L.B.: Losing Chloe

Left Behind, pp. 400-409

Buck Williams isn't intended to be perceived here as the ever-present, unshakeable, stalker-pursuer of Chloe Steele. That role is reserved for God. We're supposed to see Chloe here as chased by the very "Hound of Heaven." God has tracked her down, worn her down and now, at last, we come to Chloe's big conversion scene.

Then again, "conversion" may be too grand a word for what happens to the converts in Left Behind. None of them seems to be converted to anything. They do not become followers of Jesus, receiving and bestowing grace in pursuit of restoring right relationships with God and neighbor. Instead, they merely become believers in a series of propositions about "the Antichrist and all." Unlike Rayford and (shortly) Buck, Chloe undergoes a change in personality following her recitation of the magic words, but the change is entirely one of subtraction, not of addition. She ceases to be "independent" (the word is used more than once as a pejorative) in her thinking, becoming mindlessly receptive and obedient. Her coming to faith is not portrayed as the conclusion of an intellectual quest for meaning by a carefully thoughtful young woman, but rather as the abandonment and rejection of that intellect, that quest, that care and thoughtfulness.

Chloe's "conversion" is thus one of the saddest events in a book full of woes and calamities. We met her more than 300 pages ago as the spunky Stanford undergrad who somehow managed to transverse half the country, on her own, during the chaos of the aftermath of The Event. She alone voices the reasonable objection that the "God" of LB seems arbitrary, vindictive and cruelly pleased to be inflicting suffering. When that objection never gets a response, she has enough spunk to walk out of Bruce Barnes' evasive and shallow "skeptics meeting." And she alone sticks up for the badly mistreated Hattie Durham. All of that makes her one of the few even slightly realistic characters in the first half of the book, one of the only characters we can, or want to, relate to.

Yet after just a few days under her father's roof, Chloe begins to change. The brave, curious, skeptical character accidentally sketched earlier is replaced with a cowering, whining child, spending days at a time sitting alone in her room, doing nothing, constantly on the verge of unconsolable tears. The change is so stark that it seems to parallel the warning signs of abuse or assault that I was taught to be on the lookout for when I worked with teenagers. The abuse, in Chloe's case, is occurring at the hands of the authors.

Her conversion scene is intermixed with more of what passes as romantic-comedy banter between Chloe and Buck. She is charmed, moved and won over by his creepy seat-next-to-hers surprise, which she takes not just as a gesture of his affection, but of God's. The first thing she says to him is, "Have you ever received a direct answer to prayer?"

Buck shot her a double take. "I thought your dad was the praying member of your family."

"He is," she said. "But I just tried out my first one in years, and God answered it."

"You prayed I would sit next to you?"

"Oh, no, I never would have dreamed of anything that impossible. How did you do it, Buck?"

Yes, the same girl who nine days ago got from San Jose to Chicago while all commercial flights were grounded is now in awe of Buck's seat-booking skills. But let's get back to the wet fleece on the dry ground and the kind of faith that expects and requires a "direct answer to prayer":

She took his hand again. "Buck, this is too special. This is the nicest thing anyone's done for me in a long time."

"You said you were going to miss me, but I didn't do it only for you. I've got business in Chicago."

She giggled and let go again. "I wasn't talking about you, Buck, though this is sweet. I was talking about God doing the nice thing for me."

They both repeat their admiration for how sincere, serious and compelling her father's spiel had been the night before:

"If I didn't know better, Buck, I would have thought he was trying to convince you personally rather than just answering your questions."

"I'm not so sure he wasn't."

"Did it offend you?"

"Not at all, Chloe. To tell you the truth, he was getting to me."

Chloe fell silent and shook her head. When she finally spoke she was nearly whispering, and Buck had to lean toward her to hear. He loved the sound of her voice. "Buck," she said, "he was getting to me, too, and I don't mean my dad."

OK, I don't have the power to enforce this, but I'm declaring a moratorium on any further use of dramatic whispering until Jenkins demonstrates a better understanding of when it is and isn't effective. All this whispering makes me feel like I'm watching an M. Night Shyamalan film.

"Too bizarre," he said. "I was up half the night thinking about this."

"It won't be long for either of us, will it?" she said. Buck didn't respond, but he knew what she meant.

