Science nerd alert!
Yes, now YOU can enjoy deadly disease microbes in the privacy of your own home!
From the commonality of the Cold virus or the season delights of the Flu to the exotic pleasures of Rabies, Syphilis, or even that sensational destroyer, Flesh Eating Disease, these pettable petri dish poxes will bring hours of eww! to you and your friends.
And they’re on sale.
Where else? ThinkGeek.
This Christmas, I’m giving someone Hepatitis.
Many of you know that Greg Laden and I are good friends. He has asked me to make an announcement.
I met Greg some years back at a cultural anthropology conference I was attending out of curiosity. He and I hit it off immediately, and became great friends. I loved his stories of life among the Ik, the Mountain People of northern Uganda, and he liked my stories of working with cowboys and mule packers in the mountains of California.
I lost touch with him after he moved to Washington state. The last I heard was that he was doing fieldwork with a physical anthropologist colleague, Gideaon Oliver, studying a tribe of Pacific Northwest Neo-Primitives. Continue reading “Sad News: Greg Laden Departing”
Several speakers at Reason Rally spoke about “coming out,” and the phrase showed up in a couple of the sketchy news stories about it.
Speaking as someone who has “come out” twice, as an atheist and as – well, you know, this other thing I don’t usually talk about very much because it’s just not relevant to my work as an atheist blogger – I’d like to persuade you all to do it.
It can be rough at first, but you will eventually realize it’s one of the best things you’ve ever done. The freedom that comes with it will more than repay the transitory pain that might accompany the initial shock.
I remember my own coming out – the first one – very well. Continue reading “The Joy of Coming Out”
It’s a video sort of day. This is just too fantastically good for every person on Earth not to see. Aasif Mandvi does the deed.
… I just wish your name was anything but “Palin.”
Because the spotlight that shines on you — because of your name — is the same one that shines on two-headed kittens, and Jessica Simpson. The spotlight that says “Oh, look, all you people sitting there with really nothing better to do, and no mind to figure out what you might be doing, here’s something SUUWEEET!!!!”
Bristol Palin is now a blogger.
Yes, THAT Bristol Palin. Continue reading “Oh, Kid, I Wish You The Best …”
It doesn’t get much play in the publicly-available cultural anthropology literature, but there’s an island in the Pacific where an interesting conflict has played out over generations.
The island, which has an untranslatable name – generally rendered in English as “Ryeezahn” – is occupied by two tribes, the Kritsi and the Syenz, which have been at war for generations, a war temporarily restrained in an uneasy peace.
The root of the conflict, as visiting anthropologists have documented, is unequal resource distribution brought on by a drastic inequality in living space. The size of the Syenz territory is more than 20 times that of the Kritsi. Continue reading “A Study in Conflict Between Island Cultures”
If your father has a stick in the closet that he’s used in the past to beat you with, you have to wonder at someone who’d tell you “What are you getting all worked up about? He’s not beating you with it NOW.” Just so with organized religion and what it’s done throughout history. As an atheist, I would rather empty out that closet.
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When a news story says someone “lost” a leg in an accident, I always hold out hope they’ll eventually find it again and be better for the brief separation. Continue reading “Short Stack #12”
Man, the ads we get here at FtB. My understanding is that the service that places these things gets progressively better at targeting them to the reader audience over time. I continue to hope that’s true. If the whole thing works on nothing but keywords, and if atheist bloggers frequently mention worship and God and Jesus – in the making of jokes if nothing else – then readers here will have to grin and bear a LOT of ads that should rightly be targeted at the goddy. We’re like a Jewish site that deals with Holocaust issues getting ads from skinhead clubs because the words “swastika” and “Hitler” come up frequently. Continue reading “Madison Avenue Jesus”
I’m not actually supposed to be writing this.
More than a year ago I signed all sorts of documents demanding strict adherence to the embargo date of the information. But since the embargo date has come and gone, and there has been no public announcement – and especially since the recent news story of the entire Vatican science team being killed in a bus crash in Argentina – I don’t feel that I should honor those agreements.
I suppose there might be some danger in this for me, either legally or via some darker threat – frankly, the bus crash worries me – but maybe that’s all the more reason I should write and post it here. If this post vanishes, or even if I vanish … well, hopefully someone will look into it. But it’s time people knew. Continue reading “An Undropped Shoe”
You have no idea what a fanboy I am when it comes to superhero movies. At 59, I’m often the oldest person in the theater at midnight openers. (Speaking of which, the Spider-Man trailer looks suweeeet! And oh yeah, I’ll be there for the midnight show.)
I went to see the second coming of Ghost Rider last night, on pins and needles and eager for the flaming spectacle.
But … dayyum. Twenty minutes in, I was already thinking about walking out. Departing the theater at the end, I said “That was easily one of the Top Ten worst movies I’ve seen in my entire life.” Continue reading “Ghost Rider … Um … SUCKED”
