Biblical Rewrite

As much as she loves the nativity story, Julia doesn’t like every part of the canonical narrative, which (at least in its YouTube variant) culminates with the “mischievous” Herod trying to “steal” the baby Jesus. This doesn’t jibe with Julia’s sense of how the world ought to work, so she has altered the story in various ways. Below, read an amalgam of some of the best bits of her revisionism. If she has to be a Christian – and on Saturday, she said that she was a Christian, like Nonna and Boppa and Grandma – at least she can be a heretical one.

After Herod tells his guards to go find the holy infant, he calls them back and says that they should leave Jesus alone. Then he goes to his own house and talks to “the lady Herod lives with” and they decide to have their own baby, “because all he really wants is his own baby.” After a few minutes, “the lady Herod lives with” has a baby which they name Mary. Herod loves the baby and takes good care of her and doesn’t feel like stealing other babies anymore. Then Herod moves his castle to Bethlehem, right next to Jesus’s stable, and lives there. Sometimes, when Mary and Joseph are tired or have had “a rough day, “Herod comes by to babysit Jesus. When this happens, Jesus squeals in delight and shouts, “Hewwod! Hewwod!” Herod entertains Jesus by “falling down in a funny way” over and over. When Jesus gets hungry, Herod makes toasted pita bread with frosting and myrrh on it.

Why I Have a Scratched Cornea (Again)

1. I absent-mindedly used silicon spray, not saline solution, to clean my contacts.
2. Because I wanted to see how many different eye medications I could get. (Three and counting!)
3. I make the poor decision to act on my life-long desire to kiss a porcupine.
4. I recently led a secret Special Forces mission in western Afghanistan which included an ambush of al-Qaeda forces during a sandstorm.
5. The gods answered my prayer for the opportunity to hear the phrase “epithelial erosion” again.
6. I tried to perform LASIK on myself with a CD-player laser, a thimbleful of whiskey, and a paring knife.
7. Because after you get one scratch on your cornea, you’re forever susceptible to renewed scratches in that same spot.

The New-ish Blowing & Drifting

Welcome to the new Blowing & Drifting. I’ve shifted the blog to WordPress, for lots of mundane but important reasons:

  • Sandvox, the Mac-only application which I had been using for B&D, was getting increasingly troublesome to use, so I decided that I wouldn’t.
  • I wanted to be able to post to my blog from any computer, not just my home Mac.
  • I got sick of handling the behind-the-scenes IT wankery I’d created for myself, partly because I’m not a terribly savvy sysadmin and partly because Sandvox wasn’t making things easy on me.
  • Finally, WordPress seems pretty cool, user-friendly, and attractive.

So here we are! You can still find links to the old Blowing & Drifting – and the older, now defunct) Xferen and After School Snack blogs – in the blogroll, down at right, and I’ll set up redirects in an effort to keep any older bookmarks pointing toward this new page. But you’re of course welcome to bookmark this page or add the new RSS feed to your reader, since this is where you’ll find the new stuff.