What the FUCK is WRONG WITH YOU FUCKING PEOPLE?!

What crazy fucking math makes it alright to shoot an abortionist? He'd been bombed. He'd been shot in both arms. Now he's been murdered. Kansas late-term abortionist (one of only a few in the country) George Tiller was murdered in fucking church today.

Tiller has been the target of harassment, demonization, death threats, multiple assassination attempts, and, finally, this.

The websites Operation Rescue and Tiller-Watch are both down.

Indeed, there was this backhanded statement from Operation Rescue:

"We are shocked at this morning's disturbing news that Mr. Tiller was gunned down. Operation Rescue has worked for years through peaceful, legal means, and through the proper channels to see him brought to justice. We denounce vigilantism and the cowardly act that took place this morning. We pray for Mr. Tiller's family that they will find comfort and healing that can only be found in Jesus Christ."

I think I can speak for the family here: You can shove your messiah up your ass, you twisted, delusional fucks.

It's the "through the proper channels brought to justice" that makes me want to strangle a Kansan. Was this the "justice" that you sought? Is it just the means that you don't approve of? And he had his fucking day in court and beat 14 counts!

This is an act of terrorism. I don't just toss that word around, either. This is an attempt to intimidate people for ideological reasons by using violence. Terrorism. This is exactly why single issue maniacs are on the DHS "look out for these nutjobbies" list. You horrid, horrid fucking people. You demonize someone, direct a national smear campaign, and then you step back and say you were shocked when someone killed them? Fuck. You. You fucking fucks. Fuck.

I'm sending $50 to Planned Parenthood.

HJ

Early Morning Heartbreak...

No matter what your routine, some days take you to places you could not have predicted you would be. Sometimes before 10:00 in the morning, even.

It started with a walk. At about 7:30 or so, I was heading down to get a coffee and work on my summer syllabus. This relied on the unrealistic premise, however, that the coffeeshop was not going to be blaring pseudo-reggae to over the din of...nobody else in the joint. So, I figured that since it was a nice day I would walk down to the grocery store. After I passed my apartment building, about a block down I was trying to figure out if I really wanted to carry a carton of caffeine free diet Pepsi a mile, when I saw a personless(?) dog. A little one, or at least a puppyish version of what would eventually be a bigger dog. Every so often I see some scofflaw (heehee--I said "scofflaw") walking with his (always his) dog, not holding a leash or anything. The dog just tags along with his leash dragging. As irritating as I find this, I was ready to be indignant when I noticed another guy walking in the same direction on the other side of the street.

I stepped into the street to get his attention: "That your dog?"

"Never saw it before."

My brain kicked into animal rescue mode, sizing up the animal, calculating how far I was from my car and such. "Hey, guy!" I called.

"Hey!" the dog might as well as called, and bounded up to me. This dog was standoffish, by whcih I mean a complete tummy-slut. He looked at me as if to say, "This is how it's going to work: I'm going to roll on my back and thrash around and you are going to rub my belly. Got it? Let's proceed." And the rubbing began. Such a friendly, enthusiastic dog. At a distance, I thought he might be a full-grown English bulldog, but as he got closer it was clear he was something else. Anyway, he was completely carryable and docile and enthusiastic about it. The guy I called out to came over and said that unfortunately he could not take a dog. Well, nobody was asking you to, but he was basically saying that he would rather not be responsible for the dog from this point on.

So I carried him back to my car and called up to my roommate, who would want a piece of this doggy action. At some point, my new friend barfed a little pile of rocks in my car. But he seemed ok. Animala came down and sat up front while our chum climbed over us and then lay down in the back seat and went to sleep, a very puppy-like reaction, I thought. (If you have never had a puppy, like little kids, they go from "insane" to "coma" in about 3 seconds.) We drove over to the APA in the county, but they are completely closed on Sunday. So, we had to go to the Humane Society. I am always a little hestitant about bringing critters to the Humane Society (though it is always better for everyone than letting a dog wander in the road), so I tried to make a case for the little guy at the intake desk.

A person came out and, according to Animala, decided that he was a pit bull terrier. There was no chip, something that I had really been hoping for. He also seemed to have a little spot mange on his tush. We got him posed for an intake picture, which I have below (that's my arm).


Sortly after this photo was taken, we handed the leash to the desk worker and they led him off. It killed me only a little to see him tug against the leash in my direction.

Hopefully, someone will be in a position to pick him up. (Ben? Flavin? eh? eh?) I sent a note to a pit bull-friendly rescue group in the city, just to let them know that a really affectionate adoptable guy was waiting for them. But that's all I can do, I think. Maybe I'll mention him to the people at the St. Francis Society. I know some of them, but I don't know if they do dogs.

He was really quite a swell guy, and you can see his adoption page here.

HJ

Writing the academic paper and a shout out!

First off, I want to give a shout out to HJHOP friend Tengrain at Mock, Paper, Scissors for his 450,000th post. OK, 10,000th, but it's still enough to make you thankful for sunlight replacement therapy!

Currently, I am working on my next article, since I start teaching again in a few weeks and will need to set aside time for that. After the class ends, I have bare days before I have to move down to Atlanta and to prepare for the next semester, so this is the only chance that I will have to get it finished this summer.

I decided on a mover. Me. Damn it. This is the deal. I wanted a full-service mover, since the university I am going to be working at will pay $1000, my Spring semester contract stretched through to this month, and my summer class is paying me an assload. Of all things in the world, I hate moving into a new apartment most. That and polio. Anyway, the way that the moving racket works is that you go online, enter in a bunch of information about exactly what they are going to be moving and then they send you an email telling you that you will be getting a call/email/will have to call for a quote, and during that call you will have to go through all of it again. The estimates of how much stuff I had by weight ranged from 3,000-5,500 pounds even though I was working from the same inventory. The quotes that I got were $1,100 (which was a lie...I had to get a new quote when I talked to them and they gave me the hard sell) to nearly $3,000. On top of that, I could not be sure of when I would be moving in--there would be a range of dates, as the truck carrying all my stuff would also be carrying the stuff of other households as the truck worked its way south. So the schedule was too uncertain for that price. I checked U-Haul and they were cheap and could even schedule movers to help me load and unload at the pick-up and drop-off points. So far, when the school coughs up my moving reimbursement, I will have spent less than $500 for a full service move. Can't beat that, and I don't have to move a f-in thing! I will also be towing my car, it seems. So, we are going to load one day, drive down the next day, stay in a hotel that night, and move in on the third day.

Crazy.

Anyway, it is long past Bing's bed time. Read me a story. Can I have some warm milk?

HJ

White Supremacist Poetry Slam #13

Every so often, I being a sentence with, "Every so often...." When this happens, I am usually introducing another White Supremacist Poetry Slam. We are on number 13. For some reason, the foppish dandies over at Stormfront.org seem to write a lot of poetry. Really, really bad poetry. Recently the offerings have been less tasty then this piece. Perhaps it is because I am sick of hearing self-pitying non-warriors pretending like they are more than trailer trash. There is only so much whining I can take. For your enemafication:

Click to embiggen. Sucker.

HJ

Wherein I have sudden primal urge to throw poo at Ken Ham...

Have you ever read something that makes your eyes spin in their sockets, it is so staggeringly goofy? That was much the sensation I felt when I read Ken Ham's blog about a recent commencement speech at Penn State, which was given by an anthropologist, Nina G. Jablonski, in the College of Liberal Arts. Dr. Jablonski has published more than 40 peer-reviewed articles, reviews for a couple dozen science journals, has participated in public science education for almost 30 years, is an editor for numerous science journals, and has done extensive fieldwork around the world, not to mention her work as a collection curator, popular science writer, science consultant, and widely respected lecturer. Her academic CV is enough to make me want to throw in the towel and open a worm farm. Ken Ham, on the other hand, hasn't even met Bill Nye the Science Guy. (Dr. Jablonski has, by the way.)

So, how does Ken evaluate her pep talk to Penn State's graduates? (Let me give you a hint: very, very badly.)

In a commencement address for the College of Liberal Arts at Penn State University this year, graduates were told they were a “community of large-brained apes.” Now that these graduates understand they are just animals, I trust their university won’t be critical of any of the students if they act accordingly.

1. Have you been to college, Ken? (I honestly don't know.) Let me refer you to Buffy the Vampire Slayer:



Yay! I threw in a Buffy reference! How long has it been since I did that?

Seriously, the notion that knowing you descended from animals leads to anarchy and subserviance to animal instincts is handily and totally demolished by looking out the window every so often, you dolt!

