The Consumerist: "Someone has graffiti ed this Burger King billboard in downtown Seattle to transform it into criticism about how sugary fast food contributes to diabetes and the obesity crisis."
Coming to Kindle and Smashwords
November 2013
Oct 23, 2011
truth in advertising....
The Consumerist: "Someone has graffiti ed this Burger King billboard in downtown Seattle to transform it into criticism about how sugary fast food contributes to diabetes and the obesity crisis."
yikes.....
Christine Chin's "Sentient Kitchen" sculptures imagine a whole set of kitchenware sculpted to resemble body parts. The hairy nostrils are a really good touch -- indeed, the whole collection uses sparse hairs to great effect.
only makes sense...
Dan Savage Challenges Herman Cain To Prove Being Gay Is 'A Choice'... By Performing Oral Sex On Him
Sex columnist and It Gets Better campaign co-founder Dan Savage has some choice words for Herman Cain.
The presidential hopeful's stance on homosexuality -- that it's a choice -- has drawn outrage from many, but Cain continues to hold his ground. Earlier this week he discussed his views with talk show host Piers Morgan:
In response to Cain's comments, Savage offered him the chance to prove that homosexuality is in fact a choice, writing on The Stranger's Slog blog:
Cain: I think it's a sin because of my biblical beliefs and, although people don't agree with me, I happen to think that it is a personal choice.
Morgan: You think people wait — you believe people get to a certain age and say, I want to be homosexual?
Cain: Let me turn it around to you. What does science show? Show me evidence other than opinion and you might cause me to reconsider that...Where is the evidence?
...Cain: ... I respect their right to make that choice. You don't see me bashing them. I respect them to have the right to make that choice. I don't have to agree with it. That's all I'm saying
Morgan: It would be like a gay person saying, Herman, you made a choice to be black.
Cain: Piers, Piers. This doesn't wash off. I hate to burst your bubble.
Morgan: I don't think being homosexual washes off.
In response to Cain's comments, Savage offered him the chance to prove that homosexuality is in fact a choice, writing on The Stranger's Slog blog:
Oct 21, 2011
WWJD? (vomit in his hat...)
Catholic Church Sex Abuse Report: Blame Woodstock
Earlier this year, Archbishop Timothy Dolan posited that the Catholic church's far-reaching sex abuse scandal "needs to haunt" the institution for some time. To that end, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops commissioned a study on the matter five years ago, trying to identify the factors which led to the widespread sex abuse. And they concluded in the controversial report that though celibacy and a rise in gay priests weren't necessarily to blame, the social and sexual upheaval of the 1960s were a major factor.
Though the 300-page report, formally titled “The Causes and Context of Sexual Abuse of Minors by Catholic Priests in the United States, 1950-2010,” paints a complex picture of the causes of the abuse, it does argue that there was a link between poorly prepared and monitored priests who started around the kooky 1960s and ’70s and the abuse. According to the Times, this “blame Woodstock” explanation has been floated by bishops since the scandal broke out in the US in 2002, and by Pope Benedict XVI after it erupted in Europe in 2010.
The report states: "The rise of abuse cases in the 1960s and 1970s was influenced by social factors in society generally...Factors that were invariant during the time period addressed, such as celibacy, were not responsible for the increase or decline in abuse cases over time." They found that many more boys than girls were abused by priests, but only because of easy access, and argued that no particular “psychological characteristics,” “developmental histories” or mood disorders distinguished abusers from non-abusers: “Individual characteristics do not predict that a priest will commit sexual abuse of a minor. Rather, vulnerabilities, in combination with situational stresses and opportunities, raise the risk of abuse.” They even compared those priests with police officers who brutalize citizens.
Conducted by New York's John Jay College of Criminal Justice, the report also notes that more homosexual men began entering the seminaries “in noticeable numbers” from the late 1970s through the 1980s, at a point when reports of sexual abuse dropped and leveled off. But the $1.8 million study, which relied heavily on data provided by the church, has already garnered a lot of criticism, particularly because of their definitions of "prepubescent" children, and "pedophile."
