May 9, 2009

I wish I could say that when I’m too busy to post something for a few days, rather than just slacking off, that it is a good thing, but it never is.

/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/

I forgot I could do this, too.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Apparently sensing both my lack of direction in the world and my lack of wistful longing for the past, The Church of Latter Datter Jesus now brings me the nostalgia bible. Yes, it’s true!The Bible is coming out of the Jesus vault! All it’s missing is a doctored down grey bible to pose this one next to on a split-screen.

I remember that everything about my Cathorific religious instruction, supposedly derived from The Bible and the various sectual exceptions and alterations made over the centuries, made me feel scared. I never felt loved by Jesus so much as threatened by eternal suffering if I complained about the giant creepy statue of his hanging dead body stuck to the wall. Or merely did not memorize some weird poem or sit and stand in a weird room for an hour every weekend. And this was before I was aware of the parts about Angry God destroying people before they otherwise would have died (and then suffered) just because he felt like it. The modern, commercial approach to spreadin’ the word that the late saints take seems opposed to just about everything left that might be labeled as “pure” about western religion. Sure, I think it’s all silly made up stuff (I must be the first person on the internet who does!), but I don’t understand how anyone else could not start to think that when they see paid ads for it on television or above their email. This summer: Caffeine is The Devil. Media.fastclick.net is a-o-k, however.

I would like to make an attempt at reading a bible at some point, but not because people I don’t know, oblivious to how crazy they come across told me to.


Truth restored! Digitally re-lorded! We took out some of the lies that may or may not have been a fundamental basis of our faith!

“Oh, but that’s just the Mormons. We don’t like the Mormons. They paid the marriage company in California to ban gays and they don’t drink coffee.” Yet were they to collectively decide “okay, God changed His mind. Gays can play too,” would there be any sensible reason to just accept that from them? Saying that what they’ve been doing since whenever hasn’t actually been the path to salvation until right just now? I hate the way faith-folk resist change, but their ability to disregard change entirely when it happened before they were brought in is ever impressive. But really this isn’t about religion or Mormon religions and I just hate stupid ads.


Stupid ads, I said. This is a horrible ad. It’s an empty trashy garbage homage to other trashy homages to some scene in some movie that most of its product’s target demographic has never seen and only knows at all from rubbish reverent near-religious homages to just that specific scene. That movie was called Risky Business and it came out in 1983, the same year I came out, of a womb. You might as well make an ad that references my umbilical cord. They can say “oh it’s parody” but if they do I’ll know they’re lying because nobody who needs to explicitly label their work as parody has done it properly. And who’s that guy in the front? Does he really expect me to believe he wears such big underpants? No, he just thinks if he doesn’t have the upper halves of his legs totally covered on tv he’ll magically turn gay which is a fate worse than this, apparently. He’s seen enough Snickers ads in the same timeslot to know that. You don’t get to be the best selling chocolate bar of all the times by letting customers turn gay, after all1.

I remember there were something near eighty ads exactly like this last year, suddenly, for no reason, all ostensibly for that guitar game (even though I assumed most of them were the exact same ad, and so why have bothered with so many?). I can confirm this because some wikipediphile has listed all of them on the page for Risky Business as if they were isolated occurrences or particularly relevant to the film. Of note (whaddaya mean? If it wasn’t notable it couldn’t be in there, right?) are that it mentions the cartoon Doug (Aka My Name is Earl the animated series2) and the film Mrs. Doubtfire, two things of which I came to not be fond through direct experience without even knowing they had done Risky Business ripoffs. I could block those bits with my mind and still have enough ennui-disgust smores left over to do the deed.