I appreciate that the last lines there were intended to be hopeful. She means that their salvation is close at hand. But those lines don't seem to convey that. They seem more full of unspoken dread and foreboding, like something Dana Wynter would have said to Kevin McCarthy while hopelessly trying to stay awake in that cave outside of town.

"When do I get to be the answer to prayer?" he prodded.

"Oh, right. I was sitting there at dinner with my dad pouring his guts out to you, and I suddenly realized why he wanted me to be there ... He wanted me to get it indirectly. And I did. I didn't hear how he started because Hattie and I were in the ladies' room, but I had probably heard that before. When I got back, I was transfixed. ..."

So it was the ladies' room. For half an hour. The ladies' departure from the table was presented as a significant and meaningful event. We weren't told where they were going or what they were up to in their absence. It seemed intended as a mystery. Now here, nearly 20 pages later, we're off-handedly informed that they were just in the ladies' room, which doesn't account for either the length of their absence or for the dramatic buildup surrounding their departure.

This sort of thing happens enough in LB that you sometimes get the sensation you're reading one of those group-written take-a-turn stories in which each writer contributes succeeding paragraphs. Also, what is it with LaHaye & Jenkins and rest rooms? (Feel free to supply your own Larry Craig joke here, but let the easy ones pass.)

"It wasn't that I was hearing anything new. It was new to me when I heard it from Bruce Barnes and saw that videotape, but my dad showed such urgency and confidence. Buck, there's no other explanation for those two guys in Jerusalem, is there, except that they have to be the two witnesses talked about in the Bible?"

Buck nodded.

That's nodded in agreement, I think, not nodded off to sleep because he's exhausted and Coke is a woefully inadequate caffeine-distribution device and here we go again with the Steeles and their sleep-inducing obsession with the Jerusalem street preachers, although the latter would have made more sense.

It's easy to miss the subtle dismissal above of Irene Steele. Chloe hears her manly man father's urgent and confident presentation of prophecy mania and she's shaken to the core. But she doesn't even remember that every word he said was something she had heard previously, over and over again for years, from her mother. "It was new to me when I heard it from Bruce Barnes," she said. No, it wasn't. I'm not sure whether the authors, too, have forgotten all about Irene's years of obsessive witnessing to her husband and daughter, or whether they're just suggesting that a woman can't be an evangelist. Either way, Irene turns out to have been so inept and ineffectual at spreading her prophecy gospel that it's a wonder she even qualified to be Raptured.

Next we get another 20-pages-later explanation, confirming what I'd pretty much expected about why Chloe was -- unnoticed and without explanation at the time -- crying at dinner the night before:

"So, Dad and God were getting to me, but I wasn't ready yet. I was crying because I love him so much and because it's true. It's all true, Buck, do you know that?"

"I think I do, Chloe."

"But still I couldn't talk to my dad about it. I didn't know what was in my way. I've always been so blasted independent. I knew he was frustrated with me, maybe disappointed, and all I could do was cry. I had to think, to try to pray, to sort it out ..."

Curse all that blasted independence and thinking and sorting things out! We -- thankfully -- are spared an explicit portrayal of Chloe's prayer of conversion, but if the pages leading up to it are any indication, these are the very things she confesses as sins and repents of.

"I've been convinced," she said, "but I'm still fighting. I'm supposed to be an intellectual. I have critical friends to answer to. Who's going to believe this? Who's going to think I haven't lost my mind?"

Intellectual pride can be a sin, of course, but it is not the only sin. Nor is intellectual pride and having an intellect the same thing. Yet Chloe, like Rayford before her, treats the very possession and use of her intellect as the foremost of her sins. This form of confession strikes me as itself a violation of the first commandment: "Love the Lord your God with all your mind."

"I got on this plane, desperate for some closure, pardon the psychobabble, and I started wondering if God answers your prayers before you're ... um, you know, before you're actually a ..."

"Born-again Christian," Buck offered.

"Exactly. I don't know why that's so hard for me to say. ... I prayed and I think God answered. ...

"Chloe, what exactly did you pray for?"

