Saturday

it depends who you ask

via google search:
"If the twentieth century has taught us anything",

See if you can match the statements to who made them.

...it is that a "war to end all wars" often leads to bigger ones, and that man is the same volatile mix of good and evil he has always been.
...it is to be suspicious of those who put all their hope in science as the explainer of everything.
...it's that people are not as pliable as some utopian (or dystopian) political thinkers want to believe.
...it is that free markets work better than any other kind.
...it has shown us the ways in which individual and official memories often conflict.
...it is that large-scale, centralized government does not work.
...it is that the word impossible doesn't exist.
...it has taught us that there is not one of us who, under certain circumstances, could not be conditioned to support the hero-leader who would "redeem" the world at the push of a glowing red button.

* The American Scientific Affiliation, a fellowship of men and women in science and disciplines that relate to science who share a common fidelity to the Word of God
* a sermon on the epistle to the hebrews
* Kofi Annan
* a couple of artists alluding to Japanese internment camps
* a page about if there were no birds
* John Gordon, The Business of America
* The Harvard Salient, [an unbearably smug] fortnightly journal of political thought
* some guy at zdnet

It just keeps going like that, so I didn't feel I had to continue.

I think I've told you this before (as I have done with so very many things), but I once got lucky and happened to ask the right person one of those questions about the world that crop up every so often. He was a pediatric neurologist, and I wanted to know when it is that children go from crying about everything, to crying sepcifically about sadness, and the answer, which I have absolutely no doubt is correct, is "at the time they understand what sadness is", which in terms of actual age is immaterial, but I think was four or five.

Sadness can't be experienced by someone who doesn't know what it is. The capacity for it is there, but it's only a mess instinctive panic and pain. The baby calls, and mother responds with attention. This tends to work out for all creatures.

Now imagine this situation applying to other constructs. An abstract construct like a worldview or belief system can't be fathomed by someone who hasn't given any thought to the idea that there might be more than one. I'm working this out as I go and I only have about five monutes, so bear with me.

Here's how thoughts work. In the brain electricity tends to go down the same little pathways, and the stronger the impression it is that gets made, the more likely a person is, willingly or not, to identify things in relationship to that impression. Indoctrinating a child into the primitive blood cult of Christianity, for example, digs a gorge in their brain, a way of looking at things and at yourself...
There's good and evil and the church is in charge of it all. And if you don't like it you 're going to somehow go to hell, where you will cry and fry in turmoil for all eternity, getting buttfucked by the devil, unless you think getting buttfucked by the devil is good, in which case something different will happen. I don't know what, but trust me, it'll be real bad and hurt.

Yeah.

I don't know how many children are able to recover their higher functions after this load of shit is crammed into their willing little eyes and ears over the course of their lives and how many aren't, but it's a safe bet my kids, should they be born before I'm killed by a falling meteor, aren't going to church.


It's time to move on from this.

Friday

What happens if you let bacon sit out for two months at room temperature?
find out

Thursday

oh dear

25 Signs That, Sadly, You've Grown Up

1. Your house plants are alive, and you can't smoke any of them.
2. Having sex in a twin bed is out of the question.
3. You keep more food than beer in the fridge.
4. 6:00 AM is when you get up, not when you go to bed.
5. You hear your favorite song on an elevator.
6. You watch the Weather Channel.
7. Your friends marry and divorce instead of hook up and break up.
8. You go from 130 days of vacation time to 14.
9. Jeans and a sweater no longer qualify as "dressed up."
10. You're the one calling the police because those damn kids next door won't turn down the stereo.
11. Older relatives feel comfortable telling sex jokes around you.
12. You don't know what time Taco Bell closes anymore.
13. Your car insurance goes down and your payments go up.
14. You feed your dog Science Diet instead of McDonalds leftovers.
15. Sleeping on the couch makes your back hurt.
16. You no longer take naps from noon to 6 PM.
17. Dinner and a movie is the whole date instead of the beginning of one.
18. Eating a basket of chicken wings at 3 AM would severely upset, rather than settle your stomach.
19. You go to the drug store for ibuprofen and antacid, not condoms and pregnancy tests.
20. A $4.00 bottle of wine is no longer "pretty good stuff".
21. You actually eat breakfast food at breakfast time.
22. "I just can't drink the way I used to," replaces, "I'm never going to drink that much again."
23. 90% of the time you spend in front of a computer is for real work.
24. You drink at home to save money before going to a bar.
25. You read this entire list looking desperately for one sign that doesn't apply to you and can't find one to save Your sorry old ass.

