Sorry, gang, this thing is going around…
…but it’s entirely fake. Neither of those organizations exist, and it’s just a joke meme.
Or maybe Bachmann is sneakily throwing up a trial balloon to revive her political career?
Oh, good — both Tara Smith and Colin Purrington are a bit peeved with the recent episodes of The Walking Dead that have the survivors coming down with a nasty form of the flu, and their resident people sending them scurrying off to pillage local zombie-haunted pharmacies for…antibiotics. For shame.
They don’t mention the other things that bug me about that show, though. If the zombie plague is also viral, why aren’t they all turning into undead voracious brain eating monsters when they get splattered with zombie slime and goo and blood? They’re ripping up zombies right and left and practically bathing in disgusting fluids. Come on, people, hygiene.
Also, how long have they been wandering around Georgia? A year or two? Some of the zombies are portrayed as far advanced in decay, but others seem to be fairly fresh. Shouldn’t the zombie population be dropping off dramatically now? The pool of live humans from which new zombies could emerge is so drastically reduced that they ought to be dealing with little more than piles of ineffective rot and the very rare occasion when one of their own dies of natural causes and goes walking around hungrily.
Finally, Rick is a terrible, incompetent, awful leader. They’ve found one group of thriving humans in a town, led by a psycho tyrant — and there’s Rick’s poor struggling group who have been shredded by internal conflicts and have been succumbing steadily to attrition. The freakish violent Governor did a better job establishing a safe haven than Rick, and they destroyed it! When will the survivors learn that they’re being guided by a dangerous idiot?
You go, guys, but…what can I do to support a charity fundraiser for men’s health issues when the gimmick is to grow a moustache? It’s not as if I can grow a second one. I guess all I can do is urge all of you poor barefaced men to join Movember, and let your face do its manly thing.
But then, there’s the dilemma — I have to tell you to not shave it off in December, so you won’t be able to do it again. What’s with all these guys with naked lips, anyway? Don’t you get cold? How do you filter plankton?
I tried dancing to this but somehow I kept falling off the roof.
Those ghosthunter shows are all looking for evidence of an afterlife and of spirits hanging about to communicate with us, and finally a group of ghosthunters in Oklahoma have found it. They’ve been exploring a decrepit basement in an abandoned urban building — you know, the kind of place where teenagers might hang out and drink and get into mischief — and they left up a chalkboard, and when they weren’t around, messages appeared on it. Deep, cryptic, strange messages, so they must be from ghosties.
The lanky cowboy with the slow drawl is totally mystified by the paranormal message with its deep historical resonance scrawled on the board.
“THE CAKE IS A LIE.”
So profound. So inexplicable and enigmatic. I wonder what it means? Perhaps one of you will have insight into this perplexing arcane sign from another world.
I think it’s counterfeit.
I received a polite invitation from the makers of the History Channel show, Ancient Aliens. Here’s what they asked:
Dear Dr. Myers,
I’m working with Name Redacted on the show Ancient Aliens. We have a crew coming to Minnesota this week, most likely Wednesday, and we would like to find out if you would be available for an interview. We’d also like to speak with you on the phone briefly about some of the topics we’d be discussing (development of the brain, embryonic development, evolutionary development of reptiles and mammals) and make sure that they are topics you’d fell comfortable talking about. Is there a convenient time when we could speak with you on the phone?
Kind Regards,
Name Redacted
Associate Producer
Prometheus Studios
I considered it. I’m always happy to engage with people with wacky ideas — heck, if I was willing to talk to Ray Comfort, you know I’m open to conversation — but I’d only seen a few snippets of this program and heard about it by reputation. So this evening, before I replied, I tuned in to the History Channel website to get an idea of what I’d be getting into.
I was aghast. It was the same nonsense I’d seen presented at the Paradigm Symposium this past weekend, in a very glossy and professionally done format. I congratulate Prometheus Studios on their skill in turning out superficially slick and attractive programs. The content, though…the content. It was just a series of ludicrous assertions of the most absurd claims of gods and aliens and extraterrestrial conspiracies and outright nonsense. Not once did I see any skepticism expressed. Mainstream academics were treated as dogmatic ignoramuses who couldn’t see the power of totally unsubstantiated hypotheses about aliens.
I could foresee how any material I might give them would be treated. So this is what I wrote back.
I actually know quite a bit about those topics, evo devo and neuroscience are my specialties. However, having viewed a few of your programs, I doubt very much that my skeptical view — that the processes of the development of the brain are entirely natural, that they do not support any claims of extraterrestrial intervention, or that humans lack any exceptional capabilities that require a design hypothesis to explain them — would actually survive the editing process to make it on air. In fact, I notice a remarkably complete absence of any critical evaluation of the rather bizarre “theories” that tend to get promoted in your programming, so I don’t even see how my expertise could contribute.
After due consideration, I’d have to say that no, I’d rather not contribute to the program, and that there’s no point to wasting your time or mine.
Thank you for the invitation. I’d wish you well in your work, but seriously — your show is credulous, ridiculous, and offensively ignorant of any reasonable understanding of science. If you’re ever involved in programming that actually contributes to human understanding, rather than undermining it, please feel free to contact me then.
Willing as I am to have a conversation with people with wild & weird ideas, it was just too obvious that my side of the conversation wouldn’t be useful to them…and couldn’t possibly appear on their program.
Also, all of the people on their show enthusiastically promoting aliens were clearly total wackaloons, and I’d be embarrassed to be associated with them.
It started out that I was just reading this silly piece about some show called Duck Dynasty, and then I followed a link to “Power is on the side of the beard”: Masculinity and Facial Hair in Nineteenth-Century America. Well, yes, I thought. Power. Obviously power. But wait…
…the measures American men took to distinguish themselves from women politically, socially, and visually make sense: boxy clothing and bushy beards were reactions to women’s changing role in American public life. Although men in Europe and the United States had long written—even in times of overwhelming beardlessness—about how beards marked the male members of their species as strong, manly, powerful, and wise, it was only once women began entering “their” public that American men started to cultivate the facial hair they had publically revered (but personally scorned) for generations. Facial hair was a visual and visceral way for men to distinguish themselves from women—to codify a distinctly male appearance when other traditional markers of masculinity were no longer stable or certain.
In the second half of the nineteenth century, beards thus emerged as a key method for American men to demonstrate their masculinity to themselves, to women, and to each other.
Uh, actually, true confession: I grew a beard because I’m kind of a homely guy, and something that would cover more of my face would be a plus. I dreamed of achieving the Cousin It look, but alas, my eyebrows never quite took off.
It gets worse:
By the second half of the nineteenth century, American men had made it clear what it meant for a man to have a beard: it gave him power, it conferred authority, and it allowed him to demonstrate his masculinity. In other words, facial hair turned a man into a “true man.”
“Radical revolt against nature”: Barefaced Women and Masculine Power
Bare chins, on the other hand, were obvious markers of effeminacy and inferiority. Many beard histories pointed out that bare chins were historically used to indicate servitude, and that prisoners were often forcibly shaved to disgrace them further. But despite the looming presence of chattel slavery on American soil until 1865, beard historians were far more interested in demonstrating that women were not supposed to have facial hair.
Perhaps the most passionate argument about why women should not wear beards came from Horace Bushnell, a prominent theologian and preacher who, in 1869, published the brashly titled book, Women’s Suffrage: The Reform Against Nature.
Bushnell’s argument was quite simple: women’s rights advocates argued that they should have the same rights as men because they were equal to men, but no claim of gender equality could be valid, Bushnell believed, because “men and women are, to some very large extent, unlike in kind.” A person merely needed to glance at the two sexes, he said, for the differences between them were so immediately obvious.
The man is taller and more muscular, has a larger brain, and a longer stride in his walk. The woman is lighter and shorter, and moves more gracefully. In physical strength the man is greatly superior, and the base in his voice and the shag on his face, and the wing and sway of his shoulders, represent a personality in him that has some attribute of thunder. But there is no look of thunder in the woman. Her skin is too finely woven, too wonderfully delicate to be the rugged housing of thunder… Glancing thus upon man, his look says, Force, Authority, Decision, Self-asserting Counsel, Victory.
Oh, no, that’s not a view I’m trying to promote! Maybe I need to shave and start wearing a bag on my head instead.
Although now I’m really curious about the mindset that would compel people to write arguments about why women shouldn’t grow beards. Isn’t that kind of unnecessary?
The wave/particle duality of light is always tricky to explain to my students. If only I’d known that the Dogon priests had already figured it all out — all I have to do is put up a picture of Nummo the Fish, and wisdom shall follow.
I’m listening to Laird Scranton exercising his remarkable pattern-matching abilities, finding correspondences in glyphs and pictures drawn by the Dogon, Chinese, and Egyptians to modern scientific concepts. Did you know the Dogon have had string theory all figured out? I didn’t.
What have I gotten myself into? I just sat through a bizarre, rambling, self-congratulory lecture by Scott Wolter (some guy with a fringey History Channel show) that started with the Kensington Runestone — it’s a genuine Viking artifact, don’t you know, staking a land claim for some Catholic order of monks — then wandered over to the Bat Creek stone, a rock with some funny scratches on it unearthed from an Indian mound. The scratches are ancient Hebrew! Wait, no, they’re secret Masonic symbols! Did you know the Cherokee rituals were exact copies of the Knights Templar’s rituals? Yes, they are. Obviously.
Then we got a whole series of photos of Catholic figures and medieval and renaissance paintings and sculptures in which people are making the Masonic gang sign. This one:
That’s an “M”. For Mary Magdelene, Jesus’s wife. The Masonic cult spread over to the New World in the first century AD to share the word among the Indians, who happily adopted it. And now it’s everywhere.
Oreo cookies bear the sign.
Then to wrap it all up, he goes back to ancient Egypt, the precession of the Equinox, and the signs of the zodiac, which represent major shifts in world cultures, each paradigmatic shift associated with changing which house was represented in the equinox.
People applauded.
Dear god, wasn’t the cookie slide a loud enough cry for help?
