What did you do wrong? Oh, of course. It’s all my fault, right? Up on that pedestal as usual. It takes two to tango, sweetheart, and I don’t recall you writing any humor recently. Not your job? Not your humor website? Don’t get into semantics with me. Look, the point is that I’m back now. I don’t want to waste one more second being mad at you for letting me abandon you. Shhhhh. It’s okay, you’re only human.

Glad that’s behind us.

James Avery Totally Punked You

If you’re a Christian in the south, you’ve heard of James Avery. It’s a store that sells fancy, custom Christian jewelery. Buy a crucifix from a non-believer? Sinner. You need to be giving your Valentine’s Day budget right back to Jesus, and that’s what happens when you shop at James Avery. Buy your girlfriend a heart shaped pendant from James Avery and you’re guaranteed to be well on the way to holy-hand-holding (Christian 3rd base) in no time.

One wonderful pendant you can buy your schnookie-pooky-sugar-honey-lollipop (or whatever people call girlfriends these days) is a two-piece heart shaped set. She wears one half, you wear the other half. I know. Precious.

Here’s a pic taken from their website:

Jesus loves this relationship.

Oh. My. Gosh. Can you even believe how cute and Godly that is? I can hear it, almost as if I said it myself:

“Baby, I’m leaving for this one week missions trip down to Juarez, and it kills me that I won’t even be able to iChat with you. So I got you this necklace so that God would watch over our relationship and make sure you don’t dump me while I’m gone doing God’s work. You wouldn’t do that, would you? God’s work. Remember that. Love you!”

My heart just melted, twice. Like if I had two hearts, they would both melt. Don’t cows have two hearts? Or is that stomachs? Whatever, they all just melted big time.

Here’s the problem, which happens to be a problem with the vast majority of “Christian” products out there: This verse is taken violently out of context. Please, allow me to explain.

That quote on there is Genesis 31:49. Looks all well and good until you read the whole chapter. Or half of it. Or even the next six freaking verses. You see, that chapter is all about Jacob and his experiences with his double father-in-law Laban. I say double because Jacob was a baller and married two of Laban’s daughters, because Jacob was a guy that took one look at monogamy and said “that crap is for Chuck Norris” and then punched it in the face with his bicep. And no, he wasn’t a Mormon. Laban and Jacob didn’t like each other. In order to marry Laban’s daughters, Jacob had to work for Laban for seven years per daughter. (Not worth it. – Kent) Anyway, Genesis 31 is all about how Jacob knew that Laban didn’t like him and decided to take his womens and peace out to God’s Country.

Jacob took his wives and possessions and left without telling Laban. Laban figured this out when he was suddenly missing two daughters, one son-in-law, bunches of grandchildren, and some goats. He pursued and caught up with them and a confrontation ensued. Enter the phrase on that pendant up there. They set up a pile of rocks and basically said that phrase, and something like the following:

Laban: If you cheat on my daughters, I will kill you. But I won’t be around, so I’m setting these rocks up to symbolize the fact that God will be watching you, and he kills harder than I do.

Jacob: Right. These rocks also symbolize a boundary between us which we can’t cross to kill or maim each other.

So, we’re cool?

Laban: I wish I could hurt you but God is on your side and I don’t want to go to hell. (Note this as one of the ultimate utilizations of the “God card”)

Jacob: Good deal. Shalom!

Not quite the romantic snippet you were hoping it was, huh? So when you gave your girlfriend that necklace, you were really saying “if you cheat God will see you” and “don’t cross this necklace to kill me.”

Love is beautiful!

Dear Mr. Smittenberg,

I guess I’d like to express my interest in the Entry Level Account Manager position I read about somewhere while I was probably doing something awesome. I’ve heard some pretty good stuff about your company from colleagues and friends; we’re talking really cool, powerful people. I’m sure you have probably heard of me by now, as no doubt one of my friends in your company has told you stories about how well I’ve performed at every job I’ve ever had.  Whatever though, it’s not like it matters to me anyway.

So I hear that your company, I forget what it’s called, bought some other company recently and that’s why you’re looking to hire on some help. I have some experience in recent acquisitions,  as my last position with Goldhammer-Brown Investments (you’ve heard of them, right?) dealt with this recent acquisition they had of Washington-Ellis Investments. I’m sure you read about that one in Investments Magazine, it made the cover of the September 2008 issue. I wasn’t there at the time of the article but if I had been they would have probably asked me for an interview. Anyway I’d probably be a huge help to your company during this transitional phase, but I honestly don’t need the job. I’ve got a lot on my plate right now.

