What if the conclave of cardinals had selected me as pope? Could I do any better at leading theWorld's Catholics than the guy they got now? I've criticized him pretty harshly so far. Shouldn't I take a step up to bat just to show that I'm not all talk?
The first thing I've got to find out is if the college of cardinals has something on the order of a recall election for bad Pope choices.
Do they reconvene and admit they made a huge mistake? I'm notsure in this scenario how exactly I got to be Pope. Maybe somebody said: "Hey, I know this Dude in Wisconsin who's real righteous, Man!"And that's how I got all of their votes.
Anyways, when the cardinals would sober up, they would be looking hard at the church by-laws. But let's assume for a moment that they don't change their minds right away.
I would take the name of Alexander VII, because I would wantto follow in the steps of Alexander VI who used to have copulationcontests in the Sistine chapel. (True). I'm not actually sure if there has been an Alexander the VII yet, but if there is I'll call myself AlexanderVII, part deux. I would immediately start speaking Ex Cathedra which would make everything I say in-fallible.
Priestly celibacy would immediately go by the wayside. I would tell those priests that God actually wants them to have girl-friends (or boyfriends. Over twenty one years old, that is) and that its a sin to let their equipment rust. Most of all, God wants thePope (me) to have lots of girlfriends - not wives - girlfriends, becausethe Pope needs his space, Baby, and doesn't like to be tied down. AndGod specified that the Pope should choose his girlfriends from the latest swim-suit catalogs. It's his will.
After that, as Pope, I would do a lot of other good things.
How this affects the apocalypse: If I became Pope, it could only be because it's the Devil's work. Because there's no way in Hell it'll ever happen.
Friday, April 22, 2005
Sunday, April 17, 2005
The Amityville Weight Set
The remake of the Amityville Horror is now out on DVD. If I remember correctly, the original Amityville Horror movie wasn't such a blockbuster and it's a true puzzlement that anyone would take a second shot at it. Thumby movie critics, Ebert and Roeper, were unable to review it because the movie company didn't want the critics to see it. So, that's not a good sign. My amazing connection to this movie was that I bought a set of weights from a guy from Amityville.
Yes. It's incredible and hard to believe, but here's how it happened. It was at an airforce base in Greece where I read the entire book, The Amityville Horror. I never actually bought the book, but just read the whole thing standing in the aisles. This bookstore was a fair-sized one which was run by Greeks who had what I think is the most unique way of organizing I've ever seen.
Let me ask you - say you were going to open a bookstore - how do you think you might organize the books? Subject matter, maybe. Or perhaps alphabetical by author? Or publisher or even the color of the cover? You'd do it in some logical way, wouldn't you? Not them. They organized the books by price. (no, no, I'm not kidding). Is that the dumbest thing you've ever heard of? Have you ever said to yourself that you want to read a twenty five dollar book, for example? Anyways, the Greeks there didn't like me too much because I was pretty insistent that they find a different method of inventory. Which, 0f course, they never did.
The book was written in the form of a daily diary and I had to wonder who on Earth goes to the trouble of starting and maintaining a daily diary about their friggin' house? Do you have friends or family who've ever done that? It's pretty abnormal, I think. The story was that this family moved into this house and all sorts offrightening paranormal activities started happening. Then they find out that a gruesome mass murder had been committed there before they'dbought it and it was haunted like you wouldn't believe. I forget how I met this guy from Amityville who I bought the weights from, but I did ask him about this and he said that he hadn't known the family who wrote the book, but knew the family who were murdered and the guy who murdered them, whom he described as a pretty normal fellow who he would see down at the local bar.
Later I saw a special on the Amityville Horror on PBS. (I don'tknow why I was watching PBS and I also don't know why they would do a show on this). On the show, they interviewed the people who had bought the house after the Amityville Horrors and found the house not to be the least bit haunted at all. The wife had, in fact, gone to the trouble of looking up the daily weather reports that matched the dates in the book and not one matched. That pretty much cinched it for me that the house was not haunted.
The weights I bought from that Amityville guy, however, they were.
