Someone Is Wrong (…On The Internet)

I am still in the process of introducing myself; with any luck, our new server will roar into action at any moment and make it easier for readers to zip through my pages here, but in the meanwhile, for the six of you who manage to get through, another from the old digs. It’s friday, which is XKCD day (along with monday and wednesday, of course); I have occasionally used XKCD as a jumping-off point for a verse. This one, for instance.
(to be read aloud, with increasing speed and spittle-flecks)

Someone Is Wrong
…On The Internet,
And I won’t get to sleep for a while,
Cos I’ll stay up and fight if it takes me all night
When I know I am right and my coffee is strong
Because Someone Is Wrong!
…On The Internet
And the cases they cite are all lame;
I don’t mean to be picky, but hell, it’s not tricky,
Just google or wiki, you’ll see before long
Because Someone Is Wrong!
…On The Internet
And I’m not going to idly sit by!
What he says is a crock! So I’ll teach, tease, or mock
Till my internal clock thinks I live in Hong Kong
Because Someone Is Wrong!
…On The Internet
On a topic of interest to me,
And the rancor’s increased; I’m becoming a beast
And that glow in the East is becoming quite strong
Because Someone Is Wrong!
…On The Internet
Which I’ve stayed up the whole night to say
But his head is cement, and I’ve made not a dent
And one hundred percent of the gathering throng
Says that Someone Is Wrong!
…On The Internet
But it looks like they’re siding with him.
They are here not to cheer for the points I’ve made clear
On this fight I’ve used sheer force of will to prolong
Because Someone Is Wrong!
…On The Internet
It’s beginning to look like it’s me.
I can hardly admit that my logic is shit
But it doesn’t quite fit, ‘less I twist it a bit,
So defeated I sit, at the end of my wit…
Since time will permit, I will land one more hit:
Declare victory, quit, let that be my swan song,
Because Someone Is Wrong!
…On The Internet
Me.
image source XKCD, as if I had to tell you

The Sanctity of Marriage (Warren Jeffs Edition)

“If two men can wed, why not three men, or four,
Or a dog, or a sheep, or a pigeon?
The only thing keeping the evil from creeping
Is the holy restraint of religion!”

But casting about for examples, I find
A surprising result in my search—
In polygamy cases, and doggy embraces
What force was behind them? A church!

The news today has polygamist (and polygamist church leader) Warren Jeffs convicted on child sexual assault charges. He could spend the rest of his life behind bars. His defense, such as it was, claimed that this was not sexual assault on a 12 year old girl, but rather church-approved holy matrimony (and as the leader of the church, he should know!).

I have previously written about a marriage between man and dog. In this case, the wedding took place at a Hindu temple.

The “defenders of marriage” often tell us that marriage is religious, not civil, and that this religious aspect is what keeps the barbarians at the gate. If it were not for the church, if we can let men marry men, and women marry women, then the door is open for polygamy, for cross-species marriage, for any manner of misconduct.

But, see, that door is open. It’s just a door to a different church. If you don’t like it, maybe it would be best to recognize marriage as the civil contract it is, independent of interference from any church.

A Call To Prayer (Not You, Pal)

On August 6, the nation will come together at Reliant Stadium in Houston, Texas for a solemn gathering of prayer and fasting and faith.

Now, I know everything’s bigger in Texas, but that has got to be one hell of a stadium if the entire nation is going to come together there. Is this gonna be another one of those Noah miracles? How is “the nation” going to fit into the Astrodome? (Source: The Response. Seriously, take a look. People who know how to use the internet are planning on fasting and praying to save the country.)

We must gather Real Americans—
We’re putting out the call—
It’s time to come to Texas,
Come to Houston, one and all!
It’s the chance to save our nation;
It’s the righteous thing to do

Just a minute, buster—who invited you?

In this time of moral crisis
We must pray in Jesus’ name
And it wouldn’t do to gather
With the ones we’re going to blame
We will gather in humility
In just a couple days

But I don’t intend on welcoming the gays.

We will offer our repentance,
Asking God to intervene
In the greatest moral crisis
That our country’s ever seen
We will humbly bow before Him,
Those who answer when we call

But let’s not include the atheists at all.

We need answers to our problems,
And who would better know
Than an ancient Jewish prophet
From two thousand years ago?
There is wisdom in the Bible
And it’s wisdom we can use

But I don’t expect to see a lot of Jews.

It’s a prayer to save the nation
It’s a prayer for all of us
Only fifteen bucks for parking
There’s a place to put your bus
Come and join in prayer with us
At the Reliant Astrodome

But you Muslims maybe better stay at home.

Though we’re “non-denominational”
We’re Christian and we’re proud
You might even see a Catholic
Or a Mormon in the crowd
Evangelicals a-plenty
Other groups in small amounts

In other words, it’s everyone who counts

Once we winnow out the heathens,
The apostates, and the wrong
And we keep it to the people
Who we know will get along
We’ll have elbow-room aplenty
At the new Reliant Park

Maybe this is how they did it with the Ark.

