The threat of competition

For a moment there, I was worried. Here I was, putting the readership to work writing a best seller based on the magic power of pope guts, and then Charles Stross, a real writer, writes up his own treatment based on the same premise. Fortunately, he has also announced he will not write it.

But man, while the principled writers with standards are going to turn up their nose at this, you know every contemptible hack who scribbles up potboilers for sale in airport bookstores is pouncing on the idea right now. Write faster, people! We have to be more contemptible and more hackish if I’m going to exploit this market opportunity!

Have I ever told you how proud I am of my Scandinavian ancestry?

I am descended from Vikings, and I try to bring that wild-eyed berserkergang ferocity to blogging. But have you ever seen Swedes cook?

YEEEEAAAAAH! That’s the way to do it. You should have seen me this morning, when I was preparing the vegetable soup that will be simmering all day for our dinner here (yeah, it’s a vegetarian soup. What can I say? I’m only half Scandinavian. The blood has been thinned with that of those domesticated English and Irish and Scots). I was flinging the big knives around viciously, and I’ll tell you, their own mothers wouldn’t recognize the bodies of those tubers and onions and whatevers when I was done with them.

Here, you can also learn how to make meatballs or spaghetti the Swedish way. Oh, and dessert, anyone?

And while you tremble in fear at the fury of the Northmen, keep this in mind: these are the Swedes. The Norwegian edition would violate the Youtube terms of service, and would probably feature much more herring mayhem.

(I probably shouldn’t have said that. If the Swedes hear of it, it will stir their competitive instincts, and they’ll strive to outdo even the hypothetical Norwegians, and then…Ragnarök.)

Eye of the beholder

The other day, this comic was posted on Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. Would you believe those crazy conservatives at the National Organization for Marriage — those blinkered bozos who think letting gays marry will destroy the fabric of society — posted it on their forums?

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It’s rather strange — the comic shows a bunch of kids who are aghast at the weird old fashioned way babies used to be made. The humor in it is that you have to realize that they aren’t at all horrified by their technology, but find the old ways incomprehensible. It’s actually mocking the rigid antiques, but NOM just thought it was saying something awful about future developments. Today’s comic is on the same theme.

Zach Weiner handled it beautifully. It turns out the NOMers were hot-linking the image, making it easy for the SMBC crew to swap in a new image promoting equality, so the NOMers discovered a liberal message from Thomas Jefferson and a rainbow tainting their blog.

I’m smarter than that. I am not hot-linking the image at all, so Weiner won’t be able to change it on me when he discovers that I have a very different interpretation of his cartoon.

It’s obvious. The cartoon is telling us that in the future, scientists will resurrect, or build robot duplicates of, Isaac Asimov to teach our children about sex ed. I, for one, welcome our Asimovian sex instructors, and am pleased that Zach Weiner won’t be able to modify the illustration above to praise Arthur C. Clarke, instead. Neener neener.

The Papacy Pastiche

So, you know, I had this idea for a novel. I started it, but I’ve since discovered that jewel-like prose and engaging story-telling is a little bit hard, and when I couldn’t finish the whole thing over lunch, I’ve sort of given up. But then I had another brilliant idea! I’ll put up the first significant piece of the story, the really really important part, and let you people finish the rest for me. Just post the subsequent chapters in the comments, and I’ll splice them together and publish them and make a million dollars, and even more when I sell the movie rights. I’ll be sure to include your names somewhere in the endnotes.

[Read more…]

Who would want them?

What an odd news item: there is a rule that the Pope can’t be an organ donor. My first thought was ick — he’s rather decrepit, and if I ever require an organ transplant, I’d rather the source were a young, stupid motorcyclist who doesn’t wear a helmet. The Catholics have other reasons, though.

Vatican officials say that after a pope dies, his body belongs to the entire Church and must be buried intact.

That’s rather morbid and weird. Why bother? It’s not going to be intact for long, and it’s actually going to belong to the worms and bacteria.

But it’s this part that blew my mind.

Furthermore, if papal organs were donated, they would become relics in other bodies if he were eventually made a saint.

