Effects of BP's oil spill on bird migration...

Here. I'm going to do some drugs now, this is so depressing.

That fuck Tony Hayward should be out in his little fucking yacht personally scooping the shit of the gulf.

Wanna protest the oil spill? Use public transport for a week.

HJ

"Nothing is as good as homeopathy!"

This site made me very happy. Haha! I'm sold on Fair Deal Homeopathy.

HJ

Canadian children are ugly.

Anyone else see what is wrong with this picture?

I love it when web content is automated!

HJ

Bill Donohue loses the argument before he gets through his headline

It's called Godwin's Law, and it stipulates that the first person to use a Nazi analogy loses the argument automatically.

And so we come to this twisted little monster's email:

RAID IN BELGIUM IS A FLASHBACK TO GESTAPO ERA

In CrAzY CaPs and everything.

So, what does this class act have to say about the police carrying out an investigation into a systematic cover-up to generations of child fucking?

Over the weekend, a story broke in Belgium regarding the raid of Catholic Church offices by Belgian police who were searching for evidence that may have been hidden in relation to the priestly sexual abuse of minors. (Emphasis added. End of story. Also, duh.

Can you really call that priestly behavior? I guess so.

Responding to this story is Catholic League president Bill Donohue.

It looks as though the Belgian police took a page from the Gestapo playbook and executed it to the tee. The police detained the present bishops for over nine hours while they snooped high and low—even going so far as to drill into the tombs of two deceased cardinals—trying to get any thing they could to indict the Belgian Church.

Well, Bill has gazed into the souls of the police--as long as they can indict the Church. No stone unturned, bitch. If I creepily kept bodies in my basement, which, really, is the type of shit that only serial killers should be allowed to do, they'd have popped the top on mom ("Norman?"). I want to know if they had special reason to look there? Or if they found something?

Recently the Belgian bishops created a committee to investigate claims of priestly sexual abuse, but this mattered not a whit to the Belgian government. They barged into the offices anyway.

OK, do you know how stupid that sounds? You know, we usually let the mob, who, just like the Church are innocent until proven guilty, conduct a a preliminary internal inquiry by committee and then trust them....Oh wait, that's batshit. Since when do suspects get to sign off on an investigation? Fuck you with a carrot.

While police do have the right to conduct a search, so long as it is warranted, this seizure smacks of an agenda.

That's what a warrant is, you feeb. They had goals to achieve.

Of course the women of “The View” had to chime in on this story, but as usual their commentary left much to be desired.

You sure watch a lot of The View. Don't you have a job?

The regular Catholic-basher Joy Behar chirped, “If you’re [the Church] not going to be forthcoming with the info, then the cops are going to come in and get it.” Whoopi Goldberg’s feeble attempt to defend the Vatican—saying that it was making strides regarding the abuse of minors—was nullified by her statement that the Church “can’t be surprised that they’re [the cops] going to come in” if they are stonewalled. These ladies obviously don’t mind the Belgian police goose-stepping through Church files, but they would be the first to cry foul if their own privacy was violated.

Or if children's assholes were.

Perhaps Pope Benedict XVI said it best when he addressed the incident on Sunday. In addition to saying that he hoped justice would run its course by guaranteeing “the fundamental rights of people and institutions,” he blasted the raid by calling it “surprising and deplorable.”

Then he blasted a load of steaming spunk into the ear of a weeping altar boy, calling it "surprising and delightful."

I believe it was Jesus who said:

You're no better than a rapist, Bill.

HJ

This week in conspiracy (28 June 2010)

Yep. The pigs are inside my head man, and they got there through the fluoride, but that's no reason we can have another edition of the week that was weak:

• LOOK OUT! THE COMMUNISTS ARE TAKING OVER AMERICA FOR THE 70TH STRAIGHT YEAR!
• ALSO THE COMMUNISTS ARE TAKING OVER AMERICA FOR THE 70TH STRAIGHT YEAR AND ONE POST MORE!
• "Because it's unicorn soup, sir." (Not really a conspiracy, just a fun article.)
• Apparently security is sort of lax in Kentucky these days. One of them got out.
• Conspiracy theories related to the Guatemalan sinkholes. According Before It's News, the craziest is that it was caused by a combination of an inadequate drainage system and underlying geology. But you don't read this for the run of the mill goof. You read it for the comments.
• Glenn Beck: "I Should Be Fired." Did they ever catch the guy who killed that hooker?
• There's a new player in town, and they suck monkey balls. It's the Centre for Research on Globalization, and they find Jesse Ventura's book not complete twaddle. Not surprised it took 'em this long to read it, honestly.
• P-Diddy, lapdog of the New World Order. Seriously. I could sort of see Lady Gaga being an agent of the Illuminati, but Diddles?
• If you believe 9/11 was an inside job, you're not a "student of conspiracy theories." I'm a student of conspiracy theories. You're an idiot. I can't believe this piss-hole got to perform with Edge.
• Beck and the Birchers.
• Michael Jackson's family: every single one of them has a different conspiracy theory. Their family reunions must be fucked up. And Latoya is useless. I'm just adding that one for me.
• Anderson Cooper: Illuminati Vanderbilt Jew.
• "Blah blah, conspiracy waaaaaah!"
• It's clear that we need to start using a phrase other than "New World Order," because it is only misunderstood.
• No, wait! Israeli environmentalists tipped over the Deepwater Horizon.
• Joseph "Porno" Farrah: Did you see how President Barry Sotero inadvertently published his guide to the NWO? You such a sad loser, Joe.
• Pastor JD Link: preacher or excaped mental patient...why not both?
• Tin foil shortage attributed to rise in Wisconsin Oath Keepers
• Prison Planet headline: "Poverty, Starvation and Sickness: Welcome to The New World Order!" Dude, that how it's always been on this damp little rock.
• Oliver North: wackjob felon fuck.
• PROOF OF THE ILLUMINATI! Or of crazy people. Take your pick.
• Mother Jones: Oil spill conspiracist (and reptillian shill) wins Republican primary.
• Finally a reason to watch C-Span: The Manchurian President (Come on! McCain was a FUCKING P.O.W. of communists, you unimaginative toilet goblin.)

And the Conspiracy of the Week a tie!:

Well, glaze my nipples and call me Susan: Blackwater is run by the Vatican and so contractors are essentially the modern Knights of Malta.

The second one is from Age of Autism, wherein Orac is a Big Pharma shill. Even if he was a shill, and he's not, it wouldn't have any effect on the outcome of all the studies that destroy the notion that vaccines cause autism. Pathetic, AoA. Fucking sad. How are you enjoying the pertussis epidemic, you monsters?

HJ

Asshole Andrew Wakefield...

Still a doctor, technically, and I believe he has not yet had his American license pulled, but it sure looks as if Penn-in-a-box and invisible Teller are going to rip Jenny and Andrew complete new assholes this season. Good.

