• “Nicolas Cage’s ‘The Carpenter’s Son’ turns an apocryphal text about Jesus’ youth into a horror film.”
You gotta get Nic Cage’s name in that headline because, you know, Nicolas Cage, but just to be clear he isn’t the writer or director of this film. That would be Lotfy Nathan, who sat down to discuss the movie with the Homebrewed Christianity podcast.
Cage plays Joseph in the film, loosely based on the very strange Infancy Gospel of Thomas — an ancient text that lends itself to interpretation as a horror movie more than you might think. Some weird and creepy stuff in that one. There is, after all, something unsettling and dreadful about the idea of a small child endowed with immeasurable power.
James McGrath writes about the theological choices Nathan is forced to make in telling this story, which unavoidably walks through a minefield of trinitarian disputes about the nature of Jesus’ humanity and divinity. “Ultimately,” he says, “this film explores Jesus not as a pre-existent person dressed as a human, but as a super-human with miraculous abilities but not with supernatural maturity, and thus he must figure out who he will be and how he will use his power.”
If that story sounds familiar, it’s because we’ve already seen that movie this year thanks to James Gunn’s Superman.
Everything I’ve read about the “Satan” character in The Carpenter’s Son also reminds me of Michael Rosenbaum’s young Lex Luthor, so as much as I enjoy watching Nic Cage do his thing, I may wind up re-watching Smallville before I decide to watch this horror movie.
• Tehran is a huge city — home to nearly 10 million people. And it is an ancient city, a place humans have lived for more than 6,000 years.
And now it’s out of water and out of time: “Iran’s Capital Is Moving. The Reason Is an Ecological Catastrophe.”
Iranian officials are considering moving the capital to the country’s southern coast. But experts say the proposal does not change the reality for the nearly 10 million people who live in Tehran and are now suffering the consequences of a decades-long decline in water supply.
Since at least 2008, scientists have warned that unchecked groundwater pumping for the city and for agriculture was rapidly draining the country’s aquifers. The overuse did not just deplete underground reserves—it destroyed them, as the land compressed and sank irreversibly. One recent study found that Iran’s central plateau, where most of the country’s aquifers are located, is sinking by more than 35 centimeters each year. As a result, the aquifers lose about 1.7 billion cubic meters of water annually as the ground is permanently crushed, leaving no space for underground water storage to recover, says Darío Solano, a geoscientist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, who was not involved with the study.
“We saw this coming,” Solano says.
Other major cities such as Cape Town, South Africa, Mexico City and Jakarta, Indonesia, as well as parts of California, are also facing day zero scenarios as they sink and run out of water.
Grist has more: “Tehran’s water crisis is a warning for every thirsty city.”
If nothing changes, Tehran may soon face Day Zero — or when a municipality can no longer supply drinking water to its residents and taps run dry. In October, President Masoud Pezeshkian claimed that Tehran could no longer serve as the country’s capital, citing the water crisis as a major factor.
”If it doesn’t rain in Tehran by late November, we’ll have to [formally] ration water,” Pezeshkian told Iranian state media on Thursday. “And if it still doesn’t rain, we’ll have to evacuate Tehran.”
While it’s unlikely evacuation will happen any time soon, Tehran’s water crisis is not made equal. When the taps run dry, more affluent Tehranis purchase mineral water or rely on water tankers, a prohibitively expensive option for many. The rest must rely on charity, or they will die of thirst.
• Here’s a date-appropriate oldie, “Susan P. reads the newspaper on November 23, 1963.”
She’s still with us, you know. Got to be close to 100 now, but you wouldn’t know it from looking at her. Something in that air or that water. She may not fully remember it, but it’s still there.
• And speaking of old posts and ageless wonders … Joe Flacco is now 40 years old. If he were a member of Congress he’d be routinely referred to as a youngster or as part of the unseasoned, inexperienced, juvenile contingent of that body. If he were a local pastor, older parishioners would treat him with skepticism due to such a mere child presuming to hold a position of leadership.
But since Flacco is an NFL quarterback, the fact that he is 40 years old means every step he takes is remarked upon as some kind of miracle, with commentators acting like it’s inconceivable that such an ancient, decrepit figure is still able to walk, let alone run. In the last game I watched Flacco play, the play-by-play announcer Jim Nantz talked about him like he was Methuselah. Nantz is 66.
Granted, at 40 Flacco is usually much older than the other 21 athletes out on the field at the same time. And he’s been playing for teams that aren’t great at protecting their quarterback and thus getting hit a lot, and it is pretty remarkable that a 40-year-old is going out there and getting whalloped by a bunch of very large 20-somethings, repeatedly, then still getting back up with his 40-year-old knees and back and neck and shoulders and doing it again on the next possession.
Anyway, stumbled across this old post from back when I worked at the newspaper: “Playoffs and rocking chairs.”
It’s about covering Delaware Blue Hens football during their run at a national championship many years ago and I realized that this wasn’t from Joe Flacco’s senior year at UD, but from several years after that, which made me feel almost as old as all the football commentators describe Flacco as being.
The actual point of that older post, alas, is just as true today as it was way, way back when Flacco was still a rookie: “Throughout corporate America, management has decided to uncouple productivity and income — to sever the link between the two. They have decided, in their wisdom, to stop rewarding productivity. …”
• The title for this post, again, comes from “Tubthumping.” Since I referenced Chumbawamba’s biggest hit here the other day, here’s a delightful cover of that by They Might Be Giants and everybody they could find to sing along.
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