They argue that "it is inaccurate to refer to abusers as ‘pedophile priests,’" because fewer than 5 percent of the abusive priests exhibited behavior consistent with pedophilia, which it defines as a “psychiatric disorder that is characterized by recurrent fantasies, urges and behaviors about prepubescent children." They define "prepubescent" children as those age 10 and under, and as a result found that only 22 percent of the priests’ victims were prepubescent. However, the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders classifies a "prepubescent" child as age 13 or younger. If the researchers had used that cutoff, a vast majority of the abusers’ victims would have been considered prepubescent.
Some also argue that the report shifts blame away from the church hierarchy, which knowingly protected/shielded the abusive priests, allowing them to get away with their crimes, and that because the Church supplied all the data, it calls all the findings into question: “There aren’t many dioceses where prosecutors have gotten involved, but in every single instance there’s a vast gap—a multiplier of two, three or four times—between the numbers of perpetrators that the prosecutors find and what the bishops released,” said Anne Barrett Doyle, the co-director of BishopAccountability.
Anne Frank a Mormon?
Related At an appearance at George Washington University here Saturday night, Bill Maher bounded into territory that the news media have been gingerly tiptoeing around.
Magic underwear. Baptizing dead people. Celestial marriages. Private planets. Racism. Polygamy.
“By any standard, Mormonism is more ridiculous than any other religion,” asserted the famously nonbelieving comic who skewered the “fairy tales” of several faiths in his documentary “Religulous.” “It’s a religion founded on the idea of polygamy. They call it The Principle. That sounds like The Prime Directive in ‘Star Trek.’ ”
He said he expects the Romney crowd — fighting back after Robert Jeffress, a Texas Baptist pastor supporting Rick Perry, labeled Mormonism a non-Christian “cult” — to once more “gloss over the differences between Christians and Mormons.”
Maher was not easy on the religion he was raised in either. He referred to the Roman Catholic Church as “an international child sex ring.”
But atheists, like Catholics and evangelical Christians, seem especially wary of Mormons, dubbed the “ultimate shape-shifters” by Maher.
In a Washington Post-Pew Research Center poll released on Tuesday, people were asked what single word came to mind for Republican candidates. For Herman Cain it was 9-9-9; for Rick Perry, Texas; and for Mitt Romney, Mormon. In the debate Tuesday night, Romney said it was repugnant that “we should choose people based on their religion.”
In The Times on Sunday, Sheryl Gay Stolberg chronicled Romney’s role as a bishop in Boston often giving imperious pastoral guidance on everything from divorce to abortion.
Stolberg reported that Romney, who would later run for Senate as a supporter of abortion rights against Teddy Kennedy and then flip to oppose those rights in Republican presidential primaries, showed up unannounced at a hospital in his role as bishop. He “sternly” warned a married mother of four, who was considering terminating a pregnancy because of a potentially dangerous blood clot, not to go forward.
Another famous nonbeliever, Christopher Hitchens, wrote in Slate on Monday about “the weird and sinister belief system of the LDS,” the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Aside from Joseph Smith, whom Hitchens calls “a fraud and conjurer well known to the authorities in upstate New York,” the writer also wonders about the Mormon practice of amassing archives of the dead and “praying them in” as a way to “retrospectively ‘baptize’ everybody as a convert.”
Hitchens noted that they “got hold of a list of those put to death by the Nazis’ Final Solution” and “began making these massacred Jews into honorary LDS members as well.” He called it “a crass attempt at mass identity theft from the deceased.”
The Mormons even baptized Anne Frank.
It took Ernest Michel, then chairman of the American
“By any standard, Mormonism is more ridiculous than any other religion,” asserted the famously nonbelieving comic who skewered the “fairy tales” of several faiths in his documentary “Religulous.” “It’s a religion founded on the idea of polygamy. They call it The Principle. That sounds like The Prime Directive in ‘Star Trek.’ ”
He said he expects the Romney crowd — fighting back after Robert Jeffress, a Texas Baptist pastor supporting Rick Perry, labeled Mormonism a non-Christian “cult” — to once more “gloss over the differences between Christians and Mormons.”
Maher was not easy on the religion he was raised in either. He referred to the Roman Catholic Church as “an international child sex ring.”
But atheists, like Catholics and evangelical Christians, seem especially wary of Mormons, dubbed the “ultimate shape-shifters” by Maher.
