You know who else is bearded & drinks alcohol? ME. Also, Jesus.

Charleston Southern University has fired Professor Paul Roof for allowing his face to appear on a beer bottle.

"They said that this was not an image for the Christian environment and that it may seem to students that I am endorsing the use of alcohol," says Roof, who taught at the university for seven years and also founded the social club Holy City Beard & Moustache Society. HCBMS hosts beard and mustache competitions as charity fundraisers for ovarian cancer patients and their families.

What? This image?

paul-roof-m

If all Christians were that stylish, we atheists would have to worry that religion was becoming cool again. I usually keep my beard fairly closely trimmed, but Roof is making me think I have to try harder if I’m going to compete.

But nah, I don’t have to worry. When Christian schools are firing decent human beings over facial hair and beer, and when their commenters are saying things like this:

I’m very proud of CSU. I have children, and I would certainly consider CSU a college for them, based on CSU’s principles. Not enough people stand up to the bullies of the leftwing radicals.
From the disbanding of Gender Stiudies at USC-U and the funding-pull for homosexual propaganda at CofC, decent and moral people are fighting back.
Good for you CSU. We’re supporting you. Thank you for representing us.

I get to sit back and coast on my relatively feeble beard and once-a-month glass of beer.

Go home, Wisconsin, you’re drunk

This is a map plotting the ratio of bars to grocery stores across America.

bar-grocerymap

What is up with Wisconsin? Do you people need a lot of beer to wash down all that cheese?

I notice the brown bleeds over into Minnesota and the Dakotas as well. Maybe it’s an upper midwest thing. Or all the Germans that settled in this area. Or our winters, although Wisconsin is mild compared to Minnesota and North and South Dakota.

The link also has similar maps of Canada and Australia — they’ve got nothin’ on Wisconsin. I’d really like to see a map of Europe done up this way, though.

Rrrrooooooaaaarrrggghhh

Bigfoot_2012_DVD

This story about the the market for Bigfoot erotica was only plausible up to a point. Obviously, I have no problem believing that an attractive woman might have sex with a hideous hairy grunting beast, and even enjoy it, but the little details tripped me up.

1. The Sasquatch’s name is…Leonard.

2. The author is raking in $30,000/month with her line of cryptozoological porn.

OK, that last one might not be a matter of implausibility, but envy.

That’s awesome!

DrSkySkull thinks it is anticlimactic, but I’m kind of impressed. To find out what it would look like if a person fell into lava, some investigators made up a bag of 30kg of organic camp trash and threw it into a lava flow (they apparently couldn’t get any real human volunteers).

Spectacular! After I die, you have permission to throw my corpse into a volcano. I said after …I know you’re anxious to see the show, but no jumping the gun. Patience.

Not racist at all

Learn from a Nobelist in economics: all you have to do to not be a racist is prefix all your racist comments with the claim that you have no racial prejudices, like Friedrich Hayek.

Robert Chitester: Going back to the question I asked you about people you dislike or can’t deal with, can you make any additional comments in that regard, in terms of the characteristics of people that trouble you?

Hayek: I don’t have many strong dislikes. I admit that as a teacher—I have no racial prejudices in general—but there were certain types, and conspicuous among them the Near Eastern populations, which I still dislike because they are fundamentally dishonest. And I must say dishonesty is a thing I intensely dislike. It was a type which, in my childhood in Austria, was described as “Levantine”, typical of the people of the eastern Mediterranean. But I encountered it later, and I have a profound dislike for the typical Indian students at the London School of Economics, which I admit are all one type—Bengali moneylender sons. They are to me a detestable type, I admit, but not with any racial feeling. I have found a little of the same amongst the Egyptians—basically a lack of honesty in them.

Bengalis and Egyptians are all liars, but he says that without any racism whatsoever. And of course, he was born in fin de siecle Austria, an environment completely free of the kind of bigotry that might explode into some kind of nationalistic nightmare.

