Timely Questions for Reverend Harold Camping

Dear Reverend Harold Camping:

You must be very busy, what with the Rapture coming tomorrow and all, but I’m hoping for just a minute of your time. Actually “a minute of your time” is exactly what I want to ask you about. Because what’s really extraordinarily clever about your Bible calculations is that you’ve not only figured out God’s super-secret plan to Rapture the Earth on May 21, 2011, but also that he’s going to do it one time zone at a time. According to press accounts of your discovery:

the massive doomsday earthquake will start at the International Date Line before moving west. New Zealand . . . will get hit first – at 6 p.m. local time. And then that wave of destruction will roll around the world, wreaking havoc at 6 p.m. in each time zone.

Not only was it smart of God to come up with that cool plan for phased destruction--I mean, Rapturing the whole Earth at once would be kind of unwieldy, especially the Christian parts where there are so many souls to collect--but it’s especially neat how he wrote down the whole plan in code all those thousands of years ago in the Bible. Pretty funny that he tried to throw us off the trail with that whole “but of that day and hour knoweth no man.” He sure fooled me, but he didn’t fool Harold Camping!

I do have a couple of questions, though.

No, I’m not going to ask “what about Daylight Saving Time.” Please. Obviously because God knows everything, he knew that we humans were going to invent Daylight Saving Time, so he factored that into his Bible code.

And same goes for the whole time zones / standard time concept. Sure, in Biblical times and for practically all of human history time was reckoned locally based on the position of the Sun. But again, I’m sure God foresaw that one day there would be railroads, telegraphs, and a corresponding need for uniformity. And because His plan was to Rapture Boston and Cincinnati at exactly the same moment, instead of the 52 minutes apart that 6 p.m. would occur in those cities if we still used “Local Apparent Solar Time” like Abraham and Jesus, God just coded that into the Bible, too.

But here’s the thing. Not to second-guess God or anything, but actually doing it the old fashioned way would kind of make more sense. Because you can totally see how a continuously moving wave of destruction, travelling at an equatorial velocity of just over 1500 feet per second so as to hit each spot at “true” 6 p.m., would work.

Whereas the whole-time-zones-at-a-time model presents some difficulties. Take for example a town that straddles the Texas / New Mexico border. When the Doomsday earthquake flattens everything on the Texas side, will it be made up of some kind of special shockwaves that know to stop at the state line? And what if it turns out that I’m one of the saved, and I get Raptured while straddling the border? Do I risk the right half of my soul being “left behind” for an hour?

And actually, speaking of Daylight Saving Time, did God make clear how your calculations should deal with places that don’t observe it? Like if I’m in Arizona do I get an extra hour, even though Armageddon is already in full swing due North in Utah? But if I step onto the Navajo reservation, which does observe Daylight Saving Time, then I’m toast? What if I’m a member of the Hopi nation, so my land is within the Navajo reservation, but my tribe keeps with the rest of Arizona in not observing Daylight Saving Time? Supposing I’m off the reservation at 5:15, and I want to get home before the Rapture to make sure I didn’t leave the oven on? Will God understand that I’m only passing through Navajo land to get to the Hopi section, and give me the extra 45 minutes?

Even apart from Daylight Saving issues, it seems like the Rapture is going to have to do some jumping around. If you look at a world time zone map, it’s pretty complicated. For all kinds of political reasons you’ve got places where it can be 6 p.m. already even though somewhere to the East still calls it 5 p.m. (Or 5:30 or even 5:15.)

And then you’ve got places like Kashmir, where no one can agree whether it’s part of India (GMT + 5:30) or Pakistan (GMT + 5:00). Do the Hindus get Raptured half an hour before the Muslims? I mean, I understand they’re all going to Hell anyway because they haven’t accepted Jesus, but it would be useful to know.

Also what about at the South Pole? By convention, Amundsen Scott Station uses New Zealand time, but technically speaking the Pole is in every time zone. From what I’ve heard, that place can become a den of iniquity for the “winter-over” crew, owing to the gender imbalance and prolonged isolation in darkness.  So the schedule on which their souls will be called to account is not just an academic question.

