Pope Benedict XVI to Star in Hollow Man 3

Fans of the Hollow Man film franchise were surprised today when Columbia Pictures announced it would cast Pope Benedict XVI in the supporting role of the third installment, due to be released next February. Both of them have written letters to the studio protesting the choice as uninspired and predictable. Why Hollow Man 3, they ask? Because apparently Hollow Man 2 came out two years ago, without anybody noticing.

Director Ted Walsh was quick to defend the choice of the Pope. "In the previous two films, we took a very literal approach to the whole idea of being hollow. With this one we want to explore hollowness from a more metaphorical angle". Walsh feels that the audience will be able to relate to the Pope on this level since they are used to his empty promises and the hollow foundations on which his religion is based. "What good is the threat of punishment in the afterlife", he asks, "when most people don't plan to have one?"

A tangle with the producers has however forced Walsh into a compromise with regards to how the Pope will be portrayed. Hesitant to overestimate their audience's intelligence, they have convinced Walsh to portray the pope as actually hollow.



Viewers will of course remember the Pope from his teenage performance in the Hitler Youth. While some moviegoers have expressed concern that the Pope has limited acting experience, Walsh spoke out in support of the choice. "He's done a pretty good job so far convincing tons of Catholics that someone's up there watching their every move, you know, like Santa Claus or something. He almost had me believing my sperm had souls for a while. He's good, you know. Really good". Walsh also voiced his opinion that this role will be a change of pace for the Pope and will help to avoid him being typecast in the grumpy old man role.

Pope Benedict will be playing the role of an elderly, jaded hollow man, as the reluctant mentor to a young, upstart hollow teen, to be played by Shia LeBeouf. At first unwilling to leave retirement, the Pope's character decides to shepherd LeBeouf's as he begins to see what damage hollowness can wreak in untrained hollow hands. Under the Pope's guidance, LeBeouf sees how he can gain the unwitting trust of a solid society for his own personal hollow gratification, without offering them anything in return. Asked whether there was a positive moral to be drawn from the story, Walsh assured reporters that no, there was not. "You might say it's a hollow film".

A spokesman for the Pope said that he was excited to be working alongside LeBeouf, although he was reportedly disappointed to learn that the young actor is now legally an adult. The Pope has also expressed interest in playing the role of Frodo in a potential fourth installment of The Lord of the Rings. "I like the whole patriarchal, savior role," he said yesterday, "but I get tired of this whole Pope gig. It would be nice to play a more believable role. You know, something historical, something important". Asked whether he thought the lack of anything new to bring to the audience would hinder the development of a fourth Rings movie, he joked "it hasn't stopped Catholicism!"

Some Christians are wondering whether casting the Pope in such a flippant role constitutes blasphemy, or at least a cheapening of the Vatican brand. Actor Mel Gibson has however helped to dispel these fears by assuring followers that it's not about slander. "What's important for the faith is that people see me as a Jew-hater. I really do hate them, you know".



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Virgins – just how hard is it for them to give birth?

Part II of the I Believe in Miracles series, or "I don't believe in this one"

Over the past few months, we haven't spent too much time trying to debunk other religions' creation myths and basic tenets because we want to be a positive, constructive influence in the world. Well, besides lambasting all other faiths for their comparative infancy, criticizing Catholicism for being so harmful to the environment, showing how Christians have the wrong end of the stick when it comes to homosexuality (heh), bashing the Vatican for its love of genocide and snobbish elitism, proving conclusively that Jesus has insufficient blood to feed his greedy followers, and arguing forcefully that creationism has got it all wrong when it comes to dinosaurs, it hasn't been too much time at all.

But today we're going to divert from our usual non-confrontational stance and address an issue which has recently come to our attention. Thanks to the crafty infiltration of a Frodologist spy into a service last Sunday, we have learned that Christians believe that Jesus was born of his virgin mother. That probably needs repeating. They think Jesus, a man, popped from the uterus of a woman who had never, ever been in a position to get so much as indecent, let alone pregnant.

Generally of the opinion that only pregnant women give birth to human babies, our trusty team of scientists set off on another mission to discover just how easy it is for a virgin to give birth. To that end, they followed around a group of purity ring-wearing teenagers for a week. Following a minute misunderstanding with the police and a hairy overnight stint in jail, their first discovery was that it's probably a good idea to ask someone's permission before following children around with binoculars and a camera. Undeterred, they felt triumphant when one of the chaste little teens did fall pregnant. If it really is so easy, what's so great about Jesus?

Disappointment then struck our heroic team when one scientist stumbled across the Wikipedia entry for purity rings and discovered that they are in fact just fashion accessories which could only be worn with less sincerity had they come from a cereal box. No immaculate conception, no miracle baby, and more to the point, no virgin.

The team then surmised that there were two possible conclusions. First, Mary was a virgin and thus there was no Jesus. While we're absolutely titillated by the track that train of thought could lead us down, we must admit the second possible outcome has equal merit. That is that Mary was more seasoned than the Gospels would have us believe. Perhaps she had an acquaintance in the Nazareth Postal Service. Maybe her name wasn't even Mary, but Mary the Harlot. Regardless, if Christians want to believe she gave birth, they have a hard truth to swallow.


Scientists suspect the culprit looked something like this... a 90s computer mouse

Immaculate conception, really? You know what would be more immaculate? Fertilization. Some Christians argue that it's a metaphor. That's right. A metaphor for a load of crap. Plus it sort of defeats the purpose of a metaphor when you proceed to take all of the conclusions that follow as literal fact. Obviously back when the Bible was scrabbled together from bits of irrelevant folkore and the inside cover of the Lonely Planet guide to Tel Aviv, sex education was somewhat lacking. Perhaps people thought virgin births were possible then. But since that time we've learned to wear sunscreen to prevent skin cancer and to run away from volcanoes when the island gods get angry. I feel like there's scope for improvement in the whole virgin birth department.