"Oh, well, the prayer itself wasn't that big of a deal, until it was answered. I just told God I needed a little more. I felt bad that all the stuff I'd heard and all that I knew from my dad wasn't enough. I just prayed really sincerely and said I would appreciate it if God could show me personally that he cared, that he knew what I was going through, and that he wanted me to know he was there."

And then she turned and found Buck sitting next to her. "It was as if God knew better than I did that there was no one I would rather see today than you," she tells him, and gives God full credit for a direct and specific answer to prayer.

So this is what it takes to impress her. The Event and the Israel Miracle didn't stir her in the least. The Trip and Die Guys she found impressive, but not sufficient. But this -- this tangential-at-best maybe-response to the vaguest of vague requests -- this she treats as proof beyond any reasonable doubt. This conversion of Chloe's would make very little sense in any other setting. In this setting, in this story, it makes no sense at all.

She announces her intention to recite the magic words and invites Buck to join her, prompting this bit of dialogue that reads like it was lifted from a Very Special Episode of Blossom:

Buck hesitated. "Don't take this personally, Chloe, but I'm not ready."

"What more do you need? ... Oh, I'm sorry, Buck. ... If you're not ready, you're not ready."

It's here that Chloe has the flight attendant summon her father to hear her "extremely good news." We cut back to Rayford's point of view because this is how Jenkins works: If Chloe sends her father a message, the next scene has to be of her father receiving that same message. This is part of his secret formula for cramming a 200-page novel into a mere 468 pages. He really could have skipped the three-paragraph detour into Rayford's perspective here, and we'll skip most of it too, except for the first sentence --

Rayford was manually flying the plane as a diversion when his senior flight attendant gave him the message.

-- just so we can do our best Butthead impression. "Heh heh. Heh. Heh. He said manual diversion." (Juvenile, yes, but the opening sentences of the book -- "With his fully loaded 747 on autopilot ..." -- introduced the jumbo jet as surrogate penis motif, so don't blame me.)

We quickly return to Buck's POV, which is the next best thing to fading to black for sparing us from the intimacies of Chloe's spiritual ecstasy.

[Buck] peeked back at Steele with his daughter, engaged in intense conversation and then praying together. Buck wondered if there was any airline regulation against that.

Buck Williams may not yet be ready to declare himself a born-again RTC, but he's already acquired their persecution complex. There must be an airline regulation against praying -- probably even a federal law -- because, you know, Christians in America are so often made to suffer for their faith. Those first-century Christians had it so easy by comparison. That's why John's Apocalypse wasn't written for or about them, you know, but for and about us 20th- 21st-century American Christians. And only us 21st-century American Christians.

Comments

[Jake]

Lucia:
The answer turns out to be four words, or rather three with one repeated. The first two are "suck up."

If you wouldn't mind elaborating, I'm completely at a loss as to what the missing word is.

[Spalanzani]

jamoche: "Why am I reminded of Zapp Branigan disabling the autopilot on the starship Titanic because he didn't think the programmed course was interesting enough?"

I think you mean the Heart of Gold.

[Freelance Physicist]

Jake: I assumed it was "Shut up."

Spalanzani: The Heart of Gold always took interesting paths by design (and was never sucked into a black hole). Jamoche had it right.

[abanterer]

Hey, been reading this since the beginning years ago. In that time, I got married, and it's a ritual for me to read your stuff aloud, to my wife, because we love it so much.

And as I read this one, I was surprised at how whiny my own voice became as I emoted around Chloe's words. You hit it right on the head, she went from at least a marginal character to a caricature, overnight!

Dear God, I hates me a Jenkins today! I know punishment via prayer is wrong, but I want Jenkins to bite his tongue and lisp for a week now.

[burgundy]

Jake: I assumed it was "Shut up."

I assumed it was "suck dick." On consideration, I think both are equally fitting for the mindset in question, but yours is more likely to actually have been published.

[Spalanzani]

Crap. I saw 'Starship Titanic', and my mind somehow read 'Zapp Branigan' as 'Zaphod Beeblebrox'. See, there is a ship called the Starship Titanic in the Hitchhikers universe as well, but it suffered Spontanous Massive Existence Failure years and years before the events of the book, meaning Zaphod was never on it. I forgot about the Futurama episode. Maybe I need more sleep.

