The town of Aberystwyth banned Monty Python’s Life of Brian 30 years ago. Now the mayor, Sue Jones-Davies, wants to end the ban.
Those of you familiar with the movie may remember Sue Jones-Davies as Brian’s girlfriend, Judith Iscariot.
I knew it. Bucky Katt is an ID proponent.
In related news, I was sent a photo of this odd billboard.
Be mesmerized by the mysterious Octopult!
Christianity is like sticking a fork in your face and your rectum and plugging them into a wall socket. Your insides will smoke and sizzle, you’ll glow, sparks will shoot out of you, and you’ll become a cooked vegetable.
At the end, he says, “don’t try to do this at home, because it can be very dangerous”. That’s the honest part of his example. Kids, don’t do religion! It’s very, very bad for you!
…scientists were treated like celebrities?
There’s one photo at the link of fashion violations — man, that would be a hotly contested page with no end of possible entries, I would think. Somebody needs to start a Nerd magazine, and just cruise science and engineering conferences for endless material.
One of the splendid people I met in Denver told me about her attendance at a bizarre lecture a few months ago — and she sent me a link to her summary. If you want to experience a second hand glimmering of Native American woo, with UFOs, magic origins, transparent white people, anti-evolution, and quantum physics, there you go.
I rather like the growing bans on smoking in bars and restaurants — it makes them much more pleasant places for those of us who’d rather not inhale poisons from acrid, burning weeds involuntarily. But maybe an exception should be made from places where the burning and inhaling of plant matter is the whole intent of visiting, as is being discovered in the Netherlands.
Millions of people flock to Amsterdam’s “coffee shops” every year to legally buy cannabis and hashish over the counter and to smoke it without fear of arrest, as long as they are on the premises.
But the new law bans tobacco inside café and restaurants, meaning cannabis users are now forced to light up potent and heady pipes and joints loaded with pure marijuana.
So now visitors are getting toasted on extra-potent weed.
Hey, is this just a publicity stunt for the new “Harold and Kumar” movie?
That would look good as a bumpersticker on my car, if only I still had any room on the back of my car for bumperstickers.
What? How could Orac pass this story by?
A monument to the enema, a procedure many people would rather not think about, has been unveiled at a spa in the southern Russian city of Zheleznovodsk.
The bronze syringe bulb, which weighs 800 pounds and is held by three angels, was unveiled at the Mashuk-Akva Term spa, the spa’s director said Thursday.
“There is no kitsch or obscenity, it is a successful work of art,” Alexander Kharchenko told The Associated Press. “An enema is almost a symbol of our region.”
In related news, the head of the Zheleznovodsk Chamber of Commerce and Tourism Bureau committed suicide today…
So, what does the promotion of jazz have to do with HP Lovecraft? (This isn’t a raven and a writing desk non-connection — there really is a link.)
I guess most of us missed a bizarre poster at the Evolution 2008 meetings tonight. It was basically a paper titled The Evidently Imminent Phyletic Transition of Homo sapiens into Homo militarensis (the military hominid), by Richard H. Lambertsen. It’s garbage from the first page, I’m afraid, in which the author tries to demonstrate that there must be direction and intent in the evolution of life, and that “Earth’s largest blue whale (Balaenoptera musculus)
swimming at peak velocity most precisely represents the
central tendency of evolution.” This is followed by many pages of oddball math in which the author cites Einstein, Feynman, and himself quite often.
And then it gets weird.
The science of LAMBERTSEN and HINTZ
(2004) and LAMBERTSEN (2007) holds that the
key morphological innovation enabling maximization of free will in the organic domain was a
novel craniomandibular articulation (the MMA).
The MMA trigger enables high dEk/dt events to
be accomplished with precision. Furthermore,
the cosmological constraint confirmed implies
that maximization of free will by means of trigger
action will lead to self-destruction.
Get that? A novel jaw mechanism in whales is the pinnacle of free will.
And then it gets weirder.
Noting the apparent chiral kinematical
symmetry between the MMA and the specialized
trapeziometacarpal, or “saddle” joint of the
hominid thumb, LAMBERTSEN (2007) therefore
warned…“[In view of that apparent chiral] symmetry we now
must expect trigger actions referable to extremely
powerful individuals that do not lead to self-
destruction, but instead cause the wanton
destruction of others. This is to say that there has
been a paradigm shift in the realization of individual
power. The means to that power is different. The
direction of evolutionary change is not. It thus is to
be expected that aged individuals suffering the
effects of senescence will use the more vigorous
young to achieve their base intention… that mentally
adept if egregious individuals of age will exploit
skillfully the combined naiveté and strength of near
juveniles.”
Because there is a resemblance in the shape of hominid thumbs and whale jaw joints, people are going to do bad things. This is then confirmed by Bush’s invasion of Iraq.
This is literally insane stuff. That interpretation is confirmed by the end of the paper, which contains a series of questions addressed to George W. Bush, including a demand to know if he was the one who sent a sniper to his house at 2:00pm on 28 January, and whether he personally stole Lambertsen’s driver’s license. There was also a bizarre incident in which Lambertsen was arrested for disrupting a flight.
This is just sad. Lambertsen actually does have some scientific qualifications, and has published respectable papers on baleen whales, and you can see buried in this one a foundation of serious work on whale anatomy and physiology. He clearly needs psychiatric help now, though.
Alas, it just goes to show that having something presented at a science conference does not necessarily imply that it is scientific, or even sensible. Keep this in mind when you see the creationists striving to get a single paper published…
And please, I hope somebody gets Lambertsen the help he needs. He isn’t an evil man or a stupid man — he’s got something organically wrong with his brain, I fear, and needs psychiatric intervention.
