Why I Love Local News
Thursday, December 15th, 2005 ”Mysterious pink spots” on area lawns turn out to be bird poop
. W/ pic of bare hand holding newly demystified droppings.
”Mysterious pink spots” on area lawns turn out to be bird poop
. W/ pic of bare hand holding newly demystified droppings.
Penguins At German Zoo Stay Gay
.
If a tornado ever hits this zoo, we know what the evangelicals will blame it on.
… he said, with a sarcastic sneer.
I do love science, but science reporting sometimes drives me to drink until I can’t resist the urge strip naked, cover myself in maple syrup and start hurling profanity and small children at the Internet.
For instance, have you ever wondered why you sometimes jerk awake suddenly just as you’re about to drift off to sleep? I know I have. When I saw the lead to this story
, I was compelled to read it, because it sounded like someone had come up with an explanation.
Nope. Not so much.
As it turns out, doctors and scientists are still absolutley clueless about the cause of this involuntary nocturnal spasm. The good news is, they’ve finally managed to name it. The phenomenon is now called “Sleep Start.” Which is good, because “Demons Possess Me When I Sleep” was factually and spiritually inaccurate, as well as a mouthful to say. Now that “Sleep Start” has standard nomenclature, I can go back to using the possession bit as the basis of an insanity plea, instead of wasting it on frivolous things like twitching myself out of bed once in awhile.
CNN.com apparently just noticed that the author of The Secret is getting rich by preying on the fears and desires of the desperate, credulous masses. Seriously, CNN? I was griping about this back in March, and even then it wasn’t particularly breaking news. How are you just getting around to this now?
I pulled this CNN.com screenshot at about 3:45 p.m. on Sunday 28 July:
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:
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.
Week ending October 18th, 2008.
I haven’t been following too much news this week, and I’m a day late, but what can you do?
(- - -) to Me, Waldorf van Buren, for not keeping up with the news or even caring enough about current events. Bad Waldorf, BAD! (Bad Waldorf was a punk pop band out of the Tulsa punk scene in 1987).
(+) To Tina Fey and Alec Baldwin for last night’s SNL. The rest was crap, but I enjoyed Fey.
(-) To the shenanigans going on surrounding ACORN. Quit it, disgruntled Republicans. You want a controversy: Diebold, the economy, privatization of the military, the travesty of undeclared wars, do you need more? It is not voter fraud to submit a false name on a registration, it is voter fraud to show up at the poll showing identification the is not an accurate representation. If you sign Waldorf Van Buren on a registration, it is not fraud, but if you show up registered as Waldorf Van Buren, have an ID stating you are Waldorf Van Buren, but are not, in fact, Waldorf Van Buren, guess what - you’ve just committed voter fraud. Why don’t you focus on issues instead of made-up controversies? I guess you realize you can’t win this one with voter fraud so you may as well create a shitstorm where there is none. Smells like Rove to me.
(- - -) To the American movie going public. Beverly Hills Chihuahua? Seriously?
(+ +) To the Mormon Church, believe it or not. Well, not the church itself, which gets seventeen minuses, but to a stalwart group of followers protesting their church’s opposition of gay marriage. The Mormons have taken the stance that marriage is a sacred union between one man and multiple women.
(EVEN) To me. I didn’t watch the “debate” this week. I don’t like reruns so early in the Fall TV schedule.
Crap, I’ve been in rehearsals all week, so I haven’t been following as much as I should. I will admit to some election fatigue. I think Pfizer makes a pill for that.