South Park Sings, Dances, Offends and Celebrates in Episode 315, “Mr. Hankey’s Christmas Classics”

This is a ridiculously silly episode and not a conventional one by any means. When I first started watching it, I expected to be bored, and I was pretty annoyed that Trey Parker and Matt Stone thought that they could get away with giving me some bs songs instead of a real Christmas episode. As it turns out, these had to be a lot harder to compose and produce than a regular episode and they were really funny, at that.

The episode is set up like a pitch for a Christmas album by Mr. Hankey, and he share his ten favorite Christmas songs with us, each of varying length but all sung by South Park characters in hilarious and new ways.

Cartman’s rendition of Silent Night that celebrates Jesus’ birth and lets him get presents is quite good. My personal favorites are the Hanukah song that opens everything up (a new take on the Dreidel song) and Mr. Garrison’s around the world explanation of how most people fail to celebrate Christmas adequately. He visits all kinds of eastern religions and countries and pretty much behaves like a bigoted, American asshole. Shocking!

A very amusing episode overall.

What did you think? Which was your favorite song?

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Satanic Forest Creatures Try To Bring the AntiChrist in South Park Episode 814, “Woodland Critter Christmas”

If anyone recalls this episode, he or she will surely agree that it is a disturbing one. The whole thing is told in rhyming couplets after the fashion of The Grinch Who Stole Christmas. Stan functions as the main character.

Walking through the forest, he stumbles across some woodland critters, each of whom seems goofy and innocent, and who collectively implore him to help save their Christmas by murdering the Mountain Lion that continues to kill the porcupine’s baby year after year. Unaware of what he is doing, Stan does so, but as it turns out – what!? there’s a twist!? – the Mountain Lion was the protector of the world and preventing the Spawn of Satan (aka the antiChrist) from being born. That’s right: Satan was doing the porcupine and the baby was going to be the antiChrist. How exciting!

When Stan then tries to stop this hellaciousness, the woodland critters, possessed demons that they are, use their satanic powers to stop him. They even kill other creatures and then have sex in their blood. “Blood Orgy!!” It is sick and twisted, and what we learn when Kyle later agrees to be the host of the antiChrist so that the Jews can finally have their revenge on Christmas, is that the entire story is made up and being told by Cartman as another way to rip on Kyle at Christmas for being Jewish.

As we learn during the Imaginationland episodes when the most f-ed up thing to come from the evil side of Imaginationland is the Woodland Christmas Critters, we sure wouldn’t want to meet the kid that thought those things up!

What do you think of this episode? What was your favorite part?

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Hilarious Motivational Posters about Americans, Album Covers and Adversity

Try these on for size:

Did you like ‘em? Which was your favorite?

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Fun with the Bible: Happy Hanukah Book of Daniel – When Were You Written?

Today’s Agenda

I know that last week we talked about the plagues from the Exodus story (yes, the story, not the book, since we looked at Psalms), and that I promised to continue with that theme over the next few weeks. However, it’s Hanukah, and as such, I thought a brief digression into the materials of the Bible related to the holiday would be a nice way to change things up and enjoy something topical.

With that plan in mind I could turn to I or II Maccabees, but many of you may not have those books in your Bibles. Why? Because those books are what we call – depending on our religious predispositions – deuterocanonical, apocryphal or noncanonical. These words mean either that the books are additional but not wholly incorporated or official books of the Bible: considered holy but not in the canon. Because Jews themselves consider the books noncanonical (not part of the Bible), and yet the story of Hanukah is contained within their pages, we’re going to turn to a book that everybody thinks is part of the Bible, but for reasons other than what it is: Daniel!

What Daniel Purports to Be

First question: Did Daniel, whoever that is, write the book of Daniel? The answer: no, plain and simple. The person who the book of Daniel is about and who tells us this story is not the person in the story. How do we know this? Because the story takes place in King Nebuchadnezzar’s court in the middle of the sixth century BCE after the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem and the kingdom of Judea, and the book tells us of things that happen up to a precise moment in time hundreds of years later. Curious, no?

Of course, many people will contend – as they do every day – that the book of Daniel is a prophetic book envisioning the future of the Jews up until that specific time: which happens to be during the reign of the Seleucid king, Antiochus IV, who ruled over Judea in 167 BCE and desacrated Jewish law and the Temple (the Hanukah story). But if this is a prophetic book by a prophet then why is it that the author gets the ending and what happens in the year 164 BCE totally wrong? Because obviously he stopped writing the book before the events of that year took place and didn’t know them, meaning that our book was written sometime between his last right event (167) and his historically erroneous conclusions (164).

