Buddhism, clearly, plays a part in all this (though DeStefano identifies himself primarily as a practitioner of “recovery comedy”). Last night on the show viewers saw Mike’s monster Buddha tattoo (shown here) and also heard a joke that I imagine we’ll be hearing people repeat for a while:

“I went to a Chinese restaurant… They had a suggestion box, so I wrote ‘Free Tibet’.”

(It’s not “What did the Buddhist say to the hot dog vendor?*” but, hey, not bad, Mike.)

Other evidence of Mike’s interest in Buddhism? His new comedy album is called OK Karma. And here’s the cover (left).

He’s also written a book entitled Bada Bing Bada Budda.

Check out Mike online, here.

Update: click here to check out DeStefano’s contribution to the (true) storytelling podcast, the program, titled “The Junkie and the Monk.” It’ll give you a taste of Mike’s personality and background and — while it’s seriously rough stuff at times — it’ll make you laugh. You’re gonna like this guy.

(* “Make me one with everything.”)

Actually, it’s “The Buddha Before he Got Enlightened.” Or so says Jon Haward, the creator of the comic Wasted and his “Tales of the Buddha Before He Got Enlightened.” Of course, Haward didn’t “create” the Buddha, and indeed, this “fat Buddha” is not really based on the historical Buddha but on the Buddhist figure Hotei. (A very common mistake, as longtime readers of the Horse have seen.)

The above comic cover was drawn by Simon Bisley, longtime collaborator of Glenn Danzig. So it turns out there’s just one degree of separation between Danzig and Buddha. (That is, one degree other than me.) …Who knew?

I haven’t seen this comic at my fantastic local comix shop. (All hail HUB Comics!) But I’ll see if I can grab one and check it out. In the meantime, you can preview this clearly irreverent new comic here.

“The Last Airbender is the tale of, oh, who the hell knows. It is basically Star Wars with a Buddhist ‘theme,’ and it stars Aasif Mandvi from The Daily Show. You may remember when this movie was being made there was a fair amount of controversy about the cast being largely white, when the characters in the source material were Asian. Attention, Asian community: You seem to have dodged a bullet.”

Yikes.

And: Defamer reports that TLA has a 4% rating on RottenTomatoes.com. That’s out of 100 percent. (Meaning: very, very bad.) Defamer has also collected some of the stunning words of hate, which have to be seen to be believed, already racked up by the film. Update: the Rotten Tomatoes rating is now up to a staggering 6%! But then again, as punk godfathers the Minutemen once posited, “The roar of the masses could be farts.”

(Sorry. But Right Speech, it seems, is not a factor when people discuss this movie.)

But don’t get too discouraged, Mr. Mandvi — you’ll still have a career. Being in intentionally laughable projects suits you better anyway.

If you’ve seen the film yourself, leave a review. And do try to be nice.

Via Phayul.com:

Recently Keds — a unit of Kansas-based Collective Brands, Inc. and a mass-marketer of canvas-top — sneakers came out with a new line of sneakers called ‘Tibetan Buddhist Shoes’. These bear images of the Dalai Lama, the Buddha, holy mantras and other sacred images that Buddhist all over the world revere. Buddhists generally keep these images and scripts in temples, monasteries and on altars in their homes.

Keds’ commercial trumpets:
“Gorgeous shoes! They’re Keds, so they’re sturdy and comfy, yet they’re beautiful because of the images on them. How unique is this! A Tibetan Buddhist image in brilliant pinks, yellows, oranges and blues. Colorful and Beautiful!”

The last three words should read — Shameful and Disrespectful!

What do you think? More here.

Update: There’s a possibility these are an urban myth of sorts. If you have a pair — of these shoes, I mean! — send a photo so we know they’re real. They currently don’t seem to be on the Keds site and one diligent dharma-friend is looking into it for us all….

Here’s the host’s site — though it says he’s NOT a Buddhist, he’s said to have a “Zen-like quality” and you click on something that says “Begin Enlightenment” on the launch page to enter.

Zzzzzzz.

About the show’s finale, via Entertainment Weekly:

10 Things I Hate About You wrapped up its under-appreciated one-season run on ABC Family last night, and, quite frankly, I don’t know what went wrong here. The dialogue snapped, the plotlines crackled, and the characters popped — not easy to do in the tired high-school genre.  [...] The two-part, hour-long series finale — which was clearly not intended as its swan song, since it ended on a cliffhanger — brought us all of the things we fans have grown to love about this show. Kat, characteristically, took up Buddhism, bringing on a hilarious (but still respectful) send-up of the school “meditation collective.”

I had no idea. (Being childless, it has never occurred to me for a second to watch any ABC Family programming.) Want to check it out? You can watch it here. It’ll cost you 99 cents, until Friday the 28th, after which it’s free.

Seems everything we thought was meaningful was a red herring. Seems the theory most of us had when the show started — that the key survivors of Oceanic 815 were in some sort of limbo/purgatory/bardo state — was real. Even though JJ Abrams long ago specifically said it wasn’t:

Okay, so everything on the island was true, and it was the “sideways world” that was the intermediary state. WHATever, I say. We smelled purgatory, we cried purgatory, and we pretty much got it.

I was feeling bitter about this. But then I read this fantastic appreciation of the finale — including detailed thoughts on the bardo connection at Jezebel.

(True/Slant has more on the bardo/afterlife argument here. And EW points out that the finale’s imagery was, above all, Christian.)

Still, bardo or not: What was the planned meaning of the Dharma Initiative? Of the appearance of “Dogen”? And of most of the many non-Buddhist spiritual references the show made too? …It seems it was all pretty much nothing.

But, as Jeff “Doc” Jensen writes in his near-final write-up on the show:

It’s funny that so many people cynically bitch about Lost not having ”a master plan” — the Lost story is all about the folly of ”master plans.” Anyone who has ever had a master plan on this show has failed catastrophically. Mother. Jacob. The Man In Black. Ben. Charles Widmore. Jack. Sawyer. The best we can do is live our lives with enlightened improvisation — to be so self-aware and fearless that we can live fully in the present and redeem our every moment and every human connection.

Well, that’s something, isn’t it?

If you’d like to take a trip back to when things that didn’t mean anything on Lost did seem to mean plenty — at least through the Buddhism-and-pop-culture lens — here’s some of the Horse’s coverage. (Thank goodness there wasn’t more; I was probably too busy religiously watching and reading all about Lost to write about it. The blog Breathe has some more on all this, as does the bawdy fave, The Reformed Buddhist. And Jezebel has a whole new post going deep into bardos.)

Dogen: Tuesdays at 9/8 Central on ABC

Lost Sneak Peek: Tibetan-Style Prayer flags?

Don’t I feel silly.

Thanks to the mighty Steve Silberman for passing it along.

But now they have Dharma-clothing.

What’s so “dharma” about it? Well, nothing. Just the name.

But doesn’t that name just speak to you?