And of course there’s the International Space Station to consider. Here we see why it was definitely smart for God to choose standard instead of solar time. Can you imagine if he had to Rapture the astronauts 16 times in one day?! My only question is whether He’ll use Greenwich Mean Time, which the station normally follows, or adjust for the crew’s current temporary shift to Space Shuttle Endeavour’s Mission Elapsed Time. Your Bible calculations take that into account, right?

I would appreciate the courtesy of a prompt response to these questions, preferably by 6 p.m. tomorrow. 6 p.m. my time, I mean.

Gilbert Gottfried and the Discourse on Disaster

A Portrait of Gilbert Gottfried with a Dead Aflac Duck
on His Head by Dan Lacey (www.faithmouse.com). 
Used with permission of the artist.

As the world confronts escalating conflict and looming nuclear disaster, the Holy Prepuce has been ruminating on a more consequential matter: the Gilbert Gottfried sacking.

Why, exactly, did “tweeting” a series of earthquake / tsunami jokes get Gottfried summarily canned as the voice of AFLAC? Gottfried, after all, famously broke the ice at a post-9-11 Friar’s Club roast by recounting “The Aristocrats,” the classic improvised litany of incest, scatophilia, and a rotating menu of other horribles. So it’s not as if AFLAC was allergic to controversial material.

I suspect that Gottfried ran up against an unwritten rule of comedy: disaster jokes are not allowed to have identifiable authors.

The re-telling of disaster jokes is permissible because they are both ubiquitous and anonymous. Anyone of my generation could tell you, for example, how we knew Christa McAuliffe had dandruff, what “NASA” stands for, and why there were no showers on the Challenger. Elliot Orring’s “Jokes and the Discourse on Disaster” (1987) collects fourteen such examples, and I found no more than a handful unfamiliar twenty-five years after the Challenger explosion. Some were undoubtedly adapted from prior maritime or aviation accidents; several I have since heard re-purposed for Princess Diana or 9-11. Folklorists collect this material: Bill Ellis’s “A Model for Collecting and Interpreting World Trade Center Disaster Jokes” (October 5, 2001) identifies twelve discreet “cycles” addressing a range of events including the Kennedy assassination, the Jonestown suicides, and the Lockerbie PanAm 103 bombing.

The universality of these jokes allows us to rationalize their creation as an instinctive defense mechanism with a plausible genesis in evolutionary psychology. The impulse to detach from tragedy through humor serves as a counterbalance to our empathy and attachment, traits essential to social animals but paralyzing if unchecked in times of crisis. Laugh today about yesterday’s sabre-tooth tiger attack and you pull yourself together to hunt mastodon, eat, and live to pass along your genes.

When these jokes seem to rise from the zeitgeist, the telling itself can become the primary gag, the observational meta-joke that human beings are sick bastards who find this funny. It works because we’re all in this together: I’ve heard this one, you’ve heard that one, someone like us must have come up with this; everyone’s responsible so no one is.

But when Gottfried tweets Japan jokes as a professional comedian, there’s him and there’s us. We have no ownership, no liability as the kind of people who think this stuff up. He’s the sick bastard who finds this funny, we’re decent folk who need to take a stand against this trash.

I also think Gottfried is a victim of the Comedian On Twitter syndrome. Social media’s low-cost marketing comes at a price for comedians: fans expect free, instant funny. And so the temptation is to brain-dump ideas that might otherwise never see the light of day.

Looking through Gottfried’s tweets, and putting aside any question of taste, most of them are poorly constructed and don’t really work as jokes. A few would be salvageable with editing. One or two seem to stand on their own:

I asked a girl in Japan to have sex with me. She said “okay, but you'll have to sleep in the wet spot.”

