Recruiting the local unbelievers

It’s never too early to start advertising: Skatje is starting up a new campus organization next fall, with another student, Collin Tierney, as co-chair. The group is called the Campus Atheists, Skeptics, and Humanists – Morris Chapter, and if you’re an interested UMM student, they’d like you to join the facebook group at that link. The plan is to start the fall term with a respectable number of potential members, have weekly meetings, and develop a plan for education and outreach and just plain having fun.

I think Skatje and Collin are planning to have open meetings, so you don’t even have to be a student to show up.

Hooray! We’re getting less money!

Academia is a strange little world—we’re happy about this news!

The biggest winners from the University of Minnesota Board of Regents meeting? The 1,900 students at the Morris campus who saw their tuition go down by almost $1,000.

We’re an even better bargain than before. Now we just need to get more students to take advantage of us…so enroll at the University of Minnesota Morris! Send your kids here!

Property values in St Paul just plummeted

In an unfortunate twist of fate for the former home of the Science Museum of Minnesota, the Church of Scientology is moving in.

The Church of Scientology has purchased the former Science Museum of Minnesota building in downtown St. Paul

Eric Rapp, a Welsh Cos. broker who marketed the space, said the church plans a major renovation of the building that once housed exhibits and has since been the home of the failed Minnesota Business Academy.

Rapp wouldn’t disclose the sale price of the 80,000-square-foot west building of the former museum complex. The sale closed Friday. A number of financial institutions had come to own the building, which was on the market since May 2006, he said.

It’s depressing, but the new building the Science Museum of Minnesota is in is wonderful, and you all ought to visit it. Skip the scientologists, though.

Sunday in the Park

The first of three potluck picnics sponsored by one of our regional godless groups is being held Sunday, 10 June, at noon, at Columbia Park—Skatje, my wife Mary, and I are planning on being there. Come on out and join the freethought community in the Twin Cities area!

By the way, it’s weird how we’ve got all of these infidel organizations here — the Campus Atheists, Skeptics, and Humanists at the University of Minnesota, the Humanists of Minnesota, the Minnesota Atheists, and the Atheists for Human Rights (who in this case aren’t participating in the picnics). The Twin Cities has an embarrassment of riches, while the rural parts of the state are just embarrassingly pious. We have a few students who are going to try and start up a CASH chapter here in Morris next year, and we’ll see how well that goes—if there are any other atheist groups in outstate Minnesota, let me know…and if there are any lonely, isolated atheists scattered here and there (and I know there are), let me know that, too. We should try to build a wider community.

Ted Storck is an inconsiderate, arrogant jerkwad

Hey, I’ve got this wonderful forum that’s read around the world, so I’m going to use it to unload on one of our local idiots, Ted Storck. Storck is one of those insufferable self-important Christians who makes the whole religion look like a lobotomy ward. His wonderful contribution to the cultural life of Morris is that he donated a set of ghastly electronic chimes to the nearby cemetery. And he writes letters to the Morris Sun Tribune.

This Memorial Day weekend, the chimes will play more hymns and patriotic songs at the cemeteries here in Morris.

We hope the few who dislike chimes will tolerate them as we honor the brave men and women who gave their lives to protect this great country.

Ted Storck

U.S. Navy, retired

Morris

Let me count the ways in which Ted Storck is an obnoxious jerk.

  1. Pushing a button to play amplified, sterile hymns over a cemetery honors our dead about as much as slapping a magnetic yellow “I support the troops” ribbon on a hearse.

  2. He knows that there are residents here who find the chimes loud and annoying, yet he announces that he’s going to fire those suckers up anyway.

  3. This cemetery is next door to the university, six blocks from the center of our town, and only a block away from my house. It’s well-positioned to annoy a large number of people.

  4. Ted Storck lives nowhere near the chimes.

  5. He didn’t just start ’em up for Memorial Day weekend. They’re playing this weekend, too. He’s probably hoping to drive us mad all summer long.

  6. And the major reason Ted Storck is a contemptible hypocrite and curse on our community: they’re playing these damned hymns and patriotic songs EVERY FIFTEEN MINUTES. ALL DAY LONG. LOUDLY.

I also live two blocks away from the Catholic church in town. They ring their bells — real bells — a couple of times a day on Sunday, I presume at the start of Mass or something. That’s no problem. It’s even a pleasant sound, and I rather like hearing it—it’s a classic reminder of small town America.

But I want you to imagine this. Even if you are a devoutly religious person who thinks Christianity is the essence of all that is good and true and loving about humanity, try to imagine spending a quiet weekend at home with your family, out on the deck with the barbecue or relaxing in the easy chair with a good book, and every 15 minutes a set of cheesy chimes blares out “Onward, Christian Soldiers” or “Stars and Stripes Forever”. Now imagine being atheist or Jewish or anything other than a blithering Christian sheep and getting slammed with the same noise incessantly.

Ted Storck’s legacy to our community is that he is going to have conditioned lots of us to puke on your shoes if we hear you humming “Rock of Ages.” Thank you, Christianity, for training your members so well to be insensitive, inconsiderate, pushy, arrogant dimbulbs. And thank you, Ted Storck, for personifying one reason why I despise your religion. I still wish you’d shut those damned things off.

I’ll be at City Hall tomorrow to complain, not that I have much expectation that anyone there will do anything.

Hey, Stevens County people!

What are you doing this evening? Two big events:

  • Pirates of the Caribbean 3 is opening at the Morris Theater tonight at 8! I was thinking of going, but Skatje works there, and she’s got the inside scoop: people are already lining up. In Morris. I might wait a few days for the mob to fade away.

  • If PotC3 is too crowded, there’s always Drinking Liberally—7:00pm at Old #1.

Who says Morris isn’t a happening place?