Every American man has a beard

It's true. Everywhere in the USA, if you see a man, you see a beard. It's an epidemic.

All my favorite baseball players have beards now. The mailman? Beard. The plumber? Beard. When I went to see my doctor last week, even he had a beard! It's shocking, shocking, I tell you.

This morning, fearing the worst, I looked in the mirror and saw that even I have a beard! (I believe that mirrors are a tool to be used sparingly, to learn if you have a dead bird on your head. Since I rarely go out, I hadn't looked into a mirror in some time.) Again: shocking!

What is going on? You don't think...this could be evidence of the coming Rapture, do you? Oh, I hope so. I want so much to get rid of the godders. If Jeebus scoops them up, it'll be heaven down here! Can you imagine all the fun we're going to have? Squeee!

The beards are a harbinger of better times. Long live the beard!

Scammer fail

I really get a kick out of phishing scams. They're just so terrible. I don't understand how anyone can fall for them. Here's one I received today:

This is customer support service we are notifying you to carry out urgent verification of your account as we are having some congestion due to so many unused account that has been registered on our system. We are therefore closing some of this account and we need you to verify if your account is still very active and useful to you in order for us to wipe out the unused accounts. In order to verify your account kindly click reply and insert your password on this box (*********) for urgent purpose or you face to lose your account within 48 hrs of receiving the message.

Thank You For Your Understanding and we are sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused you.

Indeed. I particularly love "kindly click reply and insert your password on this box (********) for urgent purpose." And the Caps they use in the final paragraph are just so special.

Seriously, how do these guys make money? They'd need entire nations filled with nitwits to...

Oh. Never mind.

Bruni pays homage to Larry Kramer

Go read Frank Bruni's column about Larry Kramer. It's terrific.

I can't wait to see Mark Ruffalo play the role of Ned/Larry in "The Normal Heart" on HBO (May 25).

President Hillary Clinton's gonna be a real pip

This is just what I want to hear from a presidential candidate. Here's Hillary talking about her church:

"I love that church. I love how it made me feel about myself," Clinton said. "I love the doors that it opened in my understanding of the world, I loved the way it helped to deepen my faith and ground it."

Sigh. Go read the story. It's sickening. This is just what the country needs: another Jesus-spoutin' candidate who has accomplished absolutely nothing in her life.

A candidate like this is sure to change things for the better around here. I can't wait. Maybe she'll build on her previous "success" by passing a second law about desecrating the flag. It could make it illegal to gaze at the American flag with a shady expression on your face. Or it could force Americans to kneel and pray to it.

One can hope, anyway.

Two popes to tout two popes

If I was blogging heavily, I'd have a field day with this. But this post will have to suffice since I'm busy writing my next novel.

The NYT has an article today about tomorrow's coming-together of one too many popes to, you know, make saints out of two other popes. It's such an incestuous thing. I couldn't let this go by without mention. Here are some excerpts that paint the scene. And yes, there is purpose to this madness.

For Francis, who has spent the first year of his papacy straddling the divisions within the church, this twinning allows him to deftly avoid elevating one man over the other and serves his broader agenda of de-emphasizing ideological battles as he tries to renew excitement among the faithful and reverse a steady decline in church attendance.

You see, John XXIII was the "good pope" who tried to bring people together. He is also the hands-down winner of the title "Earth's most liberal pope". I lived through the John XXIII era and it was hard not to like the guy. But Francis can't be seen as only favoring the "liberal pope". Oh, no, no, no. He'd skew left, and he can't have that. So they took some super-glue and attached the evil conservative pope, John Paul II, as a co-winner of the "Yes, You Are a Saint Now" prize. It's a very holy thing. 

But some party poopers are pointing a finger at John Paul and saying he allowed sex abuse to flourish among priests. Tch. Don't they know he's gonna be a saint?! These naysayers ought to mind their manners. But then, the church has the perfect come-back:

At a Vatican news conference on Friday, John Paul’s former spokesman, Joaquín Navarro-Valls, defended the former pope’s record on the response to the sexual abuse scandals and argued that the “purity of his thought” had made it difficult for the pontiff to accept that priests could abuse children. 

So that fixes everything. Thank goodness. But what about the appalling spectacle of popes canonizing popes? Isn't there something...a bit seedy about this?

Despite the excitement among many Catholics, the precedent of canonizing popes worries Professor Duffy and other experts. “Are we going to have every pope canonized now?” he asked, noting that the process is also underway for some other former popes.

No problema. You gotcher good pope (Francis) on yer left, and yer evil pope (Benedict) on yer right, coming together to make saints out of yer good pope (John XXIII) on the left, and yer evil pope (John Paul II) on yer right. It all balances out in a way that leaves everyone in a state of sanctifying grace.

Those Vatican insiders have it all figured out. Enjoy the spectacle, people. And remember: it means absolutely nothing.

Bill Donohue's persistent cluelessness

Of course, y'all know Bill Donohue, NYC's Catholic blowhard who makes believe he's an organization. (Yoohoo, Bill. It's just you. One person does not an organization make.) Bill Donohue hates gays and atheists with a passion. But everything he says on this topic is so flawed, it's funny. For instance, there's this:

"Militant atheists have a new goal: they object to students hearing the name of God in the Pledge of Allegiance. No atheist has to say the Pledge, or utter the dreaded words, “under God”—it is optional—but that is not enough: they want to stop others from saying it."

Uh, no, Bill. You seem to have missed the main issue entirely, as you always do. When atheists complain about their children being forced to say the Pledge of Allegiance with it's recently added inclusion of "under god", they're not trying to "stop others from saying it". Only an unobservant Christian troll would say such a thing.

Religious kids can say "under god" all they want: before school, at recess, in their school's Jesus club (if they have one), after school in a darkened church, at dinner, while sitting next to a burning bush, etc. It's the Christians who are forcing others to say "under god".

Why should this be allowed in a secular school setting? Why do nonbelievers have to say "under god" when they don't believe in god? And even if they don't say it, why on earth do they have to witness your child saying "under god"? Is there some special virtue in your child having the opportunity to say this in front of non-believers? Is it some sort of Christian gang initiation rite?

For poor, stupid Bill Donohue, it's always about the Christians. He doesn't care about anyone else's rights. His main goal in life is to paint a portrait of Christians where they are always under attack (...in our overwhelmingly Christian-dominated country!). See, Bill, it's not an attack on Christians when we say keep your silly fairytales to yourselves and get them out of our secular classrooms. We're trying to stop the Christian attack on nonbelievers from taking place every single day in every classroom that says the Pledge. See how that works?

Bill Donohue adores victimhood -- as long as Christians are the victims. And never mind the facts. Facts just get in the way. Yay, Jeebus! What a fool this Donohue fellow is. They should put his photo in the dictionary next to the word "clueless".

The pseudo-jaded

In the early 1980s, I remember hearing a radio DJ who complained that Joni Mitchell fans never bothered to experience their own lives because they didn't have to -- Joni did it for them. They just appropriated her experiences and felt that they had lived.

I think of that observation when I see today's (allegedly) jaded young people. They think they've seen it all and consciously assume a jaded air. "Been there, done that."

But see, you haven't. You've just seen video of other people living their lives. Kids, I know this will come as a shock but that wasn't you in that video. I know you sincerely think it was, but you're wrong.

Go live your own life. You'd be surprised by how refreshing this experience can be.

Jaded, my ass.