Thoughtless for the Day

RATYHTL's favorite dick freckle, Charlie Daniels, has just gotten back from Israel - the only foreign country Fundies ever seem to visit - and he's begun writing about it on the Charlie Daniels' Soapbox. As a subscriber to both Biblical Archeology Review and Juggs., I was eager to see how Mr. Daniels trip to the "Holy Land" compared to a similar journey taken by one Lisa "Blair" Whelchel.

My family and myself [sic] recently joined our pastor and a small group of people from our church for a trip to the land of Israel.

We were only there for seven days but the sights we saw in that short time is [sic] truly mind-boggling.

Regular readers of the Soapbox are no doubt aware that Charlie probably also found the Magic Fingers on the bed at the Jerusalem Days Inn as well as any shiny objects he happened to encounter on the way to the airport to be "truly mind-boggling".

Israel is a land of contradiction and conundrum, of old enemies living side by side in an uneasy truce that is constantly challenged by the intransience of the three world religions that consider it to be The Holy Land.

Yes, gentle readers, Charlie just used the words "conundrum" and "intransience". Looks like somebody must've found a thesauruses while rummaging through the dumpster behind B-p ‘R' Us. Even more remarkable (as I plan to remark upon it) is CD's cultural sensitivity towards the locals:

It's easy to spot an Arab settlement for two reasons, first because of what looks like dozens of unfinished houses, and unfinished houses are exactly what they are, but with a twist.

Secondly, the whole area is littered with trash, which evidently is just tossed out on the ground around the residences evidently in contempt of Jewish rule.

I though Charlie was a fan of degradation, as in "Ain't no government man gonna tell me my outhouse has to be at least thirty feet from my trailer door." Also, it should be pointed out that Charlie lives in a section of the country where unkempt lawns are littered with the innards of Trans Ams, so I don't know how much weight his criticism of the abundance of litter along the Gaza Strip holds. Hey Charlie, do you think it's possible that those Ay-rabs purposely dumped all that trash there just to make hillbilly Christian tourists feel at home?

One of the truly amazing things about Israel is the ingenuity of the ancient civilizations that built it. The size of the stones which were quarried and moved from sites many miles away and how a wall was constructed with stones weighing many tons all stacked atop each other, you have to wonder how they lifted them.

Well, I used to wonder about stuff like that, until one day in second grade when our teacher, Mrs. Lawrence, made the science behind pulleys, levers, inclined planes, and fulcrums was made abundantly clear to my classmates and me.

Roman architecture is evident everywhere in Israel. The Romans had strict codes of construction that had to be adhered to and parts of the aqueducts they built are still standing. The intricacy of bringing water from a far away source and building the aqueducts in a way to keep the water flowing is nothing short of amazing for people who didn't have the modern tools to measure the exact gradual drop required to keep the water flowing.

So, God led the Children of Israel to the only spot in the Middle East where there's no oil and then didn't even have the common decency to provide them with the basic mathematic concepts needed for large-scale engineering? The very same knowledge that had been available to Pagans for centuries? What a douche! No wonder the Bible gets the value of pi wrong.

Israel is a small country, roughly the size of the state of Massachusetts, but this tiny nation will play the biggest of role of any nation in international politics in the days to come.

This must be the first time that Charlie has mentioned Massachusetts in a not-so-derogatory manner, and even then I bet he was thinking "I wonder how they managed to fit so many faggots into such a tiny state."

I was much impressed with Israel and will devote the next few columns to our trip and the places we visited. I will take you from the place where the battle of Armageddon will be fought to the holy city of Jerusalem and all the spots and experiences in between.

If it's OK with you, Charlie, I'll avoid the conundrum and intransience of your blog and stick to the latest issue of National Geographic: it has a really good piece in there about King Herod.

Posted by Rodney Anonymous at 07:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

"Al Franken is basically a paid court jester for one side of the argument. You'll never hear him saying something funny about Al Gore, ever. It's the same with Ann Coulter or Michael Moore or Bill O'Reilly - they are all in the same business: 'Yay for our side, boo for the other side, come on, troops, let's go.' Just mindlessly getting the testosterone going. Which is not a knock on testosterone. It's a perfectly fine hormone."

- Harry Sheare:

Normally I reserve the World O' Ignorance spotlight for inbred ignoramuses who, by some strange coincidence, just happen to dwell in small towns in the American South. I like to think of it as my way of helping the common man get his fifteen minutes of shame. This week I'm bending that rule, just a little bit, and focusing the laser beam of humiliation on a celebrity: Dennis Miller.

Dennis Miller is a celebrity in pretty much the same way that I'm a celebrity. We both had careers in the entrainment industry, once. We both were mildly relevant, once. And neither of our managers will return our calls. The only difference is that I occasionally pop up in front of sold-out crowds of adoring fans (OK, they're really there to the other Milkmen), while Miller's only paths to pin money are celebrity bowling and his sporadic appearances on the O'Reilly Factor (which is rapidly becoming the new Love Boat for has-beens). Oh, and I'm pretty sure that my wife is hotter than his.

Anyhoooo, it was during one of these recent O'Reilly gigs that Miller actually said the following about inflatable Alaskan figurehead Sarah Palin:

She's a great dame. People are fascinated by her because the Left hate her. I think the Left hate her - mostly women on the Left hate her - because to me from outside in it appears that she has a great sex life, all right? I think she has non-neurotic sex with that Todd Palin guy. ... I think that snow mobile looks like mechanized foreplay to me and that's why people are fascinated.

