Just in time for the holidays, I'm happy to announce the grand opening of Cthulhu's Bar & Grill! It's a one-stop shop for vaguely Cthulhu-related t-shirts and chachkes and such.
I couldn't make this up if I tried.
The logo above is from a Russian-language online gambling site called Casino FART. I don't read Russian so I have no idea of what sort of games they play in this casino. With a name like Casino FART, though, one can probably place bets on some unusual things.
There's a preacher named Rocky Twyman who is presently traveling around the country praying, which in itself isn't particularly unusual. It's where he's praying and what he's praying for that are maybe just a little bit silly:
Pray-in at S.F. gas station asks God to lower pricesUmmmm, yeah.
Rocky Twyman has a radical solution for surging gasoline prices: prayer.
Twyman - a community organizer, church choir director and public relations consultant from the Washington, D.C., suburbs - staged a pray-in at a San Francisco Chevron station on Friday, asking God for cheaper gas. He did the same thing in the nation's Capitol on Wednesday, with volunteers from a soup kitchen joining in. Today he will lead members of an Oakland church in prayer...
"God is the only one we can turn to at this point," said Twyman, 59...
...he says anyone who wants to follow his example should keep it simple.
"God, deliver us from these high gas prices," Twyman said. "That's all they have to say."
...he says his prayer for gas-price relief from God is sincere.
"I've seen him work miracles in my life," Twyman said. "He told us that all we need to do is ask and believe. He can do it, and he will do it, but we have to ask him to do it."
I'm a relatively empirically-minded individual, so I think an experiment is in order. While Twyman is praying to the Invisible Man in the Sky to lower gas prices, I'm going to make supplications to the ghost of Normal Fell to raise them. Fell, who was most famous for playing Mr. Roper on the 1970's hit TV series Three's Company, died in 1998. As far as I'm aware, no miracles have been attributed to him and nobody attaches any particular spiritual significance or beliefs to the deceased actor. He appears to wield no particular supernatural powers in the afterlife.Ben Harder works as a science journalist for US News and World Report. He has a blog on the paper's website entitled Thinking Harder (ha ha, punny). Today, he's written something there that's left me scratching my head; he claims there's a scientific hypothesis in here somewhere, but I can't seem to find it. All I can find are references to the Book of Genesis and some sort of idea that ethnic violence in Kenya is tied to lactose intolerance. No, really.
Ethnic Cleansing and Human EvolutionNow, somebody tell me what the testable claim is in all of this. To me, it reads like a bunch of speculation and nothing at all to do with human evolution. It might well be that the differing lifestyles of the two groups is being cited as a reason for intergroup violence, but that in itself would be about different ways of earning a living, not about evolution or heredity per se. Biological factors are no more germane to this than it would be to the conflicts between cattle and sheep ranchers in America's Old West of the 19th century. There's no necessity to insert speculation about the evolution of lactose tolerance in order to understand the conflict which, as Harder himself points out, is at least in part over land use and ownership.
...let's talk about ethnic conflict and human evolution. (Disclaimer: What follows is more scientific hypothesis than journalistic fact. I welcome any data that confirm or refute what I'm about to suggest.)
It's not often that calls for ethnic cleansing relate in any way to human evolution. But I think I found one in a discouraging but beautifully written article about the historical roots of Kenya's current problems. The article shows how long-simmering conflicts over land ownership underpin much of the post-election violence currently seething across Kenya...
Now, I don't know much about the Kalenjin or the Kikuyu, but I do know that the former have traditionally been pastoralists, or animal herders, and the latter, farmers. I also know that conflicts between animal herders and farmers are nearly as old as the firmament. (Just think of the allegory of Cain, the farmer, and Abel, the shepherd.)
I suspect there's a link between the metonyms the violence-inciting broadcaster used—"people of the milk" and "the weed"—and the social and genetic histories of the two tribes he or she was alluding to.
Around the world, many people (like virtually all other mammals) are unable to drink milk as adults. Lactose intolerance, in a sense, is nature's default state. But lactose tolerance has evolved in many groups of people whose ancestors have herded mammals for centuries. These people have had a long-standing evolutionary incentive, so to speak, to be able to drink milk throughout their lives. So it makes sense that the pastoralist Kalenjins drink milk.
And the "weeds"? Well, that sure sounds like an unsubtle—not to mention offensive—reference to the way the Kikuyus, like Adam and Eve, by the sweat of their brows, learned long ago to coax a living from the soil.
Today's been a fairly crappy one, so I was happy to find a meme being perpetrated via Science After Sunclipse. It's the "make your own album cover" meme, and here's my rather lame album cover:
I wouldn't mind dying in a plane crash. It'd be a good way to go. I don't want to die in my sleep, or of old age, or OD... I want to feel what it's like. I want to taste it, hear it, smell it. Death is only going to happen to you once; I don't want to miss it.The band name is that of a cave-dwelling fish from India.
Google's Webmaster Tools suite is very useful in creating statistics about any given website signed up for it. I look at it from time to time to get a statistical idea of how people wander into this site, since I know that a lot of traffic here is the result of people performing searches and the vast majority of those searches use Google. It's amusing to see what the top 20 queries entered into Google that resulted in a search hit on this site are:
Gather 'round, kids, and let me tell you of the prophecy of Reverend X, the man who could see the future.
Many years ago, in the early 90's, Reverend X penned the following lyrics for a song called Motorbike:
Me 'n baby Jesus, we take a trip and hold on tightHow do I know that Reverend X was a True Prophet®? Simple! Because Jesus on a motorbike has finally showed up... and you can buy him!
Me 'n baby Jesus, we take a trip and ride...
Jesus on a motorbike.
Surely, Rex X knew the future! Was it not he who saidSuffer little children in your skyscraper hellYea and verily.
