Archives for July 2013

Some days the smorgasbord of life just overwhelms me. I’m like a kitten in a room full of empty boxes and little red lights. You can’t chase them all but you want to. But my job is to filter the inane from the insane and present you with something to help you get through the day. So, after careful consideration and due deliberation I decided to punt. Instead of concentrating on a single issue that interests and inspires you, like my work on the 3D Shape Shifting Jesus, I’m just going to throw everything against the wall and hope that something sticks.

For example, on the useful tip, if you want to survive a zombie apocalypse, and who doesn’t really, then you’ll need to know math. Michael Dhar, from Live Science, has everything you’ll need to know.

This equation could spell your doom: (bN)(S/N)Z = bSZ. That is, if you ever found yourself in the midst of a zombie pandemic.

That’s because the calculation describes the rate of zombie transmission, from one walking dead individual to many, according to its creators, Robert J. Smith?, a mathematics professor at the University of Ottawa who spells his name with a “?” at the end, and his students. Smith?’s work has inspired other researchers to create zombie mathematical models, which will be published with Smith’s work in the upcoming book, “Mathematical Modeling of Zombies” (University of Ottawa Press, 2014).

Though of course done tongue-in-cheek, Smith?’s study demonstrates why zombies are the viruses of the monster world. Their likeness to viruses makes the creatures ideal subjects for theoretical epidemiological analyses, which can be used to capture the public’s imagination as well as explore scientific principles, Smith? said.

So, cool, zombie math can help us survive other viral outbreaks. That’s good to know.

Also if not good then, at least, interesting to know is that nature may have provided proof that faster than light travel is doable. Charles Choi, also of Live Science, brings us that Einstein Universe shattering news.

The particles that make up light, photons, may live for at least 1 quintillion (1 billion multiplied by 1 billion) years, new research suggests.

If photons can die, they could give off particles that travel faster than light.

Many particles in nature decay over time. For instance, radioactive atoms are unstable, eventually breaking down into smaller particles and giving off energy as they do so.

Scientists generally assume photons do not break down, since they are thought to lack any mass with which to decay. However, while all measurements of photons currently suggest they have no mass, they might instead potentially have masses too small for current instruments to measure.

Last year I reported that scientists had come up with a mathematical construct that allowed for faster than light travel. It basically aped Gene Roddenberry’s, oft lampooned, warp drive. who knew old Gene was that visionary?

Speaking of visionary, I would be woefully remiss if I did not share the story written by Ramit Plushnick-Masti about the house made from beer cans.

A child of the Great Depression, John Milkovisch didn’t throw anything away — not even the empty cans of beer he enjoyed each afternoon with his wife.

So, in the early 1970s when aluminum siding on houses was all the rage, he lugged down the cans he had stored in his attic for years, painstakingly cut open and flattened each one and began to wallpaper his home.

“The funny thing is that it wasn’t … to attract attention,” said Ruben Guevara, head of restoration and preservation of the Beer Can House in Houston’s Memorial Park area. “He said himself that if there was a house similar to this a block away, he wouldn’t take the time to go look at it. He had no idea what was the fascination about what he was doing.”

Milkovisch passed away in the mid-1980s, but his wife, Mary, still lived there. Her sons would do work from time to time, replacing rusty steel cans with new ones and restoring a hurricane-destroyed beer wall. And when they feared for her safety because of the gawkers, they put up a privacy fence, embedding beer cans in that as well.

The neighborhood has rapidly transformed since Mary Milkovisch’s death in the mid-1990s, going from a working middle-class area to today’s condo- and loft-lined upper-class sector. But the home remains a well-known entity.

Determined to preserve this accidental piece of folk art, local nonprofit Orange Show Center for Visionary Art bought the property about 10 years ago, began a careful restoration of the house and opened it to the public.

“It shows the human nature of the individual is supreme. You can take the simplest thing, and it can actually affect a lot of other people,” said Houston resident Patrick Louque, who lived in the area when it was John Milkovisch’s pet project. “It’s totally grabbed me, and it’s probably totally grabbed the imagination of more people than I could possibly imagine.”

I can see that. Razor sharp edges and beer make for some fun times.

Nevertheless, since we are discussing frugality, let us turn out eyes to America’s second most glaring example of frugality at the expense of its employees, Mickey-D’s. Caroline Fairchild, of Huff Biz, writes about how University of Kansas undergrad, Arnobio Morelix, figured out that McDonald’s could double everyone’s salaries and barely need to raise prices.

McDonald’s can afford to pay its workers a living wage without sacrificing any of its low menu prices, according to a new study provided to The Huffington Post by a University of Kansas student.

Doubling the salaries and benefits of all McDonald’s employees — from workers earning the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour to CEO Donald Thompson, whose 2012 compensation totaled $8.75 million — would cause the price of a Big Mac to increase just 68 cents, from $3.99 to $4.67, Arnobio Morelix told HuffPost. In addition, every item on the Dollar Menu would go up by 17 cents.

Morelix’s research comes as fast-food workers across the country strike for a $15 per hour minimum wage. Workers are also protesting for the right to unionize without fear of retaliation. Protesters are holding strikes in seven cities over a four-day period, according to Salon.

Morelix looked at McDonald’s 2012 annual report and discovered that only 17.1 percent of the fast-food giant’s revenue goes toward salaries and benefits. In other words, for every dollar McDonald’s earns, a little more than 17 cents goes toward the income and benefits of its more than 500,000 U.S. employees.

Thus, if McDonald’s executives wanted to double the salaries of all of its employees and keep profits and other expenses the same, it would need to increase prices by just 17 cents per dollar, according to Morelix.

McDonald’s declined a request to comment from The Huffington Post.

Read that again. They can double the CEO’s salary to $17,000,000 a year at a minimal impact to consumers. If they kept their upper management salaries the same and just doubled the in-store workers, the cost to consumers would drop to almost nil. since the company is already under fire for its clueless look at what it takes to live in the real world (Hey! Just work 80 hours a week!), now might be a good time for them to reassess their positions.

Speaking of reassessing a position, I may have to rethink how much credit to give to terrorists. Often portrayed as wily geniuses who plot our destruction I am beginning to think they are more akin to your goofy Aunt Gladys with the tinfoil hat. Jane Sutton reports that the most popular book for imprisoned terrorists is 50 Shades of Gray.