the mascot

Because places need exploring and you're not supposed to go there, there's the Action Squad.

Tuesday


One more reason to love popsicles.

Monday

unlikely puzzles on wheel of fortune

FORESKIN
PEDIATRIC ONCOLOGY
TORTURE VICTIM
DATE RAPIST
PROLETARIAT
NIGGER FUCKER
ARBEIT MACHT FREI


made with this

Sunday

watch the simpsons

All episodes now streaming, around the galaxy around the clock.

http://www.allsimps.com/

It's Sunday afternoon and the pharmacy is quiet and work is slow. One of our pharmacists is lamenting that the performance of one of our famously and heartbreakingly mediocre sports teams isn't matching her totally unrealistic expectations. I told her that if she wanted to cheer up, she should consider all the children in the world who didn't have enough to eat right now, and that that ought to put her disappointment in perspective. She didn't see things my way, and threatened not to give me a cookie, which I don't feel so bad about, since I hadn't formally been offered one anyway. I think I'll curl up with something to read till it's time to leave. It's times like now I'm glad there's so much good stuff to read at reconstruction

just pretend I'm deaf

I listen to an mp3 player at my job, during the portion of which I'm walking around the hospital putting drugs in the pyxis machines. On my mp3 player I listen not so much to music, because for that all you need is a radio, but to people talking. Thanks to podcasting, there is more easy-to-get decent audio than you can ever listen to, so I'll download and copy it over, and I've got something to listen to that will hopefully be interesting. Whatever it is, it's going to be more interesting than what I would otherwise hear, which is the sounds of firing solenoids and plastic clicking against other plastic.

There are three kinds of nurses here, the ones who don't talk to you, the ones who talk to you when you're not wearing headphones, and the ones who talk to you when you are wearing headphones.

The first group and I have nothing to talk about, which is fine. The second group is pleasant enough, just talkers who are also bored with what they're doing, and are looking to supplement their imaginations with a few moments of repartee. The third group I want to strangle. They talk to you specifically because they think you can't hear them, and invariably with a passive aggression that, if it had a ph, would disintegrate ceramic tile. They mean to draw their own attention to that they are being ignored, by someone who should be listening to them but "Oh, isn't, and hmm." Then they spin calculatedly away and toddle off, presumably to catch up on some other bits of nastiness they've got to attend to.

I don't like working with women, precisely for this reason; I sense an unreconstructed social heirarchy is at work, and that I'm having my eyes pecked at by the head chicken. I gather their gesture is meant to wither me into some kind of shame, but all it does is make me shake my head at the smallness of the life of anyone who could possibly take pleasure in such a useless form of exceedingly weak cruelty.

the patriotic aesthetic


Behold never forget: The art of More.

Saturday

Thursday

I'm not real sure what this is supposed to be, but I think it involves Jesus and it's pretty terrible.

something very odd

"reasonable"

Here's what happens to our language when we pretend religious people aren't insane.

"If this person were really someone reasonable, he would not agree to remain at his post one minute, but would convert to Islam immediately"

Said Muammar Qadaffi's son. Of the pope.

story

This is all you need to know about youtube and the people who watch and contribute to it. Someone has remixed a bunch of lamers and added an obnoxious tinkly melancholy soundtrack. I couldn't get through the whole thing, so don't feel bad if you can't.

