OK, dudes, you keep filling up these open threads and I have to keep opening new ones…but that’s cool. Groovy even. I’m in California, and I feel fine.
Keep on truckin’, let it all hang out, and talk about whatever.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
California girls these days are growing mildew instead of growing tan.
Or feces.
I believe we have acquired a stalker.
BS
Mormon ad parody – with the Necronomicon instead of the Book of Mormon. Lulz guaranteed.
Ah, fresh bandwidth, I love that New SubThread smell.
For those of you joining us midThread, context is highly recommended:
http://terrapinprocrastination.blogspot.com/2009/07/omnibus-thread-everlasting-update.html
Some new dispatches from the International Journal of thread Studies are linked within.
This looks to be the subThread of 20K!
19457
Link fail…let’s try that again.
Mormon ad parody
shoulda picked a Bayrea band…these guys are from freakin Hawthorne
Hey, I was just looking at some old threads and it suddenly dawned on me: I haven’t seen Smoggy on here in quite a while. Anyone know where our resident brother in Christ has wandered off to? I miss him and Floyd.
Smoggy just showed up today or yesterday…uh…here for a sample.
There are some interesting definitions for “god” that are winning on The Urban Dictionary, and it hasn’t even been Pharyngulated yet.
Oh, and like seemingly every creationist that gets a hair up about Pharyngula, Professor Fisherman Dendy can’t manage to spell “Myers”.
Why is that so hard for them?
Too close to “My errors”, which is an untypeable phrase.
just got funky in here
Play it Maceo
Useless trivia of the day :
Did you know that the term “red herring” is believed to be derived from the practice of those( pay attention here, Walton !!) trying to save a fox by leaving a misleading trail of scent(smoked herring apparently looks red) that would confuse the pursuing dogs.
Also, in the “DaVinci Code”, some catholic bishop enters the ploy to mislead the audience, and his name is Aringarosa, italian for red herring.
(via Copi)
In case people missed this due to the thread break,Prof Dendy is so desperate for attention that he has posted a picture of a pile of shit with a reference to Rev BDC and Janine OM under it.
Go easy on the toilet training folks; these issues tend to crop up later in life and cause problems.
(And he still can’t spell “Myers”)!!
BS
My shit eating or not shit eating practices are my own business. I can not speak for Janine however.
more funk
Forgot the link.
BS
easy on the embeds, Rev.
Teh CO expressed displeasure recently.
oh i missed that
part deux
One more Groovy Cosmic have you and the I’m off to bed
Robert Walter and Stanton Moore.
not the best sound, but not horrible.
that’s right
Dammit, I tried to leave a comment for that fool, but hillbillied it up somewhere.
He’s a dipshit.
Besides, why did he just pick on Janine and Chimpy when the rest of us are just as naughty? Moron.
good stuff, Rev
Here’s the Non-Prophets (atheist podcast) talking about a guy who was crushed by an altar at church, when he went to pray to give thanks for narrowly surviving an elevator accident earlier in the day.
You damn kids stop filling up these threads. Whatta ya think, they grow on trees or something?
..see I hit 40 and instantly I start chanelling my mother. ;-o
One of the first tunes that came to my mind was Bob Marley’s Mellow Mood (of course the very first was Duke Ellington).
But since Rev. had to lay down that James Brown track…
If You Don’t Give a Doggone About It
Let Yourself Go
Bride of Shrek – Well hell come sit by me, I’ve never been a mother, but I can channel Alice.
Patrica, Queen of Sluts, OM: I feel left out too. Perhaps if I style myself as The Blind Squirrel Of Gratuitous Blasphemy?
Nah, it doesn’t trip off the tongue.
BS
Test.
DrewN: Here’s the original article. At first I was skeptical…
BS
Thanks to Health Danger’s ranting about dead food vs live food, I’m going to seriously indulge tomorrow and make Guinness Stout and Filet Mignon Chili. Not a carrot soul in sight. Maybe there will be a soul in one of the chile peppers.
Oh I don’t know, “The Blind Squirrel of Gratuitous Blasphemy” has a rather poetic ring to it! A bit pompous maybe. Actually it sounds like the sort of title they have in those clubs, the Masons, the Lions and the rest. It also leaves open the possibility of other ‘Blind Squirrel’ classifications. “The Blind Squirrel of Hurtful Lack of Respect for Other People’s Beliefs” for example, depending on how you’re feeling on the day.
Thank you Blind Squirrel for the link provided @ 30.
Not only for the somewhat disturbing story about the flattened catholic, but also because it gave me this link in the sidebar :
World braces for Lindsay Lohan sex tape
:D
Since everyone else seems to be including the groovy, here’s some mellow from
one of the few songs from the 60s I can stand anymore.
Oh yeah, James Brown, that’s what I’m talkin about.
So California is the theme hmmm ?? Let’s see…
Eagles–Hotel California Live
Joni Mitchell–California
Roy Orbison–California Blue
California?
Groovy?
Where’s the….?
oh
….wait a minute
here it is
The Doors–L.A. Woman. Unfortunately, either the doors didn’t make a video for this before Morrisson croaked, or it’s been lost. This was put out when the Oliver Stone biopic came out.
The song that made me want to move to L.A. so badly that I finally got the nerve to do it.
Rorschach: I hope Lindsey’s tape delivers a little more than Paris being rich means I can just lie there Hilton’s tape did.
Janet Holmes: I’m going for the Big One: Blind Squirrel, Denier Of The Holy Spirit. Yoohoo Prof. Dendy, over here!
BS
Bride of Shrek
You tell ’em.
Goddam kids….
Get your thread off my LAWN!!!
My James Brown contribution:
“Get Up (I Feel Like Being a Sex Machine)”.
The esteemed Professor Paul Zachary Myers…
…taken tonight on a cell phone camera at BJ’S Restaurant & Brewery, after his very pleasant talk, and question and answer session at De Anza College in Cupertino, California.
(The infidel with him is a Tai Chi master named Douglas.)
Shit–I copied the wrong one! This one’s better:
Aquaria #38
Here’s Ray Manzerick talking about the early Doors, really fun listening, makes you want to move to LA and buy a time machine;
It’s right after the Sarah Palin stuff on this mp3 recording
recorded 1998
The Decemberists’ Los Angeles, I’m Yours?
The Doors were even better in concert than on their albums. They came to Minneapolis way back when.
BS
Doesnt get more mellow then this :
Doors–Celebration of the Lizard live
Finally on the subject of celebrity sex tape!
The Top 10 Celebrity Sex Videos Nobody Wanted to See (no real nudity, but definitely NSFW). While no ’17 Worst Haircuts in The Ottoman Empire’ still amusing. Read at own risk.
Now that was, interesting……
The Tommy Lee one I hated.Background was awful.Yeah, thats what it was.For sure.Shocking background.Really awful.There was a gearstick in that one, too. I think.I hope.Gearstick, must have been.
Born In East L.A.
I was doing a quick check of this blog and head off to bed but I saw the link that Blind Squirrel left, so I have a few words for Dendy.
Dendy, guess what, your attempt at an insult does not bother me. But your anger is misdirected. I did not do any of the work that exposed your trail of lies. I am merely the idiot who stood there, pointed my finger and laughed. Why don’t you try insulting any of them, not that it will get you anywhere.
As for what effect your joke will have, it will have none. People who have respect for what you might say were going to dislike me anyways. And your attempted joke did not cause me to lose respect for you. It was lost when you first came here with your invectives and lies.
Dendy, most of the people here value honesty. It comes from thinking that an objective truth is worthwhile. It does not from having a relationship with a personal savior. Your pack of lies is proof of that. Anything you have to say is immediately suspect because you are a known liar. And I pity those students who have been unfortunate enough to have had you as a teacher.
I have had teachers that I disagreed with and other that I disliked. But not one of them earned the disrespect that I have for you. Anyone who is willing to lie to an audience of people who have the means to see through your lies has no business to be in education.
So I will sign off with this. Fuck you and everything you stand for.
Now, quote this and made a new post about how the people at Pharyngula hates. And make sure you point all of this out because I am sure the readers of your blog will find me detestable. I have been an atheist for about a quarter of a century. I have been an anarchist for the past two decades. And I have been out queer for the past fifteen years. But show some fucking integrity and make a link to this site. And post here again in order to try to defend your actions.
Being the horrid awful bitch that I am, I have to fuck up the mellow with a couple of Love songs.
A House Is Not A Motel
Alone Again Or
The Doors were a little before my time, but here’s something I was around for- in many ways, they’re The Doors stepchildren-
X
Venice. The Whisky. Los Angeles.
Thank you Prof Janine, great song !
Nice takedown ! In Cricket lingo, that’s out :-)
oh, since we’re doing songs about California… http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UW8UlY8eXCk
*innocent smile*
Now for something completely religious.
or, if you don’t like that version, maybe the 21st Century version will be more to your liking :-)
Probably more appropriate a few days ago, but trying to catch up around here is crazy…
One more post for now…
Mile’s On the Corner (pt. 1) isn’t particularly mellow, but if you ask me, it’s got more than enough groovy, cosmic and “goes on and on, man” to make up for it.
For you kids who like the Hard-core Death Mellow, I present Sly Stone’s If You Want Me To Stay.
Unfortunately, I can’t stay. Back to slaving away on a string quartet…
Considering preferred fertilizers and the eons thing
It should be evident that we have eaten a lot of molecules and atoms that were once shit.
I’d venture to say we’re all full of them.
It’s just more obvious in some.
That’s cosmic while being anti-mellow and un-groovey . That mellow groovey shit never caught on with me.
Hm, a naive look at the word ‘California’ makes me think of ‘cali-‘ (hot) and ‘forno’ (oven). But apparently that’s just coincidence. :(
A good friend of mine is doing her grad work in ecology at UC Davis (her own, much less frequently updated blog is called “Fundulus Schmundulus”). I’ll have to ask her if she’s heard you speak.
From “Professor” Dendy’s blog:
Enough said.
P.S. As to the sense of humo(u)r: evidently Mr Dendy doesn’t appreciate jokes about bacon and sex, which seem to be the usual topics of conversation on the open thread. And Rev. BigDumbChimp “important”? Since when? :-)
P.P.S. I’m kidding. No offence, Rev.
Walton,
this guy is insane, incompetent and probably just plain dangerous.
I suggest we put him back into well-deserved obscurity asap.
Rorschach: Yes, I know. I was just laughing at his insane comments.
Walton, that’s Rev. BigDumbChimp, OM.
Counts for nothing outside Pharyngula, of course, but hey! ;)
Walton: Does that mean jokes about sex with bacon are doubly unappreciated?
Pigfuckers are historically unappreciated for both their humor potential and contributions to society.
Looks like this is the thread to break 20,000.
Dandy, of course, is mentally up the creek without a paddle or clue. Nothing but ignorant presuppositions on his part.
I rather think the man has lost his tiny fucking mind.
A picture of dog poop with names underneath???
seriously?
note the similarities between his list of atheist beliefs and Adams’ list of “skeptics” beliefs…
yeah.
I’d feel sorry for him IF he was already getting treatment.
PZ, I notice a spammer using the id “hery” posting multiply.
Dude doesn’t understand the concept of using a pseudonym for blog comments? That’s some grade-A level ignorance there.
My dogs think I’m the most important primate on earth.
Bendy Dendy seems little more than a blogwhore, I’m not going to give him the traffic tbh.
However when he posts here thats fair game, and boy if ever insipidity and benality were dungeon-worthy offences this guy should have been locked up after his first excrement on here.
Lost Angeles – Colosseum
Sorry no link – I’m in work and the IT nazis say nein
heh none taken.
I find it hilarious that he chose to pick on me when I’m pretty sure I haven’t really involved myself in the discussion about his severe case of dumbfuckery.
Whatever. Keep it up Dendy, at least you’re making me laugh.
Laughing at you, not with you.
Surprising news: Dictionary contains dirty words. Let’s ban it!
Merika: You can slice 40 dudes in half right on prime time, but God Forbid you say shit.
They removed all copies of a dictionary from the district because one parent complained that their kid looked up “oral sex”.
I’m sure that kid is getting a stellar education at home to supplement their time at school. In a few years, they’ll be a proud voter.
Only by Ken Ham (if, of course, one classifies piglets as pre-bacon, or bacon au naturel).
PLEASE MIND ME!
I’m only linkdumping;
http://slate.com/id/2242208
Just as one European, to me Americans were always a bit crazy. But now they’ve done it, they went from “friendly but caring in some strange way like religous auntie May crazy” to “creepy skincrawling stalker like crazy”.
I was already afraid of the idea of corporations = persons. I was already afraid of the patriot-act. I was already afraid of the fact that the US had granted itself inmunity for US citizens from the The Hague INTERNATIONAL criminal court.
But it was countered by my belief in american people like PZ, AronRa and Eugenie Scott. I loved the election of Obama.
I just watched Olbermann on this supreme court decision and i’m scared shitless. Why hasn’t PZ blogged about this(busy, i know)? Where is all the media? Where is the outrage?
From my point of view it looks even more silent then after the “rape is dandy voting republicans”.
Maybe some of you have allready said something, but i normally do not read the ongoing thread, this did seem the best place to post this…
*goes back to bed to hide under the covers, terrified of the huge beast under the corporate bed*
For the record, Olbermann is not the source I’d go to. Try http://www.scotusblog.com/2010/01/analysis-the-personhood-of-corporations/
Nonetheless, to be honest, the Corporate Personhood thing scares the hell out of me. I can only hope that in a few years Scalia or one of the other folks who voted for that dies and Obama appoints someone else sane and they just wait to overturn the decision, but still…
Either that or amend the constitution to specifically deny corporations personhood.
plien it’s pretty fucking scary
The most enraging part about Corporate Personhood, incidentally, is that it WAS NEVER PART OF THE ACTUAL OPINION.
The Court Reporter basically tacked non-Opinion statements onto the Opinion because, well, he was CEO of a railroad or some bullshit.
Well, no. that’s not the most enraging part. The most enraging part will be the abuses to the environment that folks try and perpetrate with this.
Silver Lining: Ed Brayton correctly pointed out that this means that politically, this does nothing, because PACs were free to donate prior. You just get like 500 people in the corporation to sign their names that they’ll give money the corporation gave them to a candidate’s war chest and you’re gold.
oh bloody hell, now I won’t be able to get up the werewithal to get to class. I hate to spam but the thought just occurred to me that legally, organizations like, oh I don’t know, the Mormon Church and RCC are organized as corporations. Scientology too.
Fffffuuuuck fuck fuckity fuck. No, I gotta go to class, because I need a piece of paper that says I have skills so I can move to Canadia.
Now yer talkin’, Rorschach. I’m a product of the 70’s. The last line from that song is in my sig over at the JREF:
“Tomorrow we enter the town of my birth. I want to be ready.”
plien: I’d like to disagree with several points in your post, as I think you’re conflating numerous different issues. I should be reading for my international law class right now, but since your post happens to raise various issues of law which are relevant to my degree, I guess I can justify a lengthy reply. :-)
This is actually, coincidentally, one of the issues I’ve been studying this week. It’s not quite correct to say that the US has “granted immunity for US citizens” from the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court.
The ICC, like any other international organisation, derives its authority from a treaty – in this case, the Rome Statute. Since international organisations only have the powers that are delegated to them by their member nations, the ICC can only exercise jurisdiction in those countries which have signed and ratified the Rome Statute. The US has signed the Statute, but has not ratified it (since treaties in the US require a two-thirds vote in the Senate in order to be ratified). Hence, the US has not consented to the ICC’s jurisdiction, and so it has no jurisdiction in the US. It’s as simple as that. No country is under an obligation to ratify the Rome Statute, and the US is perfectly within its rights under international law not to do so. Whether it should is entirely a political matter. (It tends to be very hard to get the US to ratify any treaties at all: since it requires a two-thirds vote in the Senate, and there are always plenty of opposition senators who will vote against any treaty signed by the incumbent President just to make him look bad, it often takes decades to get a treaty ratified.)
“Immunity” in international law is a different, though related, concept, which I won’t expand on here.
Now this is just silly. There are two reasons why all modern legal systems grant personhood to corporations. The first is to allow a corporation to enter into legal relations: a corporation can enter into binding contracts, sue and be sued, incur debts, and own property in its own name. This is simply a lot more practical.
By way of illustrating the reasons for it: a lot of groups and organisations – particularly local political party groups, unions and the like – are not corporations but “unincorporated associations”. Unincorporated associations do not have legal personality, and this creates a lot of problems. Since they cannot enter into legal relations in their own name, they can’t enter into a contract, own property or incur debts under their own name; they can only do so on behalf of all their members. You can’t sue an unincorporated association if it reneges on a contract with you, or fails to repay a debt; you can only sue its members individually.
This leads on to the other reason for corporate personality: limited liability. In an unincorporated association, all the members of the association are, in theory, personally liable for its debts. So if the association folds financially, the individual members can be sued, and their property can be repossessed to cover the associaiton’s liabilities. This, obviously, would discourage people from investing or participating in a commercial venture, since the risk level would be very high. By contrast, since a corporation is a legal person in its own right, and its shareholders are entitled to benefit from limited liability, they are not personally liable for all the corporation’s debts. This encourages investment, and therefore allows a healthy economy and promotes the ready availability of capital.