After all, if we are just animals, and there is no God, then there is no such thing as morality—particularly when the commencement speaker ended with:

You may be just a bud on the tree of life, but you are a bud with attitude and power. Find your own Beagle [the ship Darwin was on] and change the world!

By the way, Hitler tried to do that, and he did use evolution to justify his actions!

Did you see the Evel Knievel-esque jump over at least 30 feeble intermediary steps between if "we are animals" and "there is no God"? Even less healthy is the assertion that animals, including our closest relatives, do not exhibit the type of behavior that we would, in people, describe as "moral." I direct you to this podcast, called RadioLab, which I have fallen in love with other the last few weeks. They talk about chimp behavior...very near my new apartment in Atlanta, I might add:



Great show that. My roommate is so tired of it!

I like how quickly Ken whipped out Hitler, who, most history textbooks agree, was especially notorious for finding his own Beagle. It's the thought-stopping invocation of the epitome of evil short circuits rational argument. You know who invoked the Bible? David Koresh! There you go, Ken! How'd you like that? Your asinine assertion makes just as much sense. Seriously, though, nobody gets as much as a slap on the wrist for owning slaves or committing all sorts of genocide in the Bible, and for a couple of milennia, slavery in Christendom was justified by looking at the dark-skinned descendents of Cain. (Oh, Dr. Jablonski is also a world-renowned expert on skin pigmentation. I'm willing to bet she could give you an earful on the subject.) The shoddiest non-argument comes at the end of Ken's blog entry:

By the way, at least one department head for a research center at the Penn State campus doesn’t believe this. He is a PhD creationist who visited our Creation Museum last week.

You know, I have long wanted to reveal the name of the evolutionist that has managed to get on the Creation Museum staff and who is even now working hard to expose the full depths of your idiocy and shenanigans. Unfortunately, I won't tell you who that is so that they can finish their work.

Actually, this is not a mystery. I suspect the person that Ken is referring to is Jeremy Walter, an engineer who wields the awesomely gigantic title "Director of the Power Conversion Systems Department of the Energy Science and Power Systems Division at the Applied Research Laboratory at Penn State." His buisness card is printed on posterboard! But the size of your business card has nothing to do with whether or not your opinion on evolution means diddly-squat. For instance, Professor Walter presumably does not need a working knowledge of biology on a daily basis, presumably producing bigger bug-zappers or whatever the hell he does. You have invoked a false authority, Ken. Have you ever looked at one of those "science professionals who reject evolution" lists? There are never anthropologists, zoologists, or biologists on there. They are high school science teachers, dentists, and historians of science.

Ken, you crack me up. Keep it coming! I know you will!

HJ

Liberal blathering...

Mine, actually.

North Korea...what is your problem? Do you really want to be reduced to a smoking hole in the ground? I mean, seriously. Mr Kim, you are..."Il". Nuclear testing by the weirdest little state is actually completely unacceptable. You hear me, Jungy? I'm not going to stand for it. There. That should take care of it.

I have a hard time telling whether or not N. Korea's approach to international relations is psychotic or brilliant. I think a little of both. "Yes," they say, "We will enter into multilateral negotiations regarding our nuclear program. WE HAVE A SQUAD OF GLORIOUS SUICIDE CANARIES POINTED AT YOUR ADULT DAYCARE CENTERS! " I mean, how are you supposed to deal with that? The problem is that they have resorted to brinkmanship far too many times in the past for us to take them seriously, which is why they declared the longstanding peninsular truce invalid. Yet, the weird little country persists.

Roland Burris is amazing--he is a man without a conscience. I greatly look forward to his demise in jail. Seriously. You know, I gave him the benefit of the doubt even though he was appointed by...certainly the dumbest criminal in history. Now I really feel betrayed. I wonder if he is going have "2010-2025, Mad Pete's Prison Bitch" put on his mausoleum?

And from The Chronicle of Higher Education, here's another reason not to trust the Canadians, who we have allowed to snuggle up to our northern border quite long enough, thanks very much.... Aw, hell, Canada. I can't stay mad at you, especially when you give me such glittering jewels of irony as "Canadian Think Tank Recalls Reports on Intellectual Property After Plagiarism Allegation." Canada Uber Alles!

Lastly, the other day I had my first...what I would call my first "big kid meeting," a planning session for the program for incoming freshmen that I am participating in this summer, and I have to say that I left the meeting knowing less than I did going into it. How did that happen? It's run by people who are less than organized; they really seem to be more worried about making students feel "welcome" than they are about students learning. They haven't given me a schedule that has the last day of classes on it. Also, even though I was contracted to teach the English class, they want me to participate in after-school activities with the kids0--weenie roasts and the like (that's on the schedule). I don't entirely understand it.

Oh, if I were a little less pseudonymous, I could share with you the worst pun I ever encountered, which came out of that meeting. It was a pun so violently bad that it ripped a grapefruit sized hole in my brain. It's enough to make you want to go on a multi-state killing spree. Starting with all of Alabama.

Speaking of which, I may be having a White Supremacist Poetry Slam coming up soon. I found a real stinker tonight!

HJ

Neil Innes, "Mind Control" and Scary Quote Guy

All this can be yours--and more!--at the second installment of the HJHOP podcast.

Brannon's show is here. Ken Ham's personal crotch infection can be found here.


HJ

My tragic unexpected death...

I finished putting together that podcast, HJHOP official podcast number two. I will likely upload it at work tomorrow, for your listening enjoyment. This morning, as I cast about for something to talk about, I downloaded a number of conspiracy-related podcasts, but mostly what I got was that the hint that the podcast as a genre is saturated with people who, like me, have no idea what the fuck they are doing. There is apparently a form of digital broadcasting (I was vaguely aware that this service existed) wherein people call in by phone and host their shows that way. Cock-goblin psychic Anna "of the Light" Robles has a show like that, I think. Well, in the very promisingly titled broadcast "Aliens and the Antichrist," the guy could not get in phone contact with his guest, and author of a book about, well, aliens and the Antichrist, so he played a "spiritual medley" which, wow, sucked the moon through a garden hose. When the guy came back on, he said that he was not able to reach his guest, and, actually, that he had not finished reading the guest's book anyway. But that wasn't going to stop him from discussing it. It was as exciting as listening to oatmeal getting cold.

This evening I wanted to see what my new audio programs could do to music that I played (I have a couple of guitars). Specifically, I wanted to see if I could simulate the Edge's chiming, rining guitar sound. Now, the way that he pulls off that sound is a mixture of digital delay and playing through an amp into a microphone. Add to that his massive number of sound effects, and you have the Edge's guitar sound. I have a digital delay pedal, but it never sounds right. I needed more...chime...so I played the opening of "Where the Streets Have No Name" (actually, that's Atlanta, where all the steets are called "Peachtree")...classic Edge sound (though I prefer his more recent and live stuff). So I plugged in my Strat without any effects, and played the opening bars, a bit from the middle of the song, and then the outro, maybe a minute and a half of the song in total. I recorded it on my little mp3 player, which is more dear to me than my pets at this point, and then loaded it onto my computer.

With Wave Pad I was able to get pretty close through a combination of reverb and echo. I was most pleased, though I would very much like to be able to get that sound as I play it. But, you know, I'm poor so that's not an option.

Then I looked at Audacity, the standard open source sound mixing program. Two words. Wah-wah. Neat! So, that was a fun, and my fingers hurt like a bitch. They are numb as I type this. I've never played in front of anyone before who didn't communicate through meows. Well, once in college. There was a veritable guitar god on my floor at Notre Dame and I would play with him sometimes. Once we had a pretty good jam to the tune of "La Bamba" and when he finished playing what he had prepared for open mic night at the Huddle, he had extra time, and he asked me to come up. I borrowed another performer's guitar and played with him. That was pretty nifty/terrifying. And then there was the blues bar in Spain. That was cool, by which I mean loud. One day, I'm sure I will be in just the right place when someone says, "Hey! Does anyone know the opening of the acoustic version of Tears in Heaven?" and I'll be all over that.

Oh, and my podcast tomorrow ends in my sudden messy death. It's the damnedest thing.

HJ

Evening, y'all...and a favor...

Been cobbling another podcast together this evening. I want to add some sound effects and maybe a little music. A chum of mine asked me about early 19th century manias of acquisition (on the scale/of the character of the earlier Dutch "Tulipomania"). I could only point her to Mackay. I did mention some of the irrational beliefs that grew up around electricity,

My favorite was the Boston minister who blamed an earthquake on Ben Franklin because his new-fangled lightning rods took away God's option of blowing up buildings with bolts of hot death and had to settle for earthquakes. Then the "animal magnetism" health craze in France, sparked (heheh) by Franz Anton Mesmer. It got to the point where he said that he could "magnetize trees" by touching them with a magnet, which greatly increased his ability to charge people for "cures". Utlimately, this culminated in what may have been the first blinded experiment, which, damn it, included Franklin. He was everywhere!

