hell and damnit

So I watched this classic Sylvester and Tweety cartoon this afternoon with Rachel, without much regard going in for its soteriology, because I crack up every time I see Sylvester starts running through his lives at the shooting gallery.

Woodenjaknowit, we're barely a minute into the cartoon when Rachel asks why heaven looks so scary. And once I explain that Sylvester didn't go to heaven, she wants to know why not, and then I have to explain that he went to hell because "he was a bad old puddy tat." Too late I'm remembering that this cartoon gave me nightmares the first time I saw it, nearly 30 years ago, and that it called into question a lot of the Pleasant Old Guy associations I had picked up from God in Sunday school.

But I'm already in too deep, and it's getting deeper by the moment, because her next question is the one that I think every parent with faith secretly dreads: Is there really a hell?

I hate the very notion of hell. Too much, I want to scream. It serves no purpose, provides no balance, comes too late to make a difference or matter. I can trot out a thousand justifications for its existence, drilled into my head so I could parrot them back so I could bypass the discomfort the doctrine always causes me. I can even provide arguments to mitigate the sheer awfulness of a world where the sun never sets and rest never comes to the weary. It's not a Dantesque place of unspeakable torments that go on day and night without stop for all eternity; it's not a place that has fired the imaginations of poets and fundamentalists, with Sisyphus pushing a rock endlessly uphill, Tantalos trying to satisfy hunger and thirst with food and drink that remain just-so-barely out of reach, or where false priests wear robes of gold to punish them for their simony.

I want to tell her that hell, if it exists, is a garbage dump where the fire never ceases to smolder, and worms never cease to chew, and that nothing in gehenna is really what it once was, but it's no use. The more fantastic images remained indelibly ingrained in our culture, and all my protestations to the contrary sound empty and trite before they clear my throat, and so they die there, unvoiced and unheard.

I hate the very notion of hell. I wish I had never heard of it.

okay, this is amusing

A week or so before the operation, Evangeline and I were making a series of trips around the area to get some chores taken care of, and to let Evangeline buy Rachel a Christmas present. As is often the case, we passed the time talking, telling jokes and singing.

Evangeline is thoroughly sold on the virtues of Bugs Bunny, so it was no surprise when we started signing -- perhaps "warbling" is the better term -- the libretto from "What's Opera, Doc?", the classic Chuck Jones spoof of Wagner's "Niebelungenlied" opera, with Elmer Fudd cast as the mighty hunter with the spear and magic helmet. (Magic helmet?) You know the one.

Well, when we got to the part where Elmer Fudd realized that his true love was the rabbit he had been hunting, and he summoned all those scourges to kill Bugs, culminating in a loud summoning of "smog," Evangeline interrupted with this observation:

"Hey, Daddy, I bet he was calling on the dragon Smaug."

It's good to see that she's been paying attention.

wonder twins

When I got older and caught the Wonder Twins in reruns, I started to wonder what would happen to Zan if he were subjected to a phase change. Suppose he's in the form of ice, and he gets caught in Superman's heat-ray vision and melts? Worse, suppose he evaporates?

That curiosity I suppose is fueled at least in part -- how's that for qualifiers? -- by an issue of "The Avengers," where Crusher Creel escapes capture by assuming the qualities of the Hudson Bay, and disappearing into the water. He later turned out to be alive (of course), but it struck me when I first read it as an odd and terrible way for a superhuman to go.

Then there's the question of whether Jayna might ever forget herself and mentally become the animal she is impersonating, as the wizards risked in Ursula LeGuinn's "Earthsea" books.

And lastly, did anyone catch Marvin's cameo in "Kingdom Come?" I missed it until it was pointed out to me, and then I couldn't stop laughing.

SpongeBob SquarePants

I finally saw SpongeBob the other day, and I have to say, I just don't get it.

It seemed about as unfunny a cartoon as I can recall, although in that sense it goes right along with a number of other contemporary cartoons like "Rugrats."

And what's the deal with this ugly animation anyway? Why does everyone have to look like they were beaten with an ugly stick for a half-hour before breakfast?

what's opera, doc?

Our daughter is a little over 2 years old, and is learning new words, skills and songs at a prodigious rate. Recently she introduced us to her newfound appreciation of Wagner's "The Ride of the Valkyries" by singing the lyrics:

Kill the wabbit!
Kill the wabbit!
Kill the wabbit!

It's a good thing I wasn't driving at the time, or I would have wrapped our car around a tree I was laughing so hard.

When it comes to funny, go for what's old

Perhaps I'm just getting sour in my old age, but I'm finding that the funny pages just aren't that funny any more.

Great strips I've read in my life include "Bloom County," with its zany and outlandish stories that skewed current events; "Calvin & Hobbes," which Bill Watterson used to elevate comic strips to an art form; and "The Far Side," with its surreal and often Kafkaesque one-panel scenarios,

The comics section of the Star Ledger is a shadow of what it used to be, and there aren't many strips I enjoy anymore. "Doonesbury" saw better art after Trudeau's 18-month hiatus, but the writing never recovered. Other strips languish under limited-joke syndrome, like Garfield's fixation on lasagna, Mondays and what a loser Jon is.

I'd say that the classic "Peanuts" should have made way for new talent when Charles Schulz died last year, but it is a cultural icon and how many children first learn to read. And besides, what's going to replace it?

"Boondocks" is more about conveying deserved anger than it is about humor, and "Mutts," while reminiscent in some ways of older comics like "Krazy Kat," just ain't funny.

The same is true of Saturday morning cartoons. If you want something side-splittingly funny, go old school

The classic "Merry Melodies" and "Looney Tunes" from Termite Terrace have aged well. The slapstick antics of Daffy and Bugs are just as funny now as they were 40 years ago. Attempts to create new Bugs cartoons in the 1980s failed miserably in my mind; you just can't duplicate Chuck Jones, Tex Avery and Friz Freleng. Classic Warner Bros. cartoons are among the best ever made. My wife and I even bought two of the tapes for our daughter to watch.

If you want quality stuff, get what was produced sixty years ago and still has name recognition.

Now get off my lawn.