So many kooks, so little time. I’m glad some else is covering the chemtrails beat — that combination of quackery, pseudoscience, gullibility, and conspiracy theorist is exhausting.
It’s a fantastic meeting here at #atheistcon, in a beautiful part of the world, with huge crowds (I have seen the theater, and I have seen it filled with people, and I am intimidated), and I can tell this convention is going to be a huge success. But I have to complain about one thing, and that is the internet access. It’s no fault of the organizers, but it’s a universal problem of big greedy hotels.
I can say from experience staying at way too many hotels that the South Wharf Hilton in Melbourne has provided the very worst experience in wifi ever. It’s abominable. Let me tell you what fun I’ve had.
The first day was OK; we actually briefly had free access. Everything was smooth, I was pleased, but of course it could not last, because then it stopped working altogether — we were told that they were going to fix it.
The next day, it was sort of working. My wife and I could both get on, I could access it via my iPad, but that’s also where my laptop started mysteriously crashing (a problem that has since vanished, since new wifi software started working).
Later that day, though, everything changed. We’d connect with wifi, and get a login screen for “DOCOMO Intertouch”. What, you might ask, is this? It’s what greedy hotels install to fuck up the internet and bring in some additional revenue. You log into this thing and then all your access is filtered through this new layer that exists solely to monitor your usage and cut you off at a specified time limit. And it sucks.
The cost is $9.95au for two hours, which is absurdly overpriced. Nothing is too absurd for these hotels, though, because when I tried to use their Business Center, the machines there charge $26au for two hours. No thanks.
So I composed some stuff offline, and bit the bullet and paid the $9.95 to get some stuff done. I started sucking in my email, managed some essential student business, then after about ten minutes went to do some of that blogging stuff, and this is what I got instead, a big stupid error message.
I followed the instructions, quit and restarted, and fired it up again…no go. Same message. Infuriatingly, the lovely DOCOMO software does put up a little countdown clock to tell you that your time will expire in 1Hour(s):43Min(s): 14Sec(s), which you can watch count down to the time it will stop working for sure. Just the fact that they use that clumsy (s) tells me these programmers are lazy relics from the 1980s. Maybe the DOCOMO code is even written in COBOL.
I let it time out.
So today, fool that I am, I figured they’ve been working on fixing this problem, and I paid them $9.95 again. I got about 3 minutes before it died. I thought I’d be smart and try to post something first; I wasn’t quick enough. So that morning I got to watch the ever-so-useful timer count down again.
Oh, well.
I’ve run into this so often it’s become a kind of expectation for me. I get a cheap hotel, the room is fine, the internet access is routine and free; sometimes you have to enter a password, but that’s a function built into the router and it all works smoothly. Get put into a pricier, nicer, fancier hotel, and oh, no, they can’t possibly just provide access to all their customers — they have to gouge more money out of them. So they contract some company to build a wall, usually badly, that their residents have to pay to get through, and then they charge some ridiculous sum for limited access. And it almost always breaks, because the people running the hotel have no idea how to manage this clumsy chunk of code they’ve interposed between us and the internet. And we get really pissed off.
Because, you know, a hotel may have lovely amenities (like this one), but some of us see the world through the lens of the network, and all we see is incompetent IT people and money-grubbing asshole management, and that means the hotel looks utterly hideous to us.
The hotel staff did try to be helpful, and cancelled the charges, but none of them knew anything about the software, and the only way they could actually help me get on the internet was to connect me to DOCOMO. No thanks. They are the problem, not the solution.
Travelers, if you expect to get anything done on the internet, stay away from the South Wharf Hilton in Melbourne. All you’ll get is aggravation and frustration. Stay just about anywhere else — I’ve talked to a few people who got cheaper local accommodation, and they’re entirely content with their service.
Some good news: we do have free wifi in the convention center! Hooray for the organizers! I’ll try to post a few updates on the meetings throughout the Australian day (first up this morning: Peter Singer), but I also suspect that, realistically, once 3500-4000 people show up and fire up their smartphones all at once, it may get a little flaky. But at least I have one place where I can get through!
