I must object to this list!
The differences are obvious. If you’re good, Santa brings you toys every year, and if you’re bad, you get a lump of coal. Jesus, on the other hand, offers nothing but vague promises that will only be redeemed after you’re dead, and neither alternative (hovering about in the clouds with a harp vs. crackling fiercely in a hellish fire) sound particularly attractive.
If you really must believe in some magic man flying through the sky, I recommend Santa.
America is kind of a land of thugs, isn’t it? Here’s the latest sordid story: two Ecuadorian brothers are walking down the street, an SUV full of morons mistakes them for a gay couple, and they jump out and beat one of them to death.
[Jose] Sucuzhanay (suh-KOO-chen-eye) and his brother Romel, 38, were walking arm-in-arm after a night out when a sport utility vehicle pulled up near them at a Brooklyn stoplight, police said.
Witnesses said they heard the men in the car shouting anti-gay and anti-Hispanic slurs at the brothers. The attackers jumped out of the car and smashed a beer bottle over Jose Sucuzhanay’s head, hit him in the head with an aluminum baseball bat and kicked him, police said. Romel Sucuzhanay was able to get away; the attackers drove off after he returned and said he had called police, authorities said.
If anyone wants to talk about civilized behavior, this isn’t it.
The blizzard is over, and now we’re just buried knee-high in snow. It’s also finals week at UMM, and we’ve just received a note from the administration that classes are not cancelled, but that “students, faculty, and staff should use their judgment when deciding whether or not travel to campus”. Nice way to dodge any responsibility at all!
Fortunately, the first final I have to give is tomorrow, so we may be dug out by then.
Our president, the wretched villain who threw away our economy and our people’s lives in a wasteful, failed war, skulked into Iraq and tried to pretend he was a hero. Nobody was fooled, and he got a rude surprise.
Bush had just finished his prepared remarks in which he said the security agreement was made possible by the U.S. surge of troops earlier this year, when the journalist, Muthathar al Zaidi pulled his shoes off and hurled them at the president. “This is a goodbye kiss, you dog,” Zaidi shouted.
Bush dodged the shoes and was not struck. Bodyguards quickly wrestled Zaidi to the floor and hauled him, kicking and screaming, from the room. Two other Iraqi journalists were briefly detained after one of them called Zaidi’s actions “courageous.”
Catch that last line: journalists were detained for commenting on this action. I’ll comment, too: I think Zaidi was brave and right. I wish a few American journalists had the guts to throw shoes at the president — they should have started in 2001. Can we make it a new tradition?
John Holbo is determined — nay, obsessesed — to add a new holiday to the pantheon of midwinter festivals: it’s Haeckelmas. I can actually understand this, since the artwork Ernst Haeckel masterminded is worthy of obsession, a beautiful celebration of life in a Victorian vein.
If you’re tired of the traditional Currier & Ives, Holbo has put together a whole collection of Haeckeliana with a holiday theme.
Santa looks frightened. Do you think he will be eaten next?
Our first blizzard of the season is hitting us right now: snow is pouring down, the wind is howling, temperatures are in the single digits °F and dropping, and we’re nearing white-out conditions. We’re staying indoors.
I don’t think our snowflakes look anything like the picture above (from this gallery of snowflake photomicrographs). They’re tiny and powdery, and flying by horizontally at 30 or 40 mph.
All the smart people in the 56267 zip code will be tuned in to Atheists Talk radio this morning at 9am, to hear about the winter solstice and godless bus signage. You can too!
Oh, and at noon we’re all going to tune in to Nic McPhee’s and Susan Gilbert’s radio show on KUMM for an eclectic mix of interesting music. We’re all planning on bunkering down today, since we’re supposed to get slammed with a major blizzard…which I can see is gearing up outside my window right now.
Cruel, cruel readers. Everyone is sending me links to this recent episode of The View, in which four women babble inanely about something or other. In this case, it’s evolution. Do you people like to see me suffer? This was horrible.
OK, Whoopi Goldberg is wishy-washy, rather than stupid: she argues for some vague kind of deistic intervention at the big bang, then evolution is the mechanism for creating life. Elisabeth Hasselbeck, though…allow me to paraphrase. ‘Really cool handbags and shoes have, like, designers, so really cool people must have a designer, too, even greater than Gucci and Prada.’
Oh, wait…that’s not new. That’s the same old argument the ID creationists have made all along.
Here. The rest of you can suffer and despair of humanity now, too.