If you feel like it, go ahead and review the enclosed resume and references.  If not, no biggie.  Just so you know though, the last guy I interviewed with said I was “very impressive.” I’m expecting him to call by sometime next week to offer me way more than the minimum they had posted. Just saying if you want it you’d better put a contract on it.

In closing, it really doesn’t mean much to me either way if I get this job or if I don’t. There are so many other jobs I’m interviewing for, I probably won’t even notice if you respond. If you want to though, I might be able to take your call some time in the afternoon most days, as long as I’m not busy getting hired by someone else which is probably what is going to happen. For real though, do whatever you want. I could probably care less, but I’m having a hard time figuring out how.

Meh,

Michael Dawson

Two: Please Don’t Hurt Me.

Dear Miss Martinez,

I’m not really sure that you’re even going to read this since you probably have so many other candidates that have much better qualifications than me, but if you are reading this I’d like to express my interest in the Economic Analyst Position that you advertised, if that’s okay with you. Your company sounds really amazing, like on the cutting edge of the business, which probably puts you way out of my league so if you want to throw this letter away right now, I understand. I really don’t have that much to offer you that you probably don’t already have.

Since I’m here, though, I mean, I guess I’ll tell you some of my qualifications as long as that doesn’t bother you. If it does, it won’t bother me if you stop reading. Honestly, how would I know, right? That’s a joke, which my last boss told me was one of my strengths. I also graduated at the top of my class from Harvard, was the President of my class for all four years, and am a personal friend of Barack Obama. You probably have a lot of applicants like that though, I know I should have worked harder in college.

I have a few skills that maybe could help your company a little bit, but not as much as some other people. I guess I’ve been a Network Analyst before, for your competitor. You can see that on my resume, as well as the six internships I did during my college years for Fortune 100 companies.  They outsourced my job to India, but they’re really nice guys. They said that I can still go to the company parties as long as I keep bringing beer, which is completely a fair request. I totally don’t mind buying enough beer for everybody, it’s not a bother at all. I might have been given the Best Employee award for each of the 14 months that I worked there, and I contributed to part of the new employee handbook for my position. I mean, I wrote some of it, but it was mostly Susan from HR that wrote it, I just gave her a solid outline to start from. You should call her, she’s such a hard worker.

Thank you so much for reading this letter, I’m sure you have a lot more important things you could be doing. If somehow you are interested in an interview and you get around to calling me, I’m available most times. I do volunteer at the local children’s hospital in between occasionally providing freelance financial commentary for CNBC, but it’s really not a problem if you call. I can always step away and make time to talk. Or not. It’s really fine if you don’t.

Thanks Again For Everything,

Miles Lee

It doesn’t? Not even a little bit? Please, I welcome your counterpoint, although I fear it will be insufficient.

Walking Stigmata

What? That gentleman over there? No, of course he doesn’t look like the Pascal Lamb! Well, to start he’s clean shaven! No, he doesn’t look like you. Not at all. His hair is so short! Sure it’s the same color, fine. But still, I maintain that you look completely different, him having absolutely no resemblance to Jesus, the Rose of Sharon.

That’s true, good point. You are blonde and you do have two very blue eyes. It makes sense that Jesus probably didn’t have those two Aryan traits. Nevertheless, I’m going to stand my ground and say that your follicle features bring to mind artistic renditions of the one and only Son of God.

Riddle me this, Christ impersonator: What if Jesus was an albino? Oh, right, sure. Now you bring in statistics. The guy raised people from the dead and gave blind people sight, and you’re going to say that the chances of Him being an albino Jew – who would thus look a lot like you, save the nose – are “astronomically low”?

What was that? Touché, touché. Based on most long-haired modern Israelis, it is likely that Jesus’ hair wouldn’t be naturally straight like yours. I’m going to go out on a limb though, and submit to you the following explanation of your resemblance to One Third of the Holy Trinity: maybe back then, as it is now, it was fashionable to straighten one’s hair for aesthetic reasons. Furthermore, perhaps Ancient Hebrews found it appealing to bleach their hair, just as Americans did about a decade ago.

Well, sir, I beg to differ. I don’t think it’s a far jump in logic at all. Certainly you’re not suggesting that Jesus had a poor fashion sense? That’s what I thought. Excuse me for believing that Christ the Redeemer – He who turned water into wine, mind you – could turn His hair blonde and His eyes blue if He wanted to do so. All powerful, remember? Even so, I still think it looks as though you modeled for the statue of the Good Shepherd that I purchased just yesterday at a Family Christian Bookstore.