[cjmr's husband]

True Fans know that the Starship Titanic had no designer, being run by Titania, Leovinus' brainchild.

[Hibryd]

So Buck literally God's gift to women?

I LOLed.

Actually, my theory was that Buck surprise/stalks every woman he's ever gone on a date with, and that's why he's never had a serious girlfriend in 30 years. Poor newly-brainless Chloe is just the first to perceive it as divine intervention.

[yesteray]

she's giving God credit for Buck's actions

Buck's dick is God's instrument.

[Spalanzani]

cjmr's husband: "True Fans know that the Starship Titanic had no designer, being run by Titania, Leovinus' brainchild."

But it did have a designer...Leovinus. Unless you meant captain, but it had one of those too, he/she/it just didn't actually steer the ship or serve any real function.

[cjmr's husband]

*argh* I meant pilot.

I wish I could remember the captain's job description.

[pepperjackcandy]

I assumed it was "suck dick."

Me, too.

[Cyllan]

I assumed it was "suck dick."
I'd gone for the slightly more polite "Suck him" but I fear "shut up" is the more correct answer.

[Raj]

Today's forums (or, as Rush Limbaugh might say, "fori") remind me of the following lines from an episode of "Rocko's Modern Life":

"I am The Cheese. I am the best character in this cartoon. I am better than The Salami and The Bologna combined."

[JessicaR]

When ever we get an airplane/airport scene I'm reminded of Fearless. And how that movie is about a man who experiences a traumatic even in flight and this his struggle to come to terms with it and his search for god. Only that film does it a million times better. I'll give this to LB it's great for reminding me about much better books or movies on the same themes I need to take a look at again.

[damnedyankee]

Funny, there was also a Starship Titanic on the last Doctor Who Christmas special...

[Karen]

That's because "love," at least in this context, doesn't mean to them what it does to you. The love that women (and children) are alleged to need is very close to custodial care, and the "respect" that men are supposed to be accorded in return is very close to fear.

I couldn't help but think that the 'love' they were discussing was more like what I feel for my pets than for other humans. FWIW, I think even custodial caregivers would have more human regard for the wishes and dignity of end-stage dementia patients than these men are supposed to give to their wives.

[damnedyankee]

I occasionally check out RTC women's websites because I have some kind of severe brain defect, which is only made worse by the advice on said websites.

For the love of all that's holy, stay well away from Lisa ("Blair" from The Facts of Life) Whelchel's website.

It will kill your brain cells and curdle your coffee.

[Karen]

Been there, dy, been there. It's sooooo. . . . something. The one I really can't abide is the Duggar family. All those poor girls with the calico and the Jesus hair. And the dreadful recipes, all of which could have been the subject of many posts on Tuesday's thing about poverty and obesity.

[Lucia]

Burgundy and pepperjackcandy have it right, only I render it "suck off" for the parallel prepositions. The book is nowhere near that coarse, nor that succinct; that's my free translation of 100+ pages of, sorry, but the word does fit in this case, psychobabble.

I have a dear friend who is a fundamentalist Christian; she sincerely believes that God micromanages her life, to the point of, for example, making sure all the traffic lights are green so that she can get home as fast as possible when she's tired and not feeling too great. I can well understand the attraction, especially if (as in her case) you have more serious health issues than any one human being should have to deal with. And in a normal week you don't get many omens, so you work with traffic lights or seating plans or whatever you have. But against the backdrop of the Event, this overinterpretation looks very silly.

[burgundy]

she sincerely believes that God micromanages her life, to the point of, for example, making sure all the traffic lights are green so that she can get home as fast as possible when she's tired and not feeling too great

My father went through a period of... what shall I call it?...crystal-sucking hippie spiritualism? That will do. Anyway, I think he's out of it now.

A few years ago, he went to Belgium to meet up with this guy he met on-line (no, really.) And he was telling me about their first embrace and the rainbow that formed right at that moment and everything feeling right and signs and blah blah blah.

When he returned from Belgium, he brought with him three boxes of absolutely fabulous chocolate, one for me, one for my brother, and one for him. Two 250g boxes and one 500g box. He meant the 500g box for himself (and I should perhaps mention here that he has multiple health problems, including Type II diabetes), but accidentally opened and consumed from one of the smaller ones. So he gave the big one to me. During that same visit, he asked for some of the chocolates from my box, and I jokingly replied that he'd given them to me, and I didn't have to share if I didn't want to, and he said that I was only "supposed" to have gotten the smaller one anyway.

