It’s getting ridiculous. After recent events in which Facebook openly declares that lying in political ads is fine — as long as you pay them — they’re cracking down on…peach and eggplant emojis?

Facebook and Instagram are now prohibiting the use of peach and aubergine emojis in sex-related posts and nude images, reports indicate.

The new rules form part of the platforms’ new Community Standards which were implemented at some stage between 7 September and now, according to adult industry website XBIZ.com.

I’d much rather see people freely posting weakly veiled sexual images with peaches used to suggest genitals, than I would coded posts about killing Jews, but I guess Facebook has those priorities reversed.

I’m still trying out MeWe. It’s far from perfect, but at least it doesn’t have Facebook’s hypocrisy problem.

That guy with the bulging biceps is Kirill Tereshin, a “body builder” and MMA wanna-be. He looks strange; his body looks a bit like mine when I was in my teens, skinny and unathletic, but his upper arms are inhumanly huge. He skips leg day, doesn’t do cardio, and his clever idea for working his upper body is to inject his arms with massive amounts of oil. That isn’t muscle, it’s just inert goo squirted in there to inflate their size. I can think of a lot of physiological reasons that that is a bad idea, but here’s another one: he developed an inflated notion of his strength and decided to enter a mixed martial arts fight.

Yikes.

You can watch the whole fight on video at the link. Don’t worry, it won’t take much of your time.

It’s tragic. This guy is doing real harm to himself and is living with a deep delusion. He doesn’t need a coach, he needs mental health assistance.

I woke up this morning to a strange sound from my kitchen — an angry churring, punctuated with little squeaks. My first thought was that a squirrel had gotten in, or perhaps a large bat, so I investigated. The sound was coming from my oven, an ancient GE electric model. It sounded like it was coming from inside the oven, so I cautiously opened it, prepared in case an angry rodent leapt out at me. Nothing. By now the noise had been going on so long and was so repetitive that I was suspecting it might be something mechanical, but I did have one final test.

I set the oven to broil, 500°F, and waited.

Hey, I’m a scientist, baby. Gotta do the straightforward experiment, no matter how cruel.

(I would have turned it off if I heard screams from inside.)

Anyway, I got it hot, to a temperature no mammal could survive. As the temperature rose, the noise continued unchanged — no frantic scurryings, no rise in pitch, and most importantly, no screeching beast with eyes ablaze and fur smoking erupted from the works, hot for revenge. The oven just kept chittering at me.

Then, after reaching the appropriate temperature and sitting there for 5 minutes, it stopped. The beast within was satisfied. Maybe it was just cold? Or maybe it’s something mechanical. I’m looking at this antique timer built in to it, which doesn’t work. Maybe something ticked over inside it, and it decided to finally let me know the turkey from Thanksgiving, 1961 was done with its dying, febrile buzzer.

This is in many ways an unsatisfying outcome. It would probably be easier to get a demon exorcised from this hulking ugly beast that was installed in the 1950s than to get it repaired or replaced.

I just discovered that Eric Gill, creator of the reasonably popular typeface Gill Sans, was one weird dude.

Arthur Eric Rowton Gill ARA (/ɡɪl/;[1] 22 February 1882 – 17 November 1940) was an English sculptor, typeface designer, and printmaker, who was associated with the Arts and Crafts movement. His religious views and subject matter are generally viewed as being at odds with his sexual behaviour, including his erotic art and alleged sexual abuse of his daughters, sisters, and dog.

I think we need a stronger word than “alleged” there. He wrote about it in his personal diaries, and further, his daughter discussed it frankly.

I don’t know that his behavior was at odds with his religious views, either. He was Catholic, but Catholicism covers a broad range, and he favored a socialist flavor of the faith, which has modern conservative Catholics angry, and his incestuous and bestial behavior are good reasons to flog him. Well, and also for good Catholics to “analyze” his erotic art.

Before pointing out a webpage with his works, I feel it necessary to give a prudent warning. Gill’s drawings are extremely indecent. I don’t recommend that anyone look at them. But since I was making a serious investigation into exactly who Eric Gill really was, I went to a site and analyzed some of his prints. I can assure you that the critics were not exaggerating. The prints contain many nudes, including pornographic and blasphemous ones. For instance, some depict male and female nude saints with their respective halos performing the sexual act; another entitled God Sending shows a naked and sexually aroused Christ descending to earth; yet another entitled Earth Receiving shows what appears to be the same Christ fornicating with a woman, possibly representing the earth.

All that sounds just lovely to me, while the bit about having sex with is close relatives creeps me out. Ick. What a mess of a man.

I haven’t been tangling with Catholics very much lately, but if I do, I guess I’ll have to quote them in Gill Sans from now on.

I have determined that attractiveness is a recessive trait.

‘Cause those grandkids sure didn’t get their good looks from my side of the family.

I gave up on The Walking Dead. It was slow-paced, repetitive torture porn with a cast of unlikeable characters. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead was a classic that reinvigorated the genre by attaching themes of infection and social collapse to an existing idea, but his stuff was getting formulaic in the sequels — it’s gotten calcified and uncreative. I liked Jarmusch’s The Dead Don’t Die, but it was more of a knowing, self-referential wink at all zombie films, with a cast that knew all of the zombie tropes and went through the expected motions. It ought to have punctured the whole genre and ended it, but I think the title was another self-aware joke. Dead movie ideas don’t die, they get endlessly recycled.

There’s another way we know zombie movies are creatively bankrupt: we’ve entered the “Abbot and Costello meets…” phase of their existence. The fear is gone, the plots are predictable, so let’s milk it for comedy now. Worse still, we’re getting sequels to mocking comedy takes on the zombie movies.

Yeah, I saw Zombieland: Double Tap last night. It shambled onto the screen like a microwaved platter of dried-out raw brains, and it strained to provide some manic flavor to old jokes and random plot shifts, tired and pointless cameos, and a feeble attempt to add some challenge by saying that zombies had “evolved” and there was a new type that was harder to kill…but that just meant they had to fire their big guns with infinite ammunition a dozen times to achieve the same effect, a dead splattered zombie. Dreary, unfunny, and I don’t care how often Woody Harrelson yells, throws a tantrum, and blows stuff up, totally lacking in tension.

I have a better title for it: Zombieland: Tapped Out.

What an insight! Why go to class when you can just listen to Joe Rogan?

Why spend my time sitting in two anthropology classes a week listening to some puppet talk about how the earliest advanced civilizations started around 7,000 years ago when one JRE episode with renowned egyptologist, Graham Hancock proves WITHOUT A DOUBT that highly advanced civilizations were around thousands of years before that? GOBEKLI TEPE, ANYONE? Has my anthropology professor ever talked to God through the use of Ayahuasca? I doubt it. Well Graham has, and he’s not charging me $20,000 a year to hear him talk.

How is anyone still paying for an education when a tool for personal development as effective and readily available as JRE exists?

At one episode a night, five days a week, that’s more than a full class load. Two semesters of that, summers off, for four years, and you’ve got one enlightened motherfucker on your hands. All courtesy of my personal spirit animal, Joe Rogan. And even at that pace there would be more than 200 more episodes left to digest.

I once listened to a Joe Rogan podcast, and it had the opposite effect on me — it was like that dumb meathead was reaching into my brain and shredding the information therein. I had to read a whole issue of Developmental Biology to recover. I think it’s really easy to teach people what they want to believe, not so easy to actually teach them things they don’t know.