Science Comedian

My Love Affair with Space

July 7th, 2011

On the eve of the final mission of NASA’s – and the nation’s – 30-year-long space shuttle program, I present to you a video love letter – my newest piece for Time Magazine’s website, wherein Tara and I journey to Florida to witness our first launch.  STS-133, in February, was the last mission of space shuttle Discovery…

Click for bigger version at Time.com

Link:
My Love Affair with Space on Time.com

You got Jesus in my X-ray

March 10th, 2009

Where in the Bible does it say, when Jesus returns, he will appear as a silver Rorschach blot on a chest X-ray in a small town in Florida?

A few thoughts…

Reynaldo Farinas went to the hospital after experiencing chest pains.

Okay, no surprise there. You’d have chest pains, too, if Jesus were unexpectedly resurrected inside your chest cavity. The human chest cavity simply wasn’t designed for such a celestial homecoming.

Or was it?

If the Divine Plan is – and always was – to resurrect Jesus inside an evangelical’s chest… well, it seems like rather poor planning, doesn’t it? Not exactly Intelligent Design. In the very least, it might have been helpful – or polite – to have sent some advance notice, maybe an email – particularly to the person who was to receive such a glorious but awkward visitation.

I like when they show the man on camera and the lower-third graphic, the on-screen identifier, has his name and a short definition – the explanation for why we’re watching a video clip of him:

“Reynaldo Farinas: Sees Jesus in X-ray.”

How would you like that to be the 4-word summation of your life?

Farinas says, “This never happened to me.” I can accept that. In fact, it never happened to anyone.

But perhaps I’m being unfair, too much of a stickler for proper grammar, because what he likely meant was, “This never happened to me before,” in which case he is expressing surprise that Jesus never previously spontaneously generated inside his chest.

They show the X-ray around 25 seconds into the video clip…

But I don’t see Jesus. Do you? If anything, I just see a Grey, which is far more likely, if you think about it.

An extraterrestrial inside someone’s chest makes perfect biological sense. It requires no resurrection or Second Coming or magic of any kind – it’s simply a natural part of a metamorph’s life cycle – to incubate inside a host organism. It’s even part of (science fiction) canon – perhaps most famously in the movie Alien.

So, what we have here is nothing supernatural. This visitor is not from Heaven but merely from Zeta Reticuli. Just a friendly parasitic neighbor stopping by to gestate.

One family member says, “And I was surprised. I got goosebumps and I was like ‘Wow,’ you know? That’s unbelievable.”

Exactly.

But if you’re still curious, here are some stories of other sightings of Jesus and his mom – in flapjacks, lemons, and cheese sandwiches.

The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Yarmulke

August 2nd, 2008

I’m a Jew from Texas – a relatively rare breed, we can’t even propagate in the wild.

So, before my migration to Northern California – which is counter to the eastward migratory pattern characteristic of my kind – a migration which, over time, deposits us in the Sunshine State like calcium carbonate on a stalagmite – I had the opportunity to make sociological and psychological observations of an uncommon species.

I hope to someday publish my findings and share with the world these curious and fantastic tales.

The working title of my book is The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Yarmulke.