The “Fifty Shades of Grey” series of erotic novels are the favorite reading material among “high-value” prisoners at the Guantanamo detention camp in Cuba, a U.S. congressman said.
Representative Jim Moran of Virginia was among congressional delegates who last week toured Camp 7, the top-security facility that holds more than a dozen “high-value” prisoners, including five men charged with plotting the September 11 attacks on the United States in 2001.
“Rather than the Koran, the book that is requested most by the (Camp 7 detainees) is ‘Fifty Shades of Grey.’ They’ve read the entire series,” Moran said in an account first published by the

“I guess there’s not much going on, these guys are going nowhere, so what the hell.”

The guard tower stands at the entrance to detention facilities at the U.S. Naval Station in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in 2012.

Moran, who favors shutting down the detention camp on the Guantanamo Bay U.S. Naval Base, said he learned about the book’s popularity while touring Camp 7 with the base commander and deputy base commander, the head medical official and the officer in charge of that camp.

Ahem. There are a bunch of guys wearing robes reading this;

“Show me how you pleasure yourself … Keep still … We’re going to have to work on keeping you still, baby … Let’s see if we can make you come like this … You’re so deliciously wet. God, I want you … I’m going to fuck you now, Miss Steele … Hard … Come for me, Ana.”

No. You will never unsee that.

Anyway, nothing can take your mind of bad porn like good ice cream. At least that’s what I’ve been told. However, as Jonathan Stempel writes, you really shouldn’t mix the two.

A southern California pornography studio has reached an agreement with Ben & Jerry’s not to release DVDs and other X-rated products whose names pay homage to the company’s ice cream flavors.

The agreement made public on Tuesday resolves a trademark infringement lawsuit that Ben & Jerry’s filed last September against Caballero Video, also known as Rodax Distributors Inc.

It calls for Caballero to stop selling a variety of products including its “Ben & Cherry’s” film series, which included 10 titles such as “Boston Cream Thighs,” “Chocolate Fudge Babes” and “Peanut Butter D-Cups.”

Ben & Jerry’s had claimed that such titles were too similar to its ice cream flavors such as Boston Cream Pie, Chocolate Fudge Brownie and Peanut Butter Cup.

The agreement also covers labels, packaging and advertising that mimicked Ben & Jerry’s own. Caballero’s packaging featured puffy white clouds and grazing cows, and the slogan “Porno’s Finest.” Ben & Jerry’s uses the slogan “Vermont’s Finest.”

Ice cream porn or I SCREAM porn?

Yeah, that was low rent of me.

So there you have it. News you desperately needed to read all courtesy of the, self proclaimed, Segue King.

Rebecca Tun: Beautiful nightmare (NSFW) from Rollin' Rockstar on Vimeo.

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Added to the list of things I did that may not have been very well thought out in retrospect was hitching to California in 1981. For some reason I wanted to go, I didn’t have enough money for gas and I did have a thumb that worked just fine. So I took off without telling anyone where I was going. It was in Nebraska that a young lady introduced to the phrase, and the concept of, “Ass, gas or grass, nobody rides for free.” I took door number one for the win. Well, I was never much of a pot smoker (I later found out that I am allergic to THC), I already said I didn’t have enough money for gas, so what options did I have? Anyway, when you take a trip like that you tend to run into lots of odd attractions, like the young lady I just mentioned. People also have road side stands for darn near anything. You want cow skeletons? You got it. Willing to trade sex for fake Indian jewelry? I met a lady in Arizona you’d love. If you’re good for seconds you can get a poncho. I had that poncho for years. Anyway, my point is that there’s lots of fun stuff in the world if you’re willing to go take a peek. My whole trip lasted less than a month and provided me with a lifetime of memories.

Well, today, thanks to David Jennings, you need not wander aimlessly like I did. He has some great destinations for you and your kin. I have added links to each site so that you can book your travel plans as you read along.

If you think about it, almost all theme parks are bizarre. You’ve got your talking mice, your hallucinogenic landscapes, your rollercoasters based off stories of mutating humans and castles that spring straight from chauvinist fairy tales. But we’re so accustomed to the strangeness of these everyday theme parks that their novelty has worn off a bit. Therefore, to experience the truly uncanny, we need to cast our net a little wider. Here’s a list to get you started on that project: eight of the world’s most bizarre theme parks.

Tierra Santa – Buenos Aires, Argentina

Tierra Santa cast open its holy gates in 2000 AD, becoming the World’s Original Religious Theme Park. Today it is rivaled only by the slightly-less-kitschy Holy Land Experience in Orlando. The park occupies a 17-acre estate that was once a football pitch and draws 20,000 visitors into its religious mists each summer as people come to see the Bible’s most sacred stories brought to life by robotic puppets. It’s the only attraction of its kind in Latin America, and one of only two in the world.

The grounds are decorated according to loose interpretations of biblical Jerusalem and are divided into 36 events from Christ’s life, from his birth to the crucifixion and resurrection. This includes a fully-animatronic Genesis show of God creating the heavens and Earth, which features tons of lasers, and the Last Supper, a show in which the audience sits before 13 mechanical puppets who kind-of move while neon spotlights sweep around in myriad directions to the soundtrack of Handel’s Zadok the Priest. There are also dry ice shows, 500 life-size statues and multiple fake limestone buildings. The closest thing to a ride is the “Rotating Ark of Joseph,” a camel-based merry-go-round that serenades adventure-seekers with the Little Drummer Boy over and over again.

The main attraction is definitely “The Resurrection.” Every half hour all action comes to a halt, triumphal strains of Handel’s Messiah blast through the loudspeakers, and a 40-foot plastic Jesus rises from behind a rock as his palms swivel and his eyes open and close.

If this becomes too much for you head over to the Baghdad Café for a beer and check out one of the stage shows. The park is open on Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays and public holidays. Entrance is 50 pesos for adults, 20 pesos for kids. Nuns get in free.

Dwarf Empire – Kunming, China

Also known as “The Kingdom of the Little People”, this amusement park in Kunming is all about, well, dwarves. Ranging from age 19 to 48, nearly 100 dwarves, all less than 51 inches, live and work at the park. During performances they pretend to live in small mushroom-shaped houses, but they actually live in nearby dormitories specifically constructed for tiny people.

