Weirdness
pharyngula | October 27, 2010I have been sent a copy of the cover of the official Pharyngulista passport, produced by MinnieTheFinn.
I don't know about this "People's Republic" stuff. This is clearly a brutal, oppressive dicatatorship.
Oh, wait, is this like calling a small dog "Goliath"?
Warning: Using this passport can get you in big trouble with security agencies. Take special care not to visit the Vatican with it.
pharyngula | October 27, 2010I guess I'm not the only person in the world to get ranty emails from devout Christians. I was sent a copy of the message below which was originally sent to a store (name hidden to protect the guilty) which was selling a copy of the hideous leg lamp from the movie, A Christmas Story.
To 'Your Retail Store':
Today I went into your store, and I was appalled and disgusted that you blasphemed Almighty God Jesus Christ and His Most Holy Nativity Christmas by selling from your store shelves a filthy pornographic lamp that said "Christmas" Story on it. REMOVE THAT PIECE OF FILTHY, PORNOGRAPHIC…
pharyngula | October 26, 2010
Not a parody. It's a real PC game, if someone wants to try it out. I'm safe because I only have Macs.
pharyngula | October 26, 2010With mixed feelings, I announce the demise of Paul the 'psychic' octopus.
On the one hand, he was a living creature, and I feel sadness at any death. On the other hand, he was a psychic fraud, and I have no sympathy for those rascals. On the other hand, he was a cephalopod, and those especially deserve to thrive. On the other hand, the hype surrounding him was tiresome and overblown—good riddance. On the other hand, he was being exploited by his trainers slave masters, so he hardly deserves the blame. On the other hand, what a waste of everyone's time to be playing fake psychic games with…
pharyngula | October 23, 2010Fabulous fashion statement:
I'm thinking I could one-up her if I stopped trimming the beard, too.
pharyngula | October 23, 2010Daniel Phelps just reminded me that today is 23 October, the date that James Ussher, Church of Ireland Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland, determined to be the very first day of creation in 4004 BCE. That makes the world 6013 years old today, in his chronology (if you're adding it up at home, remember that there is no year 0).
Keep in mind that you now have excuses to party almost all week. Tomorrow, you should celebrate the creation of heaven and Space Water. You knew the earth was a floaty in a watery universe, right? I think the appropriate celebration is to drink.
Monday,…
pharyngula | October 20, 2010Mormons go around baptizing the dead into their church, but at least dead people were once real…the official Vatican newspaper has just announced that Homer and Bart Simpson are Catholic. It's not clear whether they didn't mention Marge, Lisa, and Maggie because they lack the sacred Y chromosome of Jesus that is required to be a true Catholic, or if it's because, perhaps, they are apostate Presbylutherans.
pharyngula | October 14, 2010Somebody should send this image to the jail in Berkeley County, SC. This is what happens if you let prisoners have bibles.
pharyngula | October 7, 2010"Oh," I thought, "I've never seen a video of George Bernard Shaw before," so I clicked on the link.
I've never had my opinion of someone plummet so rapidly.
I was also thinking that he looks pretty old here, and probably can't carry hod or dig ditches well enough to earn his keep, so maybe someone should have euthanized him.
pharyngula | October 4, 2010
You already know I dislike religion; it's a dreadful tool for distorting human values. I'm also an opponent of sexist socialization that short-changes women, in particular. How about if we combine both? Behold, My Princess Bible(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), a book you can give to your little girl to turn them into Disneyesque Bible freaks.
I'm a little disappointed, though. Is there also a Bratz Bible?
Sadly, this thing gets mostly good reviews at Amazon, and there's only one 1-star review. That's not the worst of it, either: the one bad review complains that there isn't enough Jesus and too…
pharyngula | September 29, 2010It would be a mercy. George Lucas is preparing another release of all of his Star Wars movies, after yet again tweaking them.
The new versions will be in…cheesy post-processed pseudo-3-D.
When the first one was released back in 1977 it was phenomenal — a pulpy space opera with dialogue that had the panache of a Hugo Gernsback short story, and we liked it. Then came the sequel, and we were overjoyed…it was still good old fashioned science fiction, but it was better than the first. And from that point on, unfortunately, it was dissolution and decay, beginning with the Ewoks and ending in the…
pharyngula | September 29, 2010I initially thought this was a fine graph, charting the fields of research of mad scientists over time, since it did accurately conclude that biologists rocked that niche, but then I looked closer, and they shortchanged us. For some entirely arbitrary reason, they split mad biologists into "biology", "biotechnology", and "neuroscience"…but those are simply subdisciplines of biology! You don't see mad physicists split into "physics", "lasers", and "whatever else physicists do", now do you? I see what they were doing: they were trying to minimize the appearance of our overwhelming dominance!…
pharyngula | September 26, 2010There's nothing I hate more in a sudden terrorist emergency than having to put on a cold gas mask.
pharyngula | September 25, 2010Elders of the Jehovah's Witnesses are not allowed to have beards, because it makes them look like dirty rotten gay communist hippies.
In the 1950s, in the the USA, beards were widely unpopular among the general public and most men who wore one were immediately perceived as beatniks (and later, hippies). In that American, Cold War climate, a young man who didn't sport a military-esque brush cut and bare chin was out-of-hand labeled a communist or homosexual.
I just thought it made me look cuddly!
pharyngula | September 19, 2010I just noticed — today is Talk Like a Pirate Day, and I haven't said a single "Yarrrrr."
So here it is, belatedly: Yarrrrrr.
pharyngula | September 15, 2010
This is getting ridiculous: an ad has been banned because it annoyed a handful of Catholics in Britain.
Antonio Federici's advert showed a pregnant nun eating ice cream in a church, together with the strap line "immaculately conceived".
The Advertising Standards Authority has ordered it to be discontinued, saying it mocked Roman Catholic beliefs.
The country is paying for an expensive papal visit (which is currently undersold), and in addition they're shutting down public amusement at the old geezer, out of a misplaced sense of propriety.
Hmmm. So Punch, Monty Python, and Father Ted must…
pharyngula | September 11, 2010I think this will go over well with rudeness here: bluntcard.com. One could easily get sucked into long reveries here, contemplating exactly who you would send that card to.
Not me, though. I'm off to do a little exercise, then I'm off the internet for a while to get some work done.
I'm going to come back online to a lot of rudeness sent my way, aren't I?
pharyngula | September 2, 2010What is it about Elsa Lanchester and The Bride of Frankenstein? She's the "it" girl of the 20th century, and here's a whole gallery of Bride images. I have a favorite, for some reason.
pharyngula | August 23, 2010A few years ago, a group of people dressed up as zombies for a protest march and got arrested for it.
When arrested at the intersection of Hennepin Avenue and 6th Street N., most of them had thick white powder and fake blood on their faces and dark makeup around their eyes. They were walking in a stiff, lurching fashion and carrying four bags of sound equipment to amplify music from an iPod when they were arrested by police who said they were carrying equipment that simulated "weapons of mass destruction."
I know. We're all on edge with the imminent threat of the zombie apocalypse, and it's…