The Gods Are Bored

Weighing in on SOPA and PIPA

2012-01-26T08:33:00.000-05:00

Welcome to "The Gods Are Bored," the sole intellectual property of me, Anne Johnson! If you quote more than ten percent of this post, I am going to tell the government I've been ripped off, and they'll shut down Google.

Well, I don't know. That seems pretty extreme to me, but this is what I hear through the grapevine, i.e., the Internet. There's some legislation about intellectual property that could have far-reaching implications for our "business as usual" here in cyberspace.

Theft of intellectual property is no laughing matter, because people do work hard on music, art, books, newspaper articles, films, all the rest. And when consumers are able to re-use or enjoy that work without compensating the artist, it does lead to more starvation in garrets.

In the case of newspapers, they just didn't think quickly enough. Instead of banding together, throwing up firewalls, and charging for their content, they opened web sites that essentially provide the product for free. But in the 1990s, newspapers couldn't see into the future any more than Kanye could. If you give people access to something like the Internet, they're going to use their imaginations to make it work best for them. Which means, they're going to look for ways to get bang for their buck, or freebies when freebies can be had.

You will excuse me if I feel no sympathy for the film industry. Is it my fault that they spare no expense with their special effects? I don't go online looking for free films, but I also shed no tears for Big Entertainment. The rest of us are tightening our belts. Disney, don't come crying to me.

What concerns me about the online policing that SOPA and PIPA represent is the chilling effect it could have on freedom of speech. I wonder if we would see college students getting pepper-sprayed during Occupy. Our government is already herding journalists into cattle chutes, keeping them as distant from the front as possible -- whether it's in Afghanistan or Berkeley. Enter the People with their phones. (Alas, I'm not one of the People. My phone doesn't do film, and I wouldn't know how to work it if it did.)

Like it or not, the Internet has changed our world forever, and it has done so in a jiffy. It's going to keep doing so in the future, in even more of a jiffy. And it will have its downside, probably eventually fatal to millions of people -- because from my point of view (admittedly bleak), this is the way history tends after any big innovation.

In the meantime, we at "The Gods Are Bored" just want a little space to praise and worship Those who know best what any sea change can bring: forgotten Gods and Goddesses from the deep mists of time. They listen. They act. Be careful what you wish for.

But I think you're on safe ground wishing for a free and uncensored Internet. The Gods I see are so desperate for recognition that They check every search engine looking for any sign that They might be re-discovered.

I'm Anne Johnson ... always and forever Anne Johnson ... and I approve this message.

When Abortion, Mormons, and Gay Marriage Are All That Matters

2012-01-05T08:38:00.000-05:00

Welcome to "The Gods Are Bored!" It's 2012, the Apocalypse year! Well, another Apocalypse year anyway. If we had experienced all the Apocalypses we have been promised over time, only the buzzards would remain. Therefore we forge ahead with the slow attrition that comes to any capitalist society where greed is not curbed by common sense.

I would be rejoicing over the choices of moron offered in the Iowa caucuses if I had any faith in our sitting president. Alas, it took less than four years for all of his platitudes to lose their hot air -- and his decision to waive habeus corpus for anyone deemed a "terrorist" is the most dictatorial move by a president since there was a real war going on right in our nation. The last president to decree arrests and detentions without charges or rights was ... drum roll ... Abraham Lincoln. Times were a bit different then, and it still wasn't right.

Oh well, la di dah, the message is clear: You Occupy, you die. No more wasted pepper spray. Hey, how do you think they got things done in Argentina?

Meanwhile, the Republicans are duking it out over the really, really, really important national issues: abortion, gay rights, and prayer in schools. How else could we possibly have experienced the re-emergence of Rick Santorum, a moron of such epic stupidity that his IQ has to be tested with the hamster scale? Chimps leave him in the dust.

If you've never heard of Rick Santorum, you haven't been here at TGAB very long. I've written more "moron par excellence" rants about him than any other hominid. (Using the word hominid rather reluctantly here.)

In the not-so-distant past, Rick was one of the U.S. Senators from Pennsylvania. Until some intrepid reporter got the idea to go visit the address Rick listed for himself and his family in some blue-collar locale in the western part of the state. Turned out Ricky and his large, home-schooled brood had decamped for suburban Virginia, where they were living in a lavish home, rather beyond the income level of an honest senator. He hadn't even bothered to hire someone to cut the grass at the old Pennsylvania homestead -- that's how he was nabbed.

Rick got trounced in his re-election bid. He is still living in Virginia.

The only people who like this guy are the same vote-splitting dingbats who were flocking to Rick Perry until he opened his mouth. Santorum is slightly more able to converse than Perry, but hardly the man to lead a large and diverse nation with severe economic difficulties and tense situations in several parts of the globe. Leadership? Rick Santorum couldn't guide rats through a maze if you spotted him the cheese.

I wonder what people in other parts of the world think of us. I think we look ridiculous, and I live here.

The Lords and Ladies and Wenches of Misrule

2012-01-03T18:03:00.000-05:00

I was in the Mummer's Parade. It was a Saturnalia of the first stripe (at least our portion of the parade was). I felt like I was participating in something ancient, very ancient, a rebellion against rules, and propriety, and decency, and the powers-that-be. The weather was beautiful. I spent more than half the day dancing in the sunlight, surrounded by people who know how to have fun.

The official t.v. camera did not catch our whole act, but in the clip below, if you don't blink, at 19 minutes you'll see a German barmaid in blond braids run past, smiling up a storm. Guess who?

Happy 2012! I don't have to say "Long Live Misrule." It will.

Two street stompers 2012 mummers

2012-01-03T17:54:00.000-05:00

Misrule Triumphant

2012-01-01T20:45:00.001-05:00

It is without a single jot of humility that I announce that the 2012 Comic Brigade Champion in the Philadelphia Mummers Parade is ... the TWO STREET STOMPERS!

We won.

Philadelphia Mummers Parade Live Stream

2011-12-31T21:51:00.003-05:00

Wow, I am not sure this will work, but the Mummers Parade should be live streaming on the channel that broadcasts it to Philadelphia.

The Mummers will be cleansing Philadelphia of the negative energy brought into the city by the Dominionists and their DC40 campaign. In the grandest tradition of the bored gods, we turn everything upside down, break all the rules, and have a wonderful time doing it!

I am a proud member of Two Street, an award-winning Comic brigade. We will be marching second overall ... virtually opening a parade that lasts more than eight hours! Our routine is based on Oktoberfest (another grand festival of misrule). If you see us perform, send me a four-star review! Best viewing time would be between the hours of 10 and 11 a.m. New Year's Day.

If you get the stream later in the afternoon, be prepared. Those string bands you see? Amateurs. Word. You won't believe it either.

Here's the link, but best to copy and paste or Google:

http://www.myphl17.com/

In Which I Paint My Shoes Gold and Change My Life

2011-12-29T14:29:00.001-05:00

Welcome to "The Gods Are Bored," 1702 posts strong! Lord love a fruit fly! The freakin War and Peace of vulture worship on the Web!

Today is a watershed moment in my life.

As I write this, a man from Cumberland, Maryland is driving to Bedford, Pennsylvania to finalize the paperwork and set down the money for my family's property on Polish Mountain. The property from which my great-great-grandfather marched to the Civil War.

The buyer is a nice man who has gone out of his way to let me know that I will always be welcome to "come home." He's not even changing the lock on the door. But part of his relentless protesting about my still being a part of the farm is the tacit understanding we both have that this will not be the case. In our modern culture, a signature on a piece of paper has enormous emotional and temporal significance.

Yesterday I read in the New York Times that the kind of titanium hip replacement I have has serious design flaws, and that these devices are wearing out and jeopardizing the health of many people who have them. Well, my surgeon was honest when he said I would get 20 years out of the hip. I was 49 at the time.

So, what do you do with 15 years of quality life remaining, when you can't go home again because home ain't there anymore, when your lack of ambition has led to epic failure, when your kids are nearly grown and your husband doesn't really need you so much as all that?

First you ground. Center. Breathe. Then you dedicate your life fiercely to the bored Tricksters.

In short, time to stop worrying and learn to love Philadelphia.

And so it was with reverence and a feeling of oneness with the Gods that I took a worn-out but comfortable pair of sneakers into my back yard and spray painted them gold. For most people who do this, it's just another pre-Mummers Parade chore. For me, it's a rite of passage.

On January 1, 2012, I will step out with my possibly bum hip and march in Philadelphia's biggest and longest parade. I will revel with the other participants in the neighborhood that hosts their antics. I am really and truly ringing out the old and ringing in the new.

Now I must go and put anther coat of paint on those shoes. I hope they will be just as comfortable now as they were when I used them to walk the land. Look for me in the Two Street Stompers New Year Brigade. At home with Loki and the ghost of Benjamin Franklin.

Buzzard Blogging, for a Change

2011-12-28T18:33:00.000-05:00

Welcome, brothers and sisters, to the Church of the Bountiful Buzzards! I'm Pastor Annie, priestess of the putrid since 1975! Wing it! The sky's the limit!

With wind speeds in excess of 40 miles per hour today, the time seemed right for a little worship of the Holy Sacred Thunderbird, Golden Purifier, a.k.a. buzzard. So I took my little Dodge, and my daughter The Heir, and we went to Wenonah to praise and worship. (Well, I praised and worshiped. Heir just went along for the ride.)

Wenonah is the winter residence for a huge flock of turkey and black vultures. They scour the countryside during the daylight hours and then return to Wenonah's mature pines to roost. There are easily 200 birds in this cohort. Maybe more.

It's funny how you don't see a buzzard for miles around, but the minute you pull up in Wenonah, they are chock-a-block everywhere. Today they were positively playing in the wind. Figure it out. If the wind is gusting at 40, and a bird is flying with the wind, how fast is that bird going? Those buzzards looked like they were having fun. All hail!

When Heir and I left, most of the flock had settled into the pines, where they pack themselves in tightly. (I haven't figured out yet how I can persuade Mr. J to move to Wenonah, but I want to do it.) I said a prayer to them, to make me healthy, wealthy, beautiful, and carefree. And like anyone else who prays, I expect them to deliver.

Now, secure in the vigilant care of the Holy Sacred Thunderbird, I'm going downstairs to read a front page New York Times story about faulty hip replacements, courtesy of the company that supplied the one inside me. But I have no fear. I'll carry on until I'm carrion ... and then, home to the vultures I go.

Putting the Hollandaise in the Holidays

2011-12-23T08:07:00.001-05:00

Welcome to "The Gods Are Bored!" Right on time for the holiday break, my computer has sprung a leak and won't hold content. So this post is being done on the fly at school, and I don't know when I'll be able to post again. Maybe from the public library/church in my borough.

Update on the First Amendment: The menorah that I thought had been taken down out of a sense of reason was, in fact, stolen in the deep recesses of the night. Police are baffled. Durrrrhhhh. A five-foot aluminum menorah? Have they checked the prices being paid for scrap metal lately?

Apparently, as predicted, many citizens of Snobville (particularly at the high school) are weighing in against the religious displays on public property. The Snobville Weekly Tattler reports that the displays were done after permits were issued to Hay-bad (not the proper spelling, this is the Jewish group, they are very conservative) and a society called Citizens for Keeping Christ in Christmas. According to our lovely mayor, such permits are legal because they can be issued to any religious group.

Promptly and efficiently, I applied for a permit on behalf of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. (I can't copy the text of the email here. School computers have so much security on them they could double for CIA.) I described the beautiful holiday display the Church would do, using suitable pasta products, a Santa hat, and a sign that reads "Seasoning Is the Reason for the Season." I linked to the FSM home page and warned that failure to issue this nonprofit organization a permit would be deemed religious discrimination.

Readers, you know I'll do it. Given the sentiment at the high school, I'll have plenty of creative help.

Spare was the one who coined the phrase "Putting the Hollandaise in the Holidays." I think that is so beautiful! Won't that be inspirational on a waterproof sign?

To close -- for how long I don't know -- I would just like to say that I don't want to put up a Druid symbol on public land. I don't want any symbols on public land. Xmas trees are universal; to me, they don't really have a religious affiliation anymore. Even my school has one in the lobby.

Religious displays belong on religious property. Which is why you see so few for Druids and Wiccans. Where would we leave stuff? We worship in the woods.

A blessed Yule to all, especially the Flying Spaghetti Monster, a new God among us! Next winter, get ready for Spaghetti!

Reason Prevails: The Menorah Is Gone

2011-12-21T09:11:00.000-05:00

Welcome to "The Gods Are Bored," waging a bittersweet war for the U.S. Constitution during this holiday season. Gains have been made.

The gain is that the Jewish group who erected the large menorah on public property has taken it down.

I'm sorry they had to do it, but they had to do it. My guess is that they did it with a clear understanding of the importance of keeping church and state separate.

Is there any living group of people in the Western World who has suffered more than the Jews in matters pertaining to religion? They are the only people who can connect, in living memory, to a time when their people were systematically and brutally exterminated simply because of their religion. If you can remember a time when you or your family, or all of your family and friends and distant cousins, were rounded up and killed, you might be more amenable to our national Constitution's protections and strictures.

It only took three copies of the U.S. Constitution, with the Establishment Clause highlighted in green marker and the tract folded to that page, to get the Chabad synagogue to reconsider the placement of its electric menorah.

The manger scene is still under the Christmas tree on borough property, but this morning when I dropped off the fourth copy of the Constitution, I noticed that the display was not lit up by the spotlight that had been lit for the past week. At least they've pulled the plug on my taxes illuminating baby Jesus.

Knowing Snobville as I do (it's chock-a-block with lawyers, for one thing), I'll bet the nativity scene gets pulled right after December 25. Then it will only be a matter of going to a city council meeting and respectfully reminding the burghers that they must abide by the rules of 1787, like them or not, during future holidays.

Solstice ritual tomorrow. Gosh -- public property! The local grove of oaks along the pond! Well, I just won't leave any trace behind of the work that is done.

Fa La La, Okay, I Enlisted!

2011-12-18T18:16:00.002-05:00

Welcome to "The Gods Are Bored," waging the War on Christmas since this afternoon at 3:30!

Yes, yes, I am now a Constitutional Navy Seal, and the word is out. Trust me, the word is out.

Yesterday I wrote about a nativity scene that is displayed on public property in my borough, close to the street. There's also a menorah about 50 feet away. I guess the big ol' committee of three (mayor, two councilmen) decided that if they included the menorah, there couldn't possibly be an outcry about a religious display on public property.

Well, my lieblings, I'm a taxpayer here in Snobville, and they don't call it Snobville for nothing. Next year my property taxes will crest $12,000 (yes THOUSAND) a year. And I live in a modest house! For real! This is New Jersey. The people who live in Camden's Tent City have to pay high-roller taxes. I can't imagine what the real snobs in Snobville pay. But I guess it doesn't matter to them. Once you're rich, you're really rich, and you can afford any unreasonable tally.

I'm not that rich. I may have to move.

In the meantime ...

It was a cold, crisp afternoon, so I decided to walk up to the grocery store. I shoved a few copies of the United States Constitution into my pocket and set out on my walk.

On my way I passed a Roman Catholic church and school. In front of the school was a very modest nativity scene.

Two blocks later, I arrived at the public library grounds.

There was a woman on her knees, photographing the nativity scene. This seemed weird to me, because it's not a special, expensive nativity scene like the one up on Main Street in front of the Baptist church. It's just a mid-sized nativity scene in 1970's era plastic.

When she noticed me, she turned around and said, "Oh hi, isn't this great? They didn't used to have this in Snobville. I'm a Catholic, and I think this is great!"

To which I replied: "I'm a Pagan, and I don't think it's great at all."

I opened my copy of the Constitution, read the Establishment Clause out loud, folded the little tract so it would fall open to said Amendment, and placed it in the "stable." I said to the astonished female. "I don't see a Pentagram on this property."

She said, "But it's Christmas."

I said, "I pay taxes in this borough, and this is unconstitutional."

Then I walked up to the menorah and placed another tract, similarly folded, at the base of the lights.

Readers, you have to trust me. I have nothing. NOTHING against the religions in question. They just don't belong on property that is paid for by my big, fat Pagan tax bill!

Here's how the war starts.

I walked on to the grocery store, made my purchases, and walked back past the library. No surprise at all, the copies of the Constitution had been removed from both the menorah and the nativity scene. But the funny thing was, the woman was still there, illegally parked, texting away in her car!

All hands on Deck the halls! I can just imagine the content of those texts. War on Christmas! Evil Pagans on the march! Gotta protect the Jesus shrine!

They have met their match.

First of all, I have about 100 copies of the U.S. Constitution in a bag in my room. They were free. Every day I leave for work at 6:30 in the morning. It will be a simple matter to add another 8 minutes to my commute to drop off a Bill of Rights for Jesus and Yahweh before Father Sol rises in the east. Figuring I get off work at 3:30, I can drop off another set around 4:00 p.m. And on nights when the daughters and I are out looking for Crazy Christmas Houses, I can make a third foray.

I'll leave this next part up to your discretion, readers, so please reply.

It would be a very simple matter for me to create a Flying Spaghetti Monster out of pasta and some cocktail toothpicks The Spare bought for her dinner soiree that she held last night. What do you think? Should I place Our Noodly Master on the stable roof on December 24? Your call.

My walk home brought me back past the nativity scene in front of the RC Church. NO FREAKIN PROBLEM, LIEBLINGS. That's where it belongs! My taxes don't support that church!

Tomorrow morning I will send a strongly worded letter to our mayor and city council regarding the religious displays on public property. I will NOT request the addition of a Pentagram. It doesn't belong there any more than the creche. I will say that there are taxpayers in Snobville who object to religious displays on public property, please do not include these displays in the future.

You know what? I'm on solid ground with this here in Snobville. I'm sure there are many taxpayers who feel the same way, and many of them are monotheists.

Ramen!

Gonna Teach Jesus To Read

2011-12-17T17:57:00.000-05:00

Welcome to "The Gods Are Bored," old friends and new! If you're just happening on this little love fest, please be forewarned: 'Tis not necessarily the season to be jolly around here. This is New Jersey. It gets dark at 4:30, and people's hands rest perpetually on the horns of their cars, pressing violently as needed. Fa la la HONK HONK! Humbug.

We had some road work done in Snobville this summer, and they lopped a little bit of land off the public library property. Our borough Xmas tree is now closer to the street.

Today, when I drove past, I noticed that someone had erected a nativity scene under the tree. Not far away there was a menorah, wishing everyone a Happy Hanukkah.

It was the same last year, but the displays were not so close to the street. And somehow it didn't bother me, because, after all, the tree itself is Pagan.

This year it bothers me.

Snobville has a Jewish population but no synagogue. Snobville has a charming Baptist church on Main Street with a huge nativity scene. Do we absolutely, positively need religious symbols on public property? No one asked the Garden State Pagan Alliance for a holiday sign. I would make one, but I suck at art.

Time for Plan B.

I've got 500 little pocket-sized copies of the U.S. Constitution. Tomorrow a dozen of them are going into the nativity scene, all propped open at the First Amendment. Over the protests of the Spare, one will also be posted at the base of the menorah.

I have no objection whatsoever to religious-themed displays on religious or private properties. But my taxes pay for the library, and I don't see a Pentagram on the grounds.

There have been highly-publicized fights about this in other towns of every size. I don't prefer to exercise my snit in a big public forum. It's so much easier to give Baby Jesus a little light reading to brighten his stay in the manger.

If you need some copies of the Constitution for your own community, contact me, email me your address, and I'll get some off to you. I'd have given you more notice, but the nativity scene just went up in Snobville -- so I can't promise delivery by December 25.

But I will deliver.

Occupy Camden

2011-12-15T09:18:00.000-05:00

Welcome to "The Gods Are Bored!" Fresh off the wire: The war in Iraq has ended. The American flag has been lowered. Our troops are coming home.

And in all of these nine years, no one has been able to explain to me why the soldiers went there in the first place. Did you believe all that crapola about the WMD? Me neither.

I've been watching the Occupy movement from the sideline, principally because, in order to be effective, groups need to have a plan of action along with a reason for protesting. For awhile I wondered why the big labor unions didn't get behind Occupy. The cynical part of me says that unions have their money invested at the big banks. (But in Wisconsin, the teacher's union pulled their money from the bank that had Koch money behind it.) Realistically, though, the organized labor movement, for all its flaws, has an agenda, backs candidates, and seeks to make social changes through conventional means.

Occupy sort of reminds me of the student protesters in Les Miserables. Which is worrisome, because they may meet the same fate.

As for living outdoors in a tent, well, I could make a suggestion to Occupy.

There's a top 1% and a bottom 1%. Some of that bottom 1% live in tents already.

In a wooded area of Camden, about 50 yards from the Admiral Wilson Boulevard, there's a tent city of homeless people (if you don't count their tents) who have chosen to remove themselves from society. They have leadership and a set of rules. And they live in their tents all year around, year after year. They have no social agenda beyond being allowed to stay in their tent city, because that's where they want to be.

Occupy would do well to meet with these veteran tent-dwellers, both for handy tips on winter survival and for public relations purposes. Seems to me that a country that can send soldiers to multiple nations to fight counter-productive wars could also create suitable living conditions for even its most dedicated outsiders, the bottom of the bottom of the pile.

Camden has been Occupied for years. Think of the jobs that would be created if we spent less on soldiers and more on carpenters who could fix up row houses. Then maybe no one would be tempted to live in a tent for any reason other than back country hiking.

Rick Rant

2011-12-12T15:33:00.001-05:00

Welcome to "The Gods Are Bored," a happy home-sweet-home for anyone who believes in any deity who isn't attracting followers who are either stupid, dangerous, or numerous! Welcome, likewise, to those of you who don't believe in deities at all. Hey, we are in this together. Your vote keeps the ship afloat.

Below I've posted possibly the most despicable, anti-American political ad I've seen since the days of Willie Horton. Our moron du jour, Rick Perry, has openly allied himself with the most radical of Christian sects. But this just takes the cake.

Here's a guy who doesn't know how many people sit on the Supreme Court, let alone their names. News flash: Immigrants wishing to gain citizenship know the answers to both of those questions. Basically there's a man running for president who knows less than the refugee from Nigeria who's been here since 2009!

(*Anne snaps knuckles, returns to her rant*)

I've watched at least 40 speeches by Barack Obama, and in almost every one of them (including his Inaugural Address), he has ended with "God Bless America." So how exactly is he waging a war against Christianity? Has he sent his daughters to burn down the National Cathedral? What am I missing? Maybe he doesn't go to church every Sunday. Maybe he doesn't go at all. Shame on him! Richard Nixon went to church all the time!

You know what I would really love to see? Right now, while they can openly serve in the military, I would like for every gay Navy Seal to go on YouTube and post his or her credentials ... then flex his or her muscles ... then shoot a crash test dummy through the "heart" from 500 yards away. What is the big deal about sexual orientation in the military? Oh please. It's not like people are lining up to head off to Afghanistan and get shot. We should be grateful for anyone who is willing to serve in this era of nebulous enemies.

And you can tell this is a holiday ad, because here it comes again. The war on Christmas! Prayer in the school! Okay, someone wave the white flag! Armistice Day for the war on Christmas, already. We'll just put Christmas into the curriculum and discuss its origins. We could do the same for Easter. I'm so freakin willing to do this! I think I'll submit a petition to my principal!

Ads like this one call upon us to have faith.

We must have faith that the majority of Americans who vote are rational, reasonable people. We must have faith that there are Christians aplenty out there who would be uncomfortable with this alliance between church and state. We must have faith. Faith that moves mountains.

Vote.

(*End of rant*)

Here's a nice, light ending. This picture is circulating on Facebook, and it's just such a hoot! Rick's trainers not only dressed him up in a jacket in what is clearly the middle of the summer (note the greenery in the background), but they chose from the Warner Brothers "Brokeback Mountain" wardrobe. This would be an easy mistake to make, but Rick would have been way safer wearing a choir robe from the Crystal Cathedral.

Strong

2011-12-12T14:50:00.000-05:00

New Experience Saturday

2011-12-11T18:07:00.001-05:00

Welcome to "The Gods Are Bored!" Wake up, all of you zombies! Festival in the air!

The final full moon of the calendar year is/was upon us, shining vibrantly in the sky. What better time to put an old year to bed and start thinking about 2012, Apocalypse Now?

Ah, forget the Apocalypse. Some little species always survives ... and life goes on.

Do you ever have one of those days when there are two "must-not-miss" events on your calendar? Saturday was one of those days for me. At noon: my very first ever Mummers rehearsal. At dark: The fabulous Firebird Festival in Phoenixville, PA! And only 40 miles of busy freeway between the two!

I'm a ham at heart, and so I have always watched Philly's Mummers Parade from the comfort of my recliner with a little bit of yearning. The parade is eight hours long, held at the coldest season of the year. And yet, the people in it seem to be having so much fun! How long was I going to sit out on this spectacle? Well, I've done just that for 25 years. But now I'm off the recliner, shopping for Under-Armor and gold paint for my run-down walking shoes!

I joined a comic brigade. Our first of two rehearsals was Saturday. And I must say that everyone there made me feel right at home. Mumming is a very proud tradition in these parts, and it just happened that the closest brigade to my house is a big one that has finished in the top ten every year for a decade. The rehearsal was fun and well-run, the routine is a hoot, and the 20 little kids will send it over the top in cuteness. I can't say any more now, because I don't want to give our secrets away to the opposing brigades. I'll get you a YouTube on January 2.

After practice ended, I drove over to Phoenixville. Given the town's name, it's not surprising that they would have a Firebird Festival. But what is surprising about the thing is how they don't do much at all to minimize the Pagan undertones. It is held close to the Solstice, and the crowning event of the evening is the immolation of a huge wooden bird-shaped structure, with Native American drummers and fire-dancers creating the build-up atmosphere. Many of the children were carrying long wands with a fancy bird on the top.

