On Pastor Selection

One of the things a Church must do as they select a new pastor in the ELCA (Evangelical Church of America) is fill out a form, or write a paper, or something like that, that basically describes what kind of Church you are.  This is important.  After all, you wouldn't want a pastor looking for a gritty inner-city ministry experience to wind up in a suburban church where a squeeky PA system counts for strife, right?  But a bad PA system does so grate on one's ears...

My Church actually sent out surveys with the intention of conglomerating our responses into the statement, which I was grateful for.  It gave us all a chance to have a voice in the selection process, let the council take the Church's ideological temperature, so on and so forth.  

Well, at the end was this open comment block where one could write anything that one wanted to about the selection process or anything else.  I don't know if I had a bit too much beer with my buffalo wings that night or if  I just found the idea of playing the buffoon too irresistible,  but in a fit of pique I wrote "I think we should extend a call to a lesbian pastor with purple hair", and I clicked the "Submit" button.

I didn't think too much of it, honestly,  but you know how things go.  Some council member talks to his wife one night during a commercial break for Mad Men, breaking the council code of secrecy just to fill the heavy, silent air with some kind of meaningful conversation, anything.  A couple days later she tells a friend over coffee who then mentions it to someone else when the subject comes up during bible study and pretty soon you overhear a conversation about how someone in the congregation actually wants to hire a lesbian with purple hair, though no one knows who, and isn't that just...

So I am now apparently famous -- or infamous -- for really just having a laugh, though until now no one knows that it was me.  

But as I go to Church with many friends and colleagues  and as I feel it is necessary to maintain a high moral standing amongst those most imminent of persons, I find I have this incredible need begin to backpeddle, slip-slide, flip flop, and other wise dodge, duck, dip, dive, and dodge away from my previous comments.

So here it goes:  I don't think we should call a purple haired lesbian to be our next pastor.  Call me old fashioned, but I just believe in my heart of hearts that such people simply are not fit to lead a church.  I mean...purple hair, it's just simply unprofessional.  How am I supposed to take you seriously if you have purple hair?

Sorry, but you can't be my pastor. 

Purple hair may be fine if you are a punk rocker or a pole dancer or over the age of 70.  But being a pastor is a noble profession, and I expect a pastor to be have a professional bearing.  Shoes should be shined, clothes should be neat, ill-advised tattoos should be hidden, abnormally placed piercings momentarily removed.  And someone with purple hair...well, like I said, I just can't take them seriously.  They'd be giving a sermon, laying down a little Truth, and I'd just be thinking about how damn purple their hair is rather than letting the Holy Spirit guide me to a better understanding of God and Grace.

I hope I am not sounding like a bigot here.  I'm all for all the colors of the rainbow and inclusion and all that happy-happy-joy-joy bullshit.  But purple?  Purple???  I'm sorry, but that is one color of the rainbow I simply cannot abide in when it comes to being a Pastor.

So there.  Chalk up another point for Truth, Justice, and the American Way.

Photo Credit:  I think that is Katy Perry, or someone in her entourage, very seductively eating a piece of pizza while Katy was on tour in NYC.  Taken from Katy Perry's official website, where we have been informed that she is finally getting "Back to Werk".

The Bruno Mars Experiment

I was pretty astounded to find out that yesturday's blog post had 244 views. Nothing I have ever written for this blog has had had that much attention.  Even my growing cult classic, A Treatise on Naval Architecture, has only been viewed 209 times, and I think about 50 of those come from one of my nav arch co-workers.

One would think such a development would make me over-joyed.  I've managed to reach to me what is a lot of people, at last this blog might get some ground, I can gain some recognition, and I can actually write what I want to for money and quit writing Hermoine-Snape smut for the Slytherins on Ravelry.

However, I find that I am incredulous.  I can't really believe that I wrote anything that would garner 244 views in a single night (and it is very suspicious that most of the views happened between 11PM and 7AM Eastern Time.  That means either I have a huge following in Russia or there is dirty work afoot!).  I have a couple of different theories:

1.  Something is seriously wrong with Google's track-em-up devices.
2.  A crime syndicate out of Vietnam is cycling my site for some reason.
3.  There is some causality between the fact that my post was entitled "So Bruno Mars wrote 'When I was Your Man' to put his cat to sleep" and the fact that Bruno Mars is so hot right now.  I mean, everything he touches and does is like a beautiful musical equation, so simple and elegant that it makes you question the very nature of your existence.