Oh, okay. Now you’re backpedaling. So you’re saying He could have, but He didn’t? I guess you’re aware of some physically descriptive Biblical passage that I must have missed somehow? You’re not? Well then, it stands to reason that the Lion of Judah could just as easily look like you as He could look like that Hasidic Rabbi over there. You’re grasping at straws now. Let’s just part ways, agreeing at least on the point that you probably look a lot like Jesus, if not exactly like Him.

I think you’re being unreasonable.

Calling people names doesn’t really belong in a conversation about The Lord, does it? Well you don’t talk like Jesus did, that’s for sure.

Well I wish you would turn that Evian into chardonnay, but if you did I assure you I would not shove it there or anywhere, I would drink it gratefully. Right, then. Good day, sir, and God bless.

Joe, Kevin, and Nick Jonas.  The names alone are enough to inspire envy, lust, wrath, and most of the remaining deadly sins.  In newspaper columns, entertainment blogs, and multi-colored notes passed during seventh period, this trio of troubadours has been called everything from “pre-pubescent harbingers of the apocalypse” to “OMG!  Sooooo hott!!”

Unfortunately, most of these knee-jerk professions of love and loathing are of little substance as they fail to first provide a context whereby we might understand ourselves in relation to The Jonas Brothers.  Pundits and pre-teens prattle on about peripheral issues like anti-intellectual lyrics, sequined vests, and dimples, while the boys’ influences and interests are entirely ignored.

Do not be fooled.  The Jonas Brothers are far more than just another experimental, avant-progressive noise band bursting onto the post-pop moonscape.  They are heirs to a storied rock and roll tradition with influences ranging from the Dance-Punk scene of late-1970s London to the earthy incantations of pre-colonial Africa.

To focus on their abstention from alcohol, drugs, and fornication, while ignoring the anti-folk undertones of songs like “Burnin Up” and “Lovebug,” is not only an affront to Mssrs. Jonas, it is a disservice to Iggy Pop, The Velvet Underground, and the Brothers’ many other artistic forebears.

How can we even begin to address questions like, “Would I be honored or angry if Nick Jonas impregnated my 16 year-old daughter?” if we don’t appreciate the significance of Nick’s red-stained Gibson SG guitar – an obvious nod to the late Jerry Garcia – or recognize his mid-coital onstage facial contortions as distinctly John Mayerian?

Put simply, we cannot.  It is impossible to discuss The Jonas Brothers’ music or the extent to which said music is destroying Western Civilization without first locating the band within the proper musical milieu; a task made increasingly difficult by the near impossibility of isolating the Brothers within a single genre or musical epoch.

Take Nick, for example.  Lead vocalist.  Lead guitarist.  Lothario.  Yet, before ex-girlfriend Miley Cyrus introduced him to Gogol Bordello and other mainstays of Nashville’s gypsy punk scene in late-2005, young Nicholas was just another faceless scene kid staving off capitalism while wearing girl jeans.

The influence of the gypsy punksters softened the heavy distortion and shouted invective of Nick’s early songs like “Dear God” and “Joy to the World (a Christmas Prayer),” and gave way to the multi-lingual, tambourine-laden ballads which have since become his signature.  Yet reviewers, like The Onion’s A.V. Club, insist on writing him off as another “moribund Mouseketeer.”  This refusal to critically interact with Nick’s work reveals nothing but their own ignorance of musical nuance.

And what of eldest brother Kevin?  Ever wonder why he infuses his work with sitars, harpsichords and other relics of neo-psychedelia?  The answer is right there, for anyone who wants to know, in the October 2007 issue of CosmoGirl.  Had CosmoGirl’s readers not been so hasty to shred the article for its pictures, they might have learned about Kevin’s discovery of psychedelia – specifically tribal electronica – during a summer spent living in a utility shed in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district, and his subsequent collaboration with Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci to write the hit song “Kids of the Future.”  Alas, the magazine’s readers would rather paste the article to their ceilings, lockers, and trapper keeper covers than read about the music behind the man they love.

The same fate has befallen Joe Jonas, middle child and paramour to the stars.  Pigeon-holed from the start as Hollywood’s resident man-about-town, Joe’s high-profile dalliances have been covered ad nauseum by the muckrakers at OK! and TMZ. Meanwhile, the fact that the he is a percussionist of the highest order goes unnoticed.

