Category Archives: Links

Two videos and something you will not believe exists

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Had a very productive session with the therapist today.

We refocused on anger (my least favorite and hence most important thing to talk about) then ended up talking about a related issue, which is arrogance and intelligence.

I won’t go into it in great detail yet because I am still processing it and I have links to share, but the gist of it was that one of the biggest blocks to my becoming a more integrated person is my inability to really deal with just how intelligent I am.

More on that later. Now, for some cool links from today’s web wanderings!

First off, the sweetest and most awesome thing you will see today.

A dear sweet old granny wrote a song about her granddaughter’s upcoming lesbian wedding, and GLBT marriage in general, and it will make you feel all full of sunshine and happiness.

Isn’t she just adorable? I totally want to give her a big hug. She also manages to sum up the gay marriage date with remarkable clarity and simplicity. And to think, she did it all out of love!

When sweet little old grannies are on the side of gay marriage because they correctly understand that it is about love and family, you just know the opponents of gay marriage are doomed.

Not that we need any more evidence. Senior citizens are the population most rapidly switching sides to the pro gay marriage position, presumably because they all have children and grandchildren who have come out of the closet and want to get married, and love of your children and their children is far, far stronger than any stupid and hateful political position.

And all over the world, country after country, and state after state, are joining the modern world and embracing gay marriage with absolutely no ill effects. That slender thread of plausibility to the notion that gay marriage might do some vague sort of harm has been snapped.

And now the opponents just look petty and mean, which is just and proper, because that is actually all that they have ever been.

Next up, a lady with some damn good ideas stated well.

I love this video because the speaker does such an excellent job of making the clear, nuts and bolts, logical case for liberal values like investing in early childhood care because it actually save the system money in the long run.

And I completely agree with her. I think there should be a better system for making sure that kids are looked after from the day they are born than what we have now, where right when childcare is at its most expensive, parents have the financial drain of having to pay for childcare, either via a babysitter or some kind of child care center.

Either that, or have an even bigger financial drain from having one parent quit work.

We need to face the fact that raising a child from infancy to school age is an incredibly demanding job, and yet the truth is that the two parent income family is here to stay,

The only way to reasonably resolve this problem, in my opinion, is government subsidized child care. I would be open to the notion of it working on a voucher style system, with the rider that if you take government vouchers, you are not allowed to charge any more than that.

I would also, however, be open to it being completely government run, like the school system.

And yes, I do have some doubts about creating a system where kids are raised by the State even more than they are now.

But as long as the little ones go home to their parents every night and on the weekends, I don’t see this as a big problem.

After all, with both parents working, they would not be seeing their parents anyhow. It would be a babysitter or some for-profit childcare center either way.

The main change would be the freeing of young parents from financial strain.

Finally, the thing you will not believe exists.

I have two words for you people : EDIBLE. ANUS.

I dare you to click on this link (NSFW, technically)!

Yes, somewhere in this big old world, someone decided that what this big old world really needed was big old assholes made of chocolate.

I say it’s only “technically” NSFW, because while it is a reasonably reasonably facsimile of a butthole, it really does not look like much.

If you saw it out of context, it’s at best a fifty-fifty chance that you would even recognize it as what is was. You might just think it was an interestingly textural bit of abstract art.

Still, hats off to this company for making something so breathtakingly fucked up. I have no idea what the thought process that went into creating this product was, but I bet it was disgusting.

And here’s the kicker : they have been in business since 2004. That means that this business model is successful and there is a real market for chocolate bungholes out there.

I wonder how they advertise. Hell, I wonder where they advertise. Brown Eye Aficianado Magazine? Better Homes And Stinkeyes? Bed, Buttholes, and Beyond”

Or is this the sort of thing that spreads entirely by… word of mouth?

Maybe it all started with a very unusual special order. And the person who ordered it loved it so much that he told all his anally fixated friends about it and suddenly the chocolatiers in question had a very unusual but lucrative business on their hands.

I can only assume that the largest portion of their custom comes from people looking for that really special gag gift to give their otherwise unflappable target.

It would also make for a really classy way to tell them you think they are an asshole.

And the card read “Saw this and immediately thought of you, dear! XOXOXO!”

I suppose it could also work as a “dare you to eat it” Fear Factor type challenge.

Either way… you have all learned something today.

That the world is full of assholes… but some of them are made of chocolate!

Remember the 80’s?

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Tonight’s entry is all about this fun list: 50 Things Only 80’s Kids Understand.

Being mostly an eighties kid (ages 7 to 17, and it’s not like I remember anything from the first two years), I enjoyed perusing this little list.

Some of things I remembered fondly, other things I remembered but didn’t really care about, and some of the things I flat out do no recall at all.

Well, the culture is rarely evenly distributed and not everybody gets every update.

I don’t think Muppet Babies is the greatest cartoon of all, although looking back, it was high quality kiddie entertainment. I watched it, but only because it was the Muppets. The Muppet Show was a huge part of my childhood (70’s kid!)and I was Muppet deprived.

But looking back, it had a great deal of warmth and imagination, and had the very comforting message that you can go anywhere with your imagination, but if things get too scary, you can stop and instantly be back at home, safe and sound.

If you had asked me at the time what the greatest cartoon of all time was, I would have said “Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends” without hesitation. It’s kind of hard to watch as an adult, but when I was a kid and that show was on, the rest of the world just plain ceased to exist.

And unlike other children’s shows, it didn’t treat me like an idiot. That was a very big deal to me.

As for “Team Madonna” or “Team Cyndi”, I was never aware I had to choose, but if I had been asked at the time, I would have chosen Cyndi hands down. Madonna has done some great music and some extraordinary things both with her public persona and her business sense.

But I love Cyndi. She just seems like such an awesome person.

Looking over the list, I remember 24 of the fifty things. So, not quite a pass. For instance, I didn’t even know what “pegged” jeans were until I saw the picture.