HJ

Fun with biblical literalism...

From Evolution and Theology (1932), by Catholic priest Fr. Ernest C. Messenger, without irony on his part:

"The formation of Eve ex Adamo seems to be so clear in Scripture and Tradition that, at the very least, it cannot be prudently called into question. Further, there is no reason to doubt it, other than the difficulty of understanding how it could take place."

I wish I could write material that good! That's funny stuff!

HJ

What's wrong with this headline?

HJ

I've come to love the image analyzer...

I don't remember how I came across it, but it is a damned clever little tool.

Take for instance this insipid non-story, if insipid is the word I'm looking for. Do you know why they look ageless? Here's why:

http://errorlevelanalysis.com/permalink/74c91df/

Because you twats airbrush the shit out of them!

Here's an unretouched photo of Tom Cruise:

Haha! I'm a delight. Actually, if you look at this picture using the image analyzer, it suggests that this one is less touched up than the first photo, which I suspect is misleading.

HJ

I hate my cat..

I pull you out of the gutter, literally, and who do you latch onto? Animala. I don't understand that. She comes downstairs, and you meow pleadingly until she picks you up. I come downstairs, you hide.

You pudgy little fucker.

HJ

There is nothing too lowbrow for this site.

I chortled when I saw this at MPS.

Apparently this does not want to run. Oh well. Go visit Tengrain.

HJ

How dare you protest this, Benedict?

The Pope does not like being investigated when his employees have been fucking children? No me digas!

I take back everything I've ever said about the chocolate-eating Belgies.

HJ

Finished Superorganism, am reading Fads and Fallacies

So, humble and puny readers, what are you reading these days? I finished E.O. Wilson's Superorganism the other day, and I have started reading Martin Gardner's classic Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science. I'm going to be teaching a class about science and pseudoscience in the near future (I have an awesome job), and I wanted to have this one under my belt before I taught it.

If the chapter "Flat and Hollow" is any indication (isn't that a great chapter title?), it's going to be a quick and enjoyable read. As you know, we lost Martin last month at the tender age of 453. I don't know if anyone else has done as much for the popularization of math as Martin did.

It's sort of interesting to see the cosmology of the 1950s. I recently heard Pamela Gay talking about how little old astronomers, the ones so old they fart dust, still think that galaxies are a pretty cool idea. (Truth be told, I do too, but I don't call it the "Andromeda Nebula.") The cosmic background radiation had not yet been discovered. And dark energy, fagettaboutit.

Penzias and Wilson detected the CBR using this Picassian sculpture.

So, what the hell are you reading?

HJ

I'm back, baby!

Sorry I was out for a day. I seem to have contracted a sleeping sickness of some sort. But Futurama is back, a Korg AC30 is on the way, and all is right in the world.

What's a Korg AC30, you ask? It's a multi-effect system that was used on Achtung Baby (one of many, I'm sure). I want to play with it, so I bought one this afternoon. It's not a rare effect, but it's not being produced anymore. So I found one online in Maryland that was going for $120, and when you look at how you could only get one on eBay for $300, I called Maryland and asked if they shipped.

They do. Bitchin.

Let's show you my new baby:

It's all good.

As far as I can tell, multi-effects systems are sort of frowned upon on the music boards and blogs I look at. I think that a lot of people like the illusion of control that a string of pedals affords. Once you know what an effect pedal is capable of, you can tweak it in your line. For instance, you can dial back the gain if the pedal sounds a little muddy with delay, or you can tweak the delay. The various presets of a multi-effects pedal are not so apparently defined or easily isolated.

I have one multi-effect pedal, a Digitech AP50, which I bought primarily because it was for sale cheap at a pawn shop. Honestly, the dealer and I both looked at it and tried to figure out what it was and did. I asked to plug it in, and I cycled through the presets and found one or two really nifty, stand-out effects that made me tingle with excitement. Of course, the manual is online so I learned exactly what it was doing on each present and how to tweak each sound. In practice, I don't do that too much. I use it more often as a chromatic tuner than anything else, though there are a couple of sounds that I really enjoy and pull out every couple of days.

Here's an example of someone using a Korg A3 for evil.

With respect to my various academic endeavors, my experimental class begins next week, and I am quite excited. Terrified and excited. It will be unlike anything that has ever been attempted in a college setting, as far as I can tell. I only have about 10 sessions with these students, which is just not enough to undo 13 years of failure. But they are new to college. This is a big enough change that any good habits that we can impart to them will stick and have a large effect on their subsequent college career. This is the theory.

Yesterday, I saw my students' SAT scores in reading; they were almost all between 300-400. I think you get that score when you spell your name wrong on the bubble sheet. I'm pretty sure that my other students have the highest SAT average of any public school. My new students took standardized entry "skill" exams the other day, a reading and an English exam. Out of 16 tests administered, there were only two passes. I read through the reading test ahead of time--it was extracting information and these kids couldn't do it. It makes the textbook I have written over the last few months seem...wordy. I'll put in more pictures and illustrations in the next version. A visual text for non-verbal learners is what it will have to be, I think. A big-time textbook publisher will be coming to campus to observe the class. We're hoping for the best. I'd love to have a textbook contract on my CV before the next round of the job hunt. My boss said she thought there was a 75% chance of signing a contract with this outfit. Here's to hoping.

Lastly, Futurama is back, a very smart show that is not afraid to drip with nerdiness. Love it. I was watching the first two new episodes and started to worry that I was spoiled by the movies. Futurama works well on a big canvass. We'll see if they can keep it funky-fresh in the short narrative format.

HJ

Octopuz got mad skilz

Pretty nifty:

Via The Thoughtful Animal, who has also sounded the alert that SETI has a new site at scienceblogs.

HJ

Wherein Chad Orzel has a completely justifiable little stroke.

I believe the phrase he uses is, "Aaaaaarrrrrrrrrggggghhhhhh!!!!!" And it is prompted by the following interchange (actually, unlike the experiment they are referring to, no information is actually being exchanged between these two dense masses):

DC: Is our conversation affecting something in another galaxy right now?

MK: In principle. What we're talking about right is affecting another galaxy far, far beyond the Milky Way Galaxy. Now when the Big Bang took place we think that most of the matter probably was vibrating in unison.

DC: So it was already correlated?

MK: It was already correlated. We call this coherence or correlation. As the universe expanded, we're still correlated, we're still bound by these invisible webs. You can't see them. The book Physics of the Impossible is being filmed for the Science Channel and we actually filmed this quantum entanglement.

DC: You actually demonstrated this?

MK: We actually demonstrated it right on TV cameras. We went to the University of Maryland outside Baltimore and we showed an atom being teleported right across the room. You can actually see two chambers, an atom in one being zapped across the room. A TV screen shows the blip whenever an atom is being teleported and this is non-local matter.

DC: That means going from here to there without the space in between?

MK: That's right it just disappears and reappears to someplace else.

Ah....goof. Dig it, baby. Deepak Chopra should not be allowed near science words. He is such an idiot. Read all about it at Uncertain Principles.

HJ

Sparkle Tits the Impaler

I'm sorry, I just wanted to use that headline.

The worst article ever.

1) Dracula is made up.

2) Almost everyone is related to Vlad the Impaler by now, and any direct genetic contribution of ol' Spikey up the Jacksie is so small as to be indistinguishable from background noise at this point.

3) Anastasia Taylor is a fuckwit extraordinaire and should be staked for this statement:

"Tracing Pattinson's family back to Vlad was difficult research, but the pieces that unraveled created the perfect accompaniment to the Twilight Saga," said Anastasia Tyler, a genealogist at Ancestry.com. "Without any myth or magic, we find royalty and vampires lurking in Pattinson's life — making his story just as supernatural as the one he's playing on screen."

Wow. Just. Un-news. Damn it.

HJ

Visit Tengrain Now...

Just do it. He won. Tengrain finally just completely won. At life. He wins.

HJ

It's 'junk' science week at the Financial Times!

They are giving out the Rubber Ducky Awards!

HJ

This week in conspiracy (6/21/10)

Hello. After reading this posting, I expect you all to report to your post office for vaccination and FEMA camp processing (real conspiracy...listen for my next podacast).

• "Oh...Afghanistan could be the "Saudi Arabia of lithium!" Ooooh! Big surprise!" say all conspiracy theorists in the world.
• Oily Taints claims election fraud, remains loon.
• Glenn Beck, finally admits that everything he is worried about is fiction. Also, owns sweater.
• It's nice to see Richard Hoffstadter's classic 1964 essay, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics," get some air time this week.
• Obama, cap and trade and global warming denialism--all this and less at WND!
• Obama, communists going to hurt you in November 2010. Right.
• Kliff Kincaid out-Alex-Joneses Alex Jones.
• US congressional candidate says that BP and Obama caused the oil spill.
• Are US citizens a crop of human slaves? asks Before It's News. The answer is of course no, because we would all be in better shape if we were to be used for manual labor. Duh.
• The real conspirator is Satan, says Pro-life news.
  
• I do like the opening paragraph of this review of Stonehenge Apocalypse:

If you loved 2012, you're going to have a blast with Stonehenge Apocalypse. However, if you possess a learned degree of scientific or historical knowledge or prefer your disaster movies to have even a shred of realism, be warned that the developmentally challenged Syfy doomsday thriller Stonehenge Apocalypse will probably make your head explode.

• I love to see Joseph Farah making an ass out of himself.
• Canada Free Press: Still Crazy After All of These Years:

"So who’s the enemy? The enemy is that which is opposed to truth, freedom, and God—call it what you will. Politically, we call it the Far Left—Marxist/Fascists."

• Vatican II: The work of Freemasons, or Louisiana flips out.
• Butthole, Idaho lucks out.
• Denver Airport officials: "You think we what?!?!"
• Bill Willers can't accept that 9/11 truthers often get completely reamed by skeptics.
• Before It's News reporter Bill Chapman: "Our usurping, non-citizen, ex-CIA, Islamo-fascist, Illuminist, puppet-dictator President, aka "the Joker," has done virtually nothing, as instructed by our Shadow Government, to stem the flow of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, courtesy of the BP Illuminist sabotage of not only the rig that was destroyed, but, in effect, of the entire US off-shore oil industry." And that's just the first sentence!
• The Ironton Tribune now publishes anything.
• 100% mentally disabled Marine Gordon Duff delivers again. He's my favorite fruitcake! This time, 25% of the US will be uninhabitable because of the oil spill.

Conspiracy of the week:

The most popular link at OneNewsNow is a woman who claims that Obama admitted to a high-ranking Egyptian official that he was a secret Muslim. Who reported this? Pamela Geller of AtlasShrugs.com. OK. Let's do a little link following. First, let's look how ONN states it, without editing:

Since before he was elected, controversy has stirred over the extent of President Obama's ties to Islam. During the campaign, he spoke openly of both his Muslim upbringing and his adult conversion to Christianity. But now two major Middle East media outlets -- Nile TV International and Israel Today Magazine -- are reporting that the president has admitted in recent months that he is a Muslim.

Now, while Nile TV is the purported earliest news source to report this, OneNewsNow can't provide a link. Hm. Israel Today, who has a really confused logo, doesn't have a link. They have a quote in BOLD, which somehow is supposed to make it truer. You search Geller's site, and you get no link to the original. You look at an article by Geller in the tragically misnamed American Thinker, and she cites someone names Avi Lipkin as a source. Avi Lipkin, is clearly reliable since he also think that for some reason, Obama's white mother crawled secretly to Kenya to have a baby, left absolutely no record there, smuggled the baby into Hawaii and faked a birth, all knowing that someday her son would be President. Or as he put it:

Today, the United States has a president by the name of Mubarack Hussein Obama. Until proven otherwise by a real live birth certificate, I would rather believe that according to the US Constitution, this president is ineligible to be president of the US because he was born in Kenya, not the US.

Well, you're clearly a tap dancing lunatic. No primary source anywhere. Let's go to NileTV, the supposed source, which is state-run. This should finally confirm everyone's worst fears!

Mega lame, OneNewsNow. Hella mega lame. I couldn't even find the show on their website! But at least Before It's News (that is, "always") is re-reporting it. You guys all suck. Seriously. Show me the interview.

That's all for this week. Now, if you will excuse me, I have to bathe in the blood of the unborn. Toodles!

HJ

Do you ever have the dream where your cat is crapping Cheetos?

I have often heard that when a product is mentioned on a television talk show, the show receives a gift from the company. Why am I not getting Cheetos for mentioning them on my blog? And why would I want them now that I associate them with my cat's posterior?

Anyway, a curious part of my mental makeup, and maybe your as well, I don't know, is the after-drinking dream. If I have gone out the night before (like I did to Skeptics in the Pub last night), the next day, if I take a nap, I have wildly vivid dreams. I spent a good part of this morning really concerned that my cat was crapping Cheetos.

I remember once (or twice) during my freshman year at Notre Dame, I was really hungover while studying, and I drifted off in the study lounge. I was going back and forth between two equally convincing realities as I went between sleep and wakefulness.

Today was a low-key sort of day, Cheeto-crapping kitties notwithstanding. Copied notes from a meeting I had yesterday, during which I and a colleague penned some pretty innovating pedagogy, if I say so myself. Then we ran away because we heard thunder and neither of us has a car.

HJ

"Dear God, Why do you hate Louisiana?"

Is it perhaps for things like this?

Louisiana lawmakers propose prayer to stop oil disaster

Ask the universe to be nicer? That's what you're doing? How very Oprah.

