I wish I could carry this movie around with (OK, I guess if I ponied up and bought a smartphone, I could) and play it whenever I'm asked why I don't believe in God. Of course, it's always the God of Abraham that they're asking me about; it's never Zeus, Odin, or Ra.
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"People have waited nearly 2,000 years for Christ to return, so we can wait a while longer for John Frum" - A village chieftain from Tanna
Happy John Frum Day! Look to the skies, gentle reader, because I've the feeling that this is the year in which John Frum's plane will descend...
What? You haven't heard the good news about John Frum? Well, get comfy, because have I got a story to tell you...
John Frum is not only an American G.I., but also the King of America. His prophets built a landing strip on the Pacific island of Tanna island where on day (February 15th - hence John Frum Day) his plane will land and shower his followers with milk and ice cream.
John Frum is the deity at the center of a cargo cult. Here's a wonderful, lengthy article about John Frum from Smithsonian Magazine that does a much better job of telling the John Frum story than I could here.
Like most of the more important things in life, I first learned about John Frum from the book Cows, Pigs, Wars and Witches, which devotes an entire chapter, Phantom Cargo, to the John Frum phenomenon and smarty refuses to dismiss it as just another wacky religion - because it's not. Look a little deeper and you'll realize that the John Frum Experience is an attempt to answer the question as to why some countries are wealthy and others are not. After all, "Why does the white man have so much cargo and the New Guinean so little" is the question which lead to the writing of Guns, Germs, and Steel.
Speaking of New Guinea and cargo, in 1933 a group of New Guineans took over a Lutheran Church. They were convinced that the the white man was hiding "the Secret of the Cargo" and that not only had the Bible been mistranslated (either by accident or design), but it was also missing its first page, which revealed the true name of God. As the New Guineans saw it, Jesus had given cargo to the Europeans, but not to them. In fact, the New Guineans were convinced that Jews and Christian missionaries were holding Jesus Christ captive in Sydney, Australia.
I'll leave you with this inspirational exchange between a John Frum believer, named Prophet Fred, and a somewhat stymied Anthropologist.
Anthropologist: What does John Frum look like?
Prophet Fred: He looks like an American.
Anthropologist: Have you ever seen him?
Prophet Fred: Yes, John comes very often from Yasur [the local volcano] to advise me, or I go there to speak with John.
Anthropologist: What does he look like?
Prophet Fred: An American!
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"Evolution is what it is. The upper classes have always died out; it's one of the most charming things about them." - Germaine Greer
Happy 201st birthday, Charles Darwin.
For the last several years, my Darwin Day posts have focused on punishing the ignorant, but this year is going to be different. This year I won't be spotlighting either of the two places on Earth where Evolution is not widely accepted: Fundamentalist Islamic countries and the Charlie Daniels Outhouse ("Home of the Extra Chromosome"). Shit Luther, I'm not even going to mention that Charlie recently posted another one of anti-Science rants. And I certainly am not going to bring up the fact that although Charlie doesn't archive his readers' comments, I do. For that reason, I definitely won't go into the two people who attempted to succinctly explain the facts of Evolution to the Skoal-chewing amoebae of the Outhouse, or that when one of these two posters mentioned that the last Pope was a firm believer in Evolution, it elicited the following response:
"The day that the pope speaks for Christianity is the day I hope I'm out of here.....You know as much about Christianity and as you do evolution, or you would know that the Whore of Revelations comes out of Rome and the next pope [sic] could very well be the anti-christ [sic].....In other words because someone calls themselves " christian" does not make it so....God Bless" - Plowboy
You heard it here first! A biblical scholar who goes by the handle of "Plowboy" has announced that next Pope could possibly be the Antichrist. By the way, Plowboy, it's the Book of Revelation - singular - not Revelations.
No, there will be no mockery of inbred dick-freckles like the aforementioned Plowboy today! Instead, we're going to take at look at one of the interesting ethical dilemmas that have arisen from our understanding of Evolution: cloning Neanderthals.
There's a fascinating piece in this month's Archaeology Magazine (which i read for the articles and not the centerfold) by son of Zorro, Zach Zorich, which asks the question: Now that we have decoded the Neanderthal genome would it be ethical for us to clone Neanderthals?
The pro-cloning side argues that since Homo sapiens were most likely the cause of the extinction of Neanderthals, we have a moral obligation to bring them back. And since Neanderthals had relatively large brains and were capable of speech (the FOXP2 gene was found in the Neanderthals' genetic sequence), it's quite possible that they could be eventually be integrated into society.
"Modern humans, he says, are as different from Homo sapiens who lived in the Neolithic period 10,000 years ago, as Neolithic people would have been from Neanderthals." - John Hawks, Paleoanthropologist at the University of Wisconsin
"I think there would be no question that if you cloned a Neanderthal, that individual would be recognized as having human rights under the Constitution and international treaties," - Lori Andrews, professor at Chicago-Kent College of Law.
