WATCH GRID: Biblically accurate angels

Scroll to the end for a fun fact

First! This weekend! Tell a North Florida / South Georgia friend: This Sunday at 5 p.m. in Jacksonville, Florida, I’ll be at Hendricks Avenue Baptist Church for a free (RSVP here) event about my book and stuff. I will not care which religious status you leave with afterward. Q&A, signing, panel, etc., and then we’re going to the bar selected by HAB’s pastor to enjoy a world without the Jaguars.

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(In case you’re new: I’ve been doing a weekly college football schedule guide since like 2015 or something. It’s really ugly, but people ask for it. I usually also write something that has either a lot or nothing to do with the spreadsheet screenshot.)

Quick one this week. Around here, we believe in hope, and therefore:

If tomorrow isn’t the day when these wheels are set in motion¹, then please note I did not specify in which year it would happen. “About that day and hour, no one knows” is handy for any situation!

As for days and hours we do know:

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Additionally, a holiday thing:

• If you buy a copy of my (frankly well-reviewed) book between now and December 7,

• and send us a screenshot (jasonkirkbook at gmail.com) of your 11/15-12/7 receipt, along with your address,

• then we’ll send you an autograph sticker that you can use to turn your copy into an author-signed copy — along with a handful of other stickers, while supplies last.

• (U.S. only, please. If you live elsewhere, I will email you a PNG or something.)

• We’ll get it to you in time for Christmas, so you can plan to give these copies as gifts. 😉

• Don’t worry about shipping costs. Ho ho ho! (If this burdens your soul, send a dollar to charity.)

Here’s the first pile of stickers, about to head out today:

1. A tangent, which is hopefully a fun fact:

The Book of Ezekiel opens with the prophet’s vision of a bunch of wild shit in the sky (now there’s a book that hits the damn ground running), which eventually inspired the Biblically Accurate Angels meme, the internet’s BE NOT AFRAID joke about all angels fitting the description of Ezekiel’s wheely-eyeballed sky horrors, rather than looking like the chubby-cheeked cloudbabies in the paintings on the walls at your grandma’s house.

A great joke, one I’ve seen on Bluesky several times this week, in addition to the Shutdown Fullcast celebrating Biblically Accurate Garfield.

Additionally, a biblically accurate angel can be either one of those Ezekiel nightmares or something totally different:

• Some of the Bible’s beings/gods/visions/messengers/embodiments/etc. that can be retroactively understood with our catch-all idea of “angels: God’s errand guys” really do look like the classic Glowing Sword Humanoid image. See Numbers 22:23 or Joshua 5:13, for instance. Others are different kinds of weird, as the authors of Daniel and Revelation depicted with all their fevered might.

• If you attempt to Pokemon-taxonomize all of these biblically accurate things that were described by different writers in different centuries amid different cultural influences, you end up with something like medieval Rabbi Maimonides’ angel POWER RANKINGS, proof that people have always had r/whowouldwin brains.

• Also, per Genesis 18 (when Abraham makes friends with three wandering randos), biblically accurate angels can look something like this:

The lead photo on Wikipedia’s article about humans

So if we have no way of knowing which travelers are secretly angels, then we’d better act as if all of them are, lest we have to explain our behavior to a wheely-eyeballed sky horror.