I get more weird emails

Though these formspring.me questions are much more important, so I’ll actually answer them:

How do you stop a bear ( grizzly) from eating a baby? Need an answer asap.

Obviously this bear is an atheist. Your only hope is to offer it something it wants even more, like definitive proof that God does not exist. Good luck.

I suspect my coworker is a bear. As someone who studies biology, how can I tell for sure? She is always playfully caressing me and leaving large gashes. She invited me over for fish and a movie. My parents would never approve of a bear daughter-in-law.

My friend Spelios offers his expert bear advice: “Paint your front lawn like an endzone. If they can’t enter it, they are likely a Bear.”

How do you get a bear to quit calling you after you sleep with it to stop it from eating a baby? I’m afraid simply ignoring her calls could lead to a mauling. Follow up biology type question, can a human and bear have a child together?

My friend Mark offers his expert bear insights: “Apologize and tell the bear that you prefer twinks.”

As for having a child together, I’m afraid it’s true. How else do you think we get talking bears like Yogi, Fozzi, and Ditka?

This is post 31 of 49 of Blogathon. Pledge a donation to the Secular Student Alliance here.

I get weird email

Well, technically they’re formspring.me questions. But they’re still bizarre:

Do you feel the urge to post a picture of yourself every time you ovulate?

What is your mean and standard deviation of the number of days between ovulation?

Did you start to ovulate on June 17? The picture of yourself online induce lots of signals in my ovulation-detection Bayesian neural net. Please let me know if you do because I’d like to know whether to reward or punish my neural net.

…I think this guy’s neural net needs to be punished for not picking up on what questions are socially acceptable.

Oh wait, it’s the internet. Social norms, lulz.

This is post 29 of 49 of Blogathon. Pledge a donation to the Secular Student Alliance here.

New art contest: Celestial soul portraits

My sister-in-law Erin has linked me to what must be the most fabulous thing to ever grace the internet: Celestial Soul Portraits! An artist will do a “magical” portrait of you by taking “normal” photos that represent “the real you,” getting “your unique essence,” and “transforming” it into a Celestial Soul Portrait (his use of quotes, not mine). …For a small price of $150. But don’t let that bother you, look how fabulous they are!

and
I’m dying. They’re so horrible they’re awesome. It’s like Lisa Frank got high on shrooms and discovered Photoshop. I love it.

Your challenge: Make me your own Celestial Soul Portrait! Do a self portrait, do one of a celebrity, do one of me – I don’t care. The most creative/lol-tastic/well-done one will win a doodle from me.

The only rule is that you should link to both the before and after photo for the full effect. Oh, and from what I’ve seen so far, I think “your unique essence” has to somehow include rainbows. Use caution when “transforming” flamboyant gays – their portraits may result in blindness and/or diabetes.

This is post 23 of 49 of Blogathon. Pledge a donation to the Secular Student Alliance here.

Just in case you haven’t rage punched your screen yet today

…here you go. Transcript:

“When I decided to homeschool my six year old son, I told him we were going to do “Dinosaur Week”. Which turned into “Dinosaur Month”… at the least! We watched “Walking With Dinosaurs” and a lot of other documentaries. He’s a pretty smart kid, too, so even he ended up saying “Ok. Scientists say that God isn’t real. They say earth is a kajillion years old. They say that people and dinosaurs weren’t alive at the same time and that a lot of dinosaurs could have died from a big flood, but that The Flood didn’t happen. WHAT IS WRONG WITH THESE PEOPLE?!”. He gets really upset about people not believing in God – as in he doesn’t want them to go to hell and he can’t believe people can ignore God all around us. Every time we watch one of those dinosaur things, he gives a big, overly-dramatic sigh whenever they start talking about “millions of years” or evolution.

One that really cracked him up was where they theorize about reptiles evolving into humanoid creatures. Good grief! And they teach most of this stuff as FACT in schools!!!! I can’t believe it. Neither can a six year old. So WHY is it so accepted?!!?

I teach him what makes SENSE. NOT what science textbooks say. I also teach my kids to question what they are taught – especially what they learn in school. It’s really not fun at all having a bunch of junior scientists in the house when 99% of science seems to be atheistic.”

