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.
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I forgot I could do this, too.
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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!
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.
1 I realize that makes no sense but I laughed when I typed it so it stays.
2 That makes perfect sense.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Pigbuster sez:
I know I put my name in the name box. You, sir WordPress, are a liar.
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.