We missed out. This iPhone app, Girls Around Me, has been yanked from the Apple store. It was a geolocation based mapping application that created a google map of your current location, and then checked in with facebook to find all the women who had done any social networking in that area. Then it tracked through their data to post pictures of them on the map.
Isn’t that sweet? All you women were made public targets for a kind of weird hunting game. I presume you are all now logging into facebook and trying to sort through the arcane tangle of options to limit access.
In case you’re thinking this was an app designed for creepy stalkers, though, you’ve got it all wrong. It’s the opposite of stalking. The designer has said that the purpose of the app was to allow his bros to avoid the ugly girls.
Doesn’t that make you feel so much better now?
That priest who flashed gay porn at his audience is being investigated, and something strange has happened: the laptop that he used has vanished completely and somewhat mysteriously. It’s also the only thing stolen from the priest’s home.
Makes you go “hmmm”, doesn’t it.
I’ve got two possible explanations: 1) them evil gays broke into his house to steal his legendary Gay Porn stash, or 2) Jesus teleported the computer to his party room in Heaven. I can’t imagine any other way this could happen.
Oh, OK, a priest could have intentionally destroyed evidence that he had a computer full of dowloaded porn, but that’s so ridiculous and ludicrous that it beggars belief. Priests have vows and a special connection to a beneficent god and know for sure that lying and masturbating to gay porn and using a condom or other such sinful apparatus would send them straight to hell, so they’d never ever do that. Ever.
I grew up in a Catholic household and attended parochial schools from kindergarten until high school graduation. I took communion weekly but never truly swallowed what the sacrement was intended to be: the conversion of a strange round wafer into the body of Jesus. I told myself I believed it, and I said, “Amen,” when it was my turn in the communion line. I knew what the right answer was–and by golly, I wanted that “A.”
At around age eight, the tapestry started to unravel. After learning of the existence of different belief systems around the world, it occurred to me that one line in the profession of faith we recited was obnoxious, arrogant, and unfair to non-Catholics: “We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins.” I stopped saying it as a form of silent protest.
I quit going to mass once I went to college. I dabbled with various denominations after I married an Episcopalian, especially after we moved to a small southern town and had kids. Not only did it provide a comfortable community, it seemed like what we should be doing, particularly for our sons. My attendance was sporadic at best, and ceased altogether when we moved to a small college town in southwest Virginia, though my family continues to attend a church.
When my oldest was 12 or so, I was holding forth to him on my thoughts about religion. It started with my disdain for organized religions, the hypocrisy and judgmentalism of many religious people, yet a concession that many others–people we know–are good and derive profound benefits from religious faith. I explained that in high school, I learned that “religion” is defined as “answers to the questions of the mysteries of life,” then held forth on the mythologies that peoples of various cultures have developed over the millennia to explain how and why we are here. Given the numbers, the variety and the lack of accord, I just doubted that any one was correct. And given the advances in scientific understanding of matters that address many of these questions, I didn’t really have much use for religion after all.
He asked, “So are you an atheist?” I said I didn’t think so, but would get back to him. Despite my indoctrinated aversion to that label, I felt I owed him and his younger brother an honest evaluation and answer.
I began reading Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion and Susan Jacoby’s The Age of American Unreason, and on a weekend home alone, watched Julia Sweeney’s Letting Go of God, which moved me to tears of relief. It was as though I could finally let go of the last gossamer thread of the falsehood. Finally, I’d found ideas, thoughts, concepts and a worldview that accorded with my own, that rang effortlessly true with an unmistakable clarity.
At long last, I recognize that we must write our own test of truth; it is our responsibility to find honest answers for ourselves. As for me, I believe that there are no gods. I am an atheist. I’ve earned this “A.”