The object of the Firebird Festival is to send the old year out in a blaze and to begin a new one with renewed intent. For a small donation, you can write a wish on a slip of paper that gets put into a box. Just before they light the firebird, they put the box inside. Your wish goes up into the sky on a bright tongue of flame, to your deity of choice! Since I have so many to choose from, the sky must have been cluttered with happy bored gods!

I don't know how many little towns would set a bonfire so big you can see it two miles away, with minimal firefighting presence and maximum crowds of people. All I know is that the phoenix must have had some big-time accelerant in it, because with one touch of the torch it started to flame in dramatic fashion. By that time the somber Native American drum circle had become a lively multi-cultural drum event of epic proportions.

You go, Phoenixville! This was a blast with a big ol' B.

Holiday preparations are under way, so it might be a light week here at "The Gods Are Bored." If you come here, and you've already read my drivel, check out the great bloggers in my sidebar! Not a dud among 'em.

Graduate School

2011-12-08T14:59:00.001-05:00

Welcome to "The Gods Are Bored," learning life's lessons the hard way since 1959! Have you spent some of your life in the School of Hard Knocks? Me too! Maybe we were in the same class but just didn't share homework.

This fall I have been given a master's degree class in reading by my school district. Since I took a pay cut, I figured I ought to recoup some of it by enrolling in the class. I had to drive to our sister campus for the classes (up to an hour commute one way during rush). Overall I would say I learned a few helpful classroom tools. But the teacher aggravated me in the extreme.

(Yes, yes, yes! My three most loyal readers will remember that I have it in for teachers! There's the prissy Mr. G at Spare's school, and the memorable Mr. Bigwand, who could talk for two hours without clearing his throat.)

This latest teacher, whose shapely butt I was glad to see leave the classroom at the end of the term, seems to have forgotten the first rule of teaching: namely, show your students what you want them to do. She assigned "masters degree level" papers to a cohort of teachers (including self) who had never taken a graduate class before, without giving clear guidelines or (gods forbid) showing us a sample of what she wanted!

I'm not kvetching on my part. I got good grades on the papers I've gotten back so far. But many of my colleagues were not so lucky. Some of them might have to reimburse the school for the tuition, which I'm thinking might run to $1500. That's a heck of a hunk out of an already-reduced teacher salary.

My feeling is that the professor will grade on a curve. My other feeling is that some people just didn't bother to work as hard as they could have.

But this class brought me to a big-time reckoning.

My days in the apparent world are numbered.

I want to continue learning. But the learning must feed my soul, not my stomach.

There's one more free class I can take in the spring before I would have to enroll in the master's degree program formally. That class sounds like it will be useful for my professional development. I plan to take it. (Different professor. Probably won't like him either.)

After that, it's on to Soul School. Probably modern Druidic studies. As Shakespeare put it, "The time of life is short. To spend that shortness basely were too long."

Free Advice to Store Clerks

2011-12-04T15:12:00.001-05:00

Welcome to "The Gods Are Bored!" I've got some things to do today, so I'll be brief.

See this pretty thing? It's called a "Lampe Berger." I bought one last year as a holiday gift for Mr. J. It's a product from Paris. You fill the base with alcohol infused with fragrance (ergo, not the kind you drink). There's a wick. You light the lamp, and the fragrance gets wicked up and out into the room.

I love the thing. It's the bomb. (Well, I guess if you dropped it while it was alight, it would REALLY be a bomb!) It infuses scent better than a candle, and it purifies the air to boot.

You can Google Lampe Berger and buy one it for that certain someone. I highly recommend the product. Their official site is a bit user-unfriendly, so try some of the American retailers.

I bought my Lampe Berger at a store on Snobville's charming Main Street -- a trendy little boutique that mostly sells the kind of thingamagiggies you throw around your house if you've got money to burn. But the lamp appealed, because I love it when my house smells good.

Anyway, long story short, this fancy store can't seem to keep the fragrances in stock. I've gone there at least ten times, and in eight of those times I've walked out empty-handed. Once I only got the product I asked for after having to make a special trip, when they had it shipped down from their other store in ... geez, I don't know where the other store is. Surely some place just like Snobville.

Today the weather was glorious, so I walked up to Main Street, went into the store, and requested a fragrance. They were out. I requested another frangrance. They were out of that too. They offered me "Polynesian Sunrise" or some other non-wintry scent. I walked out empty-handed.

And came home. Sat down here at the old desktop. Ordered $75 worth of fragrance that will be delivered right to my door.

I try, readers. I really try to buy local. I don't want to see empty stores on my Main Street. But if the store owners aren't stocking the items a customer wants, it's all too easy for that customer to go online and get the item. Sure, it costs a little more for shipping, but I'm a busy woman. I can't be hiking to Center Snobville three times a week, after the store calls me and tells me they got what I wanted.

So here's my free advice to store owners everywhere. If you have a product that you believe in, that you sell with all the ferocity of our old departed friend, Billy Mays, you had best lay in a good supply of any supporting products required to run the original product. In this day and age, it's way too easy to find Lampe Berger oil online. Local store owner, you needed that sale to pay your rent. You can only sell so many $300 embroidered throw pillows in this economy.

I would go up and pay the store to take my free advice (in the true spirit of TGAB), but there's that pesky shipping charge I wouldn't have had to pay if the store stocked the oils I needed. So, forget it, Snobville High-End Emporium of Generally Useless Gewgaws! The "For Rent" sign will soon hang from your door.

Mercury, That Bastard

2011-12-02T17:37:00.001-05:00

Welcome to "Some Gods Should Be More Bored Than They Are!" My name is Anne Johnson (really), and I've had a Retrograde Week so abysmal in its retrogradeness that I'd like to assign Mercury to the retro-bottom-dollar thrift store!

You know Anne's having a bad week when she doesn't blog. Blast you, Mercury! Poisonous hazardous deity!

MY MERCURY RETROGRADE WEEK, by Anne Johnson

*Formal teacher observation, SO ... the bulb in my overhead viewer burst with a resounding POP! It gets better. The warning label on the side of the machine said, "Bulb contains Mercury. Handle with caution. Hazardous Waste."

*Well-planned lesson for formal teacher observation, SO ... observer calls at the last minute and cancels. Students nail the lesson. Overhead viewer had been fixed JUST in time.

*Observer comes the next day, same time. SO ... Same students don't have the foggiest notion of what I'm trying to teach them, so they decide to chat about the Eagles and stroll around the room.

*Chosen to attend literacy workshop at Kean University. More than 70 miles up the NJ Turnpike. Didn't take GPS. Forgot cell phone. SO ... Got lost in Elizabeth. At 7:30 in the morning. Made it to the conference in the nick of time. Name not on the list of invitees.

*Master's degree class professor tells the class that all the assignments we'd turned in previously (aced by self) don't mean diddly. SO ... Suddenly, the most important one is the one we haven't done, which I have no idea how to do because she didn't show us how she wanted it done. (This is freakin CLASSIC Mercury Retrograde, folks.)

*Spare mistakenly took some change from the grocery store thingy that belonged to the customer behind us in line. When Spare offered to give it back, the woman declined. Spare asked again. Still a decline. Then, when Spare did not dump it in the Salvation Army bucket outside the store, the crazy woman yelled at her all the way across the parking lot. Called her a thief! Said she could at least have given it to the Salvation Army! (Note to TGAB subscribers. Anne does not give a dime to the Salvation Army. No one should have to believe in Jesus to get a turkey dinner.) Damn Mercury! Usually I would have been up to this challenge to my daughter's moral character, but I'd just driven 130 miles on the New Jersey Turnpike and gotten lost in Elizabeth, and had to finagle my way into a conference! Too tired to give chase and fight back.

*Decibel the Parrot got moved into this room over Thanksgiving holiday and is still here. Living up to his name. Send money for hearing aids.

*So far as I know, the buzzards have not returned to Wenonah yet.

There are other mitigating factors, all dumped on me by that flighty deity, but keeping to the basics. One more:

*Discovered that Sis "bought" her new children from a Christian puppy mill that is not state-sanctioned! Ergo, she's freakin RETURNING one who is DANGEROUSLY FUCKED UP, while KEEPING his brother!

Bite. Me. Mercury.

Oh, wait. You already have.

Helpful Shopping Tips from "The Gods Are Bored"

2011-11-27T13:58:00.001-05:00

The weather outside is anything but frightful today ... but if that music on the radio is subliminally activating your need to spend money, we at "The Gods Are Bored" can help you out!

You see, "shop local" only works if you live in a place where the merchandise is affordable. I hardly ever buy anything in Snobville except wedding presents. All else is beyond my means.

Therefore, I have a few merchants listed in my sidebar who can help you get your shopping done -- and they're also super nice people. In fact, I chose them for my sidebar because they are nice people who deserve to make a living from their stores.

*Jules Enchanting Gifts* has the biggest selection of faerie gifts you'll find anywhere, plus tons of other collectibles. The owner of Jules is a young woman named Happy. Happy is her real name, sure as I'm Anne Johnson. Either she grew into the name or it fit her from birth, because Happy is happy! Her jovial nature infuses every purchase from her site.

*Woodstock Trading Company* Channel your inner Dead Head! Or satisfy your need for esoteric incense that you dream about but can't find anywhere. Dr. Seth will either have the incense you need, or he will find it for you. If you phone them, tell them Anne sent you, and ask how "Monstro" is doing! Your order will be shipped promptly! Nicest family on earth, great little shop.

*Molly* Molly is a sculptress of faeries and dragons. Her work is unique and beautiful. Once again, she's one of the nicest human beings on the planet. If you want something extra-special, I highly recommend Molly. Follow her links. You won't be sorry.

*Moonstone Jewelry* Guys, this one is for you. As a courtesy, I'll remind you on December 24.

Ah, joy. More papers to grade, and then I have to run The Heir back to college. Not sure "run" will be the correct word. Expecting gridlock. Worth it to have her home.

Thanksgiving 2011; Or, How I Learned To Love the 21st Century!

2011-11-25T18:54:00.001-05:00

Welcome to "The Gods Are Bored," Thanksgiving edition, 2011! This century is now more than a decade old, and I have been less than impressed. But now I'm totally down with the 21st. Read on to find out how a "Dazed and Confused"-era teen finally went techno with success!

I have two daughters, The Heir and The Spare (pictured). I have a very close friend, the Monkey Man (pictured). All were invited to my table on Thanksgiving. Blessed be, they all accepted -- and Monkey Man brought his sister and another friend!

Alas, there was a snag. Mr. J, being a sportswriter, is often called upon to write at the holidays. He had a deadline. So I had to drive to Baltimore to pick up his mom. And back to Snobville for the feast.

It's a 200-mile round trip, all on a Thanksgiving morning.

Well, you have your Travel Wednesdays, and you have your Back Fridays, and in between people manage to have dinner with family and friends. I figured the traffic would not be bad on I-95 on Thanksgiving Day itself.

BAMP!!!!! Wrong. Wrong. Wrong! Deduct 50 points from Anne's score!

As I was traveling south on I-95, I noticed the traffic volume moving north. When Mom-in-law and I began our return journey from Baltimore to Snobville, the traffic on I-95 was unbelievable. You could not have squeezed a Handi-Wipe between my car and the one in front of me. You could have tried, though. At the rate the traffic was moving, you'd have been clear to make about 25 attempts.

I'm a veteran traveler of I-95, and I know how to circumnavigate it. Will I share this information with you? Hmmmmm. Email me.

I got off I-95 and took an alternate route. Here's where the plot thickens.

It was after 11:00 in the morning. I had told my guests that dinner would be ready at 4:30. The reason I had made this audacious boast was that I had full confidence in my sous chef, The Spare. You should see some of the fabulous meals she whips up! Caught in traffic? No problem! Spare at the helm, all systems go!

At a red light, I phoned up Spare. Conversation went something like this:

Anne: Hey, have you made the stuffing?

Spare: No, but I'm getting around to it.

Anne: Have you peeled the potatoes?

Spare: I was just getting ready to do that.

Anne: Listen. It's going to take longer than anticipated for me to get home. I need for you to put the turkey in the oven. The directions for preparing it are on the sheet I left on the kitchen counter.

(Very long pause.)

Anne: Spare? Are you there?

Spare: I can't handle a turkey carcass. It will make me puke.

Anne: What are you talking about? You cook stuff all the time!

Spare: Yeah, but ... look, I'm not reaching into a turkey and pulling out the ... parts. Like, I can't do that.

(Anne thinks of a contingency plan.)

Anne: Put your sister on the phone.

(Heir comes to the phone. Mind you, she can boil water for tea and toast a PopTart. End of her cooking ability.)

Anne: Heir, will you help Spare put the turkey in the oven? The directions are on the kitchen counter.

Heir: Ummmmmm. Uhhhhhhh. (No enthusiasm) I guess .......

Anne: DO YOU CREATURES WANT TO EAT TODAY? IF SO, PUT THE TURKEY IN THE OVEN! I'M IN FREAKIN ABERDEEN, AND THE MONKEY MAN IS COMING TO DINNER!

(Green light. Phone off.)

Long story short, Mom-in-law and I crawled to a stop in front of my house at about half past never. The turkey was not in the oven. It had not been removed from the fridge. To her dubious credit, The Spare had made the stuffing and peeled the potatoes.

Time for a desperate contingency plan!

My oven is a modern, computerized gadget that has had its share of glitches, let me tell you. The oven has a "convection" option that I have never quite figured out. When you use it, time and space become altered as if it's an episode of Doctor Who gone awry. When you cook with convection heat, you dial down the temperature and dial back the time. It must save energy, doing that. But it's damned tricky.

I had no choice.

Slapped that bird in the oven. Convection heat, 300 degrees, 2 hours. Can you believe it, readers? That gobbler was ready for the table by 4:30! Sixteen pounds! Welcome to the 21st century, bored deities!

Monkey Man arrived, bearing home-made cranberry bread and a pumpkin pie. His sister arrived with the classic Green Bean Casserole, which was really and truly invented by a citizen of Snobville who worked in the test kitchen at Campbell's.

We all had a lovely dinner. Even the famed Monkey was happy, because I had a whole bunch of bananas set aside for him. We drank a toast and all said what they were thankful for. (Monkey Man's sister said she was grateful "that my weird brother always manages to find lovely friends.")

My mom-in-law was particularly impressed that the turkey was ready in the nick of time. During Thanksgivings past, she had been renowned for hounding me about when I was going to put the bird over the fire.

I saved the best for last. After dinner, the Monkey Man presented me with a gift. It was like 25 Yuletides came in one single second! Here's a picture of him, modeling my gift earlier in the day, at the annual Snobville-Snob Heights football game ...

EXHIBIT A: WHAT A HAT!

I am blown away by this fabulous headgear. It bothers me slightly that the thing was probably made in some poor Third World country, but man-oh-man. Never has product met consumer with more satisfaction!

We at "The Gods Are Bored" hope you had a happy Thanksgiving. We hope you took a pass on Walmart on Black Friday. If not, don't ask us to feel sorry for you if you were trampled, shot, or pepper-sprayed. (Seriously. Look it up. People got pepper-sprayed at Walmart.)

This Thanksgiving was really special. We all missed Great-Grandma (who is still hovering), but we delighted in new friends and family. I have to work on Spare's gag reflex, but that can wait for another day.

I hope your holiday was special too. If not, let me know. I could set a place for you next year ... and save a few bananas back for your monkey puppet. It's how I roll.

Return to Sender

2011-11-23T16:44:00.001-05:00

Welcome to "The Gods Are Bored!" Last night was a big night here in Snobville. It's "Spirit Week" (wow, just got the double meaning of that!), and the classes at Snobville High participated in their usual competitions, which encourage rivalry in the name of making money for charities and food banks.

My daughter The Spare is a Senior. She has always lived and breathed Spirit Week, but never more than this time -- her swan song as the driving force of the Spirit Week Committee, Class of 2012.

Spare's class chose "Lord of the Rings" as their hallway theme. And she buckled down to work. And they won.

Her contributions ran from the sublime to the ridiculous. In no particular order:

1. Both of my formal Druid Ritual robes. With my warm blessings.
2. A beautiful hand-crafted leather mask I just bought, giving to my sister for the holidays.
3. Costumes made of sheets and tablecloths from the thrift store.
4. A large piece of Astroturf from Lakewood High, Lakewood, Ohio ... scavenged from our property on Polish Mountain.
5. The contents of my china closet, more or less. I hope she didn't take the champagne glasses.
6. Each and every piece of colonial "kit" wear we amassed over a decade of doing Revolutionary War encampments.
7. Faerie wear, all of it.
8. An old bottle we scavenged from Polish Mountain, as above.
9. Two enormous banners that she painted without any help.
10. A Treebeard costume that could go right onstage.
11. Our outdoor fire bowl AND firewood!
12. Kid-sized furniture that has followed me through life somehow, and
13. An enormous amount of sweat equity.

Spare may not rock when it comes to cleaning her room, but tell her to make a hallway look like Middle Earth, and she will deliver! I was extremely proud of her!

On to the sermon:

November 23 marks the end of the Dominionist assault on the Goddess Columbia and our First Amendment rights, at least in its formal stage. I'm not much at math, but I can't understand how they got so far ahead of me that they were able to spend Samhain in Washington, DC ("C" as in Columbia) and eleven days in Philly, while I'm only up to Missouri!

I don't know how you roll, but I'm seeing some synchronicity between DC40's ruthless prayer vigil and the Occupy Movement. It's almost as if people everywhere are feeling the negative vibe of theocracy and are stepping up to stop it, in the name of democracy. Occupy is about more than unemployment and unfair business tactics. It's about bringing our nation into balance through the right to peaceably assemble, which (by cracky!) is also in the text of the First Amendment!

I'm sure to have lots to say about Occupy in the months to come, but this sermon contains an effort to diffuse dark magick.

I found this lovely and effective spell on Facebook. The more of us doing it, the better. The best times for it will be from midnight Wednesday to sundown on Thursday. This is close enough to the Full Moon to effect a new beginning, but far enough from a Mercury Retrograde to enact any unforseen consequences.

This is a send-back spell, meant to contain no more malice than you would expend upon a pair of shoes you ordered online and need to return because they don't fit. The merchant usually makes these returns very easy, so that you feel no bad humor. Please enter into this spell with that mindset: Something has come to you and your state. That something doesn't fit. Return to Sender, postage paid.

You can say this spell or write it on paper that you consign to air, fire, earth, or water. Pay heed to your sense of calm. You are diffusing ardor, and calmness is the best way to do that.

Spell as follows:

By the Power of (Insert favorite matron/patron/nature deity here) all negative prayers and curses issued by the New Apostolic Reformation, including all so called prayer intercessors who took part in the DC40/51 Days of Reformation Intercession campaign between October 3rd, 2011 and November 22nd, 2011 shall be returned to their source and origin intact exactly as they were sent. By the Power of (insert favorite deity here) and the Powers of The Queen of Heaven, Columbia, Lady Liberty and Nemesis, so mote it be.

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

First Amendment, United States Constitution, 1791

Worst Family Illness Ever

2011-11-20T08:46:00.001-05:00

So many of us walk around with illnesses we don't know we have. Just this week I learned that the brother of my dear friend Celeste has a malignant form of brain cancer with a three percent survival rate after just one year. The way he found out was that he lost use of his arm. No prior symptoms. How fragile we are.

My family has an illness that is easy to spot if you're looking in from the outside, but hard to accept if you have it. The illness is bipolar disorder, and it can ruin the lives of the sick person and everyone around him or her. All the while, the sick person is protesting that there's nothing wrong, how dare you tell me I need help?

About six years ago, my sister and her husband sold their ranch house in West Virginia and moved across the river into Maryland. They purchased a lavish 4-bedroom home with cathedral ceilings and mountain views. Sis bought all new furniture and decor for it. When I first walked in, it looked like a palace.

Sis and her husband received two large inheritances, one from my side and one from her husband's. I figured the big bequests bankrolled the new house. But then Sis started buying stuff. Expensive stuff. Lots and lots of it. And she acquired pets. She started with one dog. Now she has three. She started with one cat. Now she has five. She started with one bird that she had for 22 years. That bird flew out of its cage recently and hit its head on a wall and died. So now she has two new birds.

Last spring, my sister and her husband (ages 47 and 49) adopted two boys ages 5 and 8. My sister paid a private Christian adoption agency $30,000 for the adoption. The boys have behavior issues, especially the younger one.

This is what my sister told me when last I spoke to her: She and her husband (he has a very well-paying job) are living paycheck to paycheck. They have exhausted both inheritances and their retirement account. The house, once spotless, is now awash in dust and mayhem. She is trying fruitlessly to sell some of the expensive stuff in a desperate effort to recoup losses. I offered to buy a statue she has of a Pan faerie, only to be told it cost $800.

Many nights Sis gets four hours of sleep. Many evenings she deals with wild tantrums. This is all I will say here about the children, but I'll bet you get the picture.

I wondered how an adoption could be arranged without an agency contacting next of kin for a report. Now I know. This "Christian" agency either heard from Sis that I was a Pagan, or it didn't hear about me at all. I would have told them not to place young children with her. I would have told them I didn't think she was stable enough to be saddled with a ready-made family.

Several times in the past few years I have warned Sis that she was showing symptoms of bipolar disorder. Each time she lashed out at me. On one memorable occasion she denounced Druids for being cold-hearted, as if my faith had influenced my discernment.

One of the classic symptoms of bipolar disorder is profligate spending of money. I figured my sister's husband was making big bucks, but he's not. They have blown through a fortune and inherited a whirlwind. I say "they," because her husband is the enabler. It was incumbent upon him to get her ... them ... help.

The moral of this sermon is this: If you know someone who is bipolar, don't blame yourself when that person's life goes awry. Bipolar disorder is a terrible illness. It is incurable but can be managed with medical treatment, constant monitoring, and medicines. But first the victim needs to see the illness. When that doesn't happen, the legal system protects the person until he or she becomes a danger to self or others.

Light a candle for my sister, please. I think she is quickly approaching the danger zone. It's like a car wreck that I don't want to look at, for fear of what I will see.

Not Blaming Arkansas for This!

2011-11-17T09:09:00.001-05:00

Welcome to "The Gods Are Bored," dispensing the wisdom of the ages since 2005! Well, okay, not really. No one here is wealthy or wise ... or old. We still have fun, though.

Speaking of healthy, the poor dude in this famous painting had failed his health test completely. But it didn't stop artist Thomas Eakins from creating the masterpiece, "The Gross Clinic."

Eakins lived in Philadelphia. The painting depicts a group of students in Philadelphia. The painting was on display at Thomas Jefferson Hospital in Philadelphia until someone tried to buy it from the cash-strapped TJ.

That someone was Alice Walton of Bentonville, Arkansas. Ms. Walton wanted "The Gross Clinic" for a new museum she was building on her vast fortune gained from Wal-Mart.

Let me plainly state my case here. Wal-Mart mistreats its employees. It encourages the production of shoddy merchandise by poorly-paid workers in far-off lands. Its low prices are offset by the way the merchandise wears out quickly or doesn't work as well as it should. A poor person can't afford to shop at Wal-Mart. He would be better served to pay more and get a pair of shoes that will last three times longer.

At the top of the Wal-Mart pyramid sits the Walton family, esconced in luxury, trolling for iconic art treasures for a museum in their backwater lair.

I keep going back to this story of "The Gross Clinic," because I love it. When the citizens of Philadelphia learned that Alice Walton wanted the painting, and had offered a giant wad of cash for it, the citizens fought back. Together we pooled our resources and paid TJ more than Alice would have. Now the painting is in the Philadelphia Museum of Art (which I affectionately call "The Rocky Museum.").

Alice Walton is not a representative of Arkansas any more than Bill and Hillary Clinton are. But she is a poster child for greed. Is there a religion out there that encourages greed? Not on paper, by golly!

Look closely at your praise and worship team. Does it foster a climate of over-acquisition? If so, resign and relocate. Greed is not good. I don't have to live in a tent to tell you that.

What Remains of Us Is Love

2011-11-16T14:46:00.001-05:00

Welcome to "The Gods Are Bored," celebrating the joys of home and hearth since 2005! We're putting aside the First Amendment again tonight, because we would always rather talk about love.

If your deity or deities are haters, drop that subscription and look around some more. There are plenty of praise and worship teams that won't expect you to think the other guy is going you-know-where.

It's going to be a lively Thanksgiving at Chateau Johnson! The Monkey Man is attending, and he's bringing his sister! When we start sounding our barbaric yawps in the back yard, we're likely to attract some stares. The houses are close together where I live.

From the Monkey Man I learned that a former resident of my house just went to the Summerlands. I used to get mail addressed to this longtime resident. I never met her, but I have met her son. He is a wonderful person, a poet, and he has fond memories of growing up in the house where Mr. J and I raised our daughters, The Heir and The Spare.

Do you believe in spirits? I do, and I fully expect this former residence of my home to re-visit on her way to the Summerlands. With that in mind, I will light candles for her, and even talk to her if I feel her presence.

And what I will tell her is this:

"Vera, whatever you did in this house before I moved in, you must have done with love. Ever since I've lived here I have felt a positive warmth here. This was confirmed by your son when I met him. He described an idyllic childhood and begged me not to cut down the pear tree. Well, the pear tree is still there, and beneath it is a faerie portal. If you choose to sit with my family awhile before you go to the Summerlands, we will be honored to have you.

"When people sell a house and move away, they take their belongings with them. What they leave behind is the aura, the feelings, the happiness or sadness that informed their days while they lived under that roof. Vera, you were happy. Thank you for leaving that happiness behind. I will pay it forward, not forgetting that I'm building on what you began."