And I sure as hell don’t remember kids going to 50’s-themed parties. Honestly, I am pretty sure I would have thought that was totally lame.

I mean, it’s not like those were my Happy Days. But I guess it was kind of like the kids with their 80’s parties today. Somehow, they inherit our nostalgia for a while.

We had a bunch of Disney Book and Record sets, though I listened to them on the family stereo, not my own Fisher Price model. Between that and my Disney Encyclopedia (seriously), I was indoctrinated into the world of Disney quite early.

Maybe that is why I still consider myself a Disney fan even though they have behaved quite badly over the years, and why I still admire Uncle Walt and the empire he built on the feeling of magic, despite knowing some of the ugly truths about the man.

Disney has a place in my heart that nothing can replace. Ditto the Muppets.

Oh, and speaking of movies (kinda), I was definitely traumatized by one of those movies, namely The Dark Crystal. My Dad took me to see it. The whole movie was a trip and I was absolutely rapt throughout the whole thing.

But at the end, when (spoiler alert!) the Skeksis and the Mystics merge into one race of beings, I was absolutely blown away. Mind went PING. It was so unexpected and so, well, wrong to my young mind that it threw me for a lot of loops.

I mean, the Skeksis were horrible, horrible creatures. I still think of them as some of the most disgusting, vile, detestable, awful villains ever. I spent the whole movie waiting for them to get their righteous comeuppance. After all, that’s what always happens, right? The good guys beat the bad guys in the end.

And I wanted the Skeksis dead, dead, dead. Not just defeated. Dead. No mercy, no negotiation, no hesitation. Children can be quite bloodthirsty, and I wanted those fuckers dead.

So to have them actually merge with the good guys, the Mystics, was a total mindfuck and I spent a long time trying to come to grips with it. You can’t merge with them. They’re EVIL.

That movie really expanded my little mind. I had to reconcile myself to a more Taoist and less Zoroastrian view of the world. Balance, not victory.

What else… I sure as heck loved Scratch and Sniff stickers! I had a teacher who gave out stickers if you did well on a spelling test, and so the sticker collection in the back of my spelling notebook was not just fun, it was a trophy room.

And I had a lot of stickers, bright lad that I was. But you had to get a perfect score, 10/10, to get a Scratch and Sniff sticker, and that was rarer for me because I always made some little dumb mistake on one answer, like not forming my letters right or mishearing the word or the like.

So my Scratch and Sniff collection was my Gold Medal trophy room. And they were just plain fun, too. You got a little reward every time you scratched one.

I scratched my strawberry one so much that I basically shredded it.

A lot of the stuff on the list passed me by, though. I never played Oregon Trail, presumably because I was a Canadian kid. I never had a Trapper Keeper. I never wore British Knights or L. A. Gear sneakers.

And I watched Double Dare exactly once, and thought it was completely horrible. A total nightmare. So I mostly ignored it and all its clones.

But I definitely watched 3-2-1 Contact (but not for the Bloodhound Gang, they were lame) and Square One Television (yes, entirely for Mathnet, the rest of the show was laaaaaaame). I played in Pee-Wee’s Playhouse and watched a ton of the Cosby Show. I drank New York Seltzer (though I preferred Koala)and blew on my NES cartridges to get them to work. I remember the dark day of the Challenger explosion (I watched it happen on Canada AM, poor little me) and the phenomenally awesome day the Berlin Wall came down. I remember trying to figure out why everyone was watched the Baby Jessica rescue (not that it wasn’t important, by why her, why now? That kind of thing happens all the time) and being extremely impressed by the idea of Hands Across America while also being pretty sure they could not pull it off (and they didn’t, but it was still a wonderful and amazing thing to see). I collected Garbage Pail Kids cards and got told to Just Say No, or something a lot like it, so very, very, very many times.

I am serious. If you grew up in the 80’s and you didn’t know drugs were bad, mmmkay, then you lived under a very large rock.

And the only reason I don’t remember being traumatized by the death of Optimus Prime in the eighties was that I didn’t get to see the movie until the nineties, and it traumatized me then.

It still does, honestly.

And you know, looking over the list, while I was only directed involved with 24 of the things, I was aware of all but 7 of them at the time.

So maybe I got a passing grade on the 80’s after all.

Friday Science Tintinabulation, May 24, 2013

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Another week has flown past like a flock of tiny birds in a heck of a hurry, and that means it is time once again for our weekly dose of the Friday Science Whatever.

It was rough, picking just six to do, but I did it, and here they are.

First up : you know that old trope, seen mostly in cartoons, about elephants being afraid of mice?

Well of course, that is absolute rubbish. Not a word of truth to it. Pure fantasy.

It’s bees that scare them.

Research has shown that elephants are hella scared of bees, so much so that they have developed a very specific “OMG BEES” noise they make when they want to warn the rest of the herd that they are on Bee Alert Status for the foreseeable future.

This discovery has lead to speculation that bees might be the solution to the frequent conflicts between elephants and humans that happen in places like Kenya, where farmers sometimes kill elephants for trying to eat their crops, and elephants in turn sometimes rampage and kill people.

The idea would be to deploy enough beehives around your farm to keep the elephants way, which really sounds like the punchline to a joke to me.

Next up : News about printing your food!

The news is that NASA is looking into the idea as a way to provide astronauts with a compact, light, and multifaceted food supply while on long space voyages.

The idea is that the basic “building blocks” of food would be stored as powders in canisters like the various colored inks in an inkjet picture, and when you wanted something, you would just tell the printer to print it, which it would do just like any 3D printing process, a layer at a time.

I have my doubts. For one, I would be real real curious to know what those “building blocks of food” are. The idea that you could get meaningful variety in foodstuffs out of a limited number of powders seems inherently flawed to me.

Our food is made of highly complex organic chemicals that take more than that to “replicate”.

Next up, an extraordinary finding from the world of human optics : scientists have found a woman who can see 99 million more colors than the result of us.

