The Decidedly Non-Sexual Fruits of Passion

On a hike yesterday, we spotted an extraterrestrial communications antenna that later turned out to be a passion flower — the blossom on the plant that gives us passion fruit.

Coupled with the fact that the passion fruit comes from the tropics, the flower’s ostentatious weirdness makes it easy to think of the passion in question as being sexual or at least romantic — the kind of emotion you find in those places where middle-aged black ladies go to get their grooves back. This purple-fringed beauty is the plant’s genitals, after all, and my friend even pointed out that “passion fruit” doesn’t sound like it’s an actual, organic product. No, it sounds like a flavor derived in a lab, some the same guys in white coats who invented blue raspberry or wintermint or that unplaceable snow cone flavor we call “Hawaiian.” The plant is real, however, but the dreamy, romantic notions we might today make with passion fruit are way off the park when you consider how the plant got its name. It’s the other passion — the Passion of the Christ passion, in fact.

From Wikipedia:

The name was given by Spanish missionaries to South America as an expository aid while trying to convert the indigenous inhabitants to Christianity. One ingenious expository device was using parallels between the parts of this common South American flower and elements of the account of the torture (the Passion) of Christ prior to his crucifixion. The missionaries said that:

• The three stigmas reflect the three nails in Jesus‘s hands and feet
• The threads of the passion flower resemble the crown of thorns
• The vine’s tendrils are likened to the whips
• The five anthers represented the five wounds
• The ten petals and sepals regarded to resemble the Apostles (excluding Judas and Peter)
• The purple petals representing the purple robe used to mock Jesus’ claim to kingship

So the next time you dig into the deep magenta of a passion fruit sorbet following a candle-lit Valentine’s Day dinner, don’t think about engorged genitals; think about poor Jim Caviezel being tormented and then executed by Roman soldiers. (And also please don’t think too much about the whole sepal thing and why you’re pulling both Judas and Peter from the traditional group of twelve.)

In case you’re wondering how passion, as a word, got mixed up both in Christ’s torment and bodice-ripping, blame the martyrs. It originally came from the Latin patior — “to suffer,” in the sense of patients and patience. According to Etymonline, the meaning drifted from “torment of God’s son” to “strong emotion” when Christian conviction led martyrs to similar abusive treatment, and now we just use passionate more or less to mean “totally DTF.” I like that passion (romantic sense) retains the element of suffering, even if on a buried etymological level, since love and hardship so often go hand-in-hand, but at the same time it’s hard not to look at the evolution of meaning and say, “Damn, we really ruined that word.”

The Good Word Is a Mixed Message

Look past the chain link fence in the below photo and gaze in wonder at a curious landmark that I walk by once or twice a week: what I’ve come to call the Jesus Dumpster.

One day, I’ll stop and ask the owner of the Jesus Dumpster what his or her intention was in plastering the waste receptacle with pro-Christianity bumper stickers (“Got Joy?” “Got Life?” “Got Hope?” ... but not the obvious question, “Got Garbage?”). Is it public art critiquing the Christian message? Or the result of a Bible-beater who didn’t fully consider the implications of linking Easter propaganda with things unwanted, spoiled, broken or otherwise unfit to keep around the house? Or was the Jesus Dumpster born simply because its owner felt that the garbage man could benefit from a little more color during his weekly rounds?

For the record, I think similar things when I see American flag designs on ratty T-shirts, baby diapers or bathing suits stretched across flabby torsos.

Religion, previously:

• Demons get divorces, and other fun demonology facts!
• Jesus is not the only person of note to be born in Bethlehem
• A reading of the imagery on a Jehova’s Witness flyer
• Jesus rose on the third day, more or less. But who’s counting?
• Kaffir limes are for heathens
  

On the Third Day (or Thereabouts) He Rose Again

So today is Good Friday, the day when Christians worldwide commemorate the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. It’s a sad day, and I’ll preface this blog post with the disclaimer that I mean no disrespect towards anyone’s religion with the question I’m going to ask here. It’s a legitimate point of confusion for me that I’m not able to answer despite my years of Catholic school. The question is this: How is it possible that Jesus Christ died and rose again in three days?

I’m not inquiring about the nature of death and resurrection, here, however. My confusion is about the timeline. Think about it: Today is Friday. In two days, we celebrate Easter Sunday, the day on which Jesus is believed to have risen from the dead. If that’s the way the Easter story goes, then why do so many Christians believe that Christ rose from the dead on the third day? After all, Sunday is only two days after Friday, at least according to how anyone today reads a calendar.

For Catholics and other Christian denominations, the belief is put forward in the Nicene Creed, a profession of various tenets of faith often recited by the whole congregation during liturgies. At one point, the current version of the creed goes as follows:

And in one Lord Jesus Christ… who for us men, and for our salvation, came down from heaven, and was incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary, and was made man; he was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate, and suffered, and was buried, and the third day he rose again, according to the Scriptures, and ascended into heaven, and sitteth on the right hand of the Father …

I mean, I know that technically speaking, Sunday is the third day, after Friday and Saturday. But in the way the story is usually told, Jesus died on the cross at 3 p.m. on Good Friday and was alive again on Sunday morning. Wouldn’t that be less than a day-and-a-half? And just like how Jesus wasn’t actually born on December 25, he might not have been crucified on a Friday — and that day of the week wouldn’t have been called Friday, even if the calendar lined up. But then why don’t we space out Holy Week so that Christians get three days to observe the period that Jesus was dead?

I’ve always wondered this. If anyone can set me straight, I’d love to hear it.

i resisted the urge to photoshop a basketball onto jesus’s finger

Call an Opthamologist

Downsides of my office: Fluorescent lights, limited parking, and a particular cheap brand of coffee that I like to call “gut rot.” Upsides: among a few others, occasional, interesting conversations about words.

A few weeks ago, a co-worker — who, as a result of her upbringing, has very good reasons to be unfamiliar with the New Testament — asked me if a person who gave an interview with the paper could have possibly misquoted Jesus. The sentence was this: “Don’t worry about the mote in your brother’s eye, worry about the beam in your own.” Without really reflecting on the word mote, she interpreted the passage to mean that one shouldn’t waste time worrying about a moat — as in, the body of water — when one has some sort of wooden plank that could be used to cross such a barrier. Which makes sense, really, if you haven’t already been told what we’re supposed to think that Jesus actually meant with this strange chunk of syntax. (I’m sure it sounded great in Aramaic.) The quote struck my ears as strange as well, because my Catholic education had familiarized me with a different though not necessarily better translation of the quote: “Why do you look at the speck that is in your brother's eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye?” This one avoids using the word mote, which doesn’t get used all that much in modern American English. I think that alone helps the (supposedly) intended meaning to be clearer: Don’t rag on someone for some small fault when you yourself are guilty of something even worse.

To me, the problem with this bit of Christian wisdom is that the wording of it always distracted me from the meaning. When seven-year-old me first heard this one, I was too amused or horrified or just generally preoccupied with the notion of a guy walking around with a portion of Abraham Lincoln’s childhood home sticking out of his eye socket. (What if he turned around? What if a woodpecker lived on him? If he fell forward, would it kill him?) Really, it reminds me of the whole “Lily Allen has a ladder in her tights” thing, which itself was confusing and ridiculous until I found out what it meant.

Beam doesn’t help the situation much, either, especially because now it makes me think of someone taking a laser pointer to the face. Actually, that might be the best way to explain it to seven-year-olds today.

According to this website, which conveniently lists specific Bible passages as different editions translate them, the following are also considered fair game, at least by some whacko sect of Christianity somewhere:

• “sawdust” and “wooden beam”
• “grain of dust” and “bit of wood”
• “splinter” and “beam”
• “craisin” and “pineapple”

Okay, I made the last one up, but it makes just as much sense as all these carpentry terms. (Oh that Jesus — always talkin’ shop.)

As I said earlier, mote is almost equally problematic, especially if the passage is being recited and not read from the page. Which is too bad, really, because mote is a cool word. Say it to yourself. Ten times. Loudly. Now don’t you feel a little bit better about life?

Aside from confusion with the water-filled river that you put around your castle to keep out invaders, mote is notable for one other reason, as one Shakespeare-savvy intern pointed out during the offices original discussion of this matter. Mote is also a character in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which itself should not be confused with A Midsummer Night’s Cream. Mote appears as one of Queen Titania’s attendant fairies, alongside Peaseblossom, Cobweb and Mustardseed. It’s easy to forget about Mote, however, because she — or possibly he, I guess — never speaks. In fact, some productions of the play leave the character out altogether.