Introspection

I have no eyes to look behind
And view my brain, much less my mind;
I cannot know your thoughts, and you
Are blind to what I’m thinking, too.
These are the facts; we can’t deny
We have no working “inner eye”
Nor any form of ESP;
Your thoughts cannot be seen by me.

The claim—that we can know ourselves—
Is countered by the miles of shelves
Of self-help books. Our knowledge hides
From where we’re told that it resides!
If we could simply take a look
Inside our minds, why need a book?
We’d never ask “How do I feel?
Could this be love? Could it be real?”

If God or Science offered me
Some cranial transparency
So you could see my every thought—
The change of mind; the urge I fought,
The censored comment never spoken,
Secret kept and promise broken—
What fabled treasures! Wondrous finds,
If we could read each other’s minds!

But we cannot. Make no mistake,
Our skulls and minds are both opaque
We do, instead, what we can do;
We read the things in public view
We see the song, the poem, the kiss;
Infer from these that love is this.
In turn, each element we find
We sum, and call the total “mind”.

If I could see inside my head,
(A place where angels fear to tread)
And see how thinking really works,
The jumble of selected quirks
And if (what wonders “if” can do!)
I saw inside your thinking too
I think that I should never see
What now makes up philosophy.

This post was originally a comment in an ongoing thread about memes. The fish, a macropinna microstoma, would be the perfect antithesis of the metaphorical cuttlefish. Cuttlefish obscure their thoughts in ink, but macropinna has a transparent cranium. Utterly open; I’ve known people like that. Except that, no. You’d think you can read her face like a book, but you’re really just reading that book by its cover, and you know what they say about that. We can’t see what a macropinna is thinking. But we can see what it is doing, which is all we need.

Botany Is Destiny

From the old blog–only had to change one sentence to apply it to today–thanks to PZ’s Botanical Wednesday.

Sigmund Freud (in)famously opined that “anatomy is destiny”, that (to oversimplify greatly) one’s personality and one’s potential were, to a large part, determined by what equipment one possessed between one’s legs. Penis envy (he has one, and I don’t!), castration anxiety (she doesn’t have one, maybe they’ll cut mine off, too!), and other Freudian concepts stem directly from whether you are an innie or an outie (so to speak).

The phrase has evolved a bit, and now is also seen as “biology is destiny”, with somewhat fewer genital-related shades of meaning, but the earlier meaning is sometimes (often? I have not done a thorough review, so cannot say) lurking just under the surface. Whether our reasons are Freudian or Darwinian, there seems to be enough interest in that one set of complementary organs to support several industries… and the continuation of life as we know it.

We have long known that the brain includes multiple areas involved in face-detection; I begin to wonder if the entire rest of the brain might not be involved in genital-detection. We see them everywhere.

Take plants. I have a cousin, an artist, who (decades ago) exhibited a number of paintings of plants, and of close-ups of parts of plants. It probably won’t surprise you to know that a split-open peach pit, in the proper perspective, will make the vast majority of a family gathering blush. It looks quite like the anatomical wall chart I once saw at an OB-GYN’s office. Robert Heinlein’s “Notebooks of Lazarus Long” includes a phrase that puzzled me when I first read it: “Have you noticed how much they look like orchids? Lovely!” And today, as often, PZ Myers’ “Wednesday Botanical” post celebrates the carnal aspect of vegetation (or perhaps that is all in my perception).

Oh, underused powers
Of beautiful flowers;
They tantalize, tempt, and entice,
Whether insect or human,
When flowers are bloomin’
There’s something that makes us look twice.

The curves I adore, kids,
I oft find in orchids
(Such flowers are dear to our hearts)
It’s not quite the same in
A pistil or stamen
But sometimes, it seems, parts is parts.

In just the right lighting
It’s rather exciting
When beautiful form follows function
In plant pollination
Or *our* fornication
When parts can perform in conjunction

That such an attraction
Creates a reaction
Is fact that a blind man could see
You might think me crazy–
I’m off to find Daisy
To ask if she’ll just let me bee.

On Flushing And Brushing

You’ve never really given it thought;
You just don’t do it, and really, you ought;
I blame your parents. You just weren’t taught
To close the lid when you flush.

But think—enclosed in a tiny room,
Each flush creates a fecal plume
Which bathes the place in shit perfume
While you might floss and brush.

To leave the toilet open wide
While stirring up what’s there inside
Creates a sort of toxic tide
And everything gets hit

So, please oh please, I think it best
To close the lid and keep it pressed
And never hear the words expressed
“My toothbrush tastes like shit.”

Yes, this was written for a particular person. No, I won’t really be able to show it to that particular person. SO… I need your help. Print it out and pin it up next to every toilet in the world. Just in case. And I’m not making the fecal plume phenomenon up.