Day: August 23, 2005

  • To Serve Funny.

    I was reminded, thanks to this bit of gaming humor that someone emailed me this evening, that on the way home Sunday the in-train movie was Madagascar. I won’t bore you with a lengthy review (in short: not horrible, occasionally clever, decently animated, minus points for major plot obviousness, and the lemur dance party song is too catchy for its own good) but I had to tell you about the one bit that made me laugh out loud.

    Yes, I get weird looks from people I travel with quite regularly. C’mon, this is me we’re talking about.

    Anyway. At one point the lemurs are in a state of panic, and one random lemur holds up a black book on which is written, “To Serve Lemurs,” and he cries out, “It’s a cookbook!”

    See, it’s funny because it’s a reference to one of the more subtly dark Twilight Zone episodes. I mean the original TZ, not the watered-down nonsense we’ve seen in recent years. Anyway. During this year’s 4th Of July festivities here at the house we caught a lot of TZ (SFC runs a marathon every year), and “To Serve Man” was one of the selections. If you haven’t seen it, well, if you’ve paid attention up to this point you can guess the twist in the story.

    How did I get here from there? Look at entry #8…

  • Other Useful Callings

    In one of the many debates to be found raging in cyberspace about what the Founding Fathers “really intended” by way of separation of Church and State, I found this little chestnut:

    “The clergy, by getting themselves established by law, and ingrafted into the machine of government, have been a very formidable engine against the civil and religious rights of man. They are still so in many countries and even in some of these United States. Even in 1783, we doubted the stability of our recent measures for reducing them to the footing of other useful callings. It now appears that our means were effectual.”

    — Thomas Jefferson, 1800

    I just love that “other useful callings” bit, really. And then, of course, there’s this concise summation:

    “The government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion.”

    — George Washington, Treaty of Tripoli

    In case anyone was wondering.