What the ‘Prophecy’ Really Tells Us

Interesting, too, is how the detail of the prophetic vision enhances and is consistently more accurate throughout the ‘prophecy’ as the time gets closer to the writer’s own time. The vision recounts the various kings and conquerors who came into Judea from the time of Nebuchadnezzar, who is being made aware of the vision, to the time of the Maccabean revolt (i.e. the Hanukah story), and the more contemporary we get, the more accurate and descriptive.

Of course, Daniel’s audience is not the Maccabees or their followers. He is trying to comfort those people who remain faithful to the Jewish law at such a terrible time (the primary subject of the earlier written part of the book in another language!) and comfort them in their decision to continue praying to God for help rather than fight. Thus, more than a book that can tell us about the time of Nebuchadnezzar or a book that prophecies the future, Daniel is essentially a book that sheds light on an attitude of a particular group of people that suffered during the time of the Hanukah story.

There’s much more that can be said about this fascinating book, but I’ll leave it there for now. Oh yeah, and Happy Hanukah!

Summary

What do you think of the book of Daniel and what I’ve written here.

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Zen Talk: Truth, Happiness and the Future

“Arise, do not be negligent; practice the principle of good conduct. One who acts on truth is happy in this world and beyond.”

These wise words of the Buddha are gracefully simple and straightforward. Be good! What that means, some of us might be less sure, as words like “truth” tend to get muddled in the confusing world of religious belief and the “truth” that is declared.

If you can manage to operate your life by basing your actions on truth, though, then more power to you.

How would you seek to understand what is truth? How do you practice the principle of good conduct in your daily life?

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Reese Witherspoon and Vince Vauhn Have Fun in Four Christmases

It seems to me that a movie so obviously related to Christmas might have been coming out a little early when released on Thanksgiving. However, that’s the way of the world (which is to say, America) these days. Once Thanksgiving hits (though this year I’d say it came mid-November) the Holiday Season is upon us.

Typically I’m not that into Vince Vauhn doing romantic comedies. I prefer him in darker or more ridiculous roles, like say, as Norman Bates or his character on Be Cool – “E-Weezey!” However, he did a pretty decent job in this movie. Nothing spectacular, but how often does that word get associated with Vauhn anyway.

Reese Witherspoon, on the other hand, is just the type of woman I like to see in romantic comedies. Not only is she stunning and classically beautiful, fun and spunky, and hints of a little naugtiness behind those big eyes, but she’s a great actress. As usual in these roles she seemed comfortable and at ease, all the while playing an excellent counterpart to Vauhn.

Living in San Francisco made this a particularly good movie for enjoying the oos and ahs of the crowd as it watched various scenes and panoramas of the city. Curiously, though, for those of us in the know, there was no reason for the couple to go over the Golden Gate Bridge on their way to the airport. That’s the opposite direction of the airport and no one is getting to Fiji driving north.

So, the movie was funny, laugh out loud a number of times, a little dumb here and there, a little over the top on ocassion but all in all a very standard and decent Holiday Season romantic comedy. If you’re into that sort of thing, knock yourself out, and if not, I’d just avoid this one.

A simple 5 Chocolate Salty Balls for Four Christmases.

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Around the World Pic: Jewish Cemetery in Prague

During my European travels I went to a lot of Jewish sites, a lot of churches, and any Mosque that I was fortunate enough to find. I love going into religious building and locations around the world. One thing that’s always easy enough to find is the Jewish cemetery, because all the Jews are always buried there since the community was only given one small plot of land for such things.

The particular cemetery in the photo I took above is located in Prague, capital of the Czech Republic – and it’s right in the middle of the city.

In this Jewish cemetery, as in others throughout Europe, people were buried one on top of the other, separated by approximately 6-18 inches of dirt. Then their tombstones were places one in front of the other. Why? No space for all the dead people! When you walk around the cemetery this makes for a particularly interesting look as tomb stones many hundreds of years old are leaning on each other and crammed together in ways hardly seen in more ‘modern’ graveyards.

Of additional note is the fact that this cemetery is filled with very important Jewish rabbis and wise men because Prague was a huge Jewish center both as a community and a place of learning. People went to Prague from all over the Jewish world to learn with its scholars and rabbis and to see a place of such renown. People stood at the graves of many of these famous men and prayed.

Care to share your experiences with us about visiting different cemetaries?

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Santa Goes to Iraq and Jesus Dies in an Amazing South Park Christmas Episode, “Red Sleigh Down,” (618)

Boy, is Comedy Central getting us in the Holiday Spirit by airing some great South Park Christmas episodes, beginning tonight with “Red Sleigh Down,” perhaps one of the most brilliantly conceived and executed 23 minutes of satire ever to have been created in the history of satire. Do you think that’s saying a lot? I certainly do. Take it as a sign that you’re not going to want to miss this episode.

