Kilstein will kill

Jamie Kilstein is putting on a comedy show in New York on 2 July, titled No War, No God, No Nickelback. You should go if you can. He’s recommended by that polite, soft-spoken gentleman AC Grayling, so you know exactly what to expect: calm, cerebral, gentle humor, quietly skewering social mores.

Yeah, right. Watch out for a GOATS ON FIRE level of outrageousness. Everyone should go and make him rich and famous, because he’s the one comedian I trust will aspire to someday having a comedy tour featuring a giant inflatable vulva*. He does need to get really rich and famous first, though.

If I were in NY on that day, I’d go.

*He doesn’t actually have such a thing, and hasn’t even mentioned wanting one, but as a fan I think it will eventually be a necessary appliance for his stadium tour.

Bill Donohue goes gaga

Bill Donohue was looking awfully silly demanding that the Empire State Building celebrate Mother Teresa’s birthday, so I guess he needed a new cause. He found one. The Catholic League is outraged by Lady Gaga’s new video.

Lady Gaga is playing Madonna copy cat, squirming around half-naked with half-naked guys, abusing Catholic symbols–they’re always Catholic symbols–while bleating out “Alejandro” enough times to induce vomit. Dressed occasionally as a nun in a glossy-red habit, the Madonna wannabe flashes the cross, swallows a rosary and manages to get raped by her S&M boyfriends. Hence, she has now become the new poster girl for American decadence and Catholic bashing, sans the looks and talent of her role model.

Like Madonna, Lady Gaga was raised Catholic and then morphed into something unrecognizable. “So I suppose you could say I’m a quite religious woman that is very confused about religion,” she told Larry King last week.

That she is confused is an understatement. In any event, we hope she finds her way back home. In the meantime, Catholics will settle for her treating us like Muslims.

I’m actually a fan of Lady Gaga (Bill will not be surprised), so I had to zip over to youtube to see this. Here it is. It’s got something for everybody. Just imagine poor Bill Donohue watching it over and over, compelled to document this atrocity, a little bit of saliva drooling from his slack lips, while with one hand he clicks “replay” repeatedly.

Donohue does have a point, I hate to say. I watched the whole thing, with its muscular young men gyrating in jackboots and tight shorts and nothing else, the weird headgear, the sadomasochistic imagery, the black leather uniforms, the flaming homoeroticism, and I was thinking, yeah, all that does remind me of Catholicism. I didn’t think it was Catholic bashing, though. I thought it was a recruiting video.

I want to see this movie

It’s called Agora, and it’s about Hypatia, who was a kind of non-Christian martyr, murdered by a religious mob. Here’s one account of her death:

And in those days there appeared in Alexandria a female philosopher, a pagan named Hypatia, and she was devoted at all times to magic, astrolabes and instruments of music, and she beguiled many people through Satanic wiles…A multitude of believers in God arose under the guidance of Peter the magistrate…and they proceeded to seek for the pagan woman who had beguiled the people of the city and the prefect through her enchantments. And when they learnt the place where she was, they proceeded to her and found her…they dragged her along till they brought her to the great church, named Caesareum. Now this was in the days of the fast. And they tore off her clothing and dragged her…through the streets of the city till she died. And they carried her to a place named Cinaron, and they burned her body with fire.

She’s definitely a wonderful subject for a movie, they’ve got a big name, Rachel Weisz, playing the leading role, and the film is done and looking for a distributor. No one wants to give it wide release. I wonder why? It could be that it’s badly made (not likely, since it was the highest grossing film in Spain for 2009), or it could be that a movie about an intelligent godless woman who is persecuted and slaughtered by a mob of mindless fanatical Christians with the approval of the church is a poor fit to the American political climate.