The park’s main attraction is the twice-daily musical performance, which climaxes with the presentation of the 3.3-feet-tall Dwarf King, who often wears a gold silk cape and rides a three-wheeled motorcycle around. There are also magic shows, dance numbers from ballets such as Swan Lake, and all sorts of variety performances that differ little from those found on Chinese television.

The park was founded in September 2009 by Chen Mingjing, a wealthy real estate investor who aims to eventually populate his kingdom with hundreds of people with dwarfism. The park has received criticism by organizations such as the Little People of America and Handicap International. Critics contend that the park isolates the handicapped from the rest of society and treats dwarfism as a humorous condition, while supporters claim the park provides employment for many Chinese dwarfs who would otherwise be unemployed, allowing them to build self-respect.

Bon Bon Land – Denmark

With its winsome cartoon characters, roller coasters, log flumes and candy, at first this seems like any other theme park. But if you move your attention to the mural depicting seagulls defecating into alligators’ mouths, the dog that happily farts as you walk by, the exposed breasts of the pink bovine on the kiddie carousel, the chair-swing hanging from an intoxicated turtle, then things begin to grow a little disturbing. This is Bon Bon Land, a strange and vaguely unsettling theme park located some 50 miles southwest of Copenhagen. It is home to such attractions as the “Skid Mark” rollercoaster and a rapids ride called “Beaver Rafting.”

Bon Bon Land’s theme is derived from a line of sweets that was popular during the 1980s and ’90s that featured flavors with weird names like “Dog Fart,” which happens to be the inspiration behind the park’s most famous ride, the “Dog Fart Switchback,” which splurts flatulent noises at you as you rollercoast under a giant dog with its leg hiked up. The park is 34 acres and attracts some 450,000 visitors each season. Besides the horse poo and gull poo rides, the depictions of peeing ants and other defecating animals, you’ll also find a mini candy factory and a cinema.

The park has been a great success with kids and over the years it’s become one of Denmark’s most popular children’s parks, and in 2008 it was the eighth most popular tourist attraction in Denmark! Bon Bon Land is the creation of Danish confectioner Michael Spangsberg, who opened the park in 1992 to promote his developing candy business. It is now owned by the Spanish entertainment company Parques Reunidos,

General admission during summer months costs around $40.

Diggerland – United Kingdom

Photo Credit: Martin Barnard via Flickr.
If you’ve ever driven past a field of construction equipment and thought “If only!” then Diggerland is the place for you. The idea of this theme park revolves around the insuppressible desire in us all to operate heavy machinery. It has four (!) locations throughout the United Kingdom and advertises itself as the “UK’s most unique attraction, where children and adults have the chance to ride and drive REAL full size construction machinery, under the guidance of our trained staff – No driving licence required!”

This park allows you to make your Bob the Builder fantasies a reality! You can race dump trucks and backhoes around big lots of dirt of plowed-up dirt. You can even rides full-on rides that have been cobbled together from converted bits of heavy machinery, rides such as the Spindizzy, a modified Tilt-a-Whirl in which guests are strapped into the bucket of a giant excavator. For the more culturally inclined, be sure to check out a performance by the Dancing Diggers, a stunt show that takes place in a front-end loader. When the boss hollers “break time” you can head on down to the Dig Inn for burgers and chips.

Grutas Park – Lithuania

Nothing says “fun” like Joseph Stalin… or at least that’s the idea behind southern Lithuania’s biggest tourist attraction, Grutas Park, an amusement park about 80 miles outside of Vilnius. It is locally known as Stalin’s World and was designed to remind visitors of the draconian days of communism in Lithuania.

It doesn’t have a roller coaster. It doesn’t have a Ferris wheel. What it does have is a large park filled with statues of the USSR’s most brutal dictators, statues that escaped destruction when Lithuania gained its independence. The exhibits are surrounded by barbed wire and imitation Gulag watchtowers that blare Soviet marching music. Pretty awesome, huh? The wooden walkways are designed to resemble Siberian prison camps.

If after all that Soviet nostalgia you still feel unsated head down to Bunkeris 1984, a Soviet-era bunker located 15 feet below ground in the nearby countryside. It is staffed by actual ex-members of the Soviet Army and for $50 you can experience what it might have been like to live as a USSR citizen in 1984. This means “watching TV programs from 1984, wearing gas masks, learning the Soviet anthem under duress, eating typical Soviet food (with genuine Soviet tableware) and even undergoing a concentration-camp-style interrogation and medical check.”

There’s also a Soviet-era playground for the kiddos, a restaurant serving Soviet-era dishes, and a petting zoo.

Harmonyland – Oita, Japan

When it comes to themed attractions, Japan has a lot of weird stuff going on. But for a real taste of Japanese culture you’ll need to dive into the nationwide obsession with kawaisa, a.k.a cuteness. Anyone who knows anything about anything knows that the jewel in the crown of cuteness is Hello Kitty, and, luckily for the kawaisa-addicted, Japan has two entire theme parks devoted to this supernatural feline. You have the Sanrio Puroland in Tokyo, which is indoors, and the outdoor Harmonyland in Oita.

True Hello Kitty fans tend to favor Harmonyland, which has a greater concentration of bedazzled sparkly rainbows than probably anywhere else in the world. The idea here is to deliver the sort of standards found in world-famous amusement parks such as Disneyland in the likeness of Sanrio characters. Thus you have the Hello Kitty Ferris wheel, the Hello Kitty spinning teacups, the Hello Kitty variation on “It’s a Small World After All.” However, where Harmonyland really outshines her competitors is in its parades and stage shows, during which Hello Kitty and gang transform into water fairies. The shows also feature, according to the Web site’s translated description: “A powerful fountain blowing up!” and “Fantastic mist spring up! This show is full of coolness!” Your journey comes to a conclusion as you make your way through happy cuddle land, which naturally involves lots of lasers.

Jeju Loveland – Jeju Island, South Korea

Penetrate the parted legs of the entrance gate, pass the depictions of acrobatic and unbiblical love-making, and behold Nipple Mountain, for you, my friend, have entered Jeju Loveland. You’re in for a stimulating experience.

