Wednesday 13 January 2010

Kneel before the almighty God Phone

In the fevered days before Apple's iPhone first went on sale, the must-have mobile was nicknamed "the God Phone" by awed gadget fans, itching to get their hot little hands on that year's hippest piece of consumer electronics. The Reverend Canon David Parrott seems to have taken the "God Phone" phrase a little too literally:

A London clergyman has brought a medieval ceremony of the Church of England* into the 21st century by blessing his flock's smartphones, laptops, and iPods.

The Revd Canon David Parrott of The City's 17th-century St Lawrence Jewry church told The Times that he wanted to update the ancient tradition of Plough Monday, when farmers would bring their plows to church to be blessed on the first Monday after after Twelfth Night.


I'm no expert on the etiquette of not offending our invisible, magic, all-seeing Big Brother in the sky, but don't they have a name for that sort of thing?

Maybe The Rev. Canon Parrot is in the wrong job. Still, if the God-bothering gig doesn't work out for him, he could always go into advertising:

What's great about the GodPhone™ is that if you want to part the Red Sea, there's an app for that.

If you want to incinerate sinners with brimstone and fire, there's an app for that.

If you want to smite the people of Ashdod with hemorrhoids**, there's an app for that.

If you want to download a legion of unclean spirits from a maniac to a herd of pigs, there's an app for that.

If you want to continue judging the quick and the dead, 2,000 years after being nailed to a piece of wood and buried, there's an app for that.

And if you want to turn yourself into an enormous number of wafer-thin morsels of bread and get eaten by millions of people every Sunday, there's even an app for that.

Only on the GodPhone™.


* there was, of course, no such thing as the Church of England in the medieval period - I think there's a name for that sort of thing, too.

** let's call them emerods, since we're using the majestic language of the King James Bible

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