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Welcome to "The Gods Are Bored," on or around our sixth anniversary! What began in 2005 as a peevish Pagan rant against anything and everything has become .... um .... okay, so evolution doesn't happen so quickly! Give me another ten million years, and I'll be the picture of calmness and sanity.

It's tempting to look back and re-live all the highlights, but oh crap. They are few, and the list of posts is loooooong. Onward and upward, I say.

May 5 has been designated the National Day of Prayer, again. I'm not sure whether the sitting president has issued some sort of decree, but I guess he probably will. Seems like he's for sale in every other area, so he's probably going to overlook the First Amendment as well.

So, once again on May 5, 2011, we'll have a big display of pastors, rabbis, and Imams praying for a nation founded on the premise that government should be unaffiliated with any and every faith path.

Do you believe in prayer? I sure do! Not a night goes by that I don't spend a few reflective moments with some deserving bored deity or another. If you haven't tried communing with a Higher Power who hasn't gotten a shred of attention in 2000 years, you really ought to. It's sort of a situation where you ask not what the god can do for you, but what you can do for the god.

We at "The Gods Are Bored" plan to find out where and when Snobville's observance of National Day of Prayer will occur. We will go there in all our numbers (that being one) and call Peace from the Quarters. It's a day of prayer. So who is choosing the recipient of the prayers? We Pagans have a Constitutional guarantee that we, too, can pray for the great, grand US of A.

We at "The Gods Are Bored" encourage fellow Pagans to get out the prayer! Take your circle, your coven, your blot, your local Pastafarians, find out where and when, and go to the local event.

Let's use this fabulous National Day of Prayer as a platform from which to proclaim that we, too, Pagans all, have our very own deities, rituals, and practices that are valid and affirming.

Honestly, does Yahweh need more press? No, but a little ink dedicated to Mannanan Mac Lir might be nice.

More on this in the future. Thank you for reading "The Gods Are Bored." I love what I do here. I've met so many fascinating Ancient Ones!

FROM ANNE
THE MERLIN OF BERKELEY SPRINGS

Well, my friends, there's so much going on in the world right now that I wish I had time to write more. I promise I'll have an interesting post tomorrow or the next day.

In the meantime, I have three weeks. The clock is ticking.

Three weeks to load my MP3 player with everything under the sun. Then the stupid monthly subscription fee runs out. We've been paying this fee for over a year without downloading a single snippet of music.

Therefore I intend to make up for lost time. I'm going to load as many albums as I can. That way I recoup the money we've spent for the doggone Rhapsody all along.

Fling your recommendations my way! I do not like jazz. I'm pretty versed in classical. I'd rather swim in Jello than listen to most Broadway, so forget that too. Never liked opera. If it's country music, it has to be edgy.

Need: music that gives you that extra boost at the end of the day. Ethnic music, especially Scottish and Celtic. Fusion, so long as it has a beat. Drums. Dance.

What do you like that the bored gods would party to? Make a list and check it twice. Subscription ends April 27.

And yes, listening to this little MP3 player is like being let out of silence jail. Currently "Earth, Wind & Fire." Highly recommend. Although it pegs me age-wise.

Please don't recommend The Residents. I will block you.

Peace to all -- some Walt Whitman this week, I think.

Denne gangen har Artsy teamet jobbet med søte motiv på Artsy kort. Artsy stilen blir ikke regnet for å være spesielt søt - så dette var litt av en utfordring for Artsy teamet. Det å kombinere to forskjellige uttrykk kan være en riktig bra kombinasjon. Så vi håper å inspirere dere til bruk av denne kombinasjonen. Enten det er søtt motiv på et Artsy kort eller Artsy kort til ditt søte motiv ; )

This week our Artsy team have been working with the challenge of combining a cute stamped image with an Artsy card. Cute isn't probably the first word you think of when you hear Artsy style - but combining two different worlds could be a good thing. So we hope to inspire you to combine the two. Here's what our Artsy team have created:

Welcome to "The Gods Are Bored!" Alas, I am singing the blues this weekend. A cappella. Just my quivery voice going out into a void.

On Friday night my daughter The Heir and I journeyed to the World Cafe for a return engagement of The Residents. I triple dog dare you to find a weirder group of performance artists than these. In fact, many psychiatrists use live performances of The Residents as a test of sanity. If you sit and listen to the entire show, you're crazy. If you run screaming from the venue, you're sane.

Poor Heir. Totally certifiable. Not only did she attend the concert, she stood at the rail by the stage, the only girl amongst a crush of nerdboys who had that never-leave-the-basement pallor.

It's not fair to the concept of music to call a Residents performance music. So I can be safe in saying that since January, my entire experience of music has been reduced to short bursts of classic rock in the car, classical music during dinner (from the t.v., Mr. J's idea), and one lovely concert by Delhi 2 Dublin, which definitely qualifies as music.

No wonder I'm going nuts.

When I was a teenager, my parents gave me a record player from Montgomery Ward. I used my spare change to buy albums, and I played them on the record player. Some of my friends had 8-track tape players. Later I got a car with a cassette player, and that was great. Still later the CD player came out, and that was great too -- just seemed like little records. Pop them into the player and hit play.

Nowadays you need an IPod to listen to music. I don't have one. If I had one, I wouldn't have the foggiest notion how to use it.

I'm not the kind of person to block out the world by filling my ears with buds and listening to music instead of what's going on around me. But damn. I live in a suburb of Philadelphia. It's not like I'll be missing the trills of the nightingale if I hear a few tunes I like.

The Residents drove me to desperation. This can't be my only music! I've got to be able to hear "Fire and Rain" whenever I want! "Winchester Cathedral." Sam Bush. Earth, Wind, and Fire. "Get Up, Stand Up."

I want one of those gadgets that gets music off the Internet. The clock is not moving backwards. I have to step into the 21st century.

So this afternoon, my daughter The Spare said she would help me set up her old MP3 player to get some tunes. (She upgraded to an IPod at Christmas.) We sat down together. She got online and began clicking buttons. Click click click.

Two hours later we were still sitting there with no music to show for Spare's monumental efforts. We wound up calling the Rhapsody people and letting some dude named Earl with an Indian accent hack into our computer to try to fix whatever was wrong with Rhapsody on our end. Spare says it's fixed now and ready to load all the stuff of my dreams, but I'm afraid to touch the doggone little box -- and she's out with her friends.

Maybe you have to have been born into the digital age to be comfortable with music machines the size of credit cards. Maybe you have to be a Type A personality to work with this technology. I am sitting here in a silence broken only by the bizarre paranoiac screeches of The Residents, wishing I could just go back to those scratchy old records on a dusty turntable.