The anti-cloning argument is, of course, that just because you can do something, that doesn't necessarily mean that you should. Despite a wealth of recent scientific discoveries which demonstrate that Neanderthals were not the brutish louts they had previously been depicted as, the word Neanderthal still remains a pejorative. Charlie Daniels' fellow corporate mascots, the Geico cavemen, understood this. If you think that Gays, African-Americans, Muslims, and Gay African-American Muslims face a lot of prejudice, just imagine what life would hold for a bunch of reconstituted Neanderthals. Now imagine what it would be like to be hated by someone who thinks that you never existed.
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I have what is known as a "restless mind", which is a polite way of saying "short attention span". While composing the previous post, I had a series of thoughts run through my head then attempt to escape out my right ear-canal . I've since tracked them down, and have placed them on display below.
Thought Number One: Who started covering women up and why?
Think about it (if I had to, you should too); the burqa and the Duggars' swimwear (yes, there is a link to that site on the Duggars' site. Marion, Don't Look At It - Shut Your Eyes, Marion!) didn't just appear out of nowhere*: for thousands of years, men have been covering women from head-to-toe. This seems counter-intuitive at fist; after all, if you've got a small Bronze-Age village run by men, wouldn't it stand to reason that all the women in that village would be dressed like Raquel Welch in One Million Years BC[E]? Clothes might make the man, but men make the rules.
So when and why did men start forcing women to "dress modestly, with decency and propriety" (Timothy 2:9-10)? I honestly don't have a good answer. What I do have is a theory.
Let's say you're a guy living in the aforementioned Bronze-Age village wherein all of the women have been running around in fur bikinis for a century or two. You may have begun to notice that the warriors from the village on the other side of the marsh have a nasty tendency to regularly raid your village and carry off your women. So, you call a meeting of the village elders wherein someone comes up with the bright idea that if you cover up all of the women, raiding parties won't know whether or not they're carrying off Angelina Jolie or Angela Lansbury until they get home and "unwrap the goods".
Maybe this is why, in the ritual of the wedding ceremony, which harkens back to the days of arranged marriage, the groom doesn't get to remove the bride's veil until after he's said "I do"?
Oddly, this led me to...
Thought Number Two: The Worst Wedding Night Ever
Norse mythology (which used to be Norse religion) gives us the charming and equally disturbing tale of Thor's attempt to appear on RuPaul's Drag Race.
Somehow Thrym, king of the Giants, managed to get his hands on Thor's magic hammer (Paging Dr. Freud, Dr. Sigmund Freud to the white courtesy phone), Mjollnir.** Anyhoooo, Thrym offered to trade the hammer for the hand of the goddess Freyja (for whom Friday is named) in marriage.
At this point the god Loki gets involved in the story: Which, if you know anything about Norse mythology, means that something weird is about to happen. Loki somehow convinces Thor to put on a wedding dress, complete with veil (I don't know a whole lot about Thor's personal life, so maybe it didn't take much convincing), and off they go to the Land of the Giants, where despite the phony Freyja scarfing down an entire ox at a wedding banquet, nobody catches on until it's too late and the hammer is handed to Thor/Freyja as a wedding present (???).
"I'm an action transvestite really, so it's running, jumping, climbing trees... putting on make-up when you're up there!" - Eddie Izzard
All this talk of clothing and lack thereof led to...
Thought Number Three: The Emperor's New Clothes
The great irony of the fable of The Emperor's New Clothes is that it has been told to generations of school children as an example of the virtue of questioning authority, yet not once, to my knowledge, has some little child, upon hearing the story, raised his or her hand and said "Wait just one Odindamn minute! While the kid in the tale did manage to point out the emperor's swinging scepter, and no point did he also point out that it was a stupid idea to have an emperor in the fist place and that, perhaps, a parliamentary form of government might be a better idea. And while we're on the subject, if the same kid had pointed at either the Pope, the Dalai Lama, or J. Edgar Hoover and said 'Hey, look at that guy in a dress', his brains would be all over the sidewalk. Now where's my box of juice?"
* I should point out that the Muslims swiped the idea for the burqa from the Byzantine Christians, and the the Duggars' swimwear was probably inspired by...hmmmm...LSD in their water supply, perhaps?
** I don't know how Thrym did this. Yes, I've getting at least four books on Norse Mythology sitting only a few feet away, but I'm feeling too lazy to bother to look this up.
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Is it just me, or has the cast of Cinemax's late-night series Naughty Cheerleader Academy just been "phoning it in" this season? I swear, that show jumped the shark shortly after the sorority rush episode in season two.
OK, now that the members of the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice have left the room in order to report me to Focus on the Family we can have a serious chat about a creepy subject. And like most creepy subjects, this one begins with me watching an episode of Antiques Road Show (Which I like to call "Rich people getting richer as saps, like me, watch") .
So, I'm watching the UK version of AR on BBC America and there's this woman with a 19th Century brass microscope and a collection of slides. The appraiser takes a look at the antique scientific equipment and basically says (and not only paraphrasing, but translating into "Philly Speak"), "Look lady; this microscope ain't worth squat. Get it out of my sight before I brain ya' with it. What I'm really interested in are these slides. In fact, I really only care about this one slide here..."
