It’s the dismal season

We went for a walk at Glacial Lakes State Park today, and we’re in the unpleasant in-betweens: the snow is gone, it was a pleasant 20°C, but everything is dead brown. Behold the majestic natural beauty of Minnesota in the spring time!

glaciallakes

Also, we walked around that body of water, which is called “Mountain Lake”. There are no mountains here. The elevation is 371 meters. Oh, Minnesotans…

The Irish holy war is unrequited

quityou

I thought I was done with this nonsense way back in early November; I wrote a post summarizing Michael Nugent’s bizarrely obsessive behavior, and washed my hands of him. Little did I know, he wasn’t done: for the past 6 months he’s gotten increasingly stalkerish, and is still hammering out thousands of words complaining about me. And now he’s complaining that I am diminishing the effectiveness of Atheist Ireland and the worldwide atheist cause! Perhaps if he quit embarrassing himself and his organization with his crusade, he’d be less of a joke.

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Wow, that was odd

doppelganger

I just got called by Newsmax asking if I’d be willing to do an interview about some recent controversial comments I’d made on Twitter — I had to stop for a moment and ask what comments those were. Then he reminded me of a comment I’d made about burning people in ovens in response to a story about some kids with swastikas on their t-shirts, and for a moment I was hopelessly confused — I know I’m getting old, but is my mind starting to go that badly? This was totally unfamiliar, and I had no idea what this was all about.

We went back and forth for a bit, with my interviewer trying to get some clarity on “my” anti-semitic remarks, and me struggling to understand what the hell he’s talking about. And then he starts reading out this tweet to me, and asking if I’m POZMyers…what? Who?

Eventually it makes sense. There’s someone with the Twitter account “POZMyers”, using my photos, claiming to be me, and babbling racist crap on Twitter. And there are some people who actually think it’s me, and are complaining!

I’ve reported this blatant and malicious impersonation. I wonder if Twitter will do anything about it?

Oh, in case you’re wondering — I also lost out on my chance to do an interview with Newsmax in which I complain about The Jews.

My weekends

I’ve mentioned before that my wife and I are coaching our wise son in driving on the weekends. He’s wise because he wasn’t at all interested in driving, still isn’t, but only needs the instruction to make getting to work more manageable in a place with poor mass transit (he and I will both be happy in the next decade when smart self-driving cars become available). Anyway, here’s a taste of what being a driving instructor is like.

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Sometimes, the spam is kind of flattering

I just got sent a listing for a TWIN SCREW MOTOR YACHT WITH BOWTHRUSTER, only €185,000. It’s a little bit out of the price range of a college professor, even one who gets a little cash on the side from blogging, but it’s still nice that someone thinks I might be in the market for my very own personal yacht. If any of my readers is shopping for yachts right now, let me know and I can pass along the details.

Party in July at our place!

Good news, everyone! Our application has been approved, and that means that FtB will be sponsoring a party room at Convergence on 2-5 July. We’re going to do the typical things one does at a nerd party: we’re planning on a table for games, we’ll have healthy fresh fruit and unhealthy quantities of liquor available, and inspired by those clever people at Skepchick who did this last year, we’re going to have some afternoon salons in which we discuss deep sciencey things.

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