It is time we moved past these captivating caricatures and smooth-faced straw men.  If we ever hope to have intelligent discourse about the Jonas Brothers we must develop a full-bodied hermeneutic of their work.  This begins with an understanding of the socio-musical universe over which they rule.

Nurtured in the bosom of the iPod era, these young men have suckled at the teat of every artist working in the past fifty years (with the exception of Hanson whom they are contractually forbidden from listening to).  Their panoply of intrigues and influences precludes any mention of them in the same breath as “bubblegum pop” or “laboratory-created performance monkeys.”

On the contrary, Nick, Kevin, and Joe Jonas stand at the crucible of rock and roll’s evolutionary journey and the dawning of the post-MTV age.  They are a new kind of rock group for a new kind of America.  Love them or hate them, fear them or desire them, we must understand them.  Because one thing is certain, these boys and their pre-apocalyptic, neo-glam, anti-Bono, Christo-rock are not going away anytime soon.

Judd Apatow

Film maker and cultural juggernaut Judd Apatow is mad.  And when Judd Apatow gets mad, children under the age of eighteen should be immediately removed from earshot.

“It’s bull****, man,” raves a wild-eyed Apatow, spittle dripping from his unkempt man-beard.  “Those ******s don’t know who they’re dealing with.”

The cause of this ire?  The Motion Picture Association of America’s rating of his upcoming film Sex, Swearing, and Seth Rogan starring Seth Rogan.  The film, as with all of Apatow’s previous works, has been given a “hard R” by the MPAA.   This marks the fifteenth consecutive R-rated film for Apatow – dating back to Su Madre es una Puta, a short film he made for his Spanish II class in high school – and Apatow has grown weary of the rating.

“We were really gunning for the NC-17 this time,” said Apatow. “Kids are getting filthier today, at an earlier age and it’s getting harder and harder to keep pace.  Used to be, kids didn’t even know what a %!@# was.  I heard a ten year-old call his mother that last week.”

Mr. Apatow – who is praised for his groundbreaking work in the fields of teenage drinking, teenage sex, teenage marijuana use, and genital jokes – says an R-rating today is equivalent, in terms of controversy, to most PG films in the late 90s.

“For guys like me, operating in the ever-shifting borderlands between pornography and poor taste, the R-rating has kind of been neutered.  If you want to realistically portray a conversation between two sixteen year-old kids, you’re gonna have to say words like $%^&#-spelunker, #@$!-sandwich, and *!&%-monkey.  At this point, it’s NC-17 or irrelevance.”

Apatow credits the internet, high school locker rooms, and HBO for the precipitous decline in youth morality, while downplaying the accolades he has received for his popularization of the “F” word.  He also does not like discussing his string of recent hit films, which include Superbad, Knocked Up, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, and Pineapple Express. He blushes modestly as I read several glowing reviews, which acclaim his work as both “deplorably irresponsible” and “unconscionable, low-brow smut.”  Never one to rest on his laurels, Apatow is focusing on taking his work to the next level.

“The [NC-] 17 has always been the Holy Grail for me; my Moby D*** if you will.  I came close with [The 40 Year-Old] Virgin, but Steve Carrell, that gutless %$!#@, wouldn’t do full frontal.”  He adds, “I really thought this one would put us over the top.”

Mr. Apatow was frustrated to learn that, despite breaking Good Will Hunting‘s longstanding record for most F-word’s in a single film, Sex, Swearing and Seth Rogan was not fowl enough to warrant the coveted NC-17.  Other objectionable content includes: animals and small children under the influence of crystal meth, Jonah Hill in various stages of undress, the unnatural use of fruits and vegetables, and a shockingly graphic scene involving Paul Rudd, Bill Hader, and several High School Musical action figures.  Despite this laundry list of filth, the MPAA still deemed the movie appropriate for children under the age of seventeen as long as they are accompanied by a responsible adult.

Undeterred, Apatow has commited to do whatever it takes to get this film to NC-17 levels of perversion.

“We’re going back to the editing room.  You can bet I’ll be giving those ferrets a more prominent role, and I might have Michael Cera wait to O/D until after the strippers leave.  If that doesn’t do it, I swear I’m going to  *&^$% my pants.”

Sex, Swearing, and Seth Rogan was initially slated for an August release, but Apatow reported that the premiere will now have to be postponed until after several of the actresses celebrate their eighteenth birthdays.  Look for it in select theatres around Christmas.