In the Bad Old Days -- 2nd Take

[For some reason, the 2nd day of Christmas is celebrated as a holiday here in Denmark just like the first day.

Soooo, I suppose I can allow myself to do a 2nd take on yesterday's theme, "in the bad old days, when the mob ruled the world...."]


A "world without Christmas" would be a less then a dreary place with no Santa Claus, no presents and no turkey dinner.

The world is a cruel place. The strong do what pleases them. There is no justice in this world except that which grows out of a gun or a kick in the ass. "Justice is Mine" sayeth the Lord. I figure that means that there is no justice in the world, of itself. None except for the little that we bring into the world. In this way justice could be said to be a little like love

When I was in high school I was once had to write an essay on the subject of how the study of Latin had taught me that Julius Ceasar was a "great man".

My essay was short and to the point -- I wrote that I had never considered Julius Ceasar to be a great man and his "veni, vidi, vici" propaganda screed about his campaign against the tribes of Gaul had not changed my mind on the issue.

My conclusion was that if Julius was a great man, then Al Capone was a great man. As I recall, I got a "D" for that essay and was quite bitter about it, as only as a misunderstood sixteen-year old can be.

I still do not think he was great. As I say, if Julius was great, then Al Capone was great. I refuse to accede greatness to that which I despise: the prince of this world with his cloak of rot and his halo of lies.

There was another kid in our class who was even weirder than me. He had a very bad stammer. He didn't just stutter, he would go into a paroxysm, almost a fit.

We took biology together in the tenth grade.


In biology, there is an exercise where you dissect a living frog. Before you dissect the frog, you supposed to "pith" the poor creature. That means that you take a big needle which is almost an ice-pick and jam it into the base of the frog's brain. You twist the needle around and this is supposed to destroy the connection between the frog's brain and the frog's body.

I hope this is true, because, as far as I know, nobody ever bothered to ask the frogs about it.

The next step is to dissect the frog while it is still alive and, hopefully, without consciousness as you lay it on its back and slit the belly open with a sharp scalpel and observe the organs -- the heart beat, the breathing -- but, the frog doesn't feel pain, because the connection to it's brain is gone...

The question of course is, does a heart feel pain? Does a belly?

Richard, the guy with the stutter had an immediate answer. He ran down the school hallway screaming, "It's a sin! It's a sin! It's a sin!".

The rest of the class snickered and I kept my silence to myself.

The point is, even if we accept that the frog felt no pain, how do we explain the pain that Richard felt?


Something they forget to tell us in bible-school is that Jesus was a heretic, a blasphemer and an utter failure -- ah, but he failed so magnificently!