And I said that maybe the accident of him opening the smaller box was something telling him that he just shouldn't eat that much chocolate, and that if he's going to be seeing signs in things, he has to be open to seeing them anywhere, not just when they're telling him what he wants to hear.

I suppose one (especially an atheist one) could make the argument that anyone who claims divine intervention/signs from the universe/word of god/etc is by definition only going to hear what they want to hear, because it's all coming from inside them anyway, so they can't possibly receive a message that they didn't first construct themselves. If there are any non-atheist ones reading this who believe they have experienced divine intervention/signs from the universe/word of god/etc, I am genuinely curious about whether or not you've gotten any messages you didn't want to get, and how you responded to them.

[Gabriel]

I'm impressed how completely random Chloe's conversion seems. It definitely seems as if her conversion was a plot point on a checklist and the writer realized he only had a couple of dozen pages left in the book to check the plot point off. Of course, that same quality permeates the rest of the book, but you should know what I mean.

Kind of funny that all she needed was a good man to make her feel like a little girl again. Well, no, it isn't really funny at all.

[Raj]

Well, Karen & damnedyankee, you made me curious enough to check out Lisa "Blair" Whelchel's website. Fortunately, my brain cells have not suffered any notable damage because me MAN!!! Me STRONG!!! Me pound chest!!!

[Turcano]

I just read The Screwtape Letters (thanks to a mention of it on here a few weeks ago) and it's interesting how this is the exact opposite of Lewis's concepts of individualism, independence, and reason. In Lewis's book it's the devils that want to take away individualism, cause dependence, and make people too stupid to realize what's going on around them.

That reminds me; I recently reread The Screwtape Letters and was struck by just how Nietzschean it is. If the goal of Hell in the Letters can be summed up in a single idea, it would be the entrenchment of slave morality throughout humanity. This is especially clear in "Screwtape Proposes a Toast," which is put in the back of many editions.

[Serafina]

C.S. Lewis may think intellectual independence is a good thing for Christian MEN, but he likes his ladies like he likes his dogs: obedient, slavish and mindless. Or liked, I should say, since the man is long dead and good riddance. The man was a misogynous halfwit. He would have been right on board with the depiction of Chloe here--he sometimes wrote strong pre-pubescent female characters, but not any post-pubescent ones.

Great post, Fred. Alas, poor Chloe.

[lonespark]

ah, Serafina, the Orson Scott Card school of Female Character depiction. I spit upon it. Soooo frustrating. You start liking a character and BAM! she becomes a "woman." Or some approximation thereof that manages to boring and aggravating all at once.

[Randy Owens]

Who's going to believe this? Who's going to think I haven't lost my mind?

Well, maybe if you weren't so eager to toss your mind away, Chloe....

spherical time:

ermic: Well, post-Rapture, I suppose it would pretty much have to be.

There's all those Catholics and other "Not True" Christians.

Right. The heathens, as had been pointed out.

And, on the creeping horror which is "psychobabble," echoes of the Scientologists, anyone?

[jeh]

"That's why John's Apocalypse wasn't written for or about them, you know, but for and about us 20th- 21st-century American Christians. And only us 21st-century American Christians."

Ain't that the truth. American Christians are *so* persecuted. Man it's like you can't even get away with being a hypocrite or bigot anymore. Because people make fun of you and your feelings get hurt and you have to go home and cry into your pillow. Only the Rapture can take you away from that sort of pain. Everyone knows that martyrdom is the coward's way out, it's the living that's hard!

[Trixie Belden]

burgundy said:
"When he returned from Belgium, he brought with him three boxes of absolutely fabulous chocolate, one for me, one for my brother, and one for him. Two 250g boxes and one 500g box."

I hope this question isn't too trivial - burgundy, do you happen to remember the name of the chocolate maker? Please let us know! Even if I never get to Belgium, I can dream!

Re Lisa "Blair" Whelchel's website - I've read excerpts from it on another snarky blog. I remember it as a deeply, deeply creepy site.

