I'm gonna respond to Noah's religion question...

When this question came up, a Catholic family friend had just returned from the first trip she'd taken east of Chicago -- she had gone with a church group on a pilgrimage to Medjugorje, Bosnia. As you can read on this site, Medjugorje is a small town where some teenagers started "seeing" the Virgin Mary in 1981. (If this sounds a lot like Fatima, Spain, it's the same idea.) Three of the "visionaries" still see the Virgin, and the town receives thousands of pilgrims a day from around the world. While Rome hasn't yet officially recognized the visions as authentic, it apparently hasn't condemned them as fake. This was an amazing experience for our friend, who is a middle-aged mother of two. She cried as she retold how she watched one of the visionaries talk with the Virgin (this visionary conveniently sees her every day at 6:45 pm). Some of the lockets and gift-shop items that she came home with had the phrase, "If you knew how much I loved you, you would cry with joy." I'm not saying that it's a major reason for the popularity of Catholicism, but the emphasis on holy women, namely Mary but also female saints, gives the religion some appeal to women, I think.

Oh, and the Bills have Bledsoe. They're gonna roll.