The legal personality of corporations does not mean that they have all the same rights as natural persons. There are plenty of human rights which, by their nature, apply exclusively to actual human beings. Corporate personality is primarily a civil law concept; it’s an idea which we construct in order to allow our system of contract and property law to work more effectively. It doesn’t mean that corporations are treated as equal to human beings in every respect. I should clarify that I don’t necessarily support the US Supreme Court’s recent judgment in Citizens United, though I need to take time to analyse the case before I offer an opinion. But the fact that Citizens United may be wrong is not an argument for getting rid of corporate personality.
(Disclaimer: I am a law student but not yet a qualified lawyer, and my jurisdiction is England and Wales, so I am not directly qualified in United States federal law. Everything in this post is personal opinion, and should not be construed to constitute legal advice.)
I had a longer response but when I got down to here I deleted it, because I realized you were speaking generally.
That’s pretty much the exact thing the recent SCOTUS decision eliminated. They do in fact have the exact same rights as people now, theoretically. That’s why we’re flipping scared.
Note: Note Legal Advice. You can ask me for htat in a few years, but it’s not yet.
Rutee (is the dooooom a way to get OM behind your name? ;-)
While this all sounds fine and dandy, how does this fit with the concept of responsibility?
The reason people are fairly careful (in general) with their decisions is because those decisions have personal consequences. In the case of limited liability, the people making the decision do so with very little actual consequence to themselves. The whole concept of corporate “personhood” practically becomes a shield for those responsible for corporate decisions.
The problems with corporate personhood extend far beyond the minor problem of moral detachment. Decisions are made on behalf of the corporation that run counter to the best interest of the citizens of a country. As an example, consider the effects of the DMCA, copyright extension, extreme fines, and so on. All that is brought on by just one sector: the entertainment industry.
The confluence of the lack of consequence, and extended economic and political power results in net harm to society.
PZ you’ve got a clean up job. hery is going ballistic with the spam-o-rama.
Argh. 140 comments accumulated since I last visited.
Interesting. I have read about parallels in Slovak and Hungarian that involve other body parts.
(You have no idea what linguistics blogs sometimes talk about.
And the spellchecker of Opera 10.10 doesn’t know the word “blogs”. Someone please tell me how to switch it off!!!)
:-)
Bah. You’re already learning fast (witness that beautiful explanation of the chromosome fusion stuff you provided recently). Till then you’ll have soaked up so much more knowledge here on Pharyngula that it’ll just bubble out of you!
Also, art is appreciated in that kind of society (especially if it depicts dinosaurs, but not necessarily only then).
Finally, I don’t think the hydrogeologist and her fresh-out-of-school friend who participated 2 years ago felt out of place… the hydrogeologist especially had a lot of fun, even though she’s basically not interested in fossils at all.
Hmmm. I’ll try to pay more attention to it. Now that I
have learnedwas taught how to do scary statistical tests, that looks like an interesting little project.(I have the brick of a book to the statistics-and-R course, I can look everything up…)
:-D :-D :-D
Good that I have trained to laugh silently.
Nononononooooo! It’s bad enough that Rehnquist died instead of being held responsible for his role in the coup of 2000 (Bush v. Gore).
:-D
Teh crazy is strong in this one – and the religious nutter is none too sane either!
Walton:
I was a bit brief in my first post, just a thing to get attention. I concur i should not have used immunity.
Bill Clinton signed it, Bush later opposed it and would not ratify it… see also the American Service-Members’ Protection Act by Jesse Helms. Or as it was known on the news in the Netherlands the The Hague Invasion Act.
Uhmm, no it’s not. Like i said i was a bit brief, but i was talking about the supreme court decision, which you state you need to read more about to form an opinion. I never argued for or against personhood in the corporate sense like the difference between VOF’s (partnerships) on the one side and BV’s and NV’s (ltd and jsc)on the other hand.
I ment that some corporations allready have some voting rights in some cases. That big corp allready buys itself into the US elections, which is why i was very impressed with Obama’s first act as president.
This ruling just takes those 2 things a whole lot further and i say i’m scared about that.
Because if this corporate bid for american government succeeds, then running for Canada or living in England or the Netherlands won’t help.
Palin as possible revelation enhancing happy (vice)president with “a finger at the red button” was a scary thought. This is no less frightning to me.
Rutee,
I’m reading Justice Kennedy’s judgment now, and I think your interpretation of it is too expansive. Yes, the majority held explicitly that the First Amendment applies to corporations as well as to natural persons; but this is not new, as Kennedy points out –
There was, therefore, prior authority for the proposition that corporate speech as well as individual speech is protected by the First Amendment. The majority clearly felt that there was a direct conflict between this line of authority and the decision in Austin, and came to the conclusion that Bellotti and Buckley should be preferred over Austin. Justice Kennedy goes on to say:
Essentially, if I’m reading him correctly, Kennedy takes the view that since the political speech of individuals and of unincorporated associations of individuals is protected by the First Amendment, there is no coherent basis for denying such protection to the political speech of corporations. Although he acknowledges the fact that corporations may be much wealthier, more powerful, and more dominant in public discourse than the average individual, he points out that First Amendment protections “do not depend on the speaker’s financial ability to engage in public discussion”; rightly or wrongly, the First Amendment protects the free speech rights of the wealthy as well as the poor, and does not seek to ‘level the playing field’ between the two.
I’m not saying he’s necessarily right about this, but it’s a perfectly coherent argument from a legal point of view.
He adds,
Nowhere does the judgment assert that corporations enjoy all the same constitutional rights as individuals. It is simply authority for the proposition that corporate speech is entitled to the same protection under the First Amendment as individual speech. There is a perfectly valid policy argument against this, and I’m not expressing any view either way on the merits of the case; but don’t read more into the judgment than is actually there.
Nor, in fact, does it invalidate all the contested provisions of the McCain-Feingold Act; the disclaimer and disclosure requirements were expressly upheld. Constitutionally, the legislature is entitled to regulate political speech; it just isn’t allowed to blanket-ban a certain class of organisations from engaging in certain types of political speech.
You shouldn’t. You should be blinded by a large yellow sphere while driving early in the morning like everyone else.
:P
Owlmirror @708 on the previous thread:
More admirable than scary. I’m impressed. You are lexically creative while sober, as well.
I wasn’t able/willing to hit the link from work, but I certainly hope the list includes the Tonya Harding honeymoon tape, which surely must be at the top of any list of lamentable sexual expressions!
Well, lamentable… but also unavoidably compelling. After all, how could anyone look away from that singular inhabitant of the intersection of figure skating, thuggishness, and amateur porn?
Ahhh… but in the process of fact-checking myself before posting this, I discovered that all that was merely the first act of a comprehensively bizarre life, which now includes a boxing career (I knew about that) and a Land Speed Record set in a 1931 Ford Model A called… wait for it… Lickity-Split.
You just can’t make this shit up!
An interesting alternative view on the Citizen’s United decision: Glenn Greenwald writing at Salon.com (a left-leaning site).
Mr. T @#60: nice
When I was a kid trumpet player with some Blood Sweat & Tears and Herb Alpert and Chicago records, I picked up Miles’ Greatest Hits in one of those 12-for-1 intro deals from the old Columbia Record Club. Liked it, the mood and Miles’ tone/feeling (very different from other trumpet players, as you know), mostly, so I bought KoB.
Liked it, too, as does any hominid with a functioning neocorex.
Next purchase: On the Corner.
A “WTF?” that reverberates in my life to this day.
italics unintentional but not inappropriate
btw, If OtC does not make you run screaming from the room,
what’s your phone number?you should pick up the Complete box set. 6 CDs of that kind of shit. There’s a lot there to chew on.It’s good.
I think I own every single official Miles release except for a few from the 80’s.
Kind of Blue is one of my favorite jazz albums of all time, along with Time Out and Monk’s Dream.
So off topic it hurts, but since this is the mellow, groovy, cosmic thread, I thought this would be the most appropriate place to ask this:
I went on a date with a girl on Saturday night who paints pictures and waters her plants with her menstrual blood. I’m no horticulturist but I’ve managed the occasional compost pile in my time and so I have to wonder: that can’t be good for the plants, can it? I was in her apartment and nothing smelled untoward, but I have a hard time believing that there’s the right soil flora/fauna around your average potted ficus’ roots to break blood down.
Oh, and I mentioned some meds I happen to be taking and when she asked why I don’t use natural products instead, I replied that I prefer to use treatments that work. *Sigh.* Young people these days.
Don’t take this the wrong way Brownian but…
How hard up are you? If someone I was going on a date with told me that I would have handed her a $20, said go take yourself out to dinner and thank you but this just isn’t going to work out.
Because I’m morbidly and unhealthily curious:
there’s fertilizers made from (animal) blood, so I doubt it’s doing the plants any harm.
OTOH, the natural medicine thing is definitely not worth dealing with, unless you’re planning on being selfless and attempting to convert her to reality.
Oh, yeah? I went from KoB directly to Aura (must have just been released and so prominently displayed). Sketches of Spain only partially healed me.
A hundred comments (after the spam was dumped) already? I seem to have dodged a boring-bullet there.
Anyway, last thread some of us were talking caffeine. I found this interesting;
http://www.dannisblog.com/post/2009/01/05/D2bCaf-Strips-Detect-Amount-Of-Caffeine-In-Your-Coffee.aspx
Seems to be a way (tho that’s not how it’s framed) of ensuring your cow-orkers aren’t faking you with decaf (an abomination).
Someone mentioned the mal-practise of using old grounds to make a second pot. I thought that was decaf.
Some plants do good with blood. Still, I think that just. . . um. . . odd.
Miki Z @109: That’s what I was thinking :-)
I don’t know if this has any california link but I enjoyed the On The Corner thing so much; more jazz;
That’s why we invented beer. It’s what makes awkward dates tolerable or worse, depending on how much one drinks! I’ll allow her some flakiness due to her age, but in any case she’s way too young for me. The thing is that I know a lot of people, many of whom are complete wackadelics, so it’s pretty hard to weird me out.
Nice girl, but like you I don’t see it working out. I’m not looking for a Sarah Jessica Parker to my Steve Martin.
It’s just all those admonitions not to throw bones, meat, fat, cheese or blood into most compost piles. So as she was describing her use of blood as an artistic medium I kept thinking “and here I am all worried about rinsing my eggshells well enough before tossing ’em in the worm box.”
It’s just all those admonitions not to throw bones, meat, fat, cheese or blood into most compost piles.
They attract rodents and other animals (more than vegetable matter). Not what you want if your compost pile is anywhere near human habitats.
Ah, I see. I mean, I know all of those things break down eventually, but for those of us who live in cities with neighbours all around.
If the plants can deal with that much iron, it might not be a problem.
:-D
Because it would start to stink. Plant matter tends to rot under less smell production.
Interesting link.
*waves at Ken Ham* ~
The reference was to one of my favourite movies of all time, L.A. Story, though I can’t exactly say why.
Of any website I’ve ever encountered, TVTropes.com will most reliably and repeated surgically excise three hours from one’s life.
Sorry Miki Z, I missed your comment. Yes, it is (A and B) with C).
OMFSM! They’ve built Maxwell’s Demon!
And the total entropy still increases.
…as I can confirm from statistically significant experience.
Ken Ham sometimes asks what I like to call “idiotic” rhetorical questions. For example that one time when he asked Bill Maher in Religulous the rhetorical question, “Are you God?” I like to call that an “idiotic” rhetorical question.
Somehow, it reassures me that David Marjanović can and will send so much time on something so trivial.
O/T, but thanks to Pharyngulites, I told a guy (for the first time out loud) who wanted me to try his “integrated healing through massage” that I don’t subscribe to such unscientific beliefs. Actually it was fun to be ‘rude’ for once!
Anyone know when the PZ/Reddit interview will be available? I thought it was supposed to be posted last week, but I see no sign of it.
Seriously #24? The altar crush guy, really?
You make these things sound so rare they almost sound like an act of god. This happens every day.
Take todays story about the 228 people in the Siberian town of Irkutsk who got sick after a religious ceremony. Turns out holy water can go stale just like ordinary water. I dont know what they were expecting, they believed they were drinking the blood of a human who has been dead for quite a while so I say they should have expected worse. I have nothing against holy water, I just try and stay away from water in which people are getting baptized thats all.
Of course local myth has it that the water has healing powers rather than the rotavirus and everything else you find on the bodies of those looking to get healed…
got it. bring a sketchbook, and when the subject of conversation wanders off into terra incognita, draw a dino and smile
. . .
I think I have a new theory about the meaning of Lascaux
The film “8: The Mormon Proposition” sold out several screenings at Sundance.
This film, along with the Prop 8 trial currently underway in California should help to bring to public notice the mormon’s sneaky campaign against gays and against civil rights in general. The film’s director is asking Sundance to set up additional screenings.
From the Salt Lake Tribune:
Source: http://www.sltrib.com/ci_14254844?source=most_viewed
I assume the former, since otherwise A would hardly be worth mentioning in this context.
Actually, while the plant-watering strikes me as really strange (and the subsequent comments about “natural” medicines constitute a confirming index of strangeness), I’ve actually heard on other occasions of artists using menstrual blood in their work, often either with a neopagan goddess-worship intent or as an exercise in some sort of feminist reclamation. It doesn’t actually seem particularly odd to me, as a visceral way of expressing femaleness in art (but then again, what would poor ol’ testosterone-poisoned me know about it, eh?).
OTOH, at about the time my daughter was starting at Yale, the college was embroiled in controversy over a really weird, not unrelated, art project: A senior had submitted a proposal for her final project that involved repeated self-inseminations followed by use of abortifacient drugs, with the final exhibition including videos of the resulting “abortions,” along with blood collected from same (the wiki doesn’t say so, but my memory is that the blood was to be smeared over the surfaces of cubical lucite boxes). Amid the predictable firestorm of criticism, the college considered banning the project, then released a statement saying that the whole proposal was “performance art,” and that the project was all a creative fiction… although the student’s own statements left it ambiguous whether she’d actually performed any inseminations (what all accounts agree is that she never verified any pregnancies). Ultimately the materials were tested and found not to contain any human blood, whether from induced miscarriages or otherwise. The student finally did a different project, and graduated.
I suppose if the purpose of art is to evoke strong reactions, this was successful art… but it was a fairly odd context for my family’s introduction to Yale life!
Bill, I remember that project! On the travel forum I occasionally post it sparked a massive debate, and was actually a starting point for me to look into the realities of abortion etc. a lot more.
Look, I’ve found lamb and raisin flavored ice cream.
http://engrishfunny.com/2010/01/25/engrish-lamb-raisin/
But, Walton! How terribly rude!
Good boy.
Brownian – in general it might have some fertilizing qualities, but the quantities she’s probably using are not going to be good for the houseplants. If you estimate even one tablespoon a month total, your average houseplant isn’t going to need that much of any of the minerals present and stuff like the iron is going to build up in the pot quickly. I would say no, unless it’s done maybe twice a year tops.
I would also advise against another date with her, but that’s just me.
Carlie (@134):
Dunno ’bout that: I’ve been cogitating on what, precisely, it means that something as intimate as menstrual blood even became a topic of conversation on a first date. Some possible interpretations would argue strongly in favor of another date! ;^)
I saw this coverage on ABC yesterday. It’s a story about humanists saying that one can be good without God.
well, I guess that depends just how many houseplants she has :-p
Personally I thank god* that I don’t have to deal with this whole menstruation thing at all anymore, but finding creative uses for that pain is a method of dealing with it, too, I suppose.
—–
*god = Planned Parenthood
more from the prop 8 trial:
Like religion?
Your daily Cthulhu (especially if any of you happen to be into knitting):
http://sugarcoatidli3z.deviantart.com/art/Cthulhu-Ski-mask-151071425
Enjoy.
Brownian;
The guys over at ED (of course *sigh* guys!)get freaked out about this, but if it is quite beautiful like the next link;
http://spiralingmoon.livejournal.com/
why not?
Then again at ED they share this with both 2girls1cup and abstinence under hall of shame, it’s like the eve/madonna question, a girl could never win.
scooter @#37:
’73?
Dear Brother Brownian,
I’d like to thank you for telling us of this marvelous woman who “paints pictures and waters her plants with her menstrual blood”. You have sent this thread in a fascinating direction. As a born again Christian I have a lot of interest in blood, having drunk (by my own estimation) some 500 gallons of Christ’s transubstantiated plasma cocktails.
I’ve also had long discussions with Jesus during prayer-time about all the bleeding He did on the cross–in fact Jesus Himself told me of a miracle that never made it into the gospels. Verily, it’s a little known fact that one of Golgotha’s local stray dogs (a large pack of them survived on execution hill by eating bits of dead people) spent a good few hours beneath Christ’s cross licking up all the blood that flowed and dripped from Our Lord’s tortured body. The miracle was that this mangy cur was suddenly turned into a snowy white Bichon Frise of miraculous perfection. He would have been the first of the breed, but sadly he was captured by a feral leper who enjoyed bichon stew for dinner that very evening and acquired a warm new hat.
But I digress… my point is that blood is a big deal for us Christians, and by strange coincidence on my last pilgrimage to the Holy Land I was fortunate enough to acquire at great price a precious vial of the Blessed Virgin’s own menstrual blood. A humble trader, Abdul Abdul Abdullah, had discovered a large barrel of the precious substance (Mary must have had a monthly flow to rival the Nile) and I was able to secure a moon’s worth. I was planning to sprinkle it on my tomato plants and see if they would miraculously produce immaculate fruit without any of that pornographic pollenation shit that the sinful scientists get so excited about, but after reading your post I realised that Jesus was telling me to paint with it.
I’ve worked right through the Noo Zillund night and I have one canvas finished already. It’s a photo-realist close-up of Christ’s blood-splattered naked loins captured as he expires in tortured agony on the cross. I’ve called it ” Blood on Christ’s Dying Loins, Depicted in Virginal Blood from His Blessed Mother’s Loins.”
Any bids?
Smoggy
We didn’t chat too much about it, but having known many such people in my life I suspect her reasoning is much the same. (I’ve been describing the subject of her art as “Georgia O’Keeffe minus the flowers”–in other words she paints a lot of female genitalia.) And I don’t have any problem with that, either, except for the atheist skeptic believing-in-neither-astrology-nor-qi kinda thing.
This was the first date I’d ever been on in which I’d made a mental commitment beforehand not to engage in any kind of romantic/sexual contact, and it’s a new rule I think I’m going to stick to for first dates. The trick is finding an appropriate time to mention the rule without sounding presumptuous (I’m pretty sure “Hey baby, I just know you’ll be begging me to come home with you in about three hours, but lemme tell you how ol’ Brownian rolls first” would come across as presumptuous), but it really makes for a more fun and relaxed time if you’re not trying to gauge how much longer you’ve got to make small talk before you get to see the other person naked. (Perhaps more importantly, it removes the risk of having to figure out then next morning whether it was a one night stand or now you’re committed to at least two or three weeks of awkward breakfasts with someone whose incompatibility with you you’re increasingly becoming aware of. All things considered, I don’t care about sex enough to put up with that kind of annoyance.)
You misunderstand. It was my next purchase, back when I was 14. Hence the reverberating WTF.
My Miles collection is bigger than your Miles collection!
Is so!
SteveM (@138):
I know we’ve been over this ground before, and I’m probably mostly preaching to the choir here, but this scares me more than a little:
So “social” choices don’t deserve legal protections? We’re not eligible for freedom of expression unless that expression is a matter of destiny rather than choice? Gulp!
I absolutely accept that being gay is not a matter of choice… but so what if it were? So what if, as social constraints on homosexuality are eased, a growing number of people do “shift lanes” as a matter of choice (see also Anne Heche, for one example, and Susie Bright has alternated between living as a “full-time lesbian” and as a bisexual who sleeps mostly with men)? Are we at risk, by making the it’s not a choice argument, of implicitly forfeiting the right to make sexual-preference choices?
Maybe it’s just paranoia, but I can imagine the next fight being over whether volitional homosexual or bisexual behavior should have the same legal protections as real homosexual orientation… or whether BDSM behavior deserves legal protections equivalent to gay orientation.
IMHO, what we should be fighting for is freedom of sexual expression. Full stop.
(All that said, of course, I’m the first one to want to avoid letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.)
this = another reason why I think American-style dating is a REALLY cruel invention. There really are a million less painfully awkward ways to spend time with people :-p
I did misundertand and
nuh uh
/brrrrrrrrrrrrrrssssssssssssssssssthp
Aura is another weird one, true.
A Miles record sort of by courtesy only, though.
Dearest Brother Smoggy,
If my experiences have provided you with a direction in with to serve Christ–I recommend serving him overhand and to the southwest, but that’s up to you–then I will consider my life well-lived.
It’s good to hear from you again; for a time I was worried you’d gone to proselytise some other bunch of heathens.
Not available in my country.
Trivial!?!
I managed to explain to my grandparents that discussing whether Wernher von Braun was Good® or Bad® is pointless because he’s a Type IV antihero.
This is the encyclopedia that explains all of literature (in the widest sense possible), and thereby all that that literature explains, and you call it “trivial”?
You should go out less. =8-)
But what did he really mean…?
:-) :-) :-)
<headshake>
I’m out of words. :-)
I think I’ll just sit here and appreciate your intellect for a bit. :-)
And, after all, it comes for free :-þ
Quite so, but another interpretation is mere nerdiness to the degree of having trouble with the concept of TMI. As you may have noticed, I know firsthand that this phenomenon exists. <vigorous nodding>
just that version, or all clips of that song on youtube?
It’s even worse for Canadians; we’re so passive-aggressive we’ll keep dating someone we loathe because we’re not sure how to let them down easy. Canada’s motto is A Mari usque ad Mare, which as any scholar of Latin knows means “It’s me, not you, eh?”
On the other hand, a movie/concert/play, a little dinner, some dessert and a few drinks with somebody you really like followed by seeing them naked is a pretty awesome way to spend an evening. It’s only the finding of that someone that’s difficult.
Where are you Jadehawk that your people have found a civilised way to achieve this, and how do you do it?
Dear Brother Brownian,
Thank you for missing me.
May I say that while I don’t understand the concept of not boinking on a first date, I do admire your delicacy in making “small talk before you get to see the other person naked.”
As one who prefers to get the pain, pleasure and fluid swapping out of the way first (congress before conversation) this seems quite a novel approach to relationships, which may not catch on. You may think me a little unsophisticated in my “fuck first, friendship later” approach, but as in everything I do I am only following Biblical precedent. In this case God Himself, who boinked Mary without a single chat-up line, and later on sent a minion to tell her what had happened (a technique practised by most ‘quiverfull’ spouses)
Yours in Christian mattress action
Smoggy
Alka-Seltzer + Microgravity
the German (and reportedly all-European) way of finding significant others is what right-wing pundits have lately been decrying as the Ebil of “hook-up culture”, which really just means you treat everybody like a buddy to hang out with, but occasionally sex happens, and occasionally sex happens repeatedly, and that means you’re in an exclusive relationship.
Since I don’t like meatspace much though, I have completely moved this to cyberspace. still works the same, since I do end up meeting a lot of my internet friends in meatspace eventually.
Really? Hmm, I wonder which is the bar nearest the Canadian embassy…
#132
Lamb and Raisin? – amateur!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D6CLoRuvGcY
Never been there, but The Fat Duck is claimed by some to be ‘the best restaurant in the world’
(no reference)
and on a related note, in civilized countries we don’t kick one-night-stands out in the middle of the night. in civilized countries, it’s possible to have a civilized breakfast (and occasionally even toe offer of showering) before parting and never talking to each other again. I’ve never even heard of the walk of shame until I moved to the U.S.
re 157;
How about Lamb and raisin-dates?
A “Slave of the Slave of the Slave of God”? Impressive.
So my strategy* isn’t all that bad after all…
* Wait till someone falls from the sky or perhaps comes sliding through the tubes of the Internet.
Let’s simply declare everyone who is capable of such choices (i. e. everyone who isn’t a 0 or a 6 on the Kinsey scale) bisexual, and let’s declare bisexuality an innate orientation. :-|
(Which I guess it is. But that’s utterly underresearched, AFAIK.)
Victimless crime.
that doesn’t stop people from outlawing other things done by consenting adults; there’s always some slippery slope to follow, some murky social morality to defend, whatever.
El Bulli is often considered the world’s best, with The Fat Duck close behind.
Yeah. Me neither until now, hence the trying something different. I’ve had at least two relationships that started because I didn’t realise it was supposed to be a one night stand and made them breakfast in the morning (apparently, the vast majority of Canadian men are assholes who don’t cook, so I ended up looking like a catch in comparison).
I remember that being sorta how we did things in high school, but as one gets older one is expected to actually go on “Hi Mr. So-and-so, I’m here to pick up your daughter” honest-to-goodness dates. I like your way better, but North Americans get all wiggy about sex.
BDSM Behavior is two consenting adults. It’s none of our damn business what they do behind closed doors.*
*Unless it’s really, really juicy gossip.
Just that version.
Impressive.
well, here’s another version: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fH6Po4X72xU
and if that one doesn’t work either, here’s at least the lyrics; music is almost the same as the original version: http://www.songmeanings.net/songs/view/3530822107858561954/
Hmph! *crosses Brownian off Internet Sex God list* *writes in Smoggy*
Well, if they recorded and put it online for profit, then it could be our business. XD
That’s a great album title: “Sieg Howdy!”
reminds me somehow of this (from 1963!)
That must suck* for socially dysfunctional nerds.
…But still less than the American method!!!
* I’m speaking in theory because I not only didn’t get into that culture, I didn’t even notice it exists. I’m not surprised it exists, but I didn’t know it.
Woah, let’s not get all crazy here.
I went on a date with a girl on Saturday night who paints pictures and waters her plants with her menstrual blood. – Brownian,OM
My wife, a keen gardener, occasionally asks me to collect my pee and pour it into the compost bin. It’s supposed to be an “activator”, and men’s urine is supposed to be more effective. I’ve just tried googling this factoid, and supposedly:
1) It’s due to the nitrogen content.
2) Male urine is better because it has a higher pH.
3) It’s all due to the androsterone.
(Not all in the same source.)
Anyone know if there’s any truth in any of this? I suspect that if it’s true at all, it’s down to (1), and the supposed greater efficacy of male urine is a myth. It is, after all, rather easier for men than for women either to collect their urine in a jar, or just pee directly on the compost heap!
I should note that my wife is not the least bit woo-ish. She presumably heard this from some source of info for gardeners at some point, and has not thought to question it.
pretty much all forms of social interactions would suck for socially dysfunctional people*, but the American method seems to be specifically designed to weed out all nerds, and all socially awkward guys: there’s something like a million rules and “things/behaviors that set off red flags”, which pretty much guarantees that even the brave/lucky nerd who got a first date is guaranteed to not get another :-p
———
*please not that this version also works (with minor changes) for the internet: all you need are female internet friends, and willingness to occasionally meet some of them offline. Sooner or later one of them will jump you (though, lack of alcohol does make this a wee bit less likely for any given encounter)
*pops in*
Wow. Does The Thread grow faster when I’m not around or something? It will take me a while to catch up…
First of all… Lynna, how are you? Feeling better? Have you seen a doctor? There’s no way I’m going to read all the comments since I last visited tonight and I want to know if everything is ok with you. And are you still craving for oranges? :)
Smoggy, I’m glad to see you back. Pharyngula is just not the same without our Outstanding Missionary. :)
Yeah. And you don’t usually go out alone with someone you’ve never talked to before. You go out with a group of friends who introduce you to other friends… and you might just end up liking one of your friends’ friends better than the others and… you get what I mean.
But, unfortunately, I’ve been noticing an increasing adherence to American-style dating here in Europe. I don’t like that.
Huh. People do that? That’s even more cruel than the American concept of dating itself. What’s the point?
I’ve heard that as well, Knockgoats, both that urine is useful as an ‘activator’ and that male urine is better suited for this task, especially when trying to compost material that’s higher in cellulose and has lower moisture content, such as grass clippings versus kitchen waste, for instance.
Last year I tried my hand at vermiculture, since a worm box was all I could manage in my apartment, but I kept running into problems with anaerobic fermentation due to too much moisture.
Now I rent a house, and my roommate has big plans for the plantable areas of the yard (she cites her English ancestry as requiring her to garden). I’d really love to buy/build a cheap composter for the grass clippings and yard waste. BTW, Edmonton has an apparently state-of-the-art composting facility, the largest in North America, so I no longer feel guilty about tossing stuff that could be composted instead.
I can’t think of any reason why males’ urine should differ systematically from females’ in either nitrogen or pH.
At a stretch, one might argue that androgenic steroids increase rates of protein turnover and thus rates of waste nitrogen production which, coupled with a larger body size, may cause males to pee out more nitrogen over a 24-h period on average. I’d buy that.
But this won’t matter unless you’re doing complete, quantitative urine collections over long time periods. The nitrogen content of any given whiz is going to be affected much more strongly by recent hydration state.
oh EWWWWW
Yes, people do that.
I don’t know what the point is except some weird macho-tude, but as you can see above, NOT doing it got Brownian into trouble :-p
Another example of my liking ‘religious’ music;
The Big Dish – Faith Healer
This from an album called ‘Creeping Up On Jesus’
Sex as conquest. Getting laid is somehow ‘putting one over’ on the other person. I’ve known girls who’ve hooked up with a guy for a night of sex and then encountered the guy months later and had him look through them as if they weren’t even there. This kind of thing makes me loathe members of my gender, although theoretically these sort of people appear with less frequency at later stages in life.
As long as one isn’t too socially awkward, or at least is seeing someone of reasonably similar levels of awkwardness, the brave/lucky nerd who gets a first date might indeed be in for a second, particularly if the person being dated has had her share of the total assholes I describe above.
The flip side of the “friends with benefits” situation Jadehawk describes is that participants here in the US and Canada tend to get confused when the relationship goes from being friends to being friends who occasionally have sex and then back to being friends again. It can sometimes require some work to keep the friendship from imploding.
Dawkins:
Haiti and the hypocrisy of Christian theology
Sven, it’s going to be really hard for me to continue this discussion of my sex life if you keep interjecting with links to more topical subjects.
Is this true for socially awkward gay men too?
well, that’s true for all forms of relationships everywhere: for one, you always need to know where you’re standing with another person, and that’s hard enough to figure out; secondly, humans are idiots, and stupid shit gets in the way of fun all the time. the only solution is to not care and/or become a hermit. :-p
Sorry, sorry.
Back to Brownian’s
imaginationsex life, by all means.2 Ps inna pod;
Tad – Jack Pepsi
Beck – Fume
David M (@160):
Yah, sure… but from the POV of pragmatic PR, those not initially inclined to be supportive, the nobody would choose such a difficult, socially stigmatizing lifestyle, so it must be innate is more likely to garner sympathy (however grudgingly) than bisexuality, which Woody Allen commented “doubles your chance of a date on Saturday night”… which could strike some less as a social disadvantage and more like being greedy in the buffet line.
The I’m stuck with this argument skates awfully to treating gayness as a disability… and, of course, the homophobia of our society means that in practice it is one. But leaning on that aspect risks throwing all aspects of sexual diversity and personal choice that don’t seem like disabilities under the legal bus.
Instead, we ought to all — gay, straight, or in between; vanilla or any flavor of kinky — be able to say: Innate? Choice? Who the fuck cares? It’s my fucking business, and nobody else’s, what sort of fucking I do.
Sorry if I seem strident; I know full well most folks here are on the side of the (metaphorical) angels on this one; dunno why the subject spools me up so.
I have exactly zero experience with the American gay dating scene.
Though, I suspect that for good-looking but awkward gays, the situation is the same as for good-looking but awkward women: if you dress up nicely enough and go to a place where the desired type of men* run around, sooner or later someone will as you out; and eventually they may even do so in such a manner that even the most socially inept woman/gay will catch on to the fact that they’re being asked out :-p
—
*unless your desired demographic is the nerd; then you’re shit outta luck and have to do the asking yourself.
*clenched-tentacle salute*
(with the proviso that if you’re fucking somebody else, it’s pretty much their business too)
Any Canadians watch that Test The Nation IQ thing last night? There was an atheist team who came in third place; the guy who got the highest score of all the contestants was on there though, and the team captain was the guy (Brandon something?) who plays the new Reverend on Little Mosque on the Prairie. The “nerds” team won, and the “believers” team were tied for second to last with the “contact sport athletes” team. Heh.
What? Why, next you’ll be advocating human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together…mass hysteria!
Besides, if we truly accepted who we are instead of hiding it behind missionary monogamy who would our unpleasant aunts and uncles have to whisper and mutter about to each other at funerals and weddings—the only family events they’re ever invited to?
*boggles*
I haven’t been on the dating scene for a very long time, obviously.
Yes, I think that’s right. (1) does make sense, but I’m skeptical about the others.
<anecdotal evidence>BTW, my grandma does that (with her own urine) and she has some of the healthiest, prettiest plants I’ve seen.
</anecdotal evidence>
So, some people enjoy being assholes. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.
That’s a risk you can minimize by talking with the other person openly and trying to make sure he/she wants the same as you do. Not always easy…
Eddie, when I was do a quick skim of this thread, I though you were linking to this: Faith Healer by Big Dipper
Warning, there is a lot of dork dancing.
This is a basic theme of US teenaged male socialization, attitudes encouraged in locker rooms, fraternity houses, mens’ magazines, and nightclubs across this great land of ours.
Hehehe, always love the use of that line.
What the hell is meant by “Merikan Dating” anyway? To be perfectly honest, I only make a habit of dating people I’m already friends with, so I have an extremely unusual perception of dating in Merika. Probably because I’m in the part of Florida adjacent to the hick parts of the country, so we don’t have many nerds..
I’ve got close to no experience* in any dating scene. :D
Well, not just nerds, muscular nerds to be precise. So I guess I’m screwed.
*I was on a date apparently, but failed to realize it until I was half naked.
We’re running at well above 200 comments/d on this subThread, which means the 20K milestone gets reached as early as Wednesday afternoon (blogtime).
Chill the
champagnebeer.19650>
Aaaaah. That’s how to do it. =8-)
Enron had its anti-noodly appendages in the Total Recall election?
(Should I be surprised?)
…How many burgeoning Internet romances are there going on here exactly?
In any case, from looking at the structural formula of androsterone, it can’t be a base itself, never mind how unlikely it is to be present in sufficient amounts in the first place.
Then they’re bisexual themselves. :-)
Toss in a twist of virgin/whore idiocy, and you’ve got yourself a nice healthy-sexual-attitude cocktail.
Fixed. :)
Dania:
… Absolutely. In any position. :D
Walton: Perhaps you should take some time to read Justice Stevens’ dissenting opinion also (if you have not already). It makes a lot of sense.
Rorschach (way back up): The gratuitous reference to cricket was greatly appreciated!
The – AFAIK only – kind occasionally shown by Hollywood.
Toss in an air hostess and you’ve got a sexual-altitude cocktail.
*resists sexual-aptitude cocktail joke*
*resists stupid tasteless 5th-grade puns involving “sexual” and “cocktail”*
Make successful movies and TV series encouraging those attitudes and suddenly you’ve got European teenagers adopting them too. Which is kind of sad to watch, actually.
Quirky girl meets guy, misunderstandings happen, guy siezes all initiative, girl blames him for misunderstanding, etc etc?
Sidenote: I hate romantic comedies. This leaves me a reasonably unhappy woman with Merikan movies.
worst case of Eagleland Osmosis EVAH.
ahem. so I guess this would be the stage at which I start the “kids these days” rant, and start yelling at everybody to get off my lawn.
I do my best, but even then sometimes everything goes haywire for a time. A friend of mine and I once went from friends to lovers to two people who never talk to each other back to friends to roommates to long-term friends who unfortunately live on different continents.
I’m still waiting for my Lark Voorhies/Zooey Deschanel hybrid.
I thought that was the goal?
no, the part where there’s specific asking out, one-on-one dinner-and-a-movie situations, the awkward
interviews1st-date, 2nd-date, and 3rd-date approved conversations, and pretty much everything else that Americans squish in between the “hanging out with other single friends” stage and the “being in a relationship” stage of being.Dania @174:
Thanks for asking, Dania. So pleasant to have someone care. I’m feeling better and am apparently functioning at what is normal level for me. Yes, I do still have the craving for oranges. I’m eating about three per day, which, for an addiction, shows restraint.
I have a bit of residual fatigue, and a low-level headache that comes and goes.
My doctor was nice enough to read info I sent him, talk to me on the phone, and order tests based on that — a process that saved me the $120 it would cost me just to walk into his office.
As Rorschach predicted, the doctor wants a CT scan of my brain and some sort of carotid artery test (actual description of carotid artery test is missing here because my pen ran out of ink when I was taking notes during the talk with the doctor). I’m now in the process of finding out what the imaging companies (there are two different ones involved) would charge. With no health insurance and no savings, this will probably be an exercise in futility. But I’ll get the facts and then see what can be done as far as negotiating fees, etc.
Mellow mushrooms but constricting creepers.
Sidenote: I hate romantic comedies. This leaves me a reasonably unhappy woman with Merikan movies.
Tell me about it. I loved Kristen Bell as a smart and noirish young woman in Veronica Mars. What is she doing now, getting roles in rom-coms. Bleah. She can play scary smart but to be a star in a rom-com, the principles must be blithering idiots.
There’s specific topics for various dates? I’ve really screwed myself out of culturally relevant information by behaving naturally, haven’t I? Jesus Tapdancing Christ…
On dates you behave naturally? What are you, on crack?
I didn’t know you weren’t feeling well, Lynna. I wish you all the best.
No, just tons of caffeine and High Fructose Corn Syrup. It’s worked out well enough weirdly, but like I said, I only date friends. I don’t know how you’d limit conversation for the purpose of a date when you already know each other well…
Thanks, Brownian. I had a little interruption of my personal narrative that resulted in about one hour of lost time. Tentative over-the-phone diagnosis was transient ischemic attack.
I made an orange sauce for my salmon, and that is the plus side of this so far, learning how to make orange sauce for salmon.
if you’re only dating people you’re already well-acquainted with, then I imagine the introductory interview questions would be redundant, and you skip to the post-introductory stage of dating; which may or may not be less dramatic, awkward and fucking stupid, for all I know.
Sven (@188):
Of course. Consensual goes without saying… except, sadly, that it doesn’t; I should not have left it unsaid.
David:
Nah. Straights of both persuasions could conceivably see bis as poachers.
Lynna (@211):
Sorry, I’ve been skipping in and out of threads and missed the fact that you were ailing. This…
…is like a stab to the heart. Ability to pay for health care should never be the issue, and I burn with rage at the people who would deny it for their own shortsighted pecuniary gains.
Tonight I plan to write handwritten notes to all 7 members of the CT congressional delegation (even the mostly useless bag of self-righteous pus that is Joe LIEberman), begging them not to give in on health care reform. The system that would truly address situations like yours isn’t on the table, of course, but what is would surely help, and it would be immoral for those of us lucky enough to have access to care to simply sit and watch those of you who don’t.
This comment has been posted on the wrong thread.
and on a different note, my bookmark bar now sports a separate button for pharyngula. I don’t remember putting it there (especially since I don’t know how), so this must mean that Firefox has decided to put it there by itself because I spend virtually all my time here, anyway :-p
It’s actually really painful to watch. I have a sister who basically got her entire worldview wholesale from American television. So she meets people, hangs out as friends for weeks/months, eventually tries dating them, gets freaked out when they’re not behaving exactly as expected according to the Rules of Dating, then is single again. I’d help, but I’ve always been rather socially inept. The fact that I’m married could almost be a mark of Divine Intervention. But then, I don’t go through life expecting everything to be like I saw on TV. A lot of people do. Kids these days…
Good health to Lynna
which puts my sausage and rice dinner to shame. :P
Very good of you to do something about it Bill (comment 220). I find it very frustrating that people who do have health insurance do not live in the same world as a self-employed writer, so they simply refuse to understand.
Medicaid seems to differ by state, and I’m not old enough for Medicare. Medicaid in Idaho sees my house as a resource. In a way, I suppose my house is a resource, but I don’t want to “spend” it on health care. I will no longer be a contributing, tax-paying member of society if I’m homeless and office-less. The $2000 worth of assets Medicaid allows me to have would not even cover my computer equipment.
Talking about this puts me back in fuck ’em mode.
The State of Idaho tells me they can negotiate my medical costs down to about half, but I can do that myself (and have done it in the past), and I can do it without signing my house over to the State of Idaho as a promise that I will pay them back or, if not, I’ll be out on the street. Fuck ’em some more.
Medical bills prompt more than 60 percent of U.S. bankruptcies
The bankruptcy-due-to-medical-bills situation is worse now than it was when the stats from 2001 to 2007 were investigated.
First TIA post on January 15
And to make you even more jealous, my boyfriend brought me the wild-caught salmon. Hey, I need to count the good things twice just to balance the bad.
A young member of the rebel alliance.
(a couple of other styles – no sign of head-phones yet though)
Well my sausage was caught by the great hunter Farmer John and came from the mythical land of Poland.
I fail to understand why you’re complaining about the dating scene, Gyeong Hwa Pak.
The headline from one of SEF’s links in #227:
I won’t point out the missing apostrophe in the headline, but the story is from Texas. Isn’t nearly everything more important than education in Texas? I mean, there’s football, the bible, um, getting your Stetson sized*…
(*Okay, I feel I can make this joke since almost any Canadian from east of Manitoba will ask you where your cowboy hat is if you mention you’re from Alberta.)
I find that it’s hard to say something without some type of Freudian slip occuring. *licks sauce of sausage.
Heh, to be fair, my secret mutant power is turning almost any phrase into a sexual double entendre (in fact, I even listed that as the thing “I’m really good at” on OK Cupid.
Dear Brother Brownian,
I admire your evident mutant talent. As a layman, I find that the best way to turn almost any phrase into a sexual double entendre is to add some variation of the phrase “as the actress said to the bishop” to the end of it.
You realize you’ve just set up a challenge.
As the actress said to the Bishop, “You realize you’ve just set up a challenge?”
Smoggy, you’re really Leslie Charteris?
Was that part of the reason they turned you away, RBLD?
(I ask not to be mean, but because I thought that was one of the cutest admissions I’ve ever read.)
John @ #236, I prefer to think of myself as The Saint.
(“I aspire to Saint Smoggy,” as the actress said to the bishop.)
Knockgoats @172:Fixed nitrogen is used up in the process of decomposition. Plant waste is low in nitrogen. That is why nitrogen is applied in the fall of the year; to facilitate crop residue decomposition. The converse is true; farmers decompose whole hogs under piles of sawdust. This beats burning them, which makes for some interesting downwind aromas. Apologies if this has already been covered; I’m still trying to catch up.
BS
As the actress said to the Bishop, “As the actress said to the Bishop, “You realize you’ve just set up a challenge?””
*runs
AFAIK, no one has previously discussed decomposing hogs under piles of sawdust.
That’s a relief.
This is actually an issue where I live, Hog containment world. If I drive 5 miles in any direction, I will encounter a pile of dead pigs awaiting disposal.(with the patience of well, dead pigs)
BS
As my first contribution to this thread, here’s some righteous guitar playing:
Anyone know why killfile would constantly screw up here on Pharyngula but work fine at ERV and SadlyNo?
Sven @ 700 on the previous thread:
Alas, I must confess my shame. It is instant coffee that I drink. Folger’s, to be specific. Ya see, it’s like this….
The only impression I’ve ever got from direct personal experience of coffee has been that it frequently smells wonderful, but tastes nasty; but then, instant coffees of one sort or another have been my sole experience of coffee. Oh, others would rhaspodise about how wonderful it tasted, but I could never see their point. I concluded that they were all Slaves of the Bean, hopelessly addicted…kinda like Slaves of Nicotene, who smoke in spite of the foulness of the taste (and smell) of cigarette smoke. I swore that I would never be a Slave of the Bean.
Then the day came when I decided that falling asleep at my desk every morning was a Bad Thing, and would not prosper my efforts to continue receiving a steady paycheck. I told myself, “Think of it as a medicinal dose. Medicine is supposed to taste bad.” And it was all so easy (and ‘easy’ is important, oh my friends and associates, because cicely wakes up totally brain-dead, and requires two hours, a strong tail wind, and perhaps a push, to get Ms. Brain to boot up in the morning)…nuke the water, add crystals, stir in a metric butt-load of stevia, non-dairy creamer and hazelnut syrup, and it didn’t hardly taste horrible at all.
It’s only one cup. And I can stop any time I want. Really.
(Maybe I can nap out in the warehouse….)
Pants on the Ground
Pants on the Ground
Lookin’ like a fool
With your pants on the Ground
With the gold in your mouth
Hat turned sideways
Pants hit the ground
Call yourself a cool cat
With your pants on the ground
Walkin’ downtown with your pants on the ground!
Giddy-up
Hey! Get your pants off the ground!
Lookin like a fool!
Walkin’ talkin’ with your pants on the ground!
Hey! Get your pants off the ground!
Lookin’ like a fool
With your pants on the Ground
With the gold in your mouth
Hat turned sideways
Call yourself a cool cat
Pants on the ground!
You’re from Alberta?
Where’s your cowb…
(Smack)
Ow.
(/… anyway, in other news, I’m currently well west of Manitoba. In Whistler. And said hill had some 10 cm of snow this am. And I was there at 7h30 Pacific to play in it. And life is good.)
Happy Australia Day, fellow Aussie Pharyngulites!
I’m happily enjoying the day off, holing up in the AC cause it’s 37 degrees outside and drinking an ice cold bottle of Becks ( I know, I know, I should be drinking Aussie beer but I have a beer about..ooh. once a decade and I just felt like it.). Took the kids to some family day stuff this morning where they got face painted, rode ponies, played on a jumpng castle and had free icypoles and sausages. Watched 48 people become newly minted Aussie citizens in the naturalisation cermeony and got all teary and proud of them. There is almost NOTHING in this country, as a right or privledge, that is not granted to permanent residents so there is really no need to go the further step and become a citizen. They must truly want to be and that made me so proud. Mr Shrek became a citizen in 2005 and it was a really moving moment and one he was so happy about.
OOps
On reading that back it kind of sounds like I’m bitching about that fact. Quite the opposite, I’m proud of the fact our permanent residents have all the rights and privledges of citizens ( except they can’t vote which, in a compulsory voting country isn’t necessarily a bad thing- it means they don’t have to turn up umpteen times every year or so, given we have THREE levels of government, or face a fine.)
Half a bottle of Beck’s and I suck at blockquoting.
The post at #249 should read
On reading that back it kind of sounds like I’m bitching about that fact. Quite the opposite, I’m proud of the fact our permanent residents have all the rights and privledges of citizens ( except they can’t vote which, in a compulsory voting country isn’t necessarily a bad thing- it means they don’t have to turn up umpteen times every year or so, given we have THREE levels of government, or face a fine.)
Well, I’m holed up at home also. It’s 9 American degrees out with snow and 30 mph wind. The entire state of Minnesota from Duluth south and Iowa is shut down, including freeways, with kids sleeping in schools because the buses can’t run.
And I’m out of beer.
BS
I keep forgetting that other countries use Celsius. I was going to comment on how mad you were to have the AC on in 37 degrees Fahrenheit weather.
Since this is an OT thread, ahem!
If we can tear ourselves away for a moment from the Sexual Adventures of The Great White Brownian and the ribald jocundities of the supporting cast (me included), I would like to ask an OT but important question.
Does anyone know why there seems to be so underwhelming media attention on the currently ongoing Prop 8 trial in California? I have been avidly following a live-blog reporting the daily QnAs and cross-examinations, but that seems to be about it. There is no other buzz!
From what I’ve been able to gather, it’s painfully obvious why the defence fought so hard to keep video streaming and YouTube out of this trial. The defense’s position has so long been one huge exercise in incompetence and stupidity (Figures, since they – in reality – have nothing better than ‘homosexuality is wrong because teh Babble sez so’ as their most cogent argument).
However, it appears the defence have also managed to keep the media largely disinterested in the proceedings. Those relying primarily on cable news would not even be aware that this trial is going on.
Am I the only one finding this strange silence akin to a conspiracy when none exists?
Anyone see the latest Newsweek cover?
“The Problem with Barack Obama: He’s Leading With his Head, Not his Heart”
*facepalm*
Ok, for the more metrically challenged nationalities amongst us:
I hear about it all the time on Towleroad, for obvious reasons, but yeah I haven’t heard much else outside of that.
GHP, you’re right, and I find that quite strange (not that you are right, hehe! – but this state of affairs). What is going on here? I would have thought that a lot of the sane and rational crowd would express solidarity and support with the LGBT community during this trial – which has potentially earthshaking impact for the issue of according human rights to LGBT people. But where is the buzz?
I can’t comment on television coverage of the Prop 8 trial (it doesn’t rate here in Japan), but I’ve noticed daily ‘summaries’ in the SF Chronicle and SJ Mercury News. I’ve been following it at dedicated websites; these offer a fuller picture, with discussion on the legal points, strategies, etc., that the newspapers don’t mention.
To be fair of course, I mostly get my news from online sources these day and often from foreign news sites. So, i’m not really sure about how well it’s covered.
In News today:
Via Towleroad: Rev. Martin Ssempa shows screening of gay porn to bolster support for the Kill-the-Gays bill in Uganda.
Via NHK: Racoons damage World Haritage Sites in Nara, Japan.
Via Phnom Penh Post: Authorities crack down on vendors for selling expired condoms and prescibed blue pills.
Hehehehehe
Now they’re sorry.
BS
Brownian,
It’s not just Canadians. I really hate hurting someone’s feelings, so I have an awful time breaking up with boyfriends. In one case I dated a man for a whole year after I decided we needed to break-up. Bad things kept happening to him (getting laid off from work, his father developed prostate cancer, grandmother died), so I couldn’t add another. I didn’t work up the guts to break things off until I explained to myself that he was a great guy, just not the guy for me, and I was robbing him of the chance to meet someone who was right for him.
Also, right after someone proposes to you is a horrible time to break up with them.
Hey, I spent much of my professional life making Smalltalk and only few times did it lead to me seeing anyone naked.
I concur that the merkin approach to sex is strange (I’m Brit-born, lived in US and now BC) and almost worryingly adversarial. So much yanqui porn is little more than assault. Compare with French (avoid the cheese-eating variety), Scandanavian, even Brit-porn. A hell of a lot more fun appears to be had by the participants.
Pygmy Loris: It appears Dendy has singled you out in his latest post, along with a gratuitous picture of a woman’s ass, bent over showing a thong . Realizing that there is no good solution for the likes of Dendy What does the Horde consider the best strategy to deal with him? Ignore or ridicule? I rather favor ignoring the asshole myself.
BS
Blind Squirrel
I tried to leave this post on Dendy’s site to show my distate:
..but it wasn’t allowed as a comment on his site. Shows what a misogynistic individual he is. I cannot believe a person who is teaching to students, no matter what age, is throwing such photos around and using them to support some completely unrelated topic.
I sincerely hope this man does not have daughters, and if so, they do read his blog and find out the compltete and utter contempt he seems to have for the female of the species.
You’d prefer he act in a manner inconsistent with his religion? (I would.)
Perhaps reciprocated? That would go a long ways in explaining his behavior. I too have several comments held in “moderation”.
BS
I also had this knocked back as suitable for his blog:
As you can see I was holding back from any swearing lest he use this as any justification for not posting my comment. I am now at exploding point so stick with me for a sec:
fuck, fuck, fuck, fuckety, fucktard, fuckward, fuck, fuck, knobfuck, fuck, fuck, arseknob, fuckdick, fuck, fuck,fuck, fuckity bastard, fuck, fuck.
..sorry, I was bottling it all in and I got a bit slap happy there.
I learned something on the internet today.
BS
BoS,
That’s true. There is one walk to the voting booth that I as a perm/res wouldn’t mind making however, and that would be a vote against Tony Abbott, the leader of the conservative federal opposition here, in the next federal election, a xtian fundie who would love to head back to the Dark Ages and have women preserve their virginity until marriage, amongst other things.
professordendrophiliac is a weaksauce pissant scumbag of the lowest order. I suggest the only response to any of his comments is to point out what a coward he is for posting on a site when he does not extend the same courtesy to others.
person @ 189,
WTF ???
My first thought was, she must spend quite some time squatting over that plant, because the flow wouldnt be as good as from a watering can , would it? Actually, uhm, never mind…..
I had an ex once who used to wash her hair with her own urine. Hair looked ok to me, so I guess it works…:-)
BoS @ 268:
Yes, the dendrite-lacking professor will squish your comment if you use teh swears. He killed my comment on his “Pray for Haiti”post when I suggested he pray in one hand and shit in the other and see which one fills up faster.
BS @ 267:
Not only are his feel-bads hurt by teh swears, he apparently has an early beddy-by time. Comments submitted late (Pacific time) will be held in moderation until wakey-wakey time.
Urine contains surface active compounds and is used in place of soap in various cultures, IIRC
BS
The man is oblivious to humor.
Or duplicitous.
BS
Adams, Dendy, why do we keep giving those crackpots a forum ? Just ignore them, at least Dendy strikes me as confused and deranged enough to even be potentially dangerous.
Rorschach
I have a real problem wth the whole compulsory voting thing. It’s a complete violition of our rights and, quite frankly, a total farce on a practical level ( witness.. my mother and sister where once out of the country on short notice and unable to put in the required paperwork. I, turned up the 3 different polling boothes and gave consecutively, my mothers, my sisters and my own names. No photo ID is ever asked for.)
As a lawyer I deny I ever said such a thing or exampled myself myself in such a manner (except for the fact absolutely fucking did).
.. It was Dendy.
Blind Squirrel (#261)
To be fair, it might be tanuki rather than American raccoons. Here’s someone’s pet tanuki making funny noises while eating bread. And if that’s not cute enough, here’s a baby one being bottle fed.
~*~*~*~*~*~
Rorschach (#272)
I figured she’d be wringing out her Lunapads or empting her DivaCup directly into the poor, helpless things.
A 2 hour sweat is twice as long as any I have ever heard of.
And with that, I’m out if here. Good night.
BS
*faints*
Fuck you, blockquote fail.
“Now they’re sorry.” = Blind Squirrel, of course.
And fuck you, too, submission error. Argh.
Interesting article by Russell Blackford wrt atheism and the upcoming convention based on a recent opinion piece in The Age.
GrrlScientist has been keeping an eye on the mormons too:
http://scienceblogs.com/grrlscientist/2010/01/mormon_cartoon_explains_their.php
eddie @ 283,
very disturbing vid, thanks for the link, also rather disturbing to read some of the comments there, maybe Lynna will be able to have a look at it tomorrow and give us her version of how accurate or not that cartoon is.
Just saw this at Friendly Atheist – a poll for ex-mormon of the year
As for Dendy, I think that whoever has been mentioned by name on his site would have cause to alert his superiors at the college he supposedly works for to his outside activities, particularly since some of it can be viewed as overtly hostile to women. Nothing he’s done violates any laws, but adjuncts are hired at-will in the first place, and they might not be too willing to have someone around who is already skirting that close to online sexual harassment.
OT: I was compelled to switch from Internet Explorer to Firefox this morning. Facebook suddenly stopped working properly with my old version of IE, and I tried to upgrade to IE8 but it wouldn’t work.
Bizarrely, all the page headers on Pharyngula, as well as the “Leave a comment” header right above this box, seem to have a shadow when viewed in Firefox but not in Internet Explorer. How weird.
So, catching up on the local news, and waddayano: Church looks to India for priests.
Pullquote:
Nice of them to admit it’s just a job, not a vocation.
@ Walton #286:
That will be because the “text-shadow” style is not supported in IE (yet). (I made a sort of survey of the state of style stuff a while back. Some new things were supported but others were not – in various browsers.)
It’s not a ScienceBlogs standard setting. PZ has specified some text-shadow in his custom css file:
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/custom.css
Some other ScienceBlogs users haven’t done this and so you won’t see the same shadow on their blogs, even using FireFox (or any other browser which would normally display that style).
Brownian #117
Hey fuck it, if you live in a city, there are plenty of rats already, and if you live in a Southern City (USA) the snakes take care of the rats, a compost heap is all about the circle of life, Simba.
DeMilo and Company On the Corner
Q: Hey what’s wrong with an wah wah pedal on an electrified trumpet?
A: Nothing unless you do it for a whole Album
Besides the obvious favorites here’s others
Miles and Monk Live at Monterrey: One side is the famous Miles Quintet, the other is a Monk qurtet with Pee Wee Russel on the clarinet. The Miles side has a Round Midnight that is incredible, there are five cuts, all masterpieces.
There’s a real obscure ‘Best Of’ Miles with a really heroined out version of Guinevere (CSNY) that’s worth the album.
The pop album from the late eighties that everybody hated with Time After Time and the MJ covers is actually very good if you listen now.
Tutu, the late 80s album with Quincy Jones is just great by any standards.
When I was out in the SF Bay Area, he did a lot of gigs toward the end of his career/life that were in the punchy funk style of Tutu, I did not go home feeling burnt for not hearing So What. Those were some of the best live shows I’ve seen, and he was a real character in his sequence robes with his blue trumpet, sounding exactly like Miles.
The latest from South Carolina Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer–aka Mark Sanford’s impeachment insurance:
The main reason I’ve been against Sanford’s impeachment since his little issue.
Bauer is a fucking disaster.
Strangely, Firefox also seems to load pages – including Scienceblogs pages, with all the tons of ads and embedded crap – far, far more quickly than Internet Explorer does. However, it has its downside too: it will take me a while to get used to the different interface.
Oh help!!
I tried loading that side wiki thingy and it might have been just as Firefox upgraded to 3.6. It quit. I have been three days removing Firefox and reinstalling to no avail. I am back to 3.0 but if I try and upgrade, it doesn’t load at all. Mozilla is flummoxed. I can live with 3.0 but I have lost my filters and my HTML bar. Would some one please be so king as to re post what addons those are ? Has anyone else had problems with either the Side Wiki or the latest Firefox upgrade ?
thank you kindly
Britomart
<>
Would some one be so KIND!!
Thank you again
Britomart
Walton,
Yeah, firefox pwns explorer. You should look into getting the text formatting toolbar. Saves time from writing all that code. You can also customize buttons. I have one that blockquotes in comics sans with a grumpy on the side!
Finally found out how to switch the annoying spellchecker off! Was hidden in “Navigation” for, presumably, some reason. Still haven’t found auto-fill-in.
In other news, it’s getting cold here. I’m told snow is predicted. :-) :-) :-)
Snow reminds me of… Yesterday I finished the bread I had brought from home. Now I’ll have to buy the only good French one again.
And… there was a team meeting today. Some 60 paleontologists in the same room. I tried to get some
measurementsestimates of canine lengths, but, while many Brits actually move their jaws when they speak, the French don’t, so I wasn’t able to gather a statistically significant sample.Methinks you’re chronically sleeping too little.
(And the most important effect of caffeine is to remove its own withdrawal symptoms.)
If you wash your hair with soap, it’ll get a kind of dirty grey because that’s what happens when soap exchanges its sodium ions for calcium ions from the water. Ways to prevent this include urine, egg, camomille tea, and lots more.
Nobody washes their hair with soap anymore, do they.
Seriously?
<headdesk>
I mean, I had read about this phenomenon occurring in the USA. But… but… <headdesk>
IE7 started having a lot of trouble with ScienceBlogs, including exceedingly slow loading speed, right before IE8 came out. IE8 has no such problems.
What do you mean “upgrading didn’t work”?
So what is a “sweat lodge ceremony”? MPR News seems to assume that everyone in Minnesota knows. ~:-|
No, no the video clearly depicts American coons. And if I’ve learn anything from Japanese Mythology, Tanukis are too busy transforming into things to scratch world heritage sites.
@283 and 284: The video is old, but still pretty close to what mormons and mormon leaders taught for about 120 years. Since then, the story had been fudged. The latest trend in mormon theology is not to state anything clearly.
Here’s a link to a good explanation of God fucking Mary to beget Jesus, and so forth, as it was taught by mormon leaders up to the time of Gordon B. Hinckley, who was the Prophet, Seer, and Revelator prior to the current oddly subdued dude, Thomas Monson.
http://www.exmormon.org/mormon/mormon385.htm
Excerpt:
Remember, God will take care of the answers we do not have. God will explain it all to you when you get to Celestial Kingdom, and you will get to the CK if a good mormon necrodunks you in the temple’s abysmal baptismal font.
The role of “spirit children” and gods who beget them is, of course, closely tied to how mormons view the role of women, to how mormons subjugate women. For more info on this, see http://www.exmormon.org/mormwomn.htm
Mormons will scoff at you for not knowing what the current Profit says, but the current Profit is so vague as to be hardly discernible as a human being. He is precise only about tithing.
So, dendy, is your next move going to involve a screen capture from a girls gone wild video?
It would be nice if you actually stopped by and defended why you had to misrepresent who you are. And why you felt the need to show a woman’s ass crack in response to Pygmy Loris’ comment about raw food.
For those that want to know about mormon views of sexuality, and how it relates to mormon theology, here’s a good dose of actual Mormon Sexual History
And here is a good overview of the “God was once a man” dogma, including an example of Gordon B. Hinckley lying about it in a TV interview. http://www.i4m.com/think/leaders/god_was_man.htm
DavidM: You are in the habit of answering your own questions before you even ask them.
Question @#297
Answer at #296
Geong Hwa Pak (#298)
That’ll teach me to be too lazy to download the plugin to watch the video.
Update from the Prop 8 trial that is still ongoing in California:
So the attorneys try to distance themselves from the lies and from the idiots associated with the Yes on 8 campaign … and fail.
Mr. Tam was shown during last week’s testimony to be active in the campaign since 2007, and they tried to distance themselves from him because he got all his “facts” from bogus pay-to-publish journals, and stated so in courts. Records show the Yes on 8 people used some of the same bogus “research” … fail again.
Yep, they did it, they paid for it, and they can’t distance themselves from it. And now they’re basically claiming that the all-powerful LBGT lobby doesn’t need any protection from faked research, lies, and out-their-arse statistics created by the mormon/catholic unholy alliance.
Read the text from the Yes on 8 videos in comment 304, and then read this comment from Mormons for Proposition 8 Donors:
@ scooterKPFT #289:
Oh, there aren’t any rats in Edmonton outside of zoos and university labs. Seriously. It’s another one of those little oddities of Alberta. We made rats illegal.
I forgot to include a link to the source for the quote in comment 305. http://mormonsfor8.com/
Mormons created “superior advertising” (their words) comparing gay marriage to 9/11, created ads that repeated false stories about men marrying their horses, and created ads linking gay marriage to pedophilia. These videos were telecast to mormon, Catholic, and evangelical churches. The mormonsfor8 website takes credit for the “superior advertising”, but doesn’t provide the scripts for the ads themselves — for that embarrassing bit of twisted propaganda you have to be in the courtroom in California where the trial is being held, and the videos were shown. After the showing, the defense attorneys tap danced away, saying they had no say in the content. More lies.
PZ, please, when you have a chance, ban and delete the spambot known as hery. It is a rather busy and annoying little critter.
Walton: If you have Fire fox,why are you seeing any adds? Get Adblock Plus and Adblock Element Hiding Helper.
Feynmaniac: The addon BBCodeXtra Puts the text formatting tool in the right click menu so you don’t lose any screen real estate.
Dave M: Can’t find any reference to surface active agents in urine in a Google search. I am devising a test as we speak. I always though it was the urea.
True story: My last sweat was administered by an Indian named (by his mother) Wile E.Coyote. (She had never seen the cartoon)
BS
True story: My last sweat was administered by an Indian named (by his mother) Wile E.Coyote. (She had never seen the cartoon)
The poor guy must be tired of hearing the jokes!
Gyeong Hwa Pak, the Pikachu of Anthropology: No, those are not American raccoon. Aren’t those what are called raccoon dogs? I believe those are the same animals the were involved in a dispute when a large retailer was selling clothing trimmed with “raccoon” from China In the US.
BS
Janine: The dude had so many other issues that his name was a bright point in his life. Haven’t seen him in years.
BS
Oh boy! Phyllis Schlafly has weighed in on the clear anti-woman national mandate handed over in the Massachusetts special election. Quick summary:
mmmmiammiam a bread thread.
My favourite bread is a pain de campagne I get from a baker in a village up in the mountains behind where I live.
It’s not one of those mass produced breads, it takes the baker a long time and a lot of expertise to make it to perfection. Even the flour is made artisanally.
It is made with a flour mix of white wheat and rye and a levain (a kind of sourdough). It has a very tasty crusty crust which resists pressure from the finger but not too much. The crumb is absolutely heavenly, a rich creamy colour and just the right density with a very slightly acidic taste that lets you enjoy all the flavours of bread whithout being too dominant when eating cheese or charcuterie. That with a glass of Gigondas and a nice piece of raw milk camembert, and that’s my definition of “heaven”.
A nice piece of bread, a nice piece of cheese, some good red wine to go with it : just three ingredients that when combined can achieve wonders.
A wonderful combination that tastes pretty much as it would have tasted more than 500 years ago and let’s you ask ! – Have we really made that much progress in the culinary art ?
Well at least, 500 years ago, I would have had to be a priest or a prince to enjoy that combination. Nowadays, it’s much easier, but I really hope these traditions and those artisans that master them don’t dissapear or go back to being the exclusivity of a tiny elite that can afford them.
(I hope this won’t be double- or triple- or quadruple-posted. Pharyngula is loading extremely slowly at the moment.)
Are you saying Mormonism is turning into apathetic agnosticism? :o)
LOL! Should have said “hall”.
That looks like a strongly polar molecule to me, hydrophilic and lipophobic. Commercially available urea is a hard-grained, white powder that is very well water-soluble, without foam; all this is as expected.
Destlund, there was nothing about pro wrestling but something about Boston College no longer having wrestling and baseball because of Title IX. And something about Obama sneering at Brown’s truck. And how men with out college education hated Coakley.
Destlund, there was nothing about pro wrestling but something about Boston College no longer having wrestling and baseball because of Title IX. And something about Obama sneering at Brown’s truck. And how men with out college education hated Coakley.
Sorry, Janine. I obviously know very little about sports. It wasn’t until I was forced to attend an Astros game that I realized they weren’t a(n American) football team.
First this wonky thing will not let me comment and then it doubles me. Meanwhile the asshole spambot known as hery just keeps going.
The pain de campagne I’ve had so far is mediocre.
Doesn’t pain de campagne just mean “country bread?” It seems that would be a rather broad category…
Blind Squirrel (#311)
The ones in the video look like American raccoons to me, now that I’ve actually watched the thing. They don’t look like tanuki (raccoon dogs), anyways.
Hi,
I’d just like to thank you all for keeping me from working for the last four hours :)
I have been following this thread obsessively and now I am at the end.
I just wanted to say hello and join the ranks of the other Aussie contributors when appropriate.
I have tussled at length with AC on another forum and have been interested to see him cut and paste the same arguments here as he did there with the same refusal to engage in meaningful debate.
For what it is worth, and a late comer I may be here, but incarcerating him was necessary and welcome.
So hi again, and if my stoopid ever shows, please be gentle :)
Chmee, as long as you do not act as you have a big sky daddy given right to certainty, you will not be abused too much.
If by AC, you mean Alan Clarke, yes; he is partially responsible for the undead thread. But he has been banned since his creepy praying to god for his child bride act of pedophilia.
Tanukis are bigger and brown. It’s definitely Merikan coons.
A Noyd And George and Geong Hwa Pak: I feel like I woke up on the wrong planet. Those are not American coons (Proycon lotor).
I’ve had raccoons for pets (not recommended). I am surrounded by raccoons (now currently asleep in the grove). We are talking about these two videos, are we not?
BS
No, Blind Squirrel we’re talking about this video:
http://www.nhk.or.jp/daily/english/26_01.html
And the fact that American Raccoons were imported to Japan and then broke loose, and now populate the island.
Towards the end of that video, they show three coons who are suspected of damaging Horyu-ji and Shoso-in. Note the similarities to Proycon Lotor.
Yeah? And how exactly is that a “bad thing”?
head desk What the fuck is wrong with these people? How does this logically follow from letting two consenting adults marry irrespective of their sex? It shows such an incredible misunderstanding of what marriage is (today, as opposed to what it was centuries ago). These people still operate under the delusion that marriage is a man pointing at a woman and declaring that he is married to her (or more correctly that she is to be married to him). So obviously if we allow him to also point to a man, then we must allow him to point to anything to be married to him. The idea that marriage has to be mutual consent is completely foreign.
SteveM,
The bible states that marriage doesn’t need to be consenting in the slightest and incest is condone too as well as polygyny (not polygamy because that would include polyandry which is a big no-no.) So when they see a man+man or woman+woman they always assume that they now can go with anything else. Never mind the fact that children aren’t capable of consent, as consent is irrelevant to them.
Geong Hwa Pak: Thanks for the clarification. I thought my fellow pharyngulites were losing it. Those are indeed American raccoons. Notice the guilty looks.
BS
Yep, I was referring to Alan Clarke.
I have been officially De-Baptised as a matter of fact and the proof is the certificate sticky taped to my dunny door.
When I was in first year of high school, I was forced to stand outside my religious instruction class because I asked the priest “If god made the universe, then who made god?”.
Pretty precocious huh :)
Referring to earlier posts I too read Edgar Cayce, Doris Stokes, Lobsang Rampa, Carlos Castenada and Fate Magazines (Does that trump anyone?, because if it doesn’t I also read the Saga’s of Ashtar and Ashtebuelah [Xtian Aliens channeled by some poor loon])
The final ammunition that I offer is that I was the Vice President of a three member UFO society in my teens.
I suppose that in some ways Western Australia is Australia’s deep south, sort of confirmed by our current bible bashing state government.
To cut a long (but absorbing and interesting) story short, I am indeed an athiest, because god made me that way.
Chmee, it does not matter where you come from. The point is where you are going. Pay attention to Sastra. She has experience with new age thought. She uses that to explain why people may find it appealing. And welcome. As you can tell, there are a lot of Australians here.
DivaCup was my thought, too.
I LOL’d. IE is the abso-fucking-lutely worst browser there is; the only reason that for a while it didn’t look that way was because websites were using broken code to make their pages work in IE; now that Firefox & other alternatives are becoming more popular, more and more sites stop adapting the broken IE code.
good for you. my snow all blew into Minnesota and got the Trophy Wife stuck at a gas station somewhere
pffft… must I do everything myself?
dunno about cicely, but I sleep 8-10 hours a day and it still would take about 4-5 hours to shake off the morning stupor. Since I started with the daily dose of caffeine OTOH, I have a completely braindead first hour, but am functional afterwards.
And as for “caffeine only removes its own withdrawal symptoms”… well, I’ve managed on a few occasions to give myself the jitters from too much tea; not that difficult when you have lots of tea in the house but no food. So I have a hard time believing that caffeine does not have any physical effects besides addiction.
pffft… you socialist bastards are impinging on the freedom of people to have pests, if they really wanted to.
I don’t generally develop strong feelings towards people I’ve never seen or talked to, but fuck, do I hate that woman.
consent is a concept that’s quite evidently foreign to those people. and it makes sense, too: their god doesn’t ask consent from his people, he declares, demands and punishes at will; and they structure their lives on this model, so consent is besides the point in marriage (esp. in the super-fundie communities that have abolished dating and have instituted courtship*); it also explains their strange hatred for democracy (except when it serves their purpose).
—–
*now there’s a method that’s even worse than American dating. it’s really arranged marriage, nothing else.
Okay, mental note to turn the monitor 180° in order to read Chmee’s comments.
‘raspberry’
Doesn’t Firefox have an addon for that?
Hi Chmee. How come only two ees?
If this has already come up
I’m sorry
I’m really, really sorry
I’m so fucking sorry
If the INTENT of the homoeopath whilst diluting/shaking is the essential thing
and homoeopathy doesn’t depend on the placebo effect,then a homoeopath is in position to commit the perfect, undetectable murder!!!
Blind Squirrel: I only got Firefox today, so I haven’t quite figured out how it all works yet, much less installed any add-ons. :-)
David M. @315
Not exactly. But they have been wrestled to the mat so many times over the Book of Abraham, over DNA reality not matching Book of Mormon fantasy, etc. that they have resorted to throwing up their hands and declaring The Church is True and God will sort out the details. The “details are complicated” is another ploy. And there’s the problem that the Holy Spirit burning in one’s bosom is turned off by intellectual pursuits and cannot be relit.
Being able to give long conference talks without saying a damned thing is the most admired and required skill for mormon General Authorities these days. If they do say something, it will be wrong, and that is embarrassing.
Somehow, they still have a stranglehold over the incomes and time/service of the members; and they still wield absolute authority when it comes to declaring gayness a choice and gaydom a perversion that needs to be tamped down.
Jadehawk: Well, I had been using Internet Explorer for ages and had been perfectly happy with it. But Facebook no longer seems to be compatible with IE7, and I needed to reply to someone online, so I was forced to change browsers. I tried to upgrade to IE8, but at the end of the installation it told me that IE8 would not work with my operating system. (I found this a bit odd, since I use Vista.) Since I needed to reply urgently, I didn’t have time to try and make it work, so I just installed Firefox instead (which took about two minutes, and now seems to be working fine). I might see if I can figure out how to get IE8 to work, though; does anyone have any suggestions?
I am very disappointed to learn that you were not President.
I’m familiar with those looks. It happens every time I check my tool shed.
Late, very late but yer tiz
@ Walton #340:
There are sub-types of Vista. I suppose it’s conceivable M$ made some on which IE8 really can’t run! You may also have downloaded the wrong bit version for your computer.
that’s what I just said: IE uses broken code, and until recently all web-pages adapted to that broken code. They no longer do so, so other browsers can read most webpages better than IE can. Plus, other browsers are better with more advanced internet content, and websites that live on being cool and up-to-date use this new content.
look up the acid tests if you want to know what I’m talking about
Yes.
Strangely, however, it isn’t. There’s very little diversity in it.
Patience. Or, as we dinosaur paleontologists say… W4tP (wait for the paper).
I said “the most important effect”, not “the only”. As I was taught in a hard, hard biochemistry course (so hard that it has been discontinued because it was too expensive), caffeine inhibits the enzyme that destroys cyclo-AMP, which means the signal for setting sugar free and turning the metabolism up stays turned on.
Note that cAMP production has to be turned on first, by glucagon or adrenaline for instance. I was consequently taught that caffeine only works if you do a bit of strenuous activity first. Maybe that explains your braindead hour. I’m just guessing, though, and I was too tired* to ask exactly how much activity counts (…well, it’s certainly gradual anyway).
* 8 in the morning, I think.
:-D
Strangely enough, it hasn’t.
<facepalms all over the world: “How stupid of me not to have thought of this myself!”>
Framboise. Euh.
Q: Sind Eisbären weiß?
A: Klar! Wenn sie rot wären, hießen sie doch Himbären!
(…That was a pun on the fact that “bears” and “berries” sound the same in most kinds of – even Standard – German.)
(…And no, Owlmirror isn’t the only one who can decompose into silliness while stone cold sober.)
Jadehawk (#333)
Only thing I miss about IE is that you can set different input langages for each tab. Firefox assumes you want to input the same language even between different windows. Rather irritating when trying to do speedy searches in both English and Japanese. IE is also smarter about disabling Japanese input in the address bar even if you have it on for the current page.
Who else does? ;-)
I missed that, but indeed A. Noyd, she uses a DivaCup.
The whole conversation started that way. She’d mentioned her favourite subjects for painting were vaginas and blood, so I helpfully suggested she get a commercial gig illustrating tampon commercials. Unfortunately, she doesn’t ‘believe in tampons’. (“What, you don’t think they exist? I’ve seen them; I’ve bought them,” I retorted.) That’s when I guessed she used a DivaCup, and she filled me in on the why.
Whatever. It’s really not that weird. When I was young(er) I used to pluck errant beard hairs and bleach them in a specimen cup full of hydrogen peroxide for future use as part of a paintbrush. In my second year of university I set about creating the longest list of things one should never rub on one’s scrotum, with the caveat that I had to empirically test each substance myself. After about the seventh or eighth night of squatting in the tub frantically trying to wash Ben Gay or whatever oil-based liniment off with splashes of cold water, I gave up. Besides the Ben Gay, I recommend not rubbing Tiger Balm, rubbing alcohol, RUB A535, or HEET on your nuts. Actually as a rule of thumb you might just want to avoid pretty well any topical analgesic. Also wash your hands before using the toilet after chopping jalapeños, though you might not want to use too much soap if you like an element of danger while playing “Towering Inferno” at the urinal.
Don’t be silly. No Canadian would call Albertans ‘socialists’. However, the campaign to make Alberta ‘rat-free’ was an interesting and effective excercise in government action combined with public education and law to achieve a goal. Bizarre. From that to single-handedly trying to destroy public health care in Canada. We’ve come so far.
I’m less interested in the paper, and more in photographic evidence; or better yet, live specimens.
It can’t need very much activity, since this works just fine just by sitting on the computer and typing. And the braindead our is easily explained by the gap between me crawling out of bed and caffeinated beverage appearing on my desk.
you’re Canadian. therefore you’re automatically an evil socialist. Everybody who isn’t a Real True American™ is a socialist. Don’t confuse me with details.
How did you manage to use ScienceBlogs for so long, then? In the last two weeks or something before IE8 officially came out and I installed it, IE7 was excruciatingly slow at loading ScienceBlogs with all its ads. Was that temporary?
LOL! More evidence that Vista was an embarrassing mistake that is best quickly forgotten.
I’ll just leave that uncommented.
And I just hope you didn’t try dimethyl sulfoxide or anything else that can pass through the skin.
Brownian: Probably easier to do a handstand unless you have one of those special monitors that have two bases.
Nerd: Where is it, coz, if I get it then I can read American properly.
SteveV: I thought that you might have read the “Ringworld” series, being Hard Science Fiction and all. :)
I thought that we were quoting from “Invader Zim”, “The Snuff Box”, “The Mighty Boosh” or “Peep Show” now.
Oh well, “Albatross !” .. “Seabird fucking flavour” …
“Doom”,”Doom”,”Doom”,”Doomy Doom” and so on.
Might I suggest that a worthwhile addon for FireFox is NoScript. It is a little annoying, but once you get used to it, it adds a further level of protection to your browsing.
Jadehawk,
Ah. Does this make me a socialist, then? :-)
David,
No, it always seemed OK to me – but then, loading pages on Firefox now seems absolutely super-fast. It isn’t just Scienceblogs; other pages with lots of ads and graphics (like news site home pages) load a million times faster for me on Firefox than on IE7.
Brownian:
I bet I can beat you in the men buying tampons category: When we were preparing to move to Korea (in the mid 80s), and having been warned that many sanitary items commonly available in the West were hard to find, my sweet, easily embarrassed wife sent me to the store to procure a year’s supply of tampons. There’s just no good way to explain that to the 16 year old girl at the checkout!
Jalapeños? Try it after working with habañeros! Even washing your hands several times may leave you vulnerable. Of course, some people may like that kind of thing, don’t they?
Actually, no matter how much washing you do, you might want to avoid putting your fingers in your mouth (or other places with sensitive mucus membranes) for several days after handling hot peppers: In my experience, the hot seems to cling to the nails long after it’s been washed off the skin.
also, since we’ve been talking about browsers, I think I’m gonna try chrome for a while. I already like the fact that I can add “blockquote” to the dictionary easily, thus possibly preventing future blockquote fails :-)
My cell phone sucks as a camera. Doesn’t even have color, and the resolution is pitiful.
Can’t be rolled up like bacon and stuffed through the tubes of the Internet. So, patience. :-|
<blink>
Hour?
Even after half a night (five hours)*, it doesn’t take me that long to organize something to drink, and it still wouldn’t if that meant making tea or coffee. That’s scary. I’m supposed to be the one with the autistic trait of finding it easier to just not initiate the next step and begin a new activity.
* Like when I’m supposed to get up at 8, and was too stupid to go to bed before 3 (because that would have required getting away from the computer, which obviously counts as another step). That was unfortunately the case a few times earlier this month.
and this is why I don’t believe in tampons, or any other kind of non-reusable sanitary product. All your wife would have needed for all that time was a single DivaCup! :-p
and then there was my friend who finally decided to try one of those because she went hiking in Nepal for 6 weeks, and hiking through Nepal with a bag of used tampons just did not sound very appealing to her.
“The man from Massachusetts who petitioned to marry his horse after (same-sex) marriage was instituted in Massachusetts–he’d have to be allowed to do so.”
What the fuck is wrong with these people… The idea that marriage has to be mutual consent is completely foreign. – SteveM.
Indeed: the horse must be allowed to say “Neigh!” ;-)
Chmee:
If I had to start my online presence from scratch, I think I might call myself Speaker to Seafood!
I beat even that! My frat plays a game where we are assigned a target and you need to tag that person with an object to receive their targets until it was down to two people. The twist was that we had to use tampons. So I went out to buy a box of tampons, only to be tagged right after my purchase.
Oh, and Jadehawk, I was a little hurt that you called me a “cruel person” over on the other thread merely because I argued that fox-hunting should not be illegal. Ultimately, we all tolerate “needless cruelty” to animals on a day to day basis; those of us who eat meat are, strictly speaking, causing needless suffering (since it is physically possible, albeit not necessarily healthy, to live on a vegetarian diet), as is everyone who uses cosmetics (as most cosmetic substances were at some time tested on animals), everyone who goes fishing, and the like. So I don’t see how I (or you) can take a moral high ground about “needless cruelty” to animals. I really can’t condemn those who choose to go hunting for sport – unless I were prepared to become a vegan, to stop wearing leather shoes, and to stop using any other kind of product that might have involved the exploitation of animals at any stage in its history. Since I’m not willing to do any of these things, I don’t see how it would be legitimate for me to support banning other people from going hunting.
I see I will have to explain this in more detail. A typical morning (ahem) here looks like this:
1)I wake up
2)15-20 minutes later I finally manage to crawl out of bed
3)I drag myself to the computer, wrap myself in a blanket, and begin the first cycle through my bookmarks
4)at some point during this activity, a cup of caffeinated beverage appears
5)at some time after the caffeinated beverage appears, I become capable of thought and human interaction, and can even begin to get some work done.
the time between point 2) and point 5) is on average an hour.
So when you told her the truth, she just laughed?
That’s what’s called a hypercorrectivism. It really is habaneros. Really. :-)
I haven’t, because Chrome apparently phones home like Windows is said to do (and Windows doing it is enough!), and because replacing the Microsoft monopoly with a Google monopoly is a bit pointless.
(Heh. I remember the days when Netscape was the browser.)
Now it gets interesting. If I can have a dictionary with nothing but “blockquote” in it, that would make commenting quite a bit easier…
Lynna,OM
Thanks for that, but when I was 15 I wasn’t terribly charismatic, but more charismatic than the third guy :)
Dendy seems to be a proper tool.
He seems to think that fire didn’t exist before Homo sapiens.
I may be wrong, but it did too !
Unless of course, lightning was invented at the same time as the rainbow, so it wasn’t available before that for starting fires.
don’t care. if you can honestly say that you don’t think stuffing kittens in the oven should be illegal, you’re fucked up and cruel.
And as for meat, I actually want all mass-animal farming to end. there’s a way to keep animals sustainably and cruelty-free, and then there’s the way we are currently doing it. And that HAS to end eventually, for many reasons.
Urine contains surface active compounds and is used in place of soap in various cultures, IIRC – Blind Squirrel
Nah – the people who told the anthropologists that were just taking the piss!
Knockgoats @172:Fixed nitrogen is used up in the process of decomposition. Plant waste is low in nitrogen. That is why nitrogen is applied in the fall of the year; to facilitate crop residue decomposition. The converse is true; farmers decompose whole hogs under piles of sawdust. – Blind Squirrel FCD
Thanks BS – I’ll tell my wife about the autumn thing; and I’ll be sure to remember what farmers do if I ever have a dead hog to dispose of!
Bill Dauphin, OM:
“Speaker to Seafood” is included in the set of “Speaker to Animals”.
Otherwise I would have to use “Speaker to Seafood, Birds, Mammals, Ungulates and so on”
I am merely being concise.
First, John Peel’s best band ever.
Then, DM, OM @296;
“(And the most important effect of caffeine is to remove its own withdrawal symptoms.)”
:-) :-) :-) :-) :-)
and;
“Nobody washes their hair with soap anymore, do they?”
I do. I find the slight greying actually enhances my natural mousey brown.
I deliberately didn’t give a definitive answer to that question. I did, however, explain how it can be distinguished easily from fox-hunting.
The result of this, of course, being that poor people will no longer be able to afford to eat meat.
Yes, perhaps… but in the world in which we actually live, taking into account the fact that many animals are kept in inhumane conditions, we all have to make a decision as to whether it’s acceptable to eat meat. Since I choose to eat meat nevertheless, despite the fact that I could physically live on a vegetarian diet if I really wanted to, I don’t see how I can distinguish this from fox-hunting. Since neither eating meat nor fox-hunting are necessary to our survival, both of them qualify as “needless cruelty”.
I’ve got one that comes close. I’d been living with my sister and her son for a time, and one day, as she was feeling under the weather, she sent me to the local store to pick up some pads. Now, I’d previously been living with my significant other and routinely bought supplies for her so I didn’t think it was any big deal. However, I couldn’t find/remember the brand and size that she’d specified, so I grabbed what I’d thought was the next closest thing. As luck would have it, the neighbour’s teen-aged daughter was working the till, but I made small talk and my purchase and headed home. It wasn’t until I’d presented the package to my sister and she fell on the floor laughing that I realised I’d bought incontinence pads, advertising to our busybody neighbour that at least one of the members of our three-person household had a problem with unwanted spritzing.
(Actually, we loved our busybody neighbour, and I doubt if her sullen daughter ever stopped thinking about the deep, dark pain of being a teenager to pay attention to anything anyone purchased, but still…)
@361
Walton, trying to reduce needless suffering is not an all-or-nothing position. Your choice of framing does lend credence to the “you’re cruel” position. Why is it you are putting all the weight on the anti-fox hunters? One could just as easily argue that if people think fox hunting should be legal, they should be honest and also call for the repeal of any and all animal cruelty laws. Enforcement of those laws wastes taxpayer money in exactly the same manner as fox hunting.
There is precedent in law to reduce needless animal harm, without requiring people to be vegans before they can voice criticism of needless suffering. Demanding veganism before one can point to needless animal suffering as something to stop just makes it look like you’re simply saying whatever allows you to keep your preconceived notion that the government should keep its hands out of the issue.
walton, your inability to understand the difference between treating and killing animals humanely and doing so cruelly is pissing me off and making me think you really are as dumb as others here have long suspected. Your pathetic “think of the economy” BS doesn’t fly either, since people have repeatedly pointed out to you that fake fox-hunts are both legal and can employ the very same number of people as real ones do, with the added bonus of not being unnecessarily cruel. And if you combine fake fox hunts with the need to humanely kill excess fox populations, you end up more and better jobs than with the cruel fox-hunts themselves. you really don’t have a leg to stand on here.