On crack cocaine
Force fed on fear and failure...
He's a proper Anglo, most likely an Englishman, just like it says in the Bible. Everyone in the trailer park will envy you when you show off DA LAWD on urethane wheels! What more could you possibly want?..or a Minicity, at least. I'm not sure what the point of it is, but what the heck. I see people blogging about it here and there as a useless time waster, and if one can't waste useless time, what can one waste productively?
So I went and built a city in Brazil called Mycelium. Every time somebody else clicks on a link connecting to Mycelium, it gets another inhabitant. When it gets a lot of inhabitants, I suppose something will happen. I don't know what, but something must happen if a bunch of people click the link.
Are you curious yet? Then click this link and something will happen.
Did I mention that you should click the link? Oh, yes, I see I did mention that you should click the link. What are you waiting for? Go ahead! Click the link! You know that you want to.
If you don't click the link, you'll make baby FSM cry.
At one level, you have to feel sorry for the people who run the American Family Association, particularly Donald Wildmon. They seem to be some rather lonely, bitter people. What else can explain an "action alert" like the following?
At PetSmart, Christmas doesn't existI'm not linking to the original because that might get people to click on a link that Don Wildmon and his Antisocial Failures Association has on the site to "check Petsmart's site," thus giving that sad bunch numbers in some tracking report that they can wave about frantically while crying, "See? See?" Instead, if you want to see how many products come up when you search for "Christmas" on Petsmart's site, click here. To do the same for "holiday," click here. If you think the whole thing is a bunch of Christofundie Crybabyism and would rather have a quick chuckle, click here.
Send an e-mail to PetSmart and ask why they refuse to include Christmas in their promotion, choosing to only use holiday.
At PetSmart, Christmas doesn't exist. It is not to be found anywhere on their Web Site. AFA checked out the local PetSmart store and there was no Christmas there, either.
A search on PetSmart's home page found 252 references to "holiday." It also found 43 references to "Christmas." But, alas, this is very misleading. When you click on "Christmas" you are directed to a page containing the same gifts you get when you search for holiday. Of all the items that pop up when you search for Christmas, not a single one mentions Christmas or is identified as being a Christmas gift.
At PetSmart, everything is "holiday."
Over the course of my years, I have developed many useful skills and even more useless ones. As I write this, I am applying my most useless skill of all. I can procrastinate with the best of 'em, and I can make that procrastination look amazingly productive.
It's 10:45 AM at this moment. I haven't yet done so much as look at the grading rubric for these student papers. I did, however, get the week's grocery shopping done. See how that works? We needed food, so I went to Shaw's on a Saturday morning — arguably one of the busiest times — and did all the food shopping. I managed to kill an hour and a quarter that way and still haven't even opened the folder with the papers in it.
In fact, I'm procrastinating right now. Better than that! I'm metaprocrastinating by writing a blog entry about how good I am at procrastinating. Brilliant! If only I could get a PhD in procrastination. I'd no doubt get around to finding a tenure-track position... eventually...
I really don't want to read student-authored papers all day long. Can you tell? If so, please write a long comment to this entry so that I can use it to procrastinate some more. With your help, I can go all day long without accomplishing anything at all!
(I just wasted a few more minutes deciding whether or not to tag this entry with a "food" label, since I went to the supermarket. Go me! Or not.)
So, yeah, I took this Personality Defect Test because everyone else was doing it. And what did I get?
Your Score: Spiteful Loner
You are 100% Rational, 0% Extroverted, 71% Brutal, and 14% Arrogant.
You are the Spiteful Loner, the personality type that is most likely to go on a shooting rampage. In high school, you were probably that kid who wore all black and who sat alone in a corner of the lunch room, drawing pictures of dead babies. You are a rational person and tend to hold emotions in very low-esteem; not only that, but you are also rather introverted, meaning you probably bury any emotions you feel deep inside yourself, like all of the bodies in your backyard. Combine these traits with your dislike of others and your brutality, and it seems that you would be quite likely to shoot innocent people in a rampage. Most likely, you also have low self-esteem. Hell, I get low self-esteem just looking at you. This is only yet one more incentive to go on a shooting rampage, because you wouldn't care if you died as a result. Granted, you probably haven't gone on a shooting rampage and probably never will, but all the motivations are there. All you need is for someone to push you over the edge, calling you names and belittling you. Like me. But don't shoot me. I have a 101 mile-long knife, you know. In conclusion, your personality is defective because you are too introverted, brutal, insecure, and rather unemotional. No wonder no one hangs around you, you morbid, cold-hearted freak!
To put it less negatively:
1. You are more RATIONAL than intuitive.
2. You are more INTROVERTED than extroverted.
3. You are more BRUTAL than gentle.
4. You are more HUMBLE than arrogant.
Compatibility:
Your exact opposite is the Televangelist.
Other personalities you would probably get along with are the Capitalist Pig, the Smartass, and the Sociopath.
Big news from England: Wacky Wiccan Will Wage Weather War!
Homer chalk giant angers pagans...Pagans have promised to conjure some "rain magic" to erase a figure of Homer Simpson which has been painted next to the Cerne Abbas giant in Dorset.
The figure, representing Homer in his Y-fronts holding up a doughnut, is standing to the left of the chalk giant and his erect penis. The cartoon character was drawn on the hill slope to promote the new Simpsons film, which will be released later this month. He was painted with water-based biodegradable paint that will wash away when it rains...
"We were hoping for some dry weather but I think I have changed my mind. We'll be doing some rain magic to bring the rain and wash it away," said Ann Bryn-Evans, joint Wessex district manager for The Pagan Federation...
If my body were to be sold to science after my death:
Mingle2 - Online Dating
In honor of the Creationist museum's recent plop into the world, somebody else (not me) came up with this:
