The weekend was a whirlwind.

Saturday was one thing after another - a morning jaunt along the Mississippi, a kid's birthday party in one of the airiest shotgun houses I've ever been in, soccer with the under-six-year-olds, and a Havdalah ceremony at the synagogue with the kids in PJs having breakfast for supper. It seemed only fitting that such a day end with a chance encounter with Ms Bettye LaVette on the TV. I had no idea she'd been a dancer, but I shoulda guessed. She's got a body that could put Tina Turner's to shame, and that voice is, as always, something else. Now I'm really regretting missing her at the JazzFest.

Sunday was a runaround morning at religious school, an afternoon of juggling watching the Saints win with my son's constant pleas for us to put up our sukkah already out on the front porch, and my husband sat around battling his cold. We got the frame and sides up, and I unrolled the bamboo roof after I got the chicken gumbo started (and after some more whining about it from the little guy - he's almost as bad as his father that way - Moooom, are you going to put the roof on? When are we going to get the roof on? Mooooom, the sukkah needs a roof. I asked Daddy already, he's not gonna put the roof on. We've got to put the roof on, Mom!!!! Alright, already, kid, here comes the roof. Sheesh).

I don't know how it happened, but Dan flipped through the channels and found Noah's Ark, and my son watched it, fascinated. A number of liberties and some ingenious excuses to use CGI abounded in the telling of this story...at one point, Abraham's nephew Lot shows up and tells of how he survived the destruction of his city (that is, Sodom), but his wife was turned to a pillar of salt, and he shows Noah his wife's finger in a jar, looking like a salt sculpture under glass. I took one look at a scene depicting how God helps speed up Noah's massive construction job and instantly said, "Oh, look, 84 Lumber supplied the boards!", as it looked like a huge lumberyard, complete with markings spray-painted on the edges of the wood on pallets.

Of course, one of the many ways the filmmakers tried to make this a dramatic epic, aside from having Jon Voight play Noah, and Mary Steenburgen play his wife Na'amah, was to look at the psychology of what being stuck on a huge boat full of animals for well over a month can do to your environment and mental health. Na'amah at one point wants to toss the spiders and the tapeworms overboard, saying they are harmful to people, so what's the point of saving them? Noah has to talk her out of it with the caveat that God's will is dictating that they save ALL the animals, even the ones she's scared of. The little guy took one look at the animals, who all had gotten loose from their pens and cages and were running all over the place in and on the ark, and he asked Dan why they were all loose.

"They've got no place else to go," Dan said.

"But why are they loose?" the kid asked, trying to wrap his head around this floating zoo gone to riot.

"It's a free-range ark. What can I say?" Dan said, exasperated, as I laughed my head off.

What can I say? I liked it better than I liked The Ten Commandments, if only because of the novelty of even coming across it, as opposed to having it on ABC every year....but throwing Lot into the story of the flood is just wrong, even if it did give F. Murray Abraham a role in the movie.

The more important question I have is: when is God gonna dictate that we in New Orleans build an ark? Now that I've been given some idea of how it might have been done, please, God, oust the so-called Recovery Czar in these parts and specially mark some steel beams from on high so that we can follow Your blueprints and rebuild this city.

Worth a shot...

_______________________

Other signs the world might need an ark:

Sarah Palin's sentences, diagrammed. Dangling participles, anyone?

My fave quote from the article:

The more the diagram is forced to wander around the page, loop back on itself, and generally stretch its capabilities, the more it reveals that the mind that created the sentence is either a richly educated one—with a Proustian grasp of language that pushes the limits of expression—or such an impoverished one that it can produce only hot air, baloney, and twaddle.

Judging from the way Palin was received at the Flyers game the other night, most folks are thinking the latter, I believe - at least in Philly.

Thanks to Minor Wisdom for that one.

Michael Homan (ahem) belatedly celebrates his blog's turning five by becoming embroiled in some contractor brouhaha online. Next time, folks, don't hire these people. Go straight to God and see if the Almighty can at least deliver some divine lumber, sheetrock, trim, and window glass to save you from your contractor woes.

I saw the reason why the Musical Road in Lancaster, California, existed in a Honda commercial broadcast during the Saints game:


..and I found out about why it is no longer there. Too many Honda Civics hitting that same stretch of road over and over again makes for some irate neighbors. Oops.

Finally, an even more amazing game went on at halftime in the Superdome. Take a look.