The carpet went to the curb, but the love lives on. Blessed be Vera, 1914-2011.

Michigan: What Are You Thinking?

2011-11-15T08:10:00.001-05:00

Welcome to "The Gods Are Bored," resuming in a less structured way our push-back against the ultra-fringe Dominionists who would like to insert God into our government. Thomas Jefferson would order these people deported back to the countries from which their ancestors fled (escaping religious persecution).

I lived in Michigan for four years, and while I was there I was treated extremely kindly on more than one occasion by Christian people. I found, as a white Detroiter, that I was occasionally in a situation where I got bullied for being white. One of those times was when I went to hear Archbishop Desmond Tutu speak at the Ford Arena. While waiting outside, I was told to leave by a group of men who thought I shouldn't be there. A lovely bunch of church ladies, dressed in their best hats, took me in and invited me to sit with them. I have never forgotten that. They even took the trouble to scold the guys who were trying to keep the white woman from hearing Desmond Tutu! And trust me, I still remember Tutu's speech. What an awesome man!

Now, I was going to begin and end with this happy story. But the peerless Jason Pitzl-Waters (see link in my blog, The Wild Hunt) has alerted us to "anti-bullying" legislation in Michigan that would exempt bullying of a religious or moral nature.

For the love of fruit flies! Those guys at Ford Arena would have had the right to bully me right out of seeing Desmond Tutu! They proudly told me that they had marched in Selma, and this was their moment. That certainly is moral grounds for me not to be there.

This is more serious than my own little story, though.

How easy would it be for a dedicated bully to find moral or religious grounds to whomp a kid?

Well, I dunno ... Let's ask Hitler.

I would submit that a good bit of bullying occurs over religious issues, or at least it already gives bullies a pulpit for their actions. Michigan, your law has a big hole in it that you had better patch. Pagan, Arabic, and Jewish Michiganders had better get on this one, or it will be their kids who get jumped, harassed, intimidated, and hazed.

New Jersey has one of the strictest anti-bullying laws around, and as a teacher it makes my job way harder. I have to be alert to every kind of bullying, not exempting trash talk to the kid who comes to school wearing a pentagram. Come on, Michigan. Get real. Go get your trowel and a good batch of cement, and plug that hole.

Here's a fun thing we did in Michigan that I have also never forgotten. When someone wanted to show you how to get to Saginaw from Detroit, he or she would hold up the palm of his or her hand and point from the wrist bone (Detroit) to the lower thumb (Saginaw). If you wanted to go to Traverse City, that's on the pinky.

Okay, got to run. Teacher meeting on bullying!

I Don't Have the Cake, but I've Been Offered a Slice

2011-11-13T12:31:00.001-05:00

Hello and welcome to "The Gods Are Bored!" Here at this site we believe in Higher Powers. Lots of them. The more, the merrier.

I can't believe I'm about to write this, because it will feel like I'm starting a novel or some sort of salacious anonymous tell-all, but here goes:

The opinions expressed at "The Gods Are Bored" are solely those of the author of "The Gods Are Bored" and do not represent the opinions of any other individual, group, race, creed, or shoe size."

You would think something like that would go without saying, but by golly, you would be surprised.

I used to believe that coincidences were just that. Then I read the work of Robert Anton Wilson, and afterwords I had a whole new view of coincidence. A mystic can manipulate coincidence. So can Ancestors and Higher Powers. When a human manipulates coincidence (with or without the assistance of Higher Powers), this is called magick.

Last spring, when the sale of my family farm on Polish Mountain became inevitable, I walked into the woods on the farm. I tore a binding off a quilt made by my great-grandmother. I tied the scrap of cloth around a tree and asked Great-grandma Annie to help bind me and my descendants to the land, by whatever means she felt was the best.

Simultaneously, my dearest cousin, who worships another God, was praying that he could be relieved of the burden of caring for the farm, so that he could go and witness for his faith.

Two people, two different strategic plans. One result.

See if you think all of this is a coincidence, unaffected by my cousin's deity and my great-grandma:

1. About a week after my cousin put up a "for sale by owner: 75 acres" sign with a phone number, he heard from a man who was so determined to buy the property that the man begged to be able to take down the "for sale" sign.

2. The buyer is a local fellow who has hunted in the area and has admired our property for more than 25 years.

3. He is paying cash.

4. He will take the property "as is," which means that he's aware he's buying a piece o' nothing cabin with a multitude of structural issues, but he doesn't care. He'll fix them himself. He even wants the furniture.

5. He does not plan any tear-down. He will never subdivide. He does not want to cut timber.

6. Coincidence? This man feels strongly about family ties to the land. He will not change the locks. I will be welcome on the property any time, and if he's not there, I can stay in the house. He has already told me this 20 times!

7. Because he is local, he will be able to maintain the house (which he loves). Most of the surrounding houses have gone to rack and ruin with their absentee owners letting them fall to pieces. Ours will be kept up. The buyer is 58 with a 22-year-old daughter and a 17-year-old son.

This farm is about 80 miles from Baltimore and Washington. Usually when properties in the area go up for sale, they're either bought by people from those cities who want a getaway, or they're bought by developers who section them into 5-acre plots. Our buyer is a retired railroad worker from Cumberland, Maryland with sufficient income that he has invested in the land for his own family legacy.

Yesterday I met the buyer and his family. He again reiterated in the most ardent fashion his desire that my family come and visit as often as we like. I liked him immediately, especially when he and his son discussed buying a goat to keep the pasture clear.

He says he's going to frame the "for sale" sign and hang it in the house. He says he feels like Christmas came early for him, that owning the "Johnson farm" is a dream come true.

And speaking of Christmas, the sale will close in mid-December. Hoo boy! Santa Claus's sleigh is going to be crushed under the weight of "must-haves" that this family needs but has been unable to purchase.

As I bid farewell to my cousin yesterday and started back for the big city, he and I had to agree that some sort of Divine Intervention has occurred. So what if we disagree on the particulars? Something good happened. Everyone is happy!

I will return to my super-snarky dissing of the Dominionists tomorrow. I must say, if any of them are reading this and wishing me to develop boils or bad luck, they're SOL. I'm keeping the key to my farm, and now I won't even have to pay my share of the taxes! La dolce vita.

Oh yeah! I almost forgot! I had some medical tests done, and the doctor said that I might live forever with so much good cholesterol flowing in my veins. His only warning was to not take cell phone calls while driving on the Pennsylvania Turnpike.

Time To Work

2011-11-10T11:53:00.000-05:00

My friends, I will be traveling to Polish Mountain today. On Saturday I will meet the family who will be purchasing the farm. Over the phone they sound too good to be true -- except that I did some Work on the property last spring, so I'm confident it's coming into fruition.

On this Full Moon I bid goodbye to an old era and await a new one. I'm walking on with the Old Ones. May They guide your feet as well.

Blessings,
Anne Johnson

Talking Sports, Politics, and the Sunshine State (Whew!)

2011-11-08T19:11:00.003-05:00

Welcome to "The Gods Are Bored!" Busy slate tonight.

1. Rest in peace, Smokin' Joe Frazier. May you find the Summerland. I copyedited my father-in-law's book about you, Ghosts of Manila, and boy, was that an eye-opener! Philly loves you, Joe. We always will.

EXHIBIT A: SPARE AND SMOKIN' JOE, 2010

2. Smokin' Joe's passing is being dwarfed around here by the Penn State scandal. It's a long, ugly story. Apparently, the sainted Joe Paterno knew about child rape going on in his locker room and felt he'd done his civic duty by reporting it to his boss ... once. There's always special outrage reserved for figures of such public eminence who are shown to be, at the core, egg-sucking dogs.

Last weekend, a Penn State victory made Paterno the winningest college football coach of all time. His record beat a long-standing coaching "best" held by the late Eddie Robinson of Grambling State University. There's nothing humble about my opinion in this matter. Robinson should keep his record, and Paterno should be removed from his position, effective two weeks ago. And if the Nittany Lions felt the wrath of the Big Ten before this, they are about to get showered with disapproval far and wide. Deservedly. Shame on you, Joe Pa. Creature.

3. Today was election day. My local assemblyman voted with Chris Christie to make teachers pay more of their health care and pension funding -- money that the state should have been setting aside for its workers lo, these many years. My local assemblyman is a Democrat. So I voted for Sponge Bob. It was fun typing in a write-in.

4. Continuing our purge of the scourge, we turn tonight to the Sunshine State, Florida, home of all things warm and sunny, including teams that beat Penn State. Tonight we're not interviewing a bored deity of the Seminoles or anything like that. We're just going to suggest a tour of Florida from one of its most caustic observers, author Carl Hiaasen.

I am crazy about Carl Hiaasen's books. This is my favorite. I've read it five times. In Carl's world, evil politicians, lobbyists, con artists, and criminals are thwarted by crazy-assed eco-terrorists. In more than one Hiaasen novel, the bad guy gets eaten by buzzards in the end. My kind of fiction!

It's not a reach for me to imagine a world where the 1%, buoyed by Dominionist laws against lewd reading material, would put Carl Hiaasen out of business. If ever there was a writer who inveighs against Big Business, it's my man Carl. The fact that he can do it and make you laugh at the same time is phenomenal.

Hiaasen's take on religion is best seen in his book Lucky You, in which a group of connivers compete to get the most tourists to their Jesus shrines. What's funniest about such things is that you can totally believe them. No one could make up what Hiaasen writes about. He was a reporter for the Miami Herald. I suspect that he saw firsthand much of the idiocy that makes its way into his novels.

Candles lit for Smokin' Joe, tar warming for Paterno Joe, and thumbs up to Carl Hiaasen for showing us how politics works in the Sunshine State!

And I hope Sponge Bob wins in District Six, New Jersey State Assembly.

The Indifferent Faerie

2011-11-06T17:58:00.000-05:00

Welcome to "The Gods Are Bored!" Pinky promise that regular dispatches from the front lines will return next week.

This past weekend I went to FaerieCon, a sort of convention thingy like other convention thingies where people with like minds and deep pockets gather to enjoy their mutual interests. I went to FaerieCon mostly to see my peeps from the Spoutwood Fairie Festival (save the date ... May 4, 5, 6, 2012) and to help sit the booth they put up to promote Spoutwood.

It's gratifying work, manning a Spoutwood Fairie Festival booth at a faerie convention about 30 minutes from Spoutwood's location. More than half the people who passed the table had either been to Spoutwood, or knew about it but never had come, or were keenly interested in its nearby location. No hard sell on my end, and Big Red always enjoys seeing the children.

But you know, I have "teacher brain." I call it "teacher brain" because in order to learn the names and key facts about 150 new people every year, you have to let some other cognition slide. In this latest case of "teacher brain," I neglected to note that FaerieCon now has its Good Faerie Ball on Friday night and its Bad Faerie Ball on Saturday night.

I thought I was coming to the Good Faerie Ball, to spend an evening dancing myself to exhaustion. I packed accordingly.

When I arrived at the con, and discovered that I would be seeing QNTAL, a Medieval fusion band, at the Bad Faeries Ball, I was distraught. I've got nothing against QNTAL, they're great, but it's like being told that you're going on a haunted hayride instead of attending the Halloween dance. Both hayrides and dances are swell, but they come with different sets of expectations.

Readers, I did what I could to make my lavender Druid cloak look "bad." Alas, the first con attendee who saw me headed for the Bad Faerie Ball told me, "You don't look bad at all."

Which in many contexts would be a compliment. In this case, not so much.

So I decided to be an Indifferent Faerie. Maybe I'll let the "good" and "bad" in me fight it out for a few days while remaining indifferent. And in the future, I will pay more attention to dates when attending balls, buzzard fests, and bazaars.

The date of the Mummers Parade is easy to remember. But oh, snap! When are those rehearsals?

Free Advice on How To Get Ahead in the World

2011-11-04T20:07:00.000-04:00

Welcome to "The Gods Are Bored!" A quick update tonight, and a pinkie promise that we at TGAB will return to our state-by-state disaster repair next week. The creepers from Planet Left Behind are supposedly right here in the Delaware Valley even as I write. Haven't seen them. Sneaky devils, I know they're around. Gonna send Jackal out to patrol.

Tomorrow I venture south to a Fairy convention in Maryland. I've been to these cons before and am not a big fan. It gives me the shivers to see some shadowy outfit (try getting a refund from these people) making money off of faeries. However, many of my friends from the real fairie festival will be there -- so pip pip, I need a road trip!

If you are going to the Fairy convention in Baltimore, you can find me at the Spoutwood Fairie Festival booth, 4-6 on Saturday and 10-12 on Sunday. Notice how I took the hardest times! Mountain Tribe is dedicated.

Postscript: I'm losing the family farm, but must I also lose followers? Number 156, where are you? I can't help it if I can't be witty every day! How about every other Thursday?

Toodle-oo for now,
Anne Johnson, Appalachian emeritus

My Heart, My Soul, and My Grave

2011-11-03T14:45:00.001-04:00

News reached me today that the property I co-own on Polish Mountain has been finalized for sale. Of my six cousins and sister, I was the only one who did not want to sell the farm.

I am no longer Appalachian. I am formerly from Appalachia. Only when I die will I become an Appalachian again.

Primary Colors: Iowa

2011-11-03T08:40:00.000-04:00

Welcome to "The Gods Are Bored," celebrating our freedom to fringe since 1776! Remember, the Vietnam War wasn't lost until the mainstream middle class said it was. Before that, fringe groups opposed it -- but no matter how loud they are, fringe groups rarely influence the large mainstream of ordinary Americans.

We Pagans, and gays, and atheists, and Occupiers, and a bunch of other concerned citizens simply cringed when the moronic Rick Perry looked like a promising presidential candidate. Rick's big confab with all the fringe fundamentalist Christian groups earlier this year sent a collective chill down the spine of those of us in non-mainstream religious practices.

Can you imagine me not being able to worship buzzards in public? Hmmm. Well, actually I keep this little activity pretty private now. But at least I can't be arrested for doing it. Stared at, yes. Persecuted, no.

While the One God for Our Nation fanatics prayed over Governor Rick, the rest of us petitioned the bored gods to do something, and do it in a hurry! This is why the busy god Yahweh is so jealous. He has competition, and when properly petitioned, it surges.

Just two months before the Iowa caucuses, our friend Perry appeared in New Hampshire for a stump speech. Oh my goodness. I have seen people drunk, I've seen them stoned, I've seen them on pain meds, I've seen them ranting in the streets for want of psychiatric treatment. It's really hard to pin down what was happening with the gov that night. Alcohol would have slurred his speech more. Pain meds would have made him more mellow. (Then again, large quantities of opiate painkillers didn't mellow Limbaugh, did they?) Nevertheless, I am ruling out pain meds, and I doubt very seriously that Perry would have dared violate the unreasonable laws against use of weed.

This leaves only two possibilities: He was possessed by Loki, Jackal, Anansi, and other Trickster deities in order to turn him from his destructive path, or

He actually goes into rants that should be treated by a competent physician.

I vote for the first option. All glory, laud, and honor to Trickster deities in every tradition!

Iowa is a pretty mainstream place. Can't see the people there voting for a wackadoo. Can you?

Rick Perry's drunken speech (3 minute edit)

2011-11-03T08:19:00.000-04:00

Woosh!

2011-11-02T14:48:00.001-04:00

I am not dead. I'm not even sick. I left off at Iowa and will resume mop-up soon. All is well, all is well, and all that can be well is well.

Our Holy Days

2011-10-30T15:22:00.000-04:00

Welcome to "The Gods Are Bored," Samhain 2011 edition! I'm your hostess with the ghostess, Anne Johnson. Honestly, that is the name I was graced with at birth. Its anonymity is brilliant.

We interrupt our state-by-state magickal clean-up behind Cindy Jacobs and her army of blood-flinging Crusaders in order to do some more immediate damage control.

On Samhain Eve, Ms. Jacobs is live-streaming a prayer event for the whole evening. A coincidence that she picked our holy night? BAMP! This clueless female looks out on Halloween and sees evil, evil, evil. Poor thing. Someone should buy her a blankie.

In the rare possibility that some of her warriors are checking out this site (and with the comfortable knowledge that a few Pagans visit here from time to time), I'm just going to do a quick outline of the holy days that General Jacobs deems evil. I'll write on a really readable level so any fighter for the busy god can understand.

1. Do you miss your dearly departed grandmother? I sure do. On these first frosty nights of the coming winter, the veil between worlds grows thin, and a discerning person can feel Granny's love all around. In the kitchen, by the stove. In the yard, by the garden. Granny, I can feel you. That's what Samhain is really all about, Charlie Brown.

Now, Christian readers. Tell me you have never felt your departed loved ones at your side in times of need. Right. You do. We all do. No evil involved. None.

2. Samhain recognizes the reality of death, of crossing over the divide. This is the fear factor: ghosts, skeletons, spider webs, scary costumes. What we are really coming to grips with here (and what we're inviting our children to do) is to face our fears and accept them as a normal condition of life. Without the inevitability of death, and the curiosity about what lies beyond, we would not appreciate life. But we don't want to walk around scared all the time, so we set aside the scares until Halloween.

Christian readers. Tell me that you are not one bit afraid of ghosts. Well, guess what? Neither am I! Death and the Beyond are part of every tradition. Don't believe me? Go to church on Good Friday.

3. Samhain marks the moment in the year when the crops have been brought in from the fields. Remember, our traditions come from Northern Europe, where the growing season was pretty much as it is here. But this is not a harvest festival. This is a stock-taking moment. This is that exact instance when we look in the larders and know whether or not we have enough food to get us through the winter. If we do, we're happy. If we don't, we pray to Cernunnos to have pity and spare us over till another year.

Christian readers. Tell me that you don't pray to your god when you lose your job, when you don't have enough money to make ends meet. Is this evil? Or do you petition on behalf of your loved ones, the people whose lives depend upon you?

4. Samhain is the original New Year's Eve and is thus celebrated as a favorite holiday throughout America. Go ahead and try to shut it down. This isn't May Day with a few pretty girls weaving ribbons around a pole. This is Halloween. It's a huge, huge industry of costumes, decorations, candy, party goods, and traditions. Cancel Halloween, and the Navajo Nation will lose the enormous income it derives from planting and harvesting pumpkins. And that's the tip of the iceberg.

Christian readers. If you choose not to celebrate Halloween, all hail. You do what you gotta do. But don't make other American families feel guilty and evil if they want their kids to have a good time. This is a sensible celebration with roots so deep you will never pull them out of our collective soil. Don't even try, except within the walls of your own wacky community.

5. One final shot across the bow: Halloween is celebrated in schools! If you don't want your kid to dress up in a costume and go eat sweet treats with friends, you have to keep the kid home that day. Might cause a little resentment in your tot. You know why? Because there is absolutely no harm, none none NONE, in Halloween! When did socially-sanctioned fun become an evil thing? Oh pleeeeze.

The moral of this sermon is that most Christians celebrate Halloween just in the way that they live and think, without even knowing it. It's a time to assess the harvest, face the alterations brought about by death, and celebrate the dearly departed loved ones whose lives made you what you are today.

Cindy, get over it. Your antipathy for Halloween stems from your own praise and worship team's tendencies to co-opt the holiday for their evil purposes. The rest of us have moral values and common sense. Pray all you want. You look ridiculous.

Wisconsin Came First

2011-10-27T08:30:00.000-04:00

Welcome to "The Gods Are Bored," proudly serving the 99% since 2005!

Unless you're an ostrich, you have noticed a growing swell of unrest in our country. The unrest stems from workers being downsized or gouged for wage give-backs ... and the educated unemployed (many with onerous college loans) demanding more equitable treatment.

This isn't going to go away. When you don't have a job -- or you are off for a few weeks in the summer -- you have plenty of time to protest.

In my humble opinion, the images of Wisconsin teachers rallying in the state capital in protest of attacks on their collective bargaining rights was the shot fired over the bow that started the whole Occupy movement. Madison, you gave us an image of hard-working people, people who hold the future of America in their hands every day, becoming furious at broken promises and wealthy string-pullers behind the scenes.

I am old enough to remember other protest movements. They were successful. The more strident the reaction to protesters, the more sympathy the protesters accrue. Trust me, every school teacher everywhere watched the news out of Wisconsin every night, or read about it in the few remaining newspapers. More importantly, other labor unions were watching too.

We are entering a period of instability, and as with all protests, the most active ones will be young people -- college graduates who feel duped by the high tuition, untenured adjunct professors, and zero job prospects in the real world.

In keeping with our state-by-state mop-up after the black magicians seeking to destroy democracy, I pose a rhetorical question: What would Jesus say about America's plight right now?

Here's what I think. I think he would wring his hands and try to drum up enough food for the people around him in his little sphere of influence, hoping that these people -- inspired by his example -- would themselves go out and pay it forward.

I don't get the sense that the DC40 crowd considers itself part of the 99%. I don't get the sense that they care about the poor, the tired, or the huddled masses longing to be free. (Duh! Of course they don't! That's what's engraved on the Goddess monument in New York's harbor!)

As in Madison, so in the rest of America. It cannot go on like this. We don't want to burn down mansions. We want equity. We want to work for a decent wage. We want our children to work and to live in a country where they can assemble for redress of grievances.

If we took all the God stuff off the table, even the Tea Party would be with us. All we want is for things to be fair.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. --Full text, First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

On, Wisconsin. We are the 99 %.

California Condor: God of the Skies

2011-10-25T09:01:00.002-04:00

Dispensing with the formal greeting today. Moving right on to worship of the Sacred Thunderbird.

First, a little navel-gazing.

I have worshiped vultures since I was a teenager. For many years (and even now) this religious devotion has run parallel to whatever other deities I praise and worship. However, having achieved the wisdom of a half century, I now choose to center my most important devotions around Vulture.

This puts me more within the Native American worldview than the European. There are numerous songs and dances, stories and Rituals, surrounding the Peace Eagle (aka Vulture) among Native American groups all across America. Especially in the Pacific Northwest, where the California condor was once widespread and majestic (wingspan of 10 feet -- think about it).

EXHIBIT A: GOD

In 1984 I went to the San Diego Wildlife Park, where a captive breeding program had begun for California condors. I wrote an article about the efforts for the Detroit Free Press. Since I had a press pass, the biologists let me go see the "Condorminium." It was a huge, netted area where they kept the condors they were trying to breed.

Needless to say, even a glimpse of these deities from afar, in a flight cage, had immense meaning for me. (We couldn't go close, because the biologists didn't want the condors to become used to people.) Mr. Johnson could hardly live with me for weeks thereafter. Rapture? Forget about Rapture! Give me a Raptor!

At its lowest point of population, the California condor dipped to just 27 individuals. They were rounded up and kept in San Diego. Some creatures might not like being in a flight cage, but the condors are pretty happy with their dependable supply of carcasses. They have been making whoopie for 25 years.

We can be cautiously optimistic about this deity. The Sacred Thunderbird of California now is represented by approximately 400 individuals, some of them in the wild. They have been released in the Grand Canyon, where there are no power lines or hunters. Efforts are underway, partly funded by the Yurok Indians, to release condors in the woods of the Pacific Northwest, where carcasses are abundant and there are traditions of condor Ritual worship.

Angels and faeries are purported to be able to fly. Vultures can do it visibly and gracefully. No skeptical atheist can scoff at the flight of Vulture. It is magnificent.

None of us will live to see a California condor pair soar over our heads in the rugged wilds of America. But it's a comfort to me to know that the species is making a comeback.

Honestly, think about it. If you looked up and saw a bird with a ten-foot wingspan glide silently past, wouldn't you feel that you were in the presence of something greater than yourself?

I can ony speak for myself, but ... As for me and my house, we will worship Vulture.

Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. First clause of the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights of the United States Constitution.

Hail Vulture, the visible Higher Power!

Brief Chat with Freya about Minnesota

2011-10-24T08:27:00.000-04:00

Welcome to "The Gods Are Bored!" Sorry for the lateness on our most recent state in need of protection, but I was at a Ritual yesterday making mournful.

And this morning, I'm really busy with school work. So I'm going to chat briefly with Freya, Great Goddess of the Norse People (who is always rather busy too).

Anne (to her cats): Alpha! Beta! On your way! Shoo!

Freya: Oh, no, Anne. I adore your sweet kitties!

Anne: And it's mutual. Once You're gone, they'll sleep all day in a patch of sunlight, dreaming of You. Freya, the state of Minnesota has the largest population of Norwegian-descended people outside of Norway itself. What does this mean in terms of praise and worship?

Freya: Well, we of the Norse pantheon are working hard there, and elsewhere too, to re-vitialize our praise and worship team. It's working, too. Asatru membership is on the upswing everywhere!

Anne: You go, Goddess! Long may You reign! I've only ever been to one Asatru outing. It wasn't really a Ritual. There were just libations to You, and Odin, and Thor, which consisted of drinking beer out of a horn. I'm all for that!

Freya: Thank you. We are much more serious than Flying Spaghetti Monsters.

Anne: And much more ancient and sacred. Well-documented, too. Your praise and worship team kept records. Does it bother you that Thor is the subject of comic books and movies?

Freya: Does it bother you that King Arthur is the subject of movies? Anything that gets Us into the public eye is fine with Us.

Anne: I know you have to fly, Freya. (To her cats) No, not with you girls! Stop rubbing that chariot!

Freya: Yes, I want to go to Minnesota to sweep up after those evil would-be God-killers. We're going to prevail on this one, Anne.

Anne: From Your lips to Your ears, Goddess. All glory, laud, and honor to You!

I would be remiss here if I didn't note that Minnesota has a very well-organized and public Pagan community. Their presence on the Pagan Newswire Collective is a boon to us all.

Remember your First Amendment, folks! Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. Hail Freya!