Why aren't you going to strongly condemn God for letting this happen on his watch? Then maybe he'll go on a PR offensive that would include evaporation.

Better yet, get your asses down there and volunteer, you useless buckets of gumbo.

HJ

"Can I use the word 'pigfucker'?" Criticism in academia.

I feel rather partial to the argument that we should be critical of weak critical theory in academia. Take, for instance, Freudian literary theory. Holy shit, if there is a more clearly flawed and masturbatory faux-scholarship, I don't know what it is. Unless it is Lacanian theory, which is where Freud fists Derrida. Seriously, psychoanalytic criticism is based on the premise that you can say that you can free associate images and meanings, which is twaddle. Take for instance, "The derailment of the train is a clear indication of the author's sexual ambivalence." The fuck it is. He needed a train wreck to move the plot along, retard. That's the sort of think that I'm talking about.

Anyway there's is an article in The Chronicle about tough criticism. It's tough love.

HJ

Opening lines of the absurd...

"London: BP chief executive Tony Hayward, often criticized for being tone-deaf to U.S. concerns about the worst oil spill in American history, took time off Saturday to attend a glitzy yacht race off England's Isle of Wight."

Dude, Obama put off trips abroad to deal with this. Apparently this asshat (I haven't used that word in at least a week) feels that his continued employment does not depend on his performance.

HJ

Ah, Blue Gal! I could not love you more!

Frances Langum, known to to cops in the donut shops as "Blue Gal," made me a very happy man this morning, in a PhotoShopic sense.

Check out her newish podcast with Driftglass. It's taken off like gangbusters! Woohoo!

HJ

The idiots are everywhere...

Everywhere.

Except for Skeptics in the Pub, which I will be attending tomorrow night. I'm looking forward to it. Always lots of fun.

In the morning, I will be heading to campus to grind out some award-winning, publishable pedagogy. We have an editor from Bedford/St. Martin's Press coming to observe the new experimental class I'm working on over this summer, which is really insanely promising. The idea behind the course is to work with two instructors at all times for...ends that I can't elaborate on, but it's wicked crazy, going to be filmed and looks to be pretty awesome. It will without a doubt be the hardest college class I will ever teach, but, hey, a big-ass textbook publication might come out of it.

Groovy, baby. Groovy.

I try to read a chapter for fun every night before I go to bed, and this month (possibly fiscal quarter) it is Superorganism. It had been sitting on my shelf for months, since I moved to Atlanta, I think. It's basically a textbook about highly social insects, and it is very interesting. It's by E.O. Wilson and Bert Holldobler's, who wrote The Ants and won a Pulitzer for it. The amount of research synthesized in this book is prodigious. I think that most of the book so far has been devoted to "communication," upon which, as far as I can tell, all interactions between the individuals are built. I would get more out of it if I had some chemistry, I think. It's really interesting to see how the functions of individual organs are distributed across a nest...I mean, I knew that they shared food by regurgitation, but to think of it as a communal stomach sort of blew my mind apart a little. I highly recommend it.

I am saving my pennies for a new, wild freaking guitar pedal. More news when it becomes available.

HJ

BP spills coffee

Via The Hathor Legacy:

HJ

Check out this sick fuking asshole

More fun with foreign tongues!

HJ

Bill Donohue: Rendered Speechless

Lately, professional victim and Major League fuckwit Bill Donohue has been tilting at the owners and managers of the Empire State Building. Why? On Mother "Oh Just Let Them Die" Theresa's 100th birthday, he wants blue and white lights to illuminate the skyscraper.

The managers said no, and that they do not commemorate specific religious figures.

Bill had a shit fit. An ongoing complete fucking shit fit. Because he is quite possibly a lunatic.

"WHAT ABOUT MARTIN LUTHER KING JR!?! YOU COMMEMORATED HIM?!" the execrable toilet clog whined. Of course, the idea that King could have stood for something more than religion was lost to him. And we don't really remember his religious sermons, but his work for social justice (not the same thing by a long shot).

I recently wrote a letter to NBC asking that they not interview Bill Donohue, since he was essentially a bully and perhaps the least qualified person to speak on behalf of Catholic interests. Today, a writer at HuffPo (spit), followed that train of logic to its logical conclusion. Bill Donohue should resign. Absolutely.

Donohue's entire email response was as follows:

CALL FOR RESIGNATION

Alex Wilhelm has a lengthy article posted on the Huffington Post [click here] today detailing all kinds of reasons why Bill Donohue needs to resign as president of the Catholic League. Donohue said no.

He does not address a single point, so we will assume that he is not interested or incapable of mounting a rebuttal. You know, if anyone ever gave Bill Donohue his own treatment, I bet we could make him whine about it. You're like a Catholic Fred Phelps, Bill. Nothing good comes out of anything you do.

HJ

I guess we know who Rep. Barton really represents...

And it ain't the "small people." Corrupt to the core.

Did Rep Barton really just say that the Nordic BP Chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg was "shaken down" by a black man?

HJ

A very happy birthday to a very special website!

Just a quick shout out to Astronomy Picture of the Day, which turns 15 today. I have followed them religiously for the last several years and their archive is a marvel to behold. If you listen to AstronomyCast, and you should, you will know that the last century has seen repeated fundamental transformations of our understanding of the universe. APOD documents that exciting, ongoing scientific revolution and brings it to you every day.

HJ

An explosion outside my apartment building...

This is a real thing, and I don't think that it was the first time that it has happened. I want to pool our collective brainpower to figure out what it was.

The symptoms: A bright light outside my apartment, an explosion, very, very brief loss of power (reset some clocks and not others) and an electric hum.

Now, last night there had been a thunderstorm earlier, but I don't think that it was related to...whatever it was, because there was no thunder and we have seen it one other time, in the middle of a bright sunny day not long after we arrived in Atlanta. And that first time Animala still saw the flash. When it happened last night it was drizzling just a tiny, tiny bit.

We weren't the only ones who saw it. A couple of people in the other apartments peeked outside after it happened. All of the lights seemed to be on in the other buildings. I went around my building with a flashlight, because if some power lines had fallen down, I didn't anyone to get near them, but there was nothing down. My suspicion first fell on a street light above my parking lot, which was off when I stepped outside, while all the other ones were on. I thought that it had blown, but about 15 minutes later, the damned thing turned on again. Lastly, no crews showed up to fix...anything. (There was an ambulance by a few hours later, but I'm presuming that was completely unrelated.) So, I don't know what it was.

Question: could it have been the street light? Could it have failed so spectacularly (and audibly) and still turn itself back on? It looks like an ordinary, darkness-activated street light mounted on a wooden telephone-like post. I am presuming that because street lights are safety devices that they are engineered to have a back up, but I don't know. Can anyone else think of another explanation, besides the obvious Illuminati pulse weapon?