With more than 140 different sexual sculptures, ranging the innocent smooching couple to the explicit threesome, the nice idea behind the park’s founding (to loosen up newlyweds) risks being smothered in a sea of salaciousness. The concept behind the park is this: South Korean culture frowns on public displays of affection and living together before marriage, thus many coy newlyweds are invited to honeymoon on Jeju Island, where your hotel can provide you with a lap dance and other racy amenities to steam you and your partner up. The island became a popular honeymoon retreat after the Korean War, when many of the visiting couples were the product of arranged marriages and hoteliers took on the role of “professional icebreakers.”

Besides phallic artwork, stone labia, busts of breasts and a hands-on “masturbation-cycle” exhibit (whatever that is) the park also features sex education information at its visitor center and a gift shop with its sorts of naughty toys. The park’s website describes the location as “a place where love-oriented art and eroticism meet.”

Children under the age of 18 are not admitted, but the immature are more than welcome, just be prepared, women, to grasp an erect penis to enter the bathroom. Men, you’ll be turning the nipples of two breasts. A separate play area is available for minors while adults have their kicks.

The Holy Land Experience – Orlando, Florida

If you looking for a hands-on sort of encounter with the Bible, look no further than the Holy Land Experience in Orlando. Don’t expect roller-coasters and tilt-a-whirls, however — the Holy Land is more like a sort-of outdoor museum, with approximately 40 exhibits, including: the Jerusalem Street Market, which recreates what the holy town may have been like 2,000 years ago (you can even pester the merchants!); the Calvary’s Garden Tomb, a replica of the tomb where Jesus’ body was sepulchered; and the Last Supper Communion, where guests can partake in Jesus and his disciples’ last meal. If it’s gore you want, head over to the 2,000 seat Church of All Nations, where you can watch a bloody recreation of the crucifixion and the resurrection and ascension of Jesus into heaven.

It’s not all fun and games though. The Holy Land conducts weekly church services and bible studies for the general public. It also houses the impressive Van Kampen Collection of biblically-related artifacts, the fourth-largest collection of its kind in the world, including ancient scrolls, manuscripts and early printed editions of the Bible.

It’s a pity they are so far apart from each other. I mean who wouldn’t want to go directly from a 40 foot neon Jesus to a defecating seagull? Especially if you could bring your won dwarf.

If you can’t get overseas I still recommend the Holy Land Theme Park (linked above) in Florida. Because if just being wildly historically inaccurate isn’t enough for you the level of violence in their Passion portrayal borders on being a live snuff film.

Then you can grab a bite to eat right after.

And, remember, it’s family friendly.

Soft As Flannel – NSFW Version from David Strange set to the song
“Out of Chicago” by The Avenger Revenger

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It’s no secret that I maintain the position that just because alien life should exist doesn’t mean that it keeps bouncing of our planet so that it can keep anally probing farmers. The problem with every – ahem – theory ascribed to UFOs is that they don’t even pass a basic smell test when subjected to 3rd grade logic. That still doesn’t stop stupid people from draping themselves in darkly colored sheets of ignorance. That being said, some rational people have given some rational thought to the idea of finding our intergalactic neighbors. As I noted on June 3rd of last year, science has progressed enough that we can now discern if there is an advanced civilization on an alien world. We haven’t found any yet, but we know what to look for. At least in the general sense. For example, we can ignore the idea of trying to parse a conversation with an intelligent jellyfish. Even if such a creature existed it would have no limbs to build things, like a space ship. In other words, we are looking for creatures who can use tools. They would also need to be able to manipulate matter into energy to power said ships. Just those last two sentences give us more focus than we’ve ever had before.

I would even go so far as to say they would probably know how not to keep crashing into the same planet again and again.

Now a scientist named Geoff Marcy has come up with a way to use the Kepler data that is finding planets to see if there’s anything orbiting those worlds that isn’t natural. Like a satellite or a space ship.

Geoff Marcy isn’t content to just look for more inhabitable planets with the Kepler space telescope. He wants to find ET spaceships hidden in deep space.

The University of California at Berkeley astronomer is an official NASA investigator assigned to the Kepler mission and credited with confirming almost three-quarters of the first 100 exoplanets — planets outside our solar system — found by Kepler, as reported in Open Minds.TV.

Nearly 900 of these “new” planets have been detected since the 1990s, with information on more than 3,000 planet candidates being examined by scientists like Marcy.

Marcy, pictured below, is absolutely convinced Earth is part of a galactic neighborhood teeming with intelligent life.

“The universe is simply too large for there not to be another intelligent civilization out there,” he told The Sydney Morning Herald.

“Really, the proper question is: ‘How far away is our nearest intelligent neighbor?’ They could be 10 light-years, 100 light-years, a million light-years or more. We have no idea.”

The Kepler spacecraft ran into a snag in May when two of its control wheels stopped operating. Kepler depends on this equipment in order to find temporary dips of light emanating from stars, which could indicate the passage of orbiting planets in the spacecraft’s line of sight, reports Discovery News.

But how does Marcy possibly hope to find evidence in the Kepler data that suggests an alien ship so far away in space, when it’s already difficult and time-consuming to just confirm new planets?

Marcy plans to apply the same methodology of sifting through the Kepler data — looking for the dimming of light from stars that’s caused by planets passing through the field of view — and suggests the same technique can be applied to looking for giant alien ships.

“I do know that if I saw a star that winked out, then at some point it winked back on again, then winked out for a long, long time and then blinked on again, that that would be so weird. Obviously that wouldn’t constitute the detection of an advanced civilization yet, but it would at least alert us that follow-up observations are warranted.”

Watch this 2011 video of astronomer Geoff Marcy discussing the huge number of planets discovered by the Kepler space telescope.

Last year, the Pennsylvania-based John Templeton Foundation awarded Marcy $200,000 for his continued search for any ET civilizations.

The grant will be used to pay a Berkeley student to create software to better study the Kepler data.

“Writing the computer code is not easy,” Marcy said. “There’s no prescription in any computer science book about how to search for aliens.”

The remaining grant funds will go toward giving Marcy a chance to use Hawaii’s Keck Observatory, where he’ll search for possible laser emissions from distant advanced civilizations — sort of an intergalactic alien laser Internet system.