Treatise on Oregon

2011-10-21T21:42:00.000-04:00

Welcome to "The Gods Are Bored," bringing you the Pagan-est Paganinity since Pagan came to Pagantown!

To answer your question ... No. I cannot be serious for a minute. I've tried, and the best I can do is 43 seconds. And that was the day my mama died. Someone stole my Cloak of Seriousness decades ago. Must have been that faerie I played with as a kid. "Serious" and "Anne": ne'er the twain shall meet!

I mean, if you want me to, I could get all depressed and angry and shit. Easily enough done, if you consider the tragic story of Sacagawea, kidnapped as a teen, sold into slavery to a French trapper, and then sent as a guide for an expedition half a continent wide with a friggin baby on her back.

What would Lewis and Clark have been without Sacagawea? Buzzard bait, that's what. The tribal areas through which they passed considered them harmless because they had a woman and child with them. Sacagawea knew how to speak Shoshone, thus paving the way for her fussy "captains" through the rugged Rockies and beyond.

For her long expedition and devotion to the white men through thick and thin, Sacagawea was awarded with ... nothing. Nada. Zip. Her husband got five hundred bucks and a farm. She died at 25.

I will cut to the quick and be done with this.

We need Goddess worship. Women should be honored and cherished and given leadership roles. They should have sovereignty over their bodies and the fruits of their labor. They should reject any religion that:

1. Casts them as the villains in the history of humankind.
2. Fails to recognize their equality by honoring them as equal priestesses in religious devotion, and
3. Expects them to have a new, tasty casserole for every gathering, no matter how hard they've worked all week.

If you don't think Sacagawea had to whip up the casseroles on her way from North Dakota to Oregon, you just aren't thinking.

When we consider Oregon as a metaphor, it ought to be in the context of female equality. Being a polytheist, I'll add: You show me a religion without a Goddess, I'll show you a praise and worship team full of exhausted females.

Before you start wagging your finger at me and tsk tsking, bear in mind that I was a Methodist for 16 years. I may not have been Sacagawea, but on the Sundays when the childrens' choir did their big musical, it sure felt like I was negotiating for horses with a bunch of ferocious native warriors on a wind-swept mountaintop.

Women, listen to me. Choose a religion where you are valued. Don't fall for that "okay, you can be a deacon" shit. Go for the path that lets you climb to the top.

Do it in the memory of Sacagawea. Do it in the name of religious diversity. Whatever. Just. Do. It.

Kansas: Birthplace of a Brand New God!

2011-10-20T16:32:00.000-04:00

Welcome to "The Gods Are Bored! What is Kansas famous for, my friends? Why, Dorothy, the Tin Man, and Glenda, the Good Witch, that's what! But more recently, Kansas has become the birthplace of a fabulous new deity Whose followers have grown so numerous that you can find them in every state! And today we are blessed with an interview with our Noodly Master, the Flying Spaghetti Monster! Please give Him/Her/It a warm, wonderful, "Gods Are Bored" welcome!

Anne: Arrrggghghhg! Avast, matey! How be you today?

FSM: That's what fills my pasta bowl. Respect! You speak in pirate, which is required of all My disciples.

Anne: Well, I'll give it the old heave-ho try, Noodly Master. Arrr, can You hoist the top'sl and tell us how You came to the attention of Americans everywhere?

FSM: The Kansas Board of Education declared that teachers would be required to tell students the false story of some god who created the world in six days. False, false, false! I created the world. Me, the Flying Spaghetti Monster! It was a complicated process. Very scientific. With meatballs.

Anne: Arrr, speak, matey, about how this boiled over to the Kansas Board of Education?

FSM: One of My disciples wrote a strongly-worded letter to the KBE, declaring that students who were taught about Genesis in science class should actually learn about Me instead, since I'm the One who got the meatball rolling, turned down the simmering seas, and touched humankind with my Noodly Appendage. This concerned disciple said that he was dismayed that students would be taught lies, when they could learn about the scientific principles behind My Godhood. It's not fair to teach one bogus creation story when there's a True One out there.

Anne: My readers can see the whole revealed religion here. And, arrghghgh, while I'm lashing landlubbers to the mast, I'll wave my cutlass at that ship of fools called DC40, who couldn't even slash and burn themselves into a dot.org! You, Noodly Master, are a certified, nonprofit religion!

FSM: Recruiting pirates and wenches everywhere, especially around Halloween!

Anne: Flying Spaghetti Monster, You have some powerful enemies. Not terribly bright, but powerful nonetheless. They'd like to simmer the al dente right out of You.

FSM: Not a chance of that! Knowledge is Power! And please note that many of My disciples were atheists until they found Me. These disciples are some of My most ardent! I am definitely ready to serve the millions!

Anne: Arrghghg! And a goodly feast t'would be too! Please accept my gift of virgin olive oil, O Noodly One!

FSM: I am pleased by this. Anne Johnson, from here to the day of your death, you will never eat a bad pasta dinner ... ever.

Anne: Considering that I live in New Jersey, and there's an Italian restaurant on every corner, that's a pretty scientific prediction. Noodly Master, look at this brilliant portrayal of Yourself by disciple TJ Morgan of Atheist Nexis!

FSM: That's a recent rendering. I'm boiling over that those idol-worshiping Christian fringe wingnuts would want the District of Columbia to be the District of Christ, and not the District of the Flying Spaghetti Monster!

Anne: District of the Flying Spaghetti Monster! Arrrghgh! That has a certain ring to it, it does! We could require the president to wear a frock coat and a feather in his pirate hat during his inauguration! (The irony of this does not escape me.)

FSM: My disciples will see that this is done. They are praying about it even as we speak.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.
This includes, and could for my money be limited to, the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster!
Pray on, pirates!

Almost Heaven, West Virginia

2011-10-19T07:30:00.000-04:00

As always, howdy howdy howdy from "The Gods Are Bored!" How are y'all?

Well, I think I'm a day behind the bell-ringing black magicians who want to void our Constitution and declare American dependence upon Jesus Christ. But that's okay! Consider me the cute little janitor who mops up after Mr. Peabody's and Sherman's big parade!

Whoa, sports fans. That sure dates me, doesn't it?

West Virginia is the state that needs cleansing today. To this I am firmly dedicated. You see, my conversion to Paganism became official in West Virginia. And when I need to meditate with the Salmon of Wisdom, it is to West Virginia that I return.

Little U.S. history here: When the Civil War began, Virginia seceded from the Union. But fully half the state consisted of rugged mountaineers who farmed difficult terrain for a subsistence living, using only themselves and their children as the workers. These people did not support slavery. So they didn't want to secede. Magnanimous President Lincoln declared them a state all unto themselves. And if ever a division of territory was meet and just, this was the occasion.

As for my conversion to Paganism, it was a slow process, beginning with connection to the Divine Feminine through the Blessed Mother of God. Which of course has no place in Methodism, except for the teenager who gets to dress up like Mary for the Xmas pageant.

More and more I began to pray to the Blessed Mother. More and more I began to feel Faerie all around me. I read up on Discordianism (a real favorite) and began to explore the Druid path. But slowly.

Then it hit.

My dad broke his hip. He was in end stages of Parkinson's Disease. When I went to see him in the nursing home, he told me he saw Peter Pan in the doorway of his room, "just standing there, with his hands on his hips."

Shaken by the sight of my dad in his last days, I got in his car and drove to Berkeley Springs, WV. For years I had been dreaming of a sacred spring that would heal my sorrows. Literally, readers. Years. In my dreams I was always looking for it. Little did I know that it was Berkeley Springs, a town near where I grew up, but just far enough away that I only went there at night, for away football games.

By day I discovered that Berkeley Springs is a warm springs (charming place), and for twenty bucks you can bathe in a huge tub of heated springwater.

It's like that tub of Berkeley Springs water just washed away the Fertile Crescent god entirely. What was already eroding just plain exploded. I went into that bath house one person, and came out an entirely different person.

And when I emerged into the air, the whole universe had expanded before me. I felt Divine from a hundred thousand sources. Not just one pantheon, not just one vulture in the sky. Everywhere.

I felt Faerie too. Major Faerie. And yes, I could see Them at that moment. Some were in the spillway, some were playing with the children, and Some were across the street in the window of a store. (Jules Enchanting Gifts, see Sidebar.)

Three months later, this blog was born. It is dedicated to any and every deity that can or could be called "Pagan." I once told Isaac Bonewits that I'm not a polytheist, I'm an omnitheist. Show me your deity, and I will praise Him/Her/It.

I follow the Druid path, somewhat. I say somewhat because I even believe in the Fomorians and Fir Bolgs and all the deities displaced by the Celtic pantheon. None of this matters, though. Divine is everywhere. It cannot be quantified, reified, or understood with our limited brain function.

Thank you, thank you, West Virginia. State of my heart. Love of my life. Forget the "almost." The place is Heaven. Ask any bored deitiy. Ask me.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.

--Bill of Rights, U.S. Constitution
"When I die, won't you bury me in the mountains? Far away in my Blue Ridge Mountain home."

Sin City

2011-10-18T09:12:00.001-04:00

What happens here stays here. But what if there's no here here? Gambling is a vice.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.

--First Amendment of the United States Constitution

Corn: Where Would We Be without It?

2011-10-17T09:20:00.002-04:00

Welcome to "The Gods Are Bored," catching up with the fabulous Cornhusker state, Nebraska, as it harvests another year of the great yellow grain!

Corn. Where would we be without corn? Europe, that's where! What the Europeans called "corn" was actually barley. They just named maize "corn" when they started chowing down on it.

Maize has been found in acheological digs in the Americas going back thousands of years. Needless to say, the Native Americans had many deities who helped them with their harvest of it. They popped it, ground it, ate it green (big celebration that absolutely coincides with Lughnasadh).

Did Yahweh create corn? If He did, why didn't He share it with His chosen people? Why did they have to float their boats all the way to the Westerh Hemisphere to find it? Seems kind of unfair to me. Just saying.

Omaha, Nebraska is just one of the many geographical names given to us by the Native Americans. In this case, the Omaha is a tribe. For centuries they worshiped around a Sacred Pole, until predation on their group nearly knocked them out of existence. When their last holy man was about to die, they were going to bury the pole with him. Instead it got carted off to Harvard, where it remained until 1989.

In that year, the Omaha petitioned for its return. Harvard graciously complied. Now the Omaha worship around this pole again!

Most Omaha Indians are Christians, but they still hold their Sacred Pole in their hearts. Is this worship of a graven image (forbidden in the Bible)? Ahhhh. Choose one or the other, that's what Yahweh would have you do. And if you choose the wrong one, off to Hell you go.

I would take the Sacred Pole. Deities who provided the Earth with maize are mighty indeed!

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; Nothing corny about this.

Please see below for a fantastic offer! Tickets still remain ... be a sport!

Commercial Break: A Really, Really Great Offer!

2011-10-15T20:08:00.002-04:00

We interrupt our regularly scheduled programming to offer you a rare and exciting opportunity!

The Two Street Stompers New Year's Brigade, proudly participating in the Philadelphia Mummers Parade since 1978, have asked me to sell 10 raffle tickets.

The tickets are $10 apiece. There are three prizes. Grand is $2,000, and there are two $1,000 awards. The drawing will be held on December 10 ... just in time for Xmas! (You do not have to be present. Your stub will contain your name, address and contact phone.)

Please buy a raffle ticket!

But wait. I'll sweeten the pot...

When you purchase a Stompers raffle ticket, you will receive:

1. the ticket (sans stub),with a personal salutation from the staff of "The Gods Are Bored."

better stuff...

2. One FREE handy, pocket-sized copy of OUR UNITED STATES CONSTITUTION, courtesy of the National Constitution Center. Perfect to have on hand when you see the New Apostolic Reformation morons at work!

3. A bright, beautiful, blue pin 2" in diameter, that says "I Signed the Constitution." A leftover souvenir from the opening of the NCC in 2008. Sure to be collectible soon!

So, you buy a chance, you get some fun freebies, and you become forever associated with the proud Philadelphia tradition of cleansing the City of Buzzardly Love of all negativity, each and every New Year's Day! Act now ... supplies are limited ...

Email me through the blog profile, I'll send you my address, and you will receive your packet post haste.

Don't miss this offer. You've gotta play to win!

Garden of the Gods, Colorado Springs

2011-10-15T18:00:00.003-04:00

Well I came upon a child of God
He was walking along the road
And I asked him where are you going
And this he told me
I'm going on down to Yasgur's farm
I'm going to join in a rock 'n' roll band
I'm going to camp out on the land
And get my soul free

We are stardust
We are golden
We are billion-year-old carbon
And we've got to get ourselves
Back to the garden

Then can I walk beside you
I have come to lose the smog
And I feel to be a cog in something turning
Well maybe it is just the time of year
Or maybe it's the time of man
I don't know who I am
But you know life is for learning

We are stardust
We are golden
We are billion-year-old carbon
And we've got to get ourselves
Back to the garden.

By the time we got to Woodstock
We were half a million strong
And everywhere there was song and celebration
And I dreamed I saw the bomber-death planes
Riding shotgun in the sky
And they were turning into butterflies
Above our nation

We are stardust
We are golden
We are caught in the devil's bargain
And we've got to get ourselves
back to the garden

Images: Garden of the Gods, Colorado Springs, Colorado
"Feast of the Gods," Giovanni Bellini and Titian
Lyrics: Joni Mitchell, Crosby, Stills & Nash
Amendment: First, namely, Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof

Full Moon over Devils Lake

2011-10-14T16:16:00.000-04:00

Welcome to "The Gods Are Bored!" It's the holy month of Samhain. No better time than that to send laughter and love to every state in America! Today we're fishing with the Devil. Not really, of course. We have no commerce with the Devil. Nor do the good sports men and women (and kids, the photos are awesome) who enjoy the beautiful environs of Devils Lake, North Dakota.

EXHIBIT A: THE LAKE BEARING THE NAME OF DEVIL INTO AMERICA

I have always wondered why there are so many great and small geographical anomalies named after the Devil.

We all know which Devil I'm referring to. He has lots of names. My favorite is "Mr. Applegate." But call him what you will, the Devil is:

1. Christian pantheon, and
2. Male.

He makes you buy dresses, abuse substances, murder kittens, whatever. And if you worship him, what the hell are you doing here at "The Gods Are Bored?" Go get yourself some ugly skull tattoo, head down into your mother's basement, and listen to Ozzy records to your heart's content. Just don't darken this blog. The Devil is evil. We hate evil in all its forms. It sucks, and that's that. Go away, Devil worshiper!

But back to the topic. Devils Lake derives its name from a mistranslation of a Sioux term. The Sioux (cleaned out and sent packing) called it "Bad Spirit Water." Only the Sioux have no Devil in their pantheon. The "bad spirit" was the lake's salinity, which varies depending upon rainfall.

Here's the satellite photo. This puppy is a big lake. And very popular with sports enthusiasts, especially those who fish.

In "One Nation under God and Only God," what would this lake be called? Would the fish in it be considered evil? Would it be re-named Turtledove Lake, or Gabriel Lake, or something causing a financial turmoil as businesses, mapmakers, hotels, and restaurants -- and a whole friggin town changes signs?

You see how silly things could become in a One God world?

Where I grew up, there were many geographical features named after the Devil. Most of them reflected the Devil's personality: jumbles of rocks at the bottom of mountains (Devil's Racecourse, Devil's Den), odd bends in the Antietam Creek (Devil's Backbone). And that's just in one little section of Appalachia. Imagine having to re-name everything that has "Devil" in the title. Crikey, even a sports team!

The moral of this little sermon is this: Any theocracy must bend over backwards to eliminate the perceived evil in its midst. This would have to include an Orwellian eradication of stuff named after the Devil ... no matter whether its a mistranslation from Sioux (cleaned out and sent packing) or not.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of relgion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. --Bill of Rights, U.S. Constitution.

The devil's in the details.

Hubris in South Dakota

2011-10-13T15:00:00.000-04:00

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary definition of hubris is "exaggerated self-confidence."

This is the sample sentence they give to help you understand hubris:

"When conceived it was a project of almost unimaginable boldness and foolhardiness, requiring great bravura, risking great hubris."

Hubris (sorry, Merriam-Webster) is generally thought of as an exaggerated self-confidence that leads to total downfall.

This monument was carved on a mountain that is sacred to Native Americans. Not only is it hideous and disrespectful to the land in general, but also it is a colossal example of hubris.

Separation of church and state includes having respect for all churches. Even if they're mountainsides.

The higher they climb, the harder they fall. South Dakota? Tear.that.thing.down.

A Few Words from Joe MONTANA

2011-10-12T15:00:00.000-04:00

Welcome to "The Gods Are Bored," sports fans! If you follow pro sports at all (and I know some of you do), you have to feel just a little bit sorry for a Phillies/Eagles fan today. Wowsa, did we have an awful weekend!

This is Joe Montana. He's a famous quarterback, and that's just about all I know about him. For the purposes of this post, Joe was chosen for his name. Montana. Get it?

Love him or hate him, Joe Montana did most of his playing on Sunday. A dizzying majority of NFL games are played on Sunday. You've got Monday night, Thanksgiving, and an odd Saturday here and there. Otherwise, the Day of Rest is anything but, if you make millions on the gridiron.

Can you imagine Sundays without football? Can you remember when the stores were all closed on Sunday? Do you recall a time when you didn't have to drive your kid to soccer games on Sunday? Golly, they play those puppies on Sunday mornings! The effrontery!

When it comes to entertainment, retail, and amateur sporting events, Sunday is the best day to git r done. Right, Joe? (I think he played in a few Super Bowls. If you know more, share.)

The Amish and the Old Order Mennonites do not work on Sunday. They even cook Sunday dinner on Saturday, so they don't have to work in the kitchen. The entirety of Sunday is spent in church, or lounging at someone's home. I don't know what they do about tending the livestock, but suffice it to say that they don't make book on the 49ers and then cluster around the big screen, cheering every play.

A national movement that would change the District of Columbia to the District of Christ might have its own ideas about how Sunday should be spent. No more NFL? No more quick jaunts to Target for trouser socks? No more kid soccer, band practice, Broadway shows? Would the new slogan be, "Bring Back the Blue Laws?" The founders of Chick-fil-a would sure go for that!

Way back when I was a Methodist, I remember one Sunday when the bishop came to preach at our church. He was a zealous dude, all done up in fancy robes. The first thing he said when he came to the pulpit was, "If you think you're getting home from here in time to watch the Eagles today, think again. If watching the Eagles is more important than your soul, get up and leave now."

He then preached a 90-minute sermon. If looks could kill, the Eagles fans in that congregation would have struck that pious windbag down like you stomp a spider that's after your kitten.

Long pass from Montana to Jerry Rice made short, a Christian theocracy could change the contours of Sunday for us all. Considering how poorly the Eagles played this week, I'd say to Cindy Jacobs ... bring it on.

Not.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion. Play ball!

They Swim Upriver: Interview with the Salmon of Wisdom

2011-10-11T16:01:00.000-04:00

Welcome to "The Gods Are Bored," today honoring the varieties of religious devotion in the great state of Washington! Never been there. Would like to go some day. Send money. (Just kidding.)

Among the most fantastic phenomena in the Pacific Northwest is the run of spawning salmon. Unlike Atlantic salmon, who spawn and move on, Pacific salmon swim upstream to the place where they were spawned. There they breed, and there they die. Considering the importance of this food source, its not surprising that the Native Americans of the Pacific Northwest have many Scriptures of revealed religion about the Salmon, from how It got into their nets to how It behaves with Its fellow Salmon in the great briny depths.

The ancient Celts also have a whopper of a Salmon story, and its star is here with me today. Please give a warm, wonderful, "Gods Are Bored" welcome to Fintan, the Salmon of Wisdom!

Anne: Fintan, the Native Americans of Washington State say that Salmon act like humans when no one is watching them. Could this be so? I mean, other than You, of course. I've always considered You a special exception, considering the fact that you had the good sense to eat the hazel nuts of Wisdom, rather than chow down on some schlub named Jonah.

Fintan: Speaking on behalf of My Fishes, we do not wish to reveal Our ways to humans, other than what you see on Animal Planet.

Anne: Why not?

Fintan: You would be envious of our superiority.

Anne: Yes, I sure would. I'm envious of ant colonies. But let's talk about normal humans for a moment. Would they, too, be envious of the superiority of Salmon?

Fintan: Yes indeed they would.

Anne: Why?

Fintan: For one thing, we all get along. Nary a harsh bubble passes between one salmon and another. You'll hear one big alpha male call out to another: "Hey, watch out for that grizzly on the bank! Right there, under the pine tree!"

Anne: Wow, I do wish people were like that!

Fintan: Suffice it to say, no underfed, undernourished Salmon have ever had to camp out in the pool demanding better treatment from the fat, comfortable Salmon.

Anne: Would that it were so among humans!

Fintan: We also understand completely the entire nature of the Universe. Humans aren't ready to know. When they are, they'll know to ask us.

Anne: The Native Americans of Washington State have a legend that their Ancient Ones could put the bones of a salmon into the water, and the bones would become fleshed-out and alive again.

Fintan: Fie on you, Anne Johnson! That's no legend. It's an archetype of the collective unconscious, having to do with the cyclical nature of sustainable food sources!

Anne (to herself): They don't call Him the Salmon of Wisdom for nothing! (To Fintan) You know, o Salmon, that I was once very disdainful of hunters and people who fished for sport. Now I love these people! They are some of the most demanding environmentalists around. In Washington State they have blocked dam projects. Around here, where I live now, a group called Trout Unlimited is lobbying for strict studies on hydraulic fracturing and its impact on water quality in rural streams and rivers.

Fintan: We Salmon love these people too. Some of them are even smart enough to throw the bones back into the water! And I certainly respect the Native American people of Washington State who have shown so much respect and reverence toward their indispensable food staple.

Anne: Fintan, we've talked here often. You know I call upon You for wisdom when I'm perplexed. This is part of my praise and worship. Do you think Native American children in Washington State should be taught to praise and worship the Deities who brought nutritious and dependable Salmon into their lives?

Fintan: Coyote the Trickster figures in some of those Scriptures.

Anne: Correct again, Wise One! So. Does Coyote, and do You, deserve a place at the American altar?

Fintan: Absolutely. Anyone who thinks otherwise has a hazel nut deficiency.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. Wisdom to live by from the Bill of Rights of the Constitution of the United States of America.

The Sacred Spud: Idaho

2011-10-10T16:05:00.000-04:00

Welcome to "The Gods Are Bored," Idaho edition! Never been there, probably never will go -- but I'm not ruling it out. We here at "The Gods Are Bored" are just practicing a little counter-magick to a group that would like to rob us of our rights.

One of my readers, Alex, suggested that when I get to Idaho, I ought to interview Mr. Potato Head. Did you ever play with Mr. Potato Head? Very few things bored me as a kid, but that toy did. Once you got his face and arms all arranged, what was the fun of doing it over, or mixing it up? I preferred Tinker Toys.

Alex's suggestion did get me thinking, though. I'm writing about Christian theocrats from the point of view of a believer in alternative praise and worship systems. There are many, many people in this country who just don't believe in any deity at all. These people are called atheists.

They have it tough.

An atheist who loses his brother in battle has to listen to "God Bless America" at every Memorial Day ceremony. Atheists can't pledge the flag, can't look at paper money, can't even be sworn into public office without being reminded that god is everywhere. It must feel kind of like the person who thinks NASCAR is ugly, environmentally unfriendly, and dangerous -- and who lives next door to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

Atheists are often portrayed as dogmatic and snobby. But actually, if you think about it, they're pretty impressive.

1. They do good deeds without any expectation of celestial reward.
2. They live with the sure knowledge that death brings a state of nothingness, and they can take it.
3. They are widely maligned, and the deaths of prominent members of their group are met with tasteless cheers and celebration. (Thinking Madalyn Murray O'Hair here.)
4. Their proselytizing is met with hostility, defensiveness, and resentment.

Yet, as science gives us more and more evidence about the nature of the Universe, it becomes easier and easier to accept atheism.

So, what does all of this have to do with Idaho potatoes?

An atheist would say that worshiping a Higher Power makes as much sense as worshiping a potato. Or maybe even less, since you can eat a potato, and it even has nice vitamins in it.

Am I an atheist? No. Do I believe atheists have the right to their beliefs and shouldn't be forced to see GOD GOD GOD GOD GOD everywhere, most importantly on and in property they pay taxes for? Emphatically, yes. Yes. Yes. Yes!

To the atheists everywhere in America, and especially in Idaho, this spud's for you. The right to hold no belief at all is the most important right we have in our enlightened nation.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion. Let's be fair.

Everything's Round: Reflecting on Wyoming

2011-10-09T14:50:00.000-04:00

Welcome to "The Gods Are Bored" and our 50-state challenge! We're setting out to prove that "One Nation under God" isn't, and isn't. I'm not going to bet that it's "indivisible" either. As for "liberty and justice for all" ... HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!!! Not.

Most praise and worship teams construct some kind of symbolic building or monument to their deities and philosophies. These monuments come in all shapes and sizes, from the Great Pyramids to the humble Amish church. It's not surprising, therefore, that cultures from different parts of the globe would evolve similar worship techniques without knowing that other cultures worshiped the same way.

This is the Medicine Wheel National Historic Site in Wyoming. It's on a plateau that overlooks Big Horn Basin. This Wheel, one of many Native American Medicine Wheels in the U.S. and Canada, is still used for praise and worship rituals by its people. It is 74 feet in diameter with spokes and cairns that align with stars that are sacred to the Crow Indians.

