Minneapolis is a lovely city, except for the geysers of blood erupting out of the sewer system. Don’t get the wrong idea, though—only some of it was human blood.
Minneapolis is a lovely city, except for the geysers of blood erupting out of the sewer system. Don’t get the wrong idea, though—only some of it was human blood.
What is this, silly religion day? I just got sent a link to this marvelous story of a young unemployed British fellow who became a goddess in India — he is now the incarnation of Bahucharaji, the patron of Indian eunuchs, and he goes around blessing people and curing their infertility. Apparently, Bahucharaji was an Indian princess who castrated her husband because he wasn’t interested in sex, and for that she was deified. Thank Lakshmi and Urvasi my wife is an unbeliever!
They call him Prema, for short. It means “Divine Love.” Hey, what a coincidence, that’s what “PZ” means, too!
Hindu pilgrims have no doubts about his powers. When we asked Bhanu Barot why she was so keen to receive Prema’s blessing, she said, simply: “Because she is a goddess.”
Another woman, Rekha, said she had travelled for days to be blessed by Steve. She added: “My sister-in-law came here and she got pregnant immediately. I am hoping the same will happen for me after receiving the blessing of the goddess.”
It must be <cough> magic.
Life isn’t all curry and rice beer, or exotic Indian beauties asking for assistance in getting pregnant. There’s also the professional jealousy.
A eunuch called Sudha said: “He is a fake. I checked and he still has a penis.
He is a male so can’t be a goddess. He shouldn’t give blessings.”
Ooooh, the little bitch.
(via Frolix-8)
Only the religious could turn a disaster into a mark in the plus column for God. Jim Downey has found an amazing series of books with some impressive titles, all with the point of giving credit to God for personal catastrophe:
One sure way to get your Important Message to me is to use the good old US Mail (although my email is much snappier now, thanks to previous suggestions), and sometimes I do get the strangest stuff. This time, it was a formal looking letter from an organization called “Campaign for the Children.” How can you possibly turn away a letter from someone who is for the children? You can’t, of course. Then once I started reading … well, this doesn’t seem to be a campaign for children after all.
This week in our regular collection of reader-submitted cephaloweirdness, the theme is “domesticity”.
I was asked my opinion of this strangely engrossing drawing titled “Man Thru History”. It’s one of those huge multi-paneled works with lots of little details that draw your eye in—I looked everywhere for Waldo but couldn’t find him. Anyway, here’s one panel out of 23:
While the details are fun to pore over, I can’t say that I’m impressed with it overall. There are too many distortions.
Anyway, it’s got next to nothing to do with history. Maybe it should have been titled “Comic book artist practices figure drawing.”
OK, I can understand copying Wikipedia and setting up your own special interest wikis all over the place—it’s an admission that your goals are too dorky or too stupid to survive outside your own special little incubator—but if you’re going to set up your own social networking site, why would you copy MySpace, the ugliest, most awkward, most annoying such site on the planet? It’s like declaring that not only do you lack any creativity or imagination, but that you are totally tasteless, too.
Behold: His Holy Space. It’s like an online ghetto for Christians. Take the cluttered, disorganized look of MySpace and drape it with Kincade paintings and animated doves and angels, and you’ve got His Holy Space. Why, I don’t know. Some things are just mysteries.
(via The Friendly Atheist)
Speaking of satire that’s hard to tell from religion, one of the cycles of the Mayan calendar ends in 2012, which is prompting some end-of-the-world hysteria, and even a movie:
Apparently, the whole world is going to change suddenly on 21 December, five years from now.
Armageddon is not what it used to be
I think there is going to be more outbreaks of telepathy
This is my favorite quote:
Whether or not time ends in 2012, we should be assuming it will so that we take care of business. Secondly and most important, don’t cancel your appointments for 2013.
The movie seems to be taking this nonsense seriously—they got a whole mob of astrologers and shamans and New Age kooks twittering away. I’m afraid I don’t believe it.
Besides, everyone knows the real catastrophe strikes 100 years later, in 2112. (I actually own that album, on vinyl, buried in a box somewhere. That’s a more apocalyptic omen than anything in this movie, I suspect.)
Baby-faced Burt Humburg passed along the word-of-the-day to me:
pogonotrophy (po-guh-NAW-truh-fee) noun
The growing of a beard.
[From Greek pogon (beard) + -trophy (nourishment, growth).]
Pogonology is the study of beards and pogonotomy is a fancy word for
shaving.
Now this sounds like news for Man Beard Blog (who will no doubt be pleased with the Greek etymology), but what is this? Have I got some reputation for facial hirsuteness (a word that is etymologically related to “horror”)? Is it a hint that I need to shave, errm, I mean pogonotomize myself?
More likely, it’s acute envy.
Besides, I’m proud to be indirectly affiliated with the Pogonophora, the bearded worms of the deep sea.