Really Assinine

Back in the 80s, living in Boston, I remember ads for a local rock radio station which supposedly featured "kick ass rock and roll". Yeah, that's what I want to feel like when I listen to music: Like someone has kicked me in the behind, preferably while wearing cowboy boots with pointy toes. As Madonna might have said, "NOT!"

What is it that makes some people act as if the addition of the word "ass" makes any communications superior to saying the same thing without that word? Why say "he has a big house" when you can say "he has a big ass house"? Never mind that it takes more verbiage and adds absolutely nothing in terms of actual information, in comparison with simply saying "he has a big house".

Here in Bellingham, we have a coffee bar called The Black Drop. Naturally, their slogan is "Kick Ass coffee".

You know, whenever I hear someone using the word "ass" gratuitously, I get a mental image of Beavis and Butthood, giggling like imbeciles. "Hey, Beavis, I just said ass!" (Yuk, yuk, yuk.)

Now, if you're using the word ass because you're talking about the animal known as an ass (as in the phrases "Indian wild ass" or "African wild ass"), I'm willing to cut you some slack. But do a Google search on the word ass, and you will find a surprising (or maybe unsurprising) number of porn sites. I find, for instance, a site under the heading "The 50 Hottest White Girls With Ass". Hmm, something tells me that that site is not going to have information about Caucasion females who own pet donkeys.

So I say (to anyone who cares what I think, which is not very many people), "Enough with the stupid ass references already. Your constant use of that word makes you sound juvenile."

Psychic Danger Zones

Back in the 70s, when I was in high school, one of the people I knew when I regularly attended the New Wine Coffeehouse in Springfield, Missouri was Jennifer Lytle. She probably could have been quite cute, even sexy, but she almost invariably showed up at New Wine wearing an old green army jacket and blue jeans, and it was clear to me that her aesthetic choices had been shaped a lot by the hippie movement which was then popular. (Her hair always looked a bit as if she had just gotten out of bed.) But Jennifer was a committed Christian, so it might have been more appropriate to describe her (and a lot of my other friends, for that matter) as a "Jesus freak".

Jennifer told us that before she became a Christian, she'd been heavily involved in a thing she called "astral projection". She was convinced that she had opened up her spirit to demonic forces when she did these things. I had no idea whether or not that was true, but it always caused me to be wary of anything involving that practice, just as I was (and still am) wary of other occult practices, such as reading Tarot cards, reading palms, etc. My knowledge of the scriptures is far from exhaustive, but I am inclined to believe that all such things fall into the category of "soothsaying", which the Bible forbids.

Jesus came into the world to save the world, not to condemn it, so I am not here to condemn anyone if he or she participates in such things, but for what it's worth, I would like to offer the following advice: If you are currently messing around with things which involve the manipulation of the human psyche, be very careful. The spirit world is nothing to toy with. Your soul is more important than any other thing you possess, and your eternal future is not something to throw away just because you thought something sounded like it might be fun.