Homeopathy started in there somewhere, too, methinks. It seems to me that there must have been more, I'm just drawing a blank. But in terms of manias of acquisition... I was thinking about the obsessive acquisition of someone like Darwin and his fellow scientists, but genteel amateurs practices science like that...it was the name of the science game! I mean, wasn't Wallace out in the fricking boonies collecting bird specimens for wealthy collectors? Anyway, there must have been some. Maybe not enough to sink entire economies, but I don't know. If anyone can think of any good ones, I'd love to pass them along to her.

Thanks, folks!

HJ

Jesus of the Week, Also Meeting the Munsters

First off, I want to endorse a site that I think is a lot of fun. It is clearly a forerunner to Hot Chicks with Douchebags and still, I was pleased to find tonight, going strong. It's called Jesus of the Week. And, well, that basically sums it up. It's kind of a kitch-detector with commentary. Very funny. For instance, one of the longest laughs I ever had came years ago from this Jesus. It was the first paragraph that killed me. The other one that I like was one of Jesus about to devour a child.

Oh, I was also sucked into a seething vortex of purest hell this evening. While I was gone, Old Man slipped a note under my door. He was having some trouble with his email and thought that I might be able to help him. Because ignoring his request would ultimately be awkward, I popped by to help him with what I could. He was there, as was the Offspring. I'm shuddering right now. Man. That should not have happened to me. It was a long, awkward conversation. The dad is all right, I suppose, but his son is just so random. I had, however, anticipated wanting to stay in their apartment (I have nightmares about what happens in there) for as short a period as possible and put my laundary in before I went by. This was so that I had a built-in excuse to leave. Yee, as they say, haw.

I am still putting together the audio from my trip. Lots of dead air. I don't know if a highlights reel can be assembled, but I'm working on it.

HJ

OneNewsNow: Little, Special, Different

Once at the peak of all journalism, only to be thrown off that peak by real journalists, OneNewsNow simply cannot stomach a contrary opinion. Every week they do polls where they ask inane questions to their presumably largely Christian audience: "Do you think that Jesus loves you?" "Do angels exist?" "Do atheists hate God or just themselves?" You know, hard hitting questions. And, of course, the results are always overwhelmingly pious. 99.7% of respondents, for instance, might find that man love is not Christian. Wow! Huge shocker! So, they are pretty much the least useful polls, at least from a public opinion standpoint. What purpose they serve, however, is only one for believers: people's prejudices are validated and affirmed in this completely meaningless masturbatory exercise. Of course, they don't ever draw attention to the composition of the audience responding to their sham polls.

Unless the poll does not overwhelmingly confirm their prejudices. Take the vomitous botch that was their recent poll: "Do you believe you evolved from an ape-like creature?" This question is pretty funny because, you know, you are not only an ape-like creature, but are in fact an ape. But that's OK. This comes on the heals of reports about Ida, an early mammal. The article is called, "Ida an extinct primate - and that's all." Here is the result of the accompanying poll:



See the little note? Heehee. All right! Way to go, guys! You have denied them their petty self-congratulating propaganda! Keep it up!

What is worse, and a measure of their editors' utter scientific illiteracy, is that they go to the argument for abortion himself, Ken Ham, to get his grotesque amateur opinion. And I tell you what, most of what AiG is saying about this find has nothing to do with the fossil itself, but the way the story is told and presented to the public. This, of course, is to be expected coming for a place which is all gloss and no substance at all, but it does leave one with the sense that they are trying to return the wrapping paper to the electronics store, if you catch my drift.

So, I would encourage the demented feebs at OneNewsNow to report on how their demographic is skewed the other 364.25 days of the year. And play too close to the elevator shaft.

HJ

Reflections on Memorial Day

Memorial Day should have a meaning, but it is not the one typically observed by the public. And let me get the religious aspects of Memorial Day out of the way right now. War dead can not hear you. They do not care that you are remembering them. Big idiot celebrations in D.C. with patriotism junkie Gary Sinise (get over it, Lt. Dan) could not mean less to the dead. In fact, I rather think that if they could have survived their fatal wounds in some way, they would be embarrassed, if not a little pissed.

The lesson that our hypothetically killed but surviving soldier would have learned is the absolute indignity of death in combat. In modern war, you probably never see the person who kills you. The shell with your name on it comes in from over the horizon; un-aimed searching fire finds you purely by chance; you detonate a booby-trap set days ago; an unmanned drone searches you out tirelessly until you are dead; a remote controlled IED blows you and your friends away; you happen to be on guard at the wrong bunker when the cruise missile strikes; you step on a land mine sown by someone who has been dead for years. Combat in the sense of a warrior facing off against another warrior, where what is proven is something more than the limits of one's capacity to suffer, is increasingly rare.

What would most anger our soldier who survived death would be the utter indignity with which he died: supremely impersonal and without redeeming characteristics. Especially galling would be the euphemisms that we use to soften the brutal realities of war. No soldier simply ever "falls" in battle. Their lives were ripped from them as they fought off death in every way. They did not willingly "sacrifice" their lives. We dragged them up the mountain and offered them up...to what? They did not "give" their lives--their lives were ripped away violently, and god damn anyone who chooses to forget that.

In a perverse way, to sugarcoat the conditions of a soldier's death reinforces a perception of war which is both inaccurate and self-serving. The sugarcoating starts with the return of the body. Every soldier who returns in a full-sized coffin, even those who have been reduced to nothing more than a liver or a foot in a boot. This illusion of integrity is a visual analogue to the distortions done by euphemistic language. The notion that there is something worth honoring in the death of a soldier makes the next soldier's death a little more acceptable.

So, have a happy Memorial Day. Have a good dinner. Watch Band of Brothers with your kids or something.

HJ

Returning and reviewing...

I'm back, and I am sitting in a comfy chair. How we made it through countless police speed traps I have no idea. The only cops out were in Illinois, and they would park someone on a bridge above the highway with a walkie-talkie and you would see a line of at least half a dozen cars pulled over at the side not a quarter a mile down. It got so that we were monitoring the bridges on the horizon and when something was not moving on them, we slowed down. OK. That's how we made it through countless speed traps. But we weren't looking for it the first time (I did notice that whoever was on the bridge had a walkie-talkie, however), we sort of caught it the second time, and we were totally in the groove from then on.

Meanwhile, I had quite a trip through the creationist south.

For instance, I felt a deep disturbance in the Force when I drove through Cobb County. That's where in 2003 or so the country school board put one of those inaccurate, student-cheating stickers on the inside of the biology books that said evolution was "only a theory." The sticker got bitch-slapped in the courts. As Animala said as we drove through, "Think of it, Bing. We're in the one part of the world that is only 6000 years old!" Very droll.

My second brush with the unfortunate existance of creationist ridiculousness was like a heart-punch. Among the brochures in the visitor's pagoda at a fancy Kentucky (motto: "The other Tennessee") rest stop, the words "CREATION MUSEUM" smacked me in the face like a line drive.

I inadvertantly knocked the stack of brochures onto the ground, and, because it was the floor of a rest stop, I threw out the entire stack. All 100 or so of them. I don't want gullible Christians catching all sorts of diseases, including mind viruses! AiG is sort of like thought ebola.

My CDC disease cards! I wanted to show both Hantavirus, but drug resistance ("Vive la drug resistance!") and TB seemed to go together so well.

Ooh, speaking of which, I am thoroughly enjoying my book about "knowing"! Or more precisely the feeling of knowing. Very good. I may write about it later.

Well, that's all. The next time I head down to Atlanta, I won't be coming back! I have a bunch of audio that I grabbed down there, but...I don't know. As I listen to it, there are a lot of asides and inside jokes and the like.

HJ

My last night in Atlanta...

I have spent a good deal of time and not an insignificant number of electrons recording audio during my trip to Atlanta, just to see if I can make something interesting out of it all. I'm not sure if I can, especially since my roommate Animala does not want me to use anything that has her voice on it. It's aggravating. We'll see. She should read my blog more often, if that's how she feels and wants to police it. That's all I'm saying.

At any rate, today was a pretty laid back sort of day. Went to Piedmont Park, which is in my new neighborhood. I still do not understand the layout of this city, or, indeed, directions. We spent most of our time on this trip either lost or getting lost. Usually on "Peachtree" Really it is a wonder that we made it back to the hotel every night.