People who live in temperate climates tend to see life as circular. Each year there's a spring, summer, autumn, and winter, revolving to spring again. Human life, on the other hand, is linear -- its seasons are childhood, child-rearing, providing wisdom, and needing the help of others. If you look beyond your own self, however, you'll see that life begins anew when your child is born, and her child is born. When you die, your descendants carry on. (Which is why you should revere Ancestors. They are part of the Wheel.)

I once had a conversation with a Lenapi Elder after he had given a talk about the Wheel and about reverence for the land. It was a pleasant chat in which we compared Druid and Lenapi beliefs. I said to him, "Maybe there was more criss-cross over that ocean than our historians know about." He agreed, and he proudly added that, since the wind blows west-to-east, it probably was his people coming to see ours.

Makes sense to me.

It's entirely possible, though, that similar bored gods spoke to the creators of Stonehenge and the Medicine Wheels, without any human intervention. It is humbling and moving to look at the Directions (or the Quarters) and associate them with seasons of the year and with intentions we make during these seasons. The circle is the most gentle and egalitarian of all shapes. Cultures that worship in the round may disappear from the face of history, but their constructions will still move the visitor to reverence and reflection.

Here's a lovely homily for the Wyoming Medicine wheel, found on a site full of Spirit Quest material:

"And there are Four Corners of the Earth that we talk about, the Four Colors
of people, and the Four Winds. You see, the Winds -- they are Spirits."

(Grandfather William Commanda, Algonquin)

The Elders teach us about the four directions. If we learn about direction, we
also learn about attention, about focus, and about power. Each direction has
spiritual power. In the morning, go outside, face the east and get still, then,
listen to your thoughts. After you have done this for a while, turn and face the
west. Get quiet once again and listen to your thoughts. Did your thinking
change when you changed directions?

Also below, two beautiful songs for the People of the Sacred Medicine Wheel.

Congress shall make no law regarding the establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.
First Amendment to the United States Constitution. As above, so below.

Vince Herman - "Everything is Round"

2011-10-09T14:40:00.000-04:00

Interview with an Angel: Moroni

2011-10-07T18:16:00.002-04:00

Welcome to "The Gods Are Bored," where we will be blissfully brief today! My name is Anne, and in the interests of our First Amendment rights under the U.S. Constitution, I have -- against every shred of better judgment -- allowed the Angel Moroni, of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, into my house for an interview.

Which is more hospitality than I've ever offered Moroni's sad-sack missionaries who all look so ... pinched.

I'll make this brief.

Anne: Moroni, your praise and worship team is truly a latter-day sect. If fundamentalist Dominionists were to legislate religion, it probably wouldn't go well for Mormons.

Moroni: I agree.

Anne: Dismissed.

Congress shall make no law regarding the establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.

--Bill of Rights, First Amendment, Constitution of the United States of America.

Gods on the Reservation

2011-10-07T17:37:00.000-04:00

Welcome to "The Gods Are Bored!" Do you ever wonder what America was like in 1491? There's a very interesting book about it. It's called 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus, by Charles C. Mann.

Mann covers the archeology being done on Original Western Hemisphere cultures. Conclusion? In 1100, there were cities in the New World bigger than Rome, London, or Paris -- with better roads and cleanliness. Mann puts the population of the Western Hemisphere in the millions, rather like the other side of the world.

So, how could a few European explorers conquer such large cities?

Forget all you've read about Native Americans thinking the "palefaces" were gods. Crock of crap.

What the European explorers had was smallpox. To which the inhabitants of the Western Hemisphere had no immunity. Mann hypothesizes that as much as 90 percent of the Native American population was wiped out. By the time the Pilgrims arrived, this Native die-off was a hundred years gone, mostly. And the New World was a huge forest, occupied by a few "noble savages."

These "noble savages" still didn't much care for people coming in and occupying their homelands. So there was some fighting, more treaty-making (broken by the government repeatedly), and eventually a virtual roundup of Indians, who were dumped, tribe by tribe, in Oklahoma.

If you look at a list of Native American tribes living in Oklahoma today, it's almost a "Who's Who" of Indian history. Comanches. Delawares. Cherokees (notorious, that round-up), Shawnee, Pawnee, Cheyenne, Seminole. These groups did not come to occupy Oklahoma because they liked the scenery and the fertile soil. The state was basically a concentration camp full of helpful missionaries and schools that taught English and table manners.

Which explains why a state that is rick smack-dab in the middle of the country was one of the last to be granted statehood. Until the 20th century, it was Indian Territory. Where people like the Outlaw Josey Wales hung out.

Many Native American deities had to give way under the onslaught of the followers of the busy god. You would think that this meant an end to all the praise and worship teams of those old deities. Thank goodness traditions die hard! Native Americans are reclaiming their Gods and Goddesses, all the while getting revenge on us with their casinos.

There are so many Native American deities in Oklahoma that I couldn't possibly interview Them all. Instead we should pray for all these deities, and all the Native Americans in Oklahoma, that they keep the faith of their forefathers and the wisdom of their grandmothers. They are nations.

Maybe that's why it took so long for Oklahoma to get its star on Old Glory. It's pretty hard to pledge the flag as "one nation under god," when in fact there were -- and are -- hundreds of nations under the banner... and hundreds of gods.

OK, Oklahoma. Rock on with your Ancient Ones! Congress shall pass no law regarding the establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.

High over New Mexico: Interview with a Hallucinogenic Plant

2011-10-06T17:49:00.000-04:00

Welcome to "The Gods Are Bored!" Yesterday was Back-to-School night at my school, with the emphasis on night. Literally I am holding my eyes open with a toothpick.

But onward and upward we go in our quest to protect the varieties of religious experience from those who would restrict our diets to one food item ... of their choosing!

Speaking of diets, especially those rich in spiritual properties, I have a very, very interesting companion here today. Did you know that some anthropologists believe that the consumption of hallucinogenic mushrooms may have been the foundation of the earliest forays into religious belief? Word, dudes. That stuff will make you at one with the Universe. Or so I'm told. We at "The Gods Are Bored" are not keen on ingesting fungi or controlled substances. Against the law and all that. *Occupy the DEA*

My "Gods Are Bored" guest today is not a mushroom, however. It's a leafy green New World plant, used for at least 3,000 years in sacred ceremonies throughout the tropical Americas. Ladies and gentlemen, please give a warm, wonderful "Gods Are Bored" welcome to Banisteriopsis caapi, better known as the hallucinogenic tea Ayahuasca!

Anne: Welcome, Ayahuasca! I'd offer you a cup of tea ... but that's what you are.

Ayahuasca: I'm not your cup of tea, though. You haven't been initiated into the Mysteries.

Anne: So true. About the most adventurous I get is a vodka gimlet. But this isn't about my religious experiences, it's about America's religious experiences. And You, o Sacred Ayahuasca, have been foully and cruelly treated! Everyone has heard the tale of the DEA agents bursting in on a ceremony of the Unaio do Vegetal praise and worship team in New Mexico. The agents pulled You right out of the priest's kitchen and carted You off to the slammer. (Or in this case, the refrigerator.)

Ayahuasca: We took them to court. To the Supreme Court. And we won.

Anne: Damn right, you won! It's called the First Amendment, and there's a long and well-documented use of Ayahuasca tea in numerous religious paths originating in the Western Hemisphere. I was rooting for Unaio do Vegetal every step of the way.

Ayahuasca: Thank you. Here is how I look at it. You never see DEA agents bursting into a First Communion, confiscating the wine, and arresting the priests for serving alcoholic beverages to minors.

Anne: Absolutely correct! But ... emmm ... playing the devil's advocate here, I'd have to say that You are far more potent than watered-down communion wine.

Ayahuasca: I am an all-powerful source of the wisdom of the universe. My followers know this and use Me with care.

Anne: As they have every right to do, under the second clause of the first sentence of the First Amendment. I've read some accounts of Your use. And of course, Timothy Leary, Terrence McKenna, and Erowid. It does sound to me like, if one used You responsibly, one could communicate with any bored god on the radar.

Ayahuasca: And many who aren't.

Anne: I understand that only the men in Your praise and worship team get to use You.

Ayahuasca: Don't pass judgment. It's My praise and worship team, and that's how we roll. Specially-trained males only.

Anne: Hey. Whatever moves the spirits of Unaio do Vegetal is a-okay with me. Ayahuasca, I hope Your legal troubles are over. How would Your praise and worship team feel if the U.S. government not only outlawed Your use, but outlawed the religion that it springs from?

Ayahuasca: We would fix that. A few infiltrators to the Albuquerque public water works, and soon everyone would be keen to join Unaio do Vegetal!

Anne: Well, that's a little extreme, even for me. Why don't You just settle for spiking the punch at the next Rick Perry prayer breakfast?

Ayahuasca: A worthy idea!

Anne: Thank you for dropping by, Ayahuasca. If I ever decide to go tripping on tryptamines, I'll give you a holler. Don't hold your breath, though. If I made it through the 1970s without dropping acid even once, I'm not likely to start at my age.

Ayahuasca: I am part of a significant and highly ritualized praise and worship. I'm not for sipping after a long day's work. Just keep that in mind.

Anne: Oh, I do! I do! See? I'm about to sip a glass of pinot grigio. The gift from Bacchus, who doesn't give a fig how it's used and abused.

To me, what is most beautiful about America is the fact that small sects like Unaio do Vegetal, who are able to tie themselves to established patterns of worship, have the absolute right to use hallucinogens in their rituals. This small New Mexico praise and worship team is hardly unique in its use (not abuse) of mind-altering substances. Long may they hold their sacred plant to their souls and soar with It to their Gods!

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America. So might it be.

Interview with a Bored Goddess: Changing Woman

2011-10-05T14:17:00.002-04:00

Welcome to "The Gods Are Bored," deity central in this time of We Want One God, and We Want His Laws.

If you just flew in on the red-eye from Los Angeles, here's the link to the wacky bell-ringers who want to shred our Constitution. Think of Sharia Law, only from a different book.

(I would like to add here that "The Gods Are Bored" will be dedicated this month to perusing the multiple praise and worship teams in the good ol' US of A, but that doesn't mean we aren't watching Occupy Wall Street and waiting for an opportunity to don the AFL-CIO t-shirt for a stroll past City Hall.)

Today I wish to welcome another bored Goddess. Her name is Changing Woman, and she is sacred to the Navajo Peoples of Arizona.

Anne: All Hail, beautiful Changing Woman! Welcome to New Jersey!

Changing Woman: Which way is the airport?

Anne: I feel ya. Those Arizona vistas are so popular there's a whole monthly magazine dedicated to them. Changing Woman, I've often thought about You, but I've never addressed You in a Ritual. So here, for the record, I would like to thank Your supremely intelligent praise and worship team for confounding the Japanese during World War II with the complexity of their language. I have always found that fascinating, and I'm sure You are behind it somewhere.

Changing Woman: I am always behind My people, watching them. Your so-called "America" hasn't been a friendly place for my praise and worship team, but nothing has kept My people from taking care of Me.

Anne: Thank goodness for that! Changing Woman, what would you say to a government that legislated religion, so that Your people would absolutely have to hear about the Fertile Crescent deity in their classrooms?

Changing Woman: I'd be all for My people hearing about God as a myth created by a literate tribe in what is now the western Mediterranean Basin.

Anne: Whoa. You're a very intelligent Goddess. (Is there any other kind?) And I love the way You created people to keep you company -- not as little mini-me half-clones for your amusement. I know I'd rather be a friend to a Goddess than a penitent to a God.

Changing Woman: Why don't you come with me to Arizona?

Anne: I don't have papers.

Changing Woman: Say no more. It's crazy out there right now.

Anne: Well, I won't keep You, Changing Woman. We'll offer a little prayer here for You, and if You would be so kind, I have a petition...

Changing Woman: Bring it on!

Anne: Would you get your son, Monster Slayer, to keep an eye on the One God theocrats?

Changing Woman: Already happening, Anne. Be of good cheer.

I stole the following chant from Debra, She Who Seeks, and I hope this link will take you to her, but if it doesn't, she's in my sidebar.

Let us commune with Changing Woman:

"There is a Woman,
She rides the night sky.
See Her spin, watch Her fingers fly!
She is within us, beginning to end:
Our grandmother, our sister, our friend."

May the Gods bless America! May the Gods guard our First Amendment rights. Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion. So might it be.

Interview with a Bored Goddess: Sedna

2011-10-04T17:13:00.000-04:00

Welcome to "The Gods Are Bored," deliberating with downsized deities since 2005! If you're a late arrival here, you've parked curbside just in the nick of time! We're having a good ol' bored god tent revival in response to a hornet's nest of theocrats bent upon making One Nation under God a legal reality.

This benign little group is called DC40, and they're rather tied in to Rick Perry. You can read all about it over at The Wild Hunt Blog. Just click my sidebar and follow the tags.

DC40 began on October 3 to concentrate ~~black magic~~ prayer intentions toward Hawaii. Every day the group will direct their ~~black magic~~ odd bell-ringing prayers toward another state, going backwards to (I presume they know their history) modest little Delaware. They plan an 11-day visit to Philadelphia in November.

That's in the future. We've got to concentrate on the here and now. And with that, I have another bored Goddess here with me today. Please give a warm, wonderful "Gods Are Bored" welcome to Sedna, Sacred Goddess of the Inuit Peoples!

Sedna: Goodness, it's warm here! Is October always like this in New Jersey?

Anne: Actually we're finally getting somewhat seasonal temperatures. It has been very warm and rainy here for the past month and a half. Dear Goddess, let me go make you a nice bucket of ice water. Home Sweet Home and all that.

Sedna: Thank you.

Anne: Sedna, just FYI, here's what the folks at DC40 wrote about Alaska on their web site:

On October 4, it will be Alaska’s turn to take the point position of leading intercession in releasing the power of eternal light over our nation’s capital, with the strength of the other 49 standing as one alongside her.

Sedna: The power of eternal light? From Alaska? In mid-winter we hardly get any light at all! Even now the days are getting shorter by the eye-blink. If I have anything to say about it, Alaska will not be releasing any light that we need ourselves to get prepared for the long winter ahead.

Anne: A highly sensible strategy, Great Goddess.

Sedna: And frankly, my praise and worship team has little fondness for the "other 49." The other 49? All they want from us is cheap oil, at any cost to My pristine wilderness. What's the name of that guy who's interested in getting Alaska to secede from the "other 49?"

Anne: Todd Palin?

Sedna: Yeah, I think he's one of them. Not that I want a moron like him in charge of anything, but my praise and worship team would be peachy keen on dumping the other 49. And keeping the oil in the ground, where it won't poison waterways and kill wildlife.

Anne: Speaking of the Palins, what have you to say about Sarah?

Sedna: Took care of her.

Anne: What?

Sedna: Did you see how foolish she made herself look? She's not that stupid. But when you run at cross-purposes to Sedna, She will rattle your brain.

Anne: You're taking credit for Sarah's precipitous fall from power?

Sedna: Well, Anne, it's like this. If DC40 and its ilk think that they can influence people with prayer, then guess what? So can the followers of Sedna! My praise and worship team prayed constantly that Sarah Palin would tank like a stone, and so she has done. And now ...

Anne: Oooo OOOOO oooo! SQUEEEEE! Rick Perry's big chums with the DC40 crowd! Is he tripping up due to the prayers of the followers of the bored gods?

Sedna: Bored gods and busy gods. Krishna is livid.

Anne: I hope we can reassure Krishna, and the Buddhists, and even the sane and sober Methodists, that this nation will remain pluralistic, embracing the great variety of people who live here and their varieties of religious experience.

Sedna: Yes, fine, pluralistic is fine, but can I get some respect for My people? Can you imagine living for millennia in one of the most hostile wilderness areas on the planet, and then being told your deities are inferior to some god who lives the soft life in the Fertile Crescent?

Anne: Good point. God's followers would not doubt credit Him with the ability to construct an igloo, but I'm skeptical.

Sedna: Me too. It's harder than it looks on those National Geographic specials.

Anne: Sedna, I have some ice cream down in the freezer. Would you like a banana split?

Sedna: No thank you. Pairing bananas and ice cream is like pairing palm trees and glaciers. Just doesn't seem right to me somehow.

Anne: Well, thank you for dropping in. We at "The Gods Are Bored" are going to lift up a prayer for You and Yours. Good luck with that long, cold winter!

Sedna: We are used to them. It's how we roll.

My dear friends, let us face Alaska and pray to Great Sedna:

"Oh gentle Sedna of the Arctic,
We pray for the protection of Your people and their way of life.
May they always reach out to You for the certain protection of their millennial ways.
Gentle Sedna, feel our concern for Your lands,
That they be held sacred.
That they not be broken in a scramble for profits.
That they hold the magnificent winter wilderness.
Go into the peaceful darkness, dear Sedna.
The light is for You and Your people.

All hail Sedna. All hail the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.

Artwork by the absolutely incomparable Thalia Took.

Interview with a Bored Goddess: Pele

2011-10-03T18:42:00.000-04:00

Welcome to "The Gods Are Bored!" In case you've missed it, this month -- so sacred to Pagans -- has been declared a war zone by some people who want Jesus to blow things up. Pish tosh to them! As the veil grows thin, we will call upon the Gods and Goddesses to protect our land from zealotry of every stripe!

Today, the nefarious group known as "DC 40," founded by the linked lunatic above, has launched its prayer assault against the great state of Hawaii, birthplace of our current president (yes, really). Little known fact: Hawaii was granted statehood the year I was born. Yep. It's me, Alaska, Hawaii, and Barbie! Great year.

In response to the DC 40 bloody rain of terror, the Great Goddess Pele, sacred to the Original People of Hawaii, has dropped by for a quick interview. Please give a warm, wonderful, "Gods Are Bored" welcome to Pele!

Anne: My, my, you are a pretty Lady!

Pele: The artist Thalia Took has done a lovely likeness. Brrrr! It's cold in your house! Shall I warm things up?

Anne: Oh, no no! That's okay! Really! So kind and all, but we've got love to keep us warm here at Chateau Johnson. We don't need a Volcano Goddess. But this isn't Hawaii. This is New Jersey. Where exactly would Hawaii be without you, O Pele?

Pele: It wouldn't exist. My Sisters and I are responsible for many of the islands of the Pacific Rim.

Anne: And beautiful islands they are, too. So I'm told. I've never been to any of them. Pele, how do you feel about people who would like to pray you out of the way? It's not like they can kill you, but they can rob you of your praise and worship team.

Pele: I get steamed up about it. Who are these people, anyway? What's so special about their God?

Anne: Their God set a bush on fire, and it didn't burn. It just stood there.

Pele: That sounds like a myth to me.

Anne: Me too. I'd like to see it done again, no modern tricks.

Pele: Me too. I send out warnings before I start burning stuff up, but when I blow, things burn.

Anne: And from the nutrient-rich ashes of your fires, Great Goddess, come the verdant forests of our 50th state! All hail!

Pele: Thank you.

Anne: I've got a modest following here at "The Gods Are Bored," o Great Goddess Pele. Today I'm going to ask them to join me in prayer. Readers, please face Hawaii and pray the following:

"Great Goddess Pele of Hawaii,
Long may You live in peace as a Goddess of America.
Guard Your people as You did before the American flag flew in Your land.
We praise you, Great Pele.
Long may Your sacred fires turn into flowers!"

Pele: Oh, that's lovely! Now I must be homeward bound. Would you like to join me, Anne?

Anne: Well, let's see. On one hand, I have New Jersey, governed by Chris Christie, peppered with oil refineries and chemical plants, criss-crossed by turnpikes, and subject to all the air pollution flowing west to east across continental USA. On the other, Maui. Give me 15 minutes, Goddess, to pack my bags!

All hail Pele, Goddess of Hawaii. All hail the First Amendment of the Constitution. Congress shall pass no law respecting an establishment of religion.

Forever and ever. So might it be.

Image: Pele, by Thalia Took. Sidebar. For all your deity needs!

Frank Talk about Sexy Witches

2011-10-01T12:49:00.000-04:00

Welcome to "The Gods Are Bored!" Enough with the Mummers already, that's local talk. The veil grows thin, the faeries romp, and it's time to turn our thoughts to Samhein! Have you kissed your First Amendment today? The government can't legislate away our bored gods. So might it always be.

This lovely artwork is part of a series of pin-ups by Gil Elvren. Wowsa. I like it!

It's time to revise our definition of Witch to include "sexy."

One of the appeals of Paganism, in my modest view, is how little it asks of you in the way of attire. How few strictures it places upon you in matters of the flesh, so long as you're not harming anyone when you strut your stuff. (*mmm* strutting *mmm* Mummers ...)

Okay, where was I? Back on topic here!

This picture does not offend me in any way. In fact, I find it delightful. I enjoy the fact that my religion attracts people who like to dress ... oh, slightly more modest than this, maybe. Maybe less modest, if you include the festivals. And if you consider nudity immodest, then ahem. What are you doing at "The Gods Are Bored?" Go tour Amish country on a bus!

With the advent of sensible family planning, the only curb I can see to rampant flesh-press is that you must be mindful that sex and love often co-mingle. As well they should. The bored gods set up the sex and love thing back in the day, before the pill and the condom. But bored gods, unlike busy ones, are more flexible when it comes to modernization of their praise and worship teams. Go to town, you sexy witches! Queen Danu approves!

It's not a bad thing to want to be attractive, sexy, seductive. Dress the part! All acts of love and pleasure are divine ... so long as no one gets hurt and the furniture remains stain-free. (The latter can be accomplished by using the great outdoors or your nice no-wrinkle cotton percale sheets.)

As we occupy Wall Street, let us also take back the Right To Have Fun. Enjoy yourself! Your body is a temple, and one of the best rooms is you-know-where.

I'm Anne Johnson, and I approve this message.

Making Mummer Magic

2011-09-29T16:57:00.000-04:00

Every year on January 1, the city of Philadelphia throws all decorum aside and has a day-long revel. It's called the Mummers Parade.

Where I grew up (Hagerstown, MD, basically), there was a big Mummers Parade on Halloween every year. In both cases, Philadelphia and Hagerstown, I think the original idea was to give all the crazies some goal beyond drunken rioting.

Turns out that the sheer energy and good will of these events can sweep away even the most dire black magic heaped on a city. This is why I, Anne Johnson of "The Gods Are Bored," sought membership in a Mummers comic brigade.

And found it. Early on New Year's Day -- like, really really early, before the well-oiled string bands and fancies -- I will be stepping out with the Two Street Stompers.

Like every other Mummer unit, this one is a conglomerate of family and friends, some of whom are third and fourth generation Mummers. They bring their kids and their grandparents. I'm invited to bring Spare, if she wants. These are the good God people, and they will cleanse the city with their cheer.

We will have a bountiful three practices in the alley behind the captain's house in Gloucester City, New Jersey. Then it will be off to the parade!

This will be the 25th anniversary of the first time I ever watched a Mummers Parade. For a quarter century I've been sitting by a warm fire on New Year's Day, sipping hot tea and saying to myself, "Why am I not out there in the cold rain, dressed like a wench and pumping a parasol?" Well, no more. This year, I have been moved by great karmic events to restore good will to Philadelphia. Here at "The Gods Are Bored," I will tell you all about it.

Video below of the brigade I have joined. They're even providing a costume!

mummers parade 2011

2011-09-29T16:41:00.000-04:00

2011-09-28T21:33:00.001-04:00

I am officially a Mummer. I have been accepted into the 2 Street Stompers New Year's Brigade. I am unspeakably happy.

Coming Down with Something

2011-09-27T19:49:00.002-04:00

I feel some grippe coming on. I'm going to bed early.

Between now and January 1, every time I don't have the energy to blog, I am going to post the lovely tribute to the Goddess Columbia seen below. It's beautiful, moving, and it reminds us that Liberty is a Lady. She carries the torch for us all.

9/11 Tribute Verizon Commercial

2011-09-27T19:46:00.000-04:00

The Corruption of Fine Young Minds

2011-09-26T18:32:00.000-04:00

Welcome to "The Gods Are Bored!" Have you heard anything about the protests on Wall Street? Me neither. Gonna be a big, fat black eye for the mainstream media if they don't get down there and cover this. I want to get this post done in time to catch ABC News and see if they are with us or agin us.

On to today's sermon: the corruption of fine young minds with evil reading material known as books!

Every year in September, the Friends of the Snobville Library hold a big used book sale. People line up like ... hmmm ... like ... hmmmm ... maybe like ... vultures? Yeah, that would be it. Vultures. People line up to get the "good stuff" cheap, so they can re-sell it on Ebay.

This year there was a good deal of kvetching from the customers. The Friends of Snobville had set the price of a hardcover at $3.00, a quality paperback at $2.00, and a "pocket paperback" at $1.00.

You do the math. Seven books, and you're out $20.00. That's a lot of cash for someone else's books.

In years past, I used to go to this sale to buy books for my classroom. But at those prices I couldn't afford it. My salary has dropped $150 per paycheck with all the new deductions for health care and pension, and losses of occasional coverage that paid $30 per class period.

You could say I was fuming. Snobville at its snobbiest!

But wait, dear readers. I was determined. It paid off. It just goes to show that if you really are hell-bent on corrupting minors, it can always be done.

The sale ran on Saturday and Sunday. Same prices on Sunday. So on Sunday I showed a Friend of the SL my Vo-Tech teacher ID and asked for a discount. Lo and behold, they let me take any book I wanted for free!

Trust me, readers, I went over those tables of books with one thought in mind: Is this book banned, or could it be banned, or was the ban recently lifted, soon to be returned? If the answer was "yes," I grabbed that puppy. I think I got about 60 books, all first-rate filth. Tuesdays with Morrie? I'll bet there's a swearword or sexual innuendo in there somewhere. Da Vinci Code? Blasphemy! (I got three copies.)