The typical human eye contains three kinds of cone cells, and that gives us the ability to see around a million different colors.

But this one has four types of cones in her eyes, giving her a whopping 100 million colors. Compared to her, we are all colorblind.

For decades, people have theorized that people like this, called tetrachromats (you and I are trichromats), might exist. But this is the first time one has been found and verified.

The obvious question for us thoughtful types is : what on Earth does this woman see? The world must look radically different to her than it does to us. And yet, nobody can imagine a color they have never seen. So we will never know.

Now we get into the really good future-y stuff! Like how about this : scientists have found a way to get human skin cells to revert into embryonic stem cells.

If this can be developed and applied on a wide scale, it might just be the breakthrough that throws open the gates for the regenerative medicine future we all hope to live long enough to enjoy.

With enough pluripotent stem cells, in theory, we could patch up absolutely any damage to the human body by removing the damage tissue and flooding the void with stem cells, which will then turn into whatever kind of cell is needed to fix the damage.

Spinal cord injuries, brain injuries, organ failures, you name it. We could ifx literally everything. Not to mention the role stem cells can play in the future of tissue engineering.

These are exiting times!

Next up, let’s talk clean hydrogen.

If you are like me, you are saying “WTF is that? How do you get hydrogen dirty? Hydrogen is so clean it doesn’t even have protons!”

What is meant by the term is hydrogen that is produced by clean methods. Traditional ways to get hydrogen are messy, expensive, and have a big carbon footprint.

But a new method might change all that and give us a practical way to make all the clean, cheap hydrogen we need for a hydrogen future.

I am still not sold on a hydrogen future, mind you. I can’t see adding hydrogen to the equation as being a practical solution when we are doing modestly well with just plain old electricity. Electric cars grow more efficient every day, and do not require a massive infrastructure investment either.

But still, this is the sort of development that might, some day, change my mind.

Finally, the most mindblowing scientific newsbit of the week : this invention.

Yeah, sorry, it’s a video, not a news story.

If his machine can do what he says, that is nothing short of earthshaking. If you can turn plastic back into the oil from whence it came, then suddenly all plastics are not just recyclable but infinitely recyclable, and the future could be powered not by hydrogen or electricity but plastic.

What I would really like to see is his invention scaled up to refinery size and set up next to a landfill, where you offer to buy plastic from whoever brings it to you.

Pay them half of what you will get for the crude-ish oil you will produce (or even better, filter on sight and sell gasoline) and you will get a lot of people recycling a hell of a lot of plastic.

Of course, in terms of global warming, the ideal thing would be if it was simply turned right back into plastic. In that sense, the oil produced would be like the stem cells of the process, ready to be turned into whatever else we need.

That is such a huge jump in efficiency, it gives me goosebumps.

That’s all for this week, folks!

Wet gay rich people in bondage!

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Got a few things to share with y’all.

Like this : Guess what city in the USA has the highest number of same-sex couples raising kids?

New York City? San Francisco? Some gay commune in the Florida keys?

Nope, it’s Salt Lake City, Utah.

Turns out, when you raise people with family values, they raise families.

As counterintuitive as this factoid may be, it makes sense when you think about how same-sex couples raising kids tends to happen.

Usually, it is after one part of a heterosexual couple with kids comes out of the closet, they get a divorce, and the homosexual person ends up with custody. They meet someone new, and bam, Heather Has Two Mommies, or Daddies.

After all, lots of place still ban gay adoption, so that’s not going to happen much. And without that, gay men have no avenue to get children. (That’s why so many of us spoil our pets.) So that eliminates half the homosexual population right there.

That leaves lesbians, and while they have the option of opting for artificial insemination, I can’t see that happening nearly as much as the divorce scenario.

But why Salt Lake City? I think it’s precisely because it’s the sort of place most gay and lesbian people would flee for a bigger urban center which will be more understanding.

Young homosexual people will take that option in droves. But people old enough to have kids already are going to have lives, jobs, mortgages, friends, and most importantly, the kids themselves.

In other words, they have roots, and can’t just pack up and go. So they stay.

All the young, unattached homosexuals end up in the big cities, and the older ones stay where they are and make do, and so the percentage of gays and lesbians raising children goes up.

Next up, we have some rich people being extremely silly.

I mean, very very very silly. I particularly like the completely deadpan way Olivia Wilde said “I only got in because I’m an android from the future. ” That made me LOL big time.

And yeah, Sir Richard Bransen can’t act. It doesn’t matter. He is such a megastar of awesomeness that he can get away with not being a super good actor.

I mean, nobody gives a shit if Einstein could golf.

And obviously, talking about not going to the bathroom is just their way of mixing in potty humour with a very simple and important message about water. It is physically impossible to keep from going to the bathroom for very long.

Eventually, it just happens.

Of course, if you take the phrase “going to the bathroom” very literally, you certainly can avoid going to the bathroom. It’s easy to avoid entering a specific room. No problem.

You will still urinate and defecate, just… somewhere else.

The best spin I can put on that is rich people squatting behind bushes somewhere. Or wearing adult diapers. Or some kind of horrifying “Rudy will await your foundation” kind of scenario.

Next up, we have a very delightful and fun to read subreddit called Shit Cosmo Says.

On it, people lambaste and ridicule all the crazy garbage that lurks inside the pages of Cosmo magazine, especially the really mindlessly sexist and patronizing “advice” to women.

It was a real eye-opener for me as a kid when I suddenly realized that women’s magazines were incredibly sexist. They reinforced this idea that women are vapid, vacuous, silly creatures who only care about fashion and makeup and how best to please a man. Nowhere do they give women credit for having brains, ambition, concerns, and a life completely independent from men and what attracts and pleases them.

And for a few years, I just kept this thought to myself. I mean, surely I was wrong. I couldn’t imagine that millions of women bought these things and eagerly devoured the degradation like it was chocolate. There must be something I am not getting.