I am not excited about the prospects for hitting the road tomorrow. It seems like we just got here. Oh, and apparently it's Memorial Day weekend or something. The only reason I suspected that is because of the television commercials.

Anyway, throughout this trip, I have done the typical English major thing and applied my sense of humor (ranked by many in my family as that of a 12-year old) to the reading of signs throughout this great land. There are a lot of good ones. My favorite has been what I have come to call "El Turd." It actually says "El Toro," but the loopy, open capital Os are suggestive. Indeed, if you mistake the first O for a U, the D fills itself in. Of course, later, in front of a Thai restaurant, we saw a sculpture of what appeared to be a guilded turd, and we dubbed the restaurant "El Turd Dorado."

On the way toward the city, we stopped in at a gas station that had this unfortunate sign:

Live Bait
Deli

Now, I tried to take a picture of this for you, but I was using Animala's phone and did not save it. I don't have much hope that we'll snag the photo on the way back.

The other one is in my new neighborhood. It reads:

I really wanted to go down this road.

I am not as keen to leave Atlanta as early as I was to leave St. Louis. There's a whole preferring to sleep over driving issue that I need to work on first.

HJ

It's unfortunate

My roommate is a computer-hog. I want to put her into a space shuttle and secretly remove the explosive bolts on the SRB and external fuel tank. That'll show her. Who'll be laughing THEN? BING!! THAT'S WHO, MUAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

I'm back. Went to the scary place for a second.

I'm sitting at the world's oldest functioning computer, writing a blog entry on punchcards. Damned thing doesn't even recognize my (other) jump drive. I'd like to write something substantive, but PZ beat me to two stories while I was out of town. The first was professional victim and unpleasant man-bitch Bill Donohue, who actually suggested that child abuse was just fine. Seriously. I think I kept the press release. Nope. Didn't. But go to the Catholic League's website and read his apology for Irish pedophile priests. His defense seems to be: "It's just a little child butt rape. What's the big deal?"

Oh, the other thing is Ida, the early mammal, who is neat for lots of reasons. PZ did the creationist round up for me. What could a professional biologist possibly have to add to anything that I, a literary scholar, would say? Please, PZ, stick to your strengths.

Luckily, Bodie Hodge has swiftly gotten over becoming a father and is back out to ruin his family name with lunacy! Yay! Some things never change. Ah, Bodie, Bodie, Bodie. He is answering a letter that is called: "Feedback: Talking Snakes and Magical Trees."

Dear AiG,
I've noticed a lot of evolutionists will try to mock creationists
and make our beliefs seem ridiculous by saying things like "You creationists
believe a woman was convinced by a talking snake to eat from a magical tree."
How should creationists respond to remarks like that?
Thanks and God
bless,
Dylan.

Now this person is hitting on something very important which I have talked about here. Talking snakes convincing a rib lady to eat a knowledge apple somehow caused syphillis and blimp accidents. I mean, and I am thinking this in the voice of Cartman, seriously weak. But, if you are going to believe that the Bible needs to be interpreted literally, well, then you need to believe that those events are historical and, if you believe in the thoroughly unfair doctrine of Original Sin, then you the second part of that sentence is true.

Even Bodie realizes that there is a problem, because instead of saying boldly and proudly, "Yes, that is what I believe," he feels that he must tapdance his way around it:

Thank you for contacting Answers in Genesis. Those making these sorts of
comments are not likely even looking for a response, but are primarily poking
fun without even knowing much about what they are ridiculing. In cases like
this, sometimes it may be good to illuminate the humor of their own belief such
as: “And evolutionists believe everyone in the world ultimately came from rock.”
Then point out that if they have trouble with talking animals then they mustn’t
believe parrots exist either!

Yes. We want you to say it out loud, to admit, that yes, you believe that a fable is literally true. Say it, Bodie. You can't, because you know how sad it is. And your defense is the type of pathetic tripe that only Bodie Hodge could come up with. I've gotten good enough at these to be able to tell just by the crudeness of thought which articles come from Bodie and which come from others. And let me tell you, it really is hard to out-stupid Georgia Purdom.

1) The proposition that life comes from lifeless chemistry has the benefit of a) being true and b) not depending on talking snakes. The parrot thing is a red herring. It is a false analogy. It is equivocation. It is 3 logical fallacies all at once! (Wow. Are you sure someone didn't try to mercifully smother you at birth, Bodie?) It is a red herring because it does not answer the question, merely brings in parrots for some reason. It is equivocation on what it means to be a "talking animal." For much the same reason, it is a false analogy because the imitative sounds a parrot makes are nothing like the type of speech visible in the serpent. For instance, look at the punishment from God that the snake receives:

14And the LORD God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast done this, thou art
cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly
shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life:

15And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.

First of all, the snake is clearly morally culpable--it is conniving and "subtle"! It is the agent who is punished. But Bodie is a rotten literalist. Instead of just saying, "Yes, at least one snake could talk, and he was mean," he tells a fanciful yarn, and even brings in some new characters:

In this case, explain that, like the talking donkey that Balaam rode, the
talking serpent was a vessel enabled for another being to use or speak
through—Satan, in the case of the serpent.

Woah, where is the devil? Yo, buddy. No devil. Just a talking snake. And if this is true, the snake gets punished for being used as a tool. Fuck justice. Yahweh has a petty tantrum that needs to be satiated. So this fallacy is...wow, just innacuracy. There is no cure for stupid, Bodie. (Also, donkeys don't talk, unless you mean that Bodie is talking out of his ass. Ba-ZIIING!)

And nowhere does the Bible call the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil
“magical.”

He goes on this for a bit, whether or not the damned thing is magical, which misses the point of the question entirely: "How do we account for patent absurdities?" (The question was phrased as a "how do we answer things things like...") Bodie seems to think that deliberately misunderstanding the intent of the question somehow relieves him from the responsiblity of answering it. Not in my class, bucko.

Humor aside though, today we see people dying, which is exactly what God said
would happen because of Adam and Eve’s rebellion and sin. Today, we also see
serpents slithering (snakes), which was what Genesis says. And yet, no one sees
people coming from rocks, algae, or even lemurs! The Bible explains the world we
live in, and it is the evolutionary position that simply begins with and ends
with absurdity and irrationality.

First off, there was no humor. You're pathetic, and I do not find that funny. Nor should you.

Can we think of a reason why, without resorting to an unconfirmed, all-knowing, all-powerful amorphous glob of improbablility that is god, one might find these elements inside the story? How's this one: snakes slithered and people died when the story was written. You have cause and effect backward, as usual, Bodie. It's like a literary anthropic principle. The world is not "finely tuned" for us, rather, we are the product of this world, shaped by natural forces over eons to thrive in this world, which is why it feels so cozy all the time. And you skip over the big missing element. Snakes don't talk. Dick.

So, Bodie's defense is to pretend to not hear the question. Pathetic. Just pathetic in every way.

HJ

Raving Lunatic Rages Across Atlanta, Takes Nap

What a day. It's official. I put down a deposit toward an apartment today. As soon as that was done, I was off to the Zoo Atlanta. First: it was freaking expensive. It was about $45 for the both of us. I have lived in St. Louis and have always have had access to the free world-class zoo there, so it stings a little to stoop so low as to have to pay. One of the upshots of visiting a (comparatively) small zoo, however, is that the critters are often front and center. For instance, there was a young male lion who came right up to the glass. We were also visited by a panda and saw three young gorillas wrestling. These were cute beyond compare.

Next we were off to the CDC! Animala was not impressed. OK, technically, neither was I. But I wanted to see it. I imagined a building in the downtown area. Nope. The CDC is on a campus of 15 acres donated by Emory. We were not sure if the CDC had a public area, and when we pulled up to the guard station, I half expected to be mowed down like somone trying to crash into Baghdad's Green Zone. But it was all good. They did, however, do a complete sweep of the car, scanning beneath it with cameras, asking us out of the car and inspecting the whole thing, bonnet to boot. Once past parking lot security, we parked in the garage and went through another round of security. Finally, we were free to walk through the littlest museum in the world.

There were three floors to the exhibits, the only area in the entire building that was approved for visitors. I had hoped to be able to look down from an observation deck into the level-4 containment areas and see people in space suits doing strange things with the Lassa virus. No such luck. Apparently an Ebola petting zoo was asking too much, but I did get to see a jug full of dead Legionaires' disease!