I did wait until late on Sunday afternoon to do this gleaning. I thought it was kind enough of the FotSL to let me have free books -- I wanted to wait until they had sold as much as they could at those inflated prices.

Maybe you've been to a used book sale? Generally in the last hour, they shout, "Fill a bag for five bucks!" After which new scurrying ensues.

The Snobville answer to this was, "Fill a bag for thirty bucks!" Pinky swear. I've paid that for a bag of hard shell crabs, nicely steamed and seasoned ... but used books? For the love of fruit flies!

I guess that idea didn't fly too well, because only a few minutes later, the same Friend shouted, "Fill a bag for ten bucks!" Which seemed slightly more reasonable but still steep, since all the good, banned stuff was gone.

And then the funniest exchange occurred. It was classic. Apparently some woman had picked out a bunch of books earlier in the afternoon and then had plopped down on a bench, waiting for the buck-a-bag call. (Probably has read so many banned books that she used her life as a bookmark and misplaced the book.)

Here was the conversation, so far as I eavesdropped:

Friend: I'm sorry. We can't sell you these at that price. We have watched you sitting there waiting for us to drop the price.

Crazy woman: You just said, "Ten dollars a bag." You have to honor that!

Friend: No, we won't honor it with you. It's not fair for you to get good books and sit around until the price drops.

Crazy woman: It doesn't matter how long I've been here. You just said, "Ten dollars a bag." Is that what you're charging, or not? It's not fair if you have one price for me and one price for everyone else.

Friend: You're trying to cheat.

Crazy woman: No, you're being unfair!

At this time I sauntered past, lugging my huge cart of freebies, nodding gratefully at the gent and noting the crazy woman's quick appraisal of my haul (nothing valuable, all banned and banged up).

It was lovely for the Friends of the Snobville Library to give me books for my classroom. As for the crazy lady who spent her Sunday afternoon waiting for a discount on books she'd picked out five hours earlier, wow. Not sure how to call that one. I'll leave it up to you.

Off I go to pollute my students' minds with Bella and her vampire!

Banned Book Week: Some Modest Proposals

2011-09-24T16:36:00.000-04:00

Welcome to "The Gods Are Bored!" It's "Banned Books Week," so throw out that lascivious copy of the Bible under your desk and read something that isn't smutty! In this sermon, we at "The Gods Are Bored" will offer you safe and secure suggestions for eliminating banned books from your life. As you know, reading banned books has caused many of the social ills plaguing humankind. We have to do something about it, pronto.

You know what great, safe, and improving literature is regularly overlooked? Instruction manuals! Don't believe me? Go find the manual that came with your IPod or your microwave. Better yet, read that fascinating sheet that came with your Ikea book case. You won't find swear words, sexual situations, or violent content in there. And it just gets better, because instructional manuals fold up so nice and cozy -- you won't need the book case you just bought. Take it back!

I'm a school teacher, so it's very important for me to be aware of all these banned books. Such evil works as To Kill a Mockingbird and Of Mice and Men can be found all over my school! But worry not, dear reader. I'm tossing that smut and replacing it with helpful and instructional literature. This week I made copies of my Verizon monthly statement for my entire class. Of course I blacked out HBO first, because we all know what kind of filth runs on HBO.

You might think cookbooks are safe. And I agree, so long as they don't have any recipes that are high in fat, salt, or sugar. The trouble is that a smart student, when given a Weight Watchers cookbook, will figure out how to re-introduce the salt, sugar, and fat into an otherwise slimmed-down recipe. So be warned. Cookbooks are not acceptable.

I'll tell you something else that should be banned. Used book sales. There's no oversight in these things! Kids can wander around and just choose whatever they want to read. Chances are that Mom is over looking at the tennis or yoga paperbacks. She won't even notice her susceptible youngster poking a curious eyeball into Leaves of Grass.

The very best way to protect innocent children from banned books is to not teach them to read in the first place. How many times have I had to remind you people that the entire Captain Underpants series is banned, banned, banned! And it's written for third graders. You can't have third graders reading about a character named Professor Pippy P. Poopypants! This will warp them for life. Better not to read at all than to be tempted to read a banned book.

Further banning: the bestseller list. Have you read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo or any of its sequels? Horrific! (I actually mean it. Turned my stomach.) And yet ... and yet ... that book is in my school's library! Heck, let's ban bestsellers and the library. Purity of mind, purity of mind.

I have been trying to decide what core curriculum I should teach my sophomores next, after they're through with the Verizon bill. Aha! Here's my high school yearbook! (*Anne blacks out the ribald comments by her classmates*) What a relief! My students will love this.

This is at least the tenth post I've written about banned books. Lately I've been wondering why I get all riled up about them. I hardly ever see anyone reading a book anymore, unless it's a student who's been told they have to read. So we stop teaching students to read, and then no one will read, and there will be no reason to ban books.

I say, give everyone a Droid and burn all the books. A modest proposal.

Equinox

2011-09-21T17:49:00.003-04:00

Welcome to "The Gods Are Bored" as the days become even with the nights, and the long descent into darkness begins. Autumn and winter are my favorite seasons, but the dwindling hours of sunshine can really take a toll. Oh well. On we roll.

I think I mentioned that Mr. J will have a book coming out in a store near you next spring. The last time I mentioned it here on this site, I used Mr. J's real name, and I got all kinds of weird email from people who are Googling that name. Mr. J, you see, had a famous father in the sportswriting biz. So for now, I'll just stick with calling a K a J.

Mr. J's book was received with vast enthusiasm at the publishing house. He had the lightest edit I've ever seen on a full-length manuscript. The press is going to put photographs at the head of each chapter. Okay, I know the guy is my husband, but I think this book is going to sell.

While Mr. J was visiting with the editor in New York, he mentioned that I had written a novel.

Yes, I did do this, about a hundred years ago. I even had a small press willing to print it, until the economic downturn put an end to small presses everywhere.

Long story short, Mr. J's editor said he'd pass it along to the editors of my sort of fiction at the publishing house. The publishing house is St. Martin's Press.

It is extremely difficult to get a novel into print these days, unless you're James Patterson or a good friend of Oprah's. Apparently two editors will be looking at mine, weighing it in the profit-vs.-loss balance, and getting back to me.

At this equinox, I would like to think my chances are 50-50. Or maybe there's a bored goddess of writing out there who wants to give me a boost.

Beam me some luck. It's a good book, and writing it was one of the highlights of my life.

All He Wants Is a Good Baseball Glove

2011-09-20T17:02:00.000-04:00

Have you ever had to live in a foreign country for an extended period of time? Have you ever gone to a school where the language spoken is not the one you know? I haven't had to do either. In fact, being in a country where I don't know the language is a phobia of mine. I'm a woman of a certain age, and I've never traveled abroad.

Many of my students are from the Dominican Republic, but most of them can speak and write pretty good English. (Reading is difficult for them -- it's like translating. No fun.)

This year I have a young man who does not speak very good English. He is struggling mightily. And we have no Foreign Language specialists on our staff.

I gave all of my 150 students a questionnaire to fill out about themselves. Struggling Student had so many heart-wrenching answers that I got teary-eyed.

Apparently the only enjoyment this kid has in his life is baseball. Every other answer had something to do with baseball. Finally came the clincher:

Question: If I could have anything I wanted, it would be .......

His answer: "A good baseball glove."

Do any of my three readers have a good baseball glove sitting around in a box, unloved and unwanted? What a simple request! I would buy him one myself if I hadn't gotten a hefty pay cut.

It's against the rules for a teacher to give a student a gift. However, there is a tenured teacher working in the building, and she could (and would) give him the glove if I did (and would) give it to her.

Send me an email (through my profile) if your diamond days are in the past, but the equipment remains.

PS - Tenure is a wonderful thing.

AAAAaaaaarrrrGGGGHHHHH!

2011-09-19T18:10:00.000-04:00

Yo ho, yo ho, the pirate's life for me! It be "Talk Like a Pirate Day," matey! Wait a pinch while I get Decibel the parrot on my shoulder, and then ...

Wave yer cutlass if you've ever worked for someone who ought to walk the plank!

I just found out this morning that a swabbie who bossed me around last year and saw to it I'd have too many students this year will be jumping ship. This former first mate third class, who I'll give the earned monnicker "Rat Face," will be a-leavin my ship and heading for the Great Sloop Snobville High! Arrrghhgh! I kid you not! The worst pirate that ever sailed the briny deep just got hired at Snobville High! I'd love to be a fly on the wall when Rat Face meets Mr. G. The incompetent leading the arrogant. Yar, won't take more than a stiff breeze to sink 'em like a stone!

Pieces of hate! Pieces of hate!

All this pirate talk puts me in the mood to worship the Flying Spaghetti Monster! A prayer to the Great Plate commences now:

Oh gracious Noodly Master,
Pasta perfection for pirates,
Promise through thy gracious tendrils
That all incompetent and arrogant sons of sea-slugs
Will be cursed with having to deal with each other.
Which, through Thy grace
Will lead to duels with pistols or cutlasses, or just plain ugly sneers.
Cast down the mighty, arrghghgh, like so much slop over the starboard bow!
In the name of All Noodles, ramen.

The Faeries Have Come for Mom Mom

2011-09-18T15:24:00.000-04:00

Welcome to "The Gods Are Bored," solemn today as we await the moment when our family matriarch crosses through the veil.

My husband is 55 years old, and his grandmother is still alive. She was an enormously active woman who only sat still while she was eating, and then only if everyone else had everything they needed. Born in 1914, she worked in a shirt-making factory to support her family while her younger sisters got to go to high school. She always resented the fact that she wasn't able to get a high school diploma.

Even without the diploma she made good. Married, bought a row house in South Baltimore near Fort McHenry, and worked at the Department of Motor Vehicles. In 1952 she pooled her resources, and she and her husband bought an undeveloped waterfront property on the Chesapeake Bay near Annapolis. They towed a house boat over from Baltimore, built a pier, and spent all their spare time there, gradually improving the place until they constructed a split-level house up on the bluff, a beach house by the water, and a 100-foot pier out into the bay.

Mr. Johnson spent many a happy hour on that houseboat with his youngish, vigorous grandparents. They taught him to fish, to drive a powerboat, to crab, and to swim. When he took me to meet them, I was bowled over -- not only by the magnificent view from their property, but also by their perpetual motion. Mom Mom in particular was a dynamo.

Whenever the topic of mortality came up around Mom Mom, her response was the same: "I want everything and anything done to keep me alive." She wouldn't sign a Do Not Resuscitate order. Maybe you wouldn't either if you'd never, ever been sick in your whole life.

Finally, at age 98, she fell and broke her hip. So you know how that goes. We went to see her in the rehab center, and we knew right then and there that her time among us was short. My throat is choking up just telling you about it.

Except for one thing. The faeries are there with her.

She is in hospice at the home of Mr. Johnson's aunt. One evening last week she told Mr. J's aunt: "There was a little girl with red hair in the doorway. She said, 'Come on, it's time to go.' But I told her I didn't want to go."

Long-time "Gods Are Bored" readers will recall that my dad, after breaking his hip, saw Peter Pan in the doorway of his hospital room.

It cannot be a coincidence that two people in my life, my dad and my grandmother-in-law, both have seen red-haired children just before dying. (I never told Mom Mom about my dad. She never liked to talk about death.) Clearly these are faeries doing what faeries do.

Portal beings take non-threatening shapes to greet those who have lived good lives and are about to cross over. In my husband's grandmother, the faeries have found a very unwilling candidate for the Summerlands. They will guide her. I just hope they don't expect her to rest once she gets there.

The Robin Hoods of Religion

2011-09-15T18:23:00.000-04:00

Welcome to "The Gods Are Bored!" Did y'all like that beautiful video of the Great Goddess Columbia? Isn't it inspirational? The beauty of it is that all those sweet little kids are praying to the Goddess. Oh, be still my beating heart!

Speaking of hearts, I guess it's more than Cupid toying with bows and arrows today. Apparently the ~~black magicians~~ misguided Christians in Cindy Jacobs' evil empire have noticed that we Pagans don't cotton to the idea of One Nation under Jehovah. Here's a recent ~~threat~~ kind note to us:

" You see, there is no DC40 Prayer War. It is finished, you just haven’t come to the truth of it yet. However, if you are reading this, it is too late – we release the arrow of blood-covered truth and convicting power of Holy Spirit into the core of your being, and release grace for you to SEE in Jesus’ Mighty Name!”

I think these people should choose their metaphors more wisely. Don't you?

The only blood released here at "The Gods Are Bored" is to the Red Cross, one pint at a time.

We stink at the link, but if you haven't seen this PNC bulletin about this fall's black magic intended to turn America into a theocracy, read it and cheep:

http://pncminnesota.wordpress.com/2011/09/14/dc40-to-pagans-we-release-the-power-of-blood-covered-light-over-you/

Then come back here. Ground. Center. Breathe. Watch the beautiful video below, courtesy of Verizon.

Coming soon: I will tell you all about the big plans to cleanse Philadelphia of all the negative energy generated by archers who tip their arrowheads in blood...

... whew. Seriously. If Pagans talked like this, they'd be investigated by the authorities.

Columbia, the Great Goddess of America

2011-09-14T19:21:00.001-04:00

Queen Mab

2011-09-13T16:12:00.000-04:00

In the play "Romeo and Juliet," by William Shakespeare, one of the PRINCIPAL, i.e. MAIN characters is a fiery fellow named MERCUTIO. The name (smart playwright) is based on Mercury (bored god), hence "mercurial."

In Act I Scene 4, Mercutio notices that Romeo is moping about a woman. Mercutio slowly wigs out about it in the famous "Queen Mab" soliloquoy. I here reprint the Bard's version and then give a short translation. For my money, this soliloquoy, INCLUDED IN BOTH FAMOUS FILM VERSIONS, is a brilliant treatise on the dark abilities of faeries.

O then I see Queen Mab hath been with you.
She is the faeries' midwife, and she comes
In shape no bigger than an agate stone
On the forefinger of an alderman,
Drawn with a team of little atomies
Over men's noses as they lie asleep.
Her chariot is an empty hazelnut
Made by the joiner squirrel or old grub,
Time out o' mind the faeries' coachmakers;
Her waggon-spokes made of long spinners' legs,
The cover of the wings of grasshoppers,
Her traces of the smallest spider web,
Her collars of the moonshine's watery beams,
Her whip of cricket's bone, the lash of film,
Her waggoner a small gray-coated gnat,
Not half so big as a round little worm
Pricked from the lazy finger of a maid;
And in this shape she gallops night after night
Through lovers' brains, and then they dream of love;
O'er courtiers' knees, that dream on curtsies straight;
O'er lawyers' fingers who straight dream on fees;
O'er ladies' lips, who straight on kisses dream,
Which oft the angry Mab with blisters plagues
Because their breaths with sweetmeats tainted are.
Sometimes she gallops o'er a courtier's nose
And then dreams he of smelling out a suit;
And sometime comes she with a tithe-pig's tail,
Tickling a parson's nose as he lies asleep;
Then dreams he of another benefice.
Sometimes she driveth o'er a soldier's neck
And then dreams he of cutting foreign throats,
Of breaches, ambuscados, Spanish blades,
Of healths five fathom deep; and then anon
Drums in his ear, at which he starts and wakes,
And sleeps again. This is that very Mab
That plaits the manes of horses in the night
And bakes the elf-locks in foul sluttish hairs,
Which, once untangled, much misfortune bodes.
This is the hag, when maids lie on their backs,
That presses them and learns them first to bear,
Making them women of good carriage.
This is she ---

(And at this point Romeo interrupts him and Mercutio pauses for breath.)

Anne's translation (not meant for the stage):

This faerie, Queen Mab, is a miniature trouble-maker, all done up in finery made by bugs. When you go to sleep, she gives you dreams of your desires. Beware, though. She won't make you happy. In fact, if you follow her, she will smite you with dashed hopes, cold sores, and pregnancy. Mab isn't nice. Don't listen to her.

And now (drum roll, please), Mr. G's version of this seminal soliloquoy from "Romeo and Juliet," also featured in the 1971 Franco Zefferelli film and the 1996 re-make with Leonardo di Caprio:

How Can You Catch the Sparrow?

2011-09-12T16:07:00.000-04:00

Welcome to "The Gods Are Bored," paper stress edition! I am not cut out to be a school teacher. The paperwork befuddles me. Love the kids, hate the dead, white trees.

Other than yesterday's navel gaze, I tried to stay as far away as possible from the 9/11 memorials. The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that an estimated 125,000 civilians died in the Iraq War. That's 40 for every American in 9/11. Little reality check there.

At the Shrine of the Mists we light candles for all children killed in warfare. No discrimination. It's how we roll.

Ah, well. On to brighter and lighter topics!

My three regular readers enjoyed the little clip below of "Mr. G's World," a day in the life of a high school drama teacher. It must be very special to be a drama teacher/coach/director. How wonderful it must feel when you ~~choose your favorite kid for the lead ...~~ ~~butcher Shakespeare like a pig roast~~ ... ~~pick a good-looking boy who can't act .~~.. don't have to grade so many papers!

It's really eerie how the "Mr. G's World" clip mirrors the Snobville drama teacher, who (ironically) is also Mr. G. What a coincidence! Uncanny, really. If Snobville's Mr. G had an Aussie accent, I would swear it was one and the same man.

Last week I noted that Mr. G (the real one) and a trusty Snobville mom had taken a cleaver to "Romeo and Juliet," of all things. Readers, I am not exaggerating. They took out Tybalt. They took out Mercutio. And they took out Benvolio. Never mind overlooking the beautiful and truthful "Queen Mab" speech about faeries. They axed the whole character! How can you perform "Romeo and Juliet" without Tybalt and Mercutio?

Maybe I'll shuck out ten bucks to find out. Um, maybe not.

The cast list was made public today, and I must say that Mr. G (the real one) is as predictable as Old Faithful.

In our humble borough of Snobville live a family by the last name of Sparrow. There are several stair-step daughters, and they have had itty bitty roles on Broadway and in t.v. shows. Not because they're extraordinary (so far as I can see), but probably because their mom is plugged in to these things. Some moms are like that. They ought to be in the back yard building shrines, but they're calling agents and private acting coaches and making long treks to Manhattan.

It's gotten to be funny. If your last name is Sparrow in Snobville, Mr. G will give you the lead in the play. He pals around with this family, and even though the most recent Sparrow is a freshman, she lapped the other 30-some auditioners for Juliet as if she were Sea Biscuit and they were a pack of winded ponies.

Before the Sparrows arrived on Snobville's high school stage, Mr. G's daughter was still in the school. Needless to say, she got the lead in every play while she was there.

I. Kid. You. Not.

So Spare and I ran down how the last few years of Snobville drama have looked:

Mr. G's daughter
Mr. G's daughter
Mr. G's daughter
Mr. G's daughter

Sparrow
Sparrow
Sparrow
Sparrow
Sparrow
Sparrow
Sparrow
Sparrow
Sparrow

I think this provides a valuable lesson for all aspiring thespians in Snobville. Might as well get used to it now, kiddos. It's who you know. And after all, Hollywood has plenty of "royal families," doesn't it?

Oh, but Mercutio! Mercutio! If this post wasn't running long, I'd type in the whole "Queen Mab" speech!

I'll do it tomorrow.

Not since Mr. Bigwand has a personage come along who so richly deserves excoriation. We'll be having fun in Mr. G's world this year!

9/11 Navel Gaze

2011-09-10T19:09:00.000-04:00

Welcome to "The Gods Are Bored," recording a navel gaze on the tenth anniversary of the fall of the Twin Towers. The tragedy happened well before I began writing "The Gods Are Bored" -- just about the time when the Old Ones began a gentle tug on my soul.

First, the politics. I am one of those people who think we ought to examine this tragedy with a touch of hubris. Why did this happen in the first place? I ponder. One thing I believe to be absolutely true. The terrorists won. Our economy was already on the brink of a downward curve, and 9/11 just pushed things over the edge. You can feel differently if you like, but anyone with a drop of Scottish blood will tell you that a few determined warriors can plunge a mighty nation into bankruptcy.

Just an opinion. Opinions are entitlements.

On September 11, 2002, I was working at the job I loved -- writing -- at home, sitting just where I am now. In those days I had recently completed a long gig for ESPN. I had a t.v. on my desk, all hooked up to the cable. Mr. Johnson called me on the phone and told me to turn the t.v. on. When I did, one tower was already in flames, and the second plane was just tearing into the other one. Honestly, dear readers, my jaw dropped. Literally.

I watched the horror unfold, and then the little Jiminy Cricket on my shoulder said, "Get back to work!"

Just at that moment, the announcers said another plane had crashed in "rural southern Pennsylvania." That's where my farm is.

So I watched on, in ever-increasing horror, until the shock turned to rage. I turned the t.v. off and went back to my mundane reference book work. Damn if I was going to let terrorists keep me from earning a wage!

Of course I couldn't work. I was too horrified. And then it was time to go pick up The Spare from school.

The Spare was in second grade. Chances are she is one of the youngest Americans who will actually remember 9/11.

The elementary school was within an easy walking distance of Chateau Johnson. Almost every day a crowd of moms would be gathered in front of the school, waiting for dismissal. (I never let Spare walk home alone until she was in Middle School.) On this day there were easily ten times the usual number of parents on the lawn. One of them was weeping. Her brother-in-law had been on the 80th floor -- his first visit ever to the World Trade Center.

When the bell rang, I witnessed something I'll never forget. The kids came charging out as usual. They hadn't been told about the tragedy. But we parents knew. We rushed our children, grabbed them and held them tight. Rare was the child who didn't have a parent, or aunt, or older sibling, crushing his ribs.

I held onto the Spare for dear life. It turned out that her teacher had been called from the classroom. The teacher's daughter had been scheduled to take one of those flights and hadn't made it to the airport on time. Of all the classes in the school, Spare's was the only one that had an inkling it hadn't been an ordinary day.

Spare remembers. She remembers me telling her to go upstairs and not watch any channel but Nickelodeon. But when she turned on my upstairs t.v., of course it came onto the news channel, and she never switched.

Heir was in sixth grade. Her school had an assembly. The principal told them what was happening. She came home with a million questions.

The rest of the day is a blur. What chiefly stands out for me was seeing this horror unfold, stubbornly and angrily returning to work (Appalachian trait), and then grabbing my little one for dear life (human trait).

There are crazy people out in the world. Real psychos, who cling to any religious fervor that feeds their inner demons. Beware of these people. They come from every praise and worship team known to humankind. We never know when they will go over the tipping point and start blowing stuff up.

When a place like Norway isn't safe from terror, why should America not stand on guard against every lunatic fringe?

Welcome to Mr. G's World!

2011-09-08T18:08:00.000-04:00

Today my daughter The Spare is trying out for her high school's autumn production of "Romeo and Juliet."

There's just one problem. The play is garbage.

Mind you, The Spare attends a "Blue Ribbon School," which I guess is supposed to mean that the school pursues intellectual rigor. Trust me, the only rigor in that school is mortis.

For the third year in a row, the school's drama teacher has enlisted the assistance of a ~~savage butcher~~ ... ~~clueless playwright wannabe~~ ... ~~bored kept woman with delusions of grandeu~~r ... local mom to create a fall production that puts the "f" in FAIL. Not FALL. FAIL.

This time, the hapless target is The Bard.

The local mom (described above with acute precision, if you ask me) took the text of "Romeo and Juliet" and re-told the story from the point of view of the Nurse as she's sitting in a nursing home with dementia.

......

No, readers, I kid you not! I swear by all the Confederate Dead in Rose Hill Cemetery, Hagerstown, Maryland! I swear by every single drop of rain that has fallen on the Delaware Valley in the past two weeks! I swear by the best and brightest bored gods! I did not make this up.

Just imagine taking a wonderful play like "Romeo and Juliet," paring it down to a stinking two acts, axing all but seven characters, and wielding a mighty mean machete over the dialogue. Oh yeah, and then there's the whole point-of-view thing. The Nurse is trying to remember. Or thinks she remembers. Or ... but soft! There's Will Shakespeare moaning from his tomb!

It seems to me that a "Blue Ribbon School" with dance classes, a madrigal choir that has performed at the White House (resplendent in Renaissance costumes), and 100 kids clamoring for roles in a play, could actually put on the real "Romeo and Juliet," First Folio. We are six miles from Philadelphia. Don't tell me you couldn't find a sword-fight coach!

...

I have just returned from picking Spare up at the audition. She is downstairs crying. The drama coach called her up on stage first ("Let's do this fairly, in reverse alphabetical order, seniors first!) and did not call her for a second reading. She was the only senior who was not given the opportunity to do a second reading.

I'm no stage mom, trying to get my kid into Pampers commercials. To me, this thing is bigger than the Spare. It's about a despot in a small high school who takes good plays and makes them bad (or writes worse plays himself). It's about a school full of kids who want to be in productions, and the school only offers two productions a year. With a cast of seven.

The only thing more tragic than "Romeo and Juliet" is "Romeo and Juliet" re-written by some fluff-brained Snobville mom. If that school deserves a blue ribbon, I've seen some Angus beeves that should be encased in platinum. Don't tell The Spare, but I'm glad she laid an egg at the tryout. Better to not perform at all than to perform in The Great Shakespeare Chainsaw Massacre.

Ah, but art imitates life, right? Look at the darling clip below! It's Mr. G's world! Might as well have been shot at Snobville Blue Ribbon High, it's that close to the real thing. Welcome to a new sub-plot at "The Gods Are Bored!" It's the small-school drama coach who thinks he can improve upon the Bard!

Summer Heights High - Mr G's Drama Class

2011-09-08T16:18:00.000-04:00

Where's Timmy Tiptoes?

2011-09-06T17:46:00.000-04:00

Welcome to "The Gods Are Bored," dishing out deities on demand! Collect the whole set!