In a Washington Post-Pew Research Center poll released on Tuesday, people were asked what single word came to mind for Republican candidates. For Herman Cain it was 9-9-9; for Rick Perry, Texas; and for Mitt Romney, Mormon. In the debate Tuesday night, Romney said it was repugnant that “we should choose people based on their religion.”
In The Times on Sunday, Sheryl Gay Stolberg chronicled Romney’s role as a bishop in Boston often giving imperious pastoral guidance on everything from divorce to abortion.
Stolberg reported that Romney, who would later run for Senate as a supporter of abortion rights against Teddy Kennedy and then flip to oppose those rights in Republican presidential primaries, showed up unannounced at a hospital in his role as bishop. He “sternly” warned a married mother of four, who was considering terminating a pregnancy because of a potentially dangerous blood clot, not to go forward.
Another famous nonbeliever, Christopher Hitchens, wrote in Slate on Monday about “the weird and sinister belief system of the LDS,” the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Aside from Joseph Smith, whom Hitchens calls “a fraud and conjurer well known to the authorities in upstate New York,” the writer also wonders about the Mormon practice of amassing archives of the dead and “praying them in” as a way to “retrospectively ‘baptize’ everybody as a convert.”
Hitchens noted that they “got hold of a list of those put to death by the Nazis’ Final Solution” and “began making these massacred Jews into honorary LDS members as well.” He called it “a crass attempt at mass identity theft from the deceased.”
The Mormons even baptized Anne Frank.
It took Ernest Michel, then chairman of the American
right wing brain trust....
Rush's recent on-air claim that Obama is sending troops to Uganda for the purpose of "wiping out Christians." Explaining that the "Christian" group Lord's Resistance Army promotes an objective "to remove dictatorship and stop the oppression of our people," Limbaugh left out that the LRA has terrorized the people of Uganda and other countries for over 25 years by abducting children, brainwashing them and forcing them to become sex slaves as well as torturers and executioners.
new yummy math...
I'm not sure I have any comment for this, other than to say how pleased I am that puns work just as well in math.
Oct 20, 2011
weird, but cool...
Ariana Page Russell is a visual artist whose work features intricate patterns etched in her own skin. Russell has dermatographia, an immune system disorder that causes histamine swelling in response to light scratching. The effect lasts about 30 minutes: "This allows me to painlessly draw on my skin with just enough time to photograph the results. Even though I can direct this ephemeral response by drawing on it, the reaction is involuntary, much like the uncontrollable nature of a blush."
20 bizarre facts and bits of interesting trivia about H.P. Lovecraft
Above is one of the rare photos where horror writer and "weird fiction" legend H.P. Lovecraft is attempting a smile. It's a fitting way to kick off these 20 facts and bits of trivia about a now famous author who lived much of his life in poverty, died in a agony and was almost entirely unknown and unread until after his death:
When Lovecraft was 3 his father went insane and died 5 years later, most likely from "general paresis of the insane" caused by syphilis.
Lovecraft's first attempt at writing the "weird fiction" he would later become famous for is a story called "The Noble Eavesdropper." The story (which some say he wrote at the age of 6 or 7) does not survive.
His first published work was a letter about "astronomical matters" that was printed in The Providence Sunday Journal in 1906.
Lovecraft became a prolific letter writer and by some accounts wrote 87,500 letters during his lifetime. He was also in the habit of dating letters 200 years earlier than the current date.
Although now considered one of the greatest early American writers of horror, Lovecraft never received his high school diploma.
Lovecraft was friends with many contemporary writers of his time, including Conan creator Robert Howard, Robert Bloch and Fritz Leiber.
Lovecraft was once "killed" by fellow writer Bloch in the short story "Shambler from the Stars" and later killed Bloch in turn in a story called "The Haunter of the Dark."
Lovecraft ghost wrote a story called "Imprisoned with the Pharaohs" for Harry Houdini, who later commissioned Lovecraft to write a book debunking superstition (which was never finished due to Houdini's death).
Although Lovecraft is most famous for creating the Cthulhu Mythos, he himself never used that term. Lovecraft referred to his own series of interconnected mythos stories as the "Arkham Cycle."
