I like a good adventure as much as the next guy and that is why I WANT TO DO THIS!
And just to be clear, “this” is underground hot air ballooning Read all about it here. Or you can just watch the video below.
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Saturday, October 4, 2014
Underground Hot Air Ballooning!
I like a good adventure as much as the next guy and that is why I WANT TO DO THIS!
And just to be clear, “this” is underground hot air ballooning Read all about it here. Or you can just watch the video below.
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Friday, October 3, 2014
Thursday, October 2, 2014
The Upcoming Synod: Edicts and Answers.
As you all undoubtedly already know, next week the Roman Catholic Church will convene a meeting of Bishops from around the world to discuss issues - both ancient and contemporary - which are of importance to the modern church. This gathering is called a “Synod”, which is a word derived from the Late Latin synodus which means “teeth together” and is also a genus of tropical and subtropical lizardfishes that look sort of like regular lizards but without legs, and also they are fish.
The Synod is expected to be seen as a referendum on the progressive policies of Pope Francis. The largely traditional and conservative group of Bishops is expected to discuss contentious issues such as homosexual marriage, premarital sex, birth control, divorce, and what specifically constitutes ‘getting to third base’.
The editors here at Standardkink have obtained an early press release concerning the decisions that will be reached next week at the Synod. Below are some of the edicts which will be handed down as well as answers to some of the most pressing questions of faith in our time.
EDICTS:
- Henceforth no one is allowed to make fun of the word “Synod” anymore. We are tired of the teasing. It was fun for awhile, but we don’t name these things after fish.
- We totally got that whole Joan of Arc thing right.
- Everybody who watches “Game of Thrones” has to stop acting like everybody else on the planet also watches “Game of Thrones”. It’s just a television show.
- You too “Breaking Bad” people. You’re just embarrassing yourselves at this point.
- Don’t even get us started on “Mad Men”.
- Everybody stop acting like you aren’t totally digging on Iggy Azalea.
- Martin Luther had some good points but he is still an asshole for handling the situation the way he did.
- Henceforth the sportsball game knows as “futbol” is to be referred to only as “soccer”. The American sportsball game known as “football” is to be referred to only as “that racist, misogynistic, homophobic, bloodthirsty, sophomoric televised barbarism we watch instead of teaching our kids to read”.
- Jeff Buckley’s cover of “Hallelujah” is the only acceptable version of “Hallelujah” and all other versions are apocryphal and are to be burned.
- Stamps are getting way too expensive. The price just goes up all the time and we don’t like it. We don’t even know how much a stamp costs anymore.
ANSWERS:
Q: What if my copy of Rufus Wainwright’s cover of “Hallelujah” is digital?
A: Burn it.
Q: But it’s on my computer …
A: Burn your computer.
Q: So you’re telling me that Jesus wants me to light my laptop on fire?
A: Yes.
Q: Really?
A: Yeah. He told us so.
Q: What if I have the Leonard Cohen version on CD?
A: Burn it.
Q: Seriously? Leonard Cohen wrote the song. It’s his song …
A: What about this is unclear?
Q: Okay, fine. I have burned all that stuff.
A: It took you too long.
Q: So what’s the deal with the Pope’s hats?
A: They make him feel pretty.
Q: Iron Maiden or Metallica?
A: I’m coming back I will return/And I’ll possess your body and I’ll make you burn.
Q: Pirates or ninjas?
A: Leprechauns.
Q: Edward or Jacob?
A: Edward. Obviously. Get your head out of your ass.
Q: Have you guys been on Catholic.com lately?
A: Yeah, we know, it makes the Yahoo comments section look like the Nobel Prize committee.
Q: Who shot JR?
A: Seriously? This question is more than thirty years old.
Q: PC or Mac?
A: Linux.
Q: That’s surprising.
A: We’re old school like that.
Q: Which are the seven countries being referred to in now decade-old White Stripes song “Seven Nation Army”?
A: The Unites States, Great Britain, Ireland, Denmark, Turkey, The United Arab Emirates and Burkina Faso.
Q: Really??
A: No.
Q: So one last question: did you guys just make up this whole “religion” thing as a way to explain a world that you couldn’t possibly objectively understand two or three millennia ago? And then maybe get hooked on the power of telling people what to do?
A: We didn’t make it up..
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Wednesday, October 1, 2014
Quantity.
Today I inadvertently ran straight into a wall. I misspelled my own name on some paperwork and I accidentally drew a penis on the dry erase board while explaining rhetorical strategies to my students.
Today I also wrote the story below. It is not particularly good or anything, but I had no intention of writing any story today, so at least it exists. I guess. I don’t know why I have been producing lots of these useless little narratives lately. Perhaps it is because the key to being generative is lowering one’s standards!
If you prefer quantity over quality, you sure are in the right place here!
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The Curse.
The Curse
by james bezerra
Only the little girl had survived the curse.
Her father had died decades ago.
