29 August—Saturday’s “South Street Golgotha” appears to have generated almost as much reader interest and comment, if not anticipation, as 5 July’s “Tits at Oxford” and 20 July’s “What a cock!” Unfortunately, none of the comment is for attribution. Is it ever, godammit!? Interest in tits and cocks certainly was expected, though the positive reaction to the purely factual, non-ribald stories wasn’t. But South Street and Golgotha?

Mostly Golgotha. Like what the hell is it? As I explained to a reader who cornered me in the po’ folks’ section in the quiet corner of Stop & Shop, Golgotha is the Greek name (from the Aramaic) for what’s more commonly known as Calvary, the Latin name of the hill just outside Jerusalem where Jesus is said to have been crucified along with lots of other troublemakers. Both names mean skull, alluding to the shape of the execution field’s topography. For the record, there are probably more cemeteries called Calvary than Golgotha.

One inner city reader commented that it’s high time the town, borough, and state did something to slow down traffic on South Street. Very few vehicles adhere to the entirely reasonable speed limit and/or stop for pedestrians in crosswalks. And when they do obey the law and stop, they act like they’re doing you a favor. Evidently there’s a new town committee supposed to be working on the traffic problem in general, but I shouldn’t expect too much of any use to come from it. We all know what committees are for.

There’s really no serious traffic problem in or immediately around Litchfield to begin with. And anything and everything the Connecticut Department of Transportation gets involved with is screwed up in all events. That said, don’t be surprised if the Litchfield traffic committee comes up with some stupid suggestions simply to justify its existence. That’s what bureaucracy is all about, after all. It’s up to town residents—electors—to not allow the bureaucrats to get their way.

Confirming one reader’s observation that for an anti-religious atheist Jew I seem very interested in and knowledgeable about Christianity, I’ll merely say that I can’t be an atheist and concurrently a Jew. But I can be and am a Jewish atheist. Think about it. And it’s also possible to believe in a natural, all-encompassing power of some sort while being anti-religious. Think about that, too.

Alluding to the gun-violence T-shirt display, more than one Episcopal reader agreed that the Episcopal Church—not just St. Michael’s in Litchfield—is embarrassingly guileless in jumping on bandwagons, especially liberal ones. One reminded me of a “knee-jerk liberal asshole of a priest” the congregation couldn’t wait to get rid of a few decades ago. Another took issue with my parsing—syntactical analysis—and uncompromising advocacy of the Second Amendment. I stand by both . . .