To complicate the matter even further, some editions of the play render the name as “Moth” instead, which pretty much eliminates the possibility that a reader could interpret the name as a pun on the word mute, which the character could very well be, since she or he has no lines.

Following that logic, I personally would like to read the Jesus quote as “Don’t point out the moth in your neighbor’s eye, when you have the trunk of General Sherman, the tallest tree in the world, in your own.”

Unless that overstates the point.

EDIT: At Spencer’s request and for the sake of accuracy, this post has been retitled “See an Ophthalmologist” from its original title, “See an Optometrist.”

Today's Moment of Fuzzy Animal Sentimentality

And it's as true today as when Jesus first said it thirty years ago.

Follow That Christ!

For some reason, this Jehova's Witness flier reminds me of Follow That Bird more than anything else.

The All-Night Nippon Retrogaming Extravaganza

The three of you I've managed to retain for the last two months may remember a post I wrote on Penguin Kun Wars, a game released for the Famicom — Nintendo's Japanese version of the original NES console — that I was only able to play through the beauty of Nintendo8.com. I've since revisited the collection of Japan-only ROMs available at the site. No single title managed to recapture the frustrating delight of Penguin Kun Wars, but below you'll get a good cross section of downright infuriating.

First up: Cool World. Yes, as in the 1992 Ralph Bakshi film, which I've always wanted to see even though it's notoriously bad. Though the film was released in the United States, the Nintendo video game version of it never made it out of Japan — and with good reason.


Well, that's a copyright for Paramount Pictures. That means it's at least officially sanctioned... by the movie house that made a bad, bad movie.


And then there's the title, right there on the very game I'm playing! That's encouraging!


Oh! A map! Well, "Cool World Street" seems as good as anywhere else to start.


This eight-bit monstrosity, as near as I can tell, is meant to be the film's female lead, Kim Basinger. I don't think even Alec Baldwin ever wished a fate on Basinger so unpleasant as being reduced to as crude a pixelated representation as this. I mean look at her — she lacks any facial structure and what features she does have float on her self-tanner face. It's just creepy.

And you don't think I can stop you, Ugly Pixelated Kim Basinger? "No way"? Way, Ugly Pixelated Kim Basinger. Way.


Okay, now I'm playing. Apparently I'm playing as the film's main character, Gabriel Byrne, thus making this the only video game existence or even future existence in which you can play as Gabriel Byrne. Also, poor Gabriel is apparently in a city with purple cobblestone streets. Like in the movie, I'll presume. Also, the streets of Cool World are apparently decorated with architecture depicting grimacing demonic faces and lined with nondescript anthropomorphic rodents, all of whom apparently want to kill me. Maybe I don't want to see this movie.


More mean faces. Also, rodents attacking me with pea-shooters from second-story windows. And a strange empty glass vial that I can't get to. Did I mention that I didn't have access to an instruction manual? Even if I did, it would presumably be in Japanese anyway. Jumping is difficult and I'm quickly growing weary.


Ooh! A club! Surely some patron inside will impart valuable information to me — and by me, I of course mean Gabriel Byrne. Also, let's hope they speak English. Oh, what's that? No combination of pressed buttons will open the door? Awesome! And I can't reach the police badge sitting up on the ledge for no apparent reason? I suppose that makes sense, given that the badge would probably grant my little guy some sort of invincibility or — God in heaven! — a weapon. Did I mention that Gabriel Byrne can't attack? That even Super Mario Bros.-style stomping doesn't seem to affect all the things that want to kill me? The rodents, by the way, are both relentless and identical and I don't understand why they won't leave me alone, aside from the fact that Gabriel Byrne is clearly not a rodent.


Well, okay. The rodent seem to have abated. I'll just walk around in this suspiciously rodent-free street. La tee dah, I'm Gabriel Fucking Byrne. And then—



BAM! In case the above screens don't properly explain the sequence of events, Gabriel Byrne was struck by a runaway black car, causing him to face forward and leap off the screen — a Super Mario-style death for a game that permits none of the fun or logic of Mario's universe.

Upon my initial failure, I immediately became discouraged with Cool World: The Video Game Based on the Hit Motion Picture and decided to switch to a different title. Fortunately, a new title arrives with just a few clicks. Given the crappiness of what was a mildly familiar video game-based-on-movie selection, I decided to go for new and different.

My pick: Jesus — Kyoufu no Bio Monster. Anything that includes the words "Jesus" and "Bio Monster" in the title has got potential, you have to admit.