The top floor of the exhibits showed some innovations for preventing disease in the 3rd world, and I have to say that some of the technology was basic but damned interesting. For instance, take the dew collecting underground water storage bag currently used in India. Or the comparatively sturdy laminated(?) cardboard shacks, complete with sloping roofs, that could easily be used in an emergency. There were irrigation contraptions, $100 laptops, and stand alone solar energy collectors. The lower levels of the exhibit discussed the prehistory and history of the CDC. A few of the most important exhibits included the history of the fight against polio (complete with an iron lung!), the emergence of the AIDS virus, and the ongoing fight against the naughty flu.



I thought that they could have spent more time hammering home the vaccination message, but I liked the exhibit. My favorite bit was the anti-VD posters ("I thought it was just a sore throat!"). I kind of hoped that there would be a gift shop, though Shatner only knows what I would have bought! They did have a couple of things for visitors to take home. I have "no polio" button, infectious disease playing cards, and a poster that lists thousands of genetic defects by chromosome! I know! I'm the coolest boy in the whole world!

After that, we went to a Barnes and Noble, which was nice. I picked up a book about the psychology of "knowing" and a book called "Discarded Science: It seemed like a good idea at the time." I think these will be fun. Already, the psychology book is rewarding. I may write a review of it later. We'll see.

Toodles, kids. I need a nap.

HJ

A full day...

I spent at least, gosh, 30 minutes looking for an apartment. The first appointment that we had was at a house that had been split up into two living areas. It was also a complete dump. I could have buried bodies in the basement, but other than that it had nothing going for it.

It was in the right area, however. We had arrived about 40 minutes early for our appointment at the place, so we decided to look around the nieghborhood. We immediately noticed a number of "for lease" signs out. So, when we finished with the nice people at the cesspit, we walked to some of the places that we had seen. The first apartment we toured seemed good enough. Done. Let's go see pandas.

I am dying without access to my usual technology. Seriously. I am in the business room of my hotel and let me tell you, it sucks monkey balls. The computer is old enough that my USB drive doesn't even FIT. Yeah. Awful.

Anyway, I will fill out the lease tonight, read a book. Watch some cable. Drink some soda.

Oh, I met my new boss and ran into someone I know who will be teaching with me next year. It was pretty wacky. More about all that later.

HJ

Working...

I just wanted to let folks know that I am all over it. Working on gettnig a place to live. Not looking promising because I have the organizational skills of a jellyfish lost in abstraction.

Lots of places nowhere near where I want to be. Drats. But I shall not fear. I will be in the right area for a long time tomorrow before I go in and formally meet my new boss, so I plan to wander around the neighborhood and try to pop in to a couple of promising places, if I can. All I want is a 2/2 or 2/1 within walking distance of work, central AC, cats and not too crazily expensive. Say $1000/mo. That's all I want. Anything else is gravy. Anything less is going to leave Bing a disappointed and frustrated man-imp.

Oh, I am taking audio snippets from this trip and will put them into a travel narrative of sorts when I get back to the real world. Today, I grabbed a lot of audio of me and Animala in the car. Thrilling stuff, that!

HJ

So much and so little...

Tomorrow, I am off to Atlanta to scope apartments. I loaded up the mp3 player with "pod," did an extra load of laundry, made reservations at a hotel technically in Georgia, did a little browsing on Craigslist and made some appointments to tour properties, made an appointment at my new department to meet some of my colleagues, wrote up instructions so that my brother does not kill my cats while I'm away, and returned to the blog to bid you all hasta pronto. There is a chance that I will have Internet access in Atlanta, but I'm not positive. Animala is coming with me, as is her computer, but she is a notorious technology hog, as am I. (I don't get to touch her laptop unless I am fixing it, and even then....)

If I have sightseeing time while I am in Georgia, it will only be because I have not been able to find enough apartments to tour. This is ok. It's partially a vacation of sorts.

I want to see the CDC. What is that about?

The night before a trip like this is always...well, anxiety ridden. I remember going on car trips with my father as just a little Jihad. I'm with him. You get up and out as early as possible and then you, as Shalini says, "Gogogo." We made it from New York City to St. Louis in one day, I remember, a journey, and I am not exaggerating, of 10,000 miles. He was like a trucker jacked up and delerious on goofballs, and his family was his payload. I am of a similar school of thought, the Go Like Hell Middle School.

On the night before, however, I'm useless. A bundle of nerves. I just need to get in "the zone."

I'll try to keep you informed, of course.

Oh, I missed Galactic Freedom Day. It's just as well. I never know what to get the aliens for Galactic Freedom Day anyhow. Next year, just tip a Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster and gimme some of that Old Janx Spirit!

HJ

Quote of the Day

"When you're dealing with serious pro-lifers, there's no gray matter here. There's no conversation...The therapist is not in here." --Stephen Baldwin

Well put, Stephen. Well put, indeed.

HJ

This song might kill you...

Seriously.

I mean, seriously.

It's a rapping physician, and the song is called "So many tissues."

HJ

Editorial staff of OneNewsNow functionally illiterate...

The people at OneNewsNow pile on the crap so dense I expect it to go stinky supernova.

You know OneNewsNow, right? They ask some conservative dickhole what they think about, say, gay marriage, turn on the tape recorder and transcribe the recording as "news." Facts? Fuck no. That's something that respectable news sources can bother with. Anyway, now I am convinced that their transcription is done by a machine, without understanding of content or context. They simply are that incompetent.

It was called: "APA revises 'gay gene' theory," and they have a couple of professional homophobes Peter LaBarbera and Matt Barber, who, by the way, both frequently streak the toilet paper that is WorldviewWeekend) give their opinions about a new pamphlet published by the APA. Their fanciful, Weekly World Newsworthy article opens with the dramatic statement:

The attempt to prove that homosexuality is determined biologically has been dealt a knockout punch.

Wow. Them's some strong words.

An American Psychological Association publication includes an admission that there's no homosexual "gene" -- meaning it's not likely that homosexuals are born that way.

Really? That's what they say? I'll use their entire quote, terminal ellipsis included:

"There is no consensus among scientists about the exact reasons that an individual develops a heterosexual, bisexual, gay or lesbian orientation. Although much research has examined the possible genetic, hormonal, developmental, social, and cultural influences on sexual orientation, no findings have emerged that permit scientists to conclude that sexual orientation is determined by any particular factor or factors. Many think that nature and nurture both play complex roles...."

Wow. They don't specifically exclude any of the possible causes. Hardly the killing blow to the notion that genetics influences sexuality. What is most interesting is what follows the ellipsis, the part of the sentence that they cut out, presumably because they did not like it (or possibly because they understood it):

" ...; most people experience little or no sense of choice about their sexual orientation."

The implications of this, quite frankly, totally skull-fuck the delusion that sexuality is a choice. Choice is the necessary precursor to sin. If someone has not decided to be gay, they simply must not be held morally accountable for their homosexuality (even if huge numbers of aging assholes believe homosexuality is a positive evil). You can't quote-mine the APA and expect to have the respect of...anyone!

But my favorite botch comes from twat Matt Barber, who, as we shall see, takes the notion of twatiness to new, dizzyingly twatly heights.

Matt Barber with Liberty Counsel feels the pronouncement may have something to do with saving face. "Well, I think here the American Psychological Association is finally trying to restore some credibility that they've lost over the years by having become a clearly political organization as opposed to an objective, scientific organization," he states. [...]

"It's irrefutable from a medical standpoint that people can leave the homosexual lifestyle," he argues. "Homosexuality is defined by behavior. Untold thousands of people have found freedom from that lifestyle through either reparative therapy or through -- frankly, most effectively -- a relationship with Jesus Christ."

"Nurse! Inject the queer with 12ccs of Jesus H. Christ, stat!" HAHAHAHAHA!!! Objective, scientific medical standpoint? HAHAHAH!! You suck! You wouldn't know an objective, scientific medical standpoint if it tickled your clitoris, Matt. You are clearly using words in ways that only you understand.

With the new information from the APA, Barber wonders if the organization will admit that homosexuals who want to change can change.

This is understandable, since he often wonders how socks work. Maybe if he read the complete article he could stop wondering, by which I mean think less, which, holy crap, turns out is possible. Quoth the APA:

To date, there has been no scientifically adequate research to show that therapy aimed at changing sexual orientation (sometimes called reparative or conversion therapy) is safe or effective. Furthermore, it seems likely that the promotion of change therapies reinforces stereotypes and contributes to a negative climate for lesbian, gay, and bisexual persons. This appears to be especially likely for lesbian, gay, and bisexual individuals who grow up in more conservative religious settings.

So, seems unlikely, dipshit.