If you've got a USB drive put the Torpark browser on it. They got digged, Yahooed and so on, so once the server isn't melting any more, this anonymizing browser is a fun-lookin' toy to supplement your dangerous, hacking lifestyle.

Wednesday

da clubs in which you will not find rapper 50 cent

1) the chess club
2) the glee club
3) future farmers of america
4) the model railroading club
5) you get the idea
6) why am I doing this
7) ...

print later

John Beckmann - Merge Invisible Layers

Tuesday

oops

A classmate of mine has a fiancee who he was set to visit in Iowa. She had to turn down an invitation from a woman she worked with to go to the bar, because it would have conflicted with his visit. The friend found someone else, and they went out together looking to get laid. The woman found a guy and took him home for a one-nighter. The next day she had to go to the clinic with throat irritation. The doctor took a look in her throat, left the room, and came back with a police officer. There were maggots in her throat. There's only one way maggots can get in someone's throat, and that's if they have sex with a corpse. The guy that lady had fucked was a mortician.

The moral of the story is, if you're going to fuck a stranger, make them take a shower first.

I like graffiti. I like girls. I like graffiti on girls. nsfw.

Monday

wowie wow wow

Watch lots of stuff!
Here!

Sunday

flickr drama

So I saw these pictures on flickr, and was like, I like those. So I do what I do with every picture on the internet I like and want to corral, so I can look at them whenever I want. I put them on my desktop, waited till I had five or six, and uploaded them to flickr.

And then people freaked out.

You see, there is a contingent of people who don't put their pictures on flickr so that anyone can see them, but rather so that they can feel like real photographers and enforce the copyright that flickr promises them exists. I guess you should get something for your money when you're a paying member. So a whole gaggle of whiny pissants decided to attack in true internet tool form, this time in numbers I haven't seen since Todd Horton's youth group sought revenge for my heresy.

The real spectacle has passed into history. Sadly, since I was most likely in violation of flickr's terms of service, I decided to delete the three pictures that were sending so many people into violent hysterics. I still have, though, the lovely comments and the usernames of the peope who left them.

Rippie: love is the way said amid a stream of what must have been some seriously overdue, therapeutic foaming:
please allow me the first kick of your ass on your way to hell.

Love really is the way, is it not?

Trinahopeful was less rabid, but passive aggression can give you an ulcer:
Can we assume you are posting stolen pics of women because you are unlikely ever to find one to pose for you?

This kind of thing went on and on.

My favorite guy also had some choice words, but a picture really is worth a thousand of them. Here's his teeny little profile pic, which can also be used to kill cockroaches. I won't be crossing into this cathedral of nastiness:



So yeah. My argument is that all these pictures already sit right there on Flickr, and if they hadn't been credited by me to the people who they "belong to", which they hadn't, then in the comments beneath them, if they were claimed to have originated elsewhere and then that had been verified by myself, that justice had been served. Done! Who cares?

Wrong. Twenty comments later, I put it together that there are people on Flickr whose hobby is tracking down their own pictures on other people's flickr pages, raising hell, and calling the flickr cops. And I guess if the terms of service say that's how it works, thay have every right to do that. But they're still bitches.

In the bigger picture, I am a photo collector and a halfway decent tagger. If people are seeing a picture on my flickr page that I got from you, chances are it's because I tagged the picture better than you did. If you're going to get mad because people comment on your picture on my page, tag your pictures better. It's a big part of the whole thing. That, and if you want to have copyrighted pictures, the internet is a terrible place to publish them.

help nedroid

He needs good sentences to illustrate.

Look what kind of work he did with the last ones.

Dennis Miller

This man is being hired by Fox because he's a republican, and that's the only kind of people Fox likes working for them. The name Dennis Miller was passing through my mind today when I remembered something I'd seen a while back that would illustrate a point well.

There once was published on the internet a list of the top 100 funniest jokes, which I read because I like funny jokes. I also get pleasure out of jokes because there is a deeper level to them; all jokes beg to be deconstructed. Maybe that's why I don't hear them as much as I used to, deconstruction for better or worse has become a national pastime, and no one likes being the subject of that kind of scrutiny.