Also, slippery slope fallacies don’t work here, and neither do false dichotomies. It’s possible to eat meat that wasn’t procured cruelly, thank you very much.
Also, people right now eat way too much meat anyway. Meat is and should be a luxury item; it’s not so relevant to our health that there should be a right to having a steak for every meal.
And as for poor people not being able to eat meat… I laugh at your fake concern for poor people all of a sudden. Do you seriously think the meat poor people eat now isn’t complete shit and killing them slowly, anyway? Plus, hunting/fishing IS a way for many poor people to feed themselves, and is significantly less cruel and unhealthy than feedlots, anyway. You use poor people whenever you want to make an argument sound serious, but you do not have the knowledge or any actual interest in what sort of thing really improves lives of poor people.
Brownian#349
Thanks a lot. You have broken my epistemology. I thought that I preferred empirical to revealed knowledge. I see that this assumption is false for at least one topic. I worked a long time on that epistemology and I really liked it.
Dammit.
Sven@176 – thanks!
I had an ex once who used to wash her hair with her own urine. – Rorschach
The one-time prime minister of India, Morarji Desai, claimed to drink a pint of his own urine every day. He died in 1995, at the age of 99.
.
.
.
.
.
Just think: if he hadn’t drunk his own urine, he’d probably still be alive today!
Let me do it for you.
We can actually stop fox hunting without mass disruptions to human life style and without some education to the rest of humanity.
Poor anthropologists. If Laura Bohannan (pdf of Shakespeare in the Bush) and Richard B. Lee (pdf of “Eating Christmas in the Kalahari”) are to be believed, it’s a wonder any ethnologies are to be believed at all. I knew an anthropologist (Hi Nancy!) who did his work in Tonga, where kava ceremonies involved tall-tale telling and general bullshitting. After a while he learned that informants were much more trustworthy if surveyed in church, since they felt honesty was appropriate in that location, for the most part.
[Brownian’s eyes attain a faraway look and his voice a flat monotone.] Hogs. Yes. Of course. If you’ll excuse me, I have some hogs to dispose of.
do you even read what I write?
it isn’t any less cruel, which is why both need to be ended. but just because one of them cannot be ended right now for various reasons, doesn’t mean the other can’t be. progress comes in smalls steps, not all at once. and a little bit less cruelty is still better than more cruelty on principle.
ok, I’m done with chrome. it’s faster than firefox, but when it reloads pages, it reloads them at the top, not at the spot I was looking at previously. That will not do for my Pharyngula reading needs.
It’s still my preferred epistemology. In fact, I’m quite proud that I was once perjoratively called a “damn empiricist” by a local drunk who wrote terrible poems while fucked up on acid and post-modernism. However, an understanding of one’s various refractory periods is a must when one uses one’s own body as a lab. (Hiring a cute undergrad as a bottle washer is less necessary but can make the work substantially more pleasurable.)
Caffeine does inhibit PDE, but its most important effects result from a different mechanism: blocking adenosine receptors on the outside of cell membranes.
OK, Jadehawk. But you have to understand that I’m British, and that I know a lot of people (through conservative politics) who are from rural England and of a conservative bent. The Labour ban on fox-hunting – which was very much a partisan manouevre, and was supported mainly by urban Labour MPs over the objections of rural people – really, really pissed off a lot of people in rural England and destroyed a whole culture. This doesn’t mean much to me personally – since I grew up in an urban area, have never been fox-hunting and find the whole thing distasteful – but it means a lot to some of my friends. For me to oppose fox-hunting would likely be perceived as a betrayal of firmly-held English Tory principles. I realise that this explanation probably doesn’t make a lot of sense; it’s something that’s not readily transferable across cultural and national boundaries. The closest analogue I can think of is Americans and their right to bear arms.
So, you’re trying to justify one morally unacceptable practice by pointing out that there’s another morally unacceptable practice that cannot be ended as easily?
Ah, the old, “Well, yeah, but something else isn’t perfect, so there!” argument. An acquaintance of mine in uni once claimed that genocides and land grabs in the Americas by European powers weren’t all that bad because the indigenous people weren’t absolute paragons of peace and virtue.
He was also a Libertarian. Go figure.
Jadehawk (#380)
Heyyy, I was trying to remember why I tossed Chrome after less than a day, but you found it already.
I don’t agree with Walton about fox-‘hunting’, but I don’t think it was entirely fair to bait him with the argument about stuffing kittens in the oven (which could be considered a form of slippery slope in itself).
Were you able to log in?
Chmee:
Nah, Speaker to Seafood is a Kzin name for Niven himself. If I recall the story correctly (it’s recounted in either N-Space or Playgrounds of the Mind), a famous fan artist dubbed him that in the caption of a cartoon of Niven chatting with the (freshly emptied) shell of a lobster at a convention banquet.
Besides, if lobsters were really part of the set of animals, I couldn’t eat them without being “cruel,” could I? Pigs aren’t really animals, either, you know!
;^)
Oh, well. If it’s a practice that holds deep traditional meaning, then…
Aren’t you supposed to be an atheist? Don’t you feel the least sorry all the altarboy-raping priests whose culture we threaten?
You know who I really weep for? The poor Brachiation Coaches who were suddenly betrayed most cruelly and deprived of their livelihoods when we developed bipedalism.
boo-fucking-hoo. if your principles promote cruelty, they’re the wrong principles. And I don’t care if it “destroys a culture” (besides, no one is stopping your buddies from doing fake hunts!). If your culture supports cruelty, it needs to be changed; if your culture is based on cruelty, it needs to die*. To use a crass example, the end of slavery in the U.S. also ended up destroying a culture.
——-
*the usual caveats about preferably changing culture from the inside instead of imposing changes from outside don’t work here since it is the British changing the British culture.
My tampon story: First live-in girlfriend sends me to the store. I’m cool; big city, no one knows me. And the clerk asks “regular or super?”
I don’t remember how long I stood there without speaking while various thoughts ran through my mind. Hell, I thought it was super.
Urine as surfactant experiment coming up tomorrow. I will collect my morning contribution to ensure sufficient concentration. Melted snow for a water source, proper controls. I will attempt to wet insect cuticle. There are plenty of Asian ladybird beetle volunteers around.
I recall a photo of a family in a dry part of Africa washing their cookware with urine but that might just reflect a general shortage of water.
Walton just installed his sniny new Firefox browser. What adons should we recomend for him? I’ll go first
Adblock plus
Adblock plus: Element Hiding Helper
BBCodeXtra
All-in-one gestures
Answers
Calculator
Download statusbar
Fastestfox
Full Fullscreen
Image Zoom
NoSquint
Split Browser
Tab Mix Plus
BS
Antiochus,
You could keep that epistemology, using Dr. Mengele techniques. You’ll be an inhuman monster, but hey, can’t have everything.
</tasteless>
yes.
the kitten thing made a bit more sense in context (and in reference to a loooooong ago thread about kittens in ovens).
It really does not. Tradition is not and cannot be an excuse for keeping a cruel practice.
BS, you got an RSS reader there? I use NewsFox.
I note Walton pointed out that there was no existing industry that generated income for rural residents in kitten-snuff, unlike fox-hunting, so it was quite a different situation.
That was not a good response, IMO.
Walton (#383)
So something could have a sound ethical basis in practice, but if it originated from a political motive you disagree with, you’ll oppose it?
Perhaps it’s a bad transfer across cultural and national boundaries, but I thought there already was a word for fox hunting without the fox (and so without the hounds).
‘Polo’, or something like that.
Bill Dauphin, OM:
Damn, I’ve been out Nivened already :)
No I didn’t know that Larry used “Speaker to Seafood” thanks for the heads up.
Still, knowing this, I would feel a bit presumptuous if I had chosen it.
I am not sure if I am happy about Louis Wu and the upgraded autodoc. I think that Protector Louis might have had legs as far as stories go.
it certainly wasn’t, but it’s a pretty good example of how thinking of everything in purely economic/market terms robs people of basic human empathy and compassion.
and on an only very marginally related note, this old article made me feel all warm and fuzzy inside :-p
Jadehawk @333:
OMG!! That’s a semi-satanic comment!
…
Never mind.
Just this afternoon, our JW secretary declared that her young son (a high-schooler) and her older daughter (a Tween kid) are allowed to go on brother-sister dates. I don’t know if this is an American thing or not (at par with the so-called ‘Purity Balls’), but it seemed (to me) pretty fucked up!
But then, I have seen the kids. They are nice and polite and polished. But when the son sometimes comes to the office with his mother, ALL he ever does is sit and read their bible.
“So, wanna come back to my place?”
“Uh, normally I’d consider that moving too fast, but since your place is my place we don’t have much of a choice.”
“Cool. There’s just one thing: my mom’s home and I’d like you to meet her.”
“Mom’s home? On a Thursday? Awesome! That means it’s pork chops for dinner and I’m gonna get laid!”
No, is it a good thing? I am waiting for the small child down the block to explain RSS feeds to me.
BS
I’m wondering if Walton has the lack of innate empathy so often (apparently) found in libertarians.
That’s normal. I usually wake up tired because my nose overproduces. I’m allergic to dust, and currently the air is dry because I have to turn the heat on, hardening said overproduction.
The difference seems to be that I go downstairs to put my milk in the microwave while Windows is loading (couldn’t do that on a Mac! :-þ *) and go down again to fetch it while my e-mails are loading. All together probably doesn’t take much less time than switching on the water boiler and waiting till the caffeinated beverage is ready.
* Though I should add… my Windows is especially bloated because Lenovo insists on adding lots of stuff to the starting process.
Last time I looked, and that was many years ago, the oldest evidence for human use of fire was 1.4 million years old. Homo sapiens is more like 0.2.
Poverty, too, should be abolished.
Looking at Sweden, that’s even less utopic than abolishing mass-animal farming.
(And battery farming has been greatly reduced over here.)
Wow. How incredibly stupid.
I can easily see how caffeine would block an adenosine receptor… but… there are adenosine receptors on the outside of cell membranes??? That’s crazy talk! How does adenosine even get there? I’m off to Wikipedia.
Then ffffuck firmly-held English Tory principles!
You don’t need to be seen as precisely following one of three party lines. Really, you don’t.
Hello?
Germany and “free driving for free citizens” – the complete lack of a speed limit on certain motorways. Really impressive accidents happen that wouldn’t even be possible like that at less than 200 km/h.
Could also be deliberate, for disinfection.
It’s great. First released on Circle in the Round, which is more outtakes than best-of but probably what you’re thinking of.
Later it appeared on CD (+ 3 min.) as part of the Complete Bitches Brew Sessions.
oh, and BDC: yuh-huh.
Gem from Brownian:
Yay for empiricism.
But…
…
…
…
*shudders*
*Everything Brownian has ever posted on any thread in this forum suddenly makes sense*
Paracrine, baby. I think it’s a neurotransmitter too.
Urine, being sterile, may be preferable to surface water for cleaning cooking implements. Adds a little salt.
I’m almost afraid to ask, but is urine a disinfectant?
BS
good coffee/masala chai requires more clarity of mind and motor control than I have before the stupor goes away; which is why I’m not the one making that first cup of caffeine.
BS, RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is basically ‘push’ technology V2.
Many blogs (including this one) have an RSS feed (a ‘feed’ URL) for their posts, and in addition many posts have a feed for their comments.
If you subscribe to the feed, the RSS reader (built-in to IE, an add-on for FireFox) software polls them either on a schedule or on demand and manages them so as to show you new posts/comments and old comments, and sorts such according to user-defined criteria..
An RSS aggregator typically lists your feeds in one pane, and their contents in another pane; you can either read the content there or click to follow through to the site itself.
The end result is you can just check your reader for any new content for any number of sources, rather than going to the sites directly.
19862
20K tommorrow for sure.
Not quite, Kausik. For that kind of clarity you’d really need to meet my parents and get a peek at my therapist’s notes.
John Morales: So if anything changes on a website, I will be notified? Is only the new content displayed?
BS
David,
If you care to spend a little time, you might want to check what’s in your Startup set; also, to run RegEdit and inspect these keys (which list the programs that run on startup):
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionRun
HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionRun
and delete the cruft. You can always start the apps manually if you find you need them.
(Note I’m still running XP, so perhaps the keys are a little different in Vista or W7)
The Canadian analogue would be fighting in hockey. I get the feeling most Canadians expect Satan himself to rise out of the ground and unwrite Anne of Green Gables should anyone even suggest a line should consist of five hockey players rather than four players and a meathead they taught to hold a stick and “bash face” on command in return for a salary sufficient to support a small addiction to blow.
Turns out adenosine is a neurotransmitter, “believed to play a role in promoting sleep and suppressing arousal”. That makes sense. Maybe my adenosine receptors are mutated, then :-)
I wonder if it’s the other way around: lack of basic human empathy and compassion makes it possible for people to think of everything in purely economic/market terms. I don’t think there are many people out there who are doing it for teh evulz.
(…Though, in Mortadelo y Filemón, sometimes the entire society seems to work on that basis. One panel depicts a man grinning above both ears and saying he’s going to switch on the street lights in order to annoy the petty criminals who prefer darkness. Another, in another issue, shows a farmer talking about calculating the optimal food mix for his cows that, among other things, raises the production of liquid manure. Yet another shows another farmer noticing city people approaching and saying he should have brought more manure out to keep them away.)
^_^
Sweden has a law that prohibits advertizing to children? That’s just too cool.
:-S
That’s even creepier than the Purity Balls.
Disgusting.
Carlie, this is old news (Though I just found out.) but it seems that Torchwood might be coming to Fox. Russell Davies will probably be part of the deal as well as John Barrowman.
I am of mixed feelings about this. Fox has been brutal to their science fiction shows. Also, I am afraid that the bisexual and homosexuality tone of the show will be subdued. (No more James Marsters and Barrowman fighting and kissing at the same time. That was actually fun!)
I would like to see the BBC crew try to get around the ending of Children Of Earth. While I thought that was great television, (BBC American, can you please stop showing How Clean Is Your House and Top Chef long enough to rerun the mini-series?) I really do not like Captain Jack very much right now.
John Morales: Mike Lin’s startup monitor does the same thing with drag and drop. No thought required. Free, too.
BS
BS @413, yes, any new content gets picked up by your RSS app/module as per its schedule (I have mine set to check once per hour, and on startup), and most readers have options to notify you when new content is available (I recommend turning this off), or you see it when you look at the reader.
You can typically set the reader to delete already-read items, or to delete items older than a specified period etc; also, they have options to highlight unread content.
B, OM: @412
I am afraid. Very afraid. I have been afraid ever since PZ posted a picture of yours (a couple of years back, I think?)…
[/kidding]
You weak-kneed short-ball-hitters make me sick. If they cracked down on fighting in hockey, think of all the
thugsenforcers that would be put out of work! In this economy? You’d better rethink right quick.Always a great idea. If you don’t feel comfortable futzing around the registry, there is an easier fix. Go to sysinternals.org – a website that would bring you to Microsoft Technet (it was purchased by MS a few years back; they retained the owner, Mark Russinovich, in their staff. Mark is a security researcher, who IIRC got into the spotlight by uncovering the infamous Sony Music clandestine rootkit business).
In the ‘Security Utilities’ or ‘Process Utilities’, you can find two small, free programs – called Process Explorer (a super efficient substitute for Windows’ own task manager), and Autoruns. Once you install Autoruns and run it, it gives you very detailed information about what is in your registry, and thereon it is just clearing or adding a check mark on an entry, and rebooting. You’re done.
John Morales: Thanks, I am installing it. I rather suspected that others had some way of keeping up on comments than by refreshing every so often. And there really isn’t a kid down the street to help me. No neighbors at all and damn near no street.
BS
Probably not a very good one, but better than nothing, and see comment 407 – unless you have serious kidney problems, your urine is sterile-filtered.
It still doesn’t make sense. So your boyfriend makes it – and it takes that long to wake him up and put him in the kitchen?
Which, somehow, often leads to people posting comments on the wrong thread. Somehow they manage to read one and post on another.
Thanks, I’m running XP, too, and would be scared shitless of having to figure out anything about RegEdit on my own! :-S
Huh? PZ posted a picture of me? I don’t think so. When? Where?
I think I look rather harmless and unassuming.
BS, yeah, I can probably download apps for much of what I do, but I’m atypical that way. I still use notepad for text editing, write HTML by hand and do screencaps using PrintScrn¹.
The advantage is that I can do everything I can do on any box, whether mine or another’s, and that I know what I’m doing. Works for me. :)
—
¹ I use Paint if I want to just select a bit of it. Still works on any Windoze system.
I seem to recall some razor thin crack in that closed door that would allow the show to continue. (don’t remember what it was specifically, but I thought so at the time).
I don’t wake him up. that’s inhumane, and I’d murder the person who woke me up for any reason, so I don’t do it to him.
actually, it’s even more complicated than that, but basically we don’t interrupt each others sleeping patterns and morning routines, because otherwise we’d start hating each other really quickly.
Kausik Datta @422 makes an eminently sensible suggestion, which I heartily endorse.
Or another free program (do you see a trend here?) called What’s Running?, a shell program over task manager that tells you every process on your computer and will go online to explain what the process is.
