Review of New Orleans

Preaching the humble word of Christ outside of Female Impersonators: Seeing is Believing strip club for maximum effect

I just got back from New Orleans today, having never been before. On the plane down there I took JetBlue so I split the flight down by reading Holy Blood, Holy Grail and then watching A&E's "Secrets of the Book of Revelation" special on the tv in the back of my seat, which informed me that the concept of the Rapture where believers get bodily assumed into heaven before Armageddon happens is not in Revelation at all, but was actually invented about 100 years ago by some embezzler/real estate speculator/trustworthy biblical scholar named Schofield, who thought it would be a good idea to, I don't know, REWARD BELIEVERS BY REMOVING THEM FROM THE EARTH PRIOR TO ITS DESTRUCTION.

In any event, as I walked around Bourbon Street, with a hundred bars with nearly identical neon lights that said things like "Mango Mango Mango" and "Huge Ass Beer," obese people walking around with drinks shaped like fleur de lis and hand- grenades and cover bands blasting "Sweet Home Alabama" onto the streets as the college fratboy Alabama Sugar Bowl fans wearing "Bama" shirts pumped their drinks in the air and screamed "Roll Tide Roll!", I knew for certain that we are now in the last days and that when god comes down to smite the earth he will be smiting Las Vegas first, followed IMMEDIATELY by New Orleans. It was like walking into Satan's lair. I have absolutely no doubt god was watching me and everyone else shoving Cafe Du Monde beignets buried under trough-fulls of powdered sugar in our faces at 10am and was wondering how the hell earth could have possibly gotten this bad.

What's really ludicrous is that in none of the coverage of Hurricane Katrina did anybody suggest that the storm might actually have been god's warning to the city that they will smitten for sure unless they start cleaning up their act, for starters including The Royal House Cafe stopping triple frying their "eggplant straws" to the point where they disintegrate on contact and Pierre Maspero's stopping encouraging people by charging ONE DOLLAR FOR A LARGE STRAWBERRY DAIQUIRI. Apparently, one other person agrees with me on this because in the middle of Bourbon Street near "Barely Legal" and "Little Darlings" strip clubs as drunk people were tripping over themselves and drinking hand-grenades, the guy pictured above planted a cross and started shouting stuff about Jesus with a megaphone and I feel like he really made an impact.

Greetings from the Rapture

You might not notice what is going on so an email reminder might be useful

Megan sent me an amazing site the other day, You've Been Left Behind. This is a convenient service for Christians, by Christians with the idea being that when the Rapture happens, people will want to notify their non-Christian friends and relatives via email that they will be temporarily out of the office for eternity and that if the non-Christians somehow hadn't already noticed, millions of Christians had gone missing because they were being given new bodies and transported to meet Jesus, so now might be a good time to convert. These Rapture emails are automatically sent to non-Christians, bosses and whomever else won't be participating in the Rapture when 3 out of 5 YBLB employees don't log in for a three day period. This is key because there is absolutely no possibility that 3 out of 5 YBLB employees will be on vacation at the same time and it is a known fact that Christians will somehow lose all internet access when the Rapture is going on. Unfortunately these days there are internet cafes everywhere and I'm actually not buying that there aren't internet cafes in heaven or that when Jesus returns to earth immediately all Blackberry signals will die or that everyone will be so obsessed with what's going that nobody will be able to spare a single second to text someone "rapture FYI" so that everybody else can know what's happening.

The most amazing part of all of this is that Christians' last and most urgent plea to loved ones to get on board with Jesus ASAP because things are going on is via email. So basically this means that if you turned off your Blackberry because you were at "The Lion King" or they send it to an old email address or it by accident goes to your spam folder and you somehow miss the email, it won't really be that big of a deal except that you'll be rotting in hell for all of eternity and there may be other serious problems.

Ugh, I asked around and apparently I don't have any friends that subscribe to this service or obviously care enough about their non-Christian friends that they would want to at least shoot me an email notifying me that they're in the Rapture so I don't freak out and think they've been kidnapped or whatever and call the police. In any event, I would imagine that the Rapture email that I WON'T be receiving because I have selfish friends says something like:

"Hi Marin - this email has been electronically generated from You've Been Left Behind. I'm in the Rapture now and can't talk for long but I wanted to invite you to join me here but in order to do so, you have to accept Jesus Christ as your lord and savior. If you'd like to join me and meet Jesus, please click 'accept meeting request' and it will automatically be entered in your Outlook calendar."

My main question here is what happens if there is a glitch in the system and these 1-800-Rapture Now emails are sent out erroneously - will I be receiving a follow-up email that says "False alarm - no Rapture yet" because if so, I need to be monitoring my inbox for this email as well.