There are two very good reasons.

1. Because rodents are pee-sniffing preverts. Eww.

2. Because every post about Republicans or the Vatican is about rodents, so we’ve already got more than enough of that around here. Double eww. Or W.

The Friday Cephalopod will magically appear at some point today. Because they’re beautiful.

This is going to be hilarious: Comic-con is next week in San Diego, and the professional attention whores at Fred Phelps’ Westboro Baptist Church are going to picket it.

The destruction of this nation is imminent — so start calling on Batman and Superman now, see if they can pull you from the mess that you have created with all your silly idolatry.

I don’t know why they’ve chosen Comic-con; maybe it’s because the attendees are mostly able to tell the difference between fantasy and reality, a grave sin to Phelps.

You know what would be really funny? Fred Phelps reading the Sunday funny pages. I can just imagine him fulminating with growing rage as he reads of that hedonistic heathen, Dagwood Bumstead, and he’d probably pop with apoplexy when he encountered that hussy, Mary Worth.

He might like Garfield, though.

I don’t know if I can bear to watch this.

Throughout the trailer, all I could think about was the creature’s gastro-intestinal arrangement. It’s got a mouth at both ends. All the heroes have to do is let it keep eating, and since it can’t excrete, it’ll eventually explode.

(via Deep Sea News)

We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives. And here is a website that tells you everything that will happen…in the Future!

You may be excited to know that we have a specific date for the imminent demise of Christianity: 2240. It’s all based on this very scientific graph.

Yes, my friends, in the future we will be able to predict complex sociological phenomena from a short sample of data by fitting it to a straight line. We cannot do this today without gagging, but in the Future, it will be easy!

My friends, there is so much more. Before Christianity fades away so completely and so linearly, hunger and disease will be eradicated in 2200, you’ll be able to upload your mind to a computer in 2220, and you’ll be able to travel to nearby stars in your anti-matter fueled starship in 2230. Well-fed godless starfaring software minds for the win! For the Future!

Even greater wonders await us in 2300, when we become naked blue superhumans. In the FUUUUUUTUUUUUURE!

The biggest consumer of porn in the US is Utah, and hotels report increased viewing of porn during religious conventions. Could there be a relationship between religiosity and private viewing of porn? Here’s another datum: use google to look at searches for pornographic terms world-wide.

Google ranks Pakistan No.1 in the world in searches for pornographic terms, outranking every other country in searches per person for certain sex-related content, FOXNews.com said.

Pakistan has ranked No.1 in searches per-person for “horse sex” since 2004, “donkey sex” since 2007, “rape pictures” between 2004 and 2009, “rape sex” since 2004, “child sex” between 2004 and 2007 and since 2009, “animal sex” since 2004 and “dog sex” since 2005, according to Google Trends and Google Insights, features of Google that generate data based on popular search terms.

The country has also been No.1 in searches for “sex”, “camel sex”, “rape video” and “child sex video”.

Yuck, FoxNews is saying this? Confirm it for yourself, try looking at the data on Google Trends. Pakistanis do love their Google. Next in the running: India, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Egypt, Morocco, South Africa, Turkey, and trailing the pack, the United States and Australia. Just to see if it was some weird artifact of Pakistanis googling everything, I checked a few random terms, big screen TV and football and oil. Nope, Pakistan was nothing special in any of those searches — they just really want to see more camel sex.

Before you get too smug, though, the US is #1 in searches for squid sex.

That one might be my fault.

Schools often block access to parts of the internet, which is fine, if only to focus students’ attention a little bit. It is not fine when they discriminate, like Indianapolis public schools, which block on religious views other than the Abrahamic religions. Their rules, though, mention something I did not know.

Sites that promote and provide information on religions such as Wicca, Witchcraft or Satanism. Occult Practices, atheistic views, voodoo rituals or other forms of mysticism, […] the use of spells, incantations, curses, and magic powers. This category includes sites which discuss or deal with paranormal or unexplained events.

Now I know I have this reputation as a big fat atheist, but I have to confess to not knowing something here. Can anyone tell me what the atheist spells, incantations, curses, and magic powers are? Please give me recipes in the comments. They might be handy, but, well, no one ever taught them to me. I blame it on being brought up in a Christian family — they didn’t know anything about atheist rituals or enchantments.

Oh, and if Indianapolis schools ban sites that talk about “paranormal or unexplained events”, why aren’t they blocking all of the Christian sites? Jesus was one paranormal dude with unexplained magic powers, you know.

Jean Stevens was a lonely old lady with an unpleasant obsession. She dug up her dead twin sister and husband and kept the corpses in her house, dressing them up and offering them tea and talking to them. That’s a little disturbing, but mostly harmless — except that you can’t help but think that she’d be a lot happier with living company.

But here’s the annoying part. They just had to interview a psychiatrist about it (that’s actually a good idea), but then they got a singularly cluelless one.

Dr. Helen Lavretsky, a psychiatry professor at UCLA who researches how the elderly view death and dying, said people who aren’t particularly spiritual or religious often have a difficult time with death because they fear that death is truly the end.

For them, “death doesn’t exist,” she said. “They deny death.”

Say what? That makes no sense. Everyone has a difficult time with death, no matter what they think of religion. And good grief, atheists don’t deny death. This is a woman who seems to have never spoken to one.

And what makes it even more annoying, is that this opinion is completely irrelevant. From the rest of the story, Jean Stevens is not an atheist. She talks about a creator god and worries about what happens after death.

Every story should occasionally take a break from the clumsy metazoan action to plunge into the biochemistry of gut bacteria. Every novel could be improved this way!