PeaceBang

Nice Granny

Nice Granny
Originally uploaded by Peacebang.

This is Sari Gordon’s grandmother. “She used to put arsenic-soaked almonds at the bottom of cupcakes and then nail them to the handrail on her balcony for the squirrels.” That is a direct quote, people.

If you want to laugh this hard on a regular basis, check out SariGordonLiving blog.

Minister of Radical Welcoming

Spellers3
Originally uploaded by Peacebang.

First of all, is that the coolest job title you could ever ask for? Yes it is, and it belongs to the lovely and talented minister in the photo, Stephanie Spellers, who has just been named Cox Fellow and Minister of Radical Welcoming at Boston’s St. Paul Episcopal Cathedral. Welcome back to town, you Fine Thang.
Some of you may remember Stephanie from her Unitarian Universalist days. She’s one that got away, and a living, glowing example of what we stand to lose when we insinuate that a skosh of Christian curiosity is okay for UUs, but please don’t get too “into” Jesus or anything: it just isn’t done.

Ms. Spellers will be ordained a deacon in the Episcopal Church on June 4, 2005. I also believe, and I’m not above pimping for a good friend here, that she just might be single and available.

Put Your Goyishe Punim Right Here

I read in the first volume of Elie Wiesel’s amazing autobiography, All Rivers Run to the Sea, that the world of Yiddish literature is quite a small, dysfunctional family. Apparently Isaac Bashevis Singer was not liked by his colleagues, and Elie Wiesel himself called Singer’s chief rival, Chaim Grade, “the greatest contemporary Yiddish writer,” causing a permanent rift between these two bright lights of Jewish literature.

Who knew?

Anyway, I got this from a friend today, one of those silly forwards that made me smile and wish I knew even more Yiddish, whose rhythms and humor I adore. Humor… metaphor… such wonderful literary concepts. Such a shonda (shame) when one has neither humor nor an understanding of metaphor… Oy. Oy vey, even.

The forward begins here:

The new Kosher computer by DELL-SHALOM!

1) The “Start” button has been replaced with the “Let’s go!! I’m not getting any younger!” button.
2) You hear “Hava Nagila” during startup.
3) The cursor moves from right to left.
4) When Spellchecker finds an error it prompts, “Is this the best you can do?”
5) When you look at porn, the computer says, “If your mother knew you did this, she would die.”
6) It comes with a “monitor cleaning solution” from Manischewitz that advertises it gets rid of all the “schmutz und drek.”
7) When running “Scan Disk” it prompts with you with a “You want I should fix this” message?
After 20 minutes of no activity, your PC goes “Schloffen”.
9) The PC shuts down automatically at sundown on Friday evenings.
10) It comes with two hard drives - one for fleyshedik (business software) and one for milchedik (games).
11) Instead of getting a “General Protection Fault” error, your PC now gets “Ferklempt”
12) The multimedia player has been renamed to “Nu, so play my music already!”
13) When the PC is working too hard, you will occasionally hear a loud “Oy Gevalt!”
14) Computer viruses can now be cured with matzo ball soup.
16) When disconnecting external devices from the back of my PC, you are instructed to “Remove the cable from the PC’s tuchus.”
17) After my computer dies, you have to dispose of it within 24 hours.
18) But best of all, if you have a kosher computer, you can’t get Spam.

I want one!!

Doing The Right-Wing Cha Cha

I think you should see this article on the Southern Poverty Law Center web site:

http://www.splcenter.org/intel/news/item.jsp?aid=10

When I lived vaguely near the Washington, DC area I used to read the Washington Times, which I thought was merely conservative and therefore might provide a counter-balance to my consistent lefty tendencies. The Southern Poverty Law Center (my heroes!) exposes the reality that the WT is not merely conservative, it is psychotic, and that one of its frequent contributors is a neo-Nazi sympathizer who refers to Muslims as “hyenas” and feels that homosexuality is a disease passed by neurotic mothers to their congenitally perverted offspring.

Mostly I just wanted to get you over to the Southern Poverty Law Center site. Thems are good people. If you spent fifty bucks on roses for your sweetie today, I bet you could maybe send the SPLC half that, right? Because they do things like take venomous, murdering Aryan Nation leaders or other hate group hyenas to trial and bankrupt them, put them in jail, or in some other way hamstring them. And we really appreciate that around here. I’m going to write them a check right now.

Happy Valentine’s Day!!

cartoon
Originally uploaded by Peacebang.

Oatmealy Monkey

Oatmealy Monkey
Originally uploaded by Peacebang.

Peacebang has a new nephew, born on Thursday morning at 8:20 a.m.!!

Among other presents, Baby L. has received this oatmealy monkey, well-known to any of my pals who have had babies within the past three or so years. Oatmealy Monkey is the ultimate baby gift. He is so soft. He is so easy to bond with. He is so comforting to teething gums. He smiles at you.

Welcome to the new little one!

P.S. Jellycat is the company that manufactures oatmealy monkey. They also make soft, oatmealy gorillas and doggies.

Sound and Fury Signifying Something

This was posted on a belief.net board recently, in a on-line conversation asking the question, “What are you giving up for Lent?”

The poster, Ed, wrote:

There are a lot bad habits I’ve either broken or am trying to break lately… I’m also trying to overcome a weird addiction I have–I love to make myself upset by listening to people whose politics and attitudes differ from mine, i.e., Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, Pat Robertson, Dr. Dobson, etc. In some perverse way I’m addicted to the feelings of smug superiority and righteous indignation that come up in me when these people spout their hateful nonsense. But it’s a bad habit, a sort of compulsive mental masturbation, and it diverts energy and attention away from God by focusing it on my own ego.I’m getting better, actually.

