• “I Was Tony Gwynn’s Bat Boy.” At Deadspin, David Johnson writes, “When kids have heroes, they tend to build them up into something unsustainable, something doomed to crumble …” But this is not that story. This is the beautiful exception to that story.
• “The [pre-paid debit] cards promoted by two big names who really should have known better, Magic Johnson and Suze Orman, are shutting down.” That’s welcome news from the Consumerist. Pre-paid debit cards are a scam that preys on desperation.
This is a scam that preys on desperation and greed: “If you have been at a low-level harvest for a long time, then it’s time to release your prosperity with higher seed-level giving and a greater expectation of an unprecedented harvest. It’s time to move into high gear and release the prosperity anointing over yourself and your loved ones!”
And this is a scam that preys on fear and ignorance:
Liberty Counsel is organizing a “powerful, five-screen multimedia extravaganza” for conservative pastors who want to stop America from “spiraling out of control as our foundation of traditional values is threatened and eroded every day” and “to dramatically affect the 2014 elections this coming November.”
The “conservative pastors” attracted to such rallies will hear that the only way to “stop America from spiraling out of control” will be through “higher seed-level giving” to groups like the Liberty Counsel. Cha-ching!
These godandcountry rallies, like the big-bank-defending Santelli rant that launched the tea party, recruit their marks by convincing them they’re footsoldiers. Each time that second hand goes to the top, like dandelions up they pop …
• The history of the world in a single headline. This is not how the story ends. This is why the story never ends.
• Gricean Maxims and scalar implicatures are funnier than they sound.
• Chaplain Mike points us to this odd sermon from clean-shaven Pentecostal Martyn Ballestero: “I Don’t Like Facial Hair on Pentecostal Men!” It includes this revealing bit of fundigelical argumentation: “If you don’t think pride is involved in wearing of facial hair, just try to preach it off of those who have it. Every wearer I’ve met is fiercely defensive.”
What Ballestero calls a “fiercely defensive” response is actually bewilderment. People tend to get confused when you decide to arbitrarily prohibit harmless behavior for no good reason. Interpreting that “defensiveness” as confirmation of the inherent wickedness of the thing being arbitrarily prohibited is a favorite circular argument in the evangelical subculture — a place where all that is not explicitly permitted is presumed to be forbidden.
• I already knew this, but it’s good to be reminded of this every once in a while, just to remember again that the world is always a bit more delightfully strange than we sometimes settle for: When Andre the Giant was a little young boy, he was driven to school every day by his neighbor, Samuel Beckett.
• John Dominic Crossan: “My point, once again, is not that those ancient people told literal stories and we are now smart enough to take them symbolically, but that they told them symbolically and we are now dumb enough to take them literally.”
• “Some candles flicker and some candles fade, and some burn as true as our sister Sinead”:
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