Well, actually that would be impossible. You'd always miss a deity or two ... or a thousand, depending upon how far back you want to look.

In fair weather I set my parrot, Decibel, on the front porch. The local squirrel population sees Decibel's cage as a lunch wagon, and no wonder: Given that parrots and squirrels are both plant-eating tree-dwellers, they have much in common when it comes to noms.

The summer guarantee of good eats has kept the squirrel population pretty high at Chateau Johnson. There are nests galore, and almost always it's possible to see one of those bushy-tailed seed-snatchers on the lawn. My cats don't even chase them. I don't own a dog. Squirrel life is good chez moi.

Last week we had a pesky, itty bitty hurricane. Not! We had a whopper of a tropical storm. It dumped inches of rain, and then the wind blew ferociously for about 16 hours. There were embedded tornadoes in the area.

Couldn't have been a good time to be a squirrel.

I write this because, since the end of Hurricane Irene, I've noticed a big drop in the squirrel visitations to Decibel's Diner. I've maybe seen one or two squirrels, total, in a week. At the height of Decibel Tourist Season, there can be as many as a half dozen squirrels in my yard -- noisy, cheeky rascals -- and another three or four across the street, trying to figure out how to mount an invasion.

Did the storm kill the squirrels? If so, where are the remains? To my unending grief, Snobville does not contain a reliable vulture population. Vultures are very helpful in detecting the whereabouts of deceased critters, but in this case it's a total mystery.

(Come to think of it, what happens to vultures in a hurricane? Oh, now I'm REALLY depressed!)

I'm sure the squirrel population will rebound. Or maybe they're still in hiding. It's just curious to me, that's all.

This was my first full day of school, so of course I am totally preoccupied by the noticeable drop in local squirrel population. This may sound insane to you, unless you have taught school.

Labor Day at the Shrine of the Mists

2011-09-05T17:25:00.000-04:00

Welcome to "The Gods Are Bored," Labor Day 2011 Edition! Please pay attention, because Labor Day will soon be a thing of the past ... and so you should make the best of the ones remaining. What are they going to call Labor Day when there is no more organized labor? I'll tell you: Monday.

A disturbing trend has followed me since I left full-time employment at Gale Research Company in 1987. I have found that, whatever I job I do, I quickly find myself working much harder for less money.

When I first left Gale Research back in 1987, they paid me very well as an independent contractor. They were so doggoned glad to have a trained worker willing to forgo health benefits and vacation pay that, for a few years, I made good bread. But as the whole "independent contractor" thing got rolling, companies like Gale learned that there were so many people eager to do the work for less money -- people who had never had benefits in the first place -- that the wages began to fall. First by a little bit, then precipitously.

It wouldn't have helped me if I had stayed at Gale Research. In the mid-1990s they laid off a number of the people who started working there at the same time I did. And we won't even go into the fact that the company is selling far more product with far less quality than it did in the day.

When I entered public school teaching, I thought that I'd finally found a profession that would be somewhat immune to this trend. But this year I am taking a substantial pay cut, what with our governor's garnishing our wages for health care and pensions and our local district's cost-saving measures. At the same time, my class sizes have increased. Last year my largest class was 24. This year my smallest class is 25. I'm despairing over the task of meeting the individual learning needs of 162 students -- all while being observed in my so-called "tenure year."

This morning I spent a long time sitting in sage smoke, arranging rocks I brought from Polish Mountain onto the Shrine of the Mists. The bored gods who visit my shrine have seen it all: vain rulers who exploited their poor subjects, tribes of people who knew that teamwork and profit sharing were the best means of survival, little bands of hardy individuals who crept from place to place. And then there are the deities of the Celts -- a people who valued the middle class. Isn't it strange? I can feel some gods whispering, "Nothing has changed," and others saying, "Everything has changed."

Wish me good luck in a new year of work, as I do more for less pay. I'm not a novelty. I'm the face of modern America. Just one more pale face.

Everything's Just Ducky! Hurricane Hype

2011-09-02T16:00:00.000-04:00

It's hard work being Rush Limbaugh. He has such a difficult time holding onto his "moron of the universe" title when there are so many other hard-working morons trying to unseat him. Nevertheless, he manages to do it. No doubt the opiate derivative medications help keep him sharp.

Earlier this week, the Limbaugh pestilence described the build-up to Hurricane Irene as "hype" created by the media. I guess hurricanes should be ignored unless they can completely decimate a city and leave a million people homeless.

We at "The Gods Are Bored" join the throng of Hurricane Irene victims calling Limbaugh's remarks EPIC FAIL.

Case in point: Yesterday I went for a walk along the murky little waterway near my house. The entire floodplain looked like someone had plastered it with mud. All vegetation was flattened and battered. As I perused this sad landscape, I stepped sideways on a hill, slipped on some muck, and fell on my face. (Actually I fell on my titanium hip and all that side of my body, and then on my face.)

So there I sat, checking for broken bones, plastered with New Jersey mud, and cursing myself for being clumsy ... and within 30 seconds I was beset by a swarm of mosquitoes.

Bitten, muddy, and humbled, I limped home.

Deep within the primal stem of my brain, at its lowest level of functionality, I must have believed Rush Limbaugh and considered the hurricane talk just so much blah blah blah. Why else would I choose to stroll along a floodplain just days after a catastrophic meteorological event?

The moral of this sermon is so simple even a moron could understand it. If the media calls it a dangerous hurricane, and you look outside and the weather's atrocious, and the fire sirens bleat at all hours for the next three days, and you can't walk a path because it's inches deep in slippery mud, it must indeed be as the media says: a dangerous hurricane.

Words of wisdom, wasted on the wise. Morons don't read "The Gods Are Bored."

Photo credit: http://haddonfield.patch.com/users/bill-duhart

What the Fringe Element Does for Us

2011-08-31T17:49:00.000-04:00

Welcome to "The Gods Are Bored," hippie-dippy edition! Just stop by here for all the sex, drugs, and rock n roll you can handle. We'll fly the astral plane, take a trip around the Bay, bring you back the same day... da da da dum dum!

I'm just barely old enough to remember hippies. What I remember about hippies is what most people remember, if they think about it -- there weren't many true hippies. If you want to know what it was like to be a true hippie, read The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, by Tom Wolfe.

True hippies did the Timothy Leary thing: They turned on, tuned in, and dropped out. If they were political at all, they didn't live any one place long enough to vote.

When we think of "hippie," we think of draft protesters and flag-burners, and young people taking over college campuses (and getting shot for it). These people looked like hippies, but they were intensely engaged in the political process. And their influence was out-sized. Politicians courted them and listened to their demands. Thanks to these political "hippies," we no longer have a draft, people can vote at age 18, abortions are legal, and it's ok to burn the flag.

The counter-cultural revolution of the 1960s was led by a small group of loud people and was given big-time press coverage. It sent shock waves of fear through Mainstream America. The Summer of Love spawned the Moral Majority. It gave us Richard Nixon as a president. Ordinary folks were just shocked to the core by all this protesting ... and sex ... and drugs ... and long hair.

The backlash to hippies was the conservative resurgence.

Now we are faced with a new group of loud, politically active, outsider freaks who are getting a great deal of press time. They are the Tea Party movement, the Dominionists, the "Pray Away the Gay" morons like Rick Santorum. These people are a tiny minority of Americans, just as the hippies were. And just like the hippies, they're getting some political traction.

Fear not, gentle reader! The same ordinary, run-of-the-mill Americans who were shocked by the hippies will be equally shocked by the Tea Party and by people who want to re-name Washington, DC the "District of Christ." Fringe groups make a lot of noise, and sometimes they change national policy, but inevitably there will be a backlash against them. Illogical as it may sound, the Tea Party may usher in a prolonged period of liberal politics.

We at "The Gods Are Bored" feel pretty certain that the conservative fringe will get loud enough, and belligerent enough, to nauseate the mainstream. Eventually their traction will fail, and they'll all go limping off to the Elks Club, and Bible Study, and minor league baseball games. Their only legacy may be reducing the amount of health care Americans can get. Vote at 18 vs. reduced or eliminated Medicare. Well, I know which one of those options is better for our nation!

"District of Christ?" Meet "Summer of Love." We all wanna change the world.

And now for the REAL hurricane...

2011-08-30T18:13:00.000-04:00

Tomorrow I go back to school. It's freshmen orientation, and I will be teaching three sections of freshmen this year. I will also have three sections of sophomores. I will not have the freshmen Honors section.

I have a new teacher coach. Last year he was the department supervisor, but he somehow got knocked down a peg. He is 29 or 30, young enough to be my son. It is due to his change in status that my schedule got re-arranged, that I got sophomores, that I lost Honors.

Remember last year when so many of you fine readers sent copies of The Great Gatsby for use in my classroom? I want to thank you again for that. I'm hoping I get Honors again some day. I'm not considering teaching Gatsby to the regular College Prep kids. But I have the books! And last year's Honors class really liked the story.

This year I'm not asking y'all for any hand-outs ... except ... I'm sure my Patience Extender is getting worn out. It was almost completely broken in June. It won't possibly last another ten months. So, if you could please send me a Patience Extender, I would appreciate it.

Peace,
Anne

God's Fault Again!

2011-08-29T16:45:00.000-04:00

Welcome to "The Gods Are Bored!" My, what a mighty wind we had here! And six inches of rain! There are trees down, and power outages, and limbs in the streets, and every waterway is flooded. All up and down the East Coast, everything's a mess. Poor Asbury Park! I looked at some YouTubes, but none of them were good enough to post here. Suffice it to say that tourist season is over for that boardwalk.

Guess who is to blame for this hurricane? God!

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/ticket/bachmann-claims-hurricane-earthquake-were-god-messages-politicians-155051199.html

Busy God, sending messages to the politicians in Washington, DC. The message? Politicians spend too much taxpayer money. Except now the politicians will have to spend even more taxpayer money to clean up after the hurricane! Who is the dummy here: God, or Michele Bachmann?

The smart money's on Michele. What a moron!

The good news out of Chateau Johnson is that all of our trees survived and we only lost power sporadically, like any old thunderstorm.

Now, mind you, I didn't leave the protection of my household and its residents up to pure chance and the vagaries of weather patterns. Oh no! I petitioned safety of a whole slew of bored deities: Chac (see below), Hurracan, Oya, Oshun, and Triton. And because They weren't busy sending a message to Washington, DC, They put up a celestial wall of safety around my house and loved ones!

If you are visiting this site because of all my dissing of Cindy Jacobs and other Christian warriors (of which Michele Bachmann is clearly one), please ponder this a moment.

A leading politician claims that the God of Cindy Jacobs caused an earthquake and a hurricane -- serious, deadly stuff. My bored gods, on the other hand, quietly and efficiently saved my family from harm, while feeling no particular need to send a political message to Washington.

Busy deities get blamed for everything. Bored deities aren't burdened with such baggage. So, why go with the god who feels the need to send messages in a showy, destructive way? Seek ye the bored gods and goddesses who have the time to care for you, and the gentility not to use major weather systems to make a point.

The word of the bored gods, for the people of the bored gods, thanks be to the bored gods! Yep.

Interview with a Bored God: Chac

2011-08-27T14:59:00.000-04:00

Welcome to "The Gods Are Bored!" About an hour ago it was raining cats and dogs. Now it's raining farm animals. And by the time Hurricane Irene gets fired up, we'll be seeing elephants and giraffes falling on the house!

I'm a weather geek, and usually I don't worry about meteorological conditions. This hurricane has me scared. My house is surrounded by mature trees, the ground is already saturated, and every time we get a fairly windy thunderstorm our power goes out. As soon as I'm through interviewing our "Gods Are Bored" guest, I'm going to turn the computer off and unplug it.

Before I introduce today's guest, I want to respond to the commenter who wanted to know how our modern Tea Partiers and Dominionists, etc. are like the hippies of 1968. I wrote a lot about that back when I first started TGAB in 2005, but I'll gladly cover that ground again next week.

But that will have to wait, because I've got a visitor. You might think it would be Hurracan, but no. Today we have Chac the Rain God, sacred to the Aztec peoples. Please give him an extraordinarily warm, wonderful "Gods Are Bored" welcome!

Anne: Chac, I'm on my knees to you. Please, please don't let us get washed away! Why are you doing this?

Chac: Mortals. So annoying! If it's dry, they pray for rain. If it rains too much, they pray for the sun to come out.

Anne: We've had a lot of rain around here this summer, Chac. Whoa! It's getting harder by the minute, even as I write! Must you?

Chac: This deluge will re-stock every aquifer and every reservoir on the Eastern Seaboard. Try to look at the bright side!

Anne: Hard to look on the bright side when it's also getting cloudier and dimmer by the moment. And the mosquitoes! Have mercy!

Chac: I show no mercy. If you want mercy, reduce your carbon emissions. You think nothing of driving your car 200 miles to Polish Mountain, and 200 miles back. Look at all the cars! The factories! Warms up the ocean. Gives me power. And when I get super-charged, I just go hog wild.

Anne: You've got a point, Great Rain God. I am partly to blame for this. But truthfully, these atmospheric conditions have occurred throughout history ... so it pretty much would happen anyway, from time to time -- just like the earthquake last week.

Chac: Yeah, well, I gotta do what I gotta do. It's my job. And with your modern forecasting techniques, any fool who doesn't get out of my way deserves what he gets.

Anne: That's true. You are a wise God. So I will petition you for just two simple things.

Chac: Making no promises, but I'll listen.

Anne: Please go easy on the trees, insofar as having them fall. Remember, trees are a line of defense against global warming.

Chac: Some trees will fall. I'm a Rain God, not a Tree God. You're interviewing the wrong deity.

Anne: Okay, forget the trees. Please spare the Silver Ball Pinball Museum in Asbury Park, New Jersey.

Chac: Done. Pinky swear. I love that place!

Anne: You go there?

Chac: Sometimes when money is short I sell hot dogs there. The owner is a great guy.

Anne: I'm gonna let you go now. Clearly you're having a busy day.

Chac: Yes. When it rains, it pours.

Anne: In this case, when it pours, it deluges.

The Earth Moved and Swallowed My Farm

2011-08-25T09:34:00.000-04:00

Welcome to "The Gods Are Bored," East Coast earthquake edition! I'm your host, Anne Johnson: shaken and stirred.

Murphy's Law: If there's a measurable earthquake in my neighborhood, where do you think I'll be? Taking a shower, of course! And that's what I was doing when the whole house started to rumble and grumble, the bathroom door began banging, and all the slippery surfaces under my wet feet began to sway. When I determined that no one was actually rattling the bathroom door, I knew it was an earthquake. I experienced one once, in Detroit. So I just grabbed the shower bar, and -- voila! -- in a few seconds it was over.

On the other hand, Heir, Spare, Mr. J, and most of my neighbors hadn't ever felt a quake. The street filled with panicked suburbanites. Heir immediately began to fret about aftershocks, and when she turned on the news and heard about all the building evacuations in Philly, Baltimore, and DC, she was just sure we should all lay flat on the ground out in a field somewhere!

Pish, tosh, said I. Mr. J and I went forward with our plans -- a short honeymoon getaway in New Castle, Delaware. It was very romantic, peering across the murky Delaware Bay as big barges motored by, at the vista of smokestack-cluttered Jersey on the far shore.

Ah, well, it appears that the flatlands will be my home for the rest of my sorry life.

The earth did indeed move on August 23. My highly motivated cousins found a buyer for the family farm on Polish Mountain. Out of nine people with a vested interest in the property, I am the only one who didn't want to sell it. My ancestors lived in that area as early as 1720. They were the first non-native residents of that rocky region. I am the first generation to have sought my fortunes in the big city. Even my dad taught school in Appalachia.

By the time the government takes taxes from my share of the sale, I'll be left with enough money to cover one semester of college tuition for one of my daughters. One set of useless textbooks, one cluster of pompous scholars in return for all of this beautiful land.

With the sale of the property, I don't believe (in our culture) that I can call myself "Appalachian." I can say I'm "from Appalachia," but if I don't own a chunk of it, I can't claim citizenship.

At a crucial turning point in my life, I chose to go to Johns Hopkins in Baltimore to study writing, instead of going to Frostburg University to study forestry. Needless to say, my parents were thrilled by this decision. Mom had a new mantra: "You'll marry a doctor!"

I moved to the city. I've lived in cities ever since. But I always had the farm to "go home to." Honestly, I was hoping no one would step up to buy it, especially in this economy. And from the sketchy report sent by my cousin, I fear that the buyer is a developer. He owns other properties in the area. But I certainly can't meet his price, and if I did he might up the ante.

On August 23, I felt an earthquake that lasted 15 seconds. And an earthquake that will last forever. An inner San Francisco that has crushed my heart.

2011-08-23T12:53:00.000-04:00

"The Gods Are Bored" will not be publishing today, as it is the author's 27th wedding anniversary.

Ain't love grand?

Fairies and Faeries Really Do Exist. Really.

2011-08-22T18:12:00.001-04:00

Welcome to "The Gods Are Bored!" Your patronage is important to us. If you have a complaint, please take a number and be seated. Someone will be with you shortly.

My three regular readers know that I have a shrine in my back yard that is dedicated to all the bored gods whose names and identities have been lost in the mists of time. Sort of a Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, except not a tomb, because deities are immortal.

Showing the utmost respect, I have made this shrine fairy/faerie-worthy by placing all sorts of wonderful pretty stuff in it: sea glass, iridescent marbles, crystals, Marcellus shale, sea shells ... rocks from places I've been. In the middle of last week, I found a bag of beautiful minerals at the thrift store. They're now on the Shrine of the Mists.

My shrine sits under an ancient pear tree that bears inedible fruit. Well, I should say that it's inedible to humans. Hornets flock to it. The squirrels seem to like it too, and I have a suspicion the possums and raccoons aren't picky either.

Saturday evening I looked out at my shrine, and I saw wings moving on it. Black wings, beating back and forth contentedly. When I went out with my ritual candle, I found a swallowtail butterfly feeding on a pear that had fallen into the shrine. Careful not to disturb the butterfly, I set down my candle (mindful also of the happy hornets that wouldn't be happy if I stepped on them).

When I put the candle on the altar stone, I noticed a single wing lying on the stone. It was beautiful. Looked like this.

I said to the butterfly, "You'd better be careful. A faerie has lost its wing and will probably be back for it."

Then, as a prank, I went back into the house and called The Spare. "Spare!" I shouted. "There's a faerie on the shrine!"

She came downstairs. I pointed to the black object at the edge of the shrine. It wasn't moving.

Spare (oozing teenage disbelief) started down the back porch steps. Slowly. Just as she hit the bottom step, the butterfly moved its wings one beat. And Spare jumped a mile! Then she went to investigate, came back inside with teenage disbelief firmly established, and coolly informed me that it was a swallowtail butterfly.

Yes. There was a butterfly sipping a pear on my shrine Saturday afternoon. It was a butterfly. But what happened to the wing on the altar stone? When I went back outside Sunday, the wing was gone! It couldn't have blown away -- the shrine is bowl-shaped with walls.

It's gone. The faerie wing is gone.

Personally I do not need evidence from my five senses to have the faerie faith. If you do, there you have it. This was a wing right out of Arthur Rackham, and it disappeared overnight.

The moral of this sermon is simple indeed. Faeries exist, and you had better show them respect.

Someone Warn Rick and Michele: Church Attendance Is Declining

2011-08-21T17:27:00.000-04:00

Welcome to "The Gods Are Bored!" Oh, I just love getting my news from the radio! It's easier for me to avoid having to link!

Driving around a bit this morning, a Sunday, not much going on in the news. A report comes on that says church attendance is declining. I don't know if church attendance is declining just in the Delaware Valley (where I live), or everywhere across the nation. That's the thing about radio. It can be nebulous.

What interested me about this report was the speculation offered as to these declining numbers. The reporter said that people are probably avoiding Christian churches because of the emphasis on nuclear families (which most people don't have anymore).

I'm not sure I buy this. I've never personally seen a single mother, or a teen mother, showered with disdain or disrespect in a church. Usually they are welcomed with open arms -- especially by the single men who go to church in search of companionship.

Here's why I think church attendance is declining:

1. Politicians who mix church and state turn people off. When all you have left in the churches are the people who want the U.S.A. to be run on biblical precepts, you're gonna have some big, empty pews.

2. Churches always ask you for money. I just wrote a post about this last week. If you don't have enough cash to fix your own leaky roof, are you going to submit yourself to a stewardship sermon requesting tithe money to fix the church's leaky roof?

3. Our society is changing. When I was a kid, church was the only game in town on Sunday. Everything else was closed. Now you've got appealing brunch options, soccer games, open shopping malls, and the wonderful laundromat, bustling with busy sinners like me!

4. Church attendance, at least in big cities, has never been all that impressive. I guess in small towns, where everyone you know goes to church, you're more inclined to do it yourself. Where I live, it's just as easy to go to a museum ... and less expensive.

If there's a cautionary aspect to this sermon, it's just this: The harder the fringe Christians press their agenda, the more people they'll alienate. Loud fringe groups who have outsized influence on politics are always met by a backlash. If you want to know why we even have to deal with the Dominionists and the Moral Majority and all these fools, just go back to 1968 and ask yourself what the hippies wrought.

I think I'll keep listening to news radio on Sunday. If I hear that church attendance is growing by leaps and bounds, I'll be concerned about the future of America. Checks and balances are good things, in government and society at large.

E pluribus unum.

I Used Black Magic To Teach a Kid To Read

2011-08-20T16:32:00.000-04:00

Welcome to "The Gods Are Bored!" This may be the first and last time I ever talk about black magic, so do a bookmark or whatever. I never intend to do black magic, but occasionally it happens by chance ... and in this case it had the desired effect.

Now, all you school teachers, read up on this post. You may want to use this spell too.

Earlier this week I went to a school meeting about a thing called data driven assessment. This is basically where you use standardized test scores to plan your lessons and to see which kids are learning, and what they're learning. All of this based on little bubbles they fill in using Number Two pencils. After they take the standardized tests, the school sends them to this geeky company (name withheld), where they're inputted and then you can zap into them 100 different ways. The school meeting was basically intended to show us teachers some of those 100 ways to read the data produced by our students.

Now, I would have thought this all to be so much flatulence into the wind. Except, lo and behold, I discovered one student who completely and totally learned to read in one year, with my instruction and black magic!

For the sake of giving him the same kind of due respect our modern educators seem to want for kids, I will call the student 07890.

07890 was one of those students who, if he was interested in the work at hand, would apply himself and do a good job. He caused no trouble, was polite, on time, and usually on task.

On the first of four standardized reading tests I had to give last year, 07890 scored a 1 out of 13. There's no such thing as "hopeless loser" in data-driven instruction. The data company labeled 07890 "partially proficient."

The school year progressed, and 07890 revealed himself to be a rather indifferent student who was satisfied with C-plus grades. One day I said to him, "I've noticed that if we're reading or writing about a topic that interests you, you really get into it."

07890 replied, "Yes, I can't always motivate myself to work on things that don't interest me."

I promised I would try to find books and topics that would interest 07890.

On our second standardized test of the year, 07890 improved slightly. This time he got 3 out of 12 questions correct. You see? Already I was having the kind of influence that only a great teacher can have. He improved 200 percent!

Sadly, on the third standardized test of the year, 07890 plateaued. He got another 3 out of 12.

This was a disappointment. 07890 was somehow maintaining a B/C average in my class, while being unable to read!

Aha. The proof was in the pudding. When the final marking period came, 07890 showed his true colors and began missing assignments, turning in work that was incomplete, and just plain not doing stuff. This is what you would expect of an illiterate student, after all, especially if he's a freshman in high school.

I can't say I didn't warn 07890. I told him he was failing the marking period. He shrugged it off.

So I had to turn to black magic.

This black magic is the well-known teacher spell, "Academic Behavior Report." It's a form letter that teachers send home to parents when students are not doing well in class. I am always loathe to send these things. How do I know what sort of punishment will be meted out upon a kid from a parent who gets the letter? But I had no choice. I might add that, if I had known of 07890's standardized test scores at the time, I might have sent a letter home sooner, just out of sheer concern for his near-complete illiteracy.

A distinctly humbled 07890 came into my classroom a few days later and asked if he would be allowed to make up the assignments he had missed or done incompletely. I gladly granted him complete freedom to do so. I also suggested that he might try a little harder on the next standardized test. If he did well, I said, it might boost his grade.

Imagine my surprise at the teacher meeting on data driven learning, when I saw the computerized assessment of 07890's standardized tests! On the final test of the year -- the test he took after the black magic was applied -- he got 12 out of 12 answers correct. No, I did not help him! There was clearly magic at work from a higher power!

(Here I wish to add that 07890 and all of his fellow freshmen would have done better on Test 3 if the testing company had actually keyed in the correct response for one of the questions. Every single kid got the answer wrong, because they all chose the correct answer -- and the machine was programmed to accept a wrong answer. If this makes sense, then you can see the vast benefits of judging teachers by standardized test results.)

Normally I don't pat myself on the back for spell work, but this case is so rare and exceptional. As a teacher I like to think that I taught a young man to read in one year. And what a convincing actor he was too! You'd have thought, the way 07890 stuck his nose into football books, that he already knew how to read. He sure had me fooled. But no matter! He knows how to read now!

Let us all applaud the presidents and governors and other educational muckamucks who think standardized testing is the shits. They're so right! Any computer can tell you how well your students are doing. The teacher's only role should be to sharpen a large supply of Number Two pencils.

One final note: In school year 2010-11, my students spent seven school days doing standardized tests. This was just great for me too. Think of it. Seven days I didn't have to plan a lesson! Add to that the three days I was out grading standardized essays, and that's two whole weeks of school without one word from the teacher! I tell ya, folks, with a little black magic and a gross of Number Twos, teaching is a snap.