Start please!


In the opening cinematic, the above monster leaps across the black background once or twice. When I say "leap," I just mean the static image of it — which, by the way, I'm assuming is the Jesus Bio Monster — slides across the screen in the style of cheap Flash animation, which of course hasn't been invented in 1989. So I'll forgive it. For what it's worth, it looks pretty good, considering the age of the game.


Okay, first real screen of the game. That awful man appears to be choking on a submarine sandwich. And he's nonetheless talking. In Japanese. I press the button. More text. Button. Text. Button. Text. Perhaps he's asking for medical assistance? After all, he does suffer from the unique condition of having an entire sandwich crammed into his bastard mouth. Button, button, button. Text, text, text.


Oh, something else. I assume Mr. Sandwichmouth passed away. Apparently I'm on some sort of space station. It certainly looks like the kind of place someone would name a Bio Monster after my lord and savior.


I can read that! Something is 20,000 years old. Maybe that's the year? Maybe that's a cost? Must I collect 20,000 submarine sandwiches to kill the fat man? To kill the remaining crew? Am I the true monster? And is that my mane of unruly scarlet hair? I'm the anime Brendon Small. I'm the Captain of Outer Space.


Oh, hello! A new man to talk to. You seem stern and powerful, like Dennis Franz. Again, so much talking. But at least now I have three choices. I'll be lazy and pick the first one.


Shit. That first option was apparently Japanese shorthand for "Please, I'd rather speak to another obese member of the spacecrew, only one without a sandwich humorously lodged in his mouth." And boy can this one talk. I think I've realized how the Jesus Bio Monster was allowed to wreak so much havoc on the good Space Station Japanimation: Everyone sits around blathering on instead of following the example of every other video game ever and just killing the thing. How diplomatic. Button, button, button. Text, text, text. At this point, I've been playing for nearly ten minutes.


Finally! Not a man! That pink, fanny-shaped hairdo leads me to believe this lass is my lady love. And what a girlfriend to have! I suppose beggars can't be choosers and those stuck in space need to jump on the first thing that isn't choking on a sandwich. Rather than treat me with a conjugal visit, Princess Fanny Hair seems to be talking a lot. Button, button, button. (By the way, I would make fun of her outfit, but I think I saw something remarkably similar being sold at American Apparel today. That's not a joke.)


WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT?! Fanny Hair leans in for a kiss and there's some kind of robotic big fuming at our feet? Seriously, what is that thing? I want to kill it. I want to kill something. Hell, I want the Jesus Bio Monster to eat me. Also, nice leg warmers, Fanny Hair. I'll pick the first available option again, and hope that one translates as "Kill the horrible thing."


FUCK! It's Dennis Franz again. Goddammit, I'm beginning to think this endless series of text windows is the game. Like, maybe the choices offered lead you through the game Choose Your Adventure-style. Of course, with all the text in Japanese, I am unable to make any sense of anything. Fine, you fooled me, Jesus — Kyoufu no Bio Monster. I mistook you for a game when you were actually a stupid book masquerading as a game. Utterly defeated and angry, I decide to give one more untranslated game a shot, suspecting that the game totally would have gotten good had a persevered over another dozen conversations.

A last shot, picked only because it was directly above Bio Monster: something with the tragic name Ikki.


Just one player for me, thanks. Also, this blog cannot reproduce sound, but anyone reading this should know that selecting "one player" resulted in a cheery, very Japanese and unexpectedly long intro jingle. I'd imagine they were trying to compensate for the fact that I didn't have anyone to play along with. And I appreciate that, Sunsoft.


Yep, that's right. Just me. I'm getting ready.


Oh! I already died! See, there I am in the bottom right quadrant of the screen, with a little halo over my head. How sad. The little man who doesn't move the way I wanted him to and only throws boomerangs in the direction the computer wants him to was somehow slain by marauding ninjas mere moments after setting foot into this lovely Japanese garden. Well, surely my Ikki skills will improve with another try, right?

I mean really — what the hell was that? That wasn't a game. I derived neither fun nor joy from Ikki. Six hundred lousy points and little men slain by ninjas in less than three minutes? Gah. GAH!

And then I stepped away from the computer for a few moments and collected myself.

This has been the second installment of Drew being frustrated by Japanese games intended for Japanese children. If any of you all think you'd fare better braving the Japanese psyche, I encourage you to test your skills at Nintendo8.com.