To be fair, since its inception in 1956, Saturday Night Live has had over 23,000 cast members, and they can't all be possible Senators like Al Franken or movie stars like Will Farrell. Shit Luther, for every Chris Rock there are easily a dozen Joe Piscopo's. And while Dennis Miller isn't the most tragic former SNL regular (That honor goes to Victoria "Fox News is the only news show that even resembles journalism" Jackson), you have to admit that it takes a special sort of sad to postulate that reason Leftists (defined by Miller as anyone who doesn't crap in an outhouse) would despise a book-banning Fundie dick freckle is because we imagine her procreating in a chandelier, if only because Miller was attempting to be funny when he said it. He was making a stab at comedy. When Dennis wrote that piece, the night before, he was no doubt thinking "this will land me an HBO special for sure!"

To paraphrase Dieter: "Dennis Miller, your attempt at humor has failed"

Posted by Rodney Anonymous at 07:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Hey there not-so-nekkid archeologists; I hope you spotted this post in time to tune into The Bible's Burried Secrets tonight on Nova. I'm hoping that Eric Cline will be one of the contributors, but I'd happily settle for Israel Finkelstein*

Speaking of highbrow PBS viewing, did anyone catch Filth on Masterpiece Theater on Sunday night? If you missed it, I suggest you try to catch it on-line while it’s still available (well worth watching for the "We want sex!" scene, alone). Filth tells the story, in a rather balanced manner, of Mary Whitehouse who headed a "Clean Up T.V" campaign in the UK for about 200 years. Here's an interview with her surprisingly well adjusted son** who, not so surprisingly, doesn't keep any photos of his late mum around the house.

And speaking of British people, if you’re like me (fat, short, and bald) then you eat your breakfast at 7 am in while watching the BBC World News, which means you've also seen the anus-clinching commercial for "The Snuggie". Is it just me, or do these people look like they should be chasing Peter Fonda and Warren Oates through the woods in 1970's devil worship flick?

Here's the ad for the Snuggie:

... and here's a clip from Brotherhood of Satan, starring Strother Martin:

I rest my case.

* "You get a goddamn job before sundown, or we're shipping you off to military school with the goddamn Finkelstein-shit kid! Son of a bitch!" - Strother "Brotherhood of Satan" Martin in Up In Smoke

** Speaking of the well adjusted sons of crazy old right wingers, did you know that Ron Reagan Jr. is an Atheist?

Posted by Rodney Anonymous at 06:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Hey folks, I'm still recovering from a nasty cold that was aggravated by my recent trip to Texas (which I really do plan to tell you all about - the trip that is, not the cold). I was, however, feeling well enough to leave a small post over at the Clog.

Posted by Rodney Anonymous at 07:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Twenty-four hours from now I'll be sitting in the Plough and the Stars, getting drunk and screaming "Fuck Libby Dole" at the top of my lungs. Oh yeah, and I'll also be hanging out with other people who voted for Barack Obama.

That's right; you're not about to read a piece about how I'm voting for Ralph Nader and how you should be voting for Him as well (Honestly, I don't care if you vote for Obama, Nader, or Bob Barr; just as long as you're not voting for McCain or McKinney). In fact, you're not about to read a piece about why I'm voting for Obama. What you are about to read is a love to the Republican Party – the old Republican Party.

You see, there was a time in this great country of ours when if a man had an education, wore a suit and tie to work and knew which wine to chose for dinner, he was a Republican. If a woman had a career (and not just a job), spoke her mind, and valued the freedom to do as she damn well pleased, she was a Republican. Republicans were people who, even if you disagreed with them, you respected them: like William F. Buckley, Lincoln Chaffee, Millicent Fenwick, Andrew Sulivan, George Will and Chase Talbott III. Republicans once spoke in entire, coherent sentences and even used multisyllabic words...correctly. I know many republicans who still fall into this category. They're good people who believe (to quote Thomas Jefferson) that a government powerful enough to give you everything you want is also powerful enough to take away everything you have. They're people who were sickened when that had to look at Mike Huckabee's name on the primary ballot.

So, what happened? How did the average Republican go from being an egghead to a pinhead in less than thirty years? I blame Jimmy Carter.

Jimmy Carter was our first ‘Born Again" president. He was also our first president who was really comfortable talking about his faith. Really comfortable. In fact, carter was so comfortable about talking about his faith that other Born Agains – people not nearly as bright as Carter – began talking about their faith and what they decided was that a Born Again from a small town in Georgia (and a former member of the Trilateral Commission) wasn't as much of a Christian as a divorced actor from Hollywood. And thus did the Republican Party, once a bastion of wit, intellect, and damn good martinis, open its doors to the Great Unwashed, begin its steady, rapid intellectual decline (after all, covering in a bunker, waiting for the Rapture, doesn't leave a person much time for pursuits of the mind) and seal its doom in the election of 2008.

Sjhit Luther, I knew it was all over for the Republicans when, during their primary debates, three of 'em proudly admitted to not believing evolution. That's stupidity on a Taliban level.

The coming "A-whoopin' of ‘08" as future historians will no doubt refer to it, might just be the best thing ever to happen to the Republican Party, which hopefully will use this opportunity to take stock of itself, purge its rolls of intellectually-challenged deadweight, and returns to its roots as the thinking-man's party. Yeah, and Joe the Plumber might earn $250,000 someday.

Posted by Rodney Anonymous at 07:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)