Yes. It's incredible and hard to believe, but here's how it happened. It was at an airforce base in Greece where I read the entire book, The Amityville Horror. I never actually bought the book, but just read the whole thing standing in the aisles. This bookstore was a fair-sized one which was run by Greeks who had what I think is the most unique way of organizing I've ever seen.
Let me ask you - say you were going to open a bookstore - how do you think you might organize the books? Subject matter, maybe. Or perhaps alphabetical by author? Or publisher or even the color of the cover? You'd do it in some logical way, wouldn't you? Not them. They organized the books by price. (no, no, I'm not kidding). Is that the dumbest thing you've ever heard of? Have you ever said to yourself that you want to read a twenty five dollar book, for example? Anyways, the Greeks there didn't like me too much because I was pretty insistent that they find a different method of inventory. Which, 0f course, they never did.
The book was written in the form of a daily diary and I had to wonder who on Earth goes to the trouble of starting and maintaining a daily diary about their friggin' house? Do you have friends or family who've ever done that? It's pretty abnormal, I think. The story was that this family moved into this house and all sorts offrightening paranormal activities started happening. Then they find out that a gruesome mass murder had been committed there before they'dbought it and it was haunted like you wouldn't believe. I forget how I met this guy from Amityville who I bought the weights from, but I did ask him about this and he said that he hadn't known the family who wrote the book, but knew the family who were murdered and the guy who murdered them, whom he described as a pretty normal fellow who he would see down at the local bar.
Later I saw a special on the Amityville Horror on PBS. (I don'tknow why I was watching PBS and I also don't know why they would do a show on this). On the show, they interviewed the people who had bought the house after the Amityville Horrors and found the house not to be the least bit haunted at all. The wife had, in fact, gone to the trouble of looking up the daily weather reports that matched the dates in the book and not one matched. That pretty much cinched it for me that the house was not haunted.
The weights I bought from that Amityville guy, however, they were.
Friday, April 15, 2005
Postcard from the Bahamas
Nigerian lawyers want to send me millions of dollars!
Apparently in Nigeria there have been a number of explosionsand mishaps and each time this happens in their country somebody seems to leave millions of dollars and no blood relatives who are able to claim the fortune. Do you know who gets the money in that event?
Me!
I know. Seems a little odd. But that's the way they do it. The lawyers do a massive internet search for any person with the same last name, or just a foreigner, who will take this money off of their hands. It turns out that in nine seperate mishaps/explosions that person turned out to be yours truly.
Now, it may seem a little suspicious that I'd be so lucky to be the benificiary of such mishaps/explosions, but the fact of the matter is: I am that lucky. What other explanation could there be?
It's totally legit. Do you know how I know this? The lawyers all told me so, without me even having to ask them. They just vounteered this information and not only that, they did so with lots of exclaimation points!!!!!! If I'd needed any more convincing, those emphatic punctuation marks surely made the case. Lawyers don't just throw those in anywhere unless what they're telling you is urgent and important.
Also, I can tell it's a real proposition because they've told me not to call the authorities, which can mean only one thing: It's so much on the up and up that I don't have to bother the legal establishment at all. I've even been assured that it is not a scam, which can only mean that it's all totally honest, because totally honest people always make a point to let you know that they're not lying to you or ripping you off.
My total take so far is one hundred and ninety nine million and a half. I'm waiting until all the yacht catalogs I ordered come in before contacting these lawyers because I want to make sure I know beforehand how I'm going to spend my fabulous wealth.
Or not. Sigh.
Actually, I did bite in a small way on the first one of these E-mail letters that came my way. I bought it at first, sort of, in a way. Because I really wanted to believe that life changing money could fall in my lap in this way. I'd coincidentally been filling out some of these PCH forms and when I read this letter I treated it like one more lottery or prize-winning contest.
So, I sent this first lawyer - by E-mail - my telephone number. My reasoning was that he couldn't rip me off with this information, because if that were the case then anybody with a phone book could do so, to any person in there who had a listing.
