Godly techno-weirdness of the day

Pop quiz, hotshot. You're driving down the highway, and you see this:

Mobile phones for Jay-sus-ah!

It's fifty feet high, and you don't remember seeing it the last time you went this way.

And yes, it's on the premises of a church.

What is it?

Obviously, it's a cell-phone tower, whose construction was paid for by a cell-phone company.

I think you'd probably get better reception from the Rio Jesus, though.

Comic break

Coincidental parallelism in the online comics pages, from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal and Sinfest.

Your contentious reading matter for today

In which a man who looks like a religious lunatic explains a neuropsychological theory of religious lunacy.

(I've already got Robert Sapolsky's hair; I could look just like him in not that many months, if I tried. It's been clearly explained to me that I'll abruptly become single again if I do try, though.)

Junk Mail Of Mystery

Usually, the Sunday junk mail is of a mercantile nature. I quite enjoy about half of it. Learning that Aldi's Weird Product To Find In A Supermarket for this week is a bouncy castle, or receiving one of the remarkably testosterone-rich Gasweld fliers, always brightens my day a little.

Today, though, all there was was this.

Religious junk mail

It took me a while to figure out what the heck it even was. Religious, yes, that I figured out, but apart from that I was flummoxed until I looked at the Web site mentioned on the front.

The pamphlet is a bunch of Hebrew and English discussing the many bits of the Bible that definitely or possibly talk about Jesus.

You know - like the bit in the Old Testament where it says you shouldn't break the bones of any of the meat you eat during Passover, and the bit in the New Testament where it says that nobody bothered breaking Jesus' legs after he was crucified.

Man, if that's not an obvious fulfillment of prophecy then I don't know what is.

Anyway, that was all there was. No exhortations to do anything in particular. I'm used to more directness when people give me unsolicited religious publications.

If I were Jewish, I suppose I would have twigged earlier to the fact that the outfit responsible, Zola Levitt Ministries, is in the business of persuading Jews that the New Testament is not, in fact, claptrap, and that Jesus Was Or Is Lord, et cetera.

Which, I've got to say, strikes me as a better horse to bet on than the fairly long list of not-terribly-miraculous Jewish Messiah claimants. But that's not saying much.

In case you're wondering, by the way, the Zola Levitt people are not like Jews For Jesus, who are Christians in all but name. Oh, no. They're Messianic Jews, who differ from Jews For Jesus in that they maintain the Jewish observances mandated in the Old Testament.

Well, not all of the observances, obviously.

I mean, they're OK with withholding the wages of a hired man until the end of the week, or even longer, in direct defiance of God's command to not even hold the money overnight. The command not to do that is right next to the one that says you shouldn't steal from your neighbour, so one presumes it was meant to be taken seriously.

They probably also wear clothing made from two kinds of material, from time to time. Which is another big no-no.

But that bit in the next chapter about men having sex with men? They obey that part.

I'm given to understand that they don't pay so much attention to the bit in that same chapter about putting adulterers to death, though.

It's all a bit confusing.

But have no fear - although apparently pretty much everyone who isn't a Trinitarian Christ-believer is a member of a mere "cult", God has still "made His message clear in Scripture".

"Clear", in this case, indicates concealment beneath multiple levels of brilliant encoding (no, not that kind) that's taken centuries to figure out.

But that's all perfectly obvious, too.

Quotation query

...that I'm the only person on the whole Web who's ever quoted the "we are cool, we are badasses" line from True Lies?

Go on, look for yourself. Hyphenate "badasses" if you like, split the quote up into two phrases, look on Usenet, go nuts. The closest I could find, besides my two pages, was a comment on some illegible MySpace page that now only seems to exist in Google's cache.

The line is not even, as I write this, in the IMDB quotes for the film.

[Although, now that I look again, IMDB does have "We're cool, we're badasses...", which I accept as being much the same thing since Arnie is unable to pronounce "we're" and "we are" so that they sound different. There are still, as I write this, only four Google hits for even that, though; two are the same IMDB quotes list, and one's another single MySpace page.]

The line is, of course, spoken by Arnie as he translates the Scary Terrorist's self-promotional ranting. It's an enormously useful quotation to use (preferably in as authentic an Austrian accent as you can manage) whenever someone starts big-noting themselves. I tend to mutter it while reading press releases.

I came to search for it after I looked up the Biblical source for the title of Stephen Fry's autobiography, Moab Is My Washpot. Fry doesn't see any need to explain the title in his book's text, since everybody obviously already knows it's from a couple of near-identical Psalms. God Himself is alleged to make this observation about a million acres of the Middle East, among other I'm-so-great-I-kick-ass claims.

Why, exactly, the author of those Psalms felt that an infinitely powerful being needed to come on like a self-aggrandising blues/rap artiste, I'm not sure. But the quote fits just fine:

"Gilead is mine, and Manasseh is mine; Ephraim also is the strength of mine head; I am cool; I am a badass."

Incidentally, True Lies is that rarest of birds, a Hollywood remake of a French film which does not stink. (Well, except for the dodgy title.)

If you're familiar with True Lies, you're also familiar with La Totale! (or "The Jackpot!"), because Lies is virtually a shot-for-shot remake of that French movie, only with huge super-expensive effects sequences added.

All of that weird misogynistic stuff in the middle of Lies, with the one-way-mirror interrogation room and such, becomes less mystifying when you know that three Frenchmen actually conspired to create it.