In a previous life, I was…

The Bronze Dog got to be a “pirate chick with panache and a heart of gold”, but my past life analysis isn’t quite as interesting.

Your past life diagnosis:

I don’t know how you feel about it, but you were male in your last earthly incarnation.You were born somewhere in the territory of modern South China around the year 1000. Your profession was that of a builder of roads, bridges and docks.

Your brief psychological profile in your past life:
Revolutionary type. You inspired changes in any sphere – politics, business, religion, housekeeping. You could have been a leader.

The lesson that your last past life brought to your present incarnation:
You are bound to solve problems of pollution of environment, recycling, misuse of raw materials, elimination of radioactivity by all means including psychological methods.

Do you remember now?

Wait…so I was a Chinese laborer with dreams of revolution, and therefore I now have the power to eliminate radioactivity with psychology?

“Dolphins used to look like humans and lived in Atlantis”

While the Weekly World News may be on the verge of extinction (although it still seems to be surviving online), at least Pravda labors on to deliver the truth…

Recent studies of Australian scientists indicate that Atlanteans, the people who lived on a legendary island first mentioned by Plato, may have been the ancestors of dolphins.

Huh. Like we’re supposed to believe a bunch of Australians.

Leviticus 3

A reader sent me this picture full of schadenfreude. Maybe this was the Gay Atheist Church of Malibu?

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In case you are curious, here’s Revelation Chapter 4.

1: After this I looked, and, behold, a door was opened in heaven: and the first voice which I heard was as it were of a trumpet talking with me; which said, Come up hither, and I will shew thee things which must be hereafter.
2: And immediately I was in the spirit: and, behold, a throne was set in heaven, and one sat on the throne.
3: And he that sat was to look upon like a jasper and a sardine stone: and there was a rainbow round about the throne, in sight like unto an emerald.
4: And round about the throne were four and twenty seats: and upon the seats I saw four and twenty elders sitting, clothed in white raiment; and they had on their heads crowns of gold.
5: And out of the throne proceeded lightnings and thunderings and voices: and there were seven lamps of fire burning before the throne, which are the seven Spirits of God.
6: And before the throne there was a sea of glass like unto crystal: and in the midst of the throne, and round about the throne, were four beasts full of eyes before and behind.
7: And the first beast was like a lion, and the second beast like a calf, and the third beast had a face as a man, and the fourth beast was like a flying eagle.
8: And the four beasts had each of them six wings about him; and they were full of eyes within: and they rest not day and night, saying, Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty, which was, and is, and is to come.
9: And when those beasts give glory and honour and thanks to him that sat on the throne, who liveth for ever and ever,
10: The four and twenty elders fall down before him that sat on the throne, and worship him that liveth for ever and ever, and cast their crowns before the throne, saying,
11: Thou art worthy, O Lord, to receive glory and honour and power: for thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure they are and were created.

Why anyone would think that gibbering insanity is worth spending a Sunday morning discussing is a mystery to me … unless maybe it was the Gay Atheist Church of Malibu, and they were discussing how looney one has to be to consider that nonsense to be of importance in your life. Your god is a demented god, Christians.

Get out there and party like it’s MMMMMMX!

Oh, no … we’ve almost missed it! Now we have to make a mad scrabble for birthday hats and noisemakers and cake and ice cream. It’s the big 6010th birthday for planet earth, according to Ed Darrell and Phil Plait and these guys in Austin. Hmmm. Maybe we should at least make a quick trip to the Dairy Queen.

Oh, wait. I don’t believe that crap. Neither do any of the people I linked to above. But some of the wacky people at World Net Daily do.

But the author of the book frequently described as the greatest history book ever written, said the world was created Oct. 23, 4004 B.C. – making it exactly 6,010 today.

In the 1650s, an Anglican bishop named James Ussher published his “Annals of the World,” subtitled, “The Origin of Time, and Continued to the Beginning of the Emperor Vespasian’s Reign and the Total Destruction and Abolition of the Temple and Commonwealth of the Jews.” First published in Latin, it consisted of more than 1,600 pages.

The book, now published in English for the first time, is a favorite of homeschoolers and those who take ancient history seriously. It’s the history of the world from the Garden of Eden to the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70.

