EASTER: WHAT A FRIEND WE HAVE IN JESUS - Tony the Tiger

Easter is April 8th (good Friday, April 6th). Start making your preparations now!

First, all you nice anti-abortion Christians, stock up on eggs to boil.

Next, be a Good Christian and do more kind things to animals, like buying bunnies and chicks from a pet store that deals with puppy mills, psychotic cat breeders and semi-legal parrot and exotic lizard sellers. Not to mention the parakeets and canaries that will spend their lives caged up like Manson just because it's amusing to see them hobble from one end of a perch to the other and do a lot of tweeting (which, come to think of it, is what people on Twitter do).

Most important: FOOD. Stock up especially on egg-shaped tooth-rotting candy. Get the hollow-chocolate replicas of rabbits made with such inferior ingredients that even after Easter, at half price, stores make a huge profit. In a more perfect world, the symbol of Easter would be the platypus, the only mammal that actually lays eggs. Fortunately the near-sighted hear-sayers who wrote the Jesus story generations after it happened, never heard of the platypus so they stuck to the tale of God immaculately fucking a married Jewish woman, and somehow after Christ died, bunny rabbits became part of the myth, too.

Lastly, Easter is not a time to stay indoors and quietly celebrate your inane beliefs (beliefs = unproven fantasy). Go outside in new, fancy clothes. Ladies vanity is always good for big sales and the big ticket item is still: HATS!

Yes among the backward and brainless, the "Easter Bonnet" is still a tradition, in both tourist traps, and all the hideous towns tourists avoid but the locals make up for by standing around a lot and coveting thy neighbor's wife and hat.

Easter is also the time of year when Jews say, "When's Passover?" And when Muslims say "When do our suicide bombers blow up the world so we can really start enjoying life?" Well, there are always killjoys on the other side of the fence, unhappy about eating flat, stale bread or having to have sex with flat, stale women who don't like the scent of camel.

Now, our song. And remember, it's "What A Friend We Have in Jesus," not "What an Imaginary Friend We Have in Jesus," because Mr. Christian has never let you down, has he? Prove that he has. If you asked for something and didn't get it, maybe you didn't deserve it. (Hmmm…if you actually believed THAT, you'd be a Jew!)

Thurl Ravenscroft was the eccentric voice-over star who sang "You're a Mean One Mr. Gingrich," a ton of other basso-voiced novelty tunes, "Teen-age Brain Surgeon" for Spike Jones, and somber religious music as well. He made most of his money as the commercial voice for the Frosted Flakes cereal-killer "Tony the Tiger," that lithe meat-eater of the jungle who somehow wore a red kerchief around his neck (the kind dopey dog owners love to put on German Shepherds) and believed that urban children thrive on a diet that's 90% sugar and 10% heavily processed and nutrition-neutered wheat flour.

And here we have the instantly recognizable "Tony the Tiger" discussing the truly horrible origin for the lyrics to "What A Friend We Have in Jesus." This less-than-uplifting saga (well, Christian martyrdom always trumped even the Jews' sense of suffering being a good thing) leads to the actual song, which is thoroughly rendered with Thurl's assured, sober sense of belief that it might bring peace to almost anyone at Easter time. Except the Easter chick that just keeled over with some disease or other, the bunny that was accidentally stepped on, and anyone wiped out by some Easter act of terror perpetrated by those who have "hijacked a fine religion" (other than Christianity) to make a point about the chances of peace in our time.

Lost in the rain in Juarez this time of year?
What a FRIEND We Have in JESUS and TONY the TIGER Instant download or listen on line. No immoral wait time or ungodly demands that you buy a premium account so that a crooked uploader or slimeball dotcom millionaire file-locker owner can profit from what they stole.