Anyway, there are a few other bits in here that I should comment on. The first is this peculiar statement:

For decades, the APA has not considered homosexuality a psychological disorder, while other professionals in the field consider it to be a "gender-identity" problem.

"Other professionals?" Ministers? Trailer park managers? Who? The APA preemptively devastates this statement:
[M]ainstream organizations long ago abandoned classifications of homosexuality as a mental disorder.

Not to be out twatted, Peter LaBarbera comes up with a strange statement:

"Studies show that if people think that people are born homosexual they're much less likely to resist the gay agenda."

Look out! Pink helicopters! Why do I find any study that presumes that there is a unified gay agenda deeply and hilariously flawed? What studies are you talking about, by the way? And how do I tap their extremely gullible source for grant money?

HJ

PS: As I perused the Internet today, I found that HJHOP friend Bay of Fundie already covered this issue a few hours ago and so is now on my shit list. Heehee.

Cell Phone! O Cell Phone! (an audio tale!)

Check out the recording here. Had I been more innovative, I would have put amusing sounds in the background. Maybe one day, when I feel comfortable with the software I am using.

HJ

My alma mater managed not to disgrace itself...

How many alma maters can one have? I have a few, I suppose. But one of them is Notre Dame, where I got my Bachelors in English and Spanish.

I remember the last several weeks of my (first) college career. A friend of mine, a male, worked in (maybe led...I don't quite remember) the Women's Resource Center. In the last weeks of the semester, a scandal broke out--the Women's Resource Center had...brochures for Planned Parenthood. Outrage! Lunacy! Blasphemy! Fwow them to the fwoor, centuwian! Wuffly!

When the WRC explained itself, they said that they were given the brochures and pointed out that Planned Parenthood was not just "McAbortion," but that they provided other services to women as well. Then, one night, all the brochures disappeared. The WRC was outraged. I was outraged (be it known I was not in the pro-choice camp at that time). In the last newspaper edition of that year, I sent in a letter to the Observer, the student daily, and I'll be damned if I did not have a few things to say, by god. My point was that the school, which was approximately 50% female, did not have a gynecologist (often a woman's PCP) on staff or on call, that Planned Parenthood had other services that ND lacked, that merely making what I then considered immoral things inaccessible relieved people of the burden of actually deciding to be moral, and that the university already distributed contact information for Planned Parenthood at the beginning of every year when they put a South Bend phonebook in each dorm room. (Whoops! Epic failure, ND!)

That same year, there was some controversy about the commencement speaker. We got the Lt. Governor (later Governor) of Indiana, Joe Kernan. Many students were furious. Why not someone we had heard of? The angry letters in the Observer were quite an embarassment--what ungrateful, privelaged, entitled little buttmunches we must have seemed. Enough of us were horrified that the Class of '98 made a point of welcoming Kernan with great peals of applause. Seriously, it is staggeringly unbecoming crap on someone who comes to your school for commencement. And his speech was a total knockout--it blew us away. We left inspired in all the typically cheesy ways. I remember that the recurring trope was of keeping his phone number "in the book." I was afraid that the school would come across as looking similarly shabby this week. Here are my thoughts.

1) It seems that most of the protests came from single issue asshats outside of the university, or the usual run-of-the-mill conservative hacks who are constantly looking for some issue to criticize...any liberal.
2) The Church higher ups who raised the issue of whether or not ND should still be considered a Catholic university have shown that they fail to understand the basic mission of the university and are as such unfit to have any influence on the speaker.
3) It was the fucking President, dumbasses. He is the speaker that every college student would like to get. I mean...fuck! Jackpot!
4) His speech was pretty good, and that sunuvabitch is a really good speaker. Seriously, he's so much better than Bush, I want to weep. The important thing was that he addressed the controversy.

The university came off looking classier than the protesters did. I'm feeling a little proud of my school today, quite frankly.

HJ

Anxiety? You're soaking in it!

I had coffee this evening. Probably not a good idea, at least, not giving my jittery nerves right now. This happens. I go for months thinking, oh, hell, I can have two cups of coffee but about 45 minutes after that second cup, I am nervous as a...kangaroo...in...a...blender. Sorry. I got nothing funny.

Anyway, I am trying to decompress. I mean, it's laundry night, but I fear my neighbors. I was stopped in the hall the other day by Old Man as I returned from commencement exercises. I had my robes with me and he was there when the elevator door opened. Whatever signal I am emanating that allows the janitor in my office building to know that I am about to go into the bathroom so he can get there first and start cleaning, well, Old Man has clearly found it out because I can't escape him. "Just the guy I wanted to see," he said.

"Just the guy I was hoping had wandered into a building that was about to be demolished," I did not say.

"You're pretty smart--hey, you even have the outfit with you--and I just got a new computer. How do I get AT&T on the desktop?"

(I have decided, by the way, that I am going to buy a matador hat and wear that to commencement next year. I'll pin a tassel on it and say it means something back at my alma mater.)


"Er," I told Old Man. I said something about creating a shortcut on the desktop, and he asked me if I would come over to do it for him.

I'd rather be eaten by a soccer team, but I said, "No problem." I mean, it really is no problem, or wouldn't be if I didn't have nightmares about what goes on in that apartment. I'm afraid that someone is going to open a closet and parts of nurses will come tumbling out or something.

I'm still not decompressing. My wonderful roommate, and I do mean wonderful, is walking and talking in the background, murdering my will to live. I don't care what was just on The Simpsons. I mean, if I really, really did, wouldn't I have watched it?

But this young man's thoughts are turning...to laundry again. It's one of those rituals that I have to accomplish on the right day or I will not accomplish it at all. So, I am fated to head down there, probably into the clutches of Old Man and his scary progeny.

HJ

Bing's Commencement Address at Alma Mater University...

(Podcast version--with hot, throbbing Pomp and Circumstance action!)


Mr. President, Board of Trustees, Friends, Family, Honored Guests, Faculty, and Graduates:

I hear that you are graduating today, but by looking out at the familiar faces of the faculty with whom I have studied and worked these many years, I see that the mentors who the President of the University just identified as what set the university apart from similar institutions clearly had better things to do. I presume what President Cushman meant was that the faculty of other institutions show up for commencement.

This is an auspicious day for you, graduates, but don't try and convince members of my department of this. Even though mine is one of the largest departments in the University, I see only one other faculty representative, a junior faculty member who, once she learns that her department chair cannot be bothered to attend graduations, will realize that her attendance is not mandatory either. I mean, fuck, the University's Special Collections Department is better represented than the Department of English, and they haven't been outside of the library for years, much less ever met a student!

As we kick you out onto the streets and into the worst job market in years, graduates, know that the professors who trained you do not care and will probably not even notice that you have gone. The rows of empty chairs in the faculty section are a testament to your mentors' indifference and apathy before your achievements, as well as a fleeting monument to the insignificance of your time among us. Know that the time you spent in their offices was as meaningless to them as it was meaningful to you.

Today, the University honors some rich people for their ability to become and remain rich. We refer to their impressive ability to make people give them money as "service in the business world," even if they inherited the money. Our other commencement speaker has clearly given versions of this speech dozens of times and is completely phoning it in, having not even bothered to learn the proper abbreviation of our school's name. Clearly, this is an achievement worthy of an honorary doctorate--well, one from this university, at least. Hell, he could get a faculty appointment.

To all the parents out there, we thank you for your money. These unemployable young people are your problem now.

Because everyone here has somewhere else they would rather be, or in the case of the faculty, has somewhere else they are, we are not going to drag this out by dealing with valedictorians and other silliness. What meaningless, ineffectual platitudes could your student representatives possibly offer to the faculty, who are, after all, well aware of your collective limitations?

In conclusion, I would like be the first of hundreds of university employees to ask you to give generously to the university so that you might continue to fund the ungrateful faculty who clearly could not give less of a shit about you.

Thank you, and get out.

HJ

I don't think Missouri is in Kansas anymore, Toto...

We're all going to die. I guess Missouri, as states go, has had a good run. Hey, we've had some up times. The Arch was a pretty good idea, and the zoo was swell. But then there was the whole not really being able to pick a side in the Civil War thing. Anyway, the weathercreature just announced that there are thunderstorms from St. Louis stretching all the way to Kansas. So, doom and destruction cometh. But at least lightening is pretty.

Right now I'm gearing up for a road trip down to Georgia to apartment hunt. I expect to leave on Wednesday morning and I'll be there through Saturday, at least. I'm looking forward to it. I haven't had a trip out of St. Louis that wasn't business or an interview in quite a while. This is more like a vacation. A brief vacation. To somewhere I'm going to work and live. Damn.