According to this list, two of the funniest jokes were made up or at least told, by Dennis Miller. And now, I present them to you are in all their glory.

1) I worked some gigs in the Deep South…Alabama…You talk about Darwin’s waiting room. There are guys in Alabama who are their own father.
2) I had a cab driver in Paris. The man smelled like a guy eating cheese while getting a permanent inside the septic tank of a slaughterhouse.

So is he funny? Somebody thinks he is. A lot of somebodies. There are millions of people in this country for whom these hackneyed stereotypes are a lightning bolt to the funny bone. "Guess whut! Foreigners stank! HAW HAW!" These are also the same people who love Fox news. Because in the end, everything comes down to stereotypes for them.

Fox and radical right wing news junkies are notorious for their mediated belief system that has nothing to do with reality except a few names. I don't even have to go into it, it's so obvious. It takes a lot of energy to stifle the simplest of questions. What's the deal with the missing WMDs? Who cares! We're winning the wore on tear!

The list shows me that stupid/vicious stereotypes are rewarded, as was Jew-baiting in 1930s Germany. And who am I to say that those jokes aren't funny, because how do you objectively consider what's funny? The jokes are right there on the list, as official as can be. Hey, did you hear the one about the nigger who was so lazy and stupid that he couldn't even read his welfare check! He wasn't white, I can tell you that! Ha ha ha! Oh my god Dennis stop you're killing me!

But sterotypes have nothing to do with intending to be hurtful, it's just primitive and primitive happens to be hurtful, like a pet alligator that eats your baby. It's not mean, it's just a reptile! The dumber you are, the more primitive your perceptions of us and them. If they wear turbans, they're them. If we laugh at turban people, we're us. Go, us! Excellent strategy for tribalism, guys. And who are the uncivilized ones?

Once you see, as I have, that the guys who are doing almost all the heart catheterizations are wops and raghead forgeigners and the patients are all fat white guys, you start thinking twice about the jokes and their actual utility. Dennis Miller did prefabricated jokes as an NFL commentator before even football fans tired of him, and the only place down from there is where he's headed now. Bon voyage, dickweed.

Dennis Miller will make maybe a million dollars this year doing material that isn't worthy of even my low standards. Which I guess is a way of saying my standards, low as they are, are worth more to me than a million dollars.

I have this recurring dream the alarm clock's going off and I have to get up. Then I realize it isn't a dream, which is even worse.

I got up and read about Nawaubianism, the worst religion I've ever heard of. It basically consists of whatever this one guy feels like saying at the time. He now lives in the toughest jail in the country because the leaders of their own religions are apparently highly susceptible to the corrupting influences of underage girls. I like grown women, which is a good sign I'm not going to have to start my own religion. Oh, and I think religion's completely a waste of time, so there's that too.

That aside, how stupid do you have to be to follow a cult? The guys go down to Guyana and have a mass suicide because Jim Jones tells them to, they give their daughters to David Koresh and this York guy and so on, what the hell is wrong with these people? There's already a problem with you if you think spirituality is real, and that's the painful part that nobody likes hearing about, and that's why we are never going to get this whole muslim vs. christian vs. jew thing under control. Ever.

Underlying problem time. If you think you have spiritual needs people can take advantage of those needs, and since spirits are made up like Santa Claus, culty types get to define what your spiritual needs are, for you. You can't blame them for doing what they're good at. Furthermore, if you think there's something wrong with cults you're wrong. Cults do exactly what they're supposed to in the same way that a wheel on a bent axle is supposed to wobble. Cults are simply very good methods for seriously disturbed people to take advantage of other seriously disturbed people.

It's not illegal to be so emotionally susceptible that a cult can gitcha, and our culture reliably spins out a human by-product tailor-made for exploitation, a slogan-repeating wallet-carrying consumer zombie, so I'm wondering what kinds of cults are next, and glad that neither I, nor anyone I know will be in one.