There is of course a third solution. Once again, it could have been a miracle.

But that's total bull: everyone knows only hobbits can immaculately conceive.

Jesus - out of blood by now?

Part I of the I Believe in Miracles series

Frodologist scientists inadvertently made great inroads into explaining the Christian faith today. Long puzzled by the sustainability of Christian hematophagy, the team first began by searching for hidden blood reserves. When this proved fruitless, they then followed up reports that the statue of Christ the Redeemer in Rio de Janeiro was actually a massive vessel of the vintage red stuff. At first discounting the theory as ridiculous, since the statue clearly wasn’t a ship, they then discovered a second meaning of the word, and set off for Brazil.

The team began to search for a giant tap, dubbed the ‘holy spigot’, which they hypothesized would be used to access the holy blood. When no tap could be found, however, the theory was abandoned for the much more logical conclusion that Jesus is permanently attached to a blood transfusion machine. Red Cross confidentiality being what it is, the scientists were at a loss as to how to begin the search.

It was then that the breakthrough occurred. The team went back to basics and began crunching numbers. They reasoned that the average human adult has approximately 5 L of blood in their system at a given time. Discovering then that each communion sip measures in at around 10 mL, they concluded that Jesus would be completely drained of blood within just 500 sips. Even with a robust immune system and healthy bone marrow, they found it would be impossible to replenish the requisite amount in the weekly ten minute orgiastic bloodletting that is a Catholic communion. Even with a small congregation, Jesus would struggle to feed it all before becoming a useless fleshy sack of bones. And that’s ignoring the thousands of years for which Catholics have practiced the art of vampirism.

Some Catholics argue that Jesus isn’t exsanguinated on a weekly basis because wine is simply transformed into blood before each communion. But that seems strange. Grape DNA hasn’t been irradiated into human DNA since that episode of The Simpsons that never got made because the plot was too absurd.

This track of reasoning has led the team of Frodologist scientists to an uncomfortable conclusion. Since Jesus’ seemingly inexhaustible supply of blood is inexplicable by science, it is clearly the result of a miracle. As an alternative to science, miracles of course benefit from enormous explanatory power. They can tie a premise to any conceivable conclusion without the tedium of scientific investigation, and best of all, are unassailable by critics. Anything seen as preposterous by science is much more easily swallowed when it becomes a miracle.

This inadvertent discovery thus bolstered Christianity’s hold on humanity. There are however two positive outcomes for Frodology in all this. First, through harnessing the efficacy of miracles, the team was able to reanimate the petrified corpse of Frodo’s pet ferret, Mungo, from orange peels and old newspapers. The scientists offered their thanks to Frodo that miracles are so egalitarian and non-discriminatory in their performances.

The second outcome is that, thanks to the abovementioned miracle, Catholics really are gorging themselves on blood every Sunday. The unavoidable conclusion is that, having supped from the blood of Christ, the original poster child for the resurrected undead, all Catholics have forsaken their bodies and souls to join Jesus’ burgeoning army of vampires. This makes them fair game for silver bullets and sharpened stakes wherever they’re found. In response to the study, Alan Greenspan recommended garlic to futures traders as a sound investment this quarter.

Genocide - not that funny

The Catholic Church’s one saving grace has always been its sense of humor. That recent joke about blocking condom shipments to AIDS-ravaged parts of Africa was a real hoot, and we can only thank Frodo that the Pope was joking. However, not everything the Vatican does comes across as a trivial lark. Of particular relevance to this article, which is itself of no particular relevance to anything at the moment, was its harboring in 1994 of some of the perpetrators of the Rwandan Genocide.

In such a complex conflict choc full of guilty parties, it would be biased and unfair to dwell on the deplorable turpitude of just one. But it sure does suit our agenda. I think it suffices to say that sheltering persons responsible for the deaths of up to eight hundred thousand people is perhaps a little off color, if you’ll excuse the tasteless racial pun.

I just can’t see the funny side in it. There’s no visual gag, because the genocidaires were squirreled away so quickly upon arriving in Italy that they never even saw the sun. It’s almost like the Pope didn’t want anyone to know they were there. But that’s absurd. Perhaps he was being self-referentially ironic. After all, it is exactly the kind of vulgar stunt you’d expect the Holy See to pull. But then they actually went ahead and did it, and confused observers worldwide mistook the move for a serious, tasteless act. If the irony is so dense no one gets it, you’re just not being funny.

Another elementary mistake made by those tricksters on the Tiber was their timing. By failing to add that pregnant pause between the genocide itself and cozying up to the criminals responsible, the comic effect was reduced to nil. Some subjects are notorious for inherently carrying that significant silent beat, and the pure act of mentioning them causes laughs: North Korea, Jesus, nipples. This arguably does not apply to genocide. Also, while it’s sometimes necessary to push boundaries a little, on this occasion it was perhaps tactlessly too soon.

All of this means that the only thing they got right was the costumes. There is no occasion on which a grumpy old man running around in a dress and a silly hat, waving a pointy stick in the air, can fail to be funny. It’s kind of like dressing up your senile grandpa for Halloween. That so many people frequently turn out to humor him by listening to his mad ravings is truly adorable. What it had to do with the subject of the joke isn’t entirely clear, but you can probably chalk that one up to old age.

Occasionally some people need reminding that genocide just isn’t that funny.

Well, it’s about as funny as Sharia.