This would be a decent mid-set gag, a supplemental laugh on an established subject. It trades on a mixing of taboos: sex and disaster, but in an understated, minimally-graphic fashion. It turns on clever incongruities of type, number, and scale. And it’s a rather sweet homage to its “sleep in the wet spot” precursor jokes, those Sexual Revolution-era meditations on negotiating casual sex and its aftermath in that brave new gender-equal world.

Here is the best of the lot:

I was talking to my Japanese real estate agent. I said “is there a school in this area.” She said “not now, but just wait."

The central equivocation is actually a stroke of genius: the ambiguity in meaning is possible only in the apocalyptic conditions of this specific moment. Delivering the punchline in the agent’s voice furthers the uncertainty: Does she intend the meaning we perceive? If so, does she take Gottfried’s question so literally as to assume a flotsam schoolhouse would meet his needs? What is her attitude toward the catastrophe if she is breezily offering its consequences as a selling point?

The fundamentals are also solid: a classic setup-line-punchline, with a strong core incongruity between mundane and extraordinary elements. I award bonus points for the dependence on visual imagination, generating dual meaning through reliance on imagery highly specific to the present moment when footage of the deluge is seared into our collective consciousness.

Indeed, the imagery invoked softens the joke by substituting masonry for human flesh. Elliot Orring points out that a defining feature of the Challenger disaster was the “shield[ing]” of “the view of that human disaster miles above the earth . . . by flame and the opaque wall of the shuttle cabin,” whereas “beyond these speakable images of flame and falling debris lay the imaginable but unspeakable images of horrific trauma and mutilation.” Many Challenger jokes operated, Orring argues, by “forc[ing] us to confront what lies behind the speakable media images that are created or manipulated for our consumption.”

The disaster in Japan was not so antiseptic: cameras covered every angle of the destruction, making blanket censorship of death impossible. Gottfried’s text in some fashion works the reverse of a Challenger joke. Instead of laying bare an obscured mayhem, it renders the devastation more palatable by focusing on a cartoonish inanimate object, without speculation as to what could lie inside.

Pre-Twitter, Gottfried might have crossed out five of his ideas, tried the rest at a small club on a Tuesday night, and wound up with the “school” bit as the one piece of usable material. It’s an excellent joke, standing alone, whose merits may render the subject matter forgivable. But by surrounding this pearl with an unvarnished barrage of lesser attempts, Gottfried came across as desperate for laughs, and his use of the subject exploitative.

I’m a tough crowd.

With Bonus CD-ROM!

The Holy Prepuce has been remiss of late in updating this blog, but hopes to make it up to you with this last-minute holiday gift suggestion, discovered while visiting the Saint Louis Science Center:


That's right, it's the Columbia Accident Investigation Report with Bonus CD-ROM!

Runner-Up Teachers in Space

Too young to wax nostalgic for the Kennedy Assassination, my generation's childhood "I remember where I was when..." moment was of course the 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger explosion that claimed the life of "Teacher in Space" Christa McAuliffe.

I recall processing through my elementary school hallway that January day, past a line of younger students abuzz with the news: "the Space Shuttle blew up!" "Oh, sure," I chuckled, "and that teacher got killed." My disbelief was forgivable, in light of the popularity afforded to the dead-teacher motif in schoolyard humor. (Viz. such classic ditties as Joy to the World, the School Burned Down (And All the Teachers Died) and the redoubtable Glory, Glory, Hallelujah, Teacher Hit Me With a Ruler cycle.)

Flash forward nearly 22 years, and McAuliffe's original backup, Barbara Morgan, is preparing to fly on Shuttle Endeavour this evening. One must allow Morgan props on her cojones, given the 100% historical casualty rate for Teachers in Space.

As the launch approaches, more than half of the 119 original Teacher in Space program finalists have gathered at Cape Canaveral. According to a CNN feature, many of the finalists since "have worked in the aerospace industry, created space camps and established schools with a focus on science and technology." Gail Klink, a finalist from Ohio, has built a two-decade strong career as a motivational speaker on the subject of "launching your life."

