Tag Archives: Dogma (movie)

Friday Notes (Mar 13, 2026)

Pardon me for going momentarily meta, but these three-paragraph opens (hopefully with a pithy cliffhanger punchline for the third) are sometimes a real challenge. The intent is a recognizable style that acts like a watermark.

Some opens are more challenging than others, though. The right half-dozen or so sentences comprising three thoughts (with a hoped-for haiku-like third) can take forever to whip into shape.

Friday Notes are among the hardest because there isn’t much to say other than “here we go again…”

Continue reading


Jay and Silent Bob

Last night I watched — for the second time this week — Jay and Silent Bob Reboot (2019), which is the latest episode of a saga polymath auteur Kevin Smith has been telling since 1994 with his first film, Clerks. The arc of that tale contains one of my very favorite movies, Dogma (1999), wherein we learn that God looks exactly like Alanis Morissette.

If you’ve never heard of Jay and (his “hetero life-mate”) Silent Bob, you’ve missed a minor cultural phenomenon. Clerks is a cinematic landmark on par with Reservoir Dogs and is preserved in the Library of Congress as “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.” In my book, it’s all three.

I’ve been waiting well over a decade to see these guys again!

Continue reading


Sunday Thoughts

signpostDespite the title, this post isn’t as strongly related to the previous three as the naming convention suggests. I don’t really have much to say about religious predestination. If anything, my views on spirituality are key to a belief in free will and choice. The religion I was raised in seems (at least to my eye) quite clear that we are allowed to choose our actions.

The connection to those other posts lies in picking up the thread of physical determinism — normally a necessarily atheist point of view — and doing a riff on religion, spirituality and atheism. This is the post I started to write last Sunday when my mind took off in a completely different direction.

This time I’m going to try sticking to the subject!

Continue reading