For those Remaining on Earth

(To be read post-Rapture)

That’s right. Frodo has beamed up all of his loyal believers as well as (perhaps) children and mentally disabled people who haven’t yet reached a point of accountability. There are of course people Remaining on Earth; cursing their own foolish sciencey beliefs and very possibly tearing away at their clothing whilst on bended knee; overwhelmed by sorrow and contrition. Perhaps they are reading this very webpage looking for the tiniest glimmer of hope in order that they may equip themselves in this new, Frodo-forsaken world.

Well ha.

Ha ha ha ha ha. Looks like we were right after all, eh?

One-two-fuck you. You’re on your own.

Marriage in the Way of Frodo

It’s becoming an all too common occurrence. Marriages that seemed destined to stand the test of time are crumbling and snapping - breaking and shattering – before eventually dissolving into the kind of toxic brew of hatred and regret that even Dr Pepper drinkers would sooner avoid. The world is changing, moving further away from the way of Frodo; and marriage has become the first casualty of these wicked Mordorian times.

Marriage was designed by Frodo as a way of stamping all of the fun out of sex. Fun detracts from suffering, and when people stop thinking about suffering they generally stop wishing for an afterlife. Frodo knew that if people stopped wishing for an afterlife, they’d stop being righteous because they no longer felt accountable to an absolute standard of morality. Unfortunately, people (being the dirty little fun-seekers that they are) started attempting to “spice up” their marriages. Couples discovered new ways of filling orifices. Dropping to your knees was no longer a guarantee that Frodo would be receiving some righteous prayer, and cries of “Oh Holy Frodo, YES!” were likely as not just people climaxing in glorious, impassioned frenzy rather than agreeing with glorious, impassioned scripture.

But guess what hippies? Sixties fun-time is over. The soaring divorce rate has proved that dirty sex involving bottoms and liquorice allsorts is not the foundation for a successful marriage. It’s time to go old-school – school like it used to be, not like now where they have illegal immigrant porn-stars teaching five year olds how to felch. I’m talking proper schools where you could say “blackboard” or “faggy faggy bum boy” without being called a racialist; and everyone knew their times tables, and respected their elders and rode into school on magical talking unicorns or flew in over the rainbow. Yeah, back to good old-fashioned basics.

Unfortunately ladies, the responsibility is yours to act like a proper wife. Believe it or not, your husband could get all the dirty-slut sex from anywhere he liked – your job as a wife is to provide the things he couldn’t get from a crack starved hooker: a clean living environment, satisfying meals and offspring that aren’t a massive disappointment. In one way, your wifely duties count as a “real job”; but in a different and much more important way they count for shit-all in comparison to what he does for you. Why not show your appreciation once in a while? There’s nothing a man likes better after a hard day’s work than a triple-steak sandwich and considerate silence from his spouse. Leave the remote control by his chair, and silently slip away until he’s sufficiently relaxed enough to hear you nag away about your day…

Just a couple of ideas there. I invite other Frodologists who are either married or know of at least one married couple (and therefore fully understand the delicate intricacies of co-dependent relationships) to contribute their “secrets to a happy marriage”.

FBWY

Disappearing for a few days...

Dear faithful Frodologists,

Unfortunately, Frodo will be going silent for several days. As we all know, when a theist loses his uplink to his deity, he loses his ability to act morally and function in society. Sadly, there's nothing you can do to control it. You'll likely start going mad after a few hours, acting to all appearances exactly like a zombie. A zombie with bad manners. And a penchant for petty crime.

I give you my condolences ahead of time. I just thought you should know.

Apologetically yours,

FrodoSaves

History Lessons: Ancient Sparta (Part II)

If you haven't already, make sure to check out the first part to this lesson on Ancient Sparta.

Work ethic

The Spartan appetite for hard work was legendary and ferocious. They were universally tireless slave owners, a breed apart from the gin-sipping, porch-sitting slaver of the American colonies, a stereotype sadly responsible for giving slavery a bad name. Their workers were a race known as the helots, although the term “race” is misleading. The helots were Caucasian, as city elders determined it uneconomical to first discover and then trek all the way to Sub-Saharan Africa to capture some blacks.