And then, I read an article that said that most women’s magazines are in fact written entirely by men, and suddenly it all made sense.

This was the patriarchy feeding women a version of themselves that was acceptable to the patriarchy. Men were very unlikely to write things that would challenge or confuse women. Instead, they get empty intellectual calories designed to make them feel they need to constantly be focused on their appearance or they will die alone.

I am sure that this is not consciously in the minds of the men writing and editing these rags, but it is still there. It is the same sort of thing that makes shows like The View and (forgive me!) Ellen make my skin crawl and my soul scream.

I am very lucky to have a mother who was quite liberated before it was even cool. My mother went to college to learn, not just to bide time and hunt husbands. She took courses where she was the only woman there and endured a lot of sexist abuse from the male professors thereof. She worked for all of my childhood, with an income equal to my father’s. She is an intelligent, inquisitive, deeply intellectual woman, and is therefore nothing like the women such magazines are aimed at.

And that is probably why they horrify and enrage me. My mother isn’t like that. Neither of my sisters are like that. Any time I have met any woman like that, I have found it profoundly irritating, to the point of taking me dangerously close to displaying my contempt to them.

And I am a very polite and sensitive fellow, so that is something I simply Do Not Do.

So my point (and I do have one) is that I hate women’s magazines and their ilk, and so I am happy to see a home for ruthlessly mocking their sexist horribleness.

Oh, and finally, the bondage. Normally I download pictures and rehost them, but this is furry art, and I feel like that would be stealing from the artist.

So I will just (Warning : NSFW, boobs)link to it.

Now, bondage does nothing for me and females do almost nothing for me, but I felt like sharing that image because I find her facial expression absolutely enchanting.

Sweet, naughty, inviting, shy… it’s all in there. She is just plain adorable. It makes me want to give her a big hug.

Although presumably, that’s not what she has in mind.

But she’s so darn cute!

The usual linkstorm

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Well, enough navel probing over being 40 years old now. Back to reportage!

First, some video content. Some very special and extremely unique video that lets you know what it would look like to have something very bad happen to you while you stay safe at home.

Warning, the following video is disgusting, frightening, and hilarious.

See what I mean? This is as close as most of us want to get to the actual experience of being eaten by a bear. If Stephen Colbert saw this, he’s shit himself so hard, he’d deflate.

Yes, I said “most”. I know of people for whom that would be wildly pornographic.

But then, what isn’t porn to someone? I am sure some people beat off to the Antiques Road Show and climax just when he says how much the thing is worth.

I find I can only watch the video around a minute at a time. Any more than that and the disgust starts to overwhelm me and I find myself beginning to try to imagine what his breath must be like.

I mean, look at those teeth. Ewww. No such thing as a dentist for bears, I guess. On the other hand, his palate and uvula look nice and healthy. We get a nice long look at them.

The most amazing part is that the camera survived undamaged! Whoever makes GoPro cameras should totally use this fact in their advertising.

Fast. Fun. Functional. Feature-rich. Bearproof. GOPRO.

Also in video content, something even more disturbing and horrifying than the last one.

Apparently some chick known as Tan Mom made a music video.

And it is one of the worst things I have ever seen.

Seriously. That is so bad it would not make an episode of Tim and Eric’s Awesome Show. Even their most strenuous efforts to make things which are deliberately as awful as possible can’t keep up.

I have no idea why she is called Tan Mom or why that makes her famous.

I just know that I feel violated.

Moving on, let’s talk news. First we have this item about how the nurses who are treating Dzhohkar “The Boston Bomber” Tsarnaev feel about the experience.

The part of this that really struck me was this :

“You see a hurt 19-year-old and you can’t help but feel sorry for him,’’ one nurse told reporters. She said she and another nurse had to form a pact after she accidentally called Tsarnaev “Hon,” and they agreed to alert each other if they used a term of endearment with him again.

The nurses also declined to use their names in the interviews, fearing judgment from the public. Others said they felt guilty for doing a good job treating him.

“When you’re in the room, it’s just a patient. You’re here to . . . make sure they’re feeling better,” a 29-year-old nurse who initially treated Tsarnaev said. “When you step away, you take it in. I am compassionate, that’s what we do. But should I be? The rest of the world hates him right now. The emotions are like one big salad, all tossed around.”

And I just wanted to go on record as saying nobody should expect a nurse to be anything less than completely professional and compassionate. That is their job. It is not their job to pass judgment on those they treat and decide who deserves sympathy and who does not.

And really, this goes straight to the heart of my feelings about the spiritual nature of compassion. At this point, he really is just a hurt 19 year old boy. Human beings rarely turn into monsters in order to make it easier for us to hate them for what they did.

The worst villain you can imagine is still just a fragile, confused, imperfect human being who deserves compassion just like anyone else. That is why we call them human rights. They are the rights of all human beings, and nothing you or anyone else can do will ever change that.

I know that people get angry and when we are angry with someone we want to punish them. The easiest thing in the world is to decide people who have done terrible things are not human beings any more. Then we can do whatever we feel like to them and not feel bad about it.

But what can be more evil than hurting someone who is helpless before you, just to make yourself feel good? The line between them and us is thinner than we would like to believe.

For all we know, Dzhokhar thought he was punishing evil people who deserved whatever they got because their crimes meant they were less than human now.

I am not saying he is innocent or that he should go free. Justice must be served and he needs to be put someplace where he can’t hurt anyone any more.

I am just saying that the true test of our compassion is how we treat those we have every reason to despise. And if our ethics be true, we will treat them just like anyone else.

Lastly, we have this story about a school district dealing with a budget crisis in the most extreme way possbile : by just plain shutting everything down.

All the schools, all the classes, shut down as of now. They are not even going to finish out the school year. And I, for one, applaud this decision.

With the best of intentions, people in caring professions like nursing and education enable the abuse of those people in their care by always managing to make do with less every time their budget is cut.

