By way of Feministing, here’s a rather irritating tool to rank your site for it’s “bloglebrity”. It’s pink and it’s illustrated with a photo of Paris Hilton.
I hate it. Here, I’ve fixed it.
You can add your own photo of Barbara McClintock or Rosalind Franklin to the background.
Oh! Respectful Insolence uncovers more woo-woo nonsense, a scheme called Global Orgasm that urges everyone to get it on on one particular day.
The intent is that the participants concentrate any thoughts during and after orgasm on peace. The combination of high-energy orgasmic energy combined with mindful intention may have a much greater effect than previous mass meditations and prayers.
The goal is to add so much concentrated and high-energy positive input into the energy field of the Earth that it will reduce the current dangerous levels of aggression and violence throughout the world.
Exactly what is this “high-energy orgasmic energy” that will be injected into the earth’s “energy field”? How does it compare to, for instance, UV from the sun? I think that if you actually measured it, at best what you’d get is a negligible amount of extra heat. It will have exactly the same effect as mass meditations and prayers, i.e., none. Or perhaps we’ll now be told that science can have nothing to say about this business?
Haven’t these people ever heard of mass spawning? I think the prayers of a few copulating people are going to be totally swamped out by the pleas of corals, algae, echinoderms, etc., and if this stuff actually worked, the earth would be 99% ocean and humans would be extinct…and who wants to encourage a practice that urges you to have sex only once a year?
Worst of all, though, these people are usurping my holiday, Cephalopodmas. That’s right, all this woo-woo New Age nonsense is scheduled for 22 December. I say we need to steal it back: go ahead and have sex on Cephalopodmas, but out of appreciation for biodiversity, do something effective and use birth control.
Thinking about getting a pet? You should read Animal Reviews first, to see if it will fulfill your needs. For example, the review of the octopus suggests that I need one, right now.
Next, Octopi are what are known as Cephalopods, a science word meaning that they are constructed entirely out of squish, with no bones whatsoever. Sensational! Yet, unlike their clearly unmotivated cousins the clam and the spinach, they have managed to get themselves hold of tentacles. And not just two or three ‘bitty’ tentacles either, but eight great big ones sticking out of their drippy bodies, whipping out to grab fish and diver’s air tanks. The only deterrent at first sight is the octopus’ overwhelmingly cold demeanour, which is at once both silent and calculating, and radiates an aura of eerie menace.
Scientific accuracy isn’t exactly their strong point.
It’s all very nice that Elayne Riggs refers to me as an A-list blogger, but it’s not true. We weird scienceblog types have to be placed on a completely different alphabet, and I have decided that I want to be on the ζ-list. Mainly because I like the squiggle.
Update your blogrolls appropriately, please.
Also via Elayne, I had to try this site that lets you figure out where you’d end up if you dug a hole through the center of the earth. I have discovered that there is a place more remote, empty, and isolated than Morris, Minnesota: it’s the center of the Indian Ocean. Although it probably does have cephalopods, so it’s a bit of a toss-up.
What if Stan Lee worked for Chick Publications? You’d get apocalyptic tracts with giant planet-eating space men.
(via Pen-Elayne)
This is all you’re getting from me for a while. I just finished a 9 hour long meeting (freaking uncivilized, if you ask me), and next I have to go attend some god-awful Christian propaganda — my daughter is the stage manager for the high school production of “Joseph and the Technicolor Dreamcoat”, so I have to go — and I suspect my day is going to continue its trend of ongoing frustration and exasperation. It is in my best interests to avoid further posting to the web until the demons fade away.
I just hope I don’t rise up in the middle of this play, barking and howling in tongues, with my head spinning around on my neck. It could happen.
Please, Galactus, come eat me now.
This has got to be a devious plot. My wife has been known to tell me to dress more formally (it’s a polite way of pointing out that I’m a slob), and in particular, that I should wear…a tie… more often. Now a reader sends me a link to ties with cephalopods and brains on them, and it’s the month before Cephalopodmas. This is horrible. I don’t want to even be tempted by a tie.
Look at this card a reader wrote me about. It’s a sweet, cute, innocent card, perfect for Cephalopodmas.
On the other hand—O Great Old Ones, this is so horrid I shudder to mention it—another reader sent me an ad. An ad so ghastly, I won’t put it on the front page here…you’ll have to click through to see it. If you’re squeamish or delicate of constitution, do not read the rest of this post. The War on Cephalopodmas is on.
After South Park made such a botch of its portrayal, this might be some vindication: Salon names Richard Dawkins as one of the sexiest men living. It’s a bit gushy, I’m afraid.
Wonder is sexy. Knowledge is sexy. And embodying both as much as any man in the world today is a man in a tweed jacket riding his bike around the Oxford University campuses, the damp English breeze sweeping a curtain of silver hair from the delicate bones of his face. Yes, those cheekbones, those piercing eyes, that pursed bow of a mouth — but that brain, oh that brain, oh, god, that brain — is what makes Richard Dawkins, evolutionary biologist and the most famous atheist in the world, the sexiest man around.
Dawkins is the professor I never had an affair with, whose very sentence structure threatens to weaken my concentration on the content of his words. Call me deluded: I ache for his atheism; I reel from his reasoning. He is my James Bond, a well-attired, fearless seeker of truth in the face of nihilism. And yet, for all his pedigree, he enthusiastically appeared this fall on “South Park” to spread the gospel of science, his dashing cartoon figure covered in the feces of a teacher who scoffs at evolution.* While scatology isn’t my thing, straddling the highest of the ivory highbrow with the glorious lowest of the low: Now that’s sexy.
I dream of his perfectly-accented voice — Oxbridge softened by a childhood spent in, sigh, East Africa — whispering to me from his latest book, “The God Delusion,” a defense of endless curiosity in the face of omnipresent theism. “If the demise of god will leave a gap, different people will fill it in different ways. My way includes a good dose of science, the honest and systematic endeavor to find out the truth about the real world.” Take me with you, Richard: You put the “sex” in sexagenarian. Let us clinch in a godless embrace, crying out to what we know does not exist, searching, searching evermore.
Personally, he’s not my type…but still, it’s good to see an atheist and a scientist described in such flattering terms.
*The article is incorrect to assume that Dawkins had anything at all to do with that South Park episode, though.
I’m not nominated for anything, praise Jebus.
Well, if they can have Mother Teresa in a bun, or Jesus in a tortilla, we can have an image of Charles Darwin in a tree.
I fear it might be a case of mistaken identity, though—it looks more like Karl Marx to me.
