I woke up this morning to the Beneficent Mr. Hall telling me that Pope Benedict XVI would resign.

I’m still sort of reeling from that news. I mean, Popes don’t resign. Well, not since the Middle Ages.

And Popes are not like Presidents. Presidents retire to their nice homes and catch up with the family, maybe do a little horseback riding, golf, get in a strip poker game for a change. Occasionally, a former President will get a call along the lines of “When you were president, what did you do?” But I think most of the time, the new guy wants to go it alone, make the job his own.

So what do you do with a resigned Pope? It’s…it’s unprecedented is what it is. The new Pope will most likely be named on Easter, so I suppose we shall all have to wait and see what happens in this historic moment.

Meanwhile, I wrote about Authorgraph and the age of digital book signings over at The Muffin.

Pope Benedict is a multi-published author, you know. Maybe he’ll finally have time to send out a couple personal inscriptions to his readers.

Just a thought.