Minneapolis is a lovely city, except for the geysers of blood erupting out of the sewer system. Don’t get the wrong idea, though—only some of it was human blood.
I’ve been seeing this xkcd comic everywhere today, and it might be heresy to do this, but I have to disagree with part of it. It just didn’t ring true.
Afarensis takes on both Sal Cordova and Jonathan Wells on the subject of anthropology. Would you believe that those two creationist frauds are talking out of their hats and are readily spotted as dishonest kooks when they discuss anything in which their reader has any expertise? I know, I was so surprised myself.
What is this, silly religion day? I just got sent a link to this marvelous story of a young unemployed British fellow who became a goddess in India — he is now the incarnation of Bahucharaji, the patron of Indian eunuchs, and he goes around blessing people and curing their infertility. Apparently, Bahucharaji was an Indian princess who castrated her husband because he wasn’t interested in sex, and for that she was deified. Thank Lakshmi and Urvasi my wife is an unbeliever!
They call him Prema, for short. It means “Divine Love.” Hey, what a coincidence, that’s what “PZ” means, too!
Hindu pilgrims have no doubts about his powers. When we asked Bhanu Barot why she was so keen to receive Prema’s blessing, she said, simply: “Because she is a goddess.”
Another woman, Rekha, said she had travelled for days to be blessed by Steve. She added: “My sister-in-law came here and she got pregnant immediately. I am hoping the same will happen for me after receiving the blessing of the goddess.”
It must be <cough> magic.
Life isn’t all curry and rice beer, or exotic Indian beauties asking for assistance in getting pregnant. There’s also the professional jealousy.
A eunuch called Sudha said: “He is a fake. I checked and he still has a penis.
He is a male so can’t be a goddess. He shouldn’t give blessings.”
Ooooh, the little bitch.
Bill Donohue is hopping mad again — he’s got another wild hare up his butt and is fuming over another insult to his very Catholic sensibilities:
Catholic League head Bill Donohue called it “one of the worst assaults on Christian sensibilities ever”.
The latest affront is a life-size sculpture of a naked man on a cross, made out of 200 pounds of chocolate, on display in New York just in time for Easter.
Come on, Bill, get over it. Shouldn’t Abu Ghraib have been “one of the worst assaults on Christian sensibilities ever”? How about the injustice of our war in the Iraq? What about the ongoing denial of civil rights to homosexuals? There are a lot of horrors in the world that might prompt a good Christian man to unleash his righteous fury, but a giant chocolate Jesus really isn’t one of them.
Besides, the only real dilemma here is which piece you’re going to start nibbling on first.
Aww, somebody already ate the big bunny ears!
Boy, you jump on one bandwagon that starts to creak and rattle and fall apart and take a wrong turn down an ugly path, and no one lets you forget it. The Republic of T resurrects the ugly corpse of “Blogroll Amnesty Day”, I’m mentioned as one of the cruel participants, and
Lauren and Chris get in on the act. In case you don’t remember it, “Blogroll Amnesty Day”, or BAD as Chris puts it, was a brief moment when a couple of the A-listers announced that they ought to clean up their blogrolls and make them more representative of their current interests, open up opportunities for new blogs to get linked, etc. The net effect, though, seems to have been that the Big Dogs of the Blogosphere tossed a lot of people off their list of links and ended up rather clubbily talking to just themselves.
I thought BAD was a good idea, in principle — we ought to encourage some regular adjustment of blogrolls, be open to fresh blood — but it turned out to be a spectacularly bad idea in practice. Personally I tried to counter the tendency to narrow my interests with a Blogroll Open Enrollment Day (and I’ll be having another sometime in the future), but still, I’m always getting tarred with my association with the great blogroll purge of 2007.
You can find my complete blogroll listing here: it’s got something like 560 entries. The way I handle the extravagant length here on the main page is to display only a random subset of ten entries at a time, over on the left sidebar; which ten changes each time the page is loaded. I also use my blogroll — it’s not just a link dump on a page. I’ve got the RSS for each blog in my newsreader, and if I see a new blog I like I add it to the list of feeds (I also go the other way, and if the newsreader tells me a site hasn’t been updated in a month, I delete it). I periodically run a script on my newsreader’s OPML file that converts it to html, and I upload that to my blogroll page. Seriously, if you’re on my blogroll, I guarantee that I at least scan the titles of your posts each day, read a little bit of your articles regularly, and dip in and read the whole thing now and then.
So please, can everyone try not to cite me as one of those high-falutin’ wicked elitists who won’t condescend to link to the little people? Besides, I’m not an A-lister. I’ve been campaigning to be referred to as a ζ-lister, but everyone ignores that request, too.
OK, simple story: kid goes to school dressed as a pirate, eyepatch, inflatable sword, and talking about the flying spaghetti monster; kid is asked to remove the eyepatch several times; kid refuses; kid gets kicked out of school for a day. You may be disappointed to learn that I don’t see a problem. I think it’s fair for schools to enforce some minimal level of decorum, by all accounts he was asked politely to remove the eyepatch, and even the kids’ mother thinks he got a little carried away. A mild punishment like suspension to enforce the reasonable authority of the school administration is a fine idea.
Except for one thing. (There’s always just one more thing.)
(via Frolix-8)
