Fear of ....

On 2 news shows this Sunday morning, Easter morning, 2 evangelical preachers were talking about politics and religion. There was one phrase they both used that struck me as odd. It has always struck me as odd.

Fear of God.

Somewhere in the Old Testament you are told to fear God. God also says he is a jealous God when he pops out the 10 commandments for Moses. (Exodus 20:5)

So the question I have always had is, Why would you want to worship someone you fear? Wouldn't that be like worshiping Darth Vader? Freddy Krueger? A person that has a gun to you head?

Did the people who wrote the Bible think that having God say "Love me" just seemed too needy?

But if you look at when the book was written, that was a rough time to live in and a tough life to have. You had a hard time eating, you were at the mercy of the elements, the weather. The rain or lack of could cause famine in the next year. Children died of diseases that we conquered years ago.

So life was basically shit. And if God loved you then why would he let bad things happen to you? If you were told to fear God then you get what you deserve. The old saying, "God only gives you what you can handle" is ridiculous. So the people who can handle bad things happening to them get it, and the people who can't are rich and pampered because they are just a big bunch of pussies who can't handle the real world?

I don't know who is "right" when it comes to religion. But wouldn't it be just the biggest cosmic joke and incredibly myopic of God to say, "Just the Jews. They are my chosen people." Or just the Baptists or just the Muslims. Why give someone freedom of choice and then punish them for it?

I tend to lean toward what physicist Richard Feynman said, "Not knowing is a lot more interesting than believing something that might be wrong."

Social Media and Employers

I've heard it in the news lately that a growing number of employers are asking job applicants for their Facebook and Twitter passwords if they can't view their profiles.

It's highly unlikely that anyone I would ever work for would ask for such a thing, but my answer would be simple.

Give me your house keys.

Asking for FB passwords is a huge, egregious invasion of privacy. Employers are not allowed to ask for sexual orientation, race, religious beliefs. By poking around on FB they can find out everything and more. How many people have pictures on their pages where they have a drink in their hands? They may not have put them there, but someone did. How many people have posted that they don't want to go to work? Does that make them a bad employee? No. It makes them human. Sometimes people don't want to go to work for whatever reason. Many people go to work when they are sick because they are afraid to lose their jobs. And they post it on FB or Twitter.

FB profiles are not really an accurate reflection of a person. It is either someone they want to be, or someplace they can be more than they are. How many people portray their lives as something awesome when it's just ordinary? Most posts I see are completely inconsequential. "I had a cheese sandwich for lunch. Mmmm I like cheese." Is this kind of trivial stuff of any interest to an employer? I really can't imagine.

I would ask for the house keys of the HR person, the CEO, the company president, and others. I would tell them that I want to see if I would like the morals of the people I'm working for. I want to check under the bed in that shoe box. I want to see what is in box in the upper right hand corner of the top shelf of the closet. I'm figuring I will find sex toys and tranny porn. And probably some guns.

Would they say I have no right to that kind of a search of their privacy? Well, then, they have no right to see my social media. When they refused to give me their house keys I would get up and thank them for their time and leave.

I don't want to work for anyone that pries into their employee's lives in such a manner. It's work.

Immortality

I remember this group from when I was a kid. I found this newspaper ad in some papers last night. I clipped it out because I had personal dealings with this group. I was a bus boy at a restaurant in a resort in Scottsdale. This group was a cult like any other. But this one had a twist. They promised immortality, in the body you had right now. Physical immortality.

All you had to do was give the guy running the cult all your money.

They would come into the restaurant to eat, but had no money to pay. So the hostess would just add the charges to the room of the leader of the cult. It was crazy. They seriously thought they would live forever. I'd never seen cult like belief before. But I've run into it since.

It's amazing what people will believe either because they are afraid of dying, or bamboozled by a charismatic huckster.

They would lock the doors to the ballroom when they had their meetings. I wrote a short story based on it. It had a Twilight Zone bent to it. Basically, the cult leader was a demon and dragged all their souls to Hell after taking all their money...

Rock Icon

I want to be a Rock Icon.

That would be a cool gig. Can you imagine? I can see it now. Me, silhouetted by intensely colored lights, standing on the front to the stage. Maybe my foot on the monitor in front of me. Hanging on the mic stand, Bono-esque.

I would already be an established Rock Icon. Not on e of the thousands of wanna-bes. All the struggling days would be behind me. It would be cool to be able to turn out anything on a CD and have the fans buy it. There would be some number of songs they would like. Fuck the critics, they're just frustrated. Albums justify the tours. That is the fun part. That's the drug.

The arenas would hold at least 22,000. The screams when I take the stage are deafening, the energy pouring on to the stage is intoxicating. That's the drug. The energy.

I'd start singing something low and sexy, "Here' comes the woman with the look in her eyes* Raised on leather with flesh on her mind* Words are weapons sharper than knives, makes you wonder how the other half dies." INXS. Got to love them. Hutch died in a Rock Icon way. Kind of weird, kind of tortured artist, or in a sex experience that went wrong. He had great rock and roll hair. Not heavy metal hair, all teased up, and if you touched it it would shatter. But great floppy, in your face hair. The kind women love to run their fingers thru, and looks incredibly cool when you casually brush it out of your face.

