May 12, 2010
May 10, 2010
May 01, 2010
April 29, 2010
April 24, 2010
The Banners Way: Tough as a cob and twice as corny
Friends,
You know the Banners Gospel: "After the Apocalypse, goods are going to go for PREMIUM prices. When the day comes—and assuming the human race isn’t portioned out between demons and a Lamb Savior who demands your love—there will be SURVIVORS. These survivors will need CIGARETTES."
But today allow Your Leader to elaborate on that advice. In addition to vice, the survivors will also need food and drink, assuming they remain human after the Earth is dusted with strange radiation from a passing comet. How to fulfill the human need for sustenance? Dag, after an exhaustive search of history's greatest foods, recommends you grow CORN.
Called maize by Native Americans, corn provided successful societies like the Maya and Aztec with the surplus food necessary to energize pyramid-builders and fatten up human sacrifices. So important was it to them that they called it the Staff of Life, though it fell somewhat short of that label when confronted by poxy Spaniards carrying firearms.
A TV commercial from 1471
The many uses of this fantastic plant can set up ANYONE in the Post-Everything good life. Varieties bearing red kernels can be smashed into a dye so strong you can brand the adulterers in your village with total confidence the “A” will never wash out. Sweet corn, meanwhile, is a fine side for any meat you can shoot or find by the side of a road. And when the eatin’ is done, the corn stalk’s leaves and silk provide two levels of bathroom tissue that make the perfect tool for imposing a caste system on your shell-shocked followers.
Since I know my readers prefer bullet-pointed lists, let me add that other benefits include:
• Corn meal ground by your youngest wife/mutant slave/humorous robot can be made into corn bread perfect for turning your hard-earned raccoon sausage into corn dogs
• Corn gruel is a fortifying low-cost meal you can provide for your followers
• Corn makes excellent bait for roaming livestock
• Corn, unknown to Biblical prophets or indeed anyone in the Eastern Hemisphere until after 1492, comes unentangled in Levitican rules that says you can't grow it, sew it, throw it, use it to pelt Canaanites, or eat it on Jewish holidays. That's right, even the stickler for Biblical injunctions in your tribal group will find it impossible to forbid!
Expect maize to attract followers
Even more significantly, corn provides an excellent base for the most important product in the post-apocalyptic economy: alcoholic drinks. The pre-industrial mountain peoples of the Andes have brewed their chichi for centuries. The pre-industrial mountain peoples of the Appalachians call their beverage shine, and have driven it across state lines to the accompaniment of banjo music since those blue-skinned people you’ve heard about were a faint shade of indigo.
Lacking digestible niacin. Stolen from the Indians. Rendered into a syrup that causes obesity. Can you think of any food more American?
The End is coming, friends. Plant your seed corn, convince your wife's dumb nephew he's a scarecrow, and prepare for an exciting NEW LIFE in the primitive-but-polygamous times to come.
Dag Banners is an author, think tank founder, entrepreneur, proud former Amway distributor, and the world’s only survivalist advice columnist. His columns appear regularly.
You know the Banners Gospel: "After the Apocalypse, goods are going to go for PREMIUM prices. When the day comes—and assuming the human race isn’t portioned out between demons and a Lamb Savior who demands your love—there will be SURVIVORS. These survivors will need CIGARETTES."
But today allow Your Leader to elaborate on that advice. In addition to vice, the survivors will also need food and drink, assuming they remain human after the Earth is dusted with strange radiation from a passing comet. How to fulfill the human need for sustenance? Dag, after an exhaustive search of history's greatest foods, recommends you grow CORN.
Called maize by Native Americans, corn provided successful societies like the Maya and Aztec with the surplus food necessary to energize pyramid-builders and fatten up human sacrifices. So important was it to them that they called it the Staff of Life, though it fell somewhat short of that label when confronted by poxy Spaniards carrying firearms.
A TV commercial from 1471The many uses of this fantastic plant can set up ANYONE in the Post-Everything good life. Varieties bearing red kernels can be smashed into a dye so strong you can brand the adulterers in your village with total confidence the “A” will never wash out. Sweet corn, meanwhile, is a fine side for any meat you can shoot or find by the side of a road. And when the eatin’ is done, the corn stalk’s leaves and silk provide two levels of bathroom tissue that make the perfect tool for imposing a caste system on your shell-shocked followers.
Since I know my readers prefer bullet-pointed lists, let me add that other benefits include:
• Corn meal ground by your youngest wife/mutant slave/humorous robot can be made into corn bread perfect for turning your hard-earned raccoon sausage into corn dogs
• Corn gruel is a fortifying low-cost meal you can provide for your followers
• Corn makes excellent bait for roaming livestock
• Corn, unknown to Biblical prophets or indeed anyone in the Eastern Hemisphere until after 1492, comes unentangled in Levitican rules that says you can't grow it, sew it, throw it, use it to pelt Canaanites, or eat it on Jewish holidays. That's right, even the stickler for Biblical injunctions in your tribal group will find it impossible to forbid!
