The subject of fear came up in the comments on a recent post, one writer lamenting the life-freezing effects of it. Because the writer’s words felt soooo familiar, I both winced and chuckled. Winced because I’ve been there, chuckled because once again I realized that I’m not the only one who feels this sort of thing.
Quoting Richard Nixon, “Let me just say this about that …” Continue reading “Dealing With Fear — Part 1: Everyday Life”
Say someone gave you $30,000, in cash, and the deal was, you had to live on it as long as you could. You couldn’t do any other income-producing work in that time, you just had to live on the 30 grand.
You’d have to pay all your bills on it, provide for all your daily needs. You’d have no additional money coming in, and all your entertainment needs, your health needs, your travel and leisure needs, all would have to come out of that one chunk of money.
How long could you live on it? Continue reading “The 30,000”
The significance of all the rapture rhetoric from Harold Camping isn’t that Camping is … well, probably pretty far gone into senile dementia.
And it isn’t that, even as far gone as he is into senile dementia, he can still sound fairly sane, by Christian standards. Continue reading “The Last, Very Last, End of the World. Seriously. No, Really. This One.”
Ever the optimist, I write letters to people.
It’s been surprising, over the years, the people who have actually answered back. Continue reading “Obama’s Speechwriter … sort of”
Sometime today Blue Collar Atheist will reach 100,000 reader hits. I know other bloggers here will smile indulgently at that number — PZ probably gets that many an HOUR — but to me it’s something special.
From my first post on Aug. 24 — just 55 days ago — I’ve written 133 posts, received 940 comments (Thank you!), and gotten approximately 30 billion bits of spam — mostly about penis enlargement. (I try not to take it personally.)
My best day ever, Sept. 17, I posted “Amish Men Saved From Burning in Hell” and got 7,222 hits.
My worst day (after the formal rollout, anyway) was Oct. 6, with 1,150 hits. I think that might have been the day I posted the Narwhal Song, the Badger Badger Badger animation, and pictures of Bill O’Reilly in a thong.
So far, none of the comments have included the phrases “You suck!” or “I hope you burn in hell!”, and there have been zero death threats, proposals of marriage or offers of gratuitous sex.
I have also, thus far, failed to attract my first Christian troll. But I suppose that’s why the Sweet Baby Jesus made tomorrows.
I lived through the Vietnam Era.
Just a few of the consequences of that war:
It killed 58,220 U.S. soldiers. More than 150,000 were wounded, at least 21,000 were permanently disabled, and 830,000 suffered symptoms of PTSD. In addition, about 50,000 American servicemen deserted, and an estimated 125,000 U.S. citizens of military draft age fled to Canada.
Besides that, about 20 million gallons of Agent Orange and other herbicides were sprayed over Southeast Asia, resulting in more than 4 million human victims of dioxin poisoning, and uncountable numbers of non-human ones. Continue reading “Thank you, Occupy Wall Street”
I hope I’m not the last person on Earth to see THIS.
Oh man, I’m soooo looking forward to the movie.
Since about the second Spider-Man movie, I’ve noticed a sharp uptick in the hits in the superhero genre.
Iron Man was just about the best action movie I think I’ve ever seen, and Captain America was awesomely well done.
Were you a nerd?
I know I was.
From high school on, and for years afterwards, I was odd, bookish, ill-at-ease and clumsy. And I had this sometimes-embarrassingly-loud laugh — meant to be a quiet, easy chuckle, it sometimes seemed to get away from me, ballooning shrilly outward to fill an entire room, turning heads and provoking “looks.”
Ouch. I still wince to think of it.
Interestingly enough, I was not a nerd in elementary school or junior high.
And I think I’ve figured out something of why this was so. Continue reading “Nerd Power”
Reader Boko999 says:
I enjoy the content of your posts but find the way they are broken up extremely annoying and I think breaking them up this way diminishes their impact. I’m not sure if it’s a deal breaker for me yet.
Time always tells 🙂
I was afraid that would happen with some readers. But I was also convinced, going into this, that even more would be turned off by the sometimes-extreme length (at least by blogging standards) of some of the stuff I write.
I am trying to keep readers engaged by breaking things in interesting places, sometimes building in little cliff-hangers, and interleaving the multipart posts with shorter standalone pieces for variety.
There’s a practical human aspect for me in all this, in that writing these things often takes a considerable amount of time. Stuck as I am with the tribulations of partial employment, part of which is scrambling with freelance jobs (and recently, moving), I’m up some nights until 2 or 3 a.m., trying to complete pieces to post here. If I post these longer pieces only after they’re completed, it might be two or three days each time before I have new pieces to post.
I’ve toyed with the idea of stitching multi-part posts together, posting them as additional single narratives after the individual parts are all posted, but I’ve worried that that would be even more annoying and confusing. Suggestions?
The payoff for me in doing this is two things.
One is the opportunity to present what I hope are some new ideas in atheism. I like to think that my quirky metaphorical approach to the subject can give people new ways to think about it, and I really want to increase both the number of atheists and their comfort in thinking about the field’s diverse arguments.
The second payoff is interesting comments. Since most readers don’t comment, I welcome everything, even complaints, from the people who do.
Boko999, I really hope you’ll stay.
But I’d also love to hear from the rest of you. Any thoughts about the multi-part posts, or other aspects of my writing?
(Just FYI, those leaving compliments are welcome to gush shamelessly. There is no limit on the amount of praise I’m prepared to handle.)
I have some dear friends back in Texas, two people I went to high school with. Call them Donna Sue and Billy Ray.
Billy Ray was rodeo people, rowdy and bawdy as hell. More than once I saw him breeze through the front gate of a rodeo arena on a Friday night and 15 minutes later breeze out the back with one of those little poured-into-her-jeans Texas cowgirls, headed for the nearest horse trailer for what Lonesome Dove’s Gus McCrae would call a “poke.”
After Billy Ray and Donna Sue got together, that part of Billy Ray’s wild days ended, but other stuff, equally wild, went on for a bit. Continue reading “I Get Emails”