At this point, the appraiser holds up a glass slide with what appears to be a tiny brown square on it, and asks the woman if she knows what it is. OK, the unspoken truth about Antiques Roadshow is that "antiques" could be used to describe either the majority of items brought in to be appraised, or the majority of people who bring those items in for appraisal. The average "guest" on AR is 104 years old and has been mummified at least twice; add to that the fact that most of these ancient coots come from "old money" and it's easy to see why if you showed one of 'em a toaster and asked what it was, they're more likely than not to say, "I think Michelangelo carved that". So there's no way in Hell the old bat was going to get the question right, but at least she had the good sense to shrug rather than offer an opinion.
As it turned out, that tiny brown square was a mid-19th Century version of the microdot. In other words, it was a minuscule photograph that could only be viewed under a microscope. Well, that made the slide a little more interesting. And then the appraiser dropped the bomb: many of these tiny photographs were pornographic.
Shut the front door!
Apparently, upper-class Victorian men of Science would say to their wives, "Darling, I'll be retiring to my study now, in order that I may continue my research into the mysteries of Nature in the hope that I may cure Aunt Gertrude's dropsy", and then they would look at dirty pictures under a microscope. Let that sink in for a moment.
I should point out that I have no idea what Victorian porn consisted of (most likely, a glimpse of woman's ankle), but I do know one other disturbing fact about the Victorian mindset: They used to cover the legs of tables in order to keep men from having "unwholesome" thoughts.
By the way, during my research for this piece, I came across the following:
...in 1874, the Pimlico studio of Henry Hayler, one of the most prominent producers of such material was loaded up with 130,248 obscene photographs and five thousand magic lantern slides.
It seems that the same Henry Hayler was also the author of a secret journal.
Next time, I'll connect Victorian porn and the god Thor. Oh yeah, you'll want to read that!
Write text here...
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If you're like me - and, these days, who isn't? - then you can remember a halcyon era, not too long ago, when MTV and VH1 showed music videos, The Learning Channel was bereft of chocolate-making Little People and deranged helmet-haired Talibangelicals, and the History Channel showed actual programs about History. Sadly those days, much like Charlie Daniels' few remaining brain cells, are gone.
Now, in the case of VH1, replacing Poison videos with a cruel social experiment involving Brett Michaels and a group women who were found hanging around the Modesto Free Clinic actually improved the network. Come to think of it, Teen Mom is much more of an "alternative" show than MTV's 120 Minutes ever was. And anyone who was surprised that, in the land of anti-intellectualism, a network called The Learning Channel would eventually morph into a Freak Show would also be shocked to learned that we almost elected a Vice President who didn't know that Africa was a continent.
But The History Channel? The History Channel was something different. It was the lifeboat many of us crawled into once PBS, suffering from a lack of government funding, began ceding airtime to thinly veiled infomercials and WASPs Gone Wild (aka The Antiques Roadshow). And while The History Channel still presents many wonderful programs like Cities of the Underworld, Ancient Discoveries, and Bad Girls Club, The History Channel has also become home to such as moronfests as MonsterQuest, UFO Hunters, and countless "specials" (as in short yellow bus "special") about Nostradamus and the Antichrist (AKA Ronald Reagan, Mikhail Gorbachev, Pope Benedict XVI, Emperor Nero, and/or Barack Obama) .
And that (along with about a million other things) is what really melts my s'mores. Look; you don't have to make up History in order to make History interesting. Mount Vernon is a fascinating place - it's where the Father of Our Country grew hemp and made booze. You don't need to send a couple of cretinous "Ghost Hunters" out there in the dead of night to help the spirit of Thomas Jefferson find his bong. that's not exploring History. That's not popularizing History. That's polluting History.
If the general public thinks History is dull, then that's only because no one has told them that Francois Rabelais used to wipe his butt with a live goose (Let's see that on Animal Planet. The guy made Michael Vick look like Betty White). If you can find a way to make that tidbit more interesting by tossing in two old farts and a Ouija board, I'm all ears.
A few months back Vienna and I noticed that we were washing clean dishes. Often, when one of us was out of the house, the other would look at the dishes in the dishwasher and, not knowing whether or not they were clean or dirty, run them through the wash cycle again, just to be on the safe side.
In order to combat this wasteful tendency, we developed an iconographic method for keeping track of the state of our dishes. What makes this method fun is that it's based entirely on Vienna's great respect for Catherine of Aragon ... and her deep hatred of Anne Boleyn (whom Vienna refers to simply as "The Great Whore"). When dirty dishes are placed in the dishwasher, a small framed portrait of Anne Boleyn with the word "Dirty" inscribed upon it is displayed on the counter top. Once the dishwasher is turned on, the portrait of Anne is replace by one of Catherine marked "Clean".
If it were up to me, by the way, I would've used Emperors Constantine for "Dirty" and Julian for "Clean".
For me, the best thing about this method of keeping track of cutlery cleanliness is explaining it to mystified house-guests who spot the portraits in our kitchen.
Buzz Aldrin will be at the Free Library tonight! How many chances do you to meet someone who has set foot on the moon, rapped with Snoop dog, and who can punch your lights out?
Meanwhile, Whoopi Goldberg continues to pursue a career in ventriloquism by demonstrating her ability to talk out of her ass: