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.

Cats. Must. DIE!

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Every once in a while, a reader sends me a link to something I’ve already dealt with (and that’s OK, I don’t expect everyone to have committed the entirety of the Pharyngula database to memory), but it’s a link to something so dang weird it’s worth reposting. In this case, I was sent a link to a page that purports to describe the beliefs of some Jehovah’s Witnesses about cats, where among many other jaw-dropping arguments, it gives us this jewel:

Indeed, modern studies of classification of cats, while not necessarily being reliable as they may be based on the discredited ‘theory’ of evolution, strongly associate felines with serpents (despite some external differences in physiology and morphology, which confuse those who do not study these matters deeply).

The consensus of the previous discussion was that the site is probably a satire, although it hews so close to the insanity of the actual religion that it’s hard to tell. It’s still funny either way, though. It’s also a good excuse to quote one of my favorite fantasy authors, Tanith Lee.

[Read more…]

I thought I’d never vote for a vampire, but…

So, in the last election, we Minnesotans briefly enjoyed the company of a vampire running for governor. Unfortunately, Jonathon “The Impaler” Sharkey was arrested before the election and we missed out on the potentially amusing spectacle.

Somehow, though, he is now free (damn those cunning vampires!), and is planning to run for president. As a most interesting and admittedly tempting part of his campaign platform, he is promising to impale GW Bush if elected.

He’s crazy, I wouldn’t have given him a chance, but dang if he didn’t come up with a vote-getting idea. They’re cunning, those vampires, they’ve had centuries to think up these plans. If he tossed Cheney in as a bonus, he might just sweep the election.