The Lady or the Tiger

I confess I’ve been watching more TV than I have in a long time, and now I remember why I stopped.  It’s making me lose faith in humanity.

My most immediate frustration is with the whole Tiger Woods ridiculosity.  As soon as the story starts to lose a little traction, we’re given a new set of pundits trying to deconstruct all the religious implications: would he have fallen to this level of licentiousness if he were a Christian?  [Answer: Ted Haggard, Jim Bakker, Thomas Weeks, Michael Reid, Jimmy Swaggert, Tony Alamo, Father James Porter and his merry band of pedophiles; it’s a long, illustrious list, people.] We all know Woods’ philandering has nothing to do with Buddha or even some ersatz sex addiction for Dr. Drew to fix up. It’s all thanks to our own over-indulgent star-maker machinery chugging out trash by the bucketful.  Read the rest of this entry »

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Great Yeastery

I love good food.  I love to cook and am pretty good at it.  But I’ve always been afraid of baking bread.

First of all, the nature of yeast is confounding.  Animal?  Vegetable?  Sea monkey?  We didn’t do much real baking at our house, so the yeast packets were written in Aramaic.  This should’ve been the first indicator of death, but who thinks about little grains of stinky sand as being alive in the first place?  Even if the leavening was hale and hearty, I worried about the exact temperature of lukewarm.  FYI, there is no ‘lukewarm’ indicator on a baby thermometer, which was older than me and probably didn’t work anyway.  Proofing?  Strange little verb.  Chances are, I either cooked the rascals before they could start farting into my dough, or froze their non-existent nuts off.

Since the yeast was probably DOA, there was little rising and no real ‘punching down’ to be done.  Kneading was a fun activity but I had no idea what should be happening or what to look for.  No matter what I tried, every attempt came out like a lump of dysmorphic building material.  Even the frozen dumbshit-proof Rhodes bread would break any plate or knife unlucky enough to wander into its gravitational pull.  I was panne morte.  Bread Dead.

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Me, James Erb, and the nature of God

I spent most of my formative years as an active churchgoer.  Then I pedaled off to college and was asked to challenge everything I knew to be true.  In that process and in learning more about the many horrors we’ve committed in the name of faith, I lost mine.  Not just because of the grandwizardmagicsantaclaus absurdity of it.  Heck, two hundred years ago folks would have thought a trip to the moon was equally absurd.  Nope, I lost my faith when I realized that religion is a purely human construct.  It’s one more tool that the powerful have devised to control the unwashed masses.  The corrupt prey on fear – fear of loneliness, of rejection, of the unknown.  Because fear, if properly sown, can work to the benefit of those controlling the story.  Scare the crap out of people and they’ll give you their last dime to keep the door bolted behind them.  It’s the worst possible chicanery and it infuriates me.  But that’s WAY off the point.

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Snob Robbery, or The Reckless Elitist

Right when we should have been concentrating on the healthcare reform discussion, along comes Officer Krupke and a strange case of life immitating art.

Well I suppose ‘art’ is a little generous, but there was an interesting movie released several years ago starring one of my favorite actors of all time, Samuel L. Jackson.  I can’t think of another actor who can go so seamlessly from badass roughian  (Jackie Brown, Pulp Fiction) to gentle sophisticate (The Red Violin).  We got to see the softer Sam in 1993’s “Amos & Andrew” where he played Andrew Sterling, a successful black urbanite writer who buys a vacation home in a small New England resort town.  One night, the local constabulary mistakes him for a burglar.  Fortunately, the cop in the movie had slightly more sense than the one who confronted Professor Gates.  The movie cop knew exactly what kind of mess he’d just made. Read the rest of this entry »

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Jesus Neutron

Is there a more absurd way to spend a Wednesday morning than in pondering the nature of God and religion?  I pulled into my driveway yesterday afternoon and saw some piece of silliness hanging from my front door knob.  Typically coming and going through the back door, I recalled the flotsam this morning and went to investigate. 

It was an intricately die-cut door hanger sporting a crazy cartoon test tube with goony glasses and a jet pack inexplicably spewing pink bubbles all over saying, “Calling All Funologists!” I immediately licked my mental thumb and started working through the calendar wondering if one of my nephews was having some party or event I’d forgotten about.  Nope.  Then I noticed what looked like a logo tucked in the lower right corner.  This event was being put on by something called Group’s Power Lab.  There, in 10-point Comic Sans nestled below the company name and inside a Jimmy Neutron-style cartoon molecule, was the real meat of the thing: “Discovering Jesus’ Miraculous Power.”  Did our favorite Jewish carpenter load all of his magic into a pink cartoon jet pack?  I would have been less surprised to see Him as Felix the Cat, (“…Whenever He gets in a fix He reaches into His bag of tricks!”). Read the rest of this entry »

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Why I Hate Columbia House

There’s no good reason in the world to expect a profit-driven company to send you a bunch of free stuff without attaching little strings to every item. Such is the paradigm vortex in which I find myself tonight.

Because I have a life, a career, and a social calendar… Because I see no particular need to set my clock to that of a major entertainment distributorship… Because there are so many more important choices to make every day when I roll out of bed, the very last thing on my mind is to tell Columbia House not to send me their absurd “Director’s Selection” every month. Read the rest of this entry »

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