HJ

Bodie Hodge asks a very important question

Bodie Hodge, AiG's go-to guy when they need someone without a shred of self-awareness to answer a really dumb question very badly, recently posted a hard-hitting analysis of a question that has plagued humanity for, like, 6000 years (heheh):

Did the Serpent Tempt Eve while in the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil?

The correct answer is, of course:

HOLY SHIT OH MY FUCKING GOD WHO THE FUCK GIVES THE TINIEST FUCKING SHIT?!?!!? THIS IS YOUR JOB?? YOU DO THIS FOR A FUCKING LIVING?!?!!? AND SOMEONE PAYS YOU??!??!?!

Thank you.

HJ

"This is a very suspicious sausage..."

Bon apetite!

HJ

"A Butterfly Effect of Bullshit"

That is how I described the workings of my brain this morning to my boss.

Some background:

Last week, I gave my apartment key to a colleague who took care of my cats while I was out of town. He dropped it in my mailbox in the departmental break room yesterday, and today I was going to pick it up. For the last two mornings, I have not been able to lock the door when I have left (though Animala is here to lock things up when she wakes up).

So, I'm up early this morning and I know my apartment key is going to be waiting for me in the break room. I go to the shelf where I keep my keys, wallet, mp3 player and sunglasses, like I automatically do every morning. When I pulled the mp3 player off the shelf, my keys were sitting on the headphone cord and fell off of the shelf.

Somewhere in Georgia, a butterfly farted.

I faced the front door as I picked up the keys and thought, These [the keys] won't help me with that [the door]. I don't need them.

I put my keys on the shelf, walked outside and was careful to pull the door tight behind me.

I walked over to Einstein's Bagels for breakfast. It's across the street, and as I trudged across the road I noticed blue flashing lights and yellow tape at the top of the hill. Cops, I thought, but it did not register yet.

I got my usual and the folks inside joked with me about getting my bagel and coffee to go. I was an hour later than I usually am (hey, it's summer), and I was not sure about the timing of the bus at this hour, which I did not want to miss. As I walked up to the bus stop, the fact that there was yellow tape across the road and that police cars were blocking the road started to sink in. Hm. My bus can't get through. Will they detour? There is a good chance they will detour around the entire block, which I have seen them do before. I should not wait here and take the bus directly into campus. I walked back across the street and considered taking Animala's car. As I crossed the street, the same bus that I take came from the other direction, finishing its route.

I knew that I could easily get to campus by going in either direction. Usually it's a straight shot on the bus from Einstein's to my office building, but I can take the bus in the other direction to a train station and get pretty close to campus. I can catch this bus and not worry about whether or not the other one will pass my block by, I thought.

Somewhere off of the east coast of Africa, a low pressure system was growing.

I climbed on and the driver, the one with the rat-tail, greeted me. I took the bus to the train station, and almost immediately caught the correct train. I got off near campus and waited for the bus to take me up the hill. I could have walked, but I was already feeling the heat and humidity. I was wearing a sport coat and a light blue shirt that would show sweat. I decided to stay put and wait for the air-conditioned bus.

For over half an hour. Baking and sweating the entire time as the morning air grew warmer and warmer. I had a meeting, and as the time passed, I got madder and madder and increasingly uncomfortable. I could see the shirt soaking through and tried to will the bus into arriving. It didn't work. All I could think about was getting to my office and sitting in front of my fan to cool off a little before my meeting. When the bus finally arrived, it was a mere 2o minutes before my meeting. I climbed on board. The driver, the one with the rat-tail, greeted me, looked again, shook his head and laughed. I realized that I could have spent the entire time on this air-conditioned bus. Damn it.

I walked to my office building and went straight into the bathroom to clean myself up a little. Every swear occurred to me at once when I saw myself in the mirror. I looked like I was leaking from all the seams in my shirt. I wiped the sweat from my face and got a wad of paper towels to use as a handkerchief. I thought of my little desk fan and blasting it for the remaining 15 minutes before my meeting. Maybe it would do some good.

I went to my office and reached into my pocket for my keys....FUCK!!!!! I LEFT THEM AT HOME! FUCK!!! Flinging my sport coat and briefcase at the door did not at all help. I stomped around. And went to the break room to at least get my key...FUCK!!!! IT WAS LOCKED! AHHHH!!!

Somewhere in Central America a hurricane was slamming into an underdeveloped country not yet recovered from the last disaster, and sink holes were opening up into which mudslides were sweeping entire cities, killing tens of thousands.

So to recap: I could not get into my office to cool off or into the break room to retrieve my apartment key, which all but guarantees that all of this will happen again tomorrow.

Because I am clever.

HJ

How do you access HJHOP?

Question:

How do you usually access this website? I only ask because sitemeter often can't tell me that, especially when you are not coming in via Google search.

Do you use Twitter? (Does the twitter headline feeder I tried to set up even work?) Bloglines? Google reader? Intrusive dreams? The town crier?

Lemme know, please. Any options that I should have on the site?

HJ

This Week in Conspiracy (14 June 2010)

My Lemurian contacts deep within the planet are certain that the hour of realignment is at hand. They need only to activate their sleeper agent inside HAARP, and then we will have consummation!

But until then, here's the week that was weak:

• Gordon Duff kinda sorta denies the Holocaust
• Not only is Australia upside-down but it's also apparently backwards (the Shakespeare "debate" on ABC)
• Alex Jones ended up on my radar this week. I've known about him for a long time, of course, but I had a chance to listen to his radio show this past week, and I will review him on my podcast soon, because of the wonky. But in the meantime, check out how Chip Berlet, a personal hero of mine, is a Nazi. (Boogedy-boogedy boo, Alex!)

One such “skeptic” is Chip Berlet, who works for a group called the Political Research Associates, which is funded in part by the Ford Foundation, founded by Edsel Ford, the son of the notorious Henry Ford, who received awards from Hitler for funding the Nazi war machine with slave labor, which somewhat taints the PRA’s stated objectives, which are apparently to track conspiracy theories and the the right-wing while “advancing an open, democratic, and pluralistic society."

• File this one under surrealism: (Cali. Birther) Orly Taitz to sue painter who depicted her giving birth to a pancake.
• By the way, Orly lost her primary. Thank fuck.
• The NWO is going implement no-touch sexual torture and have already turned their secret weapon on Miley Cyrus.
• NewWithViews readers apparently believe that the BP oilspill was engineered to stop off-shore drilling. And are all loons to a man.
• Pygalgia finds a great sign, apparently protesting something, or making a connection or not...
• Sure, we've been inside the galactic plane for the last several thousand years, but NASA is still freaking out about the galactic alignment (aligned with what?) due to happen in 2012, at least according to Before It's News.
• Ahh! Government hiding time travel!!!11!!scary!!!
  