There are many who think it’s not a good idea for earthlings to search the heavens for other life forms. In 2010, astrophysicist Stephen Hawking warned of the possible dangers of speaking to space aliens.

Marcy has a solution for the ongoing debate on whether humans should try and make contact with otherworldly beings.

“The first thing we do is transmit a message to them that says, ‘We taste bad.'”

But we’ll make great pets.

The thing is that this, boring though it may seem, is how our universe will change. The odds of some little gray or green dude or dudine smacking head first into our blue ball are so staggeringly small as to be infinitesimal. But the odds of noticing electromagnetic activity that isn’t naturally created are well within logical expectations.

I imagine that we will begin discovering those signals within my lifetime.

Then we can truly watch the going get weird.

Digits – “Love is Only Affection” from Seth Mendelson

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Yesterday I wrote about how Jesus may not have been the joyful pacifist we all know and love. In fact he may have been leading an actual revolution designed to overthrow the government. I have noted before that the New Testament, unlike the Holy Qu’Ran which was written down once and then immediately mass produced, has tended to evolve over the centuries. New documents appear which cause people to revisit the source materials. When you’re dealing with historical texts you have to be willing to correct errors or remove erroneous preconceptions. ZEALOT: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth by Reza Aslan took a long look at what could have realistically happened and came to a series of conclusions that are very different than the popular conceptions.

Not to be outdone, Owen Jarus, from Live Science, reports that new documents have been discovered that claim that Jesus was a shape shifter and that Pontius Pilate was a cool dude.

A newly deciphered Egyptian text, dating back almost 1,200 years, tells part of the crucifixion story of Jesus with apocryphal plot twists, some of which have never been seen before.

Written in the Coptic language, the ancient text tells of Pontius Pilate, the judge who authorized Jesus’ crucifixion, having dinner with Jesus before his crucifixion and offering to sacrifice his own son in the place of Jesus. It also explains why Judas used a kiss, specifically, to betray Jesus — because Jesus had the ability to change shape, according to the text — and it puts the day of the arrest of Jesus on Tuesday evening rather than Thursday evening, something that contravenes the Easter timeline.

The discovery of the text doesn’t mean these events happened, but rather that some people living at the time appear to have believed in them, said Roelof van den Broek, of Utrecht University in the Netherlands, who published the translation in the book “Pseudo-Cyril of Jerusalem on the Life and the Passion of Christ”(Brill, 2013).

Copies of the text are found in two manuscripts, one in the Morgan Library and Museum in New York City and the other at the Museum of the University of Pennsylvania. Most of the translation comes from the New York text, because the relevant text in the Pennsylvania manuscript is mostly illegible. [Image Gallery: 2 Ancient Curses Deciphered]

Pontius Pilate has dinner with Jesus

While apocryphal stories about Pilate are known from ancient times, van den Broek wrote in an email to LiveScience that he has never seen this one before, with Pilate offering to sacrifice his own son in the place of Jesus.

“Without further ado, Pilate prepared a table and he ate with Jesus on the fifth day of the week. And Jesus blessed Pilate and his whole house,” reads part of the text in translation. Pilate later tells Jesus, “well then, behold, the night has come, rise and withdraw, and when the morning comes and they accuse me because of you, I shall give them the only son I have so that they can kill him in your place.” [Who Was Jesus, the Man?]

In the text, Jesus comforts him, saying, “Oh Pilate, you have been deemed worthy of a great grace because you have shown a good disposition to me.” Jesus also showed Pilate that he can escape if he chose to. “Pilate, then, looked at Jesus and, behold, he became incorporeal: He did not see him for a long time …” the text read.

Pilate and his wife both have visions that night that show an eagle (representing Jesus) being killed.

In the Coptic and Ethiopian churches, Pilate is regarded as a saint, which explains the sympathetic portrayal in the text, van den Broek writes.

The reason for Judas using a kiss

In the canonical bible the apostle Judas betrays Jesus in exchange for money by using a kiss to identify him leading to Jesus’ arrest. This apocryphal tale explains that the reason Judas used a kiss, specifically, is because Jesus had the ability to change shape.

“Then the Jews said to Judas: How shall we arrest him [Jesus], for he does not have a single shape but his appearance changes. Sometimes he is ruddy, sometimes he is white, sometimes he is red, sometimes he is wheat coloured, sometimes he is pallid like ascetics, sometimes he is a youth, sometimes an old man …” This leads Judas to suggest using a kiss as a means to identify him. If Judas had given the arresters a description of Jesus he could have changed shape. By kissing Jesus Judas tells the people exactly who he is. [Religious Mysteries: 8 Alleged Relics of Jesus]

This understanding of Judas’ kiss goes way back. “This explanation of Judas’ kiss is first found in Origen [a theologian who lived A.D. 185-254],” van den Broek writes. In his work, Contra Celsum the ancient writer Origen, stated that “to those who saw him [Jesus] he did not appear alike to all.”

St. Cyril impersonation

The text is written in the name of St. Cyril of Jerusalem who lived during the fourth century. In the story Cyril tells the Easter story as part of a homily (a type of sermon). A number of texts in ancient times claim to be homilies by St. Cyril and they were probably not given by the saint in real life, van den Broek explained in his book.

Near the beginning of the text, Cyril, or the person writing in his name, claims that a book has been found in Jerusalem showing the writings of the apostles on the life and crucifixion of Jesus. “Listen to me, oh my honored children, and let me tell you something of what we found written in the house of Mary …” reads part of the text.

Again, it’s unlikely that such a book was found in real life. Van den Broek said that a claim like this would have been used by the writer “to enhance the credibility of the peculiar views and uncanonical facts he is about to present by ascribing them to an apostolic source,” adding that examples of this plot device can be found “frequently” in Coptic literature.

Arrest on Tuesday

Van den Broek says that he is surprised that the writer of the text moved the date of Jesus’ Last Supper, with the apostles, and arrest to Tuesday. In fact, in this text, Jesus’ actual Last Supper appears to be with Pontius Pilate. In between his arrest and supper with Pilate, he is brought before Caiaphas and Herod.

