Steve Cooper of Tooting, Professional Goddess

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“There’s something enchanting under his sari!”

What is this, silly religion day? I just got sent a link to this marvelous story of a young unemployed British fellow who became a goddess in India — he is now the incarnation of Bahucharaji, the patron of Indian eunuchs, and he goes around blessing people and curing their infertility. Apparently, Bahucharaji was an Indian princess who castrated her husband because he wasn’t interested in sex, and for that she was deified. Thank Lakshmi and Urvasi my wife is an unbeliever!

They call him Prema, for short. It means “Divine Love.” Hey, what a coincidence, that’s what “PZ” means, too!

Hindu pilgrims have no doubts about his powers. When we asked Bhanu Barot why she was so keen to receive Prema’s blessing, she said, simply: “Because she is a goddess.”

Another woman, Rekha, said she had travelled for days to be blessed by Steve. She added: “My sister-in-law came here and she got pregnant immediately. I am hoping the same will happen for me after receiving the blessing of the goddess.”

It must be <cough> magic.

Life isn’t all curry and rice beer, or exotic Indian beauties asking for assistance in getting pregnant. There’s also the professional jealousy.

A eunuch called Sudha said: “He is a fake. I checked and he still has a penis.

He is a male so can’t be a goddess. He shouldn’t give blessings.”

Ooooh, the little bitch.

I get mail

One sure way to get your Important Message to me is to use the good old US Mail (although my email is much snappier now, thanks to previous suggestions), and sometimes I do get the strangest stuff. This time, it was a formal looking letter from an organization called “Campaign for the Children.” How can you possibly turn away a letter from someone who is for the children? You can’t, of course. Then once I started reading … well, this doesn’t seem to be a campaign for children after all.

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Man Thru History

I was asked my opinion of this strangely engrossing drawing titled “Man Thru History”. It’s one of those huge multi-paneled works with lots of little details that draw your eye in—I looked everywhere for Waldo but couldn’t find him. Anyway, here’s one panel out of 23:

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While the details are fun to pore over, I can’t say that I’m impressed with it overall. There are too many distortions.

  • Start with the title: “Man thru history”. That’s actually accurate, in a sense. It’s an illustration of a particular man’s perception of history.
  • While most of the figures are just standing, men are either committing violence, having violence done to them, or having sex. The only active women are having sex.
  • There’s an awful lot of pink. Should it have been titled “White Man Thru History”?
  • Everyone is conventionally attractive: slender, curvy women and muscular, athletic men. They’re also all clean and youthful. Where’s the variation in body type and age and race?
  • It’s actually not very representative. There should be more people suffering from disease, more women the target of violence, and lots of dead babies.

Anyway, it’s got next to nothing to do with history. Maybe it should have been titled “Comic book artist practices figure drawing.”

Stop it. Just stop it.

OK, I can understand copying Wikipedia and setting up your own special interest wikis all over the place—it’s an admission that your goals are too dorky or too stupid to survive outside your own special little incubator—but if you’re going to set up your own social networking site, why would you copy MySpace, the ugliest, most awkward, most annoying such site on the planet? It’s like declaring that not only do you lack any creativity or imagination, but that you are totally tasteless, too.

Behold: His Holy Space. It’s like an online ghetto for Christians. Take the cluttered, disorganized look of MySpace and drape it with Kincade paintings and animated doves and angels, and you’ve got His Holy Space. Why, I don’t know. Some things are just mysteries.

(via The Friendly Atheist)

Party like it’s 2011

Speaking of satire that’s hard to tell from religion, one of the cycles of the Mayan calendar ends in 2012, which is prompting some end-of-the-world hysteria, and even a movie:

Apparently, the whole world is going to change suddenly on 21 December, five years from now.

Armageddon is not what it used to be

I think there is going to be more outbreaks of telepathy

This is my favorite quote:

Whether or not time ends in 2012, we should be assuming it will so that we take care of business. Secondly and most important, don’t cancel your appointments for 2013.

The movie seems to be taking this nonsense seriously—they got a whole mob of astrologers and shamans and New Age kooks twittering away. I’m afraid I don’t believe it.

Besides, everyone knows the real catastrophe strikes 100 years later, in 2112. (I actually own that album, on vinyl, buried in a box somewhere. That’s a more apocalyptic omen than anything in this movie, I suspect.)

Pogonophilia or pogonophobia?

Baby-faced Burt Humburg passed along the word-of-the-day to me:

pogonotrophy (po-guh-NAW-truh-fee) noun

The growing of a beard.

[From Greek pogon (beard) + -trophy (nourishment, growth).]

Pogonology is the study of beards and pogonotomy is a fancy word for
shaving.

Now this sounds like news for Man Beard Blog (who will no doubt be pleased with the Greek etymology), but what is this? Have I got some reputation for facial hirsuteness (a word that is etymologically related to “horror”)? Is it a hint that I need to shave, errm, I mean pogonotomize myself?

More likely, it’s acute envy.

Besides, I’m proud to be indirectly affiliated with the Pogonophora, the bearded worms of the deep sea.