There are better fates than this


What if Stan Lee worked for Chick Publications? You’d get apocalyptic tracts with giant planet-eating space men.

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(via Pen-Elayne)


This is all you’re getting from me for a while. I just finished a 9 hour long meeting (freaking uncivilized, if you ask me), and next I have to go attend some god-awful Christian propaganda — my daughter is the stage manager for the high school production of “Joseph and the Technicolor Dreamcoat”, so I have to go — and I suspect my day is going to continue its trend of ongoing frustration and exasperation. It is in my best interests to avoid further posting to the web until the demons fade away.

I just hope I don’t rise up in the middle of this play, barking and howling in tongues, with my head spinning around on my neck. It could happen.

Please, Galactus, come eat me now.

Comments

  1. T. Bruce McNeely says

    Meetings are proof that the Devil exists and wants to TORMENT YOUR SOUL!!!!!
    Re: Joseph – it’s a legend. Like Cinderella.

  2. Xocolotl says

    Ah, you haven’t seen it before? Only one song even reference a god and it’s a bit indirect. The whole play is about taking advantage of incredibly good opportunities. Joseph isn’t the Beloved Of God so much as a lucky little bastard.

  3. MikeQ says

    You know, I went to Catholic grammar school, and Joseph was one of the favorites for the Christmas concert. I must say that my mom probably saw that show 10 times between my brother and my sister and I.

    So at least you don’t have to watch it ten times. And it’s a high school production, so it will suck, but slightly less so.

    But it WILL suck, make no mistake. And, being a high school production, they may do more than one show. Feign illness and stay home.

  4. quork says

    my daughter is the stage manager for the high school production of “Joseph and the Technicolor Dreamcoat”,

    Huh? I thought she was in college now.

  5. says

    She’s doing a dual enrollment thing, quork.

    PZ, you being there probably means more to here than you realise or she’d ever tell you. I was talking to her about it earlier.

  6. ERV says

    LOL
    As a fan of musical theatre, you have my sympathy PZ. ANY Andrew Lloyd Webber show would make me beg for a giant space man to eat me.

    However, my parents sat through my 5th grade orchestra concerts (oh and we had LOTS of concerts). Youve got it relatively easy.

  7. says

    Actually, the high school plays here in Morris are amazing: they put a lot of effort into them, and the kids always do a good job. I am not a fan of ALW, though, and it’s got the religious angle (this one brought out the church ladies, and the director is one of the local Lutheran ministers), and seriously…it’s a story about fratricidal, slaving barbarians and a man who gets rich by fortune telling charlatanry, and those are the good guys.

    I’d just like to see the talents of the kids used for good, rather than mediocrity.

  8. Markus says

    Wow. Just a few days ago I was describing the Marvel Universe and Galactus to her. I guess you can now refer to me as Prophet.

  9. idlemind says

    You know, the artwork in the parody was far too good for a Chick pamphlet. There is an actual depiction of motion, and the people actually have realistic facial expressions.

    As for JATTDC, it’s “secular Christianity.” Just like Christmas itself. It makes actually devout Christians uneasy…

  10. says

    Joseph and his coat of many colors is an Old Testament story, so how Christian can it be? (At least it’s not Jesus Christ, Superstar.)

  11. says

    It’s not polite to visit a blog and tell the blogger he should shut up.

    Feel free to go away, Mr. Person.

    Go easy on the guy. He’s just upset because his first name is “Generic.”

  12. Interrobang says

    The version of the story of Joseph was a lot more interesting in my Hebrew textbook than the one cobbled up by The Fart Who Occasionally Composes (thank you Spitting Images). I’m sorry you have to sit through it; at least for me, show tunes give me hives.

  13. Fernando Magyar says

    Hey Mr. Person,

    It’s 5:30 AM and I’m going to see the sunrise on the ocean off of Hollywood beach Florida on my Kayak with my friends and my kid… Just wanted to let you know! I hope you get to go listen to some nice Christian sermon to cheer you up. Have a great day!

  14. complex_field says

    “…it’s a story about fratricidal, slaving barbarians and a man who gets rich by fortune telling charlatanry, and those are the good guys….”

    Sounds alot like a certain American president and his sycophants.

  15. says

    You’re considering that particularly hedonistic, godless play a tract for religion!?

    Depressingly, the church of my youth encountered me with a Joseph tape in my bag, then the principle proceeded to batter me with how sinful it was because of its Rock And Roll Musics and its DISRESPECTFUL and SHAMEFUL treatment of the BIBLE until I, nine years old at the time, was in tears.

    Shame, the music’s pretty natty.

  16. says

    “Depressingly, the church of my youth encountered me with a Joseph tape in my bag, then the principle proceeded to batter me with how sinful it was because of its Rock And Roll Musics and its DISRESPECTFUL and SHAMEFUL treatment of the BIBLE until I, nine years old at the time, was in tears.”

    I learned that because of some made up element, called the “anapestic beat” all rock music no matter what the words are, is the Devil’s little tool to weaken your spirit and give him inroads into destroying your soul. Supposedly, the anapestic beat has a rhythym that disrupts your heartbeat and makes you weak. Here is a discussion of the anapestic beat from an apologetics site.

    http://tinyurl.com/wdj35

    Sounds like pseudoscience to me, but I could be wrong.

  17. llewelly says

    More fun from the same site, including:

    And, finally, Frank Zappa of the Mothers of Invention put it very plainly, “Rock music is sex. The big beat matches the body’s rhythms.”

    After all these years, Zappa is still laughing at them. (Despite being dead, and perhaps never having said that.)