In the canonical texts, the last supper and arrest of Jesus happens on Thursday evening and present-day Christians mark this event with Maundy Thursday services. It “remains remarkable that Pseudo-Cyril relates the story of Jesus’ arrest on Tuesday evening as if the canonical story about his arrest on Thursday evening (which was commemorated each year in the services of Holy Week) did not exist!” writes van den Broek in the email.

A gift to a monastery … and then to New York

About 1,200 years ago the New York text was in the library of the Monastery of St. Michael in the Egyptian desert near present-day al-Hamuli in the western part of the Faiyum. The text says, in translation, that it was a gift from “archpriest Father Paul,” who, “has provided for this book by his own labors.”

The monastery appears to have ceased operations around the early 10th century, and the text was rediscovered in the spring of 1910. In December 1911, it was purchased, along with other texts, by American financier J.P. Morgan. His collections would later be given to the public and are part of the present-day Morgan Library and Museum in New York City. The manuscript is ciburrently displayed as part of the museum’s exhibition “Treasures from the Vault” running through May 5.

Who believed it?

Van den Broek writes in the email that “in Egypt, the Bible had already become canonized in the fourth/fifth century, but apocryphal stories and books remained popular among the Egyptian Christians, especially among monks.”

Whereas the people of the monastery would have believed the newly translated text, “in particular the more simple monks,” he’s not convinced that the writer of the text believed everything he was writing down, van den Broek said.

“I find it difficult to believe that he really did, but some details, for instance the meal with Jesus, he may have believed to have really happened,” van den Broek writes. “The people of that time, even if they were well-educated, did not have a critical historical attitude. Miracles were quite possible, and why should an old story not be true?”

The Coptic Bible is a fascinating book. The Copts do not consider themselves part of the larger Catholic church. They have their own pope and their own rituals. Some familiar and some not. They also have their own pantheon of saints, as you may have noticed since Pilate is one for them and he most certainly isn’t for anyone else.

Still, the one thing they hold dear is the belief that Jesus spent his youth in Egypt and was performing miracles at a very young age.

All that being said, the whole 3D shape shifting Jesus thing sounds kind of cool to me.

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When people tend to focus on a vision of what a historical Jesus would have been like they tend to look at his final days or his youth, allegedly spent wandering Egypt. You can, if you wish, even recreate His journey. Although you may wish to wait until the revolution subsides. Anyway, the point is that most people simply assumed that the accounts of His known life in the gospels were, for lack of a better term, the gospel truth. Certainly there are discrepancies in the gospels. I have already written about why the Gospel of Luke had to be different than the others. But, in the main, the Jesus presented in the first three gospels is pretty much the same. The Gospel of John was allegedly written by John near his death. Since that would have made him around 100 years old when he started writing, or dictating as the case may have been, I can excuse some of the more fanciful passages. The first gospel written, Mark, was written at the behest of Romans who were trying to discern if this upstart religion, that was very un-Jew like to them, posed a threat. Jesus was a Jew who followed His own interpretation of Mosaic law. For one thing, all Jewish religious tracts were written down. Jesus preached using exclusively oral distribution. You either heard the word or you did not. By the time Mark got around to writing anything down the religion had already spread throughout Rome and Asia so it’s doubtful that he would have felt he was doing anything wrong.

Still, despite the violence in the New Testament, the image one takes away of Jesus is of a guy who would be right at home at a Bob Marley concert. Reza Aslan thinks you may want to take a second look at that image.

Excerpted from ZEALOT: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth by Reza Aslan Copyright © 2013 by Reza Aslan. Excerpted by permission of Random House, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. It is published here with the expressed permission from the publisher.

Introduction
It is a miracle that we know anything at all about the man called Jesus of Nazareth. The itinerant preacher wandering from village to village clamoring about the end of the world, a band of ragged followers trailing behind, was a common a sight in Jesus’ time—so common, in fact, that it had become a kind of caricature among the Roman elite. In a farcical passage about just such a figure, the Greek philosopher Celsus imagines a Jewish holy man roaming the Galilean countryside, shouting to no one in particular: “I am God, or the servant of God, or a divine spirit. But I am coming, for the world is already in the throes of destruction. And you will soon see me coming with the power of heaven.”

The first century was an era of apocalyptic expectation among the Jews of Palestine, the Roman designation for the vast tract of land encompassing modern day Israel/Palestine as well as large parts of Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon. Countless prophets, preachers, and messiahs tramped through the Holy Land delivering messages of God’s imminent judgment. Many of these so-called “false messiahs” we know by name. A few are even mentioned in the New Testament. The prophet Theudas, according to the book of Acts, had four hundred disciples before Rome captured him and cut off his head. A mysterious charismatic figure known only as “The Egyptian” raised an army of followers in the desert, nearly all of whom were massacred by Roman troops. In 4 B.C.E., the year in which most scholars believe Jesus of Nazareth was born, a poor shepherd named Athronges put a diadem on his head and crowned himself “King of the Jews”; he and his followers were brutally cut down by a legion of soldiers. Another messianic aspirant, called simply “The Samaritan,” was crucified by Pontius Pilate even though he raised no army and in no way challenged Rome—an indication that the authorities, sensing the apocalyptic fever in the air, had become extremely sensitive to any hint of sedition. There was Hezekiah the bandit chief, Simon of Peraea, Judas the Galilean, his grandson Menahem, Simon son of Giora, and Simon son of Kochba—all of whom declared messianic ambitions and all of whom were executed by Rome for doing so. Add to this list the Essene sect, some of whose members lived in seclusion atop the dry plateau of Qumran on the northwestern shore of the Dead Sea; the first-century Jewish revolutionary party known as the Zealots, who helped launched a bloody war against Rome; and the fearsome bandit-assassins whom the Romans dubbed the Sicarii (the Daggermen), and the picture that emerges of first-century Palestine is of an era awash in messianic energy.

It is difficult to place Jesus of Nazareth squarely within any of the known religiopolitical movements of his time. He was a man of profound contradictions, one day preaching a message of racial exclusion (“I was sent solely to the lost sheep of Israel”; Matthew 15:24), the next, of benevolent universalism (“Go and make disciples of all nations”; Matthew 28:19); sometimes calling for unconditional peace (“Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called the sons of God”; Matthew 5:9), sometimes promoting violence and conflict (“If you do not have a sword, go sell your cloak and buy one”; Luke 22:36).