Saturday

I live close to one of only five supermax jail facilities in the country, a friend of mine owns one of the fastest cars it is legal to drive on the street, and I didn't have anywhere to be. Yesterday I put all those things together and hoo buddy is that a recipe for a good time.

Oak Park Heights is a sleepy little community about four miles from Stillwater. There are boats in driveways, mainly to access the St. Croix river, which is less than a mile away. You see shiny tongs with the stickers still on them hanging on gas grills, careful landscaping, all the trappings of the good life. And like everywhere else, you don't see any people because they're all inside watching television. The American dream is alive in Oak Park Heights. All this and a prison, too. And it's not just any prison.

It's isn't ostentatious in appearance, that is, until you look past it, down its edge and into the distance. When you see the razorwire extending in so many, many layers like a shimmering coast of pain, you know you've come to the right place. Or the wrong place.

Just over a hill either way you approach it, the Minnesota Correctional Facility at Oak Park Heights sits in a little valley which is exactly the size and shape you'd want for a really great game of capture the flag. The trees have long since been cleared away, naturally, and now there's not anything else to hide behind, but the little dell is topographically storybook perfect with open stretches ending in long, graceful curves. It's impossible not to imagine planners standing on a nearby hill with drawings, looking down into it nodding, and then smiling, shaking hands.

I didn't get pictures, but they got plenty of me. Cameras these days are small, so if you can see it and it's state of the art, you're looking at a really nice camera. I saw many of these. I've heard it said that you can't feel cameras on you the way you can feel eyes, and I'm telling you that, in some cases, anyway, that's bullshit. We drove in, read the signs telling you that your rights as an American ended once you came up the driveway, and drove off. We wanted to drink a beer and feel the wind in our receding hairlines, and we wanted to do it right now. But we'd made the trip so we went around the side to see if we could get a better look at the yard.

A few miles away, in Stillwater, there's a really big prison. That prison has rock walls and so forth around it that obviously represent many years of laborious busy-work. It's got a lot of iron and an institutional/gymnasium feel; it's a real slammer. Not the supermax. That thing looks like it came pre-assembled out of a large and very dangerous box. It's not beautiful, but it's striking, I think because it sits in such a pretty place, and yet it represents the ugliest part of existence imaginable. We contemplated this momentarily.

If there's anything cooler than seeing a badass supermax prison, it's driving away from it at 130 miles an hour. Fuckin' voom. Even other fast cars shrink away from a European M3 with a supercharger.

All in all it was a good time, but I ain't ever goin' back there.

For more information about the kind of people who call that place home sweet home, check out this wikipedia article.

senility

If I don't die in a fireball or get murdered young or get cancer soon or something else like that, and live to be old enough to become senile, I hope I get senile in a way that people can find some entertainment in.

Like, I hope I think I'm Ray Charles or something. "Somebody brang me a piana!"

Or maybe I could think I'm Rip Van Winkle and just make shit up about what used to be everywhere.

Or something even cooler.

Friday

I was just thinking about Christina McAuliffe's extramenopausal hot flash (as I so often do), and what that explosion would have looked like if they'd actually made it to space with no oxygen to combust all that fuel. Would they have been ok?

Or, would it have just sent them careening on some wonky trajectory to the far reaches of near space? That scenario captures my imagination, and I was thus exploited once by Kurt Vonnegut who wrote a story about that situation. Only in his story the guys are still in orbit. If you gotta die, the space shuttle is a good way to do it. You drift away forever, or you explode. The world is full of assholes anyway.

Misogynist: A man who hates women as much as women hate one another.

Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.

—H. L. Mencken

Thursday



It's a watch. Yeah.

hey!

It's the last post I'll ever make about the stanford prison experiment!

Or Gilgamesh!

Maybe!

learn something


armor of god pjs

Magical thinking

print

The Day That Changed Everything Wasn't 9/11

our favorite language

To cuss and to promise are both to swear. I'm just sayin'.

the morning read

blogger tapes bacon to cat

How to steal elections, instructions

Babies wearing toupees

Wednesday

how to create great passwords, etc.