I'm going to make a wee little pizza. Maybe watch Daddy-O on MST3K. It swings, baby! Really swings! "Hike, hike, hike my pants up!"

HJ

Baby's First Podcast...

Will this work? Beats me.

Give it a try.

The recording starts about about 10 seconds in. Let me know if you can hear it. Here's the Howse podcast in question.

HJ

Today

Yeah, I had a day.

I had to go in to work early this morning to pick up student papers and to make sure that I was not proctoring any exams/final classes, which is one of my occasional duties. Aside from that, I only had grading to do. By about 10:00, all of my duties on campus were complete. So I went to the radio station today to record my promo.

I lounged in the student center on UMSL's campus while waiting for my appointment. It was nice being on another campus where I did not know anyone. I got a lot of reading done, since there was basically there was no chance I would be seeing anyone I knew. At 2:00, I wandered into the radio station.

I had never been in a radio studio before. It's pretty much how you image a radio station should look. Behind the front offices and the newsroom, there were three or four cramped little studios. Now, the poor producer had clearly given this tour at least 50 times to people just like me, or so I surmised from his comments. The radio station is really, as best as I could tell, just a series of specialized servers. They stream live and recorded content from NPR and other providers, they have a queuing system that keeps everything sorted and stored and ready to go. Basically, the producer took me to a closet and pointed to the electronics and said, "Well, here's the station." All input devices (mikes and computers) in the recording studio are linked through a mixing board, and I was under the impression that each studio could work independently, if need be.

I got to meet the fellow who gives me my traffic updates in the morning. The producer said, "Yeah, he's the one who gives the tornado warnings." "So, you're the voice of death?" I asked brightly. "Yep."

I learned a bunch during the 20 minutes or so I was in the recording room, and the producer mixed my spot right there and actually seemed pretty happy with it. I'm pleased.

So, I went right home and downloaded a freeware mixer program and am going to try to slap together a podcast. I saw sound editing being done in the studio, and it didn't seem that hard. That's the big news. I might try that this weekend. I listened to the most odious thing recently, and I just have to share my commentary on it with you. In glorious hydroponic surround sound. I worked on it a little tonight, and I realized just how much preparation must go into a single show. I don' think that I will go much beyond 20 or 30 minutes, but we'll see. I might have to do a little bit of research, a little bit more outline than I originally planned on doing to make it sound, well, at least half-assed. Nonetheless, I need to get a sense of how this works for when I teach writing for the web. I'm sure I'm going to have to teach that at one point. We'll see how it goes. Just listening to my first couple minutes of recording, I say "um" a whole damned lot. Luckily, I can edit all that dead air out. It's great work for someone who is obsessive compulsive, really! Tidying! Yay!

HJ

Getting my mellow on...

It's the very end of the semester. Everything ends in the next 2 weeks. I am grading papers, almost all of which are in (an encouraging sign). The problem I am faced with is, "Where to grade?"

Grading requires oodles of concentration, so I need to find somewhere I can sit an not be disturbed. This means being Internetless and alone. I would have chosen the basement laundry in my building, but I have weird neighbors who seem to be able to find me no matter what time or day I go down there. On Sunday, my regular laundry night, I ran into Old Man in the hallway. He was coming out of the elevator and he had a large flashlight in his hand (not one of the cool ones you could sterilze a room with, like in the X-Files, but the type that a Chicago cop might use to abuse the assembly rights of students, for instance). He warned me that there were black people outside.

Because my neighbors have apparently planted a subcutaneous chip on me that alerts them whenever I go do laundry, I can't go to my usual place to grade. Drats.

So for the last two nights I have gone out for a light bite and grading. It's been really nice in St. Louis over the last couple of days, and I wanted to be out, you know, among the people. I know a bunch of streetside cafes where I could sit, look important, and not be bothered. Last night, I went to Brandt's, a cafe in the Loop that has changed quite a bit since I was a teenager. It was one of those places where, when I was a young 'un, I could occasionally get served because I knew someone who worked there. In those days they had a little store with exotic beers, if I remember correctly. That's gone, and now it is really just a slightly overpriced establishment near the "restaurant" end of the cafe scale. (Didn't know there was a cafe scale, did you?) They have drinks, fancy coffee and nothing you would call bar food. If I am not mistaken, sometimes they host folk singers to irritate people and drown out conversations, but I could be wrong. I walk past there several times a month, but haven't sat down there in years.

Anyway, I thought, "You know what, Bing? I know you don't drink a lot, but go ahead and have a beer while you grade." So looked at their beer list and ordered what must be one of the least delicious beers ever brewed. It tasted like it could have been scraped from the back of a pair sweaty yak balls. (I believe it was called Smegma Stout.) So, I choked on that a little, while I waited for my chorizo. Mmmmm....chorizo.... Of course, I thought....oh, who the hell knows what I'm thinking most of the time? I saw "chorizo and shrimp" in the description, and thought that they would be, you know, chorizo and shrimp, side by side in the harmonious manner that only hors d'oevres can achieve (I believe that the German word is Wenigessenharmonie). It turned out that the integrity of both the sausage and seafood was mercilessly violated. In a tomato sauce.

So, as I tried to get my soupy cajun spam balls onto a fork before they disintegrated, I managed to get a little grading done. Today at the office, I got some more done, but not a huge amount. Tonight was just as pleasant so I decided to go down to my coffee shop to grade. It was great for a few minutes, listening to a podcast on my little automatic self-absorbed hipster douchebag machine as I walked down there. Sitting out on the sidewalk almost by myself. Then she came with her friends. She had two friends, a he-friend and a she-friend, and they were both quite subdued. She was not, which would not have been bad if she didn't have a high, nasally voice with a Southern twang and ramble on idiotically, like she would stop breathing if she quit talking or something.

I just wanted to flick calamari at her head, set off an alergic reaction and be done with her.

She reminded me of this scene from MST3K's take on Manos:



Seriously, how do people like her hold down jobs?

HJ

Animala's gurkha is missing from her reflecting turd pit.

Anyway, reflecting turd pits aside, I want to give a shout out to my student Micah, who saw something that he knew I'd love while he was doing research for his paper, and was kind enough to photocopy it for me.

It's two pages from the 1970 publication Communism in America: Liberty and Security in Conflict (Gary G. Baker, author, Richard Brown and Van Van Halsey, eds. Addison-Wesley) which came out of the Amherst Project, which I only just now heard about.

What you are looking at are the atypical results from a survey about people's perception of their fellow citizens' participation in the Communist Party. When asked why they answered yes to the question, "Have you ever known a person you thought might be a Communist?" the respondents gave the answers below. I am scanning these two pages in as opposed to writing them out again, so you only have to click below to see the answers clearly:


Which was your favorite?

HJ (You rock, Micah! Great semester and good luck!)

Yay! A Christian Ad Baculum and other Dipshittery!

I recently posted a, um, post about the consequences of free speech, and among those is the liability that my ideas may be criticized. By feebs. Who I get to mock. A lot.

This one comes from a person who has taken the name Happy2Bfree. By which they apparently mean, "Free from thought." It comes from my January contribution to the Interbabble, entitled, "Cripple Fight!"

I bet you think your real clever.

Well, clever enough to spell "you're" right.
The problem is... one day little ones like you are going to find out how wrong you were.

But it will be too late for you.
You secretly enjoy the thought that I might spend eternity roasting like a turducken in a...turducken roaster. (I just wanted to use the word turducken.)

And no.. I don't think all Iraqis are evil. Did I say that?

Don't care. You think that they are going to hell too and deserve it. What's the difference?

But those that follow extreme Islam are. Better educate yourself a bit.

I have a Ph.D. How about you, asswipe?

You have an ax to grind from what I can tell.

Usually people react this way when they are frustrated. Are you feeling frustrated?

Nope. Doin' swell. Feeling wrong?

The other slice of turducken comes from...Well, the Post-Dispatch, which is deposited on my neighbor's doorstep daily. It's sort of old, but I need to clear out my bloglines account. Lots of stuff backed up there. It's a letter to the editor called: "New Data Challenges Darwinism." The salient excerpt:

For the last century and a half, Darwinism has been the great model accepted by biologists and other scientists. Life, they postulate, is the product of a random universe. [...]

But today, new data is challenging Darwinism. DNA codes, which constitute not mere chemicals but, in effect, a language, are fundamental to life. This DNA code language is not random gibberish but rather an irreducible complexity that suggests a rational order as opposed to chaos which infers its origin from an Intelligent Design - a Creator.

This is pretty easy, but then again, I've had an entire bottle of a wine with a duck on it. It's all I'm up to right now, air-guitar jamming as I am to U2's "Elevation".