I would never have thought of that. Ever. That’s really twisted. What about blood transfusions, then? A few popes are known to have fathered children, too—are they and their descendants actually considered holy relics, too?

I also had this brilliant idea for a cheesy serial-killer thriller novel, too. Pope after pope murdered and butchered, and the killer implants bits and pieces into himself…and then a team of ninja jesuits is commissioned to defend the murderer from the secular police, since he is after all now a sacred artifact of the Catholic church. Conflict! Car chases! Long abstract discussions of the nature of good and evil! Halberd-wielding fanatics vs. Carabinieri with machine guns! Evil madman manipulating the church while preying on it at the same time! Papal gore! And then, in a triumphant ending, a courageous atheist cutting through all the bullshit and taking out the killer while making some sardonic one-liner! “Nothing is sacred, meatsack!” BAM!!!

If you steal my idea, I want royalties.

Are you writing a vampire novel, too?

Last night before bed, I downloaded and started to read a light piece of fluffy fiction, one of these urban fantasy novels that are so popular right now. I won’t name it because I really just want to complain about a phenomenon I’m seeing a lot of in this whole genre, as much as I’ve read, anyway.

The driving conflict of this story is supposed to be the horror of the undead: the protagonist is both tainted with the curse of partial undeadness and trying to protect friends from being similarly afflicted. This is a reasonable premise for a fantasy novel, and could make for a good story.

However, there is one little problem. The taint (vampirism, in this case) makes the victim inhumanly strong, with lightning reflexes and acute senses, and also immortal and immune to mundane threats like bullets, poison, knives, and suffocation — decapitation and being burned to ash are the only serious threats (and granted, her enemies know this and are trying to chop her head off). Meanwhile, the traditional weaknesses of vampires — sunlight, garlic, wooden stakes, holy water, etc. — are all dismissed as superstitious misconceptions of the Middle Ages. They don’t affect her.

Also, it turns out, vampirism gives its victims a hypnotic glamor that makes them irresistible, and also an awesome sexual stamina. There is a cost, in that they have to drink blood, but it turns out that nipping a pint from a willing and enthusiastic partner once a week, preferably during the throes of orgasmic ecstasy, is enough to fuel all those superpowers.

So I’m having a little difficulty getting into the story. Every time the protagonist moans about her curse and these evil, rotten vampires who must have their heads ripped off before they eat her baby sister or whoever, I’m thinking the story should be about getting this poor crazy woman into a mental hospital to address her self-esteem issues, and about how she should be joyfully trying to share her gift with her family and friends. It’s very confusing.

Just a suggestion if you’re writing one of these stories: could you either make the curse a real curse that generally puts one into an undesirable situation, or could you write a story about happy, enlightened, lucky people who are overjoyed at their amazing new abilities? ‘Cause the whiny gripey moaney stuff over objectively glorious circumstances is gettin’ old.

Pray4PZ!

Some gomer has set up a website about prayer with a subsection dedicated to an experiment: they’re going to pray for PZ Myers. They’re rather vague about what they’re praying for, which I guess is tactically useful, since if I stay healthy or drop dead they can then claim success either way. I’m also going to confound their experiment since I’m going to tell everyone to not Pray4PZ, and since their site traffic is so minuscule, I’m going to overwhelm their results.

They also have a post titled “Can PZ Myers be reasoned with?”, which is amusing — I guess the prayer effort wasn’t doing much, so they had to resort to reason, and they even do that ineffectively.

They’ve also got an online poll, and I’m embarrassed to point it out. The subject is me again, it was set up 11 months ago, and it has received ONE vote so far. That’s just sad.

poll: Is PZ Myers the AntiChrist?

No. Obama is. : (0 votes)
No. Pat Robertson is. : (0 votes)
No. Someone else is. : (0 votes)
No. He doesn’t claim to be God. : (1 votes)
100 %
YES! YES! YES! : (0 votes)
I don’t know. : (0 votes)
Other answer: : (0 votes)

There’s a lesson here. I guess I’m not Kim Kardashian, and just dropping my name won’t make you popular and draw in lots of meaningless interest.

Now if one of the Kardashians was on that poll…