I don’t have a link for this, but it was created by Kara Treibergs and Laurel Hiebert for the Oregon Institute of Marine Biology. And it is so true!
(Also on Sb)
The pastor of the Crystal Cathedral, Robert Schuller, has a wife, Arvella. Arvella is sick! She has pneumonia.
I’m so sorry. I wish her well and hope she gets better soon.
The Schullers have done something quite common: since she’s not feeling well, they asked the community to help prepare meals for the family. This is a very traditional thing to do, and one of the nicer parts of religion — it’s quite OK for someone to ask for help, and people are happy to pitch in.
What grates, though, is the email sent to explain how to deliver the meals. Don’t come by the house, oh no.
…they would appreciate meals over the next three to four weeks. They are to be sent to the church in order to be transported to Arvella. The limo drivers could pick up the dinners or meet in the Tower Lobby around 4:30 p.m.
‘Please, we need charity, just hand it to our limo drivers’? America is in deep economic trouble, and we’ve been bled dry by income inequity: the Schullers are perfectly emblematic of the attitudes of the 1%, oblivious, privileged, arrogant, and demanding more. And they do this while their church is failing into bankruptcy.
There’s something really notable about this image. Most cartoons feature the octopus as the villain; this one has the cephalopod representing the good guys, the 99%, strangling the villainous mammal. It breaks the stereotype!
Is it weird that I identified with the mollusc and felt a little happy uplift when I saw that?
(Also on FtB)
I am an atheist because when I was a child, my parents read to me (and later with me) every night before I went to sleep. Some of my earliest memories are of Joseph and his Technicolour Dream Coat, of Rudyard Kipling’s Elephants Child and the Cat who Walked by Himself, of Midas and his Golden Touch. If I was ever told one of that lot was more true than the rest, I can’t remember it. I am an atheist because I can not comprehend how an adult living in the modern age, confronted with the plenitude of myths that purport to explain our existence without foundation in evidence or even simple plausibility, can pick one and say “that is the truth”.
Charles Miller
Australia
I don’t have a link for this, but it was created by Kara Treibergs and Laurel Hiebert for the Oregon Institute of Marine Biology. And it is so true!
(Also on FtB)
There’s something really notable about this image. Most cartoons feature the octopus as the villain; this one has the cephalopod representing the good guys, the 99%, strangling the villainous mammal. It breaks the stereotype!
Is it weird that I identified with the mollusc and felt a little happy uplift when I saw that?
(Also on FtB)
Registration is going strong, and a bunch of you students want to get into my Fundamentals of Genetics, Evolution, and Development class, and you’re sending me all this email. A few of you also want to get into my Biological Communications class. Bad news: I ignore most of my email. I’d go insane if I didn’t. If you really, really want to get into the class, you have to come see me personally.
Weird, I know. It’s like the 20th century or something.
Anyway, I’ll be in my office from 9-4 tomorrow*. There will be a physical piece of paper with permission numbers on it somewhere on my desk. Come in, say hello, tell me why I should let you take my course, and you might be able to walk away with one of those numbers. This is a real university! We actually have to meet face-to-face now and then!
I know not every student here reads this blog, so spread the word. Cranky ol’ Myers expects you to demonstrate your corporeality before he’ll let you take his class. OK?
*OK, I might duck out to use the men’s room or to run next door to get lunch or something. Be persistent. I’ll be around. If you’re daunted because I closed my door for 10 minutes, you don’t deserve one of my permission numbers.
I spoke at the Imagine No Religion conference in Kamloops, BC last year, and the video just came out, so here it is. I’ll be speaking there again this year, on 18 May 2012, and registration has opened. Sign up, show up! I promise that this time I won’t give slimy details about tapeworms in my talk.
(Episode CCLXVIII: Spooky story time.)
Hey, I know the Elwha river! I think we stopped there on my honeymoon. Lovely place, the Olympic Peninsula. And getting even lovelier if they are ripping out unneeded dams and restoring the rivers. There’s something so satisfying about a timelapse of a dam being demolished.
Next, restore the watershed and the salmon runs. Whatever, I’ve got to find an opportunity to relax on the peninsula someday again, before I die.
(Also on Sb)
