Golden Ticket

I never thought my life could be...
Anything but catasophe..
But suddenly I begin to see..
A bit of good luck for me.
'Cause I've a golden ticket...
I've got a golden twinkle in my eye...

It's Monday, and although people are whining about how they hate Mondays, I'm a good mood. A great one, even. There's no real reason why, but I scarcely need one. The weekend was fairly uneventful. I had planned on doing something productive, but I didn't. Imagine that! I can't actually think of what I WAS doing during the weekend, outside of reading a biography of Carl Saga and binging on The Office and Monty Python's Flying Circus. That would explain my utter lack of productivity.

Yesterday I met a grotesque little animal I named "Mr. Grotesque". Mr. Grotesque is a spider, although he's not any ordinary kind of spider. While other spiders are basically a little orb with eight legs, this guy was built like a tank. I would expect to find him in Shredder's Technodrome. If I wanted to built a very large robot that terrorized people with its looks, I would build this guy. Intrigued by the thing, I stopped to look at it. It didn't look very much like a spider, but there it was sitting in the middle of this web.

http://www.whatsthatbug.com/images/g_cancriformis.jpg

That is not the spider I saw, but it's similar. One half of it was like that -- but the spikes were black. The other half of the spider was rather dull black. Anyway, from the side the thing looked amazing, like some mechanical horror. I spent a good bit of yesterday staring at the thing. Occassionally the wind would blow and the Mr. Grotesque would go right back to building his web. Most of the webs he built were triangles. I got to see some little bugs all wrapped up in the spider's silk, but sadly didn't see any of them actually fly in. One of my friends took a picture of the little beastie. If he uploads it, I will share it (with his permission).

On a minor note, this morning I used a brochure a friend sent me as a bookmark. The brochure is a map of "Cape Disapointment" in Oregon. Imagined interview with whoever named that:

Me: So, er, why'd you name the place "Cape Disapointment"?
Director: Well, you know, every summer we get this great horde of surbanites who want to experience the 'great outdoors'. Well, what they find is that the great outdoors is full of skunks and bugs and rocks in the ground that annoy you when you're trying to sleep. They've a tendency to complain. So we named the place that way to ward off those people. If anyone complains about their experience, we say "Well, we warned you!".


Lastly, last night I watched Dogma for the first time. I saw a scene from it on YouTube that intrigued me, so I decided to take a look. I was sold on the idea when I saw that Alan Rickman was in it. The film is about two fallen angels named Bartleby and Loki who want to go home. They were banished from Heaven after Bartleby convinced the death angel Loki to resign his post as Genocidal Maniac. God, angry at not having been given a proper two weeks' notice, expelled them both to Earth. Why is it we get all that guy's rejects? Why does he send ALL of his fallen angels here? Why not Mars?

Well, these two guys -- played by Ben Affleck and Matt Damon -- find a way to get themselves forgiven and back home. The problem is that if they exploit this loophole, existence will cease to exist, because all of it is built on the assumption that God is infallible -- and if they prove that he isn't, well. God can't do anything to stop these two because he's tied up, so his angels and a human servant are trying to stop the two angels before they muck everything up. Satan is also trying to stop the two, because in spite of the whole "In Hell" thing, he still fancies getting out and taking on a being of infinite power and infinite knowledge and winning. This guy isn't all that bright, clearly, but then again he used to be God's chief worshipper, so there you are.
Behind this scheme is another fallen angel named Azrael, who tried to play both sides and wound up in Hell with Satan. He wants to terminate all of existence because life in Hell isn't pleasant.

The film was funny, although not as irreverent as I'd been led to believe. It ended like a Joan of Arc episode. While the film did entertain me, it mostly reminded me one of one of the biggest reasons I couldn't take religion seriously: it was such a story. God creates everything; his angels rebel against him, so he creates humanity and gives us a choice. The fallen angels make us fall out of spite, and now Satan and God vie for our souls.



See? Christian mythology takes humanity WAY too seriously. The same is true of Jewish mythology and so on.