It's senseless. It's pointless. It's a complete
waste of time...
If only it weren't so danged much fun, too.
As of March 16, 2001, only two days after first encountering
it,
I have become hopelessly hooked on the
"All Your Base Are Belong to Us" phenomenon,
a thought contagion traveling across the 'Net faster
than a chain letter e-mail hoax.
It's only a matter of time before "CATS" shows up on both
The X-Files and Millennium in a special
cross-over-story-line double episode.
Mulder always said that the truth was out there.
Who'd have ever guessed that the truth would be,
"All your base are belong to us"?
Below are examples of evidence that I have found in the
past day or so
that clearly indicate the presence of a "vast Zero-wing
conspiracy."
(They're also evidence that I've got too much time on
my hands...)
Resistance is futile...
Here's one truth that we always knew was out there...
What CATS' broken "Engrish" really means...
Of course! "CATS" is a bad translation of "GATES."
"I am Bjorn... of Borg!"
The end is Mir...
In looking for material for Easter I came across the
above religious painting
(I've left it at its original size so that the text on
the pages of the open book will be legible).
What caught my eye is that while the noun (o qemelioV)
is singular,
the verb (eisin) is plural.
I pulled out my Greek lexicon to try to make sense of it;
apparently it's in a divine syntax because it doesn't
make sense in ordinary Greek.
A literal rendering would be "All the foundation of you
are ours,"
or "Your whole foundation are ours." As best as
I can tell,
this painting represents the Holy Trinity as saying to
the viewer,
"All your base are belong to us."
I suppose that the painter was seeking to express the
doctrine of divine sovereignty.
The above image came to me in a moment of inspiration.
While I was thinking about how the Zero Wing phrase "For
great justice!"
sounds like an expression of Shatnerian, melodramatic
overacting,
I suddenly realized that the words themselves could actually
point
to something beyond a badly-translated computer arcade
game,
to something that truly did happen "for great justice":
Christ's death upon the cross for the sake of our justification
before God.
He "was put to death for our trespasses and raised for
our justification"
(Romans 4:25).