Think of a word. Then misspell it. Then, convert some of the letters in it to leetspeak and throw another random digit/character into it somewhere. Now your password is awesome.


Now the etc. I used to consider hangovers the official feeling of adulthood, but now there's another one. It's the feeling of defeat you get when you're sick and tired of being sick and tired of something (like when people break up with their mean boyfriends and empower themselves!), but you just have to keep doing the same shit anyway because there's no way out. I'm so tired of watch school right now it amazes me, yet I have to go till it's over.

I heard somewhere that, and I'm sorry I didn't get the link, since I'm sure it was on the computer network, but I heard somewhere that our memories protect us. The gist of it was, the things we think we remember aren't remembered the way they actually happened. A sepia tone glosses over the cracks and hard edges of unpleasantness that should saturate our memories if they were written down by our conscious minds. Basically, it's been shown that we misremember pain and discomfort. Example: Try to remember being in a really foul frame of mind four years ago. Can you? I can't, and for purposes I don't have to go into, will assume you can't either. What do you think that's about?

Each day is a struggle, full of details and phone calls and traffic. And yet remembering five years ago, it's like those were "the good old days". No, it was the same shit five years ago only you can't remember it. Five years from now I'll look up this blog and think of how neatly it fits in with the subject matter that I was in a bad mood when I set these words down. That it might not have mattered if it weren't for my saying it did, which really had no effect on anything, so it won't matter. By then school will be a dimming memory, and I'll probably have blacked out most of it, except maybe one or two things I enjoyed.

Tuesday

We're working on these in school:


They're nice.

You learn something every day. For me today's lesson came early...
When some chick eating a hot dog winds up in front of a camera, is when all my flickr-surfing pays off.


/if you're into that kind of thing

Monday

things that sound funny in burp-talk

excuse me
cheeseburger
get some pussy
I love you
bawawaaawawaaaa (be careful not to get any on you, this one's not for beginners)
who farted

Sunday

I attack, you decide

I have a long and proud history of seeking out turds on the internet and being obnoxious at them. I've driven girls to carve my name in their arms and christians to make gay porn blogs to commemorate their frustration. And I can hardly wait to see what happens next.

Seeing as how I'm going to do it to someone regardless, I thought it might be fun to involve you the reader in the selection process of the people I mock, annoy, ridicule, and frustrate. I'm going to put up a few suggestions and then let you all decide what will be the next blog I attack. If you see a good one that's not here, let me know about that, too. (I could throw five hundred sites up here and not even scratch the surface so I'm just going to start with three.)

At number one, it's Titanite.: "This is the blog of the sweetest guy on earth". He's a vain poof.

Number two, a street corner Jesus preacher. I just don't like those guys at all. Raven Midwest.

Number three, welcome to the fuck house, a sex worker's blog. Whether real or fake, it sucks.

Someone's opinion of how to grill a perfect burger.

This is pretty good start, but if you mince a shallot or two in there it adds a lot of the right kind of flavor. That and getting the bun toasted right is key. Tomorrow I'm making burgers and I'll be doing this sauce as well. Do vegetarians get this excited about their food?

The wife's going to a wedding next weekend, so Saturday night will find me at the roller derby's first home match/game/whatever. I'm hoping to take as many people with me as possible. If enough of you want to come I may even clean out my car to fit you in.

I don't understand

Why clothes that say "OLD NAVY" are considered to be superior to clothes that say nothing at all.

Saturday

scandal

This is what the internet was always capable of. Someone with balls has showed up.

Sex Baiting Prank on Craigslist

Friday


Help the Warmongers Help Themselves
A Vanities Cover-Flap Public Service

people are funny

confidential, do not distribute

most obvious thing ever

NYT:
As Wal-Mart Stores struggles to rebut criticism from unions and Democratic leaders, the company has discovered a reliable ally: prominent conservative research groups like the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation and the Manhattan Institute.

Of course they "discovered a reliable ally". NYT pussyfoots that one if you ask me. Heritage Foundation is the best propaganda machine in history. Those guys can make people believe anything. Get ready for Wal-Mart to suddenly be the quintessence of patriotism, and "Wal-Mart retirees for Truth".

Before long this viral marketing coup will result in Wal-mart parking lots filled with every Bush '04 bumper stickered vehicle there is, whose occupants in a fever of love for America, max out their credit cards to get an emotional fix. That's how good the Heritage Foundation is.

/story

Phelps hates Stewart and Colbert

Thursday

yikes

Sometimes despite their best efforts, children get cancer and that's the way god likes it. You don't like children with cancer, you don't like god. Simple as that.

So when god kills your kid, grab one of these fun kids' coffins. Four out of five Jehovah's witnesses agree, it makes the pain stop hurting!

Child Caskets

Not sure where I got this, sorry it has to remain uncredited. If that's ok with Ginsu, I mean, Maynard.
More than half (two) of the Christians I interviewed do not take the Bible's account of creation literally! How can this be? I was truly shocked. How can you not take the Bible literally? And as if that wasn't enough, one-third of them feel that the Old Testament doesn't matter any more! The old testament makes up more than 60% of the Bible! Myself, and fellow Christian fundamentalists, are outraged!

Fortunately, all three of them believed that the Bible and science are compatible. This greatly relieved me. Maybe our young Christians aren't so lost on a path of evil as I thought. Now, I had better explain this to all of you arrogant atheists out there. The Bible and science are compatible, in fact, they help each other for several reasons. Firstly, who's to say that the Bible and evolution aren't compatible? Have you ever heard of the day-age theory? Hello! It would have taken God a long time to create the universe, it's not like he can just snap his fingers and make anything happen! That would almost make him all-powerful!

Also, I mean, come on people: haven't you ever heard of the watchmaker's argument? Solid logical basis there. I mean, how can you not fully put your faith in an analogy where one side involves completely organic material and the other is 90% artificially made? I mean, the comparison still holds true: we had to have been made by something! That's what you call creationi – intelligent design. That's it. I didn't say anything before intelligent design. Moving on, I'd like to point out that if you took out one letter square from a Scrabble box every five seconds, it would take you 800 000 years to spell the word evolution! Come on, all you atheists – convert! I've practically undermined your entire religious stance here!

Now, what about Noah's Ark story? There's a good lot of evidence for a worldwide flood when you consider the fact that heaps of tribes throughout the world have a common memory of a flood (as well as flying snakes, a god that turns into a golden shower to get laid, and hundreds of conflicting creation theories), but hey, if they have a common memory of a flood, it must be true! Also, it's pretty wrong to say that God couldn't have fit all of the lions, leopards, cats, jaguars, panthers, pumas, etc onto the ark. He could've just taken two cats on, then they reproduced like mad when they got off the boat! There's a name for that! Next, I'd like to blow some incorrect atheist nonsense out of the water.

Firstly, a lot of atheists think that if God knows everything, then we have no free will! This is complete rubbish, and here's why. Do a little experiment for me. Flip a coin and, if it's heads, scratch your head. If it's tails, give yourself the thumbs-up. Now, here's what will really blow atheists out of the water: if you get a heads, do the thumbs-up. See? You do have free will! Has God prevented you from doing anything? No! Therefore he exists! I win! No returns.

Now, I'm sure some of you atheists out there are going to argue with this editorial, but it doesn't matter, I'm not going to listen to you, because you're atheists without morals. I mean, come on, you actually support aborting babies? Why don't you just eat the babies? I mean, without God, how can anyone possibly have morals? It's not like there are people out there who actually want to better the human race - the only possible reason anyone would have for acting morally is so that they can get into heaven. Makes sense, right?

Next, let's look at some of the good morals taught by the Bible. For example, take a look at Exodus 21:15 2 Samuel 24:15, 2 Samuel 23: 8, 2 Kings 1:9-12, 2 Kings 9:10, 1 Chronicles 2:3, 1 Chronicles 19:18, 2 Chronicles 15:13, 2 Chronicles 28:6-8, Esther 2:22-23, Esther 9:16, Job 6:4, Job 16:9, Psalms 50:22, Proverbs 16:4, Proverbs 30:33, Jeremiah 4:4, Jeremiah 9:15-16, Revelation 1:7, Revelation 9:7-10 … wait! Don't read those! In fact, those verses don't even exist … so, um … yeah. In conclusion, I've proven God exists. Any questions? No? Good.

Odds are toward the end of this winter my wife and I are Movin' On from this state like Merle Haggard, and if I were making a high school yearbook to commemorate the change there's only one candidate, one real one with some teeth, for "Least likely to be missed". And that thing, honey chiles, is the drivers in Minnesota. I have long acknowledged my need for some large signs to hold up and show people that say "FYI: YOU AREN'T VERY GOOD AT DRIVING A CAR", but yesterday I had to slam on my brakes on the highway harder than I ever have. Not to boast of my suffering under the invisible fist of Adam Smith's narcoleptic blue haired grannies, but I've driven this stretch hundreds of times at rush hour and seen many an accident, many a rubbernecker, and many a forgotten blinker (both on and off). I've even pulled many feats of daring that caused my passengers to sweat and make the kind of involuntary high moans you'd normally associate with the kind of porn where it isn't being faked, but never did I really wonder if I was going to end up in the back of a Volkswagen.

I hate you, Minnesota drivers. You suck and suck. I'll see you in twenty minutes on the freeway. Take us out of here, Merle.

The white line is a lifeline to the nation.
And men like Kix and Ronnie make it move.
Livin' like a gypsy, always on the go.
Doin' what they best know how to do.
Jammin' gears has got to be a fever.
'Cause men become addicted to the grind. (The grind.)
It takes a special breed to be a truck drivin' man,
And a steady hand to pull that load behind.

Wednesday

Monday

another ☠ celebrity

Steve Irwin finally fucked with the wrong animal. A stingray, which never attacks unprovoked, was obviously made to feel a little threatened and stung the piss out of the crocodile hunter right in the chest, which killed him exactly like a heart attack would. I can see him wrestling it around in my mind's eye even now. Oh wow, he says through his special TV-friendly scuba mask, look at this beauty! He yanks it and turns it, and it zaps the shit out of him. He shakes, makes a face you don't ever want to see, much less make, and twists lifelessly away above the teeming great barrier reef.



Well, you finally did it, Steve. You got your ass killed. I'll never forget the special times we had together, you on an adventure, me on the couch watching you and eating potato chips, but not the fat free ones that make people shit their pants. And what about that time you went on that other adventure and I sat there watching you again? You might not remember me, but I sure remember you, man. It's sad you're gone because you seemed like the kind of dude I'd like to hang out with, but mostly it's sad because now I'll have to find something else to watch while I eat potato chips.

Sunday

happy birthday dude!!111ONE

You know who you are.



10,000 Reasons Civilization is Doomed

testing

comics r good

click, it makes it bigger:

more

a different kind of excellent comic here, of the dinosaur variety

What else is out there that's great?

important discovery

It might not be the fountain of youth, but it's still pretty good.

"Earworm", like it or not, looks like it's won its right to exist in our vernacular, which I think says bad things about our vernacular. It means a song or a song segment that gets stuck on repeat inside your head against your will. It's a mysterious problem and it affects millions of people, and I'm sure Marvin Minsky could goon about it for hours. Anyway, I figured out how to make them go away. Whatever song it is, imagine it's being sung by Wesley Willis and the problem goes away.

A few songs I'd like to be covered by Wesley Willis.
Rainy days and Mondays
The scientist
Smells like teen spirit

If you're not familiar with his work go download it. He's dead and won't miss the money he isn't making.