This protects Philistine politicians from any and all consequences of their callous and thoughtless actions, and insures that their bad behaviour will continue.

The only way people will get the message is if they are the ones who will suffer for it, and that means no longer protecting them from the consequences.

And nothing lights a fire under parents’ asses like suddenly having to find and pay for a babysitter in a town where demand has suddenly shot through the roof.

There will be hell to pay. Heads will roll.

And because the teachers won’t even be teaching any more until the budget is fixed, the people’s wrath will have only one target : the budget-slashing assholes who caused the problem.

Society costs money, people. Civilization doesn’t come for free.

Grow the fuck up.

Nudity and Bill Nye

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More link n’ load tonight. (Lock and link? Nah. )

First, one I have had hanging about and mixing with the wrong crowd in my browser for almost a week now, the charming story of a family of four that went for a little bit of a walk down the road.

Completely bare-ass naked.

This is a highly quotable article. For example :

Another witness, Charlotte resident Jill Mead, told the paper that the sight “blew [her] mind.”

Really, dear? That’s all it takes to blow your mind? The sight of an old lady, her daughter, a toddler, and an infant walking down the road in the State of Grace, clad in glory, popped your noodle?

I find that adorable. But then again, I have lived with nudists and I am a sexually deviant pervert. So my frame of reference might be a little different.

Here’s one from the officer in charge of the case, Captain Rod Farley, regarding the conclusions drawn from the medical and psychological examination of the two adults :

“It didn’t appear that they had any problems short of that they didn’t have any clothes on,” Farley said.

Don’t you just love that gift for understatement many people from the South have?

But the true beauty comes from the simplicity of the explanation :

As for the inspiration for their public nudity, the women gave as good a reason as any: Farley said they told police, “the Lord told them to get naked and walk down the street.”

Kinda hard to argue with that.

Now the kids, they will be fine. Infants barely even know clothes exist and toddlers are not sold on the concepts yet either. This odd excursion will do them no harm.

But as for the adults, apparently, both women agreed that God had told them to walk naked down the streets, and that’s what really blows my mind.

What was that conversation like?

Grandmother : Well, God just told me we should walked down the street naked with the kids.
Daughter : Yup. Me too.
Grandmother : Well, best get to it, then.

And then they just shucked down and went for a stroll.

The alternative is that one of them talked the other into it, which I find equally hard to believe.

And what about the officer? What kind of day did he have? There he was, on his third Krispy Kreme, and he gets a call from dispatch.

Officer : There’s a what on Providence Road? You’re kidding. And all of them buckass naked? Not a stitch on? Alright, this I gotta see. I’m taking the call. But send backup. With blankets.

It must have seemed like a gently amusing dream. Just one of those odd little things that happen in life. I can’t imagine a single person being truly upset by it.

Frankly, the whole thing strikes me as adorable.

Of course, the police often have to deal with nudity.

Nude Police Lineup by Bob Newhart

Bob Newhart is a hero of mine. His gentle style of comedy is, to me, absolutely beautiful.

The other news item I wish to address is this latest teapot trapped tempest.

Here is the headline as it is making the rounds on Facebook : Bill Nye Booed (not Boo’d, you knobs) In Texas For Saying The Moon Reflects The Sun

And as such, it is perfect Internet bait for all of the Asshole Atheist crowd to crow about and point out how stupid and superstitious all those inbred yokels down in Texas must be.

So that set is falling all over themselves to post things like “And to think, these people vote!” and “No wonder these people have Rick Perry as their leader” or the always elegant and original “*facepalm”.

Yeah, good thing us cool people aren’t smallminded bigots intolerant of those different from ourselves while patting ourselves on the back for being The Right Kind Of People, right?

And that’s how the Asshole Atheists and Sadistic Skeptics would like you to interpret the article that foes with that headline, but that is not the truth at all, and I can show you the smoking gun.

Here it is. Emphasis mine.

But nothing got people as riled as when he brought up Genesis 1:16, which reads: “God made two great lights — the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars.”

The lesser light, he pointed out, is not a light at all, but only a reflector.

Note the important words there. He brought up. Nobody asked him a question. Nobody was suggesting teaching Genesis 1:16 as science in schools or making it part of Texas law.

He was the one who brought up the Bible in the first place.

In other words, Bill Nye The Asshole Guy started the fight. He is the aggressor here. He deliberately attacked these people’s faith and now is acting all disingenuously butthurt because they got mad at him for it.

What the hell did he expect to happen? They would look at him and say “Gosh, you are right, Science Guy. My faith is a sham and the Bible is a pack of lies. All hail Bill the Science God!”

He knew exactly what was going to happen. He poked these people in the eye, and not even to make a point, just to generate this kind of bogus news story so he and all his bigoted atheist skeptic friends could masturbate their egos over it.

Tell me, Nye, would you have done that in a synagogue? Or a temple? Or a black Baptist church?

In doing shit like this, all you do is confirm to these people that scientists are out to get them and there is no possibility of middle ground between you and them.

You, sir, are no humanist, secular or otherwise. You are an abusive bigot religion-bashing just to score points with your bigoted friend, and that makes you no better than the people who you oppose.

In fact, you are worse than them, because you are smart and educated enough to know better.

I had a hard time forgiving you after that detergent ad where you sold out your credibility and your responsibility to teach the truth to children just to make a quick buck.

You chose money over science, Nye, and that is something I will never entirely forgive you for. What were kids supposed to think when they saw you shilling for some megacorp?

Still, over the years I got over that, mostly. After all, I loved your show, I loved you on Almost Live, and I have enjoyed your recent work.

But this erases all that and puts you further into the red than ever.

You are a bad person who did a bad thing Bill. You have fallen in with the Richard Dawkins, Ayn Rand, Neil DeGrasse Tyson bunch of tiny minded “skeptics” whose idea of science is to shit on all beliefs other than your own and close your minds and your hearts to the vast majority of humanity.