Santa goes to Iraq in order to spread the Christmas spirit to a part of the world sorely in need of some holiday cheer, but Iraqis, uninterested in his western capitalism and false promises, shoot his sleigh out of the air, take him into their lair, and torture him in an excruciating fashion.

The boys and Mr. Hankey (everyone’s favorite Holiday Season icon), in an attempt to rescue Santa, locate Jesus. Jesus takes them all to Iraq where they burst into the militants’ compound and save old Saint Nick. However, on the way out of the compound, Jesus is shot and killed. That’s right. Jesus is killed on his birthday. Jesus died to save Santa, making Christmas a day on which we should remember how Jesus died in order to save us. The theological implications and real world scenario derived from Christian theology make this a sensational episode – among other hilarious and disturbing moments.

Rather than flee Iraq, Santa steers his sleigh back towards Baghdad and shoots missiles at the capital city; these missiles don’t actually destroy anything, but rather, they explode as holiday decorations, presents and cheer.

What an amazing episode, and boy do I hope you watch it. What did you think of the episode? What was your favorite part?

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Quran Read-A-Long: The Cow 164-167

Why Give a Creation Account?

Well as the end of verse 164 tells us, the results of creation are “signs for the wise.” Every single one of these natural phenomena that we take for granted should be reminders to us that God is the ultimate creator, all-powerful and capable of anything.

Foolishly, however, there are people who don’t recognize this seemingly obvious fact of life and worship something other than God, giving that thing the love due God. No good, we learn, but this seems like par for the course when reading a religious text such as this.

But That’s Not Where My Confusion with These Verses Lies

My confusion concerns what follows in verses 166 and 167, the discussion of which I’ll begin by noting that all of the followers (of those people who were receiving God’s love) burn forever in Hell. That is, those who didn’t recognize that they should worship God, who didn’t see the signs inherent in creation, are going to Hell for worshiping something else (is that something else a person – e.g. kings or royalty – or a thing, like the sun?).

Okay, makes sense from the back end, but what I don’t get is how it seems that they understood what they did wrong by saying that, knowing what they know now about God, they would leave those they had followed just as they were left by what they followed. If they understood enough to leave and repented, despite their foolishness from the outset, shouldn’t a merciful God show them their deeds and fill them with remorse but then not make them burn in eternal hellfire?

Is my question clear because without understanding it I fear that my great companions on this journey through the Quran will not be able to correct my reading where I have erred?

So, to any and all who can help me understand who is being punished, why they are being punished and how that fits into a larger Muslim understanding of Allah in these verses, I would be most appreciative.

Summary

What are your thoughts about these verses? Did I miss anything important you’d like to add?

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The Cow 164-167

164. Creation of the heavens and the earth, alternation of night and day, and sailing of ships across the ocean with what is useful to man, and the rain that God sends from the sky enlivening the earth that was dead, and the scattering of beasts of all kinds upon it, and the changing of the winds, and the clouds which remain obedient between earth and sky, are surely signs for the wise. 165. And yet there are men who take others as compeers of God, and bestow on them love due to God; but the love of the faithful for God is more intense. If only the wicked could see now the agony that they will behold (on the Day of Resurrection), they will know that to God belongs the power entirely! And the punishment of God is severe. 166. When those who were followed will disclaim those who followed them, and see the torment all ties between them shall be severed, 167. And the followers will say: “Could we live but once again we would leave them as they have abandoned us now.” God will show them thus their deeds, and fill them with remorse; but never shall they find release from the Fire.

Michael Jackson Comes to South Park in Episode 807, “Mr. Jefferson”

When Michael Jackson and his son come to South Park disguised as Mr. Jefferson and company, the local children are amazed at all the wonderful toys in his house and his generosity in regards to sharing them. Stan and Kyle, however, grow concerned at Mr. Jefferson’s neglect of his son, Blanket, in order to play with other children.

In the meantime, local cops realize that a rich black man has moved to town and, like all cops when they see that rich black men live near them, they try to frame him for a series of heinous crimes. Unfortunately, they see Mr. Jefferson (i.e. MJ) come home and are startled that he is white! What to do?

One cool thing in this episode is that we see Kenny without his jacket on but don’t know for sure that it’s him until he is killed by Mr. Jefferson during some rough play time. Though Kenny is no longer getting killed regularly on South Park by the eighth season, Parker and Stone are always willing to kill him when it adds something different like this. A weird Mr. Jefferson and the boys in bed scene also appears as well as a variety of scenes in which MJ’s face is falling off.

In the end Kyle and Stan tell us that it doesn’t matter what Michael Jackson may or may not have done (in regards to the framing) but what is important is that he grow up and stop acting like a child because he has one that needs taking care of. It is time, we learn, for Michael Jackson to act like an adult.

What did you think of this episode?

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