Escape Artists
Escape Pod => Episode Comments => Topic started by: Russell Nash on January 14, 2008, 08:25:39 AM
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EP020: The Burning Bush (http://escapepod.org/2005/09/22/ep020-the-burning-bush/)
By Jennifer Pelland (http://www.jenniferpelland.com/).
Read by Deborah Green.
I did the sensible thing. I screamed and ran to the bathroom, where I started tossing cups of water on my crotch in the hopes of extinguishing the flames. My boyfriend ran in behind me, started the shower up, and tossed me into the freezing water. But the fire continued to rage, despite the dousing.
At that point, I realized that I wasn’t actually in any pain. I stepped out of the stream of water, teeth still chattering, and held my hand in the blue flames. “This should hurt,” I said.
Rated X. For blasphemy and anatomy. Really.
Referenced Sites:
I Should Be Writing (http://shouldwrite.blogspot.com/)
Dag Viggo Lokøen (http://www.lokoen.org/)
(http://escapepod.org/wp-images/podcast-mini4.gif)
Listen to this week’s Escape Pod! (http://media.libsyn.com/media/escapepod/EP020_BurningBush.mp3)
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Okay, if no one's going to start this thread, I will. It's been a long long time since I listed to this story. But I remember it well. One of the funniest damn things ever. Sure, I'm the type of person who finds blasphemy easily amusing, but this was really well done, too. Made me want to run out and share it with some of the particularly feminist professors I had back at UCSC, actually.
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OOoh yea, this is an EP classic. I could not stop laughing while listening to this one.
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I thought this one was absolutely hilarious. The funny thing is, I didn't really find it all that blasphemous. (Then again, I thought the same thing about Kevin Smith's Dogma)
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One of my favorites, great story!
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This one had me laughing my ass off from beginning to end. It was one of my first EPs and most likely the first one I ever kept.
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Despite my glowing comments about Pelland's religious story Immortal Sins, I really disliked this one.
I'll admit, I thought the immediate reveal of the burning bush was pretty hilarious and quite memorable. The rest I didn't really care for. There's no clear reason why she's the one who gets to be the vessel of God. The apparent moral: the only way for a woman to end up in charge is to get alone with the man in charge and then drop her pants. And, if you ignore that unpleasant apparent moral, then the more overt moral is that the Catholic church makes absurd rules that are clearly not from God, such as only men being in the clergy. And, even though I agree with that, the message was delivered with the subtlety of a steamroller.
If this had been a flash story that showed a reveal of the bush and then some short summary of consequences it would've been hilarious and may have been one of my favorites as a joke story that made you think about religion. But the joke went on too long, and just kept pounding at its message and in the end I didn't care for it overall.
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Oh man, I loved this one. I can't believe you didn't like it. :p
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Oh man, I loved this one. I can't believe you didn't like it. :p
I usually go for stories that look at religion in any novel way, so I'm a little surprised myself. The execution, and the apparent moral, just didn't work for me though.