*brain explodes*

Yes, because if something doesn’t make sense to a 6 year old, it’s obviously wrong. That’s also how we’ve disproved gravity and economic policy and algebra. Ironclad logic.

…I …I’m not even going to bother refuting everything Random Internet Creationist Parent has to say. It’s really not going to accomplish anything other than make me weep for humanity. Seriously, it kills me that little kids are being brainwashed like this. Is he one day going to wise up, and then have to deal with the crushing social stigma of leaving your family’s religion? Will he become trapped in this mindless acceptance of unthinking religious dogma and never have the skills to do anything more than flip burgers? Or even more terrifying, will he go on to be your child’s biology teacher?

Auuugghhabbbbllllhhh. Should have saved this post for night so I could relabel it as a scary ghost story.

And yes, it was painful for me to type those periods outside of the quotes.

This is post 20 of 49 of Blogathon. Pledge a donation to the Secular Student Alliance here.

Apparently dancing = rip my clothes off!

I have no idea how this story eluded me for so long, since it’s the type of thing I generally get ten million emails about. A woman is suing Girls Gone Wild for using footage of her shirt being pulled off against her will in one of their videos…and lost the case:

But Patrick O’Brien, the jury foreman, told a reporter later that an 11-member majority decided that Doe had in effect consented by being in the bar and dancing for the photographer. In a trial such as this one, agreement by nine of 12 jurors is enough for a verdict.

“Through her actions, she gave implied consent,” O’Brien said. “She was really playing to the camera. She knew what she was doing.”

Told of that reasoning, the tearful woman said, “I was having fun until my top was pulled off. And now this thing is out there for the world to see forever.”

[…] Stephen Evans of St. Louis, her lawyer, argued Thursday that Doe never gave consent — and even could be heard in original footage saying “no” when asked to show her breasts shortly before another woman suddenly pulled Doe’s top down. Evans said the company usually gets women to sign consent forms or give verbal consent with cameras rolling.

Yes, “she was totally asking for it” was successfully used as an excuse in a court of law. What. The. Hell. Since when has dancing been consent to rip clothes off a woman? While she’s saying “no”?! It doesn’t matter how flirty she was being or how sexy she was dressed – that is not consent for what GGW has done.

This is the same bullshit argument people use to defend rape, and now a court has actually accepted it. For the sake of women across the country, I hope they try to overturn this ruling. The last thing we need is people getting off for sexual assault or rape because the woman was showing cleavage at the time of the crime.

This is post 14 of 49 of Blogathon. Pledge a donation to the Secular Student Alliance here.

I should not be allowed to drive bloggers

I’m back from the Secular Student Alliance conference! I apologize again for the dearth of blog posts. I was itching to blog the whole time, but I didn’t have the time or the internet access. Lucky for you that in just a couple days, I’ll be pooping out 49 blog posts in a single day! Hopefully that will more than make up for my absence. But since I made the mistake of checking my email before flopping into bed, here’s one funny story you get from the trip.

I have realized that I should not drive bloggers.

Not because I hate bloggers or I’m a horrible driver or something. God just hates atheist bloggers in transit, apparently. When I had to pick up PZ from the airport, his flight arrived horribly late and I felt like I was going to kill both of us speeding off to our event. When I had to drive Greta Christina to Chicago, it was during a nasty blizzard, where we passed many cars in ditches.

And now I had a driving adventure with Hemant.

Hemant was nice enough to pick up me and my friend Mark on his way to Columbus, OH since we’re fairly close to him. Half way into the six hour drive we decided to switch so he could nap as a passenger, instead of behind the wheel. He pulls over and we trade places.

Me: Man, your side of the car is really hot.
Hemant: Huh, I was just going to say the same thing about your side.

A couple minutes go by and we realize the air conditioning magically broke right when we pulled over. Not the end of the world, but definitely unpleasant since it was in the 90s and humid. Thankfully we were all sweating like crazy, so I didn’t have to worry about my individual stinkiness.

I drive for a bit more. Hemant’s already sleeping.

Mark: Do you smell smoke?
Me: …Yeah.

