Pop Culture – Page 259

A Candy Bar in Poor Taste

leeduigon(patty)October 31, 2013

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.

Can Anyone Explain This?

leeduigon(patty)October 29, 2013

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?

Episcopal Church Hosts Muslim Prayer

leeduigon(patty)October 24, 2013

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.

Where Not to Go for Information

leeduigon(patty)November 22, 2015

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.

Shocking Video That’ll Turn You into a Monster

leeduigon(patty)October 15, 2013

Oops, I lost that story. But why let a good headline go to waste? Anyhow, I have another story.

My wife takes surveys on the Internet. Today she took a survey on a new ad for a credit card company. The ad featured a woman rejoicing deliriously in all the great boons that were going to come her way, now that she has such-and-such a credit card. Don’t ask me exactly what she said: I can’t listen as fast as she was talking.

Then came the survey part.

“Do you think this is the kind of ad that people will talk about?”

When was the last time you invited a bunch of friends and family over to talk about commercials? Is there really anyone as benighted as all that? Get a life.

“Do you feel this ad was sincere?”

If your mind just naturally associates words like “sincere” and “commercial,” you probably need a lot more supervision than you have.

“Your responses indicate you found this ad annoying. What about it did you find annoying?”

My helpmeet simply answered “everything.” Shakespeare would have said, “How do I detest thee? Let me count the ways.” Commercials are by nature annoying. If the ads are the best thing about the show you’re watching, you need to be watching something else. All right, the ad is better-acted and better-written than a soap opera. It’s less irritating than a heavy nosebleed. But that hardly makes it a thing of beauty and a joy forever.

The ad’s hook is that this woman calls the credit card’s customer service, and–voila! The person who answers the call looks exactly like the caller!

And they call me a fantasy writer.

Has Britain Really Turned Against Christianity?

leeduigon(patty)July 25, 2015

Patty and I have been watching Midsomer Murders, a long-running British cop show that’s one of the most popular TV shows in the world. I was enjoying it tremendously–until last night.

An episode from 2004, “The Straw Woman,” featured one of the most offensive, anti-Christian screenplays that I’ve ever seen. In it, all Christians without exceptions are perverts, hypocrites, criminals, ignoramuses, or fools–or some unhappy combination thereof–in contrast to the saintly pornographer and the kindly, caring atheists. The top of my head almost flew off when the mean-spirited, adulterous churchwarden, asked if she objected to a pair of unrepentant sodomites running her church, replied that “I am a Christian” and that “homophobia” is a sin which God will punish.

What Bible did they get that out of?

Britain, birthplace of St. Patrick, cradle of saints, home of King Arthur–is this what has become of you?

Granted, it’s only a screenplay, which means the writers put into it whatever they please, no matter how fantastic. But I’ve encountered rampant Christian-bashing in other British TV dramas, too–and I have to wonder to what degree this reflects the British people’s real-life attitude. I’m here in America, so I don’t know.

But I do know that the media in my country are not far behind yours when it comes to spewing hate at Christians.

I would very much appreciate hearing about this from readers in the UK. Clue me in, my friends: is the nation that gave us C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien truly come to this?

Raising Children to be Animals

leeduigon(patty)September 28, 2013

As reported recently in The Huffington Post ( http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kelly-lynch/an-open-letter-to-the-parents-of-the-stephentown-300_b_3983962.html? ) , some 300 teens in Stephentown, NY, celebrated Labor Day by breaking into someone’s house and having a “party.”

In addition to just plain vandalism and theft, along with a lot of drugs and alcohol, these fine young people also peed and pooed all over the house. Just like monkeys. And to make sure all their little friends knew about their exploit, a lot of them bragged about it on the social media, complete with video. Hint to publicly-schooled young geniuses: if you’re going to do a crime, posting video of it on Twitter is a real good way to get caught.

The owner of the house, a former NFL player, was able to identify the animals because they publicized their own names and pictures. He set up a website, http://www.helpmesave300.com , where he named all the kids and said he wouldn’t have them arrested. That was his first mistake.

He offered the animals the opportunity to return to his house and put things right.

So naturally the parents of the animals threatened to firebomb his house. According to a Sept. 19 article in The New York Daily News, they have also threatened to sue him (!) for publicly identifying their kids. Hint to idiot parents: your offspring already identified themselves on Twitter and Facebook.