And that is just plain unacceptable.

You are dead to me until you renounce your wicked ways and come back into the true light of promoting understanding, cooperation, tolerance, and acceptance in humanity.

That’s what a real humanist does. It’s what a real liberal does.

It’s what real human beings do.

Come back to being human, Bill, before it’s too late.

Caine stands up

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Tonight we start off with a very powerful and moving video.

But before you watch it, please read this.

SEVERE TRIGGER WARNING for all of of us who were bullied as children. Caine talks about his experience and it might just be a lot like your own, so fair warning, make sure you are ready before you watch this.

I can tell you that it’s worth it, but I must warn you that it is rough.

That duty discharged, please watch the following video.

Caine is a very brave young man. I am not sure I would have had the courage to do what he did when I was his age. I was only able to understand and articulate my problems that well when I was much older than him.

When I was 11, I was just trying to survive. both physically and emotionally. The idea that what was happening to me every school day was deeply wrong would not have occurred to me, let alone the notion that I could do anything to protect myself by talking to adults.

All the adults in my life had failed me. When I was 11 years old, I was at least three years into giving up all hope that there was anyone, anywhere, who in any way cared enough about me to go to the trouble of protecting me from the violent abuse I faced every day.

I tried to tell my parents. They shut me down immediately. I tried to tell teachers. They said various unhelpful things that were supposed to placate me but really just gave me the message that they really did not feel like actually doing anything about it. Same with the principal’s office.

Never thought of escalating it to the school board level. I doubt I would have been able to summon the courage anyhow. I was a crushingly shy and timid child in many ways.

But the real point is that saving myself was not my job. I was just a kid. My job was to go to school, get good marks, stay out of trouble, and be part of a family.

It was not my job to protect myself from the vicious assaults and humiliation of my peers. Every day of my elementary school life, I was exposed to things which would be easily recognized as serious crimes if it happened between adults.

But somehow, between kids, it was considered “normal”.

I will never forget one day when I tried to tell one of the teachers who oversaw the playground during lunch and recess about the horrible beating I had just suffered not ten feet directly in front of her.

I don’t know who she was. These ladies were often not the regular teachers at all. For all I know, they were parent volunteers, or just people the teachers hired so they would have some peace while the kids went out and played.

Kids in a playground. What could be more wholesome than that, right? The sound of it still takes me instantly to a very bad place. Trigger city, big time.

Anyhow, so I tried to tell this playground monitor what happened, but I had not gotten two words out before she just glared at me and jabbed a finger back at the playground.

It would have hurt less if she had jabbed her finger directly into my heart. And that would have healed a long time ago. Not this.

I guess that told me where I stood. She was mad at me for even trying to talk to her. I find it hard to believe that she did not see the crowd all gathered around where a bunch of bullies where having loads of fun kicking me and stomping on my head as I lay helpless on the ground.

I suppose that if she had let me talk to her, she might have had to face the fact that she just let me get brutalized right in front of her and did nothing about it, and then she might have had to ask herself why, when I am entirely sure that if I had attacked one of the popular kids, she would have been on me like a flash of lightning and I would have been in the principal’s office before the dust settled.

Things like that, and like young Caine’s video, make me really wonder just what kind of effect that kind of abuse has on a child. The damage is impossible to calculate.

All the feeling of security that a child should have and internalize is gone, destroyed. All faith in others is gone too. In my childhood world, there were savage peers and apathetic adults and that was it.

What choice did I have but to withdraw deep, deep into myself? Where else could I go? What else could I do? It was my only means of escape.

So in a way, it is amazing that I grew up to be as sane as I did. Somehow I held it all together enough to get through school and not end up killing myself or anyone else in high school.

Again, thank you so much, Doctor Klein. Having someone to talk to in those times probably saved my life, even if I could only see you every three weeks and you were not, objectively, that great of a therapist.

But people dying of thirst are not going to notice or care if the water is a tad brackish.

Looking back, I realize that I did not just have one or two childhood traumas. I had hundreds. Thousands. Every school day was a fresh hell.

And like with poor Caine, a good day for me when I was a student at Parkside Elementary in Summerside was one in which everybody leaved me the hell alone.

There is something seriously wrong with a child’s life when their greatest wish is to go one day without anyone noticing them.

That’s usually reserved for children in war zones, isn’t it?

Or at least it should be.

So much stuff!

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No diary stuff today! Well, except for one thing.

Got my new glasses with the anti-fatigue lenses and a slightly stronger prescription today. Only took them two weeks to make them. Whatever happened to “in about an hour”?

Anyhoo, I have been wearing them all day and so far they are cool and froody. When I first put them on, everything looked really shiny and it sort of felt like my eyeballs were changing shape.

But now I have settled into the new groove. I am not fully adjusted yet by any stretch of the imagination but the weirdest part is over.

And now… STUFF! We will start with the cute and innocent and gradually share to the perverted and obscene.

Doesn’t that sounds like fun, kids?

Up first we have this utterly adorable example of the amazing work fans of the latest My Little Pony show are doing on their own.

It stars a critter called Fluffle Puff. You will soon see how it got the name.

It’s like someone crossed a Pony with a Tribble and filled it with love!

My favorite comedy beat is the one where FP gets cupcake, gasps, then faceplants into it. Excellent timing and very smooth, yet dense. It really shows good animation chops because the animator has to really understand the comedy of little nuances, expressions, and gestures very well to pull it off.

The sort of stuff Chuck Jones (hallowed be his cels) was good at.

I also love the one that ends with FP and that odd looking blue pony rolling around like a tumbleweed. That is just plain adorable AND hilarious.

All in all, way too awesome not to share.

Next up, something to completely mess with your mind.

I love that he does the trick both ways, subtracting the ‘extra’ blocks and then adding them back in. That really helps to sell the trick and I found both ways equally fascinating to watch.