In retrospect this should have been a red flag, but it smelled so similar to cigarettes we thought we were just driving by a particularly stinky area. Eventually it goes away, and I figure I’ll start to be worried if I see flames shoot out from under the hood.

We’re all dying from the heat, but the zoo is in sight. We’re just stuck waiting to turn at the light, and then we’re in the parking lot. Except there’s just one problem.

Me: Um, Hemant, nothing happens when I press the gas pedal.
Everyone: [insert explitives of your choice here]

Eventually after much restarting, the car decides to live again. I make it to the parking lot, trying not to ever come to a full stop. This was especially interesting when I needed to pay for parking and I’m trying to exchange money without coming to a full stop. We decide to just park the car, go to the zoo with the rest of the group, and deal with it later.

Dealing with it later = Realizing the car doesn’t start at all.

Thankfully my friend Mike was there with his own car and called AAA for us. So we spent the rest of the afternoon following a tow truck and scheming how we could possibly get back to Chicago without Hemant’s car. Eventually we found out his car could be fixed, and we were able to get back to Chicagoland in one piece.

Unfortunately, the same cannot be said about Hemant’s wallet.

I’m starting to think this is compelling evidence for the existence of a God who hates atheist bloggers – not enough to strike them down, but just enough to annoy them with horrible driving experiences. Hopefully I never have to drive Richard Dawkins around – I can’t imagine what major catastrophe would happen then.

lol modern art

Yesterday I went to the Art Institute of Chicago with my parents, aunt, and uncle. I love the Art Institute. Between many art class field trips and my mom being an art teacher, I’ve been there so many times that I no longer need a map to navigate it. Definitely in the double digits. But they had built a whole new modern art wing since the last time I visited, so I was excited to check that out.

Oh boy.

Now, I probably have more of an appreciation for modern art than your average person. Up until my senior year of high school, I thought I was going to be an artist, not a scientist. I’ve taken many advanced classes, won art awards, yadda yadda. There is plenty of modern art I really enjoy, including some crazy abstract/weird/symbolic stuff.

But man, I just don’t get some modern art. Seriously, what the hell?That is an old oversized car mat someone bent and pinned. And it is now hanging in the Art Institute of Chicago. WTF. And this wasn’t the weirdest stuff. There was a black canvas, a pile of rocks, a painting of a date, a video of an electric guitar being drug through grass…

I’m sorry, but just because you were the first person to think to do something doesn’t make it good art. Nor does writing up some flowery bullshit post-hoc explanation of what deep symbolism your piece has. Gah, artist pet peeve.

Some of the stuff there looked comparable or even worse than stuff I did as a toddler. For example, The First Part of the Return from Parnassus by Cy Twombly:

“Cy Twombly’s famously inimitable art is tensely balanced between expressively abstract and suggestively pictorial impulses. His work originated under the auspices of Abstract Expressionism in the late 1940s and early 1950s and advanced uniquely along lines afforded by its freedoms. Twombly’s entire enterprise is characterized by unruly marks—stammering, energetic, and raw—that merge drawing, painting, writing, and symbolic glyphs. Scrawled, overwritten, erased, or willfully misspelled, words cite people, places, events, and stories nominally derived from Greco-Roman culture and history, especially literature, poetry, and myth.”

…And here’s the watercolor hanging in my bathroom that I did at age 3:Let’s have a contest.

Write the best summary you can of my piece that would make it worthy of an art museum. “Best” can either be most humorous, most deep, most similar to the BS descriptions we’re used to hearing. This is art, I’m not going to make strict rules!

The one I like the most will get a quick sketch by me of something of their choice. I’ll post my favorites in a couple of days.

Kill, sleep with, or marry

In honor of the totally awesome slumber parties Hemant, Jamie, and I have probably been having at TAM8, let’s all get in touch with our inner 13 year old girls and play an old stupid game: Kill, sleep with, or marry.

I’m sure there are alternative rules out there, but this is the version I learned when I was but I young lass grossed out by the idea that I had to pick someone to sleep with. You get a list of three people – usually celebrities, sometimes friends (if the goal was to figure out who had a crush on who). You must decide which of those people you rather kill, rather sleep with, and rather marry.