The owner estimates that the animals did $20,000 worth of damage to his home, according to the Daily News.

Once upon a time, the shame of having raised a child that could do a thing like this would have been too much to bear. The parents, rather than live as outcasts with everyone in town whispering behind their backs, would have moved. As for what kind of punishment would have been administered to the “child”–

Well, hey, when I was a kid, nothing like this ever happened. We all knew that no form of punishment our parents had ever handed out before would be adequate for such a gross offense as this. Mine, I think, would have imposed the death penalty. So we didn’t do such things!

But they do ’em now. And what does that say about their parents?

P.S.: The link above doesn’t seem to work. The HuffPo article cited is by Kelly Lynch, Sept. 24, “An Open Letter to the Parents of the Stephentown 300.”

The Vacuousness of ‘Being Spiritual’

leeduigon(patty)September 16, 2013

I have two neighbors who have deserted Christianity in favor of “being spiritual.” At least that’s what they say. When they’re not simply “spiritual,” these jidrools claim to be Buddhists. I doubt they know the difference.

The one volunteers for Hudson River clean-up cruises (we don’t live in New York), then comes home and walks her dog on other people’s property and doesn’t pick up after it. No amount of protest seems to make an impression on her: no Golden Rule here. I guess that’s part of being spiritual. She also goes to art movies at ridiculous prices. She hasn’t worked in donkey’s years.

The other has Buddhist prayer flags hanging all around her property, and an outdoor hot tub, and the mother of all floodlights–which goes on in the middle of the night and wakes me up because it’s aimed right at my bedroom window. When you’re spiritual you don’t have to think about things like that. I don’t know how she affords all these gew-gaws; she doesn’t work, either. Maybe spiritual people don’t have to work.

The both like to get together with friends occasionally and all do yoga on the front lawn, with the cars going by. It’s not a pretty sight.

Mind you, neither of these individuals has ever been within 1,000 miles of a Buddhist culture. I remember an ad I once saw in one of the Jersey shore papers: “The Bugville Buddhists will make their annual trip to the Atlantic City casinos on such-and-such a date.” I think this tells us all we need to know about folks who say they’re “spiritual.”

Their point is, Anything but Christianity. Christianity is not cool. It won’t get you into the whoopee crowd. No one will mistake you for a celebrity. And of course it really isn’t Christian to let your dog poop on someone else’s yard and let your floodlights shine into someone else’s bedroom window in the middle of the night. It ain’t Christian, but it sure is spiritual.

My Favorite Sunday Color Comics

leeduigon(patty)September 1, 2013

After coming home from church or Sunday school, for most of my childhood, one of my favorite Sunday pastimes was to read the color comics in the newspaper. Here are a few of my all-time favorites.

1. Prince Valiant by Hal Foster, launched in 1937 and continued to this day by Foster’s successors (he died in 1982). Was there ever more gorgeous artwork in any newspaper or magazine? I loved just to look at this strip; reading it was almost an afterthought.

2. Mark Trail, by Ed Dodd and his successors, first appeared in 1946. The Sunday version took a break from the weekly story-line to educate readers about wildlife, helped along by beautiful color illustrations. Boy, could you learn a lot about wildlife by reading this! It helped instill in me a lifelong fascination for wild animals.

3. Peanuts, by Charles Schulz, ran from 1950 to 2000. In its time it was the most famous and widely-read cartoon on earth. Charlie Brown’s perpetually futile efforts to kick the football continue to symbolize all sorts of real-life tribulations for all sorts of people. But I think the strips from the 50s and early 60s, before “Peanuts” became a global phenomenon, were the funniest and most creative.

4. Mandrake the Magician, by Lee Falk, who also gave us The Phantom, first appeared in 1934 and is still being produced by Falk’s followers. Who can forget that dramatic phrase, “Mandrake gestures hypnotically…”? Don’t you wish you could do that! (Well, you can–but nothing much will happen except to make people think you’re a kook.)

5. The Teenie Weenies was cranked out every Sunday by William Donahey from 1914 to 1970–a good run! You’ve gotta love the idea of these little tiny people living just out of sight: a whole little world, with everything that that entails. Imagine what they could get up to today, if they had access to our computers while we were asleep.

I could go on, but I’d rather let you, faithful readers, expound on some of your favorites. To be nine years old, and spread the color comics section on the floor, and lie down to revel in it for an hour–it’s hard to beat those simple pleasures.