Fathers can never be young in the memories of children, but she kept a picture from the expedition on her nightstand and he looked so young there.
She wasn’t a little girl anymore and not all of her moments were entirely lucid anymore. Some nights she would roll onto her side and look at the picture, just study it as if it were something new that had appeared there. A tall and slender man with neat black hair and a thin moustache, a hand-rolled cigarette dangling from his lips. His hands gently gripping the small shoulders of the little girl who stood in front of him. Who would take such a little girl to such a desolate end of the earth? Both of them smiling widely out from the picture frame as the excavation site loomed in the background. Big skeletal scaffolds and ropes and the blur shadows of the dark-skinned locals who did the actual excavating.
He was an attractive young man, the little girl thought with her head pressed comfortably into her pillow. He reminds me of someone …
The days were better for her than the nights. Her mind seemed to work more easily in the daylight. Each morning she would brush out her thinning white hair and as she left the bedroom to go down for tea she would say back to the photo, “Good morning Daddy.”
She read The Times of London while Marjorie rolled the tea cart into the sunroom. More dead in the western Somali deserts, but she had to go far into the paper to find that news. It had become her habit as an adult to follow the news from east Africa. She felt some guilt about it all. The curse was not localized there, but those hundreds of natives must have all carried a germ of it after the expedition. When they had all returned to their homes and their families, the curse had gone with them and then it must have spread like a contagious. It must have spread with every hug of homecoming, every kiss on the cheek of a wife, every pat on the head of a child. It had ravaged that whole continent, as far as the little girl was concerned.
It had not stopped there.
Bromwich, her father’s faithful sidekick and the excavation’s foreman, was shot dead in a Cairo street fourteen years after they had opened the tomb, purportedly over a gambling debt, which would not have been out of character for Bromwich.
Jianxing, her father’s lifelong valet, died of typhoid 35 years after they pried the final stone away from the burial chamber. He’d retired back to his ancestral village on the Kowloon Peninsula after the cancer took the little girl’s father.
Jagdish, who worked as their translator and local palm-greaser - and who always offered her sweet dates from a blue metal tin - was killed in the desert by bandits less than a year after he’d followed her father down into that ancient burial chamber.
Even Zisfain fell victim. Always her father’s shadow, he had ostensibly been only their armourer. In actuality, the little girl knew now, he had been their hawkish protector. Zisfain, whose bloody reputation, it was rumored, stretched all the way back to the Second Boer War. Zisfain, whose quiet had always unnerved her, whose eyes had never betrayed a thing, whose thin lips seemed to have no color to them at all. Zisfain who was still only ever spoken of in hushed tones or - preferably - not spoken of at all. Zisfain who, when a native laborer had been half-crushed by a cave-in, killed the man with a single quick blow of a pickax to the forehead. Quite antithetically, Zisfain had been killed in a car accident in Paris. Perhaps even the curse had been a little afraid of him, and so had chosen to ambush him with a lorry at night on the rain-choked Rue de Seine.
She heard Marjorie returning, “More tea mum?”
“Oh no, no thank you Marjorie. I have to attend services this morning, for Colonel Hardaker. Remember to set out my father’s watch. It was a gift from the Colonel. I’d like to give it to the Colonel’s son.”
“Yes mum.”
Hardaker was the last of them to fall to the curse. She’d never believed the adoption stories that her mother told anyone who would listen. Elliot had her father’s soft and expressive brown eyes. Her father had always treated Elliot like a son - which everyone knew that he actually was - but had never, insofar as she knew, acknowledged him as such. She remembered so clearly how big fat Bromwich used to bounce Elliot on a knee while the little boy hooted and laughed and pretended to be riding a horse. “Giddy up! Giddy up!” Mother had been incensed that Father would take such a little boy to the godless edge of Africa.
The curse had finally gotten to him too. Some eighty-five years on from the opening of the tomb. He’d been a fine man and a caring half-brother and he’d distinguished himself in her Majesty’s Royal Marines. He’d lived well. He’d married and had children and those children had their own children. It had been a good and worthy life, but nothing could stop the curse. It laid its dark grip on his heart just four nights ago when Elliot had stopped breathing in his sleep.
Now she was the only one of them left.
The little girl folded The Times and laid it down on the tea tray. She turned her attention to the bright and crisp morning beyond the glass of the sunroom. How will it come for me? she wondered to herself.
She had only ever spoken out loud about the curse once. In her father’s final days, when it was clear to everyone what was happening, when it was obvious that his end was near, she’d sat right there in the sunroom and held her hand out to Elliot, who had only been a Captain at the time. He’d taken her hand in his and given it a little squeeze. “I suppose we all knew this day was coming,” she’d said to him.
“The cigarettes,” Elliot had said, “Always with those hand-rolled Turkish cigarettes.”
The little girl had looked at him intently, “No. I mean the curse, of course.”
Then Elliot had said back, “What curse?”
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