SyFy must die

Is it possible to take out a hit on a channel? Last night I skipped through a few television channels and was briefly intrigued to see A Princess of Mars on SyFy! I had to watch a few minutes to discover that it was a heretical abomination which must be burned and its television creators hunted down and punished. I saw enough to notice that:

  • The green Martians were made up with some cheesy lumpy appliance over their heads; their tusks wobbled like rubber every time they talked.
  • The green Martians had only two arms. Two! They were also runts, far short of 12 feet tall. I tuned out before I could see how amputated the banths or calots were.
  • Dejah Thoris was not naked. Nor red. And she was played by Traci Lords, who looked exhausted beyond her years.
  • The dialogue was hokey beyond belief…aw, OK. They get a pass on that. That was true to the book.

The horror. My father was a major fan of Burroughs’ works, and I grew up on Tarzan and John Carter. I cannot believe the botch SyFy made of the story, ripping all the romance and exotic weirdness out of it.

It’s also sad because there are rumors of a big budget version in the works; let’s hope this quickie lump of SyFy emesis does not chill the market for it.

Just to add to the sadness, while looking for a few of the classic images of Burroughs’ Barsoom, I learned that Frank Frazetta died just last month. Noooo!

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Minchin morning

At the youtube page for this video, it’s recommended that you buy his DVD. I agree! I want it! But, unfortunately, I only found one Minchin DVD at Amazon, and it won’t play in the US. Any suggestions? Anyone? When I see Tim Minchin in London in the fall, do I have to beat him up, steal his computer, bootleg everything he has encoded on it, and get rich selling the stolen data on the internet? No, that wouldn’t be nice at all, especially since he’d probably beat me up and then write a satirical song about me that would mean I could never leave my house ever again.

Where’s the Minchin HBO special?

Wake up from Slumberland

I was catching up on Narbonic this morning, and she linked to an animated Little Nemo cartoon by Winsor McCay — from 1911. I was impressed. We all need a little hundred-year-old psychedelia to start the morning.

McCay was a pioneer of animation — you might also enjoy the famous Gertie the Dinosaur, or even the rather jingoistic Sinking of the Lusitania. They’re all a bit quaint and slow-moving by modern standards, but then again, you have to appreciate that each frame was hand drawn and hand colored by McCay himself — it took him a year to make a 5-minute cartoon.

In which I have to defend Morgan Freeman

People were apparently rather peeved about Morgan Freeman’s appearance on the Daily Show on Wednesday night (that link is to the whole episode; Freeman appears at about 15 minutes in). He’s narrating a new science show that, in the clip shown, seems to be mainly about physics and cosmology. After talking a bit about the show, they get down to the problematic bit: Stewart asks if scientists know what happened at the beginning of the universe, and Freeman basically says they don’t; that there are different scientists with different ideas, some contentiousness, and some outright ignorance about the details.

This is not offensive. That’s the truth. I hope no one was bothered by that.

I get the sense that what did bother people, though, was that Stewart pressed a bit and asked Freeman what scientists tell him when faced with stuff they don’t know, and here’s how Freeman replied:

Whatever scientists don’t know becomes the god factor.

Again, Freeman is right! This is what happens so often: there are many things we don’t understand, and some people, even some distinguished scientists, are prone to look at the gaps in our knowledge and announce that that is where god lurks. It’s the standard ‘god of the gaps’ logic, and it’s bogus, but it really does happen and there are a lot of scientists who indulge in it. Look at Einstein, who was constantly flinging out god references for all the mysteries of the universe, despite the fact that he was an unbeliever himself.

Now it’s a short clip, a seven minute interview, and of course they don’t get into meanings and implications at all, so Freeman’s interpretation is completely ambiguous. If he’s trying to say our ignorance is evidence for a god, then he’s full of it and we can point and laugh at the movie star floundering out of his depth…but he didn’t say that at all. In the context, I took it as more of an admission that there is still a lot of god of the gaps thinking even in the scientific community, and that’s entirely true.

So don’t get mad at Morgan Freeman just yet. Roll your eyes at the scientists who bleat out “God!” every time they’re baffled by something, instead. Save your scorn for the nonsense of people like Tipler and Davies and even Kaku. They’re the ones feeding mystical fluff into our perception of reality.