In an interesting case of foreshadowing, the helots staged their own civil rights movement in the form of a violent rebellion, but were unsuccessful due to the lack of underground railroads, airplanes, or buses on which to stage protests.

Take note: if you’re planning a civil rights movement, center it around a mass transit system

The complete lack of moral philosophy in Spartan culture may also have played a role.

 

Equality

While Sparta might not be remembered as the great democracy that Athens was, it was undeniably egalitarian. Equality was ensured through a complex system of taxation, stringent rules on property ownership, and a rigorous policy of infanticide to weed out the weak and crippled.

This policy was enforced on the battlefield with the expectation that every soldier would profit from a campaign in equal proportion to the others, or as happened more frequently, suffer an equally brutal death.

Sparta was however notoriously backwards as regards education, in that their girls received some. Unfortunately, the decision to educate women predated the cliché that “a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.” The influential role of women in Spartan society and their limited vocabulary of “fight,” “war,” and “stabby-stabby” are thought to have been largely responsible for much of Sparta’s constant campaigning.

Whoever educated Condoleezza Rice has a lot to answer for

Whoever named her, even more so

 

Battle

The policy of Fight, War, Stabby-Stabby was put into effect in the Spartans’ infamous stand at Thermopylae in 480 BC. Several months prior, Emperor Xerxes (Sexrex, really?) of Persia had crossed into Europe with an army some say was a million strong,  though fully a fifth of these were nubile young nymphs used for servicing the Emperor’s prodigious, sexy appetite. And some of these were female.

Three hundred Spartans, their helot attendants, and several thousand Peloponnesians met the Persians at Thermopylae, a narrow mountain pass overlooking the sea which trapped the advancing Persian army in a bottleneck. Several days of vicious fighting ensued, resulting in the eventual destruction of the valiant Greeks. The heavy cost in men and great delay taught Xerxes a valuable lesson: candlelight and oiled skin really help to take the edge off morally ambiguous child sex. Ok, well Xerxes wasn’t paying attention. But everyone else learned this: a rocky cliff is a dangerous place to have a battle.

Following the Persian victory at Thermopylae, the Greeks staged their last ditch defense at Plataea. Its unremarkable, gradual, downhill slope was calculated to recall in the Persians their fear of geographic features. With an army now staffed almost entirely by short-legged child prostitutes, the shallow incline was precisely the minor setback the Persians could have done without. While Plataea was a decisive victory for the Greeks, it wasn’t until legislation raised the age of sexual consent to sixteen, effectively outlawing the only thing the Persians were good at, that they finally decided to head home in defeat.

 

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If you like the idea of more history lessons, please, do let me know, and if you have any suggestions of particular events, epochs, or civilizations, I’d love to hear them. 

100th post!

My last article on Ancient Sparta checked off yet another arbitrary blogging milestone - the legendary 100th post. She was a wily beast to slay, and the ephemeral joy of her capture was fleeting. Nevetheless, I fully intend to feast on the glory and bask in your envious adulation.

Of course, promiscuous dynamos like PersonalFailure and UNRR scratched their hundredth tally into the bedpost yonks ago, and are probably thinking "so, what? I did it, and I'll do it again." But like the mercenary caress of your first hooker, you never forget the giddy joys of your first century. Oh, sure, they might tell you they're happy. But as they soar ever closer to the seedy millennium, it's the perverse happiness of yesterday's makeup and unemployed clowns.

To those of you still furiously blogging away, beating at your keyboard and tugging at your hair with frustration, desperately trying to score that hundred, I will say only this: Frodo is watching.

Of course if we'd been designed by Frodo with eight fingers instead of ten, then this article would've been my 144th, and my history of Man - the last 303,240 years would have been my 100th. And if we had eleven fingers, we'd have to start using letters in our numbering, which is a whole new kind of crazy. The message is clear: numbers are evil.

I will be accepting gifts now.

New reader favorites?

Since by now you're no doubt in a sycophantic, fawning mood, I would like to ask you for your suggestions as to which articles to add to my reader favorites list.

If you're of the opinion that nothing you've read here has so far been any good, but you're confident that I'll come up with something worth reading in my second hundred, because seriously, it's like the freakin' law of probability or something, then you're guilty of the Blogger's Fallacy and you can shut yer hole.

Excellent.