Signs of the Times, Offline Edition

Over at The Onion AV Club, they're making pop-culture resolutions. Interesting: several resolve to spend more team reading, you know, books, and two of them actually resolve to spend less time online.

Take that, machines (he blogged).

Irish

So on Christmas Eve, I played "Fairytale of New York" for my mother. Then I played it for her again. There was a lot to do, but to my surprise, she stayed put.

"What are you doin', Ma?" I asked about halfway through the second listen.

"Dreaming."

I coulda been someone/Well, so could anyone...

Close Together, Worlds Apart

Carrying my eight-month-old down through the yard to check the coop for eggs, I hear the voice over the megaphone from the helicopter circling overhead, telling me to call 911 if I see a black man with cornrows in a Raiders jacket and black pants.

UGH.

I just received a stern NPR lecture on the American fascination with irrelevant, sensationalistic "news" from the head writer for The Wanda Sykes Show. Special scorn was heaped on the furor over Tiger Woods. Over on the show's website, two of the three featured video extras concern, yes, that's right, Tiger Woods. The other: former porn star Jenna Jameson. Buh-bye, 2009.

Ugh.

Pre-emptive request: please don't anyone refer to 2010-2012 as the tweens. Kthxbai!

Mr. Godsbody's More Recent Finest Hour

Christmas Eve, 2009

I wrote a story!

Me and another guy go back and forth a bit about Ye Olde Christmas Spirit. Good times. And a bonus DFW reference at the end!

Mr. Godsbody's Finest Hour

Youth. Giant hair. A full bottle of wine in a single glass. They were heady days. If I ever get around to writing a book on wine, I want this for an author photo. Thanks to Smokee for the image.

Winner, winner, Christmas Dinner

Yeah, I know food photography is tricky, and can often look less than awesome. Don't care. Tenderloin, tarragon-shallot reduction, creamed spinach with deep-friend shallots, lemon roasted potatoes. So very happy. Thanks to Danielle for the pic!

Creation

I think David Edelstein is a really smart guy. But I think he's wrong to say this about James Cameron: "In Avatar, he’s king of a world he made from scratch."

From scratch? No. The man spent a lot of years underwater, and hauled a lot of things - intense colors, iridescence, bioluminescence, tentacles, etc. - out of the deep and onto dry land (and into the air). After that, he slapped on a lot of extra legs and wings.

It's amazing to look at, yes. Really amazing. And the anti-gravity mountains are flat-out stunning. But it's not a world made from scratch. That's been done. Cameron is just reassembling the pieces.

Question for Mr. Cameron

Why would you send in a ground force to support an airstrike? Isn't it usually the other way 'round?

No God But Nature?

I think Ross Douthat is a really smart guy. But I think he's wrong to say that James Carmeron's Avatar equates God with Nature. Douthat writes:

"At the same time, pantheism opens a path to numinous experience for people uncomfortable with the literal-mindedness of the monotheistic religions — with their miracle-working deities and holy books, their virgin births and resurrected bodies. As the Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski noted, attributing divinity to the natural world helps 'bring God closer to human experience,' while 'depriving him of recognizable personal traits.' For anyone who pines for transcendence but recoils at the idea of a demanding Almighty who interferes in human affairs, this is an ideal combination."

But while Eywa, the Na'vi goddess, may live in the organic Internet of Pandora's tree roots, the film makes it very, very clear that she can be prayed to, that she can hear prayers, and that she can bend the natural world to her will. She absolutely interferes in human affairs.

Further, Douthat writes: "But except as dust and ashes, Nature cannot take us back."

Maybe so. But in Avatar, the dead live on - Jake hears their voices when he logs in to the soul tree. And if voices, then intelligence, person. Individual existence that endures. In this, the film does contradict itself a bit - we get an earlier line about how all energy is borrowed, and eventually, we have to give it back. But there is supernatural life in Avatar.

Oh, and this is a very good review of the film.

The Onion: Superfluous

Just saw this headline in the video section of the New York Times: "Obama Accepts Nobel Peace Prize: Acknowledges Tension Between War and Peace."

The rest is silence.

