Friday, June 06, 2008

Man Beard Blog presents: The (Man Beard) Bible

(updated below)

Man Beard Blog has been showing signs of life lately, and so we've been receiving many queries about our whereabouts during the prolonged lull. Our first response to such questioners is to gouge their eyes with a sharp stick we keep nearby for this exact purpose. The eye-gouging sharp stick has yet to be used however, because luckily for you all (you know who you are), the questions were asked via email.

In spite of our overwhelming popularity as instructors and our excellent publication record of high quality research, Blogger.com has yet to offer tenure to Man Beard Blog. But that didn't prevent us from taking a sabbatical, because we're the leading beard academics in the world, and blogging is intellectually draining. But our intentions of taking some time off to rest never were realistic. The beard was itchy, and we had to scratch it.

So we wrote a big fat fucking book.

That's right you smooth-faced little cupcakes, just when you thought you might never seen new Man Beard Blog material again, Man Beard Blog is back in business and now we have a gigantic tome of Man Beard goodness, and we call it The Man Beard Bible.

Well that's what we wanted to call it but our publisher* made us shorten it to just The Bible. But don't worry it is full of beards, regicide, artistic creativity, and putting women in their places. There's also a great deal of divinity and stomping of queers, though not as much piracy or testicles as we would have liked*. Nevertheless it is a strong offering. Some highlights:

  • Every single man in the book has a beard. All of the star characters have beards: Moses, Abraham, Jesus, St. Paul, Satan. All of them. Moses had an especially fine white beard.
  • Showing disdain for my audience, large sections of many of the books are boring as shit. Many are just lists of imaginary characters and who their fathers were. Others are long lists of ridiculous rules that you have to follow like the fucking sheep you are. One of those rules, in the 27th verse of the 19th chapter of Leviticus, is that you are not allowed to trim your beard. That is a good rule.
  • Women are put in their place, big time. The lists of shit you must do includes raping women in cities that you've destroyed (Judges 5:30). You can rape women in your own city too, but if her father catches you, you owe him some money and you have to marry her (Deuteronomy 22:28-29). Other times, The Supreme Man Beard Divinity, a.k.a. "God," helps dudes rape women and this one time he turns a woman into stone just for looking at some shit.
  • Showing further disdain for our audience, the purported protagonist doesn't even show up until more than halfway through the entire compendium, and then he dies almost right away. His death is a gruesome regicide perpetrated by Roman soldiers. He is a sweet-ass Man Beard though. We then proceed to loudly retell the story 3 times with various bizarre inconsistencies like some drunk. Actually we were drunk when we wrote it. Our words are all slurred and shit.
  • There is some fine poetry included. "Song of Songs" is quite lovely.
  • Showing complete disdain for our audience, the last book makes no sense whatsoever. We basically just ramble on for pages and pages about shit we dreamed up when we were on drugs.
The good news is that our book is already the best selling work of literature in human history. But that isn't really a surprise.

The bad news is that in our irrational exuberance, we didn't read the papers our publisher had us sign, and we don't actually signed away the rights to all of it. It was a nice move on his part, and we kind of had it coming. I guess that's what happens when you burn all your bridges*. But this was never really about the money anyway; what matters to us is that our work is so beloved and influential. So we can't technically sell you a copy, but you should be able to buy one lots of other places. If you come by, we'll even sign it for you.

UPDATE: It has been brought to our attention that there is strong evidence that The (Man Beard) Bible has existed in more or less its current form for almost 2,000 years. We haven't fully investigated these claims, but it does help explain the speed with which our book shot to the top of the all-time best seller list. We had expected that would take several months.

If research shows this to be the case, it must mean that at some point in the future, a Man Beard invents a time machine and plants our book in the past to use our tales of bearded regicide to inspire 2,000 additional years of queer-stomping and putting women in their places. His mission was an astonishing success, so if he's time traveling to 2008 we hope he drops by to meet us and get an autographed copy!


* Why didn't you override the publisher to stay true to your creative vision, as a real Man Beard would do? A good question. You must be a very astute Man Beard Blog reader to have noticed this conflict and/or the several asterisks and/or the paragraph of small print at the end. Here's the story. When the Man Beard writing juices start flowing, there can be no containing them, so strong is our irrational exuberance and artistic creativity. So we didn't write just one book; we actually wrote between 66 and 72 separate books. So when we brought all of them to a publisher, he suggested that we just start with one. I think he expected us to just sit around and wait and see how it sold or something, and then maybe publish a few more. Well, fuck that guy. We ripped his throat out, and went to another publisher. He also insisted on starting with just one book. We ripped his throat out too. Publishers are a dime a dozen. Well by the end of that day we had 5 more throats but no publisher. We were holding all 7 throats in one hand, and they kind of looked like one big bloody throat. That's where we got the idea to push all 66 to 72 books into a single volume. That was a lot easier to sell to publishers, although by then we had developed a reputation and only one publisher would agree to meet with us. So we pretty much had to do what he said. Hence, The Bible.

Indecent Proposal: Irish Beard Style

This marvelous item was posted on Futility Closet.

A razor company once invited George Bernard Shaw to shave his famous beard. He responded with a postcard:

Gentlemen:

I shall never shave, for the same reason that I started a beard, and for the reason my father started his. I remember standing at his side, when I was five, while he was shaving for the last time. "Father," I asked, "Why do you shave?" He stood there for a full minute and finally looked down at me. "Why the hell do I?" he said.

– GBS

Man Beard Blog doesn't know much about Irish playwrights (or the Irish, or playwrights, or plays) but we have to fucking give it up for this fine furry fellow.

For starters, he not only had a beard, he had a famous beard.

Props, yo.

And so famous was this beard that a razor company sought out his endorsement! (Why does this sound familiar?)

Further propers.

But so much irrational beard exuberance was coursing through his whiskey drenched Irish veins, that Shaw failed to realize that "because a razor company paid me to" would be a damn good answer to his father's question.

Fucking triple props, you artistically creative, money-disdaining Man Beard!