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The “One Million Moms” (who actually only had around 40,000 Facebook likes) tried to get Ellen Degeneres fired as a JC Penney spokesperson on account of her being gay. A counter Facebook page looking to garner an actual 1,000,000 supporters for Ellen started fishing for likes and has received over 100,000 in a hurry. If you happen [...]
Archive for the ‘Culture’ Category
Are You One of the Millions Who Support Ellen?
February 10th, 2012 
Daniel Fincke 
Posted in Gay Marriage, Gay Marriage, Gay Rights, Gay Rights, LGBTQAA, Pop Culture, Pop Culture, TV, TV 
Tags: Ellen and Portia on Oprah, Ellen Degeneres, Facebook, Portia Degeneres, Portia DiRossi 
6 Comments »A Medley of the La Las and Na Nas and Da Das
February 9th, 2012 Daniel Fincke A joyous and creative experiment, the “history of lyrics that aren’t lyrics”: Unfortunately, you can also hear the devolution of mainstream pop as the quality steeply drops in the songs chosen from the last couple decades. Your Thoughts?
Posted in Music, Music, Novelties Tags: Billy Joel, Doo-Waa-Diddy Do, Elton John, Eminem, Equal Sonics, Gwen Stefani, Hey Jude, Jack Johnson, Jane Lui, Joe Sabia, Kylie Minogue, Manfred Mann, Medley, Michael Jackson, O-Zone, P!nk, Roberta Flack, Seal, Simon & Garfunkel, Steam, Stevie Wonder, Taintedblue.com, The Beatles, Van Morrison 8 Comments »Ellen Responds To The “Million Moms”
February 8th, 2012 Daniel Fincke This organization doesn’t think I should be the spokesperson because I’m gay. For those of you who are just tuning in for the first time, it’s true. I’m gay. I hope you were sitting down. I hate to break it to you this way. I usually don’t talk about stuff like this on my show [...]
Posted in Civil Rights, Civil Rights, Gay Marriage, Gay Marriage, Gay Rights, Gay Rights, Homophobia, Homophobia, Homosexuality, Homosexuality, LGBTQAA, Right Wing Politics, Right Wing Politics, TV, TV Tags: Ellen Degeneres, Ellen DeGeneres's Reply To One Million Moms, JC Penny, One Million Moms 10 Comments »St. Vincent’s “Cheerleader”
February 8th, 2012 Daniel Fincke A new video from the incomparable St. Vincent: This is the closest to anthemic that Annie Clark ever gets and that makes it too relatively straightforward for her. What is here is good if there were something else, less direct also going on. The song feels half done, more like a traditional pop song than [...]
Posted in Indie Music, Indie Music, Indie Rock, Indie Rock, Music, Music, Music Reviews, Music Reviews Tags: Annie Clark, St. Vincent, St. Vincent's Cheerleader 5 Comments »Patton Oswalt Sums Up The Underwhelming Imagination of the Star Wars Prequels
February 7th, 2012 Daniel Fincke From his comedy album Werewolves and Lollipops, Patton Oswalt sums up many people’s disappointments with the premise of the Star Wars prequels: It’s weird that objectively I fully understand and usually agree with many of the criticisms of the prequels and yet still personally love them. Are they flawed? Absolutely. They could have been 15 [...]
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January 18th, 2012 Daniel Fincke Your Thoughts?
Some Acoustic Guitar Virtuosity
January 17th, 2012 Daniel Fincke “Acoustimetallus Plectrus” by Ewan Dobson. His album Ewan Dobson III is available today. Your Thoughts?
If Freethought Blogs Goes Dark In The Future…
January 17th, 2012 Daniel Fincke …this will be the cause. Your Thoughts?
Isn’t She Adorable?
January 15th, 2012 Daniel Fincke Her name is Bramble: (Image ©2012 ~missmonster. Reprinted with permission.) Miss Monster sells her here, and describes her thusly: This is my friend Bramble. She’s a little monster but is super sweet and curious. Bramble loves Altoids and coffee. This doll is one of a kind and handmade. Her face/claws/horns are cast in plastic, hand painted and [...]
You Know I Usually Hate Wes Anderson Movies…
January 12th, 2012 Daniel Fincke …and this trailer is so Wes Andersony (Slate nicely breaks down how) that at first it struck me like he was descending into self-parody. But by the end I felt like I had just watched a charming two minute movie. Watching the actual full length film might spoil the charm. I’ll have to think over [...]
Posted in Comedy, Comedy, Film, Film, Hilarious, Parody, Parody Tags: Moonrise Kingdom, Wes Anderson, Wes Anderson's Spider-Man 3 Comments »Camels With Hammers Insomniac Theater: Songs from Synecdoche, New York
January 12th, 2012 Daniel Fincke From the Synecdoche New York soundtrack: Your Thoughts?
Camels With Hammers Insomniac Theater: Low Anthem
January 12th, 2012 Daniel Fincke Who can heed the words of Charlie Darwin? Heed the words of Danny Fincke: if you get the chance to see these guys live, don’t miss them. Their albums are Oh My God Charlie Darwin and Smart Flesh Your Thoughts?
