News of the Weird
oracknows | March 30, 2007And I bet you wonder what nudist smokers did with their smokes before this.
Who knew this would be an issue in 1938?
I guess even nudists need to keep their smokes with them. I wonder where they kept their cigs before this was invented?
oracknows | March 25, 2007You be the judge...
Personally, I don't know if I could trust anyone that much.
(Hat tip: Attuworld.)
oracknows | March 16, 2007Continuing Orac's quest for truly stupid quotes from The 365 Stupidest Things Ever Said calendar, this time a couple of tasty stupid morsels about free speech:
Here's entry number 1, from the February 17, 2007 entry in the calendar:
"We forbid any course that says we restrict free speech!"--Dr. Kathleen Dixon, Director of Women's Studies at Bowling Green State University, Ohio, commenting on the resignation of Dr. Richard Zeller, who wanted to teach a course in how liberalism has led to political correctness.
Here's entry number 2, from the July 4, 2001 entry:
"What we have is two important…
oracknows | March 13, 2007Apparently, our President brings "bad energy" wherever he goes, requiring some strong woo to cleanse the area after he leaves:
Maya leaders are to perform a special cleaning ceremony at ancient ruins to clear bad energy after a visit by President Bush.
Mr Bush is due at the Mayan ruins of Iximche in Guatemala as part of his tour of the Latin American region, reports the BBC.
But after he leaves, Maya protesters said they would hold a ceremony to restore peace and harmony to the area.
Morales Toj said: "We will burn incense, place flowers and water in the area where Mr Bush has walked to clean…
oracknows | March 12, 2007
With nearly 20 months to go before the election itself and 10 months before even the first primaries, I'm already bored with the Presidential election of 2008. None of the current candidates does anything for me. One's a total lightweight who's in no way ready to be President, and I utterly loathe two others. My reaction to the rest ranges from mild dismay to downright ennui.
Now it's gotten interesting (or at least entertaining, with the potential for many jokes). Remember Jonathon Sharkey, a.k.a. "The Impaler," the friendly Satanist who ran for Governor of Minnesota on a platform of…
oracknows | March 11, 2007This driver should win some sort of award for bad driving:
A Bergen County woman was charged with driving under the influence after police said she mistook the landmark Boardwalk in Atlantic City for a road. Capt. Bill McKnight said he was on patrol when the vehicle sped by him Wednesday night.
McKnight had given chase with lights and siren when the vehicle made a U-turn and nearly hit his patrol car, he said. McKnight broke off the chase when speeds reached 40 m.p.h. because he feared for the safety of the few pedestrians who were on the wood structure. Two motorcycle officers cut off the…
oracknows | March 9, 2007It's Friday, which means that it's time once again to delve deeply into the world of woo, all for your edification and (I hope) education. Even though I started out with less motivation than usual for tending to the blog, it actually turned out to be yet another rather eventful and surprisingly productive week on the old blog, with topics ranging from plumbing the depths of antivaccination lunacy, to doing some nice straight science blogging about the anticancer drug dichloroacetate (which actually gave me some ideas for my research), to discussing the "individualization" of treatments in…
oracknows | March 4, 2007
I'm not sure if the group above, Clowns for Christ, Inc. (complete with Gideon the Parrot, Precious the Super Dog, and illustrated Bible messages, songs, and clown tricks), is the group responsible for the training videos that I posted yesterday. If it's not, though, apparently clowning for Christ is more widespread than I thought, because Googling "Clowns for Christ" or "Clowns for Jesus" brought up a lot of hits, including:
Clown Ministry
Clowns for Christ (a different group)
Clowning4Christ
Christ the Rebel Clown (which led to The Rebel Clown Army, which bills itself as wanting "to…
oracknows | March 3, 2007In which Christian "clowns" are being trained to invade a nursing home to "entertain" the unfortunate residents trapped within.
Money quote: "If people are in need of touch, you touch them."
Coming from clowns, that just sounds a bit creepy to me.
Or maybe, "Clowns can look a bit intimidating if you see a lot of them in one place." (Substitute "creepy" for "intimidating.")
See for yourself:
Worse, there's a Part 2, in which the clowns invade the personal rooms of the elderly nursing home residents and then use the residents in wheelchair races:
This stuff could scare the crap out of…
oracknows | February 24, 2007In case you didn't know, here are instructions for opening your bowels (via Clusterfock, Kottke, and Kevin, MD):
I wonder if I've been doing it wrong all these years. I mean, I don't think I've ever used a footrest...
oracknows | February 22, 2007At least this time the surgeons aren't disgracing my profession by making ignorant statments about evolution. Well, actually, I almost wish they were, because puffed up idiots pontificating about evolution at least don't put patients in immediate danger like this:
A routine appendix operation in Belgrade went badly wrong when two surgeons started fighting and stormed from the operating theatre to settle their dispute outside, the daily Politika reported on Wednesday.
