http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/12/world/europe/pope-benedict-xvi-says-he-will-retire.html?_r=0

I never heard of such a thing. i thought when one becomes a Pope, the only thing that could take him out was God. Doesnt even feel as if he's been Pope for that long

Like I said when I found out this morning:

"But popes don't quit, they die."

He is resigning on my birthday, though: February 28th. So that's kind of cool, I guess .

I wonder if he's going in part to make sure a much younger and equally extremist Pope takes his place.

I'm Jewish and if this was Hanukkah, we would be eating potato pancakes. No chicken though.

I'm actually 1/8th Jewish. So, when my mom was growing up. Her mom would make Latkes too. My mom tried to attempt them once...and she FAILED. Massive fail. They were like bricks. LMAO.

BREAKING NEWS..... A new pope

That's huge and at least there was actual news to report today instead of yesterdays non-news

That's huge and at least there was actual news to report today instead of yesterdays non-news

Yeah, yesterday they interrupted to tell everyone they had no news? Who does that?! lol

Until I started watching American shows I'd never heard of pre emptions.

In the UK we don't get shows interuppted often, only times I can remember is Princess Diana's death & 9/11. And a few shows have had episodes postponed if something happens in the news that is similar to a storyline.

What happened to the generation of people who loved being witnesses to moments in history? I remember a time when the whole world would have come together in front of their television sets to watch this historic moment, regardless of religion.

Today's GH is not lost. You'll be able to see it tonight on ABC.com, YouTube, and if you still have it, SoapNet. And actually, why waste an hour watching GH live, when you can watch for roughly 36 minutes on YouTube tonight?

People have always complained about TV interruptions. They always will.

I'm not going to say how I feel about what the Catholic Church has become, but I'll just say that it's not something I am interested in seeing.

news events don't seem to change our Soaps at all.

live sports events if they overrun can change them but usually that just means the show is shown later. Or if it's a bbc show it sometimes gets switched from bbc1 to bbc2. Might be because our soaps get higher viewers than most of our other shows.

I swear the news here interrupts for the slightest thing

They rarely pre-empty things here. They broke in during the breakfast shows to say there was news and they ran with it as breaking news through the breakfast shows and the morning news, but they rarely pre-empt free channels and hardly ever in the evening. Breaking news like this does take over all the news channels though.

This is 2013. All this forced live hullabaloo seems like an overly enthusiastic hard sell by the American media to remind us that we must still be a largely Caucasian, devoutly mainstream religious country. Which of course is nonsense - the Pope and the Church are not relevant to a great many people. It's not 1980 or 1950 anymore. I'm agnostic at best, I don't give a [!@#$%^&*] and I don't think most of the modern civilized world does either. People can worship whatever they want, but to report on this as though it's our head of state or live minute-to-minute international news coverage anymore is ridiculous. This is baby boomer thinking dominating the airwaves.

Edited March 14, 201312 yr by Toups

They often interrupt shows here to tell us it's raining or snowing, they really think their audience(es) are stupid. Like we can't look out the window and see the obvious.......

This is 2013. All this forced live hullabaloo seems like an overly enthusiastic hard sell by the American media to remind us that we must still be a largely Caucasian, devoutly mainstream religious country. Which of course is nonsense - the Pope and the Church are not relevant to a great many people. It's not 1980 or 1950 anymore. I'm agnostic at best, I don't give a [!@#$%^&*] and I don't think most of the modern civilized world does either. People can worship whatever they want, but to report on this as though it's our head of state or live minute-to-minute international news coverage anymore is ridiculous. This is baby boomer thinking dominating the airwaves.

I'm 31 and I was so interested I watched on my iPhone.

Believe it or not, not everyone is ridiculing it. I don't attend services and I still think it's very exciting.

What's ridiculous is the level of anger over a TV show being interrupted by history.

I get annoyance and I feel ya in that. But real anger?

Besides, by the second break, I was hoping for the interruption. Today's episode looked to be on the sucky side.

It's a soap it's really not that serious to interrupt it for global news when you can see it later on youtube.

It's not like they interrupted it for the weather. My old CBS affiliate used to constantly intterupt Y&R for the weather(they also used to interrupt weather reports for weather updates), kidnappings(and since I wasn't living in the area it wasn't a great concern for me), fires, crashes.etc

I don't care that much about preemptions but I just disagree with the idea that people are wrong if they do get upset about them. This is not something that affects most of the people watching. It's a chance for a bunch of jerkoff news people to preen and pose and blather the same ten talking points someone wrote on a card for them.

It's also not some new phenomenon for people to complain about preemptions. People complained about Watergate hearings, and I'd imagine that was far more important to Americans than this is.