I had never seen this done in three dimensions before, only with paper cutouts. And theoretically, I should not be surprised that it works in “the real world”, and I am not, exactly.

But it is a whole lot more impressive with that additional physical reality to it. Plus I have never seen it done in three stages like that. Wow.

Now there are many videos to explain how the trick works and I will likely watch one eventually, although all the explanations of it I have read before have failed to penetrate this soggy old brain of mine.

But for now, I will just enjoy the magic and the wonder of it, and pleasantly contemplate just how freaky the world of topological transformations can be.

And now, things get just a little darker. Check out what happened across the border recently.

So much for “good fences make good neighbors”, huh? In my experience, fences are exactly the thing that neighbors get into these crazy feuds over. The sweet little lady that lived behind us when I was a kid tried to take us to court because she thought the fence my Dad built in 1980 or so was six inches on to her back yard that she never used.

Granted, she didn’t go nuts with a bulldozer. I think I speak for all of us when I say I can maybe understand ripping out the fence.

But this Swegle asshole destroyed a lot of things that did not belong to him or the people who built the fence, and that is just plain wrong.

Assholes with short fuses should not have access to heavy equipment.

Next up, we have the slightly naughty but mostly super sparkly fabulous Louis Virtel with some words of wisdom (a day late) for Mother’s Day.

Get More:

Very funny and fun stuff. I have thought about it, and if I was a heterosexual parent with no connections to the gay community and my kid came out to me, I think I would say “I want grandkids. You’ll adopt. Otherwise, fine by me!”

Is it weird that I always imagine myself to be the mother in that scenario? I’m so maternal!

My coming out was a shock to absolutely nobody except maybe my father. My siblings all knew, my college friends all knew, distant acquaintances knew. I was in a cellophane closet and I had no idea!

Next, a whole bunch of pretty naughty things. Ignore the fact that it says Banned Commercials 2013. Many of them have never been banned at all and a lot of them have been around for ages.

And one of them is very obviously a skit and not a real commercial.

So just rename it “a bunch of funny commercials”, and enjoy.

My favorites include the Bottle Opening Challenge (very clever and very well executed, if lowbrow), and the one with the father caught in an awkward position (definitely not banned, I saw it on TV a dozen times) is also very well done.

FYI, in the full version of the ad, the father responds to the cop by saying “I’m her… Daddy?”

Oh, and “When are you going to get out of here?” (also never banned. saw it many times) is a work of genius. I totally fell for it the first time I saw it.

And of course, how can I not love this one? Hey, they are both getting what they want, right?

Hate the cowboy hat, tho. Seriously.

And we all know what this kids needs, right? Bam. Like a thunderclap. No warning. No negotiating. Smack. Then you go about your business like nothing happened.

Finally, we have… this. This is most likely NSFW wherever you are. Possibly even in the place the picture was taken.

Click me to enlarge!

I really don’t want to know what you have to do to make it go around and around.

Click to enlarge…. IF YOU DARE.

I really want to live wherever this was taken, because they have to be some seriously cool and relaxed people if they leave things like this out in the open for kids to see.

Four vivid videos

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Last night was news type links. Tonight, it’s a video show. Get ready for some embeds.

First up, a short and sweet cat video entitled A Very Obvious Cat Trap.

Obvious to us, of course, because we have great big human brains that possess a lot of knowledge about how the world works that is not accessible to our fuzzy feline friends.

So Miss Kitty has no concept of what a trap is, let alone how not to get caught in one.

Note, the technique above should only be used for good, in other words, when cat trapping is medically necessary in order to take your kitty to the vet or change their flea collar or whatnot.

Or when your skitty kitty needs, in your estimation, cuddle time.

Next up, we have that fun pop culture slice of life, the compilation. This one involves a certain Number One and his unique approach to seating.

Hard to know what to say, isn’t it?

I certainly noticed him doing that once or twice, but I had no idea it was a “thing” for Riker. A signature affectation, just plain part of his style.

Frakes pulls it off in a way that seems smooth and natural most of the time. This makes me wonder if it is something he has done all his adult life. He is 6 foot 3, after all, so I am betting that a lot of chairs are a little on the low side for him. Certainly the standard Starfleet model seems to have been designed for someone a little shorter.

I am only 6 feet tall, yet I often find things are built just a little too low for me, especially sinks and countertops. I can only imagine how bad things are with three more inches of height.

So I can totally imagine Frakes’ unique approach to seating being something that he did spontaneously on set once day, and the producers decided they liked it, so it became part of Riker’s style as well.

I suppose if you are a Riker hater, you might say “He can’t even sit like a normal person!”

But I am well disposed to both Riker and Frakes, so I am willing to give them both the doubt and say that I think it works for everyone’s bearded buddy Riker.

After all, he does it so smoothly that most people don’t even notice it until it’s pointed out!

Next on our playlist is a truly epic encounter between an apathetic teacher and an articulate student about the state of education today.

I love this video for three reasons, which I will list in order of ascending importance.

1. I love that kid’s hair. That is epic cool hair, dude. Must be a pain to deal with, but it looks great.

2. I did something similar way back in my junior high days. We had this simply awful French teacher who could not control the class, her lesson plan was a mess, she had no idea what she was doing, and so on.

One day, she decided to take this out on the class. She was being a world class bitch, which is the classic response of a weak person to losing control of a situation. And then she decided to rip into my then-friend Jason, and sent him to the principal’s office.

So there I was, going quietly volcanic as I always do when something threatens someone I care about, when it came to be my turn to answer a question in the exercise we were doing.

She asked me what the answer to the question was, and I said “I don’t care!” then launched on a verbal tirade about her and her terrible teaching skills which, sadly, I do not recall. And this was way before everyone had a video camera in their pockets via cell phones.

What I do remember quite vividly is giving that bitch a hearty “Seig Heil” as I passed her desk on the way to the principal’s office.

