Go pester him with your questions. Remember, he really likes disgusting parasites!
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Go pester him with your questions. Remember, he really likes disgusting parasites!
Gary Farber is a blogospherical fixture; a long-time member of the Skiffy community, an entertaining writer, and an all around good guy. He blogged for 11 years at Amygdala, and still holds forth at Obsidian Wings.
He’s also the guy who wrote my favorite piece of negative literary feedback I ever got for a blog post.
And as those of you who have followed him over the years might know, he’s kinda reluctantly used to being broke. Long-term disabilities have made it hard for him to match his income to his outgo. Which leads to situations like this one, which he documented Wednesday on his Evil Empire page:
A few minutes after coming inside from the drenching rain, where I’d put a last piece of garbage in the garbage can, the bottom half of my left sneaker fell off, rendering it unusuable. These were my Last Backup Pieces Of Footwear. This follows the sudden demise of my main pair of sneakers three weeks ago when the plastic in the upright part of the rear right heel completely jabbed through the cloth, turning the plastic into something resembling a syringe, or at least a knife. Since I was now wearing my Last Piece Of Backup Outside Footgear the last three weeks, I’ve been meaning to try to find replacements at a thrift store, or at least get my sizes from a new shoe/sneaker store, as the last time I had myself sized was in the 20th century. I’m now pondering how to get to such a store. Try to temporarily tape up one of these pairs of dead footwear somehow or other for one last use, I guess.
Gary lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, which had an Atmospheric River land on it this past weekend out of which several inches of rain precipitated, which makes walking around in duct-taped sneakers especially poignant. It’s supposed to rain again in a week. It’s hard enough to keep yourself afloat in the US with no real income if your feet aren’t swaddled in moist duct tape.
As someone who’s in slightly better shape — read “currently supporting two people on a freelance writer’s income” — I can imagine being exactly here in about three years. You burn through your personal economic seed corn. I had a good fulltime job about five years ago, and I am still taking advantage of the pair of boots I bought back then with that, um, what was it called? Oh right: “Disposable income.”
At some point in 2015 I may be reaching for the duct tape myself, who knows?
Gary’s got a PayPal account (the Other Evil Empire) reachable through the PayPal buttons in the Amygdala sidebar. A hundred of us giving him $3 each would mean he can get a pair of sturdy shoes and pair of sneakers. It’s maybe not the biggest evil in the world, or the cause with the greatest degree of personal suffering, but come on. He’s one of us. He doesn’t have shoes because he’s fallen through the United States’ otherwise unimpeachable social safety net. That’s just wrong.
And he doesn’t even live in Washington state, so he can’t use dope as an excuse! Or maybe it’s a hint that after the passage of the liberal marijuana laws, he’s moving to Seattle. Sean Carroll has announced that he’s leaving his site on Discover and moving back to Preposterous Universe, so update your blogrolls. His excuse is that he’s happiest with the least personal responsibility, which I think is code for ordering a pizza and putting a Lord of the Rings marathon on the DVD player.
Which I’m down with, man. High five!
I gave an exam yesterday, and worked like a madman to get it all graded. I’m giving another exam today (In a different class! Not the same one! What kind of sadist do you think I am?), and I expect I’ll be frantically working to get it all graded quickly, too. Sometimes it’s good to be on a network where other people write stuff when I’m too busy to contribute.
If ever Calvin Trillin disappears under mysterious circumstances, I think the police might want to look into The Digital Cuttlefish.
Comrade Physioproffe makes Rigatoni With Sausage, Tomato, and Goat Milk Ricotta. I skipped breakfast this morning. This just isn’t fair.
Greta Christina is off the drugs and is beginning to get antsy. Somebody harsh her mellow so she’ll start writing ferociously again.
Hank Fox took a few pictures at Eschaton.
Jason Thibeault has accomplished nothing other than playing his video games. Jason, clean your room and take out the garbage! Right now!
Wait, what? Elizabeth Cady Stanton fought for women’s right to vote while opposing suffrage for blacks and immigrants? Sikivu Hutchinson, why must you always shatter my delusions? Fortunately, she also names some new heroes.
I’ve noticed that a scientist declaring that they believe in god seems to be major news. So has Taslima Nasrin. She’s kind of cranky about it. So am I.
Zinnia Jones doesn’t seem to be much of a fan of Dinesh D’Souza, although the Salvation Army is.
Brianne Bilyeu wants to tell everyone how to have sex.
Aron Ra is a movie star! He’s been cast against type as a “random biker” in fantastic new film, The Zombie Christ. I already have doubts about its accuracy.
I cannot resist linking to Miriam’s link roundup in my link roundup. If we all did this, we could turn the whole internet into a virtual Klein bottle, and next thing you know we’d pop into a wormhole and travel to another dimension. It’s good to have aspirations.