And then midway through itself page section mentions an ad with Metallica that I saw but doubted in which instead of doing the thing they kidnap other people who looked like they were going to do it, because that foyer film set is a theme park attraction or something, and then Metallica Guy says, in the ad, that they won’t do the ad and then the house explodes, just on it’s own, I guess, as the Metallicites walk away from it. Oh, go die, Metallica. You were still in the ad and accepted Activision’s dirty money. You’re just about as bad-ass as those letters kids used to send to EGM magazine with Sonic the Hedgehog beating up Mario drawn on the envelope. You’re so pouty, you wouldn’t let your songs be in the game unless you got a special version with no one else’s songs in it sold at the price of a new game. But Aerosmith, the world’s third worst old band after KC and the Sunshine That and Kiss outpouted you and did it first. That is the interpretation this presentation has led me to and I feel you are not owed a thorough investigation, even though this vague disclaimer seems to indicate that I gave you one anyway.

I can appreciate how Metallica, among other overstated modern bands that just come at me constantly, used its fame to demand that it be allowed to make really long songs, not adhering to arbitrary standards regarding length and repetition. Yes. Maybe. But I still don’t want to listen to them for hours, continuously, much less while holding a toy guitar and staring at rainbow dots. I would have those dots coming at me in my sleep if I did that, which would interfere with my normal schedule of dreaming about people not liking stuff I said on the internet.

1 I realize that makes no sense but I laughed when I typed it so it stays.
2 That makes perfect sense.



7 Responses
  1. 1
    6:44 am, May 11, 2009
    An ankle-biter sez:

    I read the Bible once back when I was in high school, and I must say as a literary work it’s not all that entertaining. It rather dry and repetative in parts, and the original versions of most of the popular stories are very brief and terse in style, with most of the additional details which “everyone knows” being the result of several millenia of what one might be best described as “fanon”.

    I never did get around to reading the book of Mormon, though despite an incident several years ago wherein I listened to the extended spiel of two street missionaries in the hope that they would give me a free copy at the end (they did). Alas, even back then I had a rather lengthy to-read queue, which has only since gotten larger, with newer entries invariably pushing out the older ones. After all, first shall be last and last shall be first.

    As for the Risky Business business, I rather suspect the advertisers expect their audience to recognize previous parodies above the original original work anyway (c.f. most internet memes). Repeatedly parodying parodies to the point where the original is forgotten actually has something of a long historical precedent (Don Quixote is a particularly notable example). Such is the inevitable price of parodic success, especially in cases where the thing being parodied was something that particularly deserved it.

  2. 2
    12:30 pm, May 11, 2009
    Lemphlyn sez:

    But this is just some house with some fool dancing stupidly. It is not worthy of having its imagery become an accepted aspect of culture. People aren’t mocking it so much as acknowledging it. I will not allow that without making a tremendous fuss any more than I would my mother saying UGH DO NOT WANT when the topic of ham came up. Whenever I see that sort of dance scene in a filmed production I get really embarrassed. We should not be encouraging that.

    You told me before that Bible wasn’t so hot, but I still have other yahoos insisting that it is. So I suppose in that sense I would be reading/trying to read the book because an oblivious crazy person said so. I may be the crazy person.

    I feel like an oaf just saying “the bible” all the time without knowing what that really means. I don’t need to get very far, I just need to see that it IS great or isn’t. That it’s just some long boring book. I need to at least show that I don’t want to be close-minded, that such is just the only sensible option sometimes. People live their whole lives supposedly following The Word. They love to pull these weird quotes from nowhere and then say somebody’s name and a time of day afterward, like that proves something or makes sense. I am continually encountering -ted 5:15 and -benjamin 3:30 and I need to see if there is a benjamin 3:31 immediately afterward that nobody ever mentions. I need to see for myself that there is no basis for being offended by bible-themed gripes beyond that so many idiots complain about thebible. I don’t intend to attack anyone with this knowledge because I’m no good at that regardless of how informed I am. I made a similar excursion regarding Amiga computer games a couple years ago. They too are boring, and they take a long time to load, also, because the twit who designed the emulator valued authenticity in unnecessary ways.

