Poor business plan

I don’t think I’d trust this Latvian money-lender to stay in business for long — he’s giving small loans and asking for your soul as the only collateral. He doesn’t employ collection agents, using only fear and superstition to get people to pay him back, which might work for a little while…but only until the atheists show up. Sure, I’ll take a loan for $500, and hey, I think I’ll just default and let you keep the collateral. If you only want to trust me for $1.98, that’s fine, I’ll take it and you can have my soul for as long as you want.

There’s also a poll with the story: Would you use your soul as collateral for a loan?. Unfortunately, you’ll have to until tomorrow to get the results.

Gosh, I think I went to the wrong meeting

While I was off at the Lindau Nobel meeting, hanging out with mere Nobel prize winners and scientists and enthusiastic graduate students, I seem to have missed my chance to hang out with fairies and angels.

About 250 people came to the Methow Valley June 26 through 28 from as far away as Europe and Hawaii to participate in the ninth annual Fairy and Human Relations Congress, an outdoor festival in a secluded mountain meadow called Skalitude.

Hey, I know where that is — near Twisp (a wonderful name for a fairy congress), Washington, and very lovely place. And they were gathered for such a noble purpose!

“The purpose of the congress is to encourage communication and cooperation of the fairy realm,” said Michael “Skeeter” Pilarski, the event’s founder and organizer.

The human world is in crisis and can use all the help it can get, Pilarski said, so why not form alliances with those in other realms?

Why not, indeed. It sounds so reasonable. They’re also right about something.

Skeptics might mock the participants or dismiss them as New Age hippies, but they say their belief system is not much different from Native American animists or even Christians who believe in angels.

You’re exactly right, Skeeter. There’s no difference at all between what you’re doing and what’s going on in churches every day, all across the world.

Customize your bible!

Once upon a time, people like Thomas Jefferson would take scissors to their bibles to produce a customized versions that better represented their beliefs. It is now the 21st century; all you need is an internet connection and a little comfort with the Unix command line to tweak the bible into any state you want, and who wouldn’t want the HPL edition of the Unholy Bible. Abdul Alhazred would have loved this.

One of us

Our respectability among juvenile fans of Harry Potter may have just gone up a notch: Daniel Radcliffe has cheerfully declared himself to be an atheist.

I’m an atheist, but I’m very relaxed about it. I don’t preach my atheism, but I have a huge amount of respect for people like Richard Dawkins who do. Anything he does on television, I will watch.

I understand that this same segment of society has also found a heightened interest in the works of playwrights like Peter Schaffer, so we know the Harry Potter effect can help. If only Radcliffe had an excuse to take his clothes off for atheism…

Of course there is also the complementary effect that the people who were convinced that both Harry Potter and atheism were the demon-spawned products of Hell have now had their suspicions confirmed.

Why would I go on a game show with a lose-lose premise?

What a crazy idea for a game show: a Turkish program is looking for 10 atheists to compete for the chance to be converted. What next, a show with healthy contestants competing for the chance to be infected with a disease, and the winner gets a long hospital stay?

The game show producers give their bias away when they announce “We don’t approve of anyone being an atheist”. They’re also planning to have a team of theologians to screen out religious people pretending to be godless so they can get a free trip to the holy site of their choice.

Well, I’m not a fake atheist, but I’m wondering what they’re offering to people like me. We go on the program, we get non-stop harangues from crazy imams, priests, rabbis, and monks, and if we don’t fall for their foolishness, we lose? I’d be tempted to just say “yes!” to the rabbi to really piss off the Muslim hosts, get a trip to Jerusalem, and then annoy the rabbi when I tell him I lied. Or would the theologians also have to confer to determine that your conversion was sincere?

Sewer blobs of North Carolina

Everyone is sending me this video of a strange pulsing blob found in a North Carolina sewer inspection. It is officially creepy and disgusting, and someone from the SciFi channel is racing to make creature feature about it right now, I’m sure.

I have no idea what it is, but the explanations that it is a colony of either tubifex worms or bryozoans sounds reasonable. I want to see a sample of that thing put under a microscope.

You are now free to make jokes about <despised NC figure>’s colonoscopy exam in the comments.

The best explanation so far is from Deep Sea News: they’re almost certainly tubifex worms, and they have a comparison video to demonstrate it.

Don’t do it!

Whirled Nut Daily has announced that the Ark of the Covenant has been discovered and is going to be unveiled in Rome! I urge any of my Italian readers to close your eyes and don’t look, because we all know what will happen when the Ark is opened.

You know this is serious—WND even illustrates their very scholarly article with a photo taken from the Indiana Jones movie.