Have you noticed that very few of the cool singers have spines. Maybe it started with Jim Morrison of the Doors. And the tradition was kept up by Bono of U2, and Michael Hutchence of INXS. They hang on to the mic stand like it's the only thing holding them up. Take it away and they'd crumple to the ground.

They move in a way that insinuates sex. . Very loose movement, very fluid. It's not blunt or rude like rap or heavy metal. It's slithering, gliding like a reptile. It's an attitude, a presence of sex. The ability to seduce every woman in the crowd without ever meeting them in person. A sex fantasy larger than life. It would be daunting though; so much would be expected from you. But with all the practice, you would probably be good in bed.

The concert is the thing. Putting out an album gets you the chance to tour. The energy coming off the audience is amazing. Then afterward, ears ringing from the decibels, you go to the next city to do it again. Living for the time onstage.

I do understand it a bit...

Lottery Fever

I didn't win the $640,000,000 million Mega Millions lottery yesterday. That's okay. I had 5 quick picks and didn't feel the need to buy more than that.

The odds are long. 1 in 176,000,000 if the news stories are to be believed. When the lottery is $640 million there is a sure fire way to win. Buy up 176,000,000 lottery tickets. That would cover every possible number combination. It could only really be done by a billionaire with a lot of time on his hands or some hedge fund as a way for a sure fire return on money spent. You would win.

But there's also a chance that someone else would also have the numbers. The profit would be less and you might not cover the expense of buying every possible combination.

Though I didn't win, it was fun to think about what I would do with that kind of cash. And for $5, that's not bad. Like they say, you can't win if you don't play.

Mix Tapes

I used to make mix tapes to play in my car when driving. Tapes. Not CDs, tapes. Did it for years and years. Then I switched to CDs.

Sometimes I would pick a theme and do a bunch of songs in a certain genre. Like "80's Hair" which was a bunch of late 80's hair bands. Or "21 the Hard Way" which was all heavy metal. Or "Speed" which were great songs to speed down the freeway at 90 mph.

Since I got a CD player in the car years ago I rarely pulled out the tapes. I had a deck of 10 discs at my disposal so the tape deck in the car fell to disuse. But recently I pulled out some old tapes and was playing them as I drove. They were somewhat remembered and a bit of a surprise because I didn't remember what I had on the tapes or what order.

I was hearing songs I haven't heard in over a decade and it took me back to the roads I travelled when they were new in my tape deck. I can't say for sure who some of the artists are. I had to have a tape or a record that the song was recorded from, but I have no idea who these bands or singers are. I remember the lyrics to many of them. Or a guitar riff. But I don't know who did it.

It's kind of cool to go back and listen to the tapes. They provide a window to who I was at the time I made them. Some songs I still love. Others were merely a memory, a phase, a brief obsession.

It may take the rest of the year to listen to them all.

Backstage

I worked recently at the happiest place in Anaheim. It was a commercial for an iconic park. It was a lot of fun. We were there after the park closed. Any other time I had been there it was crowded. So to have the space to ourselves, just the cast and crew was glorious.

Getting backstage was interesting. The place probably has better security than the TSA. We rode in a shuttle van to an innocuous gate that took us backstage. It looked a lot like many other backlots for studios. Large non-descript blocky warehouses. We passed by the metal skeleton of some float recently retired. The fiberglass shape of it in pieces laying on the ground next to it. Someone recognized it as a certain float, but we passed it so quickly I couldn't figure out what it had once been.

Base camp was a stage near Big Thunder Mountain. We hung out until later when the park had almost closed. Rides were winding down and patrons were headed to the exit. A large illuminated helium balloon lit up the area in a diffused white light. We went to work. They had us, the "atmosphere", do crosses and walk away from the camera. When they got what they wanted we walked back to base camp and got our stuff together to move locations.

I learned from talking to the cast members which were assigned to hang out with us that they were there to keep us from taking pictures of the backstage stuff. Pictures of things that could end up on Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, or in a blog like this one. I asked could I take a picture of this? and I pointed to something. Yes, you can take a picture of the castle, but not the balloon. It would ruin the magic of the place.

The van took us along a road backstage that your regular park visitor never sees. Then there was a traffic jam. On a private road. How could that happen? The large balloon from earlier had been tied down, still inflated, to the back of a pick up which would take it to the other location. The truck with the 12' diameter balloon got stuck between the wall of the road and the pillar holding up the monorail. Oops. 3 guys were pushing on the balloon to try and get it thru the narrow space. When the driver figured out this wasn't going to happen anytime soon, we crossed into the oncoming traffic lane and continued on. The balloon eventually made it but had been partially deflated.

We went to the next location in the other park. There is a show which started a year or 2 ago I've only seen once from the side. It takes 30 minutes. I'd seen it before, but didn't get the full effect. I never had waited in line to get a prime spot in front to see the World of Color from the front. But now we got to see about 5 minutes of it repeatedly from the front. 10 of us extras placed in specific spots so the show could be seen beyond us. This is not how it works in the real world. Where we were 10, there are hundreds who see the show in the evenings. It was cool, but I missed the pyro.

So the question is, will the people who work for this company, whose job it is to scour the internet looking for things and taking them down because they ruin the magic, find this and take it down? Hmmm...