Best Goofmas Evar!
Tiki Santa (with a little help from the beautiful and talented Mrs. Bali Hai) stopped at our house on Goofmas Eve, and left this fantastic carved tiki post from Tiki Master! I had one empty spot left in my bar, and this fearsome effigy fits the bill perfectly.
Click on the thumbnail to see a larger version.
I'll be dancing around it in my grass skirt later this evening, but in the meantime, I'm working on my 2nd mug of Glögg in hopes that Britt Eklund soon will be here.
We had quite a feast yesterday: a classic beef roast with carrots and mashed potatoes, along with a very chocolatey pecan-rum cake that I whipped up (I was all out of Grand Marnier and Maribou Mules). I also uncorked a bottle of 2004 Barossa Valley Woodcutters Shiraz that complemented the roast perfectly. With the cake, I drank the last of my Bonny Doon Bouteille Call, a sinfully delicious portified Syrah.
After dinner, we took the kids to see The Chronicles of Narnia. We enjoyed it thoroughly. The CGI work was superb, especially Aslan, and if its message of family, friendship, responsibility, and self-sacrifice for the common good makes it horrible right-wing, fanatical fundamentalist propaganda, as that insufferably self-righteous twit, Polly Toynbee, suggested in the Guardian recently, then I say we need more of it, if only to twist her knickers into even more of a Gordian Knot of self-loathing than they already are.
Comments
What the Narnia detractors seem to forget is that the tale is an allegory. Certainly, the torture, death, and resurrection of Aslan is a stand-in for that of Christ, but without someone pointing out the resemblance, those events stand on their own.
Posted by: Jonathan K. Cohen | December 28, 2005 3:01 PM
I seem to recall reading somewhere that C.S. Lewis actually denied he'd written the book as an allegory, although I find that a bit hard to believe.
Posted by: MrBaliHai | December 28, 2005 4:43 PM
Looks like an allegory, smells like an allegory, reads like an allegory... authorial intention aside, I think it's an allegory.
Posted by: Jonathan K. Cohen | December 28, 2005 9:54 PM
I'll have to dig up the actual quote from Lewis, but I suspect what he was getting at was that the while the subplot of Aslan's redemption of Edmund is almost certainly a Christian allegory, the rest of the book isn't; it's a conglomeration of Greek and Norse myth, Beatrix Potter, and peculiarly English anachronisms.
Posted by: MrBaliHai | December 28, 2005 10:54 PM
I am in the wrong business. Me make ugly faces on wodden sticks. Sell to rich americans.
Posted by: orangeguru | December 29, 2005 9:25 AM
Hmm, yes. I am trying to visualize Bavarian Tiki, but all I can see are the ugly faces of Thomas Gottschalk and Karl Valentin...;-)
Posted by: MrBaliHai | December 29, 2005 9:40 AM
I think yours may be a more generous (and less reductive) reading of the book
Posted by: jkcohen | December 29, 2005 10:34 AM
I can level a lot of valid criticisms against the Narnia series: they're morally simplistic, unevenly written, and the characters are not very well fleshed out.
However, I don't feel the need to project my own hang-ups about religion onto a relatively benign and well-loved series of children's books, as Toynbee and Phillip Pullman have. In Pullman's case, I find his attacks on C.S. Lewis incredibly disingenuous since his own childrens' series, His Dark Materials, is unabashed anti-religous propaganda without even the thinnest cloaking of allegory to disguise it.
Posted by: MrBaliHai | December 29, 2005 11:08 AM