Month: October 2013

A Candy Bar in Poor Taste

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

Would you believe it? There is now a Hunger Games Chocolate Candy Bar ( http://www.vosgeschocolate.com/category/vosges-wild-ophelia-hunger-games-chocolate-candy-bars ).

If memory serves, The Hunger Games is about a nasty world where most of the people starve while the ruling class wallows in debauched luxury, and once a year a bunch of teenagers have to kill each other off in a kind of lethal Survivor game: the last one left alive wins a food supply for his or her district.

When I saw this product, I asked the clerk behind the counter, “Are these people serious?” He replied, “It’s advertising; and advertising’s always serious.”

You can always buy a chocolate bar; so what is it, really, that they’re selling here? A chance to identify with the parasitic ruling class? Or a chance to feel solidarity with the downtrodden common people?

Maybe my sensitivities are too nice, but I can’t help thinking this little marketing gimmick is in rather poor taste. If I had written The Hunger Games, I think I would object. I mean, I write about all this misery and suffering, and you name a freakin’ candy bar after it?

The times we live in are not only evil. They are inane.

Satan has a lot of real idiots working for him.

P.S.–I was wonder, what comes next, after the Hunger Games candy bar? My wife suggests 50 Shades of Grey… licorice whips.

 

Politicians Who Defend Our Values (LOL)

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

I can’t go hardly anywhere on the Internet without being peppered by ads for New Jersey Democrats. We, poor devils, have a gubernatorial and legislative election next week.

Somehow Republican ads never appear. I wonder if unlimited campaign money from the teachers’ union has anything to do with that. I haven’t seen any ads for the airhead who is running for governor against Chris Christie. I interviewed her once. We would be better off electing a statue.

So, it’s all Dems, all the time.

They say they “defend NJ values.” What values are those? Same-sex pseudo-marriage? Abortion? Freebies for illegal aliens? Cory Booker, our new interim U.S. Senator, likes to pretend he’s a sodomite so he can “challenge people’s homophobia.” You have to be brain-dead not to know what Democrats “value.”

Why do they presume we’re so abysmally stupid?

(Uh, because we elect them?)

The candidates promise to keep property taxes “low.” Cue in maniacal laughter.

They promise to “fight for us” against “draconian budget cuts” blamed on the Republicans, even though the Dems control the legislature.

“Fight for us” can be literally translated into English: “Fight for more money for the teachers’ unions.” Maybe teachers will be able to retire at 40, and not have to choose between buying a horse farm and going on perpetual world cruises: give ’em pensions that’ll allow them to have it all.

We ought to have some protection against this much hypocrisy.

Of course, we could protect ourselves just by never, never, never voting for a Democrat or an incumbent of either party. We would have to outvote the dead, the illegal aliens, the multiple voters, and the rest of the Dem voting base. But we could do it, if we put our minds to it.

Always presuming the electorate has a mind. Jersey pols seem to do very well by presuming that it doesn’t.

Can Anyone Explain This?

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

There’s a young woman in our neighborhood who goes around with half her head shaved down to the scalp. That’s right: I said half. The other half is normal.

It looks horrible. And my question is, What’s it all about? Is she imitating some ridiculous celebrity I never heard of? (For that matter, what’s the use of celebrities hardly anyone has ever heard of?) Is it some kind of half-baked ideological statement? Or is she just plain daft? She isn’t doing it for Halloween, because her head always looks like that.

I have ruled out hallucination because other people have seen her, too.

Can anyone tell me why any young woman would want to keep half her head shaved clean?

And does it matter which half?

Religion as a form of Mental Illness?

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

Check out Steel on Steel where I address this issues. I’m introduced about 13 minutes into this program.

Steel on Steel: Religion as a form of Mental Illness?
So is religion a form of mental illness? Seems to be a trend that way in some academic circles. We’ve been warning that mental health will be the upcoming hammer for controlling dissenting groups and depriving them of rights. There’s a growing trend in Great Britain to label religion as a source of mental imbalance.

A New Hymn For a Defeated Church

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

First it was the Pope suggesting the Roman Catholic Church should chill out on such matters as sodomy, adultery, and abortion.

Now the Southern Baptist Conference has one-upped him. The new honcho of the SBC’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, Russell Moore, recently called for his church to raise the white flag on the whole culture war, and to be “winsome”–I don’t know about you, but I have really begun to hate that word–so as not to turn off “young believers” who have spent most of their lives in public schools learning that fornication is a virtue and the Bible is both fiction and hate speech.

To help the institutional churches express themselves more clearly, a new interdenominational hymn has been written: Throwing in the Towel, to be sung to the tune of Bringing in the Sheaves. Here are the lyrics.

Triumph for abortion, joy for same-sex “marriage,”

Now we understand: the bad guys always win.

We the church surrender, we the church cry “uncle!”

Now we understand there’s no such thing as sin.

Chorus

Throwing in the towel, throwing in the towel,

We know when we’re licked, we’re throwing in the towel (repeat)

We have been defeated, we have lost the culture;

Gates of hell have finally ‘gainst the church prevailed.

Sorry, Lord, we blew it, we just couldn’t do it,

Satan’s team has won and we the church have failed. Chorus

And do remember to be nice and winsome to the lions, when they force you into the arena.

I’ve Finished Writing My Book (Oh, No)

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

Yup, yesterday afternoon I finished writing The Glass Bridge, Book #7 of the Bell Mountain Series.

This is the kind of writing I love best of all, and I have loved this book from the first page to the last. So it’s gonna be kind of dreary around here without it. But a Book #8 will come along, by and by, because the general arc of the story requires it.

So what’s this one about? Oh, the usual. Danger, adventure, love, hate, treason, courage, honor, weird animals, just another day in the neighborhood. If you’ve read the first five books, you know there’s a huge treasure-trove of gold at the top of Golden Pass–and who is going to wind up owning it? And what’ll they do to get it?

But first Book #6, The Palace, has to be published. We’re waiting for the cover art from Kirk DouPonce.

By the way, if you’ve read the books, and if you know how to do it, I really could use more Customer Reviews on my amazon.com pages. You know, in the Young Adult fiction market, I’m competing with books about boys who want to be girls, witchcraft, teens having sex with vampires or zombies or whatnot. Help me elbow some of this crap off the shelves!

 

Episcopal Church Hosts Muslim Prayer

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

The Episcopal Church in America has mastered the ABC of pop theology–Anything But Christ.

As reported yesterday in my town’s “community announcements” paper, St. Luke’s Episcopal Church “will sponsor a one-hour presentation by a Sufi Dervish who ‘whirls’… This particular ’embodied’ form of prayer, the physical act of moving in a circle, is not well known in the West… The program is connected to [St. Luke’s] current exhibit, ‘Spirituality of the Mandala’…”

Whirling dervishes are Muslim mystics who spin themselves around and around until it puts them in a kind of trance. A Mandala is some kind of Buddhist or Hindu thingamajig. And “spirituality” is bunk.

When the Son of man returns, will he find faith on the earth? (Luke 18:8) I guess it’ll depend on where He looks.

But when ye pray, use not vain repetitions, Jesus said (Matthew 6:7). I think that would apply to mindlessly whirling around the floor before you wander off to stare at the mandala.

If it were my church, I would not like the Lord to find whirling dervishes and mandalas there when He returns.

A Wolf Among the Windmills

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

I saw a video the other day, taken by someone from his front door during Hurricane Sandy. It showed a good-sized shark swimming around his front yard. “Farewell and adieu to ye fair Spanish ladies…”

All right, it was a freak flood caused by a major hurricane, not Jaws‘ revenge. But one of my buddies from Chessgames.com, who lives in the Netherlands, reported  a national freak-out this summer when a wolf turned up in Holland. (Full story at http://phys.org/news/2013-08-wolf-netherlands-scientists.html )

There’s hardly any wildlife left in Holland, he says. “People are excited when they see an occasional squirrel–or sometimes even a rabbit. Anything larger will induce various degrees of panic.”

Well, at least one scientist thinks there might be a small population of wolves in the Netherlands, probably having migrated there from Eastern Europe. In the hypersuburban town where I live, a bear turned up last summer. Uh-oh.

Those of you who’ve been reading my Bell Mountain novels know that the return of exotic, dangerous wildlife to lands inhabited by civilized nations is a sign that God is going to change the world.

Sharks in this one’s front yard, a bear in that one’s back yard, and wolves wandering among the windmills…

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Kids Taught Bill of Rights is Out of Date

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

Check out Phyllis Schlafly‘s column at townhall.com today, in which she offers a coast-to-coast sampling of education malpractice–by which we always mean “standard practice,” when speaking of the public schools–under the banner of Common Core.

I’ll let her tell you about the Arizona school with the class play featuring a character who has sex with a goat, and other goodies. But let’s consider this from the Bryant school district, Arkansas–in which 6th-graders were asked to “update” the Bill of Rights by deleting two “out of date” rights and replacing them with new ones. It seems the teachers didn’t make it entirely clear that this was make-believe.

You know what? It’s not such a bad idea to get kids thinking about the Bill of Rights. Our founders added those first ten Amendments to the Constitution because they thought we absolutely couldn’t do without them. They were put there to protect us, and our states, from the central government. Of course they should be studied. If I were homeschooling a child at this point in my life–over my dead body would any child of mine be taught in public school today–I might well ask him to try to imagine what America would be like without, for instance, the First and Second Amendments. We can all do with a greater appreciation for our liberties.

But somehow I don’t think a unionized public school teacher would ever present it quite that way.

“Now, class, I’m sure you can all see that that pesky right to bear arms is really bad for our country. What we really need is a Constitutional right to practice same-sex marriage, and another right to force those nasty religious haters to celebrate it and say it’s good…”

You get my drift.

Get your children out of the public schools before they’re irreparably brainwashed.

Where Not to Go for Information

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

Over years of fishing in Barnegat Bay, NJ, my wife and I caught hundreds of small sharks which we and everybody else called “smooth dogfish.” But were they really smooth-hounds? Could they have been the young of another kind of shark? Curious to find out, I consulted the Internet.

So what’s wrong with that?

A question-and-answer site called “Cha-Cha” blithely informed me that there are no sharks in Barnegat Bay. Yup, that’s the answer from the high-tech oracle. That the answer happens to be completely, 100% wrong would not be noticed by someone who had never fished in Barnegat Bay.

Above the stupid answer, among the ads by Google, was an exhortation to “vote for Peter Barnes,” Middlesex County, NJ, Democrat, because “He believes tax money should be used to fund education instead of CEOs’ retirement packages.”

“To fund education,” translated into English, means to pump colossal sums of money into the teachers’ unions, who will continue to support Democrat politicians by funneling union dues into political campaigns.

So the ad is no more truthful than the phony phacts on Cha-Cha, and certainly no more informative.

Or have we reached the stage in our cultural development where “to inform” means “to provide with false or incomplete information”?

P.S.–They were dogfish, all right. As my wife reminds me, they have the flat, shellfish-crunching teeth of dogfish. So I didn’t need the Internet for this, after all.