[ninjanun]

Serafina (great name, btw):C.S. Lewis may think intellectual independence is a good thing for Christian MEN, but he likes his ladies like he likes his dogs: obedient, slavish and mindless. Or liked, I should say, since the man is long dead and good riddance. The man was a misogynous halfwit. He would have been right on board with the depiction of Chloe here--he sometimes wrote strong pre-pubescent female characters, but not any post-pubescent ones.

But I believe he changed his mind after meeting, marrying, and falling in love with his wife (yes, in that order). And then he wrote Till We Have Faces which arguably has the strongest adult female character he ever wrote.

[burgundy]

Alas, Trixie, that was more than 3 years ago and I really have no idea. I even went back to old journal entries, but I never recorded that particular detail. (Apparently, though, I misremembered the size of the boxes. It was two 300g boxes and a 500g box.)

[Monkay]

Every event being "a sign", a sense that the world is literally revolving around oneself, every thought and action echoed, is something I went through at one time; it was rather unpleasant, as I recall (I'm fine now thanks).

[pyramus]

Chloe's "conversion" is thus one of the saddest events in a book full of woes and calamities.

It really is profoundly sad, isn't it? That seems to be the authors' conception of what a religious conversion and and an actual woman ought to be like: shut down your brain, disconnect your curiosity and independence, do as you're told (by God or by your man), allow yourself to be turned into a mindless drone.

And every pilot has prayed the Pilot's Prayer: "Oh God, please don't let me (screw) up!" :^)

Or, as Melanie Griffith says in "Working Girl": "Don't fuck up. Don't fuck up. Don't fuck up."

"Oh, well, the prayer itself wasn't that big of a deal, until it was answered. I just told God I needed a little more. I felt bad that all the stuff I'd heard and all that I knew from my dad wasn't enough."

"Big of a deal". Tsk. More proof, as if we needed any more, that the book never saw an editor. I tried to convince myself that the authors were putting that into Chloe's mouth, but she's too well-educated to have said "big of a deal". They're just miserably unfamiliar with the finer points of the language.

[RobertoElGrande]

Inspired by Chloe's conversion.
---
Kovit was impressed. Not by the presentation but the gear. Apparently the NSA could afford a digital projector, something the UN could not manage to provide even during a planetary crisis.

The lights turned off as he stood, he wondered if it was coincidental, then dismissed the thought as he focused on the tired-looking woman at the podium.

"A few questions, Agent... Smith was it? One, why have all foreign nationals been segregated from us? Two, why are you wasting our time with a YouTube clip of two people tripping? Three, what is the point of this ludicrous interruption?"

Somehow Agent Smith managed a wan smile.

"Thank you Dr. Kovit. If I may? One, as of 7 a.m. Eastern Standard Time today you and all American nationals working for United Nations Data Collection Point Alpha have been Federalized under the National Emergency Resources Act of 1953. In short, we own all of you and we are negotiating with foreign governments to own the rest of your team. Second, the YouTube clip you watched has been seen over eight million times, a new record, and has been inexplicably played over the cable news channels for the last 48 hours."

"Third, the United States, and the entire planet, have been determined to be under attack by an as-yet unidentified and presumably extraterrestrial force. Accordingly, Case Lemon Breakpoint protocols have been invoked by the President, as of 7 a.m. this morning. We must assume the remaining human population is being attacked with methods up to and including memetics, nanobiologics and teleneurolgy."

Kovit didn't understand much of what had been said, but he caught the shocked expression of Dr. Wembley, one of his psych guys. This wasn't just some three letter agency throwing their weight around again. His smirking nemesis didn't miss a beat.

"You have now been given official notification of the invocation of NERA and can now unseal the packages that have been provided to you. To summarize. You work for Uncle Sam now. The planet is under attack and the enemy can screw with our minds. We are at war and we need you to help us win. I'll give you a few moments to digest the contents of your packages and Dr. Wembley can attest to their authenticity. Dr. Kovit, a moment of your time?"

[Chris]

Speaking as a "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" fan (and a Futurama fan, though that has nothing to do with this), mind if I point out that "Starship Titanic" by Terry Jones was one of the most disappointing novels I've ever read? Sure it had some neat ideas (I liked the guns that convinced people that they had been messily shot rather than actually doing it), but nothing interesting happened in the plot, there was no aspiring to Adams' wit, and even the supposed-genius character didn't even know roughly where Earth is situated in the solar system. Sigh.

