Catholics outdo the Mormons in crazy

Mormons go around baptizing the dead into their church, but at least dead people were once real…the official Vatican newspaper has just announced that Homer and Bart Simpson are Catholic. It’s not clear whether they didn’t mention Marge, Lisa, and Maggie because they lack the sacred Y chromosome of Jesus that is required to be a true Catholic, or if it’s because, perhaps, they are apostate Presbylutherans.

Disillusionment

“Oh,” I thought, “I’ve never seen a video of George Bernard Shaw before,” so I clicked on the link.

I’ve never had my opinion of someone plummet so rapidly.

I was also thinking that he looks pretty old here, and probably can’t carry hod or dig ditches well enough to earn his keep, so maybe someone should have euthanized him.

How many ways can we screw up little girls?

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You already know I dislike religion; it’s a dreadful tool for distorting human values. I’m also an opponent of sexist socialization that short-changes women, in particular. How about if we combine both? Behold, My Princess Bible(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), a book you can give to your little girl to turn them into Disneyesque Bible freaks.

I’m a little disappointed, though. Is there also a Bratz Bible?

Sadly, this thing gets mostly good reviews at Amazon, and there’s only one 1-star review. That’s not the worst of it, either: the one bad review complains that there isn’t enough Jesus and too much focus on the women of the Bible.

I think I’m hoping the world does end in 2012

It would be a mercy. George Lucas is preparing another release of all of his Star Wars movies, after yet again tweaking them.

The new versions will be in…cheesy post-processed pseudo-3-D.

When the first one was released back in 1977 it was phenomenal — a pulpy space opera with dialogue that had the panache of a Hugo Gernsback short story, and we liked it. Then came the sequel, and we were overjoyed…it was still good old fashioned science fiction, but it was better than the first. And from that point on, unfortunately, it was dissolution and decay, beginning with the Ewoks and ending in the terminal embarrassment of Jar Jar Binks. Yet Lucas keeps tinkering with the sell-out garbage, trying to restore that brief moment of magic by hammering it all flatter and paving it over with a virtual steamroller of reprocessing and rewriting.

Nothing will save them, George. They were badly conceived and badly written, and yet another digital makeover will not change that fact. Maybe if you’d written them competently when you made them, you wouldn’t be masturbating their corpses now.

We all know who makes the best Mad Scientists

I initially thought this was a fine graph, charting the fields of research of mad scientists over time, since it did accurately conclude that biologists rocked that niche, but then I looked closer, and they shortchanged us. For some entirely arbitrary reason, they split mad biologists into “biology”, “biotechnology”, and “neuroscience”…but those are simply subdisciplines of biology! You don’t see mad physicists split into “physics”, “lasers”, and “whatever else physicists do”, now do you? I see what they were doing: they were trying to minimize the appearance of our overwhelming dominance!

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So, Annalee Newitz, Stephanie Fox, Kelly Faircloth, and Mary Ratliff…you sought to belittle mad biologists, eh? I shall plot my vengeance. Do not be surprised if some night you wake up to find giant mutant cockroaches laying eggs in your ears, or your brain transplanted into the body of a hagfish, or strange infections writing incantations to Cthulhu in rashes on your body, or tentacles emerging out of your shower drain.

So that’s why I can’t be a Jehovah’s Witness

Elders of the Jehovah’s Witnesses are not allowed to have beards, because it makes them look like dirty rotten gay communist hippies.

In the 1950s, in the the USA, beards were widely unpopular among the general public and most men who wore one were immediately perceived as beatniks (and later, hippies). In that American, Cold War climate, a young man who didn’t sport a military-esque brush cut and bare chin was out-of-hand labeled a communist or homosexual.

I just thought it made me look cuddly!