Too Darn Hot

The other night I compared the Westfield Shopping Center (nee the San Francisco Shopping Center) to the Seventh Circle of Hell.  Which serves beautifully as a simile for what was a rather dispiriting and NOT AT ALL JOLLY consumer experience.  But then I thought, was it really the Seventh Circle?  What of the Sixth?  Could it have had some nice moments and thus warranted something less harsh, like comparison to the tamer circles of hell, i.e. second or third?

So, let's consider this.

The Seventh Circle of Hell, as you know, comes from Dante's Inferno.  Lovely book - a poem, technically - which, like you, I haven't read but which I feel free to reference frequently in order to demonstrate how much my parents paid for my education.

The various circles have to do with how bad you've been, i.e. the higher the number, the lower in hell you've fallen and the higher the likelihood that the soles of your Skechers will get all melty.   The higher circles include people who've misstepped only slightly, such as pagans or the unbaptized, which means it's basically Willow from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a bunch of babies and my cousin's girlfriend who freaks me out with her insistence on giving me an 'angel card,' usually accompanied by a too-loud declaration that 'it's 4:20 somewhere!'  So that's the first circle.

Second circle of hell is populated by folks who are overcome by lust while the third circle is full of gluttons.   I imagine this is like having Dore Alley spanking/getting spanked on a plane located just above the City of Houston, Texas.

Fourth and fifth circles are all about the greedy and the slothful, i.e. people who make daytime t.v. and the people who watch it. 

Now, the sixth and seventh circles apparently occupy their own tier of hell, for who knew that hell was a subdivision?  These are for sins which are more active than passive, which is a distinction I don't get because what's more active than sexing each other up (see, circle #2)? 

The sixth circle was Reserved Seating Only for heretics, which seems a bit much, frankly, especially since it's another judgment call.  Why not lump them in with the pagans, who are much cooler, four levels up in the second circle?  Sounds like the sixth circle is for felony non-believers.  Seriously, people, this is why sentencing guidelines suck ass. 

And this brings us to Nordstrom, or as Dante knew it, the seventh circle of hell - which is apparently where the people who have been violent against property or people are banished. People so scary that you'd have us believe that a minotaur is guarding them.  These are some bad folks, right?  All locked up like a bug in a maximum security rug in some divine version of Pelican Bay, where everyone's all tatted up and have nicknames like 'Cornfed' or 'Mayhem.'  Guys whose necks are the size of Rosie's thigh, who would never say 'bless you' after you sneezed, who wouldn't even call the guards after they'd seen you get shivved in the laundry, blah blah blah. 

But that is not these guys.  No, per Dante, the seventh circle includes those who are violent against people and property - including sodomites (!), suicides and usurers.  Elton John, Kurt Cobain and Countrywide Mortgage - benvenuti! 

And then there's the eighth circle of hell.  This has gotta be awful stuff right?  People tearing the faces off of babies, telling you that Dennis Kucinich really is awesome or that you shouldn't eat so much bacon* - but no.  The eighth circle is for the 'fraudulent' - the ones who knowingly committed an evil act. 

Hello, my name is Paris Hilton. 
Hi, Paris!
I released an album on Warner Brothers after making my engineers rape AutoTune.  Wait - where are you taking me?  No, my manager told me I was going to Bungalow 8, not Circle 8.  Aieeeeeeeee! 

(*The antibacon hordes, I think, charitably, believe that they're doing a good thing, ditto the Kucinichettes.)

This also includes the flatterers, so forget trying to lie to someone and tell them that no, their car does not make their butt look big; the fact that their ass is causing a solar eclipse in Bangalore is what makes their butt look big. 

You can say that I said so.

I'm just trying to keep you out of hell.  Now go out and save the date, you crazy kids!