    I don’t think I’ll bother with the Mormon book since that one only comes up in ads which are easy enough to yell at on their own non-merit, and was not involved in my indoctrination process anyhow; I don’t have that lying dormant within me. I don’t need to protect myself against becoming born-again because I was never born the first time. I hope. Although if it did happen ideally this would fill me with such blind and joyous-yet-vaguely-fearful devotion that I wouldn’t mind too much.

  3. 3
    9:10 pm, May 12, 2009
    A knee-nibbler sez:

    I don’t know; the incident you describe there sounds uniquely hilarious to me. Constant repetition might render it less so, though.

    Did I already mention that? I seem to be repeating myself to a distressing degree lately. I must be getting old.

    To be honest, I suspect that a not-insignificant number of the people who claim to follow the Bible haven’t actually read it, either. As for those who have reapeatedly (and indeed quote it etensively), I imagine the book has significantly more meaning to a person who regards it as their holy scripture than one who does not. For those on the outside it just seems a largely impenetrable collection of ancient texts. Sometimes you’ll run into the really weird stuff like a story which for a modern reader seems tohave an absolutely horrifying moral, or an account of how solid white sheep being persuaded to mate in front of speckled sticks yields speckled sheeplets, but the majority of (at least the first two thirds of) the book consists of things like geneologies and excrutiatingly detailed accounts of how to make the priestly garments. What’s was rather more interesting for me was what wasn’t in it (yet which I had assumed to be) rather than what was.

    But if you still really want to read it, I imagine you should have little trouble finding a copy. Pretty much every major translation can be found in our local library, or even on the internets, for that matter.

  4. 4
    6:17 pm, May 13, 2009
    Lemphlyn sez:

    It seems funny until you realize that I am legally required to respond with “massive fail” or “made of win,” when in fact in most situations I encounter neither is appropriate or decipherable English.

    Eh, well, I would like to read Gravity’s Rainbow at some point, too, but who can say when I will get around to it? I probably stated my case a bit forcefully there.

    I’m sure authentic bible verse is available on the internet, but reading screen text for long periods hurts my eyes. Which seems like a baffling excuse when I spend much of most days doing just that, but I wish I didn’t.
    Anyway, I saw some merely kind of embarrassing video that doesn’t need to be four minutes long in which some guy insisted that he particularly enjoys big bibles, and further could not have lied in stating that, so perhaps some of the experience comes with possessing an actual tome.

  5. 5
    10:21 pm, May 21, 2009
    Anonymous sez:

    If at some point in the not-too-distant future your website becomes popular and pop-cultured enough for the David Letterman to base a “Top 10” featurette on it, assuming that the aforementioned “not-too-distant future” is not-too-distant enough for Dave Letters to not be retired, and also assuming that by this point in time D. Lett’s “Top 10” segmentette becomes something made up by taking actual things from the subject’s particular pop-database as opposed to being written by writers, which I’m pretty sure is the way it’s done now because that way is both funnier and not what everyone else does, and honestly this makes me question why I’m using the D.L.’s specific tendency to make lists of ten as a subject of this posting, seeing as how a lot of other people do that sort of thing and in a way more appropriate to what I’m trying to say, but honestly I’ve already made the sentence this long and it would be a shame to go back now, your opening bible paragraph would assuredly be on that list.

    I am afraid to try and comment on anything else.

  6. 6
    10:51 pm, May 21, 2009
    Pigbuster sez:

    I know I put my name in the name box. You, sir WordPress, are a liar.

  7. 7
    6:35 pm, May 22, 2009
    Lemphlyn sez:

    Maybe WordPress was just expressing lack of enthusiasm for your name.

    I’m glad anybody was able to make any sense of any part of that thing that I wrote. Still, I question the ability of a mere mortal to endure all of the junk I’ve written through the years for bimshwel purposes, much less make the intellectual[ly devoid] investment necessary to compare and rate them, so to devise a definitive list, for any reason other than to aid in my prosecution.

RSS feed for comments, for they hunger.

Sorry, the comment form is apologizing at this time.