1) Not a random universe. We have laws that are as best we can tell inviolable.
2) For that reason, the notion that the DNA codes are "random" should be checked at the door. These are the products of a non-random process. When you are incapable of understanding that which you criticize, you should probably send it to a newspaper, because it cracks my shit up, feeb.

Ironically, now I'm air-jammin' to "My Sweet Lord."

3) The language is not a language in the common sense of the word. Indeed that is a metaphorical short cut that says "Certain strings of molecules will produce specific proteins." Suck it.
4) DNA=irreducible complexity? How about GATC and their constitutive atoms? Now you are just throwing out words that you don't understand. Ding a ling.

So, what I'm saying, I think, is that I'm the Taxman.

HJ

Acne scarred

(Note: Sorry about the surrealist title of this post, but it remains. There's a story for why it is titled as it is, but I can't think it up right now.)

On this website, I have made a point to not discuss prominent folks on the right like the Noxema-Smeared Corpse, the Bloated Pill-Popping Gas Bag, and other such well-paid dingdongs, probably because I don't want to contribute to their online status. But Bill O. came up with such a whiner winner today, I just had to post it. Giddily.

It's called: The Destruction of Miss California, and it is clearly the product of a deficient mind.

Bill is proudly standing up for Carrie Prejean, who I would totally do. Twice on Sunday. If she promised not to talk, because what comes out of her mouth is, unfortunately, noxious and would make me more limp than, well, Bill O is. Bill tells how she is now the victim of a media-wide bitch-slap for being a run-of-the-mill homophobe and an unthinking swallower of religious dogma (I was going to say "ruminant" for the swallowing and vomiting of dogma, but the word also means "thinking or considerate"--so she swallows). When she was asked whether or not supported gay marriage, well, she failed to consider her audience:

Smiling brightly, the young woman said: "I think that I believe a marriage should be between a man and a woman. No offense to anyone out there."

Most polls show that the majority of Americans agree with Prejean, including the president of the United States.

Ad populum. Go on.

Yet since she made that statement as Miss California, the woman has been persecuted in the media.

You mean, on a nationally televised event she participated in because she wants to become the perpetual object of the media's attention? (I liked Blue Gal's comment: "Just do the Playboy spread and go away.")

MSNBC allowed a guest to call her vile names, and the far-left cast of characters on that cable network has delighted in mocking and demeaning Prejean almost nightly.

Hey, Chris Matthews should be allowed to marry whomever he likes! And can you allow someone to say something on live TV? I honestly don't know. But then again I imagine other networks, Bill, don't script their guests.

The left-wing blogs have been especially vicious, and now, even her own pageant is turning against her: She's being investigated for possibly violating pageant rules by giving unapproved interviews. Of course, she gave those interviews trying to defend herself against media assaults.

Sigh. Boring.

This is a disgraceful exposition with wide implications for all of us. Here we have an American citizen answering a direct question respectfully and honestly and being punished for it. You don't get more un-American than that. Where is the American Civil Liberties Union on this? That great defender of free speech has been totally silent. Once again, the ACLU displays its biased hypocrisy like a giant float-balloon in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade.

Whawhawha?!?! She was allowed to say what she wanted! To say this is a free speech issue...it's...like saying she was denied her right to free assembly when she got on stage with 50 49 other impossibly perfect females! Freedom of speech does not mean freedom from criticism, Bill!

And where is the National Organization for Women? A young woman is being victimized by hate speech, actually being called a "b*tch" on a variety of television programs, and NOW has no comment? Again, the hypocrisy is breathtaking.

A botch? A butch? A batch? I'm not following you.

Finally, where is the homosexual community?

LOOK OUT!!! THEY'RE RIGHT BEHIND YOU, BILL!!!

Do they not respect freedom of speech?

Again, they did not stop her from saying it. She was not thrown in prison, and she still gets, as you pointed out, enough free press to give her underdeveloped conscience full expression.

They don't want to be punished for their expression, right? It would be incredibly smart for a gay leader to pull a Voltaire and publicly state, "I don't agree with what you say, but I defend your right to say it." So, who's going to be courageous and step up on this one?

Bill, someone totally fed you that "pull a Voltaire" line. Nobody who so badly misunderstands the First Amendment has a chance in hell of understanding Voltaire.

Man, I hate you.

HJ

Update from the voice talent...

My recording session at NPR has been delayed. These things happen. The producer who contacted me had a conflict that kept him from getting in by the time we agreed to meet. So I will be going in near the end of next week. But it's going to happen. I hope I can find a way so that y'all can hear it when it is finished. I may have to email a clip to people in the loop, if you catch my drift.

HJ

Today in Awful! A Townhall.com Roundup!

You know what I don't like? Moronitude. Right now I am in the middle of proctoring an exam, so I have about 2 hours to work on whatever I want. I haven't done much with the politically (as opposed to the religious;y) conservative RSS feeds that I get on a daily basis. I wonder, do people really get paid to write the commentaries that appear on there? If so, their standards political editorial content is really low.

Take, for instance, Ben Shapiro's "Barack Obama Proves His Anti-Semitism." Shapiro does not understand that wielding the word "anti-Semitism" when you don't know what it means is the rhetorical equivalent of handing a toddler a chainsaw. Sure, it's amusing, but really, how are you going to get the stupid out of the carpet? (Disclaimer: Not even I know what that last sentence means.)

One hundred days into Barack Obama's presidency, he demonstrated cowardice
abroad and demagogic tyranny at home. On the 105th day of his presidency, he
demonstrated his clear-cut anti-Semitism.

Wow! He hates all Jews everywhere because of who they are? Well, not exactly.

On Monday, Rahm Emanuel, the president's hatchet man, delivered a message
to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. According to the Jerusalem
Post, Emanuel stated, "Thwarting Iran's nuclear program is conditional on
progress in peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians." The
message is clear: America will bar any action against Iran unless Israel makes
concessions to the Palestinian Arab thugs who seek to eviscerate all Jewish
presence east of the Mediterranean.

Talk about a goofy sentiment! I did not help elect the President to look out for Israel or Palestine. I want him to cover my ass. US support for Israel might have made sense in the Cold War, when we divided the world into the neat categories of friend, enemy, and vulnerable to the Red Menace. But it is not entirely clear that it serves our interests to be unconditional allies to Israel, and that includes the Muslim and Christian minorities there. I see no reason why American foreign policy should start from the assumption that whatever Israel does is fine. It is the duty of an American President and his foreign policy team to use what leverage they have to improve the position of the US in the world, and let's face it, the longstanding conflict between Israel and, well, almost everybody but especially the Palestinians, hurts hurts us in the Arab world. Huzzah! Love and peace, or else, baby!

The kicker is in his hysterical climax:

Any Jew who continues to support Obama's foreign policy should turn in his badge
as a Jew -- that means you, Rahm Emanuel. And all Americans who support Israel
must stand up against a president who values the genocidal murderers in Muslim
lands over our democratic allies in the Jewish State.

Turn in your Star of David armbands, folks! Man, he totally went there. Anyway, ill-considered phrases aside, the problem is that the party that has racked up the highest body count and makes for damned sure that a certain populace stay, ahem, concentrated in permanent camps, is our "democratic ally." Not acceptable. You fail to consider that the peace we seek goes both ways. Yes, Iran is an intolerable blight on the universe. Well, the religious leaders are, at least. I have nothing against the people, who are really more liberal. The Iranian president is of course, more a figurehead than someone who wields actual control. To take him at face value and deliberately focus on his inflammatory rhetoric is like...being the vicious guard dog who eats the steak while the thieves make off with the priceless paintings.

Mike Gallagher, meanwhile, in "Free Speech is Uniquely America," fails to consider the ramifications of freedom of speech, one of which is that you are responsible for what you say.

Michael Savage turns on a microphone and broadcasts his opinions to faithful
followers who enjoy listening to his views on politics, social issues, and
anything else that this colorful, provocative, entertaining guy comes up with.
It doesn’t matter which of his views I agree or disagree with. He’s a proven
commodity that is blessed to have a platform that enables him to be a First
Amendment practitioner on the radio airwaves.

Yeah, and you know what? I once heard him call on his listeners to hang people with my beliefs. Not metaphorically, mind you. Literally kill me. In his world, I'm not just silent, but dead. Great champion of free speech! Honestly, after that, I don't know why he walks free because that's illegal. I think that the Brits have had a dose of common sense when they realize that the type of rhetoric that Savage spews is destructive to a democracy.

That's that. Y'all have a day. I gots me things to do.

HJ