Oh well, at least I liked how Nessie (?) turned out to be the intelligent one (for a given value of intelligent, as see above). I hate how the blonde girl always has to be the stupid bimbo.

[HollywdLiz]

She giggled and let go again. "I wasn't talking about you, Buck, though this is sweet. I was talking about God doing the nice thing for me."

... WHAT.

No, really, that's all I've got. I actually said "Wait, WHAT?" out loud at least three times while reading this entry. I feel like I'm reading a seventh-grade fanfic, except there aren't nearly enough misspellings.

"What more do you need? ... Oh, I'm sorry, Buck. ... If you're not ready, you're not ready."

So Buck is turning down his gold-plated invitation to join the Mile High Club. ... OK, now somebody might have to write a Right Behind incorporating that concept.

[damnedyankee]

Well, Karen & damnedyankee, you made me curious enough to check out Lisa "Blair" Whelchel's website. Fortunately, my brain cells have not suffered any notable damage because me MAN!!! Me STRONG!!! Me pound chest!!!

You Tarzan?

[MikhailBorg]

With you on the Starship Titanic review, Chris. I could never get the game to install properly, so I was pleased to at least get a copy of the book in a box full of hardcovers from a convention charity auction. Read it once... and it went back into the next charity auction.

While I haven't found the nerve to check out Blair's website, I'm reminded of the con at which I was the driver for Grace Lee "Yeoman Rand" Whitney. On one trip from her hotel, she quite seriously explained to me how the Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers were damned by looking for strength within themselves, rather than putting their faith in God - not to mention their worship of the big blue face in the tube.

Yeah.

I managed to get my assignment switched to Mike "The Wizard of Speed and Time" Jittlov for the rest of the weekend. Now, he was much more fun :)

[Cary Bleasdale]

See, look, you all have it wrong. The Starship Titanic was SUPPOSED to suffer Spontanous Massive Existence Failure when Zapp Brannigan, the unwitting victim of Max Capricorn, (who sabotaged Titania) crashed it into the earth. However, the ship crashed into the TARDIS first. The computer game "Starship Titanic" is simply told from the Doctor's point of view-the ship has crashed into his house and he must fix it. The Doctor saves the Titanic AND the earth, resetting all of time and space-leading to the destruction of the earth by Vogons. The Doctor re-resets time, causing Fenchurch to disappear, however, she is probably still safe on earth, back where she started, since The Doctor (who has met Arthur Dent) is watching out for him. (As a side result of all of this the Cathedral of Chalesm pops back into existance, tearing the bottom out of the postcard industry.) Think about it...all the incredible coincidences that happen to Arthur, the miraculous saves...the feeling that the universe is screwing with him? All signs that the Doctor has been keeping an eye on him the whole time.

Ok.

All geeked out now.

So, how bout them Pats, huh?

[mmack]

And an FAA regulation requiring blood sacrifice to Cthulu, pre-flight, just to ensure no more disappearing Christian pilots, might well be reasonable at this point in time.

I'd love to see THAT checklist!

"OK Bob, let's cover the preflight checklist"
"OK Dave. I have the list. I'm ready"
"Battery"
"Check"
"Standby Power"
"Set to Auto"
Hydraulic Demand Pumps"
"Off"
"Flaps"
"Off"
"Flap Lever and Indication"
"Both Agree"
"Blood sacrifice to Cthulhu"
"Standby"
(Sound of knife being unsheathed)
"Timmy, could you come up into the cockpit with the captain and I?"

[mmack]

And one wonders, how does Rayford handle captaining after The Event?

"Good morning folks, this is your captain speaking. I'd like to welcome you aboard Oceanic Airlines flight 3:16 Chicago O'Hare direct to London Heathrow. We'll be cruising at an altitude of 30,000 feet and I anticipate a smooth ride once we divert around some thunderstorms in the Ohio Valley. In case of a Rapture, will the passengers Left Behind please remain seated until I turn off the "Fasten Seat Belts" sign. At that time you can freely move about the cabin in a frantic, desperate search for your loved ones, wail and rend your garments, or simply loot the wallets and purses of those who were raptured. For those of you who will be staying with us to London, our inflight movies today are Left Behind with Kirk Cameron and Brad Johnson, and Left Behind 2: Tribulation Force. We hope you enjoy your flight on Oceanic Airlines, and would like to remind our Born-Again passengers that at Oceanic, only your luggage gets Left Behind."