Ah, grasshopper, how wise you are. As a recovering crisis-addict myself, I’m not only careful about ingesting the thoughts of bile-producing commentators, but about spending lots of time with those who do, and for whom impotent raging is somehow satisfying. They belong to no organizations, they volunteer not at all, they show up for nothing, they join nothing, they contribute their money to nothing, they spend their free time purely in the pursuit of leisure, but they vent and spew and vent and spew. Benevolent rage is a good thing, as is judgment. But rage and judgment without action, without commitment and without community is, as Billy Shakes said, “sound and fury signifying nothing.”

If you want to renew your sense of sound and fury signifying everything, may I recommend a re-read of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr’s “Letter From a Birmingham Jail?” I read it again today and it is breathtaking.

http://www.nobelprizes.com/nobel/peace/MLK-jail.html

Three posts in one day! It is not mania, it is merely sermon-writing day (so say it with me boys and girls… “Pro-cra-sti-na-tion!”)

Jolly Good

Jolly Good
Originally uploaded by Peacebang.

I don’t want to have to remind everybody of the entertainingly torrid letters that passed between Charles and Camilla some ten to fifteen years ago. You remember that particularly, er, graphic one, don’t you? Okay. ‘Nuff said.

Doesn’t she look so pretty these days? Remember when she looked so bloated and pasty and horsey? She’s a regular English rose now by comparison. And look at him with his silly little man-purse, just beaming.

In a kind of silly-grin kind of way, I’m just plain happy for them. Long live the king and his consort. Why the hell not? What a revolting fate it is to be a royal.

Headlines We Never Thought We’d See in 1983

“Corey Feldman subpoenaed in Jackson case
Actor says the singer never touched him inappropriately”
(- on MSN.com)

This is totally shattering my memory of happy teenaged nights dancing our hearts out to “Thriller.” Corey Feldman!!?? Lord have mercy.

By the way, back then …
we didn’t have cell phones,
we wrote our term papers on typewriters,
no one had a computer in the house,
we had a brand-new state-of-the-art VCR machine that weighed about 40 lbs. and which did not have a remote control (nor did the television set), you actually got up and changed the channel,
we stopped in the middle of dinner to listen when the phone rang and our brand-new answering machine picked up the call (you could hear the caller stammering with confusion: “I don’t know what to say on these things!” — and we’d giggle)
we wrote letters on paper — and mailed them — when we wanted to send a message.
we had to actually go to the bank during business hours to get cash,
we were just starting to hear about this weird gay sex disease called AIDS,
we thought it was really high-tech to send our film away to be developed instead of going to the Fotomat,
we were amazed by this cool new thing, the Sony Walkman, which allowed us to listen to our cassette tapes while doing Jane Fonda work-outs (”feel the burn!”),
we wore knickers with metallic Peter Pan boots (thank God the knickers haven’t come back),
our movie theatre in town showed one movie at a time…

and Michael Jackson was still Black.

Ashes, Ashes, We All Fall Down

It’s hard to admit this, but I went out and had a martini with a colleague immediately after Ash Wednesday services last night.
It’s this constant pull I have between the life of the good Christian and the life of Auntie Mame.

Why do I observe Lent? Because I feel that if I’m going to embrace a theology that affirms the inherent worth, dignity and improvability of every human being, it gives those commitments some much-needed oomph to also acknowledge the sinfulness and depravity that we daily try to overcome. And not just in human nature in general. In myself.
The ashes were imposed upon me last night by a friend and colleague of the United Methodist persuasion. I was expecting something along the lines of “Ashes thou wert, to ashes thou shall return” as she marked my forehead. (Is “wert” a word, or did I just make that up?). What she said was, “Repent and believe in the gospel.”

Whoooooooooooooooooooooooooooooa. You can bet that’s going on my fridge and staying there for the next forty days. In my mind, I gave her a huge high five and said, “Right ON, sister!” In real life I said, “Thanks be to God” and went meekly back to my pew to repent. And to believe in the gospel. It’s still a wonder to me how many unbelievably cool and smart people will never crack a Bible in their adult life, but they will rifle through the pages of Wayne Dyer and Dr. Phil and that Marianne Williamson creature looking for exactly the spiritual teachings that Jesus gave. They actually think the Bible is too kooky, and that that other stuff is eminently more sensible and spiritually wholesome. I want to set my hair on fire and run down the street waving a Bible and screaming, “You just can’t let Jerry Falwell and those despicable nut jobs have this!!!Nooooo!!!”

My spirit always feels like Brian Boitano winning the gold medal on Ash Wednesday. All year long I carry this incredibly huge burden of trying to believe in the benevolence of God (central to classical Universalism) and the potential goodness of each person(central to Unitarianism). On Ash Wednesday I am only asked to do the former, and released of the latter, my spirit spins around in crazy freedom and joy, cackling maniacally. It is a huge relief to be invited to the dank cellar of my nastiest spiritual parts and reminded that it is because God loves me and made me in Her/His image that I am possessed of inherent worth and dignity. It is not, as I was taught by my dearly beloved but currently theologically floppy tradition, just CUZ.

I don’t think you say, “Happy Lent,” but I’ll say it anyway. Happy Lent. If you’re making a sacrifice, I hope it’s a worthy one. I am giving up dessert and fantasies about inappropriate men.