Sunday, January 21, 2007

One Billion Dollars

I never thought that going to work would make me this rich. Was I ever wrong. Wrong as wrong could be, boy howdy. There I was, just minding my own business, milling about the lobby, when I happened to notice a piece of paper lying on one of the racks that hold our FLM magazines. I ambled over. Glory be - and I say this in almost all honesty - there it was, a billion dollar bill. Some yo-yo had left a billion dollars just lying around for me to find.

Oh Hosanna, oh don't you cry for me. It was almost the same size as real money, and bore colors similar to those found on the new twenty dollar note. But, oh was this one worth so much more than twenty little dollars. See...on the back was the "billion dollar question," which was: Will you go to heaven? Well...um, no. Have you ever lied? Shit. Stolen anything? Shit. Used God's name in vain? Goddamnit. Unless one or more of those, including the last one, was a foul tip, I'm out of there.

Good thing there are web sites for future brimstone fodder such as me. One of them, pimping a radio and, apparently, TV program called The Way Of The Master (which actually sounds kind of cool, until you remember that Bruce Lee is dead), is just sort of run-of-the-mill evangelical propaganda, including many examples of "actual" telephone conversations in which people who had been having doubts about their faith were firmly informed that anything less than full frontal faith in Jay-zus would mean death by wood-chipper and a lifeimte of burning in hell. (That's where they get those videos of fireplaces that you can play on your TV so it makes it look like you have a fireplace. Those are sinners burning in hell - Heathens Gone Wild!)

Anyway, a second web site pimped on the billion dollar bill was for Living Waters, an online portal full of evangelism resources (although, oddly, it makes no mention of where they stockpile all the hot air) - and this one actually had something that made me laugh out loud. Really hard. I was half afraid I was going to wake Amy up. Are you ready for this? Are you sitting down?

There's a board game you can get. Swear to...well, you know. I mean it. There's a board game you can get - apparently people around the world have been clamoring - clamoring, I tell you - for this kind of game, and now, AT LAST, it's available. It's called...Intelligent Design Vs. Evolution, and here's the tag line, which I promise, Dave Barry style, that I am not making up: "At last, a board game that reveals the insanity of perhaps the greatest hoax of our times - the unscientific 'theory of evolution.'"

Well. So much for that, I guess. I suppose it is safe to say that the people behind this board game will not be working with the people I wrote about yesterday, the ones who are going to work on global warming with the scientists. There are literally tens of millions of people in this country who buy into this kind of nonsense - depending on where you glean your information, the number is between forty and one hundred million people.

But hey, before this gets too dark and scary, let's go back to the first web site I mentioned, The Way Of The Master, and end on a light note. One of the little menus on their web page leads you to a News page (which you can get to by clicking on the above link), where they tell you what they're up to, what's new and exciting in their corner of the Internet. The News page contains not one, but two, jokes about people with only one tooth, and it also talks about the upcoming new design of their web site. They say that it's going to be a "spanky" new design. Not "brand spanking new," which was probably what they meant. No, a "spanky" new design. Again, I have to reiterate that I am not making any of this up. I swear to...well, you know.

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