The catmeister has sent his minions to wreck a poll, and wreck it wrongly. Look at this malformed question:
Adorable Pictures of Babies? 4%
Adorable Pictures of Puppies? 27%
Adorable Pictures of Kittens? 47%
All of the Above 13%
None of the Above 6%
I ask you…WHERE ARE THE SQUID? Given the absence of a correct answer, clearly the only acceptable reply is “none of the above”. Teach them a lesson, please. For great justice!
The day is off to an awful start. Internet access in the hotel is only intermittent, and it’s only occasionally that I can get on; and then this morning my laptop plays prima donna and dies, repeatedly, with ugly lock-ups and horribly slow performance. I may be restricted to blogging by iPad all weekend, which is slower and clumsier.
The day will get better. Mary has plans for us. We’re going out to see the sights this morning and afternoon, so she’s totally in charge. She keeps talking about flowers and trees and birds, though, and not a word about Cephalopoda or Insecta, so it might be a little weird. I’ll try to cope.
Then, 4:00 to 6ish, any pharyngula people in the vicinity ought to converge on the South Wharf Hilton Bah for some ‘Strine beeah. The Global Atheist Convention commences at 6:15 with a cocktail party, and then…chaos reigns!
This isn’t so much about why I am an atheist so much as when I recognized that I was one. In the 70s, the public schools in Richmond VA had become such inner-city honor-culture shit holes that my parents, aware of my general timid nature, decided to send me to a cheap Catholic school instead. My experience there, despite bullying by peers was actually kind of pleasant. The nuns were the full-on types regarding their habits and convent life, but were of that odd variety that probably emerged after Vatican II was put into place. Guitar masses, Kum-ba-ya, warm fuzzies=good, cold pricklies=bad and all that. On nice days we had classes outside. The math program was especially good, and there was no in-school time dedicated to Catholic doctrine or any other Xtian doctrine to speak of. I imagine there must have been a morning prayer but those kinds of banal memories are the first to get washed away as we get older. There was, however, mandatory mass on Tuesdays and Thursdays which I kind of liked since they were held in a beautiful church next to and affiliated with the church that Patrick Henry ostensibly gave his “give me liberty” speech. ( Oh, and George Washington slept here too…I’m just sayin’). And there was the ritual and the mediaeval sounding call and response largely sung in Latin. All very exotic and entirely new to me.
But tender souls beg for beatings just by existing, so of course there were bullies, two in particular that gave me such regular grief that I actually kept a little notebook that mapped out where and when I shouldn’t be at any given place and time in order to avoid “the boot” as it were. The thing is, they were terrified of the main priest who presided over the church and the school, and most of that anxiety centered on the mandatory monthly confessions that all the Catholic kids were required to make. Although required for the Catholic kids, it was “optional” (could it have even been allowed? I couldn’t take communion for instance) for non-Catholics. I remember the first non-threatening thing those boys said to me was along the lines of “you’re lucky you don’t have to go to confession.” I said it didn’t seem that bad, so, in a change of tactic, instead of threatening me, they dared me to go to confession, and there would be a five dollar bill at the end of it if I did.
The anonymous side of the confessional was like you would imagine. However, there was also an option to sit with the priest face to face, and I’m sure this is what I was being paid to do. So I did it. He was a nice enough guy. I remember him asking if I was Catholic (he must have smelled my Methodist blood), and me saying no and him asking why I had come. I told him I was just curious and then he asked if there was anything I wanted to confess. I told him I had hit my sister and talked back to my parents (neither of which I had done), then conveniently skipped the part about my recent discovery of the joys of masturbation (I was 12).So, long story short; The bullies actually paid up and then quit bothering me after that. I remember thinking ‘what were they so afraid of’, followed by a quick and completely uninteresting realization that it was all crap. I also realized at that moment that I had never believed any of it in the first place. I had just never really thought about it.
There was also a time when I was 6, when I prayed to god that my runaway basset hound would come home. I remember even then feeling like I was simply hedging my bets. Might as well? You know?…Shows what a crock Pascal’s wager is…Cross your fingers behind your back…Even a kid can do it!…right.
Ashley Bell