I may be the worst person in the world for saying this, but doesn't it seem like the Challenger blowing up was the best thing that ever happened to these people? If the mission had gone off as planned, the Teacher in Space program would have been forgotten in a matter of months as the expensive publicity stunt that it was, a new coat of paint on a manned space program long since bereft of any credible scientific purpose.

And this field of also-rans would have been packed back off into obscurity with their commemorative plastic orbiters. Nobody would still be paying $39.95 to hear some Reagan-era runner-up explain why her honorable mention in a Cold War propaganda contest should inspire the audience to follow their dreams of mortgaging the house and starting that scrapbooking business.

Check your O-rings, Barbara Morgan; careers are waiting to be reborn from your solid rocket fuel flames.

Flight Status: Flight Risk

Rule # 1 of successful blogging: add value to information. To justify his bandwidth, the blogger must create, discover, or improve knowledge. And so I am faced with a problem. Clearly, today's post must be about yesterday's NASA love triangle fiasco. The problem is that the story already exists, everyone already knows it, and, definitionally, one cannot improve on the most awesome thing that has ever happened.

No, there is no point in going over the details of how Astronaut Lisa Marie Nowak, Navy Captain and mother of three, became the rival of space program engineer Colleen Shipman for the affections of fellow Astronaut Bill Oefelein. Nor how, after learning that Shipman would take a commercial flight from Houston to Orlando, Nowak drove the 850 miles to intercept her, wearing a diaper to avoid bathroom breaks. Nor... no wait, must go over that one: wearing a diaper.

And there's no need to describe how Nowak, sporting a wig and trench coat, pepper-sprayed Shipman in the Blue Satellite Parking lot of Orlando International Airport. Nor how police found Nowak stuffing the wig, trench coat and a BB gun into a trash can, while carrying a duffle bag that contained $600, a brand-new steel mallet and buck knife, and "3-4 feet of rubber tubing." Nor that Nowak had apparently ridden a shuttle from the airport's LaQuinta Inn, where police would later search her car and discover latex gloves, Shipman's itinerary as printed from Oefelein's computer, detailed maps of the airport grounds, and a list of items including the wig, the knife, and something called "ammo 9."

What can I possibly add to this? Oh sure, there's the obvious "flight risk" joke, which I thought myself pretty clever to have come up with until Jay Leno used it last night.

At least I can be helpful and provide you with links to the important documents: the initial charging affidavit, the second charging affidavit (not thinking the attempted murder is going to stick, guys), and Shipman's affidavit in support of her application for a protective order.

And, for what it's worth, a few observations: First, this story is made all the better by the fact that its players are not just among the scores of "Astronauts" that NASA trains but never puts in space. Nowak flew on Discovery last July and is considered an expert in operating the shuttle's robot arm, and Oefelein piloted the same orbiter just two months ago. Fewer than 500 human beings have ever flown in space, and two of them are involved in a love triangle that necessitated the use of rubber tubing, a steel mallet, and the LaQuinta Inn airport shuttle.

Second, the common denominator in all sensational crime seems to be poor problem-solving skills. Take Scott Peterson's problems, for example: failing marriage, affairs, mounting debt. Good problem-solving skills solution: get a divorce, declare bankruptcy. Scott's solution: tell new girlfriend he was a globe-trotting widower, kill Lacy two weeks later and dump her body in the Berkely Marina during a Christmas Eve "fishing trip," then phone new girlfriend from New Year's Eve candle-light vigil for missing wife, claiming to be in Paris. I can't say what would have been the best solution to the Nowak/Shipman rivalry, but I'm guessing it didn't involve diapers.

Third, speaking of diapers, I might point out that Nowak benefited from years of NASA research into adult waste collection garments. The story of space flight is in many ways the story of human excrement containment engineering. When Grissom and Young blew the hatch after a week in space on the first Gemini capsule, a rescue diver actually passed out from the stench. But today, an Astronaut can drive non-stop from Houston to Orlando swaddled in odor-free absorbency.

Finally, how cool must it have been for Officer William Becton, no doubt used to filling out "unemployed" or the like on his charging affidavit forms, to type in the following: