And now you know what god does with all his spare time.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
I wonder if I can get hair extensions to just leap immediately to “wizard”.
It’s the Holotypic Occlupanid Research Group. “Occlupanid”, in case you weren’t familiar with the lingo, is the taxonomic term for bread ties, those little plastic clips used to close up plastic bread sacks. There is more than you ever wanted to know about bread ties at that link.
It’s actually rather thought provoking: it’s an entire classification scheme for a trivial industrial widget.
I was sent a link to Bund Katholischer Ärzte (the Federation of Catholic Doctors), which, if you can get past the goofy name that already promises much hilarity, has an interesting agenda.
They are against homosexuality. It causes “suffering” and should be treated.
But their treatments are spiritual and homeopathic.
I don’t know whether to damn them, laugh at them, or encourage them to go on praying for gay people while giving them sips of pure clean water.
No. I can’t watch any of them. I was sent a link to The 13 Creepiest Christian Education Videos for Kids, and … hideous clowns and rapping puppets … and OBEY … oh, jebus, the children. Think of the children.
It’s Towel Day. I’ve got mine right here next to the computer. Incredibly useful things, towels.
Just in case you are unaware of the importance of your towel, take it away, Douglas Adams and the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy:
A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value. You can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapors; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a miniraft down the slow heavy River Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (such a mind-bogglingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.
More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitch hiker) discovers that a hitch hiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitch hiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitch hiker might accidentally have “lost”. What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is, is clearly a man to be reckoned with.
Hence a phrase that has passed into hitchhiking slang, as in “Hey, you sass that hoopy Ford Prefect? There’s a frood who really knows where his towel is.” (Sass: know, be aware of, meet, have sex with; hoopy: really together guy; frood: really amazingly together guy.)
This is only for the thoughtful, responsible fundagelical fanatics, obviously.
Author Annie Jacobsen has a new book that finally reveals the truly true truth about the so-called UFO crash in Roswell, New Mexico. And here is the answer: Roswell Martians May Have Been Deformed Nazi Kids Sent by Stalin.
It explains so much.
The craft, she writes, wasn’t an alien spaceship, as many have since theorized, nor was it a weather balloon, as the U.S. military alleged in its clumsy cover story. It was, according to Jacobsen, a Nazi-inspired Soviet spy plane with Cyrillic letters embossed on the hull, crewed by malformed adolescents, two of whom survived the crash.
Stalin used captured Nazi aircraft designs to build the plane, according to Jacobsen. She says he had Mengele provide surgically altered “grotesque child-sized aviators” who were supposed to climb out of the aircraft and be mistaken for visitors from Mars — to sow the kind of confusion in the U.S. created by Orson Welles’s 1938 “War of the Worlds” radio broadcast.
Of course! Why didn’t I think of this before?
This “revelation,” such as it is, will no doubt gratify those who already suspected as much.
I…wait. I was being sarcastic. Really. This can’t actually have been an explanation with widespread currency, could it? I mean, I’ve seen the photos of the “wreckage”.
It doesn’t look like a crashed interstellar spaceship, but it also doesn’t look like a top-secret Nazi Wunderwaffen, either. It sort of looks like tattered scraps of a weather balloon.
The city of Lake Forest, California has given a talented young boy scout the job of designing the city’s logo. The presentation of his Eagle Scout project to the city council must have been dramatic: he displayed his carefully crafted graphic arts project to them, and they voted 3 to 2 in favor of giving him the project. His design must have exhibited great style, panache, and technical expertise to dazzle them so. And here it is!
Why, he must have worked for weeks on that. It’s bold, original, and wonderfully crafted.
Well, errm, actually…it looks like he whipped it out 2 minutes before the meeting. And it’s rather ugly.
OK, then, they must have been impressed with his character; Eagle Scout candidates have to be ramrod straight representatives of distinguished civic responsibility, after all. I’m sure his Facebook page demonstrates the quality of his character.
Ooops. Well, I guess it’s more a matter of being from Rick Warren country, in Orange County, and all you got to do is slap “god” on something for them to flop down on their bellies and worship it.
You can’t get riper nerd schadenfreude from anywhere but a bad powerpoint competition.
There are some real horrors at that link, but they unfortunately miss a trick: the greatest suffering is not inflicted by the single slide, but by the endless flood of one bad slide after another.
I have suffered through a presentation by Kent Hovind: 3 hours nonstop, and over 700 slides. My brain yet bears the awful scars.