Camels With Hammers Insomniac Theater: Rural Alberta Advantage’s “In The Summertime”
January 12th, 2012 Daniel Fincke As I do the overnight leg of my blogathon I am suddenly nostalgic for the overnights I used to work in the rec room at Grove City when I was an undergrad. I used to love VH1′s “Insomniac Theater”. So for this and the next post, I’m going to do a little Insomniac Theater and [...]
More Encouragement of the Unabashed Desire for Self-Expression, Love, and Fame
January 11th, 2012 Daniel Fincke Having earlier today in my all day blogathon celebrated and analyzed Kermit the Frog’s unapologetic fame seeking, I thought it would be fitting to post one of my very favorite songs, as it is on the same theme and performed by artists with whom I generally identify much like I identify with Kermit: Your Thoughts?
I’m a Muppet of a Man, I’m a Very Manly Muppet
January 11th, 2012 Daniel Fincke Life’s like a movie, make your ending, keep believing, keep pretending… As Tyler Cowen was talking about in the last post, humans are inexorably drawn to stories. I even like to think of every sentence as a story. It stars a subject which verbs something. And in my childhood there were two stories that loomed [...]
Ingrid Michaelson’s “Ghost”
January 11th, 2012 Daniel Fincke I love when cool new stuff comes out on my birthday. This January it’s going to be Ingrid Michaelson’s Human Again. I love her earlier albums, especially Girls & Boys. She is admittedly prone to being a little too twee and precious at times, but at her best she is has a real way with [...]
On Atheistic Religion
January 8th, 2012 Eric Steinhart Once upon a time, Carl Sagan predicted the appearance of an atheistic nature-religion: “A religion old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the universe as revealed by modern science, might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths. Sooner or later, such a religion will emerge” [...]
Posted in 'Nuff Said, Atheism, Culture, Featured, Naturalism, Philosophy, Religion, Religion and Science 59 Comments »Tegan and Sara Pose With Black Eyes—Is It Wise?
January 4th, 2012 Daniel Fincke I love Tegan and Sara immensely. I have tens of thousands of songs on my i-pod, and yet will play their songs on repeat for whole days. Sometimes I will play a single one of their songs on repeat for a half hour straight. I go so far as to consider The Con my single [...]
The Atheist Wheel of the Year
January 3rd, 2012 Eric Steinhart The Wheel of the Year involves eight solar holidays (the sabbats). The sabbats include the solar quarter days (the solstices and the equinoxes) as well as the solar cross-quarter days intermediate between the quarters. For theistic Wiccans, these days symbolize events in the life-cycles of the god and goddess. These days are marked by sabbat [...]
Posted in Astronomy, Atheism, Cultural Secularism, Culture, Featured, Naturalism, Paganism, Philosophy, Wicca 68 Comments »How You Get Millions of People to Cooperate in a Global Project for Free
January 2nd, 2012 Daniel Fincke Fascinating stuff: After re-purposing CAPTCHA so each human-typed response helps digitize books, Luis von Ahn wondered how else to use small contributions by many on the Internet for greater good. At TEDxCMU, he shares how his ambitious new project, Duolingo, will help millions learn a new language while translating the Web quickly and accurately — [...]
John Lennon Did Not Imagine That “All Religion Is True”
January 1st, 2012 Daniel Fincke So Cee-lo Green sings “Imagine” before the ball drop and, as has been done before, the lyrics are appallingly sanitized, changing “no religion too” to “all religion is true”. It’s sheer cowardly pandering bullshit. If you can’t respect the ideas of the song then just don’t sing the song. Leave it alone. Don’t twist it to [...]
More on Religious Diversity among Atheists
December 30th, 2011 Eric Steinhart [I did a short post on this two days ago; I’ve since dug further into the full Pew report and found more and stranger religious diversity among atheists.] The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life conducts the US Religious Landscape Survey. The survey is statistically sound, and thus its percentages can be reasonably extrapolated [...]
Posted in Atheism, Culture, Featured, Law & Politics, Philosophy, Rationalism, Religion, Religion and Science 38 Comments »Did NYU Fire a Professor for Giving James Franco a D?
December 21st, 2011 Daniel Fincke The Guardian: A professor who was fired by New York University has filed a lawsuit claiming he was dismissed for giving celebrity student James Franco a D grade for poor attendance. Dr José Angel Santana, who taught as an assistant arts professor on the actor’s graduate film course, says that Franco – who supplements his acting career [...]
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December 20th, 2011 Daniel Fincke for Christopher Hitchens, by Helen Sotriadis of Too Many Tribbles. ©2011 helen sotiriadis. View the photo “in the dark”. More of her photos inspired by Christopher Hitchens are here. See a video slideshow of more of her photos here.
Atheist Ceremonies: De-Baptism and the Cosmic Walk
December 19th, 2011 Eric Steinhart An earlier post presented nine theses on the possible future development of atheism and neo-paganism in America. The third thesis is this: As the atheistic community grows larger, social and practical pressures will compel it to begin to develop rituals and ceremonies. As support for the third thesis, I gave various examples of atheists celebrating [...]
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