"Stewardesses prepare the cabin for takeoff."

[Karen]

Sinceg there are no children left, who would they sacrifice to Cthulu? Kittens? In the alternative, couldn't they just have sex with specially designated Ishtar priestesses?

[hapax]

If there are any non-atheist ones reading this who believe they have experienced divine intervention/signs from the universe/word of god/etc, I am genuinely curious about whether or not you've gotten any messages you didn't want to get,

Yes.*

and how you responded to them.

Depends mainly on much I really didn't want to get them.

The precise details are... well, none of anybody else's business. But I think Augustine's famous prayer, "Dear Lord, make me celibate, but not yet" pretty much sets the general tone.

*And no, I'm not talking "green lights on the drive home" type of messages. I've been known to say a prayer of gratitude, however, when things fall out my way in such instances, but more along the lines of "Thanks for giving me the ability to recognize how lucky I am, don't let me waste the opportunity to take advantage of it, and please look after all the people who must be suffering some inconvenience due to my good fortune."

[Dorothy]

Bravely I venture into the land of Lisa Whelchel:

Lisa Whelchel combines her love for God’s Word and her enthusiasm for scrapbooking to help women sow spiritual seeds in the next generation…and beyond.

Yes, this is what Chloe has to look forward to. Scrapbooking.

[Deoridhe]

burgundy:

If there are any non-atheist ones reading this who believe they have experienced divine intervention/signs from the universe/word of god/etc, I am genuinely curious about whether or not you've gotten any messages you didn't want to get, and how you responded to them.

Yes. And I did pretty much the only thing I could; lived with it.

[hapax]

Poked around on the Lisa Whelchel site. Gaaack. I was amused by her recommendation of the CyberSitter filtering software:

if you have children I recommend you do that right away. This is the best parental Internet control program I have ever seen. It does a great job of blocking your children from visiting the sites you find inappropriate. It also has additional features so that you can determine exactly how long and when your child can access the Internet. You can also have it send a daily email to your email address showing you every address your child visited and it can even log their Instant Messenger conversations if you are concerned about any of their friendships

Sheesh. Apparently not only L & J confuse stalking with love.

[cjmr's husband]

I wouldn't consider logging your kids web access to be stalking, I'd call it keeping an eye on your kids.

Depends on their age, of course.

[Dash]

Since there are no children left, who would they sacrifice to Cthulu? Kittens? In the alternative, couldn't they just have sex with specially designated Ishtar priestesses?

In that case, Rayford's passengers are doomed. He'd spend the entire pre-flight Ishtar session flirting with the priestess while trying to make her feel in some vague way not quite up to his standards. Ultimately, he wouldn't get the job done, and his plane would crash.

Come to think of it, maybe Ishtar is just the goddess to deal with our boy Rayford.

[hapax]

cjmr's husband, I disagree. If your kids aren't old enough to be on the Internet without you surreptitiously receiving copies of everything they see, then they're not old enough to be on the Internet without you sitting your butt right next to them and watching.

It is EXACTLY the same philosophy of parenting that substitutes electronic monitoring of bedrooms, censoring public library collections, and removal of all moving equipment and potentially breakable objects from playgrounds because parents are too darn lazy to do the hard work of PARENTING: you know, spending real time with your children, supervising them, interacting with them, teaching them how to make good choices, and letting them make them.

I've worked with CyberSitter and similar programs. All they do is provide a very false illusion of safety and control, and a very real sense of frustration, oppression, and contempt.

[Ursula L]

Hapex - it depends, I think, on the kind of threat you're worried about.

There are things that you want to stop before they happen - and the various surrogate supervision/censorship things don't work for that. But there are also things that you don't mind them seeing, but that you want to be able to address with them as they arise. So what you need is a heads-up if the kids have stumbled across something that you want to work with them on. Copies of what they've seen works for that type of need.