• Twit Glenn Beck: Barack Obama is fulfillment of a Weather Underground plot. Ho hum.
• The economy is going to collapse on the first of January!
• "Foul Play: Vatican Official Tied To BP, Goldman-Sachs, And Media Censorship In The Oil Spill Fiasco"
• How many citizens of Poland does it take to come up with a conspiracy theory? All of them.
• The least understood news of the week: experts consult with Big Pharma about things they are experts in! A new swine flu conspiracy.
• Before It's News (that is, "always") speculates about a nuclear July 4th!
• Enjoy the top ten fears of far-right wackaloons!

And now for the conspiracy of the week, my top pick:

Woompers: "Did Barack Obama appear in the 1993 'Whoomp (There It Is)' video?"

Stephen Colbert asks, "Did he also pop that coochie?" Tag Team is clearly in on the conspiracy too!

That's all for this week. I'll see you next week...OR WILL I?!?!?

HJ

Dear Texas, when you leave, take Arizona with you...

The Republicans in Arizona are out of their minds. This is just racism, perhaps the most public widespread instance of racism in America that I have seen in my life. I fully expect the Republican National Committee to denounce this. If not, God help us.

HJ

I made it to Illinois...

It took some doing, and I tried to get us super-lost outside of St. Louis (I was like Clark Griswold, almost ending up in East St. Louis), but the 11-hour haul was, by the only measure that matters, a success.

It honestly did not feel like a 11 hours. At some point in my recent back-and-forths between St. Louis and Atlanta, I have learned how to "turn off" the awareness of time's passage. It sounds like zen driving, but it is just a defense mechanism against boredom. I have an unspoken agreement with my travel companion, Animala--I never have to drive through Kentucky. I just won't do it. We cross the midpoint of the trip somewhere in the area of Kentucky, and that is break time for the Bingster.

We passed the time by listening to some podcasts. When I made the trip solo in the Fall, I listened to a course on astrobiology, which was pretty sweet. This time, however, I needed to accommodate the tastes of another. She wanted to listen to funny woo, which I can do. I will be doing some reviews in the near future, either in podcast form or in write-ups of the Alex Tsakiris' Skeptiko podcast. Tsakiris is almost a tragic figure, a true, genuine moron who thinks he's brilliant. He'd actually be a tragic character if he weren't a backstabby, unpleasant tool. But I'll get to him in due time.

We also listened to old editions of Alex Jones' show. I can do a quick impression in textual form: "Guns!...North American union!....2nd amendment!....You have to tell people!....Hiding in the open!... Slave grid of tyranny!"

Animala has some family stuff to take care of this afternoon, and then the evening is ours. Can you say, "Ghost tour?" Heheh.

HJ

Podcast 23ish is up.

You can find it here. This week, sinkholes, Taco Bell, and conspiracy theories. Also, I assault the universe with my guitar (I tacked on myself messing around with my new Gibson at the end--Yay!).

Or you can just listen to it here:

Enjoy! I'm out of town for a few days and don't expect to have access to the Internet. See you on the flip-flop.

HJ

An opportunity to masturbate for a good cause...

Apple has banned the webcomic adaptation of the novel Ulysses from the iPad. Leopold Bloom spanks it on a beach while watching a fireworks display. And the world ends. I thought we got past this in the 1930s. This is like Prohibition for the mind.

I have no tolerance for prurient pigfuckers, so I propose we all go to Apple's headquarters and have a jerk-in.

Or you can call them: 408.996.1010

Or you can go to the website and explain to them that they beneath James Joyce's most rank shit and that their decision bespeaks ignorance, sub-normal-education, and pigfuckery.

http://www.apple.com/contact/feedback.html

HJ

Janet Porter loses radio show, mind.

Not necessarily in that order, either. Wow. That puts a little spring in my step. That wacky woman has been on the radio far too long and should be consigned to the street corner, passing out fliers wearing a clapboard like the crazy fuck she is!

I picked up the joyous news of her impending suicide from Camels with Hammers.

It seems on May Day, she had a dominionist rally. Dominionists are Christians who want to seize control of everything on the planet to hasten the return of Jesus. Fucking nobody showed up--HAHAHA! She lost $70,000! HAHAHA! Jesus sure loves you, Janet! HAHAHA!

The next day she lost her spot with her radio network, VYC America, cutting the crazy woman off from her audience and funding! The announcement is here! Hold on, I need to get the hand lotion before I listen to this!

Porter bitched on WorldNetDaily, which really will publish fucking anything. VYC reacted to her, even unruffling the unpleasant Ingrid Schuetler.

Ah, that was great. so nice.

Past posts on Janet Porter's (nee Folger) ongoing strangeness (the top four are my faves):

Janet Folger: Queen of Filth and Lies

Janet Folger: Why Won't They Cover Our Religious Freak Show?!

Now is the Time for the War on Stupid to Begin!

Janet Porter: Wacky MILF

Why Am I Up at 4:45 in the AM?

Finding Jihad: It's not just for breakfast anymore!

Creationist and Bitch Janet Folger is One F-ed up Mamma-Jamma

Let Me Feast On Your Tears, Janet Folger

Worldview Weekend is Fagging Out All Over the Place (If you check the image forensics of her portrait on this page, you see that they removed her fangs.)

Adolescent America: Janet Folger Tells You to Grow Up

Gotta Say It...

Janet Folger: Good to the Last Drop

Perhaps Worldview Weekend is hiring, Janet? They're all asshats over there too!

HJ

A sharp, well-deserved jab in the groins of veterinary homeopaths

This made me chortle.

HJ

Just imagine that I'm staring at you and not saying anything.

I am working on a second book right now. That's two of them. One has to be done in less than a month. Less than a month. Christ on crackers.

So, why do I still maintain a blog? I mean, I clearly don't have time for one. Because I want to bless the masses with my pith. Pithing all over you, ath it were.

I have a meeting in 10 minutes. I'm Skyping a lot lately, and I might try to give it a whirl at some point to record a podcast. I'd like to interview someone at some point or co-host an episode, but not this week.

Cats are fighting. The earth groans.

110 pages of pure English-teaching action. Put together in less than a month. Not bad.

Blech. Roommate's home. Must go play nice.

HJ

Quantum physics...as fast as wacky can be!

This is just a cool experiment about the speed of spooky action at a distance.

HJ

A blogger has an opinion about Israel...

This past semester, as I have explored issues of antisemitism in my courses, as I have had students who are Israeli nationals, and as I have seen even the most moderate suggestions made by the US to Israel blasted by the right, and now, as I see Helen Thomas (who is older than fuck, by the way) leave her position as cantankerous ol' broad (said with affection now, but probably how she was seen when she started there) of the White House press pool, I think that I can officially say I can find almost nothing to support among the various parties who take a serious self-interest in Israel.

As best I can tell, not a single genuine hero has come out of the 60 years of strife in the region. Not one! Sadat and Begin managed to agree to not kill each other. No applause here. You should have been doing that all along.