BS
SteveM, I meant making Captain Jack likable again. Though it seems that he is not happy with himself. That was a hard ending and, frankly, one that I doubt an american network would allow.
@ 381
I enjoyed that so much. what a combo.
Knockgoats was on a roll there with the bad jokes, and I like jokes that are so bad you laugh at their awfulness … the horse saying “neigh” to marriage, for example.
Up-thread there was some discussion of polygamy, polyandry, marrying one’s siblings and so forth. From the endless well of Moments of Mormon Madness, I give you:
I postulate that this kind of history may, in part, account for the mormons being so hysterical about the slippery slope of gay marriage … mormons having slid down more slippery slopes than can be accounted for by reason. Maybe they would marry their horses and therefore require the law to prevent them from all temptations.
David,
Check out a free download named CCleaner.
It is a quite efficient system cleaner and offers a relatively easy way to delete or disable start up application in most varieties of Windows.
Another place that is often overlooked is the Windows scheduled tasks folder. Some apps poke entries in there, so deleting them can help also.
The main thing is that you don’t have to directly edit the registry.
Using MSConfig actually offers more options for optimising windows start up applications and again makes registry diving unnecessary.
I didn’t think it was fair in the original thread, either.
If I don’t think that recreational (not subsistence) fishing should be banned outright, am I a “fucked up and cruel person”?
Thanks for all the suggestions, I suppose I’ll look into them on the weekend…
I see… makes sense…
LOL!
fish are not furry, warm, cuddly, sycophantic,or sad-eyesish
“Maybe they would marry their horses and therefore require the law to prevent them from all temptations.”
As long as it wasn’t a same sex Equine/Human marriage, because that would be wrong and perverse.
this has already been answered.
fuck you kindly. aside from the fact that the average fish have smaller brains than the average fox or kitten, and thus less ability to suffer, AND aside from the fact that fishing isn’t as torturous as fox-hunting, most fishermen I know actually do eat the fish they catch.
seriously, WTF is with these idiotic black-or-white arguments?!
That sounds very familiar. The Redhead and I have been doing that for 30+ years. It did take me a few years to make her understand I could get my own breakfast…
Oh, my…citation needed for the brainsize /suffering-capacity correlation!
I don’t think that’s been established as a “fact” either.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catch_and_release
I wasn’t making an argument. I can if you’d like.
1)catch and release is stupid; still not as torturous as fox-hunting, but if we could get rid of it, why not?
2)primitive brains do not perceive pain the same way more advanced brains do. to say “size” was stupid and misleading, sorry
3)why again am I expected to defend some extreme position on principle, when the whole fucking point is that allowing animal cruelty where not necessary and easily abolished is cruel? And to be quite frank, if this whole thing leads do the end of all hunting/fishing as a consequence, I wouldn’t care either. But that isn’t my argument. Reducing cruelty where possible is.
Gay Republicans, an odd group to begin with, are splitting up because some of them are not happy with the ties the others choose to wear (just kidding about the ties).
Do you mean this?
Plus, hunting/fishing IS a way for many poor people to feed themselves, and is significantly less cruel and unhealthy than feedlots, anyway.
But what if I’m not poor and/or I’m not using the fish to replace cruelly produced meat?
So it matters that fishing isn’t as tortuous as fox-hunting. Does it matter if fox-hunting isn’t as tortuous as stuffing kittens in the oven?
And how does eating the fish, or the fish being healthy for me, excuse the cruelty? Going on fox hunts might be healthy for the participants, too…
And equating fox-hunting to roasting kittens alive isn’t black-or-white?
(I’m not trying to be needlessly combative, it just seems that people are applying different standards to the pro-and anti-Walton side of the argument. not that Walton is helping matters by dragging ‘Tory principles’ into it :| )
Walton, when I lived in Dah UP, the deer there were more plentiful than could be sustained through the harsh winters. The DNR did not mind the subsistence farmer/trapper getting an extra deer or two. That deer was used for needed food, and help get that family through the harsh winter. What pissed the DNR off was hunters from downstate who poached deer for trophies. They would cut off the head/antlers and leave the rest of the carcass to rot. Morality comes into the picture when you go just beyond the animal dying, and look at why that animal died, and how. But then, liberturds like yourself tend to morally bankrupt because they can’t see beyond economics. Until you can do so, you aren’t a member of the human race.
recreational hunting/fishing, that is. *sigh*
seriously though, I’m done being asked to defend something “on principle” when I hold the position on purely practical grounds: it’s cruel, it’s unnecessary, and it’s possible to get rid of it without major negative consequences, the whining of a bunch of spoiled Tory brats who for some reason don’t find drag hunting acceptable notwithstanding.
Windy,
It’s a matter of degree, not of quality.
I guess that if you can delineate the point at which the quantity of cruelty inflicted for fun exceeds the quantity of satisfaction derived therefrom and show that recreational fishing falls under that point, you can justify the cruelty.
PS AS I recall, the Marquis de Sade offered just such a justification. Was he a “fucked up and cruel person”?
Jadehawk, I think Sven is making the same point as you in regards to fish, though ironically.
Janine, I think the last Tennant Doctor Who is what sets them up for a new Torchwood. Jack finds redemption and his sense of himself through his relationship with Alonso, then goes back to find Gwen and Rhys with the new couple of Martha and Mickey.
And I puke all over my screen.
My husband actually brings me the first espresso of the day while I’m still in the shower. I guess he figures it’ll turn me “human” that much faster.
Ack. That “hery” spammer clags up the recent posts list when I come back to this tab.
I console myself that but one click from PZ will eradicate it and its droppings, in due course.
I have just read all the comments on this thread since my last post (#243). I have nothing further to say.
The argument I hear most often is that banning fighting will actually increase injuries and fatalities, at least initially, because the fear of retribution through a fight with an enforcer prevents players from making especially dangerous cheap shots. Maybe, but I’d like to see evidence first.
What I wonder is why other popular sports, even the contact ones, don’t seem to need to replace some of the players on the roster with professional pugilists. I don’t see how hockey is improved by having one less player on a line and a vigilante referee instead.
Oh, and I saw the joke Sven; I just wanted to point out that one of the arguments I’ve heard is no less ludicrous.
I show up in this thread, and what’s the first phrase that pops out at me when I skim the comments? “My tampon story.” Well then:
I have some oddity in my brain that causes me to misread product packages in stores – consistently and ridiculously. A few years ago, I was standing in line at one of those dollar stores, and piece of merchandise on a peg board caught my eye. Surely not – a “tampon organizer?” Who needs that? And how much organizing do they need – they’re only going to one place, after all. How does it work – “This Side Clean – This Side Used”?
I pondered all of this for at least a minute before reading the package again. “Coupon Organizer.” And no, it never occurred to me in that full minute that there was something wrong with me , not the package.
Brownian, the photo I am referring to is one when you and PZ met somewhere, and he posted a rather dark and gloomy photo of the occasion. I can’t find the image, but I do remember that the guy PZ pointed out as Brownian was tall and impressively built like a log, possibly with a hat/cap on. Catching a glimpse of your relatively recent pictures (from the link), I think I can confirm that was indeed you. You look quite the hoopy frood. With muscles (which is why I am afraid).
Real Mormon Priesthood Holders would only marry a pale horse, because there’s prophecy about that. Any other animal would be a horse of another color.
Ah, yeah. That must have been from the time he came to Edmonton about this time last year.
If I recall correctly, I had buzzed my hair rather close and was wearing a tocque, making me look slightly longshoremanish.
Ha! I’m really a big wimp.
grrrr….
I went to the coffeeshop to finish reading my book without the distractions of work and Pharyngula, and what do I get? Two baristas smugly and loudly “discussing” what a lie global warming is, and how science has proved that there’s a warming period every 1000 years because that’s how our ozone(?!) layer balances itself out. I wanted to strangle them and scream “The Medieval Warming Period is a fucking LIE!” instead I just lost my appetite and went back home. Now I feel like a total loser for not saying something.
How would you guys have handled a situation like that…?
:-(
Jadehawk, I would say that the peer reviewed scientific literature doesn’t back them up. Only denier web sites where the scientific literature is ignored.
On the spectrum of cruelty* there is a continuum between necessary and unnecessary cruelty. Also a similar spectrum probably applies to an axis running from benign to very cruel**. I do not find it strange that people are able to separate these spectra into “acceptable” and unacceptable”. What I do find strange is that anyone would think most other people would agree about the placement of those lines…the problem is ultimately that what is acceptable and what is not is a metaphysical question. No amount of evidence will show that your line is in the wrong place.
Let me draw some heat from Walton*. I don’t actually have much empathy for kittens. I know this is weird, but I don’t. I don’t feel any tugs to the heartstrings when a dog is taken to the pound, or a kitten freezes to death. That doesn’t mean that I hope these things would happen or wouldn’t lift a finger to prevent it. I just don’t lose any sleep on it. On the other hand, I am physiologically incapable of squishing a spider. I shared an apartment for two years with brown recluses, and could never bring myself to harm one.
The point is that these are gut reactions. Don’t be surprised if people don’t share them.
Regarding the suffering argument, I also have the sense that what is moral is that which causes the least suffering…but then again, I don’t really know why “suffering” is such an important criterion for morality, or if there can be any expectation of agreememnt on a thing as nebulous as this.
I guess that I am always surprised when people have a tremendous amount of confidence in where they have drawn their lines.
Now, having revealed myself as a sociopath****, I await rebuke.
*Imagine a rainbow, if you’d like.
**I suppose the rainbow analogy was stupid.
***But not on the Tory thing. That was weak.
****Just over the kitten thing.
Whereas I would say “Jebus, you two are stupid! Thank FSM nobody lets you do anything more important than serving coffee.”
And then when I got home I’d feel all guilty for demeaning the serving of coffee, which is, after all, perfectly honest work.
“You pays yer money and you takes yer choice,” I suppose.
As Edina Monsoon would: “You can drop the attitude – you only work in a shop, you know.”
Jadehawk, putting people in their place starts with proper terminology. Repeat after me “counter clerk, not ‘barista,” “counter clerk, not ‘barista'”. :)
oh yeah, that would work spectacularly well, considering no one lets me do anything more important than serving coffee, either (and at least one of them knows that) :-p
Jadehawk, your situation is all too familiar to me and reminds me of a situation where I was dragged to a creationist “lecture” and told by my friends that I would be rude if I dared to bring up any contrary facts about creationism.
damn, but I can’t figure out how to run News Fox.
BS
Try Fox News.
Well, jeez Louise, Jadehawk, what’s logic or fairness got to do with it? This is abuse we’re talking about here!
Besides, I’m pretty sure you’re a Struggling Artist©, aren’t you? These ignorant bozos are mere serving wretches!
Ummm… you did read my comment about “honest work,” didn’t you? I was dead serious about that part.
Jadehawk, I feel your drowsiness. :D
David M., while it is true that I am chronically underslept, I’ve tried it the other way, too. Doesn’t matter. I am just a dead loss first thing (and second, and third, and….) in the morning. Luckily, my job doesn’t usually require actual cognition.
Another reason to like Tim Hortons. Not only do they taste better and cost less than Starbucks, but the people working there are generally not complete morons.
Feynmaniac: I agree with your assessment about the quality o Tim Horton’s coffee. However, the moron ratio must vary locally.
jeez, you canucks & yer Timmy’s
GET A ROOM
yeah, I know you were serious, the situation of me saying such a thing just seemed so surreal and absurd.
As for Struggling Artist©, I always thought of it as Starving Artist but…. *pokes self in well-padded middle*… I guess that hasn’t been accurate for a while now, hehe
Anyway, it just bugs me that I couldn’t think of a sensible way to explain to the two of them that they’re wrong and why.
SIWOTISIWIRL Syndrome is painful :-pDid you mean wenches? They could still be wretched.
And speaking of Fox News, who do you suppose the public trusts most?
BS
Yep. I’ve dealt with some doozies.
I somehow feel that Brownian was possessed by Smoggy during the composition of this entry.
Jadehawk, for what it’s worth. For me, it would have depended on how much trouble I wanted to deal with. Maybe it’s because I have twins, but “choose your battles” is my rallying cry.
For me, it really depends on whether or not they were worth your time and effort. If you weren’t going to get anything positive out of it (tooth sharpening, perhaps?) then why bother? They wouldn’t be worth it. If you thought they were teachable, then by all means. Go for it.
Then again, this could be the fresh batch of limoncello talking.
Antiochus Epiphanes (@461):
No rebuke from me. I have said here before — and been rebuked for it, I’m afraid… or at least vehemently disagreed with — that I’m not convinced we have any abstract moral obligation to other species (and let’s not get hung up on biology, here: by “other species,” I really mean whatever is not people), nor to “nature,” per se.
I eat Tasty Critters® without a scintilla of guilt: I don’t believe a pig or a chicken or a stunningly beautiful wild salmon has any rights that supersede my desire for a delicious meal. Likewise, I don’t think indigenous wild plants have any more right than I do to the land I’m using for my house and lawn and vegetable garden.
All that said, though… I also despise gratuitous cruelty1 to animals, and I believe intensely that careful stewardship of the natural environment is one of the most vital concerns of humanity.
The thing is, I support humane treatment of nonhuman animals and a high level of environmental sensitivity and sustainability not because I see them as a direct moral requirement, but because I think a world full of the kind of people who take good care of animals and the natural world is a better world for people… and I do think we people have moral obligations to each other.
The more I think about it, the more I think moral philosophy boils down to two propositions: [1] The purpose of life is to be happy. [2] Each other person has the same purpose and rights as you. Understood broadly enough, these two propositions give rise to all forms of human decency… including rationally humane treatment of other life and good stewardship of our natural surroundings.
OK, is there room for one more in those Nomex drawers? ;^)
1 By which I mean (not dissimilarly from you, if I understand you correctly) that I oppose unnecessary pain and suffering, but I don’t assume all use of animals, even if it involves some suffering, is unjustified by human needs and desires.
Chmee, may I ask you a moderately nosy, but not personal question? Not, I hasten to say, life or death or anything; just curiousity on my part.
As to whether they were wenches, I couldn’t say — AFAIK, “barista” is a gender-neutral term, and I don’t believe Jadehawk specified their sex — but I definitely meant they were wretches. Sadly, I fear there is no such thing as the “amazing grace … that save[s] a wretch like” them. YMMV.
In terms of Walton’s justifications for Fox hunting, more than anything he’s shot himself in the foot by not making very good arguments for it.
Cicely, you may ask anything you like.
Although, I am wondering how a question can be moderately nosy and not moderately personal.
Bill Dauphin: You’re right. I made them female in my head. Couldn’t tell you how, though.
BS
shower…? you mean, BEFORE caffeine…?!
I would probably end up hurting myself if I tried; not that I would try; showering in the morning just never sounded like a good idea. when I had McJobs, it meant 20 minutes less sleep; and now I simply can’t be bothered to shower as often as civilization demands of me :-p
Blind Squirrel,
I saw Dendy’s post, but I didn’t comment since he deleted all of my previous comments. It is interesting that not only is he a creationist idiot, endangering the education of students, but a misogynist too.
Sorry for the long time between comments, but I was on the road all day.
Shower is the first thing I do in the morning, need it to wake me up. I want to start using the exercise bike before shower, though I’m not sure if I could find the motivation to do it while still in that zombie-like state.
Pygmy Loris : Wondered where you were. If you want to comment where Dendy and others will see, he is currently spamming the “I support the freedom to marry” thread. And I do mean spam, much in the style of “global warming is a fraud” or whatever his nym was.
BS
I never understood that. a nice warm shower generally makes me sleepy and ready to go to bed; on occasion, it also makes me dizzy, which is another reason showering in the morning could lead to injuries.
Ha! It would take a brave soul to shower in this wood burner’s house. After a very cold night it can fall to 45 degrees American in the bathroom. Keeps all your business brief.
BS
Showering is generally the second thing I do in the morning (on weekdays at least); the first is to make the tea, which I drink once I’m out of the shower. I can’t handle coffee first thing in the morning. Weirdly enough it wasn’t until I was in my late 20s that I found out my sister has the exact same problem – one of the few things we have in common.
On the weekends showering becomes a bit more optional unless I have to leave the house (which sometimes isn’t for 36 or so hours between getting home from work Friday evening and going to the gym Sunday morning) – but I live alone so it’s not like I’m inflicting my funk on anyone.
You have not responded to my claim that you said a human culture eating only raw food is unsustainable! Don’t try and say I deleted them, because I have been waiting to hear what you had to say about man predating the use of fire for cooking!
Don’t lie and say I deleted your comments!
oo when does everybody brush their teeth?
hah, a man who lies about his job-title accuses an upstanding, and honest member of Pharyngula of lying. Yeah, I know whom I’m gonna believe.
And WTF is this about man predating the use of fire? what sort of definition for “man” are you using, dendytroll?
pDendy:
Since you have no credibility, it behooves you to acquire some by citing where this contention was purportedly made.
Nope. Really happened. I will, however, cop to the fact that like a journalist, I’ll occasionally do things more for the purpose of telling people about doing them than for the actual doing.
Hey, it was college. (And I think I’d been jilted and had gone a little weird[er] in the noodle.)
Dendy!
What the fuck are you doing here!
If you know of a sustainable raw-food human culture name it!
Otherwise go away!
You guys are so simple minded, you are really pathetic…
Aww, Jadehawk, you’re so sweet!
so now that you’ve gotten that projection out of the way, care to answer my question?
Are you familiar with the concept known as projection – you pathetic pile of pig excrement?