I wrote still yet another story!

Religion, America, etc. Glenn Beck's The Christmas Sweater: A Return to Redemption.

Gopnik on Lewis, Part One

So Adam Gopnik wrote an essay on C.S. Lewis for The New Yorker about four years back, and in true Godsbody tradition (Yesterday's News Today!), we're just getting to it now. Of course, we're not going to tackle the whole piece at once - who has time to read anything that long any more? Instead, we'll just offer piecemeal comments here and there over the next little while. Cheers!

Gopnik:

"Yet a central point of the Gospel story is that Jesus is not the lion of the faith but the lamb of God, while his other symbolic animal is, specifically, the lowly and bedraggled donkey. The moral force of the Christian story is that the lions are all on the other side. If we had, say, a donkey, a seemingly uninspiring animal from an obscure corner of Narnia, raised as an uncouth and low-caste beast of burden, rallying the mice and rats and weasels and vultures and all the other unclean animals, and then being killed by the lions in as humiliating a manner as possible—a donkey who reëmerges, to the shock even of his disciples and devotees, as the king of all creation—now, that would be a Christian allegory. A powerful lion, starting life at the top of the food chain, adored by all his subjects and filled with temporal power, killed by a despised evil witch for his power and then reborn to rule, is a Mithraic, not a Christian, myth."

Really? Gopnik's version would be a fine allegory of Christianity seen, as it were, from the outside - the wondering world marveling that this odd little tribe could provide the seeds of a new dominant paradigm. But if we're talking about what Christians think really happened with the Incarnation, then Aslan sort of has to be a lion - God Himself come down to earth, yes? And even so, his account of the "Mithraic, not Christian" myth doesn't quite tell the whole story. What makes Aslan a Christ figure is that he not only descends to earth and walks among us, but also that he strips himself of power and delivers himself over to his enemy, out of love for one who betrayed him. That's the moral force of the story.

This is not a particularly clever or subtle observation, but that's precisely my point. It feels a little like Gopnik is twisting the text a bit to fit his larger point. (And what is his larger point? I'm afraid you'll have to go read the thing to find out.)

I wrote still another story!

In which the atheists have their say. The comments thread is off the hook, as the kids used to say.

Ah, swine flu. Or, maybe not. Maybe just regular flu. Either way, I’m not going to church today. It’s as good a time as any to spend some time with the Other Side, the crowd that doesn’t do church because they don’t believe in God. Or rather, they don’t do the part of church that involves worshipping a personal deity. The rest of it, I found, they might be okay with...

I wrote another story!

December 2, 2007: During his radio broadcast of the San Diego Chargers’ victory over the Kansas City Chiefs, announcer Hank Bauer gave a shout-out to Charger fan Alfred Silva, who was battling cancer. (Silva’s brother-in-law Jim Muse Jr. golfed with Bauer and had put in the request.)

By March of 2008, Silva had succumbed. But when he was laid to rest at Singing Hills, it was in a powder blue coffin trimmed with gold — Charger colors. His body was dressed in a jersey honoring his favorite player, Lance Alworth. (Not, however, the jersey that Alworth signed for Silva with his old Bambi nickname; that one still hangs, under glass, on the wall in the Silva home.) On his feet, his Charger shoes; on his head, his Charger hat. “It was awesome,” recalled his son Armando during a recent tailgate party in the Qualcomm Stadium parking lot. “He was ready to go up and watch some more football.”

I wrote a story!

[Scroll down - they stuck me at the kiddie table - er, the very end - this year.]

What Have You Done for Me Lately?

“How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is, to have a thankless child.”

— King Lear

Perhaps Shakespeare should have rendered that bit about the serpent as “How common as a horse’s hoof” or some such. Children, in my experience, are not naturally grateful. They regard whatever blessings they receive as the normal course of events. You have to train them to say “Thank you,” and even then, there is a sad tendency to forget the blessing even as the words hang in the air, to move on to What’s Next. You have to threaten them with unspeakable horrors to get them to write thank-you notes. And no power on earth can make them grateful for food they don’t like, no matter how many starving Africans you may be tempted to invoke...