And the best part was that I didn’t even get into any real trouble for it. I ended up just sitting there chatting with Mister Meek, one of the school VPs, then when the lunch bell rang, he told me I had better just go home for the rest of the day.

So all I got for my act of rebellion was a pleasant conversation and a half day off school!

And before the end of the month, that teacher was gone.

3. Of course, his hair and my glory days aside, the most important thing about the video is that this young man so articulately and powerfully nails his teacher, and by extension the system that supports her, to the wall. You can just hear the apathy and sullen anger in her voice. She knows she sucks and she is beyond caring about it. She deserves everything she gets out of this.

I mean, teaching via workbooks? Why the fuck is the state paying you a salary?

As the great Arthur C. Clarke said, “Any teacher who can be replaced by a computer, should be. ”

Statements like that were made for teachers like her.

Finally, I think I might have shared this one before, but it is so good that I just have to share it now that I came across it again.

I call this a Biblical version of Things That Must Have Happened.

Is that not brilliant? And not just because it is kind of funny to see God Almighty portrayed as a somewhat thick-headed and irritating boss.

If nothing else, it is a perfect example of the irresolvable tension between the Old Testament God, who is downright psychotic not to mention cruel, vindictive, petty, arbitrary, and altogether cranky, and the New Testament Jesus, who is kind, patient, compassionate, understanding, forgiving, and noble.

Clearly, Christianity should be all about the Jesus. It’s named after him, after all.

And yet, the Religious Right never seems to bring Him up at all.

Gee, I wonder why that is?

Links n’ thangs

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Haven’t done a link share post in a while, and tonight, I am in the mood.

First off, we have this article from Psychology Today (great mag) about the Left Brain Right Brain “Myth”.

It is, basically, a stupid article and not up to PT’s standards. It starts off with something that seems provocative enough, talking about how the left-brain right-brain stuff is a ‘myth’.

Briefly, ever since the split-brain studies of the 1960s, we have known that the two halves of out brains seem to have different functions. Broadly speaking, the left brain handles things like abstract logic, language, time, and conscious reasoning, while the right brain handles intuition, emotion, deep processing, memory, and so on.

If someone had proved this to be untrue, that would definitely be a big story because it would be knocking fifty years of brain science into a cocked hat. That would be worth writing about.

But no, that’s not what the author of the article, Christian Jarrett, is saying. Instead, all he is doing is complaining about people using these ideas incorrectly as a way of oversimplifying a very complex and important area of brain research.

Well duh! There will always be pop psychology and pop science. There will always be people who get their hands on a scrap of science and go to town with it without restraint or understanding. And there will always be well-meaning people who simplify something in order to make it easier to understand and end up inadvertently giving people the wrong idea.

It’s hardly something worth griping about, especially not in an actual psychology mag. It does not really matter if the average person does not quite understand this hemispheric specialization thing.

All that matters is that your brain surgeon gets it.

And it’s “chicken coop”, not “chicken coup”, you knob.

Speaking of dumb articles, this one rankled me as well. It asks “Is Outrage Driving Homophobia Underground?”

The premise of the article appears to be “We think homophobia is going away, but in reality, it’s just hiding! Oh no!”

To which I say, “Well duh!”. The real battle is to make certain opinions unsafe to speak in public because people will be morally outraged and the speaker will lose social status rapidly.

Whether or not people still have prejudice in their hearts is beside the point. If they can’t talk about it without everybody will (rightly, in the case) think they are a bigot, then they can think whatever they want in the comfort of their own noggins.

They can even band together with other neanderthals who still share their opinion and have a grand old time trying to convince themselves that society is, indeed, going all to hell now that the queers can get married. Go ahead, it’s a free country.

Bigotry doesn’t die overnight. But once the cultural shift has been made where expressing it openly makes the average person think less of you, the rest is merely a matter of time. Social pressure has a very strong effect on people, as does exposure (hard to think gay people are all horrible people when your nephew comes out of the closet), and so once that vital social tipping point has been reached, it is all over but the shouting for that form of bigotry.

After that point, the writing is on the wall. Within a very short time, the bigotry against gays, which was once aired as a serious and valid political and moral position, will join sexism, racism, religious intolerance, and all the other forms of bigotry in the dustbin of history. They will never entirely go away (after all, there’s still white supremacist groups around today), but the number of adherents will dwindle into a tiny minority clinging to the edges of society, loathed and mocked by all.

And that is all you can really expect in a free and open society. The minority is now protected and supported by the vast, vast majority. The polarity has completely shifted.

That’s progress enough for me.

And now for something I really do like. It’s a new show that will be on Logo soon, and it is well, kind of different, but in a good way.

OK, OK, go ahead and laugh at the puppets. You have my permission. I laughed a bit too. On the surface of it, it seems completely absurd. We are not used to taking puppets seriously at all. It is hard to get over that and focus on what is going on.

But I think the idea for the show is actually quite brilliant. They take the real audio from actual couples therapy sessions and then use the puppets to provide use the audience with a little distance from the events to make them more bearable, and provides the people getting therapy a iugh degree of anonymity.

These two things make it “safe” for us to be there in the session with these people. It is actually quite a brilliant idea if people can just get past the puppet thing.

Ah, the puppet thing. I have to admit, those are not the greatest looking puppets in the world. They will do, mind you, I am not saying they are a dealbreaker. They get the point across.

But they are kinda crappy looking.

Honestly, I think the premise would be a lot better executed via animation instead of puppetry. Even if it was just very simple Dr. Katz style “squiggle” animation, it would still look better than the puppets, and despite what mass media seems to find novel every single damned time a slightly dark animated feature comes out, I think audiences are prepared to accept seriousness and drama from animation.

At least, more so than puppets.

But I realize that animation, even very simple stuff, is expensive, and TV show budgets have been shrinking rapidly, so I understand why they would opt for puppets instead.

Kind of makes me wish some of the fabricated-American characters from Greg the Bunny would show up for a session on the couch, though.