Nobody I know has a website anymore

Mr. Sr. Mxy
Nowhere
Titash
pc72
Pickford
Gilhodes (bah you need a facebook account to see)
video game music database
pacific novelty
Green Lantern Head Trauma

i warned you about this
  • Less recent posts
  • March 2024
  • February 2024
  • January 2024
  • December 2023
  • November 2023
  • October 2023
  • September 2023
  • August 2023
  • July 2023
  • June 2023
  • May 2023
  • April 2023
  • March 2023
  • February 2023
  • January 2023
  • December 2022
  • November 2022
  • October 2022
  • September 2022
  • August 2022
  • July 2022
  • June 2022
  • May 2022
  • April 2022
  • March 2022
  • February 2022
  • January 2022
  • December 2021
  • November 2021
  • October 2021
  • September 2021
  • August 2021
  • July 2021
  • June 2021
  • May 2021
  • April 2021
  • March 2021
  • February 2021
  • January 2021
  • December 2020
  • November 2020
  • October 2020
  • September 2020
  • August 2020
  • July 2020
  • June 2020
  • May 2020
  • April 2020
  • March 2020
  • February 2020
  • January 2020
  • December 2019
  • November 2019
  • October 2019
  • September 2019
  • August 2019
  • July 2019
  • June 2019
  • May 2019
  • April 2019
  • March 2019
  • February 2019
  • January 2019
  • December 2018
  • November 2018
  • October 2018
  • September 2018
  • August 2018
  • July 2018
  • June 2018
  • May 2018
  • April 2018
  • March 2018
  • February 2018
  • January 2018
  • December 2017
  • November 2017
  • October 2017
  • September 2017
  • August 2017
  • July 2017
  • June 2017
  • May 2017
  • April 2017
  • March 2017
  • February 2017
  • January 2017
  • December 2016
  • November 2016
  • October 2016
  • September 2016
  • August 2016
  • July 2016
  • June 2016
  • May 2016
  • April 2016
  • March 2016
  • February 2016
  • January 2016
  • December 2015
  • November 2015
  • October 2015
  • September 2015
  • August 2015
  • July 2015
  • June 2015
  • May 2015
  • April 2015
  • March 2015
  • February 2015
  • January 2015
  • December 2014
  • November 2014
  • October 2014
  • September 2014
  • August 2014
  • July 2014
  • June 2014
  • May 2014
  • April 2014
  • March 2014
  • February 2014
  • January 2014
  • December 2013
  • November 2013
  • October 2013
  • September 2013
  • August 2013
  • July 2013
  • June 2013
  • May 2013
  • April 2013
  • March 2013
  • February 2013
  • January 2013
  • December 2012
  • November 2012
  • October 2012
  • September 2012
  • August 2012
  • July 2012
  • June 2012
  • May 2012
  • April 2012
  • March 2012
  • February 2012
  • January 2012
  • December 2011
  • November 2011
  • October 2011
  • September 2011
  • August 2011
  • July 2011
  • June 2011
  • May 2011
  • April 2011
  • March 2011
  • February 2011
  • January 2011
  • December 2010
  • November 2010
  • October 2010
  • September 2010
  • August 2010
  • July 2010
  • June 2010
  • May 2010
  • April 2010
  • March 2010
  • February 2010
  • January 2010
  • December 2009
  • November 2009
  • October 2009
  • September 2009
  • August 2009
  • July 2009
  • June 2009
  • May 2009
  • April 2009
  • March 2009
  • February 2009
  • January 2009
  • December 2008
  • November 2008
  • October 2008
  • September 2008
  • August 2008
  • July 2008
  • June 2008
  • May 2008
  • April 2008
  • March 2008
  • February 2008
  • January 2008
  • December 2007
  • November 2007
  • October 2007
  • September 2007
  • August 2007
  • July 2007
  • June 2007
  • December 2004

