“I’m praying for you,” or “you and your family are in my prayers.” They’ve become the all-too familiar refrain of people who want to do or say something meaningful to someone in crisis, but don’t have the desire or the knowledge to actually do anything.

Admittedly, when one faces a deadly disease (or sees someone close to them go through it), there isn’t much you can actively do to get well. You can follow doctor’s orders, you can try to enjoy life, you can do any number of things to take your mind off of the impact that the disease is having, and will have on the rest of your life. For those who don’t know how to do anything else, there’s prayer.

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Since we’ve brought our new authors on board, you may have noticed some changes in the posts coming through your favorite feed reader. We’re updating more regularly, and the average post length is growing like a rogue Trapper Keeper.

In order to keep the RSS and Livejournal feeds from turning into a screen-killing torrent of word doom, we’re going to switch to syndicating summaries of the entries. You’ll have to click through to the site if you want to read the full-size posts.

Unless there’s a big a uproar, in which case we’ll think of something else.

EDIT: Okay, I lived with it for a few hours, and I can’t stand the arbitrary way the post summaries just cut off in mid-sentence. I’m going back to including the full text in the feed. I am giddy with my minuscule power.

As always, thanks for reading.

EDIT: And for putting up with my indecisiveness. Indecision. Nondecisionariness.

After three months of nervously keeping it secret, I can finally share the biggest thing to happen to my life since I got married. No, I’m not going to drop out of law school to start a dating service for narcoleptic furries. My wife is going to have a baby.

The answer to your first question is February. The due date is sometime in mid-to-late February. If that wasn’t your first question… well, I’ve spent three months anticipating reactions to this announcement, so I’ll try to cover as many of them as I’ve thought of. If I don’t answer your particular question, or if you don’t like my answers, feel free to leave a comment. Or have your own god damn baby. Bonus ultrasound photo if you make it to the end.

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I pulled this CNN.com screenshot at about 3:45 p.m. on Sunday 28 July:

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The same weekend that Iran’s freakazoid religious police are hanging people for dealing drugs, being intoxicated in public, and committing adultery, someone in Tennessee goes to church and starts shooting. The grisly scene in Tennessee — where apparently even the Unitarian woo-woos aren’t safe — is the fourth time in 15 months that a freakazoid Christian went to a house of worship and started blowing people away.

My point, and I do have one, goes thusly: On the one hand, you have the state religion authorizing, no requiring periodic waves of particularly cruel, slow, public executions (i.e., suspension hanging by cranes) for infractions of social norms that civilized people would consider minor. And on the other hand, you have the quasi-state religion, kow-towed to by politicians and spoken of with superstitious reverence by the entertainment industry, that also isn’t safe from murderous fanatics.

The guy in Tennessee went to a Unitarian church because the worshipers weren’t Christian enough. That’s logic for you. They don’t follow Jesus as closely as he does — so he kills them. If that’s not a Christian message for you, I don’t know what is.

Ever seen a headline that reads anything like “Shooting spree at atheists’ gathering shocks community”? I sure haven’t. So in the interest of serious, in-depth research, I googled “atheist shooting spree.” Here’s what I got:

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Here’s another recent headline for good measure: “Israeli parents forget daughter at airport.” The ultra-Orthodox couple — and ultra-Orthodox anything tends to involve keeping the woman at home as a baby factory, even in the States — had multiple bags of duty-free shopping, 18 suitcases, and 5 kids. Guess what got left behind? One of the kids.

[T]he parents were unaware they had boarded the aircraft with only four children instead of five until they were informed by cabin staff after 40 minutes in the air.

Let’s work this backwards: Forty minutes in the air + time spent waiting on the tarmac + boarding the plane and waiting for everyone else to board the plane (did they board early as a party with special needs?) = probably over a full freaking hour that they didn’t notice that one of their kids wasn’t with them! And a 3-year-old, at that! And because it’s that kind of blog, I blame their religion. Any freakazoid belief system that requires you to have so many kids that you forget — or “forget” — to take one of them on vacation with you should just be banned and its practitioners caned. The Yahoo! news URL references the comedy film Home Alone; instead, it should reference something like the documentary Jesus Camp.

I’ve been a video game geek for most of my life. It started in the Seventies with Space Port, a local hangout in the Mall for kids with an excess of time, energy, and quarters. My parents bought a Magnavox Odyssey for family fun. It had FOUR games, and they were all variants on PONG, although they had much catchier names like Tennis, Hockey, Racquetball, and the one I can’t remember.

Because I was an overweight schmuck who thirsted for pixels and eschewed sweat, the Odyssey became the standard for sporting events. When I saw my first tennis match, I was amazed that the players could move toward the net - unbelievable!

After the Odyssey, my parents went with an Atari 2600 instead of the Intellivision system (like the one owned by my friend down the street), and they supplied me with game after game from Atari and Activision. This piqued my interest in game programming, which I tried once or twice on a Commodore 64. This lead to playing bigger and better games, as well as running my own BBS service. I went to college and soon forgot all of that. It wasn’t until I was introduced to Mechwarrior 2’s multi-player options that I got re-hooked into the gaming world.

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Let’s talk about Matthew Lincoln, the 58-year-old Tennessee man who’s suing his former church. After praying to have “a real experience” while worshiping, Mr. Lincoln was so overwhelmed by his faith that he fell down and hit his head. Twelve months and two surgeries later, he’s still experiencing leg and back pain. When the church’s insurance company refused his claim, Mr. Lincoln sued. He’s asking for payment of his medical bills, wages lost when he was unable to work, and pain and suffering, all of which he values at $2.5 million.

Comment on this story has run along two major themes: “He got what he prayed for,” and “He should blame god, not the church.” I figured that Mr. Lincoln surrendered to the will of his chosen deity, so he should rock his injuries Job-style, and accept his suffering as the whim of that deity.

It’s a little like every story ever written about wish-granting genies. You ask for a whole lot of pudding, and a tanker truck carrying a ton of tapioca crashes into your house. You get what you wished for, with a side dish of zero sympathy. I assumed that a court would set Mr. Lincoln on fire before it awarded him any money.

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• The New Humanist Blog does a little investigating, and concludes that the Birmingham, Alabama City Council web-flitering flap was probably caused by a software setting, rather than simple anti-atheist discrimination. (Atheists lumped in with Satan, Baba Yaga and the Boogie Man. Except, you know, real.)
• FactCheck.org explains that the uranium shipped out of Iraq in July is left over from the end of Gulf War I: The Prequel, and had nothing to do with the still-elusive WMDs that the Bush administration invented out of whole cloth in 2003. (FYI, if you’re not reading FactCheck.org, you probably believe something that’s entirely untrue. If you are, you’re aware that being able to lie convincingly is a prerequisite for political office.)
• Wired provides useful links and a poorly cropped photograph to point out that forensic DNA isn’t as perfect as the hype. (Nature just keeps right on building better fools.)
• Some dinky blog seems to think that a lawsuit against a church for a faith-inspired injury isn’t as stupid as it sounds. (I am a filthy self-linker, and I deserve to have a belt sander applied to my genitals.)

Sorry for the double post this morning. I made a stupid mistake that kept the comic image from publishing the first time around. I’m still getting the hang of the webgnomery.