HAPPY BIRTHDAY PZ!

Happy birthday to my godless mentor, esteemed FTB comrade, and beloved friend, PZ Myers.

At my old blog, I would throw a virtual birthday party for him every year on this date, and celebrate with a collection of quotes, quips and bon mots that he’d written on his blog over the previous year. When his obsession was strictly cephalopods, it would look like this:

cameo photo of PZ Myers surrounded with purple balloons and floating presents, with a plate of fried calamari and black-colored cocktails in martini glasses.In 2016 I served fried calamari and Barchetta’s Spezia cocktails, made with vodka, caper brine and squid ink, with whole caperberry garnish. (I’ll have to come up with a spider-themed menu… hmmm.)

These days I’m not up for throwing a big bash, not even a virtual one. But I do want to celebrate PZ’s completion of another orbit around our sun. So today, I thought I’d share a quote from PZ that has long inspired me.

The general context of the quote is this. Back at ScienceBlogs in The Year of Our Lard 2009, PZ wrote a scathing, righteous screed about an apparently very terrible book by some Christian apologist named Terry Eagleton. PZ was stuck on a plane for 8 torturous hours with nothing to read but a SkyMall catalog (which, ♥♥♥! cultural anthropology FTW!), and a copy of this Eagleton book someone (evil?) had just given him in New York. He read the fucking thing twice.

As he was wrapping up, he wrote this:

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Happy International Women’s Day! Or, not!

Today, March 8, is International Women’s Day. The day was first professed by the Socialist Party of America in 1909, the idea arising from women’s rights movements in industrializing nations around the turn of the last century. Its purpose is to celebrate the achievements of women throughout history, as well as engage in the ongoing struggle for gender equality.

March is also Women’s History Month. <-That is a website curated by the U.S. Library of Congress that showcases women’s battles and triumphs with interesting and informative stories, audio, video and still images.

If you are a dude and still reading this post: here, have a cookie. (I baked them myself.) That’s for seeing the word “women’s” and not immediately deciding to GTFO.

However, if you are a dude blogger, social media influencer, or a Big Willie with a platform of any kind? [Read more…]