Archive for April, 2007

Take us Out of Orbit, Ms. Rice. Ick Factor 1000.

Pam passed along an excerpt from a bio of Condi Rice that got my head work­ing. Suggesting Bush has an “inquis­i­tive mind” makes me think of noth­ing more than a three-​​​​year-​​​​old and his “why” phase — you know, where “why” is the response to every answer you give. At this rate TI is going to slide into being […]

Darwinism: The Devil’s Religion (3 of 4)

Jack Chick mocked yet again, con­tin­u­ing #2, begin­ning with #1. One of the eter­nal ques­tions faced by reli­gion, phi­los­o­phy and sci­ence is where did it all come from? This is a damned good ques­tion and should occupy any think­ing person’s mind from time to time. It’s one of those queries that may well never be answered, because […]

In Defense of David

AI was not well received by crit­ics in much the same way that a grenade is not wel­come in a detach­ment. The atti­tude seemed to be run, run away from this before it explodes chaot­i­cally. Well, that wasn’t how I saw it, and it had damn lit­tle to do with how cute Haley Joel was back then — […]

Darwinism: The Devil’s Religion (2 of 4)

The Jack Chick sendup started there and con­tin­ues here. I find it strik­ing that right-​​​​wingers seem to define the entire world in terms of reli­gion; I’ve been accused more than once of mak­ing sci­ence my “reli­gion”. The notion is fool­ish in the extreme, of course; reli­gion relies on inerrancy, received Truth and unrea­son­ing appeal to authority. […]

Monkey Fluids Remixes!

Thanks to Pharyngula I dis­cov­ered, a few weeks back, a per­fectly lovely toon site called Monkey Fluids. Hey, what’s not to love about the name? ANYway, MF is about tak­ing silly old­school draw­ings — osten­si­bly for chil­dren — and remix­ing them with post-​​​​modern, post-​​​​porno Net thoughts to … aug­ment the orig­i­nal pic­tures. Now you have to love that. But better […]

Darwinism: The Devil’s Religion (1 of 4)

Jack Chick is famous to fun­da­men­tal­ist Christians for cre­at­ing a library of incred­i­bly narrow-​​​​minded tracts which present an almost Jihadist view of right-​​​​wing ultra-​​​​fundamentalist Christianity. Everything’s there includ­ing para­noia that God will cast you into hell at the drop of a hat; the com­plete Caucasian-​​​​ness of God, Jesus and angels; and of course gargoyle-​​​​like aspects on anyone […]

God Never Was the Answer

A host of idiots has come crawl­ing to light after the tragedy of Virgina Tech,* most of them mak­ing the fatu­ous claim that some kind of lack of reli­gios­ity is the cause of death for 32 humans and one psy­cho gun­man. Pam notes that the most recent in this list is Chuck Norris, who is […]

There’s Trauma Other than the Physical

Caden Thomas, all of four years old, is prob­a­bly not going to want to be any­where near a grid­iron again for the rest of his life. Attending a foot­ball youth fes­ti­val at Colorado State on Saturday, the boy — wan­der­ing around the end zone — got sacked by wide receiver George Hill. He’s had 30 stitches and […]

Support Our (straight) Troops

One kilo­word in ref­er­ence to the recent deci­sion of some right-​​​​wingers to devalue the first ser­vice­man wounded in Iraq. Turns out Sgt. Eric Alva is gay, and that makes his sac­ri­fice unacceptable.

Nappy-​​Headed Host

Holy Toast has returned.

Oh. My. Non. God.

Paramount’s remas­ter­ing Trek:TOS for HD, and they’ve remapped all the exte­rior FX shots using dig­i­tal tech. My first thought was trav­esty. But you sim­ply must, must see this exte­rior from Space Seed (Khan, remem­ber?). Here’s 1701 heav­ing to next to the Botany Bay. If you thought that was good, you should see it in motion. I feel […]

Diary of Adoption 2: The Home Inspection

It’s nerve-​​​​wracking to think of it; you’re open­ing your home to a state-​​​​licensed inspec­tor whose job it is to basi­cally see you and look on where you live, how you live, and pass judg­ment on all of it. I spent the day off work final­iz­ing things. I needed a secure place for tox­ics such as bleach, anti­his­t­a­mines and so […]