I bet Jesus would agree with me that "A New Hope" was better than "Empire."

Allana Harkin, who plays a hot mom on a sad television show about a little boy who can't distinguish reality from fiction and so believes that he's living in a terrifying world populated by dinosaurs, recently said on Twitter

"I'm looking forward to the Holidays being over so I can stop thinking everything is a Star Wars reference."

Which is funny because she's from Canada. 

It's understandable for Allana to think that she can avoid things being a Star Wars reference, but it's also wrong because everything is a Star Wars reference, up to and including that cloud formation above, which was claimed to be a real cloud formation by the guy who posted it.  (IO9, my source for the picture, wasn't so sure.)  But even saying that every facet of Western culture -- and I am 64% sure that Canada is a part of Western Culture in that (a) it is located in the Western and (b) it has a culture, I'm sure, possibly -- is based on Star Wars (as superhero book author PT Dilloway noted) doesn't accurately describe just how bad it has gotten.

At least for me.

Here's what happened.  Every week, I listen to the Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me podcast on NPR, because I pay good tax money for that service and if we are going to pay $178,000,000,000 to support it, as most people in the public incorrectly guess, then dang it, we'd all better listen, oughtn't we?

(Most of the public thinks that 5% of the federal budget goes towards NPR, as that link will tell you.  Some think  it's as high as 10%, which tells you that most of the public has no idea what the federal government does or how it spends its money,  which tells you in turn why the Tea Party is still a thing.)

I was, as I said, listening this week to Wait Wait, and they got to the segment where they read three news stories but only one of them is a real story, and the listener/contestant has to guess which story is the real one.

This week, the three candidates were a story about how yacht owners are protesting a nominal increase in dock fees by not holding a Christmas parade, a story about a grocery co-op having a skinny Santa to send kids a healthy message, and this story read by Bobcat Goldthwait, who is also still a thing and, I believe, also Canadian because why not?

Port Talbot, Wales, like many towns all over the world, has a manger in its town square, with animals, wise men and baby Jesus. And after requests from another religious community in town, the Jedi, it now has a manger showing the medical deck on the asteroid colony of Polis Massa, showing the birth of Luke Skywalker.

However, local vandals did not take too kindly to the space-themed nativity and stole baby Luke Skywalker from his cradle.

Jedi Porter Barron, the group's leader, turned to the local media in an effort to have Baby Luke. "It disturbs the force, in these times that all faiths are not respected equally, and myself and my brother and sister Jedi knights have been deeply hurt by the lack of sensitivity and attention that has been shown by the local authorities in helping return Baby Luke."

Mr. Barron added, "Also, the Luke doll wasn't even ours. It was on loan to us from a Jedi chapter from Hartford."

The correct answer, as it turns out, was the yacht owner thing because rich people with yachts are subhuman jerks who ought to be forced to live on that island from Lost so they can explain to the Smoke Monster why they are worthy of saving, but the real moral of this story is that I so badly wanted that last story to be the real one.  I wanted it so badly I could taste it, feel it.  I wanted it so badly that I almost spontaneously evolved a new sense just to be able to want it with that sense, too.

But, alas, that was not the real story.  Despite the fact that Star Wars now permeates even the holiday gatherings of Canadiers (where they call the holiday Canadian Christmas, and hold it a month earlier to prove they are different than us), it has not replaced the traditional Nativity in our mythology and religion.

Only, it turns out, it has.  The LA Times did a story over two years ago on just that thing.


Here's a jungle moon one:

Here's one that gets credit for having Luke and Leia be born without making Leia and Han somehow the parents because that is messed up mythology, people:

And here's one with R2D2 as our future lord and savior because let's face it, that's where Lucas was going with it and what do you expect from Disney Star Wars in the future?

Gritty space realism? Not when there's cute droids to merchandise: