Archive for May, 2007

A Library Containing One Book

A man respon­si­ble for intel­lec­tu­ally retard­ing hun­dreds of thou­sands — if not tens of mil­lions — of peo­ple from all around the world is get­ting ready to die. Unfortunately he’s not check­ing out fast enough and is busily lega­ciz­ing him­self in the form of a “museum” and “library” that was designed by an amusement-​​​​park firm. No, […]

Death Penalty. Now.

MSNBC reports that a “top-​​​​ten” spam­mer has been arrested. Robert Alan Soloway is accused of using net­works of com­pro­mised “zom­bie” com­put­ers to send out mil­lions upon mil­lions of spam e-​​​​mails. Kill him. Immediately. Fuck the trial, fuck the defense and fuck the appeals. Get him on his knees, put a Glock to the back of his […]

Evidence of Life After Death

that I would accept as being incon­tro­vert­ible, to be found at The Perry Bible Fellowship. If some­thing like that actu­ally did hap­pen, it would rock my skep­ti­cism. If it had hap­pened when I was ten, it would have rocked my world.

Geekin’ Out with the MtG Arizona Theme Deck

I was able to assem­ble a bit of a cast of char­ac­ters for the Magic Arizona theme deck I men­tioned last week when com­ment­ing about (among other things) solifuges. They inspired me. These crea­tures are known locally as sun spi­ders; oth­ers might have heard them called camel spi­ders. They acheived demi-​​​​legendary sta­tus a while ago amid wildly inac­cu­rate claims […]

Arachnid Serendipity

I’d intended today to post on my Arizona-​​​​themed Magic deck (men­tioned here), but some­thing hap­pened last night that changed my mind. Wednesday we hosted a pre­sen­ta­tion on ven­omous crea­tures of north­west­ern Arizona — the talk was about the A-​​​​listers with poi­son, such as Western dia­mond­back and Mohave rat­tlesnakes, Gila mon­sters* and scor­pi­ons. That night (last night), while […]

Ham Boned

Ken Ham’s Creation Museum is hold­ing its grand open­ing on Memorial Day — 28 May 2007 — amid much hoopla, hype and gen­eral stu­pid­ity on the part of dozens of gullible “jour­nal­ists” and tens of thou­sands of slack-​​​​jawed igno­rami. As part of the fes­tiv­i­ties, PZ sug­gested putting together an anti-​​​​Ken blo­gabra­tion. My entry fol­lows the […]

T’row Yo Hands in th’Air and Say Wiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii!

I finally got my paws on one this week­end, and have spent a hell of a lot of time since then just hangin’ out and playin’ with my Wii. You might have gath­ered a while back that I’m a ded­i­cated Nintendo sys­tem user. You’d prob­a­bly be wrong about that, actu­ally; I never owned the orig­i­nal NES. My first actual Nintendo purchase […]

Life’s Way: Offense and Defense in the Mojave

Shelley Batts (a ScienceBlogger) posted some com­ments on dif­fer­ent kinds of stings, along with a scale for rat­ing which hurt the most. That led me to muse on some of my own expe­ri­ences with our local pointy objects. Arizona’s ter­ri­tory — on the west­ern side — is pretty much entirely com­prised of the Mojave Desert. With […]

One down…

…28% to go. Jerry Falwell has, at last, died. One less bap­tard to herd the fold. Don’t despair; I’m sure some other use­less sack of shit will slime in to replace him within 24 hours. UPDATE: PZ posted this inter­view excerpt between Anderson Cooper and Christopher Hitchens. Hitchens describes Falwell’s brand of reli­gion as “an actual dan­ger to […]

Suck a Fag, Go to ‘R’

The MPAA is the “author­ity” in the US which decides what kind of rat­ing a film should get: G, PG, PG-​​​​13, R, NC-​​​​17 and the noto­ri­ous X range. Over the years since Jack Valenti founded the orga­ni­za­tion in 1968, some of its deci­sions have been baf­fling and arbi­trary. For instance it’s not uncom­mon for close-​​​​up shots of […]

Duplicity is Color-​​Blind

Al Sharpton to Don Imus shortly after his “nappy-​​​​headed ho’s” com­ment: You could be fired and the nicest guy in the world, but you ought to be fired. Al Sharpton on the sub­ject of Mitt Romney: As for the one Mormon run­ning for office, those who really believe in God will defeat him any­ways. You know […]

Strange Beliefs and Odd Superstitions

What is it that sep­a­rates super­sti­tion from belief? What makes the dif­fer­ence between myth and faith? To me, it’s a ques­tion of dura­tion and quan­tity. The longer a super­sti­tion per­sists, the more akin to belief it becomes; the more peo­ple who believe in a myth, the closer to reli­gion or faith it is. The biggest rea­son an Israelite accepts JHVH […]