Honestly, I think this Dharma-Burger is cool. It makes sense, it’s safe, it seems to be well-designed: It’s the electric butter lamp.

Really. Offered by “Offering Light” who describes the product as:

We design and create innovative electric butter lamps for butter lamp offerings, Buddhist lamp offerings & Tibetan light offerings. [...]

How do butter lamp offerings become safe and clean? Make them with flameless candles! Learn how you can brighten up your world with these electric butter lamps.

Our Offering Lights are a brand new illumination on this classic Tibetan Buddhist ritual. It uses earth-friendly, super low-energy LED flameless tea lights that flicker just like real candles! Order now–you’ll love them!

I don’t have one so can’t vouch for the product but I have no problem endorsing the idea and the spirit behind it. Check ‘em out here.

PS: Thanks to online friend Ross B. for bringing this to my attention.

I just learned that that’s how comedian Eddie Pepitone identifies and markets himself. (A documentary by the same name is also forthcoming.)

So is he Buddhist? I can’t really tell. His new album is called “A Great Stillness.” That seems like something, no? A Google search turns up a reference or two or three to Pepitone from Zen teacher Brad Warner — who counts the comic among his favorites — and some gags from the Pepitone’s Twitter feed:

• “Watching Saturday Night Live is like watching a Buddhist monk light himself on fire except for no reason.”
• “As a buddhist child I got teased a lot for renouncing all thought.”
• “I studied zen Buddhism with Maharishi Gus Lobotomovich and he always said “shit, did you hear that?”

And here’s a quote from a new AV Club interview with Pepitone: “You wanna give life meaning against all of this pain and anguish. You’re trying to give it meaning and you’re trying to be happy, but you have all this stuff that is in the way. And that’s the stuff I talk about.”

Know anything about the Bitter Buddha? Let us know.

Did you know Bugs Bunny traveled to Tibet? It’s true, NYC’s Rubin Museum of Art tells us by way of its Facebook feed, providing this classic comic book cover as proof…

The Rubin offers us the opportunity to “learn more about how prevailing perceptions of Tibet and the visual narrative evolved over time.” Their exhibit, Hero, Villain, Yeti: Tibet in Comics opens December 9, 2011. Click here for details. You’ll see comics discussed here on the Horse, like the Green Lama, plus much more like, Milarepa and Dalai Lama comics(!).

PS: Comics or not, The Rubin would be a must-see anyway!

If “Dharma-Burgers” are incidents of Buddhism and/or Buddhist ideas colliding with mass culture, then certainly “Buddhify,” featured on the great Lifehacker site today, qualifies:

There’s not anything so new, in and of itself, about there being a meditation app. So why might Buddhify be notable? (more…)

Last night, Chef Jose Andres joined Coco to talk rum and other concoctions. While we’re told by the Conan’s Facebook page that “Buddha” appears in the segment, that’s not quite right. It’d be more accurate to say that it’s Hotei, aka, the “fat Buddha,” or the “happy Buddha” who makes the cameo here, at around the 5:20 mark. Also appearing are lots of disembodied replicas of his body parts — all made of Jell-O.

This is not the first time Hotei and rum have made a pop-culture appearance together; see the entry for Pyrat rum on this page of the Dharma-Burger archives. But it’s almost certainly the oddest.

Here on the Horse we often discuss Dharma-Burgers, or manifestations of the ongoing collision of Buddhist imagery and ideas with pop-culture. Such occurrences can run the gamut: sometimes they can be subtle, fleeting nods, and sometimes they can wallop you over the head. Sometimes they’re funny, and sometimes they’re not. Blogger Scott Mitchell (The Buddha is My DJ) sends on a remarkable new example. See what you think of it.

Thanks, Scott! And thank you, Mr. Pizza!

Thanks to reader/friend Blake Wilson for pointing his finger to the new Asus “Zenbook.” That’s right, the Zen laptop has arrived. Asus  — an unfortunate name, isn’t it? It reminds one of “Anusol“ — has even built a special web page that will tell you “All About Zen.”

Though it should be said that that’s a bit of a misnomer, because, well, the page won’t tell you ANYTHING about Zen.

I know. You’re totally shocked, right?

(Or Kanzeon, or Kannon, or Chenrezig, or Kuan Yin…)

Thanks to James Morgan for this one.

See also: Separated at Re-birth: Historic, Halloween Edition

This is a production still from the forthcoming remake of Total Recall featuring Colin Farrell.

Via IMBD; with thanks to Danny Fisher and others who have sent this on.

Thanks to John A. Graves for sharing this photo of a billboard for the new “sleep formula” product, Zazen:

“Calm your mind,” reads the copy. They even dared to put the little “TM” next to the product name. Sorry, Zazen Sleep Formula, I think you’re the ones infringing here.

Another day, another lazy co-optation of Buddhism. I’m going to pass out from boredom just thinking about it.

Hey, that stuff really works!