How did Adam and Eve’s kids have kids?

I have written before about Jonathan Morris, a Catholic priest who is a Fox News favorite and a member of the infamous Legion of Christ order. (See here and here for more about that odious group and its disgusting founder.)

In one call-in program titled Father Knows Best, someone asks Morris “How did Adam and Eve’s kids have kids?” Morris actually seems taken aback by this question, as if it had never occurred to him before. He flounders around, going off on tangents about other mysteries to which we have no answers such as whether Adam had a belly button and then riffs for a while on original sin. It is obvious to even his co-hosts that he is not able to answer the question. It is quite the spectacle. [Read more…]

The Penn State aftermath

Those of us who were appalled by the Jerry Sandusky affair tend to feel that no punishment, from whatever quarter, is sufficient to make amends. But Dave Zirin argues that while what Penn State allowed to happen with Sandusky was terrible, the NCAA should not be the body that exacts monetary punishments for things that lie outside its jurisdiction, and that this represents a dangerous over-reach by a purely private and unaccountable and process-free body into the financial affairs of a public university. [Read more…]

Burned firewalkers blame themselves for having poor attitudes

Apparently the people who attended the Tony Robbins program paid anywhere between $600 to $2,000. The blame for those who were burned during the fire-walking climax is being placed on them, saying that they must have been ‘out of state’, which is apparently the technical term for not having the proper mental attitude. Even some of those who were burned say that it was their own fault for not having the right frame of mind despite Robbins’s careful preparation. Some of them repeat it even after getting burned. [Read more…]

Subtle cartoons

The TV show Seinfeld takes a look at the oft-discussed puzzle of the strange humor of some of the cartoons that appear in the New Yorker magazine and how they get selected.

Here are a couple of jokes (not from the magazine) that are not nearly as obscure but they took me a little while to get them. (The first one via reader Norm.)

Fire-walking gone awry

The main shtick of so-called motivational speakers is to persuade people that if only they think positively enough, they can achieve great things. One such speaker named Tony Robbins provides a practical demonstration of this principle by borrowing a practice that is fairly common in India and Sri Lanka during Hindu and Buddhist religious festivals, and that is ‘fire-walking’ which involves people walking across a bed of coal embers to show their devotion to their gods whom they believe will protect them from burns. [Read more…]