vatican smoke watch- what you need to know

so, pope john paul II is (finally!) pushing up daisies (joke!), which means one of two things:
1) no more popes
or (more likely):
2) time to elect a new pope

we're going to assume the catholic church still wants/needs popes, which means cardinals from around the world are now locked in the sistine chapel, working hard to figure out who's really the closest to god among them. it used to be that the cardinals would fight to the death in an octagon shaped ring, the last cardinal standing earning the title of pope. but times have changed, and now they just debate and vote by secret ballot (boring!).

since the chapel is closed to the public and the media, the cardinals use (of all things) color coded smoke signals to announce their progress. when they take a vote and no pope is chosen (no one got 2/3 of the vote), they burn the ballots with a chemical that turns the smoke black. if they do figure out who's pope, they add a chemical to the ballots to make the smoke white. but the cardinal's smoke signal system was recently modernized to account for several unforseen circumstances. here's a little chart to stave confusion when the smoke comes outta that chimney!

orange smoke: new pope is mel gibson! just kidding! nothing yet.

green smoke: out of funyions. send replacements.


blue smoke: picked a new pope but he died too, so we have to start over.

brown smoke: we think we got a pope, but he's black. is that okay w/you?