Expect maize to attract followersEven more significantly, corn provides an excellent base for the most important product in the post-apocalyptic economy: alcoholic drinks. The pre-industrial mountain peoples of the Andes have brewed their chichi for centuries. The pre-industrial mountain peoples of the Appalachians call their beverage shine, and have driven it across state lines to the accompaniment of banjo music since those blue-skinned people you’ve heard about were a faint shade of indigo.
Lacking digestible niacin. Stolen from the Indians. Rendered into a syrup that causes obesity. Can you think of any food more American?
The End is coming, friends. Plant your seed corn, convince your wife's dumb nephew he's a scarecrow, and prepare for an exciting NEW LIFE in the primitive-but-polygamous times to come.
Dag Banners is an author, think tank founder, entrepreneur, proud former Amway distributor, and the world’s only survivalist advice columnist. His columns appear regularly.
April 15, 2010
Earthquake in Yushu
It is an odd feeling to wake up at 5:30 a.m. and find out that the tragedy in the news that morning affects one personally.
While sleepwalking through my Carnation Instant Breakfast, I saw on TV that an earthquake had struck Tibet. Online I was thunderstruck to see the area affected was Yushu. That may be the only city in western China I know anything about. For the past two years, I've sat on the board of an organization that oversees a girls school in Yushu. The young women come from the countryside, specifically, from the Tibetan herding peoples of the region, and the school is dedicated to giving them an education that includes job and language skills, and information on family planning and basic health.
The goal, to put it in Americanized terms: empowerment through education.
The school was masterminded by a Tibetan named Asang (he goes by one name). These days Asang lives in Evanston, Illinois. Some years ago, after his sister died in childbirth, Asang essentially walked out of Tibet. After an arduous and lengthy journey, he made his way to India, got an education, and met an American woman in the area to study. They married, he moved to the U.S., and in part to honor his sister's memory Asang organized the Yushu school.
The first class had ten young women. I've seen and interacted with some of them via Skype. Now I've learned, via Asang, that not all of them survived the quake. And I find this ... incomprehensible.
Heartbreaking, too, 0f course. But since I learned of the disaster at 5:30 this morning I have returned over and over again to how it at once seems so big I cannot get my mind around it, so unreal, and yet on an emotional level nothing but real. Every time my thoughts turned to the school today I ended up staring into space, overwhelmed here by feeling, there by a hunger to understand. Always I remembered seeing the young women and their teachers bunched around the camera.
I have no idea if those I saw on the computer screen--or in the very recent picture above--are among the dead. In fact, at this moment I have no idea how many of the students died or were injured. I only know that the school is destroyed, that some of the girls at least are missing, that two children Asang and his wife Nancy hoped to bring to the U.S. are no more.
Donations to aid those in Yushu.
While sleepwalking through my Carnation Instant Breakfast, I saw on TV that an earthquake had struck Tibet. Online I was thunderstruck to see the area affected was Yushu. That may be the only city in western China I know anything about. For the past two years, I've sat on the board of an organization that oversees a girls school in Yushu. The young women come from the countryside, specifically, from the Tibetan herding peoples of the region, and the school is dedicated to giving them an education that includes job and language skills, and information on family planning and basic health.
The goal, to put it in Americanized terms: empowerment through education.
The school was masterminded by a Tibetan named Asang (he goes by one name). These days Asang lives in Evanston, Illinois. Some years ago, after his sister died in childbirth, Asang essentially walked out of Tibet. After an arduous and lengthy journey, he made his way to India, got an education, and met an American woman in the area to study. They married, he moved to the U.S., and in part to honor his sister's memory Asang organized the Yushu school.
The first class had ten young women. I've seen and interacted with some of them via Skype. Now I've learned, via Asang, that not all of them survived the quake. And I find this ... incomprehensible.
Heartbreaking, too, 0f course. But since I learned of the disaster at 5:30 this morning I have returned over and over again to how it at once seems so big I cannot get my mind around it, so unreal, and yet on an emotional level nothing but real. Every time my thoughts turned to the school today I ended up staring into space, overwhelmed here by feeling, there by a hunger to understand. Always I remembered seeing the young women and their teachers bunched around the camera.
I have no idea if those I saw on the computer screen--or in the very recent picture above--are among the dead. In fact, at this moment I have no idea how many of the students died or were injured. I only know that the school is destroyed, that some of the girls at least are missing, that two children Asang and his wife Nancy hoped to bring to the U.S. are no more.