Lovecraft's favorite author was Edgar Allan Poe, of whom he said "Poe was my God of fiction."
Lovecraft in turn influenced numerous writers that came after him, including Stephen King, Cliver Barker and Neil Gaiman. King called Lovecraft one of his biggest influences and "the twentieth century's greatest practitioner of the classic horror tale."
Lovecraft only truly became popular after his death, when friend and fellow writer August Derleth founded Arkham House publishing to help keep Lovecraft's work alive.
All of Lovecraft's stories written before 1923 are now in the public domain. However, it's not clear who owns or owned the copyright to many of his works, and the status of stories written after 1923 is disputed.
The statuette for the World Fantasy Award is a bust of Lovecraft, in honor of his writing. The award is informally referred to as a Howard.
Lovecraft created one of the few fictional books that was later turned into a real book: The Necronomicon. No less than 4 versions of the Necronomicon have since been created.
Although everyone knows Lovecraft was born on Aug. 20, 1890, and died on March 15, 1937, he's one of the few people whose "middle day" of life is also on record. A fan once calculated that December 2, 1913, was the exact halfway point of Lovecraft's life.
While he died in 1937, Lovecraft didn't actually get his own headstone until 1977, when fans pitched in to buy him one.
Lovecraft isn't buried under his headstone, however, even though hundreds of people visit it each year to pay homage to him. (His body is buried nearby.)
On Oct. 13, 1997, someone apparently tried to dig up Lovecraft's body, not knowing it wasn't under the headstone. They dug down about 3 feet before giving up for unknown reasons.
Lovecraft and his creations frequently appear in popular culture and have shown up in such diverse places as episodes of South Park and songs by Metallica. Although dead, Lovecraft has a Facebook page with more than 122,000 fans
Oct 19, 2011
Ape speaks....clown college...
Now if you are a Republican... A deck shoe, no white after labor day, Episcopalian ,fiscal and social conservative you must have been feeling pretty good around four months ago. The right track, wrong track is leaning your way, unemployment over 9%, they way you got it figured any one your party picks (boring white guy) will waltz right in over this community organizer (what the hell is that? does he wear shorts and have a whistle?) Short of him walking out on a debate stage with a feather duster up his ass and asking everyone to call him a pretty little peacock it should be a shoe in. And you would feel justified. It has been a tough twenty years. Clinton? (are you kidding?) Bush? (what the hell was that?) and then Obama.
But things have been looking a little spooky.
Trump,Perry and now Cain?
The only thing left is Romney. (Doesn't he have magic underpants?)
Why one can barely bring one self to finish a Manhattan...
So now you sit and watch the debates with a white knuckled intensity...
Because you know it's just a matter of time...
Before the feather duster comes out.......
cave gap!!!
Russian space caves on the Moon
Some Russian scientists want to build a space colony inside a network of caves on the Moon. No, really. It's hard to tell, from the Reuters story, how much support this plan actually has from the people who hold the purse strings.
sharp..
Folding utility knife that fits in your wallet
The CardSharp 2 from Iain Sinclair is a folding utility knife that turns into a credit-card object when it's not in use, suitable for storing in your wallet. It's a clever little design, unlike a lot of credit-card tools that leave you with a rectangle of plastic in one hand and a tool in the other, the "card" folds around to become the handle.
Oct 18, 2011
The end of western civilization....
Jimmy Dean Pancakes & Sausage on a Stick
By on October 18, 2011
I recently spotted the Jimmy Dean Pancakes & Sausage on a Stick food product in my local grocery store’s frozen food aisle. As surprised as I was to see it there, I was even more surprised to find online that they produce a a blueberry pancake version of this sorta-corndoggish item too. Not surprisingly, this product has a very low NuVal score: 6 (out of a possible 100)
all too true....
Life Cycle is an upcoming gallery show by anonymous prankster artists TrustoCorp. The focus of the show will be the life cycle of a person in contemporary America. Life Cycle opens at the Opera Gallery in New York City on October 21 and runs through November
so absurd it's righteous...
(vi
Oct 17, 2011
very cool...
Virgin Galactic opens world's first commercial spaceport
.
Richard Branson blogs: "A historic day today in New Mexico as we will be opening the first commercial spaceport in the world - Spaceport America.
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