The Israel-Palestinian conflict is, in every conceivable way, an intractable intergenerational cluster-fuck, awful from the inception of the Israeli state, a rallying cry for idiots of all stripes, and a black hole of hyperbole from which no useful information escapes. The whole Israel-Palestine region is a hodgepodge of nationalistic nightmares, pigheaded ideologues, and opportunistic posturing. It is an excuse for group A to do whatever the fuck they want to group B and an excuse to not compromise. It is perhaps where the most obviously gray areas in international relations are routinely portrayed as if they were black and white.

I don't hate any individual. I don't hate any ethnic group. I don't prefer any religious creed over another (I think that they are all equally infantile). I don't have any personal investment whatsoever in the region or in any party's success. I think the whole Israel-Palestine area is the most ridiculously overvalued parcel of land on the planet and that you'd have to be fucking crazy to want to live there...and guess what?

I hate that some absurd traditional loyalty to the integrity of Israel exerts so much influence over American foreign policy. It don't think that it is "the Jews" who hold so much sway. It's clearly a homegrown lobby. As a little kid, I thought that Israel was an ally in a generally Soviet-sympathetic region, and that's why we supported them. When the global balance of power shifted, I truly expected the US to reevaluate its strategic interest in Israel and be able to address the pressing human rights issues there through diplomacy and making it clear that our friendship was conditional, as it should be with every nation. That reevaluation seems to me to have never been made, nor does it seem likely to.

I see two huge problems: religion and colonialism. The religion issue alone makes it unlikely that the region will see peace in my lifetime--Jerusalem is where stupid creeds go to have it out. Too many world religions have fetishized this truly useless gateway to nowhere. As long as the religious/ethnically affiliated rule Jerusalem, there will be no peace. Seriously. So, we take the toy away from the fussy babies. I propose that we take Jerusalem away from the Israelis because they can't fucking share, and that we establish the city as a UN-governed International Reality Zone. Israel should have no problems with this if they are genuinely concerned for the safety and prosperity of its citizens more than they are with saving "face" (how they can look at that face in the mirror when they maintain state-sponsored ethnic internment camps...well, I don't understand why they'd want to save that face, honestly) or keeping land. You can have all the rich fucking religious traditions you want there, you just don't get to own it anymore because you are just not up to it.

Maybe sell Jerusalem to Disney and turn it into a religious amusement park or something. An international monument to Bronze Age brutality? Or maybe something useful, like a parking lot. Honestly, I have no ideas about how to salvage the region because you can't get any information that is not spun beyond recognition. What you are usually left with is two diametrically opposed positions, and you are forced to choose/accept as truth whichever one you like more. That's no way to forge a first-world nation. A pox on all of them.

HJ

This Week in Conspiracy (6/7/10)

An interesting week for those of us deeply involved in the coming New World Order. I have been informed by my Reptillian leaders that I will be commanding a legion of demons during the Tribulation, which is pretty neat! But enough of that. On to the week that was weak!

Best conspiracy theory of the week? A "network of Sikhs" is trying to take over the governorship of South Carolina. South Carolina, I support your leaving the Union, but only if you take Texas.

• Wow! He looks like what he writes! Subliminal Illuminati takeover? You're soaking in it!
• "Josef Stalin. Our savior!"--Before It's News.
• Media Matters: Rand Paul gives interview to Russia Today (weird-ass anti-American conspiracist state media) instead of Meet the Press.
• Oh, how cute. Can 30% of South Koreans really be completely out to lunch? I have my doubts.
• YOU CAN'T READ THIS ARTICLE! CONSPIRACY?!?!
• World Net Daily: Can you see where they attribute a Ghandi quote to Jane Fonda? (Hint: look where they refer to Jane Fonda.)
• The Dennis Hopper-UFO connection.
• Bilderbirgers meet. Big huge shit given.
• Look at how much cocaine they do at Before It's News! Also, now they don't like communists? Cripes! Pick a conspiracy and stick with it, asshats!
• Turkish conspiracy theory: Why just hate Kurds when you can hate Jews too? Also, notice the entirely responsible use of the word "taints."
• Mysterious celebrity deaths. Boogaboogabooga!
• Mysterious presidential commissions. Boogaboogabooga!
• "Useless Fuck Claims Obama Antichrist!" "There's a sale at Penny's!"
• Did Goldman-Sacks cause the oil-rig explosion? Fuck no. This is going to go the way of the put-options on the airlines before 9/11. A far from unique burp in the noise.
• Ah, more Bilderberg stuff. More level-headed this time.
• Is BP lying about damage in order to hurt Obama? (Seriously, it amazes me what shit the untrained mind can come up with.)
• Almost the best conspiracy theory this week: "It seems like the global elite always likes to well plan things, especially around good numerology dates." Wow. That totally makes my water more hydratious.
• Colin Powell, the oil spill, the military and David Icke. From Krazy Kanada!
• A Conspiracy Con update. Or, ConCon, as I like to think of it.
• Scientists benefit from creating useful vaccine! Dastardliness presumed!
• Hey hey! The Australian Skeptics are mentioned in this article about nutty Australian nutters who are askeered of the weather! Woohoo!
• Oh noes! He' comm de Izlamz!

We'll be back next week. Just you wait.

HJ

Letting go of your memory...

Tonight I'd like to share a skeptical moment with you.

I've been doing a lot of studying of conspiracy theories lately (and with any luck, you'll have your conspiracy theory list tomorrow[-ish]), and I need to come clean. I was at one time a big believer in one conspiracy theory. The downing of TWA 800. I was convinced that not only did I have inside information about the investigation and the true causes of the flight's demise, but I had anticipated the timing of the leak of the truth. And I had independent confirmation of this.

TWA 800 went down in the summer before I went to Spain for a year. The investigation was ongoing during my first semester abroad. One night, while talking to my father on the phone, he mentioned a conversation that he had with a patient. She was a high-ranking TWA official. She told him that it looked like there had been a training missile strike and that it would probably come out after the election (for Clinton's second term). I told this to a friend of mine.

The election came and my first vote was for Bob Dole (I know!). The people in my dorm dispersed across Europe for the winter, as we were locked out of our dorm. Several hundred miles of backpacking later, back in Toledo that Spring, my friend came up to me and said, "Guess what? I was home for break and my father said that the possibility a training missile strike came out right after the election. And I thought about what you had told me."

Confirmation--a predictive hypothesis tested against reality and confirmed independently. AHHHHH! COVER-UP!

Or was it?

Before we start calling people before Congress, mind you, we need to step back and regard the situation from an outside point of view. What evidence do I have that this happened? Well, actually none. I don't even have my father's say-so, and he was the one who was supposed to have told me this. He has no recollection of this. That is curious. What about my friend? I have no idea. I haven't talked to him for years. I suspect that he is camping down by the Tagus, but who knows? He could be a goat herder in Romania right now. I have no idea.