Those are the only rules. So yes, they’re open to interpretation. You magically don’t have to worry about pregnancy or STDs when you sleep with someone. Your marriage can be sexless, but generally implies living together. And killing…well, it can be as humane as you want (or not).

I’ll get you guys started with a couple of trios that fit in with my blog’s theme, but feel free to suggest more in the comments:

Three of the Horsemen: Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris

A Painful Decision: Ken Ham, Kent Hovind, Ray Comfort

The Golden Trio: Harry Potter, Ron Weasley, Hermione Granger

I guess that wasn’t fair to my readers who are predominantly attracted to women. Here, one more:

The Crazy, It Burns: Ann Coulter, Michele Bachmann, Sarah Palin (I’m so mean)

I am such a REBEL, YEAAAAHHH!

I get crazy email sometimes, but this person seemed to have my best interests at heart. How about I share it with you guys, and see what you all think?

My name is Eric [redacted] and I have read much on what you have had to say on various subjects.

Religion
prochoice/prolife
Gay rights

You have a rebelious nature. You are about the same age as my children, and I see a lot of immaturity in you.
You enjoy attacking people to much.
You demand your right to be heard and then are rude to those who disagree with you.

All of the various subjects that you believe so strongly in are all tied together under one real subject. Your desire to buck the system.

Most people do believe in God…. you do not and you consider anyone who does an uneducated backwards fool.

You believe in Gay rights….. Yet HIV/AIDS has shown that nature itself has cursed this life style.

You would fight for the right of a serial killer to be saved from the electric chair and later that day fight for a woman to have the right to kill an innocent unborn child.

I would ask a feminist this: If women are intelligent why is abortion even needed? Today we have so many different forms of birth control abortion should no longer even be needed.

Could it simply be that women are not using birth control and then saying they do not want children? If you want men to take the responsibility can a woman not say ” not until you put that condom on”>??????

Maybe what your belief system is really all about is being able to do whatever you want anytime you want with anyone you want and their being no consequences to any of your actions….

We use to call people that thought like that children….. maybe it’s time to grow up

My new email address is: [redacted]

I wish you good luck

You know, I feel it’s only fair to respond to people with the level of respect that their thoughtful arguments have earned. Which is why, Eric, I feel compelled to say this:

Lolololololololol.

Hey, if there’s anything maturity has taught me, it’s to not waste my time responding to the insane judgemental ramblings of random internet strangers. Each sentence he wrote could get it’s own novel-length rebuttal, but what does it matter if it’s flying in one ear and out the other? The only reason I’m posting this is that I think it’s unfair to keep all this merriment to myself. Or so you could facepalm at the stupidity and develop your own counterarguments. Whatever floats your boat.

Though I do have to point out one thing: If I really wanted to rebel against my parents, I would have become a fundamentalist Christian Republican Sarah-Palin loving housewife. I think just typing that made my dad feel a disturbance in the Force.

Touchdown Jesus is on fire!

A lot of storms have been moving through the Midwest today, and apparently the infamous Touchdown Jesus in Ohio hasn’t been spared God’s wrath.

The “King of Kings” statue in Monroe was struck by lightning on Monday and engulfed in flames, according to various reports. The statue of Jesus in Monroe, dubbed the King of Kings by the Solid Rock Church where it resides, was struck by lightning during the severe storms on Monday.

It was engulfed in flames.

Fire crews are on the scene now, and are attempting to put out the fire. The is made out of wood and Styrofoam, covered over a steel framework anchored in concrete. This is covered with a fiberglass mat and resin exterior. It is 62 feet high and weighs 16,000 pounds.

Part of me feels bad – I mean, I wouldn’t want my $500,000 property to be destroyed. On the other hand, there’s a certain amount of schadenfreude when a giant Jesus gets struck by lightning and destroyed. I mean, how many times have atheists suggested that God strike them with lightning if he was real, but he’s never delivered? I guess he’s annoyed by gaudy Christian art more than godless heathens.

…That being said, the first person to find a photo wins a million internet points. EDIT: Found!

(Hat tip to Mike)