The problem with pinning down the historical Jesus is that, outside of the New Testament, there is almost no trace of the man who would so permanently alter the course of human history. The earliest and most reliable nonbiblical reference to Jesus comes from the first-century Jewish historian Flavius Josephus (d. 100 C.E.). In a brief throwaway passage in the Antiquities, Josephus writes of a fiendish Jewish high priest named Ananus who, after the death of the Roman governor Festus, unlawfully condemned a certain “James, the brother of Jesus, the one they call messiah,” to stoning for transgression of the law. The passage moves on to relate what happened to Ananus after the new governor, Albinus, finally arrived in Jerusalem.

Fleeting and dismissive as this allusion may be (the phrase “the one they call messiah” is clearly meant to express derision), it nevertheless contains enormous significance for those searching for any sign of the historical Jesus. In a society without surnames, a common name like James required a specific appellation—a place of birth or a father’s name—to distinguish it from all the other men named James roaming around Palestine (hence, Jesus of Nazareth). In this case, James’ appellative was provided by his fraternal connection to someone with whom Josephus assumes his audience would be familiar. The passage proves not only that “Jesus, the one they call messiah” probably existed, but that by the year 94 C.E., when the Antiquities was written, he was widely recognized as the founder of a new and enduring movement.

It is that movement, not its founder, that receives the attention of second-century historians like Tacitus (d. 118) and Pliny the Younger (d. 113), both of whom mention Jesus of Nazareth but reveal little about him, save for his arrest and execution—an important historical note, as we shall see, but one that sheds little light on the details of Jesus’ life. We are therefore left with whatever information can be gleaned from the New Testament.

The first written testimony we have about Jesus of Nazareth comes from the epistles of Paul, an early follower of Jesus who died sometime around 66 C.E. (Paul’s first epistle, 1 Thessalonians, can be dated between 48 and 50 C.E., some two decades after Jesus’ death). The trouble with Paul, however, is that he displays an extraordinary lack of interest in the historical Jesus. Only three scenes from Jesus’ life are ever mentioned in his epistles: the Last Supper (1 Corinthians 11:23–26), the crucifixion (1 Corinthians 2:2), and, most crucially for Paul, the resurrection, without which, he claims, “our preaching is empty and your faith is in vain” (1 Corinthians 15:14). Paul may be an excellent source for those interested in the early formation of Christianity, but he is a poor guide for uncovering the historical Jesus.

That leaves us with the gospels, which present their own set of problems. First of all, one must recognize that, with the possible exception of the gospel of Luke, none of the gospels we have were written by the person after whom they are named. That is true of most of the books in the New Testament. Such so-called pseudepigraphical works, or works attributed to but not written by a specific author, were extremely common in the ancient world and should by no means be thought of as forgeries. Naming a book after a person was a standard way of reflecting that person’s beliefs or representing his or her school of thought. Regardless, the gospels are not, nor were they ever meant to be, a historical documentation of Jesus’ life. These are not eyewitness accounts of Jesus’ words and deeds. They are testimonies of faith composed by communities of faith written many years after the events they describe. Simply put, the gospels tell us about Jesus the Christ, not Jesus the man.

The most widely accepted theory on the formation of the gospels, “the Two-Source Theory,” holds that Mark’s account was written first sometime after 70 C.E., some four decades after Jesus’ death. Mark had at his disposal a collection of oral and perhaps a handful of written traditions that had been passed around by Jesus’ earliest followers for years. By adding a chronological narrative to this jumble of traditions, Mark created a wholly new literary genre called gospel, Greek for “good news.” Yet Mark’s gospel is a short and somewhat unsatisfying one for many Christians. There is no infancy narrative; Jesus simply arrives one day on the banks of the Jordan River to be baptized by John the Baptist. There are no resurrection appearances. Jesus is crucified. His body is placed in a tomb. A few days later, the tomb is empty. Even the earliest Christians were left wanting by Mark’s brusque account of Jesus’ life and ministry, and so it was left to Mark’s successors, Matthew and Luke, to improve upon the original text.

Two decades after Mark, between 90 and 100 C.E., the authors of Matthew and Luke, working independently of each other and with Mark’s manuscript as a template, updated the gospel story by adding their own unique traditions, including two different and conflicting infancy narratives as well as a series of elaborate resurrection stories to satisfy their Christian readers. Matthew and Luke also relied on what must have been an early and fairly well distributed collection of Jesus’ sayings that scholars have termed Q (German for Quelle, or “source”). Although we no longer have any physical copies of this document, we can infer its contents by compiling those verses that Matthew and Luke share in common but that do not appear in Mark.

Together, these three gospels—Mark, Matthew, and Luke—became known as the Synoptics (Greek for “viewed together”) because they more or less present a common narrative and chronology about the life and ministry of Jesus, one that is greatly at odds with the fourth gospel, John, which was likely written soon after the close of the first century, between 100 and 120 C.E.

These, then, are the canonized gospels. But they are not the only gospels. We now have access to an entire library of noncanonical scriptures written mostly in the second and third centuries that provides a vastly different perspective on the life of Jesus of Nazareth. These include the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Philip, the Secret Book of John, the Gospel of Mary Magdalene, and a host of other so-called “Gnostic writings” discovered in Upper Egypt, near the town of Nag Hammadi, in 1945. Though they were left out of what would ultimately become the New Testament, these books are significant in that they demonstrate the dramatic divergence of opinion that existed over who Jesus was and what Jesus meant, even among those who walked with him, who shared his bread and ate with him, who heard his words and prayed with him.

In the end, there are only two hard historical facts about Jesus of Nazareth upon which we can confidently rely: the first is that Jesus was a Jew who led a popular Jewish movement in Palestine at the beginning of the first century C.E.; the second is that Rome crucified him for doing so. By themselves these two facts cannot provide a complete portrait of the life of a man who lived two thousand years ago. But when combined with all we know about the tumultuous era in which Jesus lived—and thanks to the Romans, we know a great deal—these two facts can help paint a picture of Jesus of Nazareth that may be more historically accurate than the one painted by the gospels. Indeed, the Jesus that emerges from this historical exercise—a zealous revolutionary swept up, as all Jews of the era were, in the religious and political turmoil of first-century Palestine—bears little resemblance to the image of the gentle shepherd cultivated by the early Christian community.