Here Comes the Moron

2011-08-19T15:22:00.000-04:00

Welcome to "The Gods Are Bored!" When choosing a deity to worship, keep in mind the way you dress. Some deities like for you to gussy up a bit. Others will take you as you came into the world. Personally I like deities who choose comfort over style. It's just how I roll.

During prom season last spring, Heir, Spare and I were treated horribly in a local dress emporium called Jan's Boutique. It was the busy season, and we went in the store, and a saleslady took one look at us and steered us straight to the cheapest gowns, saying, "I don't think you want to spend $3,000 on a dress, right? Unless maybe you do." (The last said in a very condescending manner.)

This is nothing to the story going viral right now out of dear old New Jersey. A clueless salon in Somer's Point canceled the sale of a bridal dress when they discovered that the purchaser had crossed out "groom" on the application and wrote "partner" instead. In a voice message on a phone, the store owner told the bride-to-be that the store wouldn't participate in anything "illegal," and what the bride was trying to do was "illegal."

I've heard of laws in my time, folks, but have you ever heard of a law against purchasing a bridal gown?

Anyway, the lesbian bride-to-be went ballistic, since she really loved the dress she tried on in the shop. She contacted the Philadelphia Daily News, and now the sad tale has gone viral.

Here's the pathetic, whimpering damage control offered up by the beleaguered shop owner:

http://philadelphia.cbslocal.com/2011/08/19/somers-point-bridal-shop-owner-denies-anti-lesbian-claim/#respond

The owner certainly got cussed out, and rightly so, but it wasn't during the try-on. It was after the spurned customer got the telephone message that her custom not only was not wanted, but also it was "illegal."

What is it with these people in high-end dress shops? Can they afford to be discriminatory and insulting in their selling practices? If so, why am I teaching school? Their businesses must be booming! If they can turn customers down, or steer them to shoddy merchandise, without thought of profit, they must be comfortable indeed.

We at "The Gods Are Bored" hereby designate Here Comes the Bride, of Somers Point, NJ "moron store of the month." Feel free to let them know what you think.

The only hope this sorry establishment has of staying in business is to relocate. Saudi Arabia springs to mind.

Gilligan and the Skipper Need Not Apply

2011-08-16T18:51:00.000-04:00

Welcome to "The Gods Are Bored!" Are you a libertarian ... someone who would like the government entirely and completely off your ass in all matters public and private? If so, you may have some interesting housing options in the future.

We all know how Anne sucks at linking, so.....

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/lookout/silicon-valley-billionaire-funding-creation-artificial-libertarian-islands-140840896.html

The gazillionaire founder of PayPal, who is also heavily invested in Facebook, wants to create artificial libertarian islands in international waters. These islands would obey the laws of no country. Guns would be permitted, welfare not.

Can you imagine being a school teacher on a libertarian island?

"Okay, boys and girls, open your books to page 34. That is, if you want to. If you don't want to, you don't have to. You can do whatever you want. This includes distracting the kids who actually do want to learn what's on page 34. If all of you want to play video games, and there aren't enough consoles, then just fight it out. The strongest wins."

Can you imagine being "the help" on a libertarian island?

"I'm not going to clean your house today, Mr. Thiel. I don't feel like doing it. Oh, so you say you aren't going to pay me? Well, then I'll just have to shoot you. There are no laws against it, after all." BANG.

It's not like the idea of libertarian communities hasn't been tried before. There was one, I think it was called Dodge City, somewhere in the American West. Don't quote me, though. I went through a libertarian phase in high school, and I think I missed some classes.

We at "The Gods Are Bored" are all in favor of these expensive libertarian islands in international waters. One down side: An island outside of all national boundaries will have trouble finding any good deity to worship -- and recall that all religions have rules, so religion would be O-U-T, out! However, an expensive libertarian island seems like the perfect dumping ground for morons with money. To hell with taxing American billionaires! If they move to the libertarian island, we'll just smack a hefty tariff on every little thing they want. Pint of Ben & Jerry's? $10,200. Utz potato chips? $7500 an ounce. Don't even get me started on the cost of a T-bone, spring mix salad, truffles and home made apple pie. Why, we could fund two Camden police officers for a year, just on what the libertarian islanders would have to pay for a bag of Tootsie Pops!

Off you go, founder of PayPal and all your billionaire buddies. Off to no-nation waters, your little artificial island, like something out of a "Dr Who" episode. Bon voyage! Please note, though, that if you want to return to America, you will have to get a green card and apply for citizenship all over again. But why would you want to do that? You'll be so very happy in your world with no rules other than the ones you personally choose.

Wow. I so totally see a reality t.v. show in this one. Don't you?

Damn greedy, elitist bastards. Why don't we send them to Elba now, instead of waiting years for their prototypes to launch? Good riddance, they're doing nothing for us anyway.

Reaper Gonna Get You

2011-08-15T14:26:00.000-04:00

Welcome to "The Gods Are Bored!" Isn't that a cheerful title? Well, we all have to face it, unless we're divine. The Grim Reaper's gonna arrive at our doorsteps someday and -- off we go.

This would be more depressing if there was only one Heaven and Hell, but considering the number of deities and pantheons and praise and worship teams out there, I'll bet there are thousands of Heavens. That's why I promote the bored gods. I haven't traveled much in the apparent world, but I plan to voyage far and wide once I'm finished with this challenging mantle of mortality.

Twenty-two years ago, when my daughter The Heir was born, my mother-in-law and her mother invited themselves up for a week to "take care of me." I was 30 at the time and was up on my feet in two days, but the two Mom Moms lingered a week to cosset The Heir.

When things got dull, the two Mom Moms went to work. They cleaned my entire house. Then they washed all 38 windows. At that time we still had the old 1920s-era storm windows with hooks that had to be taken down by hand. They did it. And they were so efficient that my next door neighbor tried to hire them.

This was 1989. Mom Mom Senior was 76. Mom Mom Junior was 56. They worked like fiends from dawn till dusk.

Ten years later, when I invited them up for Thanksgiving, Mom Mom Senior went missing. She was 86. Know where we found her? My basement. She had cleaned it from top to bottom. She had scrubbed the floor. Never had been done before, never has been done since.

Mom Mom Senior owns a beautiful waterfront property on the Severn River just minutes from Annapolis. As you might imagine from the above, she poured her vast energy into the place, and it's gorgeous. She and her husband bought the land in the early 1950s for $3,000. If her heirs ask anything less than a million for it, I will be shocked.

Even though she never learned to swim, Mom Mom Senior had a 100-foot pier out into the estuary, from which she hung crab traps and went fishing and boating. Her favorite thing in the world was a soft crab sandwich.

Every time all of us younger folk watched her bustle relentlessly, we would joke that the Earth had finally produced its first immortal human.

Not so.

On Tuesday, Mom Mom Senior's closest family members will decide whether, at 98, she will be placed in a nursing home or brought to her daughter's apartment for hospice care. Having seen my own parents in similar straits at much younger ages, I would bet that this former dynamo of a woman will go to Catholic Heaven in a few months. Mr. J and I, Heir and Spare went to see her yesterday in her current room in a rehab unit (she wants no parts of the rehabbing or the pureed food that has no salt or sugar). We all emerged sobbing.

Can you imagine owning a waterfront property minutes from Annapolis and not having a hearing aid? We literally had to shout right into her ear for her to hear us at all.

I have held my tongue about Mom Mom Senior's elder care because she isn't my blood relative. But it sickens me to see that her son and daughters have gone on the cheap, not getting an equity loan or reverse mortgage or anything, to provide top-level care for her. Then again, I've heard enough of the family lore to know that there's not much love lost between children and parent in this situation. So Anne, after having given advice that was unheeded, said no more.

The moral of this sermon is not really the "live life to the fullest" platitude that you might expect. I would say, "Live life the way you want to." Eat cake, drink hard liquor, smoke a spliff, I dunno, whatever makes you happy in the moment. The most frugal and hardest-working among us will meet the Reaper some day. Tra la la! Praise the gods and pass the brownies!

Questions I Would Like To Ask the Republican Presidential Candidates

2011-08-11T17:39:00.000-04:00

I bet you're like me. I bet you can't stand one more ludicrous "debate" in which a bunch of well-groomed politicians promise us jobs, jobs, jobs.

Here are the questions I would like to pose to the Republican candidates:

1. Did you finish grade school?

2. We know you're praying to win the election. What does God get if He helps you?

3. Given that Armageddon will arrive prior to the next election, why are you even in this debate? Is your faith in Scripture that shaky?

4. Give three examples of successful "trickle down."

5. When did Social Security become a government hand-out? The people have paid for it from their checks for decades.

6. Other than repealing Roe v. Wade, gay marriage, and medicinal marijuana laws, how else will you bring our nation closer to the Old Testament?

7. (Tough one) What magazine or newspaper did you read this week? Online counts, so long as it's not "Bachelorette" gossip.

8. Sing our National Anthem, all of the lyrics.

9. How do you plan to handle the pesky problems of Paganism and atheism? Internment camps or deprogramming?

10. Who did your makeup?

Unexpected Feel-Good from Facebook

2011-08-10T16:04:00.000-04:00

Welcome to "The Gods Are Bored!" It's a beautiful afternoon. Time for a walk!

But before I do ...

About two weeks ago I started a Facebook group. It quickly became a forum for arguing and vitriol, which made me feel very, very bad. So I shut it down. I may moan and bitch and rant here at "The Gods Are Bored," but I don't like to argue. Done with that.

Two days ago I joined a new Facebook group dedicated to my hometown. And what a pretty, fun group it is indeed! It's called "You Know You're From ______ If You Remember ..."

Tells you something about where I grew up. All of us geezers are reminiscing fondly about the farms and sno-cone stands and flooded quarries. And our school teachers.

So I uploaded one of the videos of my dad doing his science experiments. He taught school in Hometown for almost 50 years. And here's one of the replies the video got:

"This is the best posting I have seen on this page. He's exactly as I remember him from 1967 or 8. My brother got hooked on chemistry and went on to get a Ph.D. in Chemistry. Thank you for putting this up. Please do it again as more people my age get on here."

My dad went off with the faeries in 2005, but not before leaving behind a great deal of good in this world. As you can see from the picture, he was pretty much half-faerie when he was alive.

The Sea Glass Cure

2011-08-09T18:23:00.000-04:00

Welcome to "The Gods Are Bored!" Do you ever get so riled up and teeth-gritting angry that you just want to dash a dozen eggs on the kitchen floor? Have you ever done it? Well, I don't recommend it myself. It's messy, and then you have another thing to be angry about: cleaning the kitchen floor.

When I'm angry (which I am now), I generally grab a piece of sea glass. Sea glass, as its name implies, is any kind of glass that has gone overboard or been swept into the waves. It gets scoured by the sea and sand, winding up opaque and softly rounded, instead of shiny and sharp.

I am now asking the sea glass to smooth me out, so I am no longer angry at:

1. Incompetent co-workers. For the love of fruit flies, we all have those!

2. Psychotherapists who watch their clocks and grab their checks with no real regard for the feelings of the people who come to them for care.

3. Left-wing and mainstream Christians, who ought to be chastising their more radical brethren, but who aren't -- for whatever pathetic reason.

4. People like Christine Flowers, who think that anyone and everyone can, through sheer hard work, become a billionaire.

5. Governors who would rather vilify public school teachers than ask the rich to pay more taxes.

6. A president who has done everything he can to pacify the very people he promised us he would oppose to his final breath.

7. People who are still writing to me about their sweet and cuddly Rhodesian Ridgebacks! Give me a break. Of course you love your dog, he's the best dog in the world! Surprise me, please. Tell me you hate your dog, he's dangerous and vicious, and you fear for your neighbors' lives. Yeah, not holding the breath on this one.

8. The death of print journalism. I'm part of the problem, but I can honestly say that when newspapers stop publishing, we will be lost.

9. Conservative politics. Our governor laid off all the car inspectors. Now the only thing given an inspection in New Jersey is emissions. Conservatives believe that all New Jersey citizens will be responsible enough to keep their brakes in good repair. Good luck widdat. See you on da Turnpike!

10. Political candidates being showcased at prayer events. We got a black president. We will probably get a female president sometime soon. You know what we will never see? An atheist president. And that's exactly what we ought to have. An existentialist president would be even better.

Ahhhh, sea glass, take me away!

Not working.

Tanqueray, take me away!

I'm what you would call a practical Pagan.

The Sky's the Limit

2011-08-08T18:48:00.001-04:00

Welcome to "The Gods Are Bored!" Do you own a house? I live in a house. The bank owns it, but they let me rent it from them. Trouble is, they expect me to keep up the place like I own it. Why can't they fix the leaky pipes? I'm paying good rent here!

Today's sermon is inspired by a post from Hecate in which she discusses whether or not Pagans should start building community centers and sturdy places of worship. Churches, in other words.

Hold the phone. Count to ten, Pagans. Take a deep breath. Then sweep from your mind all notions of a warm and fuzzy community center where you can hold Rituals without dodging pellets of hail.

(Seriously, my Druid Grove once got pelted by hail during a Ritual.)

Just before I ceased and desisted being a Methodist, the church I attended began a vigorous campaign of building additions and renovations. I've been gone from that place for awhile now, and I went in to give blood a few months ago. Oh, you should see it! Big old gymnasium in the basement with a basketball court, and a brand new entryway that looks like Versailles... Jesus would be proud, I tell ya! Fresh paint on the three-story pillars, new carpet ... The church lady greeter remembered me, you see, so she was keen to give me an eyeball full of what I'd been missing.

You know what I saw? I saw fifty bucks out of my pocket twice a month to pay for Jesus Versailles. Bullet dodged!

I'm 100 percent sure that my Druidic ancestors did most of their praise and worship indoors. It gets cold in the British Isles in the wintertime. But our religions can evolve while still supporting the bored gods. In this case, I vote for evolving into outdoor praise and worship teams. There is literally no overhead if you go to the nearest park and do a gentle little ritual. For something bigger, you can go with a festival that will not take chunks of change from your daily lifestyle. If you are phobic about the outdoors, look for that friendly Unitarian Universalist Church -- but they will probably charge you a user fee.

I have never liked the idea of religion and money going hand in hand, except when the do-re-mi goes to a worthy and reliable charity. Otherwise, if I want to play basketball, I'll join a gym. And if I want to sit in a pretty parlor, I'll visit my granny.

You know how they did it at the Methodist Church? They were so hard-pressed to get the money to pay for the building and its upkeep that, on certain Sundays, they asked you to put dedicated charity money into a different envelope, so they would be sure to send that money to the charity! I call that double-dipping.

I will borrow today's punch line from Bard Andrew (see my sidebar, he's pretty cool).

You get up in the morning in a box. You get your breakfast from a box. You get into a box to drive to a box, where you work all day. Then you get back into your box, drive home to your box, and sit and stare at a box all evening.

To me, being a Pagan means getting out of that box, going out in the thunder and hail and sub-zero wind chills, out in the blistering heat and the glorious equinox weather, and pouring your love of the bored gods into the air, down into the earth, deep into the water, and across the hot coals of the fire. Leave the box behind! It's an expensive distraction.

Finally, let us not forget that, being meek, we will inherit the Earth after Rapture. Then we'll have our choice of so many fabulous buildings, all bought and paid for, and some with basketball courts -- also paid for!

Bide your time on that building campaign. Is there any roof prettier than the sky?

Another Chesapeake Odyssey

2011-08-07T19:25:00.000-04:00

Welcome to "The Gods Are Bored!" I salute and praise the bored Goddess Oshun for a very brief but enjoyable two days on the mighty Chesapeake Bay!

Oshun's praise and worship team was brought to the Chesapeake area in the 1600s to do all the heavy lifting and farming. Now, in their honor, the main road through the peninsula where we stay is named Frederick Douglass Highway. He got his start (and not a good one) on a plantation in that area.

Today, Dick Cheney lives in the same region, so you might say the karma is not exactly blissful. But we Johnsons can't resist the view from the ever-more-expensive inn where we stay. This year's visit was the shortest yet. Like everybody else, we're watching the economy with great anxiety.

You know what? There's bitter irony everywhere. A tanking economy means fewer people buying boats and shorefront properties. And this is the lead-in for today's sermon.

Spare and I always go kayaking when we visit the Chesapeake. Not far from the inn, as a buzzard flies, there's a little wild spit of sand where you can beach the boat and wade. The water isn't deep for hundreds of feet out into the channel, so it's like a gigantic natural swimming pool.

Except a miracle has happened, readers. We should all Hail Oshun, Queen of the Bay!

When Heir, Spare and I first made landfall at this little wild beach, there was a sandy bottom all the way out. Nothing much to step over except a few dead horseshoe crabs. This year, in addition to the fabulous and unexpected dearth of jellyfish, the beach showed a fantastic transformation. Basically, it was all but gone.

Acres and acres of seaweed has sprouted where once there was only barren sand. This puts an end to human swimming but marks the beginning of a new nursery for the teeming life that calls the Chesapeake home. Seaweed is a sign of health for the bay, so even a little bit of it makes my soul glad and loosens my tongue for the praise of Oshun, may her people recall her name!

Mr. J and Spare love the Chesapeake for its water, and its steamed crabs, and its pretty sailboats. But let me tell you, the buzzarding is good there too. When Nature provides, I always heave a nice roadkill into the field for the local vulture population, but it's not necessary. There's never a vulture-free sky, and if you know where they hang out, you can do a devotion that they will see, hear, and ponder!

The news gets even better. My daughter The Heir is home safe and sound from beautiful Oslo! (Thanks be to the deities of the Norse pantheon!) She climbed mountains, she survived a frightening terrorist attack, and she got to see how another nation handles a horrific tragedy. Suffice it to say that Norway is very, very different from America. The people there are determined that this event will not change the freedoms they value. Heir tells me that within a week of the bombing, all the barricades were removed, and the police presence returned to normal. Not that Norway has no problems -- Heir saw the junkies -- but it's not a paranoid, "eye for an eye" culture.

Heir's bummed to the max about being home. Suddenly her beloved New Jersey isn't quite as appealing. Just now she was telling me about taking a 10-minute El train ride to a fresh water lake with a swimming beach. HA! A 10-minute El train ride here gets me to foul, fetid, fuming, foggy, filthy ... Philadelphia. Somebody open up a window!

Here's some free advice that I'll gladly pay you to take. If you or a loved one takes a flight out of Newark International Airport (famous as being the departure site for the 9/11 bombers), use a GPS to get yourself in and out of that place! The signs are terrible, and if you take a wrong turn, you damn near wind up in New York City, and you find yourself surrounded by honking commuters who have no patience when it comes to lost drivers.

Back to the Chesapeake: I'll try to get Oshun here this week for an interview. She must be thrilled at even the smallest sign of improvement in Her domain. I know I was! Forget swimming. It's seaweed, seaweed, seaweed for me!

I've got to ask you something. How many blogs talk about the Chesapeake Bay and illustrate the sermon with pictures of buzzards and the Jersey Turnpike? That's why you should stop by here frequently. Nothing makes sense. And that's a damn good thing.

"Oshun," by the truly incomparable Thalia Took.

When Worship Goes Wrong

2011-08-02T17:19:00.000-04:00

Welcome to "The Gods Are Bored," dedicated to the notion that all deities are created equal, no matter how few or how many followers They have! Lob a name and human characteristics at them as you will. No matter. They're expressions of the Higher Power we can all feel around us, within us, in our bones and our brains and our hearts.

In the wake of my knee-jerk reaction to the DC40 malefic magick, I created a Facebook group called "Pagans Protecting Philadelphia from DC40." Quicker than you can shout, "Who loves the Dallas Cowboys?" the few members of the group began getting testy with one another. What the heck is it about Philly? I don't care what Ed Rendell says on national t.v.: Philadelphia is not a touchy-feely, hail-fellow-well-met kinda place. I guess all the good karma gets stored up all year long and is let loose on January 1, for the Mummer's Parade. Then we settle back into our hostility for another 365 days.

EXHIBIT A: WE START THEM YOUNG IN PHILLY

"Witch wars" are notorious, having occurred way before the Internet came along to supply extra vitriol. And they don't particularly bother me, because

1. I live in Philadelphia (see above), and

2. I was once a Methodist, and the worst witch war in the world can't match a Methodist war. Those Methodists know how to quarrel, let me tell you.

Anyway, I created the Facebook group to channel positive energy, and after three days it was doing everything but that. So I took it down. If DC40 thinks this is a win for them, well, they ain't been to Philly yet. It's just how we roll, yo.

What I found more disconcerting yesterday was my difficulties at worship in my usual place of devotion, the laundromat.

When all is right with the world, the laundromat is a fabulous place to connect with deity. Watching the clothes in the machines puts you into a trance state. Ecologically, you can take the secure thought that you are saving tons of energy by shoving three weeks' worth of dirty stuff into one 20-minute wash cycle. There's an orderly progression to the ritual, from hearing the metallic clink clink of the coin machine to pulling those warm, clean-smelling bath towels out of the big ol' dryer. Nobody bothers you unless you choose to strike up a conversation. Basically, you're free to pray and meditate while energy-efficient machinery scrubs your socks.

Yesterday, not so good. It was 95 degrees outside and about ten degrees hotter inside. The coin machines were grumpy, no doubt due to the heat. But by golly, with all that heat, would you believe that two out of the three giant dryers I used were tossing the clothes around with no hot air? So when I was finished my deep dialogue with Manannan MacLir, two-thirds of my clothes were still wet!

EXHIBIT B: THE BORED GOD MANANNAN MAC LIR

Well, the laundromat attendant made good on my loss of $3.00, and I put the clothes in different dryers. Having bid farewell to Mannanan, I started watching the local news, and the big story was a line of thunderstorms that kept getting bigger and stronger as they headed west-to-east, from Reading to Philly to the dear little Suds for Duds Laundromat and Worship Center in Westmont, New Jersey.

Just as my towels were finally crisp and dry, a whopping thunderstorm hit. The rain was slanting sideways, and the lightning and thunder just ripped right along. So I had to wait for that to pass (which reminded me to thank Thor for protecting my daughter The Heir). When the rain died down, I started carting my towels to the car, hit a snag in the parking lot, and ... down they went, onto the puddled pavement!

Well, the gods give, and the gods take, and yesterday just wasn't my day. Honestly, it wasn't a very good day for our nation either, so there you have it. Monday's in the archives.

On Wednesday, Spare, Mr. J and I are going to our annual summer destination, St. Michaels, Maryland. There I will set everything right by doing my Lughnasadh devotions to the Sacred Thunderbird. Please don't ask for details of this praise and worship unless you want to hear about double-thick Hefty bags, road kill, and radio towers.

EXHIBIT C: HOLY SACRED THUNDERBIRD

Heir comes home Friday! And what stories she will have to tell!

Image of Mannanan by the incomparable Thalia Took.

The Most Powerful Spell

2011-08-01T10:35:00.000-04:00

Welcome to "The Gods Are Bored!" Today we begin a little experiment. Kind of like Job in reverse. I am going to mention Cindy Jacobs and DC40 frequently in my posts, giving them ample opportunity to find this site. Let's see if they can harm me through their prayers. I stand in flat-out opposition to their agenda, so ... have at me, varlets! Jesus is too busy to look after me, so I put myself in the hands of the bored gods. Na na na na BOO BOO! (Bronx cheer with rude gesture)

I've just finished writing 25 spells for next year's Llewellyn Spell Almanac. Many of them are based on the Appalachian hedge magick I grew up with, so they tend to be cautionary and protective. And serious. My grandmother showered me with dire predictions of what the "black dog" and the "booger men" would do if I strayed too far from home. (This, of course, was for her convenience. Much magick works this way.)

As for me, I find that the strongest spells are those laced with humor. How many times have I said it here? Laughter is the best medicine!

(Speaking of which, when you're through here, go look at Yellowdog Granny's spine-ticklers. She usually puts a slew of them up on Monday morning, and if that isn't strong magick, I don't know what is.

Let's look at a recent event, and you'll see what I mean.

I invited the Great Goddess Freya here, knowing that She's getting busy again but hoping for a moment of Her time. She penciled me into her schedule, dropped by and played with my cats, and shared a horn of local lager. Four weeks later, my daughter The Heir was in downtown Oslo when she was literally rocked by a bomb blast. She was a ten-minute walk from the government complex.

Freya was probably busier than ever that day, but She found time for The Heir. All glory, laud, and honor to thee, Freya, Mother of the North!

Here at Chateau Johnson, the only event that is not mocked and saturated with humor is the death of a loved one. At that time, and that time only, I become serious. But it passes. As for being angry at the spouse and kids, I turn that over to Anansi, who helps me disappear into a story-world until I've cooled down.

Laugh through the Apocalypse. It's happening to you anyway. Will crying make it any different?

Maybe that's a bad analogy, because all of us Pagans will be laughing through the Apocalypse. We're going to turn all those mega-churches into skate parks and have Rituals at the National Cathedral.

My family has so far been spared from the ravages of fire, flood, and hurricane. But I've been through job loss, work frustrations by the cartload, and the heartbreak of my child's chronic illness. I don't laugh at these things, I laugh at myself going through these things. Best. Medicine. Ever.

With that in mind, I remembered that Philadelphia has its own amazingly powerful counter-spell for malefic magick. It's called the Mummer's Parade, it happens every year on January 1, and this year I will be in it. What ill-guided intentions can stand up to 15,000 crazy revelers in sequins and feathers, carrying parasols and wearing wigs? Get real, DC40. Philadelphia is free!

Ha ha ha, ho ho ho, and a couple of tra la las! That's how I laugh my day away, as I cheerfully thumb my schnoz!