• On April 1 every year, we Mets fans take a moment to think of how different our favorite team’s fate might have been if Sidd Finch had chosen baseball over the French horn.
• “[It is] not a hate crime [but] an act of love — and a warning.” To be clear, the guy who was just arrested for spraypainting “666” on various Dallas landmarks is a certified crank. He’s a perennial independent candidate for mayor and a regular, long-winded presence at City Council meetings where he rants about gay conspiracies and the JFK assassination.
The problem these days, though, is that the distance between such old-school cranks and actual members of Congress is getting smaller and smaller.
• Speaking of certifiable cranks, Texas mega-church pastor John Hagee has a new “documentary” based on his best-selling book Four Blood Moons. Hagee believes that the current series of lunar eclipses are a fulfillment of “Bible prophecy” — evidence that the Rapture he has been predicting for decades will occur in the Fall of 2015. (Lunar eclipses and Jewish holidays both occur around full moons — coincidence? Hagee says no.)
So that’s the Hagee timeline. The Rapture is coming this year, marking the beginning of the seven-year Great Tribulation and The End in 2022.
It doesn’t matter if you think that’s nutty. The point is that this is what John Hagee is preaching and teaching.
Which makes it kind of strange that his son, Matthew Hagee, would say this: “It is impossible for same-sex marriage to do what biblical marriage does: create children. … Without the procreation of children, the American society economically, will fail; culturally, will fail. It is not a matter of right or privilege, it’s a matter of survival.”
Set aside the arithmetical absurdity and just consider why someone who believes we’re just months away from the Rapture and seven years from Armageddon should be concerned with the procreation of future generations.
• Dianna E. Anderson finds an app called “Clean Reader,” which promises to filter out profanity and other potentially offensive material. She applies it to her own book, Damaged Goods: New Perspectives on Christian Purity. And hilarity ensues. (If, that is, you’ll allow “hilarity” to include bitterly mordant observations about how, for example, the Clean Reader translates “rape” into “forced love.”)
• Jonny Scaramanga reports that yet another group of illiterate Christians claim to have found Noah’s Ark.
Look, if we’re going to refuse to distinguish any kind of story from any other kind, then there are lots of things we should be looking for before we go looking for Noah’s Ark. My top five:
- Excalibur
- The Red Book of Westmark
- Digory Kirk’s wardrobe
- Hogwarts
- The Holy Grail
• Stephen King is probably at or near the top of the list of People You Shouldn’t Pick a Fight With if you’re the governor of Maine.
• Some country music stations are now refusing to play the song “Girl Crush” by Little Big Town because some country music fans have mistakenly concluded that it’s about a lesbian affair.
I suppose you can understand their confusion when you look at the lyrics, which read like a declaration of love from one woman to another:
Your beauty is beyond compare
With flaming locks of auburn hair
With ivory skin and eyes of emerald greenYour smile is like a breath of spring
Your voice is soft like summer rain
And I cannot compete with you Jolene …
Oh, wait. My mistake. Those are the words to Dolly Parton’s No. 1 country hit from 1973 — a classic in the “don’t take my man” genre of which “Girl Crush” is the latest example.
Seeing as Dolly is at or near the top of the list of People You Shouldn’t Pick a Fight With in country music, I can’t wait to hear what Dolly has to say to the country fans and country stations now blacklisting Little Big Town.
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