Consider this: Crucifixion was a punishment that Rome reserved almost exclusively for the crime of sedition. The plaque the Romans placed above Jesus’ head as he writhed in pain—“King of the Jews”—was called a titulus and, despite common perception, was not meant to be sarcastic. Every criminal who hung on a cross received a plaque declaring the specific crime for which he was being executed. Jesus’ crime, in the eyes of Rome, was striving for kingly rule (i.e. treason), the same crime for which nearly every other messianic aspirant of the time was killed. Nor did Jesus die alone. The gospels claim that on either side of Jesus hung men who in Greek are called lestai, a word often rendered into English as “thieves” but that actually means “bandits” and was the most common Roman designation for an insurrectionist or rebel.

Three rebels on a hill covered in crosses, each cross bearing the racked and bloodied body of a man who dared defy the will of Rome. That image alone should cast doubt upon the gospels’ portrayal of Jesus as a man of unconditional peace almost wholly insulated from the political upheavals of his time. The notion that the leader of a popular messianic movement calling for the imposition of the “Kingdom of God”—a term that would have been understood by Jew and gentile alike as implying revolt against Rome—could have remained uninvolved in the revolutionary fervor that had gripped nearly every Jew in Judea is simply ridiculous.

Why would the gospel writers go to such lengths to temper the revolutionary nature of Jesus’ message and movement? To answer this question we must first recognize that almost every gospel story written about the life and mission of Jesus of Nazareth was composed after the Jewish rebellion against Rome in 66 C.E. In that year, a band of Jewish rebels, spurred by their zeal for God, roused their fellow Jews in revolt. Miraculously, the rebels managed to liberate the Holy Land from the Roman occupation. For four glorious years, the city of God was once again under Jewish control. Then, in 70 C.E., the Romans returned. After a brief siege of Jerusalem, the soldiers breached the city walls and unleashed an orgy of violence upon its residents. They butchered everyone in their path, heaping corpses on the Temple Mount. A river of blood flowed down the cobblestone streets. When the massacre was complete, the soldiers set fire to the Temple of God. The fires spread beyond the Temple Mount, engulfing Jerusalem’s meadows, the farms, the olive trees. Everything burned. So complete was the devastation wrought upon the holy city that Josephus writes there was nothing left to prove Jerusalem had ever been inhabited. Tens of thousands of Jews were slaughtered. The rest were marched out of the city in chains.

The spiritual trauma faced by the Jews in the wake of that catastrophic event is hard to imagine. Exiled from the land promised them by God, forced to live as outcasts among the pagans of the Roman Empire, the rabbis of the second century gradually and deliberately divorced Judaism from the radical messianic nationalism that had launched the ill-fated war with Rome. The Torah replaced the Temple in the center of Jewish life, and rabbinic Judaism emerged.
The Christians, too, felt the need to distance themselves from the revolutionary zeal that had led to the sacking of Jerusalem, not only because it allowed the early church to ward off the wrath of a deeply vengeful Rome, but also because, with the Jewish religion having become pariah, the Romans had become the primary target of the church’s evangelism. Thus began the long process of transforming Jesus from a revolutionary Jewish nationalist into a peaceful spiritual leader with no interest in any earthly matter. That was a Jesus the Romans could accept, and in fact did accept three centuries later when the Roman emperor Flavius Theodosius (d. 395) made the itinerant Jewish preacher’s movement the official religion of the state, and what we now recognize as orthodox Christianity was born.
This book is an attempt to reclaim, as much as possible, the Jesus of history, the Jesus before Christianity: the politically conscious Jewish revolutionary who, two thousand years ago, walked across the Galilean countryside, gathering followers for a messianic movement with the goal of establishing the Kingdom of God but whose mission failed when, after a provocative entry into Jerusalem and a brazen attack on the Temple, he was arrested and executed by Rome for the crime of sedition. It is also about how, in the aftermath of Jesus’ failure to establish God’s reign on earth, his followers reinterpreted not only Jesus’ mission and identity, but also the very nature and definition of the Jewish messiah.

There are those who consider such an endeavor to be a waste of time, believing the Jesus of history to be irrevocably lost and incapable of recovery. Long gone are the heady days of “the quest for the historical Jesus,” when scholars confidently proclaimed that modern scientific tools and historical research would allow us to uncover Jesus’ true identity. The real Jesus no longer matters, these scholars argue. We should focus instead on the only Jesus that is accessible to us: Jesus the Christ.

Granted, writing a biography of Jesus of Nazareth is not like writing a biography of Napoleon Bonaparte. The task is somewhat akin to putting together a massive puzzle with only a few of the pieces in hand; one has no choice but to fill in the rest of the puzzle based on the best, most educated guess of what the completed image should look like. The great Christian theologian Rudolf Bultmann liked to say that the quest for the historical Jesus is ultimately an internal quest. Scholars tend to see the Jesus they want to see. Too often they see themselves—their own reflection—in the image of Jesus they have constructed.

And yet that best, most educated guess may be enough to, at the very least, question our most basic assumptions about Jesus of Nazareth. If we expose the claims of the gospels to the heat of historical analysis, we can purge the scriptures of their literary and theological flourishes and forge a far more accurate picture of the Jesus of history. Indeed, if we commit to placing Jesus firmly within the social, religious, and political context of the era in which he lived—an era marked by the slow burn of a revolt against Rome that would forever transform the faith and practice of Judaism—then, in some ways, his biography writes itself.

The Jesus that is uncovered in the process may not be the Jesus we expect; he certainly will not be the Jesus that most modern Christians would recognize. But in the end, he is the only Jesus that we can access by historical means.

Everything else is a matter of faith.

I still believe that the gospels were written by their named authors. The dates of their creation fall well within the lifespan of the purported authors and each contains interesting points the others do not. Mark has a couple of first person accounts that the others do not. Matthew has the entire Sermon on the Mount which the others only allude to. Luke embraced the sacred feminine of Jesus’ ministry and John … well John appears to have been chasing imaginary bunnies by the time anyone got to him.

That being said, none of that refutes Mr. Aslan’s claims. The authors of the gospels could very well have toned down the rhetoric to keep themselves, and their followers, alive.

After all, it would have been the Christian thing to do.

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