten activity. A White House spokesman was quoted: "We have to spend 634 Billion dollars on health care in order to cut the deficit in half in the next four years."

Masks, anyone? T.C.'s logic lives. No doubt saloon keepers up and down 3rd Ave. are drinking to his perspicacity.