(via Free-Market Orientalism)

Harken back to the satanic panics of yesteryear

Ah, the 1980s. When every preschool was a hotbed of satan worshipping child abusers, police departments had ‘experts’ on ritual murder, daytime talk TV would run very special episodes on cultic cannibal orgies, and Jack Chick published Dark Dungeons. You’ve read it, right? The story about Dungeons & Dragons giving you actual magical powers that would damn you to hell? Go ahead, take a minute to read it if you haven’t already.

Or don’t. Just wait until August, fork over $5, and you’ll be able to watch the movie of Dark Dungeons, no reading required. And this version is even more over the top than the Chick tract.

Watch to the end for the surprise guest appearance of an important character beloved by yours truly.

In case you’re wondering if this is a sarcastic send-up of the original tract, read the FAQ.

Is Dark Dungeons the Movie a satire?

NO! Satire is “a humorously exaggerated imitation.” The most classic example is Swift’s “A Modest Proposal”, in which he mocks the English aristocracy’s indifference to the rural Irish poor by suggesting they eat Irish babies. This was an exaggeration as the English did not actually hate the Irish enough to eat their babies. By contrast, Dark Dungeons the comic shows that RPGs can lead to suicide, joining a witches coven, and gaining real life magical powers and Dark Dungeons the movie shows exactly those same things as well. The film adaptation does not exaggerate or alter those claims. It is NOT a satire.

Brilliant. It’s true — you cannot possibly make a satire of “Dark Dungeons”.

The sexbots are everywhere!

After that short post yesterday pointing out the abuse of photoshop to distort women’s bodies, I was briefly harangued by a loon who announced that I obviously did not understand the concept of sexual selection.

women’s bodies today are changing due to sexual selection whether you like it or not. Humans use tools to sculpt their bodies into appealing forms, so it’s not just left to inherent biological changes. And, women are abiding our wishes whether you like it or not. As biologists say, evolution is merciless. So why all the whining?

Actually, I do understand sexual selection quite well. I fail to see how making images of bodies plastic with photoshop is an example, or how you leap from manipulating pixels to how we can “sculpt…bodies into appealing forms”. Perhaps he thinks it is a kind of sympathetic magic, that if you paint a picture of a woman with balloon breasts and a wasp waist, women will simply comply with your wishes?

I am also impressed with the obliviousness. Sexual selection works both ways — has he ever wondered why some men are obsessed with women’s body parts, wanting them to be a certain size and shape? Exactly who’s brain is being sculpted by nature here?

I should also introduce him to the concept of the supernormal stimulus, the idea that a species can evolve to respond to a triggering stimulus that can be inappropriately strengthened by an exaggerated stimulus. This isn’t necessarily a good thing; for instance, Lorenz found that birds would enthusiastically nurture large fake eggs at the expense of their normal-sized real eggs, which at least isn’t a serious concern in nature, usually (although cuckoos can take advantage of it). There’s also the serious concern about human diet: give a person the choice of a twinkie or a carrot, and guess which one will be most attractive?

Or we could talk about RealDolls, these “life-like” (more like corpse-like) full-sized rubbery plastic dolls with conveniently compliant orifices. Is that an example of “sexual selection”? I suppose you could make a case for it, although it’s not affecting women, but rather selecting out males who waste their time in futile coupling with an infertile assortment of artificial stimuli — futile in both the sense that reproduction will not occur, nor will any bonding with another human being.

Besides, apparently those RealDolls are over-engineered. Simpler models will do the job just fine.

According to a Murfreesboro Police Department report, an officer was dispatched to the bar, where a witness said that Hutton walked to the ATM and “pulled down his pants and underwear exposing his genitals.” Officer M. Rickard added, “Mr. Hutton then attempted to have sexual intercourse with the ATM.”

After his encounter with the ATM, Hutton “then began to walk ‘nude’ around the bar thrusting his hips in the air,” Rickard reported.

Behold the latest generation of sexbot!

atm

Is that an example of selection? Or just a case of drunken disinhibition exposing the simpler driving machinery of the male sexual urge?