I’m a total piker when it comes to blasphemy

I have been put in my place. This is a fantastic way to blaspheme. Behold, the Jesus Christ Ice Pop.

At a party this weekend celebrating New York Design Week, which begins today, the Chilean-born artist [Sebastian Errazuriz] plans to hand out 100 “Christian Popsicles” made of “frozen holy wine transformed into the blood of Christ” and featuring a crucifix instead the tongue depressor that typically hosts the frozen treats, he said.

An image of Jesus Christ positioned traditionally on the cross is visible once the ice pop is consumed. As for the frozen wine, Errazuriz said, he concealed it in a cooler and took it into a church, where it was “inadvertently blessed by the priest while turning wine into the blood of Christ during the Eucharist.”

Excellent! I bet they’d go well with crackers.

Unbelievable

That creationist rascal Kenwal Hamza is up to his tricks again: he’s convinced the state of Kentucky to invest millions of dollars in his planned theme park, Koran Kountry.

The controversial park is the creation of Answers in Koran, LLC, who seek to bring visitors to the “family-friendly attraction that celebrates the truth of the Koran, and the power of the global jihadist movement to liberate Muslims from the oppression of the infidels and Jews. We also have roller coasters.”

The $300 million park, built on top of a reclaimed surface mining site in Muhlenberg County, was constructed with the help of unnamed international investors from Pakistan and Iran. Their feasibility study projects millions of tourists from the Middle East and South Asia will come to the park in its first three years of operation.

“This day would not be possible without the great help we received from the Beshear administration,” said Kenwal Hamza, CEO of Answers in Koran. “Muhlenberg County is now truly the closest thing to Paradise on Earth.”

They’re going to have rides and celebrate the true history of Islam…no, stop.

This doesn’t work.

Sorry, total fail. It’s bad satire.

No one is ever going to believe that an American state would fund something as stupid as “Koran Country”, or that they’d actually smile and approve tens of millions of dollars to a non-Christian theme park. There’s a plausibility gap a few zillion miles wide.

Although it does go a good job of highlighting the smug sense of Christian privilege that allowed the colossal inanity of Ken Ham’s Creation “Museum” to get built in the first place.

Sounds familiar

Damned social networking sites! They’ve been destroying people’s lives since the 17th century, when the hot app was called “Coffeehouse” rather than “Facebook”.

Enthusiasm for coffeehouses was not universal, however, and some observers regarded them as a worrying development. They grumbled that Christians had taken to a Muslim drink instead of traditional English beer, and fretted that the livelihoods of tavern-keepers might be threatened. But most of all they lamented that coffeehouses were distracting people who ought to be doing useful work, rather than networking and sharing trivia with their acquaintances.

When coffee became popular in Oxford and the coffeehouses selling it began to multiply, the university authorities objected, fearing that coffeehouses were promoting idleness and diverting students from their studies. Anthony Wood, an Oxford antiquarian, was among those who denounced the enthusiasm for the new drink. “Why doth solid and serious learning decline, and few or none follow it now in the university?” he asked. “Answer: Because of coffee-houses, where they spend all their time.”

And look! Muslims were wrecking Christiandom even then! And don’t get me started on those students, screwing around in idle chitchat all the time…

We can learn things from the 17th century

I was amused overall by this timeline of hysteria and sex toys, but I have to say that the 17th century entries were my favorite. So informative!

Nathaniel Highmore, an English surgeon who was one of the few doctors to publicly acknowledge that the end result of pelvic massage—the “hysterical paroxysm”—could also be described as an “orgasm,” noted that it was no easy task. He likened it to “that game of boys in which they try to rub their stomachs with one hand and pat their heads with the other.”

I’m going to have to play that game more. For practice. I’m confused though — I’m supposed to give her an orgasm by rubbing my stomach and patting my head, or hers? Or some other combination of the two motions? I suppose that trying all the permutations could be fun.

English physician Thomas Sydenham estimated that hysteria was the most common disease after fever, accounting for a sixth of all human maladies. Among women, he wrote, “there is rarely one who is wholly free from them.”

Oh, my. The poor dears. We must do whatever we can to save them!

Did everyone draw Mo today?

Hey! It’s Everybody Draw Mohammed Day! I’ve been been engaged in this meeting all day, so I haven’t had time to do anything — although, I think I should get a pass since I spent an hour listening to Maryam Namazie giving a ferociously anti-Islamist talk, which I’m sure was far more offensive to the fanatics than any doodle I could possibly scribble up.

But OK, I’ll just steal something someone else drew: here’s a picture of Mohammed by Rashid al-Din, a 14th century Persian. That should do the job.

Or you could just read Jesus and Mo for a while.