Those damned evil atheists. Now NonStampCollector is fantasizing about Hitler winning his war. (This summary may not be entirely accurate.)
Avicenna answers 15 questions about atheists. How could he have answered them without the brain god gave him, huh? Checkmate, atheists!
Hey! Near-Earth Object is still not on the FtB main page! I shall have to nag the powers-that-be about that.
Meanwhile, you can read about Paul Fidalgo’s gadget fetish. If you’ve followed him on twitter, you know that all he talks about are a) children and b) electronic toys. I fear for his family if Apple ever comes out with iBaby. Now watch: he’s going to scan all the Mac rumors sites for news about iBaby.
Yeah, we’ve grown again. Now we’ve added Miriam to beat us all up if we get out of line.
Nothing to worry about, it’s just Paul Fidalgo joining FtB.
I’m in the process of moving my blog Coyote Crossing to a new home. As a result, I’ve been spending odd 20-minute spans in between tasks over the last few days importing archival blog entries into WordPress. WordPress is pretty good at importing other content management systems’ data, but my blog had been run on ExpressionEngine, which is not at all good at exporting data. That’s just one of the reasons I’m abandoning the software.
As it turns out, I am not the first person to make the decision to leave ExpressionEngine. And because of that, there are a couple well-established work-arounds for importing your data from EE into WordPress. The one I chose was to adapt someone else’s template which output blog entries into something close enough to Movable Type export format that WordPress will happily gobble it up.
It works okay, but due to memory limitations and the fact that I’ve got almost ten years’ worth of blog entries on the old site, I’ve had to do it in chunks. One such 2-megabyte chunk just refused to import, no matter how often I made sure there weren’t any trailing spaces or odd characters in the text file being imported. The new database just found that file too hard to swallow.
I figured out one of the posts in that chunk had been slightly corrupted — a bug that comes up with EE now and then having to do with the database record for the URL title. I got the entry number and went to fix it. I found the post, one from January 2007. Swallowed hard and cursed to myself.
It’s safe and sound on the new site now.
I need a drink.
I don’t know how long it will be up (maybe permanently), but Lousy Canuck is now using the new site redesign template. Take a look, it may soon be sweeping through all the FtB sites.
If you’re concerned about the font size (I am), I’m also pretty sure I’ll be able to tweak little things like that once it’s in place. I’m kind of fond of the familiar 14pt Georgia I use here.
It’s Thanksgiving! The Americans around here are going to be slowing down to gorge themselves, and I’m going to be grading! But there’s still lots of stuff to read.
Chris Rodda has a horrific story of a Christian poultry processing company’s labor abuses. If I were eating a turkey tonight, I’d be worried that it was the product of a crippled child forced to work by a sneering Christian overlord. But I’m not (vegetarian meal here), so it’s all OK!
Digital Cuttlefish has another war on Christmas story for you all. He’s been doing that a lot lately…while also flogging his merch.
Steven Andrew features a very confused Pat Robertson, who admits that the words from God he thought he heard predicting the election were wrong. Don’t expect an epiphany in which he realizes maybe he hasn’t been hearing the word of god at all, ever.
Alethian Worldview finds Christians wailing over the imminent death of Christianity. It shouldn’t be surprising that an apocalyptic death cult is full of people obsessed with their own demise.
Finally! A relevant post! Stephanie Zvan posts a pie crust recipe.
Jason Thibeault skeptically shoots down the myth that tryptophan in the thanksgiving turkey makes you sleepy. I’m having pad thai with tofu, so I wasn’t worried about it.
Dana Hunter is having a godless thanksgiving…and finds someone other than an invisible sky fairy to thank.
Ian Cromwell hates freedom of religion. Not because you shouldn’t be free to practice your religion, but because it’s already covered by freedom of speech. Why does religion get special attention?
Kate Donovan seems to have had a good time at Skepticon, and especially enjoyed Rebecca Watson’s talk.
Aron Ra is being attacked by a rabid Lutheran. That dog gets put down calmly and with a minimum of fuss.
Zinnia Jones is an ABOMINATION!
Natalie Reed asks us all to remember the victims of hate driven by race and gender.
As everyone knows, and the Montreal police have finally figured out (amazing — he was only spamming the Montreal city police twitter account in addition to all the usual targets), Dennis Markuze has been a naughty young man again, and now he’s been arrested — and released — again.
A Saint-Laurent man has been charged, again, with abusing social media to threaten people who express their views online.
Dennis Markuze, 40, faces three new charges, including one alleging he violated the conditions of a sentence he received in May for the same offence. He was also charged with threatening the Montreal police officer who was investigating claims from several of Markuze’s past victims. Those victims alleged that Markuze’s threats have intensified in recent months.
This isn’t a case where the police should be so involved, I think — Markuze has some serious mental health issues that need more professional help.