As I should have been able to predict, he called and asked me for my bank account number so that he could get my millions of dollars transferred. He left a message on my machine, so I wasn't able to talk with this fellow directly and then, of course, I didn't call him back. It saddened me to realize that I wasn't going to be a millionaire and there probably wasn't a 'Sir Richard Sommers' who perished in a pipeline explosion with his entire known family, leaving only me to inherit.
Even sadder, I told this story in class and was told of an older man who had lost seventy thousand dollars in a deal that was almost exactly the same as the one I related. That should be a warning. There are people out there who think that they have more of a right to your hard earned money than you do, if you make the unforgivable mistake of trusting them.
Nigeria, by the way, is a fantastically corrupt place. Sixty Minutes did a story on the place where Mike Wallace boutght identity papers proving that he was a Nigerian citizen. They weren't forged, either, he got them by bribing public officials.
As far as the impending Apocalypse: Were I to actually become wealthy beyond imagining, the money would cause me to become even more wicked and immoral than my present state. This would mean that I wouldbe highly unlikely to be brought to Heaven in the first round of rapturing.
My theory is still that the rapture has, in fact, already occurred, but God was so damn picky about it that he only raptured about a dozen peoplebecause his rapturing standards were that high. All those people who just assumed they should be raptured annoyed him too much.
Tuesday, April 12, 2005
Bovine Resort
Meat is murder - I understand that - but what if it weren't murder? Would it be alright to eat it, then? The reason I was thinking of this was that I almost hit a couple of wild turkeys while driving to work today and it occurred to me that if I had hit them it wouldn't be murder at all and their meat would be free of the stigma of cruelty that taints most meat. And I should be able to eat themwith a clear conscience. (In Wisconsin if you hit wild animals you are allowed to keep the meat for yourself, so it also would have been total legal. I suppose you can't try to hit them and you have to stay on the road, but other than that it's okay).
That example was hypothetical, but I've got a real-life one that makes my point better. A co-worker of mine - a vegetarian - hit five deer at one time on the road, then donated the venison to a food shelf. Here you have a non-meat-eater providing un-murdered meat for charity.
It seems to me that in this case, eating those deer is almost virtuous.
This is fine so far, because basically I'm still talking about road-kill, tasty road-kill, but road-kill nonetheless. And most meat just isn't obtained in this way. But what if all the meat that was consumed in America came from animals that died from natural causes? Would anybody have any problems with that?
Here's how I think it would work for, say, beef. Instead of cattle farms you would have cattle communities. These 'cattle communities' would be set up so that they provided everything a cow would need to live a long fulfilling cow life. It would be a resort almost for them. They would receive the finest care available till they gently close their eyes at the end of their happy lives.
Then we eat them.
How this affects the Apocalypse: The Bible has numerous dietary laws which few Christians actually follow. Jehova said you could eat meat,but he was real picky about how it was prepared. I think God must be irate that so many Christians just pick and choose which of his numerous laws they follow and I think just about now his wrath will know no bounds. Bad for the apocalypse.
That example was hypothetical, but I've got a real-life one that makes my point better. A co-worker of mine - a vegetarian - hit five deer at one time on the road, then donated the venison to a food shelf. Here you have a non-meat-eater providing un-murdered meat for charity.
It seems to me that in this case, eating those deer is almost virtuous.
This is fine so far, because basically I'm still talking about road-kill, tasty road-kill, but road-kill nonetheless. And most meat just isn't obtained in this way. But what if all the meat that was consumed in America came from animals that died from natural causes? Would anybody have any problems with that?
Here's how I think it would work for, say, beef. Instead of cattle farms you would have cattle communities. These 'cattle communities' would be set up so that they provided everything a cow would need to live a long fulfilling cow life. It would be a resort almost for them. They would receive the finest care available till they gently close their eyes at the end of their happy lives.
Then we eat them.
How this affects the Apocalypse: The Bible has numerous dietary laws which few Christians actually follow. Jehova said you could eat meat,but he was real picky about how it was prepared. I think God must be irate that so many Christians just pick and choose which of his numerous laws they follow and I think just about now his wrath will know no bounds. Bad for the apocalypse.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)