  18. says

    Yes, it’s all about religion. Not directly, but it’s part of the propaganda process of persuading kids that gods are cool.

    My daughter says that next year they’re considering putting on “Godspell”.

    It’s all shallow, unthinking schlock. It’s also teaching them that religion is stupid, and I could go with it except that at the same time they’re trying to make the kids stupid to match.

  19. says

    I live in a mostly insignificant midwest town that just happens to have what might be the best high school musical theater program in the country and perhaps the world. My daughter was in the program for 4 years and during that time Godspell and JC Superstar were both done. For the kids, it’s all about the performance. As far as the religiosity of it is concerned, the fundies didn’t like either because they saw both as blasphemous. These are fables, nothing more, and most of the kids (and audiences)understand that. The ones who don’t understand it are extremists of some sort, and should be disregarded. In this case, the medium is the message.

  20. J. J. Ramsey says

    My daughter says that next year they’re considering putting on ‘Godspell’.

    It’s all shallow, unthinking schlock. It’s also teaching them that religion is stupid, and I could go with it except that at the same time they’re trying to make the kids stupid to match.

    Um, you do know that in Godspell, there’s no resurrection, right? Actually, the same is true for Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Jesus Christ Superstar. At the end, there’s a song-and-dance routine (with Judas no less!) asking questions like:

    “Now why’d you choose such a backward time?
    And such a strange land?

    “If you’d come today
    You could have reached the whole nation
    Israel in 4 BC had no mass communication”

    Sheesh. Andrew Lloyd Webber simply used the Bible as a source for interesting stories that were out of copyright. Walt Disney did the same with fairy tales like “Snow White.” [Insert obvious joke about the Bible and fairy tales here.] Weber is no more trying to get people to believe in God than Disney was trying to get people to believe in fairies.

  21. minimalist says

    PZ, this *blasphemy* you are promulgating is just beyind the line. Shameful, utterly shameful and profane.

    Stan Lee had nothing to do with Galactus; it was all Jack Kirby, brother!

    Stan Lee was just a relentlessly self-promoting showman who filled in the word bubbles with “hep” “jive” lingo.

    Jack “King” Kirby was the artistic madman with a thing for creating entire pantheons of bizarre space gods for the Age of Science. Galactus, Celestials, New Gods, the list goes on.

    Get it right, or we comic nerds will have to burn you at the stake!

  22. Sea Creature says

    PZ, got to say, you may be getting your knickers in a twist unnecessarily. As an atheist who was raised catholic (12 years of catholic school no less!) I say enjoy the mythology.
    We sang the Godspell songs at mass in the 70s when I was in catholic grade school. The grooviness of “Day by Day” still makes me giggle, especially when accompanied by memories of the folk mass choir clapping and swaying like a bunch of tripped out Deadheads. However, Mary Magdalene singing, “I don’t know how to love him” in JCS still makes me gag.

  23. khan says

    However, Mary Magdalene singing, “I don’t know how to love him” in JCS still makes me gag.

    Back in the ’60s, I heard that song played at a wedding as the bride walked down the aisle.

    “I’ve had so many men before”

  24. Kida says

    I’m laughing so hard. I was in said play, the exact one PZ went to, and Saktje was the lighting designer for, not the stage manajer, the stage manajor was a much crabbier girlfriend of one of the main characters.
    The pastor is not directing next year’s musical, it will be the high school’s drama teacher, and he’s thinking of doing “Bye Bye Birdie.”
    The only obvious religion that came out in the play was in the casting, I don’t think it was a coincidence all the main characters go to the director’s church.

  25. says

    From that Christian rock site:

    “If you absolutely are still convinced that “rock music is sex” or the beat causes sexual stimulation, why am I not affected? When I hear Christian rock music, I enjoy it stylistically, but have no sexual stimulation whatsoever. ZERO! Sexual stimulation by anything or anybody other than my wife is a SIN – one that I flee from. You will find no sexually explicit books or videos in my home. If I accidentally surf to a web site that has an inappropriate graphic, I immediately hit the “close” icon and take the time to purge the image out of my browser’s cache. Are any of you critics that thorough? It should be crystal clear to even the harshest critic that I am SERIOUS about sexual purity in my home and my life. IF there were any trace of sexual stimulation in the music, I would publically agree with you. But – there is not.”

    Holy fucking shit. These guys can’t even get a boner without collapsing in shame.

  26. says

    Sheesh. Andrew Lloyd Webber simply used the Bible as a source for interesting stories that were out of copyright.

    It’s a shame he also found it necessary to do that with his music, too. One of the interesting things about going to La fanciulla del West is the fact that there’s always someone there who has never heard Puccini’s opera, but has heard “Music of the Night” or the whole of The Phantom of the Opera, and when it comes to the second act duet between Minnie and Ramierez it’s always fun to watch them look with initial puzzlement, then consternation that they’ve been had by a hack whose compositional talent is that of a classical music DJ.

    Needless to say, I pity PZ in his predicament, no matter how professional the production may turn out to be.

  27. says

    Correction to what Kida said: I helped with lighting design, but credit goes to the technical director. He did the bulk of the work. Stage manager’s job is to call cues and run the show. I was doing this from the booth. In the program I was among like five people to be listed as “Sound board/light board” because we all switched our roles around. I was originally going to be lighting designer, and Zach as stage manager. But Zach was irresponsible, so Dave made me call the show instead.

    And I don’t think you should be criticising the director for casting people that go to his church. New Wine is a theatre thing, thus people in New Wine have more experience in theatre. It makes sense if you’re not someone who’s been quoted as saying “That should be me.” in reference to the narrators. :o/