Linkstew

Speaking of Guinness, there's a song on 69 Love Songs by The Magnetic Fields called "Crazy For You (But Not That Crazy)". This has been one of my favorite songs in the collection since the first time I heard it, mainly because I thought it contained the amazingly clever line

"I performed acts of devotion, as if you were Guinness..."

But then, just a couple of weeks ago, while reading the 69 Love Songs box set insert, I glanced at the lyrics and saw that the line actually goes

"I performed acts of devotion, as if you were Ganesh..."

note: This post has three different, randomized punchlines, because I couldn't pick just one. Either reload or check the source for the rest.

On the one hand, this story about implanting ID chips in people gives me the willies and makes me want to run for the hills.

On the other hand, these two paragraphs had me dying laughing:

Theologian and author Terry Cook said he worries the identification chip could be the "mark of the beast," an identifying mark that all people will be forced to wear just before the end times, according to the Bible.

Applied Digital has consulted theologians and appeared on the religious television program the "700 Club" to assure viewers the chip didn't fit the biblical description of the mark because it is under the skin and hidden from view.

You know you're in trouble when Religious Zealots turn out to be on your side. And be sure to check out the article, it's definitely something to be aware of.

I don't typically like bashing religion, but this article is just too ridiculous. Taking a gander at the article's meta keywords, I think even the site's web monkey found this amusing, as "incoherent" was included. Here's a choice quote from the article:

"The recent release of Windows XP illustrates the concept of intelligent design. If Windows XP points to Bill Gates, how much more do the marvelous complexities of DNA point directly to God, the great Intelligent Designer?"

At this point, the story of Kaycee Nichole has been covered everywhere from CNN to the New York Times. I haven't seen anything this talked about on the web since November 7th, 2000. For those who don't have any clue what I'm talking about, I'll just link to this msnbc article, because I haven't been paying attention to this topic at all, so I actually have any useful links. I've just read what Kevin and Eve had to say about the situation. (Here are three more links about Kaycee that Eve sent me, if you want to dig deeper.) And today, with still more news on the subject being created, I finally spent a few minutes thinking about it, and this is what occured to me.

First, I'll describe how I understand the situation, because it'll help you understand where I'm coming from if I'm way off base. Girl with a terminal illness has an online journal, chronicling her fight. People read Girl's journal, feel happy when Girl gets better, feel sad when she gets worse. People are affected by Girl. Girl was an incredible optimist, who helped others see a little beauty around them. Girl dies. People around the net are very sad, but other people around the net are suspicious, and snoop around, and ask too many questions, and uncover that Girl did not exist, and as such, never died.

People believed in Kaycee as much as they believe in George W. Bush, though they'd never met her, and all they had to go on were some pictures and phone calls and a lot of meaningful words. Belief is an essential part of the world, as any avid Pratchett fan is well aware. People believed in Kaycee, and therefore, she existed, if not in reality then in the hearts and minds of readers around the world.

Kaycee existed, and Kaycee died, because people believed she did. I had never read her journal, but when I heard she died, I believed right along with everyone else. Apparently some people feel let down, having placed their belief in a fiction, and having cried for a fiction, and yet people willingly cry for books and movies all the daily.

And if you don't like that point of view, then look at it this way: People no longer believe in Kaycee, and without her belief, Kaycee is dead. Dead any way you look at it. And if she's dead any way you look at it, then being sad for her passing is a perfectly natural thing, even if the death was a metaphysical one.

The question, then, isn't one of whether or not she was real, but of the intentions of the deceiver. And as far as I can tell, everyone involved claims that no money or gifts were ever asked for. In this light, belief in Kaycee was an investment which didn't require anything other than the time to read her journal, and if her journal made the reader happy or sad, then it was time well spent. She didn't ask for any money to keep her "church" (web page) running, and she didn't ask for you to even believe in her. If you enjoyed reading what Kaycee had to say, and if she made you happy or sad, then your belief was well founded and the reward was free.

If people are this upset about the Kaycee situation, I'd love to see what'd happen if anyone ever proved The Bible to be fiction and showed a whole lot of people how ill-placed their belief was.

It seems to me that believing in Kaycee may have been an even better way to spend your belief than believing in some religious character.

Billy, you should get to be good friends with Pill, because for the rest of your life, you're going to be stuck in this pill based culture. This Article on msnbc is very scary -- Schools demanding that parents give their children Ritalin. I wonder when it'll be revealed that whichever drug super power owns the name Ritalin is funding children's television and bribing these school officials...

Who, me? No, I'm not paranoid. Just a little bitter. Sure, I pop aspirin all the time, but I believe that they work. If someone replaced my apsirin with sugar pills, my belief would work just as well as the aspirin. Unfortunately, I can't replace them myself, because then my mind wouldn't let the trick work.

Belief is a damn powerful healer, but in this "advanced scientific age," people no longer believe in belief or other forms of healing -- they need "advanced" medicines and surgeries -- I'm just as vulnerable to this as anyone else, but I can recognize it in myself and others.

It's a shame to see pills being forced upon little billy as soon as possible. "Get him hooked on the program," the drug makers say. "Make him believe in us."

I remember a long time ