Friday Fiver: What I am to you is not real

In the interest of a weekly post I present to you the most disappointing Friday Fiver since the creation of fire.

1. Age?
36, although the AARP is sure I've got at least 30 years on that number. For you longtime readers, yes, they're still sending me mail.

2. Sex?
Male. I think I'm actually supposed to be cute here and say something like, "Yes, please!" or "Only if you bring the soy sauce!" Fuck that--I'll do you one better and take us into the very depths of black comedy: "Okay, but this time I get to strangle the hooker!"

3. Location?
Barre, VT. We're the granite capital of the world. Yep. When you die, there's a good chance your headstone will be made of granite from the town I live in. On a slow summer night you can sometimes smell the granite sheds...ahh.

4. Single?
Maddied.
Ya, maddied!
Jeesh!



5. How long have you been doing the Friday Fiver?
Long enough to know that this week sucks! My friend the Quartermaster pointed out in her blog that this week's Friday Fiver is really pathetic, and that most of the questions are already answered in people's bios. Instead of slogging masochisticly through five throw-away questions she wrote her own. Of course, she was too lazy to answer her own questions, but I'm hoping that with a little peer pressure she'll step up to her own microscope. I answered her questions in the comments section of her post, and I encourage you to do the same. Support disgruntled Friday Fiver participants! Viva la resistance!

Friday Fiver: Sam I Am

Remember the announcer in the club in Purple Rain? "Ladies and gentlemen...the Friday Fiver."

1. What do you normally eat for breakfast?
Brains! No, really it's usually either cereal or wheat toast, sometimes with all-natural peanut butter, sometimes with fake butter. I'm trying to get more fiber in my diet (Remember the SNL skit about Colon Blow cereal?), so the cereal I eat tends to be the high fiber "My grandfather ate that." kind of cereal. I've found that Fiber One with the little honey cluster things has the best balance of high fiber, low sugar, and lack of a certain cardboard-like quality. It's actually decent stuff. Quaker Corn Bran tastes better and is decently low in sugar but doesn't have as much fiber. That's my "junk food" cereal. The past couple mornings the kids have been enjoying Pirates of the Caribbean cereal. It's nothing more than rebranded Cocoa Puffs with "pirate-shaped" marshmallows in it. Somebody should really blow the whistle on the lack of originality in movie tie-in breakfast cereal. It's pretty tasty, though.

2. Are you more likely to drink coffee or tea?
I'm more likely to drink tea. I only like coffee when it has an absurd amount of sugar in it, like the amount you'd put in someone's coffee as a practical joke. I'm diabetic, so that pretty much rules out coffee for me. I've found that I don't mind herbal tea sweetened with Splenda, so I drink that occasionally. The days of me starting off most M-F mornings with a 20 oz. Dunkin Donuts French vanilla capuccino are dead and gone. Better them than me.

3. Would you consider yourself a good cook?
Sweet fucking Christ, NO! Like Charlie Brown, all I can make is cold cereal and maybe toast. Actually, I can also follow simple directions for the preparation of canned soups and boxed pastas. And frozen foods. My wife would argue that I make great baked potatoes, but really it's all in selecting the right potatoes. Any asshole can wrap 'em in tinfoil and stick 'em in the oven for an hour. And that asshole is me.

4. What is your favorite meal?
Thanksgiving! That's the best meal of the year, as far as I'm concerned. The turkey, the gravy, the potatoes, more gravy, rolls, gravy, corn, cranberry sauce, pumpkin pie, and wash it all down with a shot of hot gravy! Then a nice refreshing 12-hour food coma.

5. Green eggs and ham: would you eat it?
Since my pre-school years I've been fascinated by artificial food coloring, so I'd have to say yes, as long as the eggs were prepared to my liking, scrambled, maybe with a little green cheddar mixed in. I would also eat blue Canadian baccon and hash browns, or orange sausage gravy and biscuits. No more brown pancakes, though. I tried those once at IHOP, and it was one of the worst dining experiences of my life. Do not eat at IHOP.

Jesus thinks you're a jerk!

I've never been a religious person. Even as a kid, I never felt comfortable with it. As an adult my main problem with religion (apart from the fact that I don't particularly believe in divinity) is that when I look at the beliefs of various religions I don't see God handing down the rules of how to live a just and good life; what I see is men establishing a complex system of control over other men. Women too--I don't mean to be sexist. As women know, the Catholic church values your uterus so much that you'd think you're renting the thing from the Pope. ("Um, how do I get rid of an unwanted tennant?" "Sorry, that violates your lease. Don't forget to bring the little nipper up Catholic, otherwise it's the burning sulfur pits for both of you! Have a nice day!") So if I live my life without hurting other people, do my best to help people out in time of need, and raise children to be responsible and considerate adults I'm still gonna go to hell because I didn't go to church? (No, no, no, not THAT church! THIS church! Cripes, almost made The Big Mistake there, buddy!) Sorry, I don't buy it. Over the past 15 years I've learned quite a bit about predatory and manipulative behavior. Sometimes you've just got to hold your chin in your hand for a few minutes and think to yourself, "Well, if it looks like snake oil, smells like snake oil, tastes like snake oil..."

It may sound inhumane, but many years ago I stopped feeling much of anything when I hear about violence in the Middle East. There are two reasons for this: the violence is caused by religious fanaticism, and it happens every fucking day. To me (and I'll freely admit that this is due in part to me being an American sitting in comparitive luxury half the globe away) a car bomb killing 10 people in the Gaza Strip is about as newsworthy as turning on the TV and seeing, "This just in: a man was mugged in New York City today. We'll have the details at 11:00." If you knew two people who did nothing day in and day out for years but slug each other in the head with lead pipes, how long would it take you to stop asking them if they want to play Parchisi with you? If it were up to me, I'd have a sturdy and tall wall build around the region and tell the occupants, "Okay, the rest of us are tired of watching this shit. When you've settled your differences and can play nicely with the rest of us, give this gate a good solid knock. Oh, and if you settle your religious differences but still want a reason to kill each other, try crack." Actually, I think we would've done this already were it not for the fact that we like to drive our cars.

But I'm not here to talk about that. I'm here to wave Pat Robertson around on the end of a stick and say, "Here, kids: this is what a dangerous pea-brained idiot looks like. Don't let 'em getcha!"

Most of you are probably aware that Israel's Prime Minister Ariel Sharon suffered a major stroke recently and is in pretty sad shape. I know nothing of the man personally and little of his politics, but I don't require a lot of knowledge or common ground to feel sorry for someone in that condition. In a way that makes me more Christian than...oh, I don't know...say, Pat Robertson. Pat used the illness of a world leader as an oppurtunity to remind everyone of his personal relationship with God, declaring that the stroke was divine retribution for "dividing God's land."

Oh, Pat, you slimy, self-promoting little pimp of a man. Shame on you!

Whether or not you agree with the religious viewpoint of his comment, you have to admit that's a damn foul thing to say about anybody dying in a hospital bed. Furthermore, it's inaccurate. After all, if that's the sort of thing you believe in, isn't it all God's land? I think He's got dibs on the water and the sky, too. Better check on that.

But it's all okay. Pat's done the right thing. He apologized to Sharon's family with a letter that said, in part, "My zeal, my love of Israel and my concern for the future safety of your nation led me to make remarks which I can now view in retrospect as innapropriate and insensitive..." He went on to refer to Prime Minister Sharon as "a kind, gracious and gentle man." Golly, you can almost wipe the sincerity from Pat's chin, huh? He's so fucking slick he should run for President...oops! So how does a man go from warranting divine retribution to being kind, gracious, and gentle in the span of a day or two while lying in a hospital bed? There must be a reason for Pat's--ergo God's--change of heart. There is.

Actually, there are fifty million reasons.

You see, before Pat shot off that adder-like mouth of his Israel had agreed to donate some land along the Sea of Galilee (you know, where Puff the magic dragon lives) for the building of a $50,000,000 Christian heritage site. (No, I don't know quite what that means either. Sounds like a boring version of Disneyland with no acid or looking up Snow White's skirt. I mean really, what's the point?) Pat was leading the group of evangelicals (a frightening word--note that it begins with an abbreviation for "evil angel"...Hmmm...) planning the whole clubhouse project with Israel. When Pat opened his mouth and inserted a deity-sized foot the Israeli tourism ministry's response was to announce that they would hapilly proceed with the project without Pat's involvement, seeing as how he's such a douchebag. (I'm paraphrasing.) Now, I don't credit Pat Robertson with an overabundance of intillect, but if there's one thing he knows, it's money. $50,000,000 is a big pot to skim from, and if he's not part of it, no part of it's for him. It's sad, folks, but this is what being a religious leader in America has come down to. After all, you're only as holy as last year's tax deferment. A slice of $50,000,000 pie makes Pat's tongue a little sweeter. When he lets that slip his mind he sounds more like this:

"Woe unto any prime minister of Israel who takes a similar course to appease the EU, the United Nations, or the United States of America. God says, 'This land belongs to Me, and you'd better leave it alone.'"
--Pat Robertson, 700 Club broadcast, referring to Sharon's dismantling of Israeli settlements in Gaza

I'm no religious scholar, but isn't there something in the Bible about a beast with two faces? If so, I'm pretty sure it wasn't a reference to Jesus, Lance Armstrong, or Kermit the Frog. I think there was something sinister implied.

Folks, I respect your religious beliefs, as long as you respect my lack of them. However, I find it hard to respect anyone who watches televangelists like Pat Robertson behave the way they do and continue to send belief and money their way. If any of you are reading (hard to believe, but you never know), please refer back to my previous snake oil comment.

I don't pretend to know what happens to any of us once our last breath has been issued. Heaven, hell, Valhalla, worms, reincarnation as Drew Barrymore's favorite sex toy...I've got no clue, though the Drew Barrymore thing sounds like a nice idea. However, I've sat on this little blue-green ball and watched it make 36 trips around our sun, and in that time I've learned a few basic truths:

1. Any religion that advertizes in Popular Mechanics is not a real religion. (Thank you, Woody Allen.)
2. Never pass up an opportunity to take a piss. (Thank you, Dudley Moore.)
3. Anyone who tells you Linkin Park is metal is either kidding, lying, weak, or too stupid to know better.
4. Freedom is just another word for "nothing left to lose."
5. Robert Loggia can bellow "motherfucker" better than anyone who has ever lived.
6. Anyone who mentions your soul and your wallet in the same sentence is not really thinking about your soul.

Robertson says that he's The One
Oh, he sure is, if Armageddon
Is your idea of family fun
An' he's got some planned for you!
(Now, tell me that ain't true)

With a Ku-Klux muu-muu
In the back of the truck
If you ain't Born Again
They wanna mess you up
Screamin', "No abortion, no-siree!"
"Life's too precious, can't you see?!"
What's that hangin' from the neighbor's tree?
Why, it looks like 'colored folks' to me
Would they do that?
(They've been doing it for years)
Seriously?

Imagine if you will,
A multi-millionaire television evangelist
Saved from Korean combat duty by his father, a US senator
Studied law --
But is not qualified to practice it
Father of a "love child"
Who, in adulthood, hosts the remnants
Of Papa's religious propoganda program
Claims NOT to be a "faith healer"
But has, in the past,
Dealt sternly with everything from hemorrhoids to hurricanes
Involved with funding for a 'secret war' in Central America,
Claiming Ronald Reagan and Oliver North as close friends
Involved in suspicious tax-avoidance schemes
(Under investigation for 16 months by the IRS)
Claims to be a man of God;
Currently seeking the United States Presidency,
Hoping we will all follow him...into...
The Twilight Zone
--Frank Zappa, selections from "Jesus Thinks You're a Jerk"