A Tale of Four Popes

In front of a sprawling sea of pilgrims fanning out from St. Peter’s Square, Pope Francis canonized John Paul II and John XXIII yesterday, bestowing sainthood on two towering figures of the 20th century who left outsize marks on the Roman Catholic Church. The hypnotic sounds of the Sistine Chapel Choir rang out across a crowd estimated at 800,000 faithful from the Vatican to beyond the Tiber River, where spillover crowds gathered before big screens. They watched as, for the first time in the church’s history, two popes were proclaimed saints at once. In fact, yesterday’s event was a tale of four popes, with Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, who retired last year, present in the wings - not that that's news. What is news, though, is that despite doubters, the first of what could be thousands or millions of buried E.T. game cartridges were discovered in the Alamogordo landfill where Atari buried them 31 years ago. "We found something," said Zak Penn, and the crowd cheered. Penn, the director of films like 2003's "X2: X-Men United", is making a film about the hunt for thousands, or even millions, of Atari E.T. game cartridges that the company disappeared 31 years ago. No one has known for sure where they went. Until now. Now we know. "For anybody who doubted," Penn continued, "there's a whole heck of a lot of games down there. We just saw them." It was 12:45 p.m. local time on Saturday, and hundreds of people were gathered at the old landfill in Alamogordo. There'd been lots of clues that the games, along with unknown other titles and hardware Atari didn't want anymore, had been dumped here. And yesterday, the crew making the movie had done an initial dig. As a result, garbage buried here for decades had blown up against an orange trash fence, like a 1979 IRS form 5695 ("Energy Credit") and an IRS Optional State Tax Table, and a customer register from the Townsman Motel dated July 3, 1978. Even an old plastic Bounty paper towel package. So look through your local rubbish dump today - even if it's not a whole bunch of old game cartridges, you never know just what free stuff you might come across there.