Jesus ‘n’ Mo ‘n’ Sastra

December 16, 2015 • 8:30 am

I’m pleased to see that reader Sastra has won the Jesus and Mo contest, in which people were asked to give the captions in the last frame of this cartoon:

2015-12-16-2016_12_16

The artist notes this:

This is the winning entry in the J&M script-writing competition. Sastra’s entry stood out from among a strong field for it combination of profundity and brevity. Congratulations, Sastra! Your signed book will be winging its way to
you soon.

I’ll add that her caption is also subtle!

58 thoughts on “Jesus ‘n’ Mo ‘n’ Sastra”

    1. John Cage had some sort of coherent argument justify his profound use of sound. Unlike these two (or at least, this one and the body-double).

      1. You’ve given me an idea. It would be to set up recording equipment in a church, and cobble together all the “moments of silence”(right after the Homily in a Catholic mass). The recordings would end up being a sequence of squeaky pews, plus the occasional burp or fart. I’d call the composition: “God”.

        1. Conceptually speaking, brilliant!

          To do justice to the brilliance of the concept you would need top shelf recording equipment and production. I hope to see (hear, actually) this at Art Basel 2016.

          2. Very interesting connections there. I got lost for about an hour at that web site and all the searches it inspired. Cool stuff!

          3. It is an amazing world of goodies. My bro Chris is the guy that invented & designs the Dangerous Music line of equipment… specialty is analog summing stuff. He’s really an industry heavyweight. He once came into town to help a friend record an album. Brought 2 mics with him that he had fixed. Normally one buys mics like the ones he brought in lots of 30-50 or so for something like 1.5 million (as I remember from long ago – my memory could be faulty here). Anyway, he bopped into town with two of those and a special $20k VCR device as the recorder, and those two mics and recorder did the job perfectly for the album (Donut Storm, by Geoff Cleveland). Live jazz set up on stage in our high school auditorium. He hadn’t counted on signal noise problems coming from Cheyenne Mountain (NORAD) though. It took about 4-5 hours setup, playing with cords to lay them out in such a way as the weird signals from space command got canceled out. He did an amazing job, considering. There’s only one place in the album, during a very quiet section, that you can hear a tiny bit of motorboating coming through. The A/D conversion was excellent though (thanks to that pricey VCR), and the results are startling when played through a good system. That was well before “Dangerous Music”, as I remember.

          4. I knew that good mics were expensive but, damn. Dropping the mic might be cool but I bet the sound people don’t like it one bit.

            Great story Stephen. Experts are a treasure, and a real pleasure to watch (even vicariously) in their element.

        2. Didn’t Simon & Garfunkle record that one a few decades ago? “The Sound of Silence”?

    2. I have seen 4:33 twice live. I have it on mp3 too, my own arrangement, studio version, with a cat who said nothing.

  7. Congratulations, Sastra. That’s outstanding. I’m glad that a member of the WEIT Commentariat had the most clever entry.

  8. Congratulations!
    It’s of course a classical ‘Sastra’ so it rather would have been a surprise if she hadn’t won the contest 😉

  9. I am pleased that an atheist has contributed more to the understanding of religion in a single effort than 2000 years of theology!

  10. Thank you, thank you, one and all. I’m deeply honored. As I told “Mo Jones,” I worked hardest on the “brevity” part. It was LOTS more “profound” before I got around to doing that. About 10 previous drafts, I think.

    After I sent the entry in I looked again at the comic scenario and realized it was probably supposed to resemble “American Idol” or some other sort of talent show. Jesus and Mo are trying out, they’ve never been seen before. So my final line (from the “barmaid”/”judge”) doesn’t really fit.

    But I was clearly overthinking it. So gosh.

        1. I think a lot of us (including me) tend to do that with nyms that end in “a.” So I’ve had my share of surprises going the other way.

          1. Yes us poor Anglo Saxon Europeans are still suffering under the linguistic boot of colonial oppression from those evil Roman imperialists.

      2. Dunno; “Sastra” doesn’t convey a gender to me and I formed an image of a male personality. Maybe the nerdy Star Trek symbol helped. 🙂

        1. Oh, you’re batting 1.000 now. That’s an “A” for Atheist!

          😀

          (But hey, more than a few of us gals here like Star Trek…)

          1. “That’s an “A” for Atheist!”

            I know, but my first though is still “Star Trek”. 🙂 Which is why the design is a bit unfortunate.

        2. Heh, the word “sastra” is a variation of a Hindu term for ‘a work of sacred scripture,’ so it is gender neutral. It’s also a play on my real name and my son would have the same abbreviation, so again gender neutral.

          When the atheist symbol
          is actually placed next to the Star Trek one, the similarity isn’t all that striking.

          2. P.S. *I* think it looks like Star Trek.

            (And I also thought ‘Sastra’ sounded male. I guess I’m beyond redemption).

            cr

          3. Interesting. I get two different pages, but the Star Trek symbol page starts out as the atheist symbol and quickly switches.

            Maybe there’s a message in that.

            At any rate, my vote for the dumbest comparison is Glenn Beck.

            In case you have trouble getting through all the ads at The Blaze, Beck thinks the atheist symbol looks just like the anarchist symbol.

          4. “similarity isn’t all that striking.”

            And a cucumber doesn’t look much like a snake….

    2. Yes … and now I think you owe her a chorus of “For she’s a jolly good fellow.”

      Congrats, Sastra; great caption.

  12. Sastra is totally awesome at thinking great thoughts, and putting those great thoughts out there with clarity and economy. I only wish I could be half as smart.
    Sastra, we are going to embarrass you, but in a good way.
    Hip Hip, Hooray! (needs 2 more).

  15. I’m wondering how long this will take. If I race to the bathroom will I miss anything? When can we go home. I want to go home.

  16. When this contest was first presented, a few people said no caption would have been perfect. I agreed at the time, but now after reading Sastra’s, I must say her’s is a lot better than leaving it blank. Congratulations!!!

  19. Congratulations, Sastra.

    It has gotten so that several times now, I have been able to recognise you as the author of a comment, just by how thoughtful and well written it is.

    There are others here that offer consistently good comments but you have always seemed to me to be the best of the lot.

    Thank you.

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