Weirdness
pharyngula | December 20, 2006Maybe we should sic Edward Tufte on 'em—Feministing found some amazing posters that purport to explain everything with the power of overwrought metaphor and cluttered, confusing cartoons. It just draws your eye in with the awesomeness of its arbitrariness.
So contraception is the source of single-parent families and infanticide? The stalk of divorce leads to the flower of abortion? The leaves of adultery and pre-marital sex use sunlight and carbon dioxide to make the sugar of sexual chaos that is stored in the root of coitus interruptus? Watch out, kids, if you blow on the puffball of…
pharyngula | December 19, 2006We know that spammers cobble up chunks of text by skimming various sources, such as religious tracts, but a reader has discovered that they also pull random text from newspapers. My name has appeared in spam!
That's from a Star Tribune article that quoted me—now I'm wondering what the spammer was trying to sell under my name.
pharyngula | December 17, 2006Sometimes one does get a little tired of powerpoint presentations, but the subject matter can help overcome the tedium: here's one on The Evolution of Vampires, Homo sapiens whedonum. It's an interesting exercise in free-running BS, but still, there's some surprisingly accurate general information about the principles of evolution embedded in all the silliness.
(via Jonathan Arnold)
pharyngula | December 17, 2006This spam mail came into my mailbox, and I made the mistake of opening it. I know the spammers throw in random blocks of text and mangle the porn keywords to throw off our filters, but this juxtaposition was just plain weird.
Fundamentalists believe Jesus was God becoming man. I believe that Jesus was man becoming God.
URL deleted
Rvedhead Gxirl Sfucking Her Fhirst GIGTANTCOCK
The Holy Spirit can't save saints or seats. If we don't know any non-Christians, how can we introduce them to the Savior?Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.
Idleness is the stupidity of the body, and…
pharyngula | December 16, 2006Somehow, I think I got a shave, too.
At least Wilkins looks exactly as he does in real life.
pharyngula | December 16, 2006
Blame Nic for this…but did you know you can put your face on a dancing elf and make a spectacle of yourself? If you have the guts, click here for the show.
Or if you'd rather, watch Nic dance. All the faculty out here at the University of Minnesota Morris are elfin, as you can see.
Now we just need to get all the scienceblogs people to join in, and we can have an all-dancing scienceblogs review!
This could get disturbing. Here are the latest scienceblogs elves:
Afarensis
John Lynch
Craig McClain
pharyngula | December 14, 2006OK, this fellow in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin saw a strange-looking deer: it had the stubs of extra legs growing out of 3 of its limbs, and it was an intersex. That's strange enough, and is of developmental interest, and would have me wondering what kind of environmental stresses are perturbing wildlife development in that neck of the woods.
The fellow hit the deer with his truck and killed it, and reported it to the DNR. So it's actually road kill, a very common thing.
Now here's where I get baffled: the man ate it afterwards.
"And by the way, I did eat it," Lisko said. "It was tasty."
Jebus.…
pharyngula | December 13, 2006Here's another article on that freaky Left Behind video game. The rationalizations for the ability to kill people violently in the game are fascinating.
Left Behind Games' president, Jeffrey Frichner, says the game actually is
pacifist because players lose "spirit points" every time they gun down
nonbelievers rather than convert them. They can earn spirit points again by
having their character pray.
Isn't the most wonderful version of pacifism ever? Go out, butcher a few people, engage in a warlike campaign…and as long as you beg an invisible man's forgiveness afterwards, you can still call…
pharyngula | December 13, 2006Although, actually, I was hoping to get Caligula, like The Countess.
Which Historical Lunatic Are You?From the fecund loins of Rum and Monkey.
(Honestly, I warned you. Keep voting.)
pharyngula | December 13, 2006Comrade Myers signs his confession before the eyes of the Committee
I have been ordered by the Ministry of Justice of the We Are All Giant Nuclear Fireball Now Party to publicly confess my shame and apologize for my grave offenses against the WAAGNFNP. I do so apologize. I have been ordered to abjure all attempts to redirect trolls to the distraction of the Glorious Show Trial against the Enemy of the People, Chris Clarke. I do so.
pharyngula | December 12, 2006Is it too late to join the "We are all giant nuclear fireball" Party? 'Cuz I'm getting a little worried what with all the show trials of the radicals. Pretty soon they're going to start banishing people to gulags in icy wastelands like Western Minnesota…oh, say. That's all right then. I guess they can't do anything too horrible to me, then.
Other than the Dakotas, that is.
pharyngula | December 12, 2006Revel in the crankiness: Charlie Brown Must Die. (If that link doesn't work for you, here's a direct link to the Quicktime movie)
P.S. I do not endorse incinerating blockheaded kids. After all, I'm one of those Christmas atheists.
pharyngula | December 11, 2006There's a little bit of everything out there. How about this: a blog dedicated to lesbian vampire movies (and no, it's not some freaky porn site). Genre rules!
(via ZayZayEM)
pharyngula | December 10, 2006What I really want to know is what Shelley was looking for when she stumbled across this: an art project to collect 1000 liters of human sperm and display it in a transparent cube. The Sperm Cube does not look like it was well thought out, I'm afraid.
One problem is the collection method. They just want donors to ejaculate into a vial, and mail it, unrefrigerated, to them. Would you like the job of opening tubes of rancid semen and dumping it into the cube?
Another is the health risk. Human fluids need to be treated as a biohazard—they can be ripe with nasty pathogens (HIV? syphilis?), and…
pharyngula | December 4, 2006Any parents out there? I bet you know the children's book, Goodnight Moon. I read it a few million times myself, with each kid as they came up through those preschool years, and I can still remember each page and how the little ones had to repeat each goodnight. Lance Mannion finds the strangest summary of the book, though—it's a dark nihilist tract that portrays the inevitability of death.
Whoa. Heavy, man.
The other obsessive touchstone of my children's early years was Pat the Bunny, where each page had a different texture glued on — a piece of sandpaper, a feather, some soft fluff — and…
pharyngula | December 4, 2006This story says it all in the title: He was naked, on crack and in alligator's mouth. It does make me feel a little better about waking up to single-digit temperatures and that blowing powdery stuff on the ground, I will say—we don't have much of a problem with naked unconscious people getting eaten by alligators around here.