Why The Asylum Shouldn't Allow Pitches On Their Website

This is a movie pitch written for the low budget production company the Asylum (the people behind such gems as Megashark vs. Giant Octopus, Megashark vs. Crocosaurus, Sharktopus, Mansquito, and Transmorphers). Apparently they allow you to submit pitches on their website. They were only accepting a few genres, and Latino family dramas were one of them. So:

Megashark vs. Latin American Family

A Mexican drug kingpin kidnaps the patriarch of the Menendez clan, only to find out that his drug submarines are being eaten by nuclear powered Megashark. The Drug Kingpin, who is also the father of young Alejandra's yet unborn baby, must stop Megashark from exploding, because his explosion would spread the cocaine over a thousand mile radius, and flood the drug market. And on top of it all, an intolerant hobo preacher is harrassing Alejandra about her potnetial abortion, to say nothing of her stolidly Catholic family. Now the Menendez family must team up with the druglord and former President George H.W. Bush to convince Congress to do something to stop Megashark from exploding. Discuss.

Why Sea Cucumbers Will Always Win Out Against Chess Sets

What if I were a chess set? What if I were a sea cucumber? It's a difficult decision.

If I were a chess set I would be made of many pieces moving against each other but also together. I would appear to be many but in fact be one, composed of many within a single system. I would be glamorous and intellectual and interesting. I would probably drive a Maserati. But it would be very strange to be made up of more than one body.

If I were a sea cucumber, I would be ugly, weird, and puke my guts out at the sight of predators. I would also not move much, live underwater and look like a cucumber. It would be solid. I would probably not be very interesting. But because of  my terrible ugliness the absurdity of my worth would be all the more glaring. I would have a terrible beauty.

If a chess set fought a sea cucumber, though. Now that is the question. The sea cucumber would undoubtedly win, but how exactly is a zennish sort of riddle well worth thinking on. 

I advise you all, contemplate these things as you fall asleep. Consider the ens of the chess set and the sea cucumber. What if you were?You will probably find it more interesting than facebook.

Actually Why Celery is Boring

In our previous post we stated that celery was boring, and included in the title that it would say why. It did not. This ought to be mended:

Celery is boring because it is plain and not even dark green and tastes mostly like water.

Celery is not boring because it is food that is always around somewhere and because any taste is, in the end, fascinating and reflects the charged, surging reality that we partake of.

Why Celery is Boring and Why the Church Needs to be Stranger

Because I fear that I may begin to think my infant thoughts are important, this post and all following opiniony kind of posts will be kept under five hundred words.

            I had a talk with two of my friends today about an article in the New York Times which can be found here: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/15/opinion/sunday/douthat-can-liberal-christianity-be-saved.html?_r=2&smid=fb-share about the failure of “liberal Christianity.” My first answer is that of course liberal Christianity—in the sense of the modernizing, debunking Christianity that appeared in the Nineteenth Century—was bound to fail because it was about as interesting and upsetting as a piece of celery. It was a product of nineteenth century ideas about science and was probably designed to allow people who had no interest in the supernatural historical events that are central to the Christian faith to continue to go to church and appear respectable in a context when they were socially required to. It was palatable, cultured, logical, and easy to tack on like a stripy scarf or a tie. But now, as the article says, liberal Christianity is dying, with Episcopal (as the liberal archetype) and progressive Catholic attendance taking a deathly kind of dive.

            Both of my friends, and G.K. Chesterton (who is not in fact my friend, but I wish he was), and most of the great Christian thinkers who have thought about this point out the uniqueness of the Church in the face of every other thing the world has seen. The Christian faith, and the Church as its living out, is profoundly strange. We openly confess to worship a dead Man Who isn’t actually dead. We get together once a week to shake people’s hands we don’t know and sit together awkwardly before we eat human flesh and blood—and people come back routinely for that. We say that God’s one, but also three. And then there’s the problem of evil, so troublesome to the idea of God that anybody with half a mind would give up on any kind of theism, nevermind this extravagant absurdity. And it seems the genuine Church has stuck with it for two thousand years. If we step back, it's profoundly bizarre.

            And so, as Chesterton says, the greatest argument for Christianity is that it seems all the time that it ought to die, but comes back. It seems so silly that it should have died long ago, but it keeps returning. The greatest argument for the faith is perhaps that it really can’t be argued for. Any respectable, reasonable person would think it ludicrous. But respectable faiths, like Arianism, like “Liberal Christianity,” die out. It seems that it’s the discord with what we think reality is that makes the Church so powerful and longlasting. Anytime it tries to assimilate it becomes ridiculous (as politically conservative evangelical Christianity often seems as well); but when it refuses it becomes powerful and strange and draws us to it. Where the Episcopal bishops in the article were asking how to make the Church respectable and refined, maybe we should be asking how we can keep the Church weird.

The First Post

This is the first post, so I'll say something auspicious like "today begins a new chapter in my experience" or "to all who come to these sentiments, welcome," or perhaps more appropriately, "to all who come to these sentiments, I'm sorry, we don't actually sell trousers" or something like that. I should let it be known that we do not sell trousers, just to avoid confusion from the beginning. This is a blog where we don't sell too much that's useful, or too much in any other direction. If we were trying to be hip, we might say we were doing that to be aticapitalist or something but really, like most people who claim that title, we just don't have anything to sell.

All that to say--Welcome. We are glad to have you. This blog is semi-literary, semi-braingoop, semi-serious (we know that's three halves), fully silly blog about lots of things including but not limited to the limits of reason, time, rubber bands, the apothegms of the Desert Fathers, justice, e-book commerce, Moby Dick (more usually the whale), and occasionally trousers. We make every effort to avoid preachiness and tritehood, but we make no guarantees on either. We make no attempt at consistency or principle, but we do have Peter the Great cutting of beards in the background, so that almost makes up for it.

Thank you for reading this. If you've gotten this far, then you've gotten through the worst of the post and you deserve a pat on the back for sticking it out. Thanks to all and to all a good dinner.