Donations to aid those in Yushu.
April 13, 2010
The Banners Way: Fryin' for Jesus
Friends,
As many of you know, I, Dag Banners, have dabbled in bringing the Old Time Religion to my ever-expanding audience of short-wave listeners and email blastees. I have even pitched it to YOU as the career opportunity that can best reshape your otherwise empty and frustrated life.
How, you say? Well, I don't often ask my listeners and readers to think, but try it just this once. The faith business provides an opportunity to earn respect, donations, and a get-out-of-jail-free card for all manner of crimes WITHOUT having to get educated, rise through the cutthroat corporate world on your own talents, or emerge from the loins of rich people. Indeed, NO OTHER JOB in our rigged-against-you society allows an ordinary person to rise to a position of such undoubted authority despite an utter lack of preparation, luck, or merit.
With just one (good) Book, a lectern purchased at an estate sale, and one of the many empty properties withering away in America's strip malls, YOU can seize a tax-free lifestyle that will reward you in both this life and the next. And by the next, of course, I mean the Post-Everything, where shell-shocked survivors will cling to the confidently-spoken words of any clergyman, as long as the words express ideas they agree with and promise that a vengeful God will rain ruin on their enemies, real and imagined.
I admit that I have yet to practice what I preach for just $49.95 hardcover. Is the reason because Banners is godless? No. Because Banners cannot find a pair of white leather shoes with matching silk tie in his size? No. Because his labyrinthine layout of barbed wire, homemade explosives, and rusted-out appliances has kept a 900-foot Jesus from appearing on the lawn outside his redoubt? No.
The real reason seems even more impossible. Banners, after thirty-plus years of entrepreneurial success, failed to come up with a marketing gimmick for his ministry.
Until now.
It's a strategy that takes advantage of two irresistible currents in our society: the fact that church attendance is way down, and the fact the obesity rate is way up.
Thus, I bring you... The Dag Banners Ministry. With Fried Chicken.
Put aside services that interfere with your Sunday afternoon football watchin'. Embrace the divine as it is expressed through delicious food. Get something solid back for your weekly donation--so solid, in fact, you'll feel it in your intestinal tract for two days.
Dag's church offers good-enough-to-be-sacrament fried bird surrounded by a trinity of salted flour layers, or four levels of barbequed chicken smothered in a Banners homemade sauce as red as the blood of martyrs who run afoul (no pun intended) of the zero-tolerance Roman legal system.
Eat up, y'all:
Level Blue: our mildest blend, recommended for extremely white people and those who, due to heart conditions, are not quite ready to host the Holy Spirit.
Level Yellow: Hot and spicy.
Level Orange: Hotter and spicier. It is to Level Yellow what Pam Anderson is to Shelly Duvall.
Level Red: Armageddon. So hot you'll taste it even if you've damaged your tastebuds through long-term nicotine addiction.
We've got legs. We've got wings. We've got American thighs. And we've got tasty, tasty necks. (Breasts, however, are not on the menu, as they engender sinful thoughts. We apologize for the inconvenience.)
Jesus Christ...Supersized!
Unlike the more secular fried chicken providers, we serve our baskets of white meat, mashed potatoes, and butter-drenched biscuits in pages of real Scripture. As if that wasn't enough, our church features a mini-pool capable of borning again any customer under 400 lbs. Step in and one of our ministers-slash-shift managers will wash your sins away with pure, unchlorinated rainwater bottled by Banners Sundries, Inc., while bosomy waitresses with the good news written on their t-shirts sing a hymn (followed by our jingle).
But fear not, longtime followers. Though Banners is naturally excited by this new direction, he wants to reassure everyone that he remains COMMITTED to his survivalist philosophy.
Toward that end, he wants to cater YOUR apocalypse by providing dinners guaranteed to last long into the Post-Everything.
Order up our End Is Nigh Combo and get enough EXTRA BISCUITS to support a circumnavigation of the globe.
And don't forget the easy-heat Survival Combo: a meal of vacuum-packed fried chicken, biscuits, and dehydrated mashed potatoes that we GUARANTEE to have a shelf-life of seven years.* Discounts on orders of 100 or more!
Think of it. A service you can enjoy with minimal prayer. A brief taped sermon from Your Leader (with limited commercial interruption). A bib with Dag's image done in black velvet.
Put aside your idea of religion as a tedious obligation. Enjoy your worship. And your choice of fifteen kinds of soft drink for just 99 cents.
* Guarantee is rhetorical only.