That exact conspiracy theory now exists, that it was a training missile. It may have existed then. I may have heard about it somehow. After the election, my friend heard it again and recalled that I had told him about it, I think. Did this establish the appearance of prophesy? As I remember it, it was a truly uncanny moment for both of us, but who is to say my memory is accurate? Nobody can.

Now, there is a lot of evidence that the flight went down because of a short circuit that somehow was allowed to occur in the freaking fuel tank, which I would call a shortcoming of design. This culminated in an explosion that accounts for everything that was seen on the ground, including what people thought was a missile striking the plane. The sucker split up, and one half kept climbing for a moment while the other fell, giving the illusion that there was an object climbing to meet another object. Actually, now that I think about it, those eyewitness accounts are one possible way how I could have heard about the missile theory very, very early on. But even if I heard the story from my father, I heard it at least third-hand.

Listen, no matter how real it feels nor how genuinely creeped out I was, I know enough to be skeptical of my own memory. All I have are stories I'm telling myself. Convincing ones, but stories all the same. I'm remembering something that happened almost 15 years ago to someone who was going to vote for Bob Dole. I am far less likely to make an ass of myself if I stick to the forensic evidence and conclusions of experts and accept that my memory is doubtlessly flawed.

HJ

Rejection!

Well, sort of, again. My damned article on the thermodynamic characteristics of peanut butter smeared on a beluga whale has been returned to me for revisions. It's never a good outcome when someone says, "So, what's the point?" So, apparently, it's interesting but has no point.

Holy fucking crap. I'm so sick of this article.

It's been back and forth between editors and readers for a year now. FUCK! It's been revised 3 times. FUCK! The first time I submitted it, it was called "potentially seminal." FUCK!

I've decided something. Instead of being a sophisticated writer, I'm going to treat the audience like infants, stick an "In this article, I argue..." sentence in there, and see if the shitheads can get a grip on my brilliance. I'm totally endumbening it, but I feel it has to be done. Maybe my intricate arguments within arguments are just too clever. (Maybe I shouldn't have wrapped them in an enigma.)

And it has to be 1/3 shorter---FUCK! Actually, the last 10 pages of the sucker are my bibliography, so I could cut that. My artsy fartsy opening, which is fucking brilliant, is going to get a circumcision. Don't have space to keep it. Sure, it's an illustrative anecdote that makes the case as solid as granite, but apparently they want to understand what I'm saying. The meanderings into the operation of individual memory and social memory, forgotten. I'm going to leave the obligatory gender-studies tripe, which is as ridiculous as titty-fucking, and get on with it.

What I really want is to get an article accepted before going on the job market in the fall, so I want this off of my desk. Also, I am truly so fucking sick of everything that was related to my dissertation that I could projectile-vomit blood.

HJ

Update: I've decided on the 5-paragraph essay structure. Perhaps they will understand it then. FUCK!

How big is the oil disaster?

A new website puts it in terms that you can relate to.

HJ

Well, the Oilpocalypse is now officially depressing shit.

I don't watch a lot of TV, and I don't think that I have seen a lot of oil spill footage since I started birding, and this is really, really depressing to see these animals wallowing in humans' filth. It's disgusting. I want to see that pigfucking BP CEO tarred and feathered. Let's see how he likes it, the piece of shit.

Anyway, on happier note, there's been a death. Nobody you know. It's just that next weekend I'm going to be gone for a few days for the memorial. We got word last night that their condition (a disease we all knew was going to be terminal) was crashing. Last night, we were trying to get everything together, planning to leave this afternoon to get up there in time, but their family said that there was no point--we'd never make it in time. And they were right. It ended last night. So, big bummer.

And then there was the radio interview today. That went well. I had a good time, at least. It was like an hour's vacation of sheer terror from the depression. I have a hard time speaking off the cuff in, you know, complete sentences, and if you were to read a transcript, you'd see a lot of recursive speech (by which I mean, "repetitive shit"). Also, I may have conflated the Israeli Defense Force with "Jews" which is not good, but inadvertent. I was making the point that an antisemitic conspiracy theorist had to somehow reconcile the idea that the Jews were capable of running the world but incapable of executing a raid. So you have to reconcile a sort of omnipotence with a sort of incompetence. I can't do it. Anyway, I was making the point that Jews aren't evil, which I'll stand by, or at least not any more evil than the rest of us.

HJ

Can this possibly be real?

Perhaps the mother of all Rube-Goldberg machines.




Ah, there we go. I thought the curtain transition looked a little off.



It's still completely freaking awesome in every conceivable way, though.

HJ

Nuts.

My roommate is having one of the two worst nights of her life right now, and life is suddenly truly shit here at my place.

Damn.

HJ

Rue McClanahan Dead. Is Rue McClanahan Alive?

Rue McClanahan has gone on to the big Golden Girls reunion special in the sky.

HJ

Things that happen to toads...

Right now Atlanta's getting a meteorological dry-hump. All thunder and lightning, no rain. I have a few minutes to spare right now before I write a book chapter about argumentation. (Come to think of it, I might go outside and manually test that lightning rod.)

A few bits of news. My guitar is still awesome, thanks for asking. I had so much fun tonight. I was struck by inspiration, not lightning, earlier when I had a neat sound and thought...that delay goes on too long, so I dialed it back and I got this doubling of the notes at about .2 secs (I'm guessing). I was running it through the Big Muff (fuzz pedal) and had forgotten to turn off the light chorus pedal, and I got this really fun sound. I wondered what this would sound like if I bounced around on a wah pedal with it, and it was pretty wild for a minute there. I did find something sort of cool just by being lazy, that you get this ethereal midrange tone if you just leave the wah pedal on but walk away from it when it's at mid-sweep. The guitar sounds...farther away. I don't know if that makes sense. When I added yet another pedal, a Digitech Whammy set to octave, it sounds like you're shooting a crossbow bolt through a dog, so I gave up on that pretty quick.

I got a letter from Leonard Pitts today. He thought I made too much out of his comment that there are no atheists in foxholes in a recent article on Bobby Jindal (I wrote a letter) and then suggested that it there was some literal truth to the phrase ("there are few atheists in foxholes," he thought he might write), so it was a mixed message. Mostly it was my fault for taking him seriously, he seemed to think, which is odd for someone who I presume would like to be taken seriously.

I'm going to be on the radio later this week (yay) sharing my expertise on conspiracy theories. I got a list of questions from the person who'll be interviewing me. One of them was "Are there any conspiracy theorists who have been right?" I can't think of one. Not on purpose. Not by following evidence. I mean, if you follow evidence, you become a journalist or a historian. It's like if your alternative medicine is shown to actually do something, then, by definition, it becomes actual medicine. But if you can think of a counterexample, let me know.

HJ