So I am going to do a little experiment.  Using all my other posts as a control, I am going to put Bruno Mars into the title of this post and see how many hits I get.  If I get my normal 11 hits, then I know it was a fluke.  If I get an enormous amount of hits again then...

Well, at that point all we really know is that I have either arrived as a blogger or people still want to learn more about Bruno Mars (have you just noticed that in two posts promising to talk about Bruno Mars, I haven't really said anything about Bruno Mars at all?).  Or maybe that Vietnamese mafia are still interested in me.  So then I will make a third post but this time leave Bruno Mars out of the title and see how many hits I get.

That final posts, dear friends, will decide my fate.  For if I hit it big again it might be time to monetize and modernize the old blog.  If I don't its going to be time to get the band back together so we can tour some blighted post-industrial American cities in the rust belt and maybe raise the money we need to get the Tarqinio Bakery up and running again.  For I ask you this:  how can bread be bad for you if half of it is just air?

So Bruno Mars wrote "When I was Your Man" to help put his cat to sleep?

So today's history pop quiz is this:

Describe the life and musical contributions of George Friedrich Handel.  No notes.  No books.  No Wikipedia (though you are welcome to hop on to Wikipedia and see how close I was, and how much this is actually truthful).  

GO!

So George Friedrich Handel was born in Halle, a city in what would one day be Germany, around the same time as J.S. Bach.  Somehow or another he becomes a court musician for King George I of England, and that really is where our story begins.  

Now George I was brought over to be the King of England by the Parliament after the death of Queen Anne.  He's from Hanover:  he can't speak English very well, he thinks Guiness tastes like motor oil, and while he finds the larger noses of the English females simply charming he is utterly horrified at the state of English dentistry (one finds that this is a common theme throughout history).

So he's a nervous wreck.  As he gets rowed up and down the Thames on his barge from the palace to parliament and from parliament to various social engagements he finds himself obsessing over English grammer, and trying to figure out how he can get his damned subjects to put their verbs at the end of sentences as God intended.  He's losing weight.  He won't touch his beer nor his beer wench.  He can't figure out which corner of his tri-corner hat is the front one.  

In desperation, he hits upon an idea.  What if he had a group of musicians on the barge who could play music  to him so that he could forget about his cares for a while?  Relax him?  

So he calls in his head court musician, Handel, a fellow German.  And Handel writes this little ditty for him:

King George I loves it so much that he has them play it again, and again, and again, repeating the first movement incessently, the orchestra acting like the 18th century version of a CD player with the repeat button on....

And so, because the King loved to listen to the music so much while rowing around on his barge, the music became known as "Handel's Water Music Suite".

This is not the only classic work that has such an innocuous beginning.  Bach's Goldberg Variations were written for a student of his (Goldberg), who was a royal musician for a certain Prince Humperdink.  Prince Humperdink's large gambling debts and rampant syphillus tended to keep him up at night, and the only way he could fall asleep was if Goldberg played some soothing piano music in a room adjacent to his.  

But Goldberg was fast running out of material.  He hurriedly scribbled a note to his former tutor J.S. Bach and shot it out the window with a bow and arrow:

Dear Mr. Bach:

Heilige Scheiße!  I can't write music fast enough to keep this guy happy.  I had to play 100 variations on "Home on the Range" last night and I am seriously running out of fucking ideas here.  Please help me!!

                                                                                              Your Friend,

                                                                                              Goldberg

So Bach sits down and he writes a classic set of variations on a very simple theme:

It's amazing to me to think that here we have two classic pieces of music that have endured for nearly 300 years, written to entertain one royal and to put another to sleep.  I don't know how much thought Handel and Bach put into their pieces, I don't know if they were trying to write something that would endure or if they were just putting in another day at the office.  I can't help but wonder at the fact that these two men of genius were able to construct things so beautiful seemingly on a whim.

I also can't help but wonder what, if anything, from our own culture will endure, and what the stories behind their origins will be.  The closest I can think of is how Don Draper drafted his ad campaign for lucky strikes on the back of a napkin at a cocktail bar before boffing some beatnik bimbo, or how Wayne's World 2 was written in 90 minutes.  Will we be talking about Lucky Strikes in 2313? Will we remember Niki Minaj?  Will we tune into NPR to hear Ke$ha?  Will people put on their finest suit of space clothes and, after a nice space dinner with a glass of space wine, file into the space ampitheater to watch the Lunar Surface Philharmonic play the complete "Locked in the Closet" suite?

I don't know about any of that.  But I'll bet we'll be watching Wayne's World 2 every Easter on our space-o-visions.  It's a classic.  

Party on.