Proof that God exists!

Here it is, the proof from breast ironing. Simple selectionist models can’t explain why human beings would mutilate secondary sexual characteristics and genitalia, therefore god exists. We also know the Christian right is exactly correct: God really does obsess over people’s sex lives, and he is a kind of sick pervert who likes to hurt children.

We can also suspect that he’s probably male, since testicle flattening, penis knotting, and scrotum binding don’t seem to come up often in his prescribed lists of genital abuses.

So that’s where he got his preternatural powers

If you were still wondering what kind of scientist Batman is, here’s the roundup, along with the best Batman origin story ever.

Sing along with Cthulhu

Feeling musical this morning? Stephanie Ching sent me links to some lyrics. An old User Friendly cartoon combines Cthulhu, zombies, and brains, and then there’s the unspeakable: this guy has written a song for John Tesh. If anything is going to rouse the sleeping Old Ones that lie in lost R’Lyeh, it’s got to be New Age caterwauling.

Quick! To scrub the thought of New Age Lite muzak out of your brain, Unfogged provides a cure: visualize your scrotum rupturing. Think about epididymitis and Fournier’s gangrene. There, can’t you feel the nightmare ebbing?

The “What kind of scientist is Batman” problem

This new strange question is sweeping the scienceblogs: “what kind of scientist is Batman?”

The answer is obvious.

[Read more…]

Mixed signals

According to Boingboing, this is a sign warning people of peril. Why do I feel that this is a sign beckoning me to rush on and jump in the water?

Mac tech bleg

I have a DVD of The Horror Express, starring Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee, and Telly Savalas. There’s a short clip of a conversation I’d like to extract as an mpeg or quicktime movie—even extracting just the audio would be nice.

It’s a classic. Christopher Lee is explaining his discovery of an ancient fossil to a beautiful woman:

Lee: That box of bones, madam, could have solved many of the riddles of science. If the theory of evolution is confirmed, if the science of biology is revolutionized, if the very origin of man is determined…

Beautiful woman: I have heard of evolution. It is immoral.

Lee: It is a fact. And there is no morality in a fact.

It’s intercut, by the way, with scenes of Peter Cushing doing an autopsy on one of the victims of the fossil (it’s a horror movie, of course—the fossil comes to life and wanders about a train in pre-revolution Siberia, sucking the minds out of people with its red glowing eyes. There are also zombie cossacks), sawing open a dead guy’s skull to expose his brain.

They just don’t make movies like that anymore.

Anyway, if anyone can tell me how to pull out this very short (less than a minute) segment on a Mac OS X machine, I’ll put it on the web. You know you all want to hear Saruman/Count Dooku/Dracula endorsing evolution.

Your suggestions worked, and I’ve now got the movie converted and edited out the part I wanted. It did take hours for the decoding to finish, but I just let it run in the background, so it wasn’t too painful.

Now, if you want, you can listen to Christopher Lee declare that evolution is a fact, and there is no morality in a fact (250K .mov audio file).

Infectious agony

I succumbed to the tempting link Corrente waved around, and clicked through to see Connie Chung’s farewell to some cable show I never heard of before. I suffered horribly, so it’s only fair that you share my pain.