I really, really don’t understand the minds behind this: I’m getting a bunch of messages from sniggering puerile slymepit types who have jumped on a hashtag bandwagon, #wherespzmyers. They’ve got a photo of my face photoshopped onto a plush doll, and then they photoshop that into various scenes.
Warning: the very first image that turned up at that link above is a smiling picture of me spliced into a graphic ISIS beheading photo.
I got this email this morning, and I think it was misaddressed — it’s intended for the people who comment here, not me. Don’t you people have one common address that people can write to? Anyway, I’ll let you all deal with it for a change.
It’s a big day tomorrow! First, Jamie Kilstein’s and Allison Kilkenny’s book, NEWSFAIL, comes out. I’ve pre-ordered it for my Kindle, so I’m kind of hoping my iPad will go beep at 12:01 am tonight. You can read an interview with the two of them on Skepchick right now (I’m not big enough to score an interview with them, or to appear on Citizen Radio, even though Jamie was once the opening act for a lecture I did in DC <drinks whole bottle of bourbon, wades into the ocean, drowns, weeping>).
I was sort of vaguely listening to the chatter of the hordelings from my lofty perch near the continental divide (the North-South one) when I heard discussions of food, and one word leapt out at me: peas. There is much conversation about peas in the comments here, so I assume you must all love them as much as I do. So I bought peas, many peas, and I had dried peas soaking overnight, and this morning I made pea soup by tossing in carrots and onions and oregano and garlic and a bit of salt and a few other secret ingredients, and I set it to simmer.
This is the lounge. You can discuss anything you want, but you will do it kindly.
Status: Heavily Moderated; Previous thread
I haven’t read the book since the 1970s, but mainly what I remember about Mario Puzo’s The Godfather was how badly written it was…I guess I happily forgot the details. But now Mallory Ortberg has to go and remind me.
Really, the movie might be a classic, but man, the book was terrible.
There is a place for academic arguments — but in the real world, we have an obligation to take arguments that harm people seriously, and advocate honestly for what we really believe. If you’re talking about torture, for instance, you do no one any favor by inventing improbable-to-impossible scenarios and then making justifications that will be used in far less justifiable situations.
Last year, there was a rather ridiculous tempest in a tea cup in which our local conservative “alternative” student newspaper, the Morris North Star, published some sick racist crap, and I suggested that the campus ought to throw the paper out, and then they threatened to sue me. Nothing happened, except that the North Star stopped publishing for the rest of the semester — I think they probably ran out of money.
This year, I thought we might be rid of them. Their lawyers had gone silent, and no more crappy editions appeared. Unfortunately, our luck has run out, and new slimy stuff has appeared.
I thought I’d do them a favor. Since they’re so touchy about people taking their paper — they now say on the cover, First Copy: FREE. All subsequent copies are $5
— I thought I’d encourage you all to take zero copies. But if you’re really curious, I thought I’d be nice and summarize the content for you.
You must read her discussion of the ‘Kool-Aid Point’. There are a lot of interesting insights there.