Surgeon Spasoje Radulovic was operating when his colleague Dragan Vukanic entered and made a remark that started a quarrel,…
oracknows | February 21, 2007Fellow ScienceBloggers Ed, PZ, Afarensis, Tim, and John have all been having loads of fun beating up on a rather amusing and pathetic project known as Conservapedia, which, according to its creators, is designed to "combat the liberal bias" in Wikipedia. There's not much for me to add, except that I noticed one particularly amusing howler in Conservapedia's Examples of Liberal Bias in Wikipedia page:
Wikipedia's entry for the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, a conservative group, features a rant against the group by a British journalist who was a former press officer for the…
oracknows | February 19, 2007Apparently some librarians and parents are upset that a children's book (which happens to have won the Newberry Medal, the most prestigious award in children's literature) has, within its pages, the use of the word "scrotum." The book, The Higher Power of Lucky by Susan Patronhas, been banned in some school libraries, mostly in the South.
Money quote:
"I think it's a good case of an author not realizing her audience," said Frederick Muller, a librarian at Halsted Middle School in Newton, N.J. "If I were a third- or fourth-grade teacher, I wouldn't want to have to explain that."
Really, are…
oracknows | February 11, 2007I have to admit, I don't quite "get" the whole Aqua Teen Hunger Force thing (I'm either too old or too uncool, I guess), but, as a certified 24 addict, I found this to be a rather amusing take on the terror scare caused by an ill-fated ad campaign in Boston a couple of weeks ago:
(Via Stupid Evil Bastard.)
oracknows | February 9, 2007It's my last day in sunny Phoenix, and all I've done thus far is to go to conferences, work on a grant, and do a little blogging, usually late at night because I often have trouble falling asleep in hotel rooms, particularly given that the air conditioning always seems to be such that it's either too cold or too warm. I must be like Goldilocks, at least with respect to hotel heating/cooling systems, because it's always ridiculously hard for me to get it "just right."
In any case, I bet you were probably wondering if I'd pull off this week's Your Friday Dose of Woo. Actually, I wondered myself…
oracknows | January 28, 2007Remember Donnie Davies, the "youth pastor" that I wrote about a couple of days ago, who posted a list of gay bands, plus a homophobic video proclaiming that "God hates a fag" that led to a prolonged debate over whether he was for real or some sort of elaborate Borat-like prank?
Two sources tell me that he's apparently been outed as actor Joey Oglesby:
Thanks to the sleuthing of Dallas JMG reader Bob Stoller, "Pastor Donnie Davies" has been exposed as Dallas-area actor Joey Oglesby (First name corrected from post headline). Here he is. Joey Oglesby recently appeared in a production of Debbie…
oracknows | January 25, 2007Oh, no! The gay bands are here! Hide your children, and keep them away from this corruption! So sayeth Donnie Davies, an evangelical preacher who runs a website called Love God's Way:
One of the most dangerous ways homosexuality invades family life is through popular music. Parents should keep careful watch over their children's listening habits, especially in this Internet Age of MP3 piracy.
Oooh. Scary!
But let's look at the list of bands that Davies thinks we should all watch out for and protect our children from. The first thing I noticed is that Elton John is listed twice. Given what a…
oracknows | January 21, 2007I had originally intended to use this one for a segment of Your Friday Dose of Woo. Unfortunately, when I tried to start writing, I realized it was unsuitable. No, it wasn't unsuitable because the content wasn't delightfully loopy enough to deserve targeting. The problem was that it was an insufficient--shall we say?--target-rich environment. Again, this wasn't because the overall concept wasn't bizarre enough. No, it is certainly more than strange enough to qualify. It was that there was so little information on how this supposedly works and the little information that was there was vague in…
oracknows | January 17, 2007The other day, I commented on the very sad death of a young woman named Jennifer Strange. In essence, Ms. Strange died after a radio contest to see who could drink the most water without urinating. The prize? A Wii. This was pretty clearly a case of water intoxication leading to hyponatremia, an impression that was reinforced by a later report (now confirmed) that she had drunk 2 gallons of water in a short period of time. Since then, the three DJs involved in the contest, plus seven other employees of the radio station, have been fired for "violating the terms of their employee agreements."…
oracknows | January 16, 2007A couple of days ago, I commented on the sad case of Jennifer Strange, the woman who entered a water drinking contest and died, apparently of water intoxication. While listening to the radio this morning as I got ready for work, I heard pundits discussing the case, and one of them stated that she had drunk over two gallons of water in the course of the contest. I've been unable to confirm that Strange did indeed drink that much water, but, if true, that would be around 8 L of water in a short period of time and would be enough to explain her death.
The DJ also mentioned that the Sacramento…