Mindless Diversions Comment Rescue And Open Thread!

Jaybird

Jaybird is Birdmojo on Xbox Live and Jaybirdmojo on Playstation's network. He's been playing consoles since the Atari 2600 and it was Zork that taught him how to touch-type. If you've got a song for Wednesday, a commercial for Saturday, a recommendation for Tuesday, an essay for Monday, or, heck, just a handful a questions, fire off an email to AskJaybird-at-gmail.com

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27 Responses

  1. Tod Kelly says:

    I have to disagree with Glyph. I don’t think that the New Testament does end with the Good Guys winning; in fact, it really ends with the bad guys winning. There’s a promise that come the next chapter, the good guys will prevail, but we’re made to wait for the last part.

    In fact, as I’m writing this I’m thinking that the NT is kind of like Christianity’s Empire Strikes Back.

    Everyone’s no waiting for Return of the Jedi to see the bad guys finally conquered.Report

    • Jaybird in reply to Tod Kelly says:

      The Revelation has stuff ending well. God’s in his Heaven, all is Right with the world.

      The Gospels are, I suppose, a bit of a downer… but Paul pulls it back.Report

    • Glyph in reply to Tod Kelly says:

      Hey Tod, the question as I understood it wasn’t ‘happy ending’ per se, it was ‘Good guys winning’, emphasis on ‘Good’ guys…my point was just that Jesus was the first truly ‘good guy’ – like Supes, he never screwed up (well, in retrospect, hiring that Judas guy might have been a mistake).

      David had a man killed to hide the fact that he’d impregnated his wife; Samson basically let ‘little Samson’ do all the thinking for him, and squandered his potential; Moses wasn’t even allowed into the Holy Land, after years and years of listening to grumbling and eating frickin’ manna, again, breakfast lunch and dinner it’s manna.Report

  2. DensityDuck says:

    The Good Guys won all the time in the Greek plays and mythologies.

    Of course, in their stories, the Good Guys lived on Olympus.Report

  3. greginak says:

    Well JC wasn’t the first super guy .There were other gods who has some similarities.

    What about Zeus? He won pretty darn good. Beat his parents and got to rule on Olympus until his great fall when he was played by Liam Neason almost got punked by Ralph Fiennes until he was saved by an animate chunk of wood. Of course the Greek gods has all sorts of drama.Report

    • Jaybird in reply to greginak says:

      He was kind took a lot of liberties with a lot of women. And that’s putting it delicately to the point where I can see someone show up and yell at me for it.Report

      • greginak in reply to Jaybird says:

        Most definitely. The Z Dawg was…well its good to be a god i guess as Mel Brooks might say. Most of you are much more up to date on the bible then i am. However the old testament god was sort of capricious and testy. I know many people can offer complex readings of texts about why this story really means this and isn’t’ just about killing lots of heathens or God trying to get a dad to kill his kid. I’d offer that ancient greeks ( my people) had some sort of explanation for Zeus being a royal ahole that satisfied them.Report

    • Glyph in reply to greginak says:

      Hey greginak, I am aware that JC is not totally sui generis (and again, I am referring to JC as literary ‘character’, not making any statements at all about JC as historical or religious figure).

      But again, as noted the Greek and Roman etc. gods were, to put it kindly, at best flawed (and even if you argue Yaweh was not capricious, He was at least was able to change his mind about things, see Noah and Jonah etc.) whereas JC is presented as completely flawless and free of doubt or caprice/change (Gethsemane aside) – he always did the right thing, from the start – and that seemed new to me.Report

  4. Mike Schilling says:

    The oldest novel in English that I’ve read (that occurs to me at the moment, anyway) is Tom Jones, and it has a happy ending. That was published in 1749. I think Sir Walter Scott’s books also generally have happy endings, and they date from about 1810-1830.Report

  5. Mike Schilling says:

    An (alleged) drunk crashed his car into the dorm I used to live in, shearing the natural gas line into the building, and forcing it to be evacuated. Fortunately, no one was injured, even the alleged drunk. As a friend of mine pointed out, it’s a good thing college dorms aren’t full of open flames.Report

  6. Patrick Cahalan says:

    Definitely Gutenberg was a contributor.

    When the only book in most houses is the Bible, you don’t have money to spend on frivolous things. When books become more affordable, you can throw down on a book of lessons for the children.

    When money buys more printed pages, you can start to get into stories with nuance.Report

  7. Kolohe says:

    Man, do I love them run-on sentences.

    (Thanks for the post!)Report

  8. CK MacLeod says:

    Why is Beowulf a downer – just cuz he finally dies at the end after all of his exploits? Things go pretty darn fantastically well for him overall, and he has a fine superduperheroic end, and, if you don’t accept that, it’s gonna have to be no mead for you.

    The epic stories of a culture are of hero-founders doing amazing things, the best of them also receiving great rewards on Earth and in Paradise, even if from time to time bad things also happen to good people.Report

  9. Kolohe says:

    Via Radley Balko, strange things are afoot (again) at the Circle Cato,

    https://twitter.com/radleybalko/status/240150834556575745Report

  10. MikeSchilling says:

    but ‘the lumberjack’ is more of the deus ex machina

    And he’s OK.Report