<snicker> “homeschoolers and those who take ancient history seriously”. How can WND not be a parody site, I sometimes wonder.

If you are what you eat…

Is it close to your dinnertime? Zooillogix is looking out for your health by helping you stick to your diet, with this tantalizing assortment of interesting foods. Escamoles, lutefisk, and baby mice wine don’t look too bad to me, pacha is unappetizing to look at but I could probably choke it down, and I’ll pass on balut, although I can see how it could be an acquired taste … but you’d have to hold a gun to my head to get me anywhere near casu marzu.

It’s too bad this is a joke

It’s not a real proposal, but someone has come up with a provocative new genre, Squidpunk.

Fiction that unlike New Weird, Steampunk, or Slipstream, is at its core not only about squid, but about the symbolism of squid as color-changing, highly-mobile, alien-looking, intelligent ocean-goers. As a powerful ecosystem indicator, the squid is a potent symbol for environmental rejuvenation. Squidpunk is almost exclusively set at sea and must contain some reference to either cephalopods or to anything that thematically relates to squid, in terms of world iconography and tropes. Squidpunk is never escapist or whimsical. It is always serious and edgy. This combination of a hard punk aesthetic with the fluid propulsion system common to the squid has produced a unique literary hybrid beloved by Mundanes and Surrealists alike.

I’d read it. I would hope, though, that authors would realize that this definition is hopelessly restrictive and far too narrow to encompass the imaginings of the savants of the squidpunk movement. For instance, there’s no reason it must be set at sea; the landlocked prairies of cold northern states — Minnesota, for instance — can be a fertile backdrop for the more exotic variations on the theme, as can even temperate rainforests. The statement that it is always serious and edgy is also false: squidpunk erotica, with its softer focus on tactile pleasures and mind-expanding interactions with otherness is one of the most popular motifs.

And how could this critic overlook the common threads of biodiversity, evolution, and the alien within us? It’s like he never even read any squidpunk, and the whole essay reads like the guesswork of a poseur.

Is this a good way to go?

At least it’s an interesting and unusual way to expire: a man in India was killed by a horde of wild monkeys. Not many people get to have that written in their obituary.

Reading further, I see that some places in India have a real problem with monkeys overrunning them, but I was surprised at this one solution they’re trying:

One approach has been to train bands of larger, more ferocious langur monkeys to go after the smaller groups of Rhesus macaques.

Uh, right. The little guys have just killed someone, so the obvious answer is to bring in bigger, meaner monkeys. Maybe the fate of death by monkey isn’t going to be so unusual after all.

(via Cronaca)

Invitingly halloweeny

Now this is the kind of thing I’d like to have on my lawn…

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…except, unfortunately, that I have to miss Halloween this year. Halloween is a Ray Bradbury-esque holiday best celebrated in the midwest, and I’m going to be spending that day in the sunny, cheery, less-than-autumnal climes of Southern California, dispelling ghosties, I hope.

Old pulp crumbles into cultural irrelevance, alas

Prehistoric Pulp, my source for all pop culture with dinosaurs, reveals that there will be a new direct-to-video (not promising) animated (could be bad) movie of Turok, Son of Stone (awesome!) And it’s not the stupid bastardized version that was corrupted for video games to include cyborg dinosaurs!

Yeah, yeah, it looks a bit cheesy and cheap and it’s got cultural stereotypes run amuck, but it’s personal. Back when I was a tiny young fella and my father was a blue-collar wage slave working long hours, when he got home he’d sometimes ask me to read to him, and there were two things we both got into: Edgar Rice Burrough’s Mars stories, and Turok comic books. Both of those have faded considerably from the Great American Memory Collective, you have to be of a certain age to actually appreciate them, and they just seem a little quaint and peculiar and dated if you read them now, but hey, they were part of my childhood landscape, so I like ’em.

I’d also like to see A Princess of Mars made into a movie, but I think it’s impossible. The special effects are doable, but the tone couldn’t survive: they were all about old-fashioned gallant heroism, naked people with swords and radium pistols, and exotic, unbelievable Martian landscapes, and nowadays the casual chauvinism would get in the way, and nobody could write it straight as Burroughs did. The titular Princess is a voluptuous Martian mammal … who interbreeds with a human and lays eggs. It couldn’t be done now without cracking a joke.