Dag Banners is an author, think tank founder, entrepreneur, proud former Amway distributor, and the world’s only survivalist advice columnist. His column appears regularly. He would like to think Anthony Zaius for his invaluable marketing suggestions.
As many of you know, I, Dag Banners, have dabbled in bringing the Old Time Religion to my ever-expanding audience of short-wave listeners and email blastees. I have even pitched it to YOU as the career opportunity that can best reshape your otherwise empty and frustrated life.
How, you say? Well, I don't often ask my listeners and readers to think, but try it just this once. The faith business provides an opportunity to earn respect, donations, and a get-out-of-jail-free card for all manner of crimes WITHOUT having to get educated, rise through the cutthroat corporate world on your own talents, or emerge from the loins of rich people. Indeed, NO OTHER JOB in our rigged-against-you society allows an ordinary person to rise to a position of such undoubted authority despite an utter lack of preparation, luck, or merit.
With just one (good) Book, a lectern purchased at an estate sale, and one of the many empty properties withering away in America's strip malls, YOU can seize a tax-free lifestyle that will reward you in both this life and the next. And by the next, of course, I mean the Post-Everything, where shell-shocked survivors will cling to the confidently-spoken words of any clergyman, as long as the words express ideas they agree with and promise that a vengeful God will rain ruin on their enemies, real and imagined.
I admit that I have yet to practice what I preach for just $49.95 hardcover. Is the reason because Banners is godless? No. Because Banners cannot find a pair of white leather shoes with matching silk tie in his size? No. Because his labyrinthine layout of barbed wire, homemade explosives, and rusted-out appliances has kept a 900-foot Jesus from appearing on the lawn outside his redoubt? No.
The real reason seems even more impossible. Banners, after thirty-plus years of entrepreneurial success, failed to come up with a marketing gimmick for his ministry.
Until now.
It's a strategy that takes advantage of two irresistible currents in our society: the fact that church attendance is way down, and the fact the obesity rate is way up.
Thus, I bring you... The Dag Banners Ministry. With Fried Chicken.
Put aside services that interfere with your Sunday afternoon football watchin'. Embrace the divine as it is expressed through delicious food. Get something solid back for your weekly donation--so solid, in fact, you'll feel it in your intestinal tract for two days.
Dag's church offers good-enough-to-be-sacrament fried bird surrounded by a trinity of salted flour layers, or four levels of barbequed chicken smothered in a Banners homemade sauce as red as the blood of martyrs who run afoul (no pun intended) of the zero-tolerance Roman legal system.
Eat up, y'all:
Level Blue: our mildest blend, recommended for extremely white people and those who, due to heart conditions, are not quite ready to host the Holy Spirit.
Level Yellow: Hot and spicy.
Level Orange: Hotter and spicier. It is to Level Yellow what Pam Anderson is to Shelly Duvall.
Level Red: Armageddon. So hot you'll taste it even if you've damaged your tastebuds through long-term nicotine addiction.
We've got legs. We've got wings. We've got American thighs. And we've got tasty, tasty necks. (Breasts, however, are not on the menu, as they engender sinful thoughts. We apologize for the inconvenience.)
Jesus Christ...Supersized!Unlike the more secular fried chicken providers, we serve our baskets of white meat, mashed potatoes, and butter-drenched biscuits in pages of real Scripture. As if that wasn't enough, our church features a mini-pool capable of borning again any customer under 400 lbs. Step in and one of our ministers-slash-shift managers will wash your sins away with pure, unchlorinated rainwater bottled by Banners Sundries, Inc., while bosomy waitresses with the good news written on their t-shirts sing a hymn (followed by our jingle).
But fear not, longtime followers. Though Banners is naturally excited by this new direction, he wants to reassure everyone that he remains COMMITTED to his survivalist philosophy.
Toward that end, he wants to cater YOUR apocalypse by providing dinners guaranteed to last long into the Post-Everything.
Order up our End Is Nigh Combo and get enough EXTRA BISCUITS to support a circumnavigation of the globe.
And don't forget the easy-heat Survival Combo: a meal of vacuum-packed fried chicken, biscuits, and dehydrated mashed potatoes that we GUARANTEE to have a shelf-life of seven years.* Discounts on orders of 100 or more!
Think of it. A service you can enjoy with minimal prayer. A brief taped sermon from Your Leader (with limited commercial interruption). A bib with Dag's image done in black velvet.
Put aside your idea of religion as a tedious obligation. Enjoy your worship. And your choice of fifteen kinds of soft drink for just 99 cents.
* Guarantee is rhetorical only.
Dag Banners is an author, think tank founder, entrepreneur, proud former Amway distributor, and the world’s only survivalist advice columnist. His column appears regularly. He would like to think Anthony Zaius for his invaluable marketing suggestions.
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