  • May 2007
    April 2007
    March 2007
    February 2007
    January 2007
    December 2006
    November 2006
    October 2006
    September 2006
    August 2006
    July 2006
    June 2006
    May 2006
    April 2006
    March 2006
    February 2006
    January 2006
    December 2005
    November 2005
    October 2005
    September 2005
    August 2005
    July 2005
    June 2005
    Maypril 2005
    March 2005
    February 2005
    January 2005
    Novcember 2004
    October 2004
    September 2004
    August 2004
    July 2004
    Maune 2004
    April 2004
    Febrarch 2004
    January 2004
    December 2003
    Octvember 2003
    Augtember 2003
    Junly 2003
    Maypril 2003
    Febrarch 2003
    Octnovdecjan 20023
    Junulgustember 2002
    Maypril 2002
    This never happened


    old webpages
    Mall Meh...ness
    03-03-2007
    Labyrinthy
    02-22-2007
    Cartoons
    12-10-2006
    Ludicrous
    07-01-2006
    I do not approve.
    06-04-2006
    irrational complaining about my television set
    04-24-2006
    Dennises are dead to me
    04-17-2006
    web-tv
    04-08-2006
    This page is not about shoes.
    03-22-2006
    I hate shoes.
    03-11-2006
    something award related
    03-04-2006
    Bahrg.
    02-26-2006
    Those Green Eyes again
    01-28-2006
    More valid but unfunny Disney criticism
    01-15-2006
    MeSpace
    11-EH-2005
    Biggest Loser
    10-EH-2005
    Mall Blandness
    07-20-2005
    2004 advertisement complaint world championship
    01/05/05
    Belindi
    11/03/04
    Mall Egadness
    09/22/04
    Las Vegas
    07/30/04
    Spiderman 2
    07/20/04
    Jope and Dopes
    06/27/04
    These Green Eyes
    04/24/04
    Friday
    04/01/04
    Wedding
    03/07/04
    Game Over
    03/02/04
    McDenny's
    01/09/04
    Mall orneryness
    01/06/04
    Movies I'm not going to see
    11/14/03
    Back fashion school to
    09/14/03
    Movies Make Me Mad. Moreso.
    06/14/03
    JList
    06/03/03
    France
    03/31/03
    Official pizza of Nascar
    03/16/03
    Browsers
    02/23/03
    Michael Jackson
    2/16/03
    Free Speech
    02/05/03
    Thursday
    01/23/03
    Doofs
    01-whenever-03
    NO
    12/11/02
    Film Critics. I hate them.
    10/15/02
    Coconuts. I hate those as well.
    10/14/02
    Independence Day
    Some time in July 2001
    video games
    Runaway Rainbow
    12-29-2008
    Marsupilami part 1
    Marsupilami part 2
    02-12-2007
    Spirou part 1
    Spirou part 2
    05-26-2006
    Cosmo's Cosmic Adventure!
    04-18-2005
    Kirby part 1
    Kirby part 2
    Kirby part 3
    01/23/05
    Dynamite HeaddY
    07/04/04
    McDonald's Treasureland Adventure
    03/21/04
    Pac in Time part 1
    Pac in Time part 2
    02/12/04
    Air Fortress
    07/16/03
    Super Widget
    05/17/03
    Back to the Forest (the skunny page)
    01/21/03
    Tintin and the Prisoners of the Sun
    09/24/02
    Bip Bop II
    2001, a space waste
    Barney's Hide and Seek "Game"
    too late to make a difference
    Moraff's Dungeons of the Unforgiven
    before the one above it
    Super Games Galore! Doy!
    mysterious
    other things
    Awards this website hasn't won
    mysterious
    The first First Beet segment
    05/28/10
    Embarrassing pictures 1
    09/17/04
    Embarrassing pictures 2
    The same
    Umiliphus (my old derivative megamen sprite comic
    08/15/03
    Hopeless.swf
    11/24/04, (I can only justify this by calling it an experiment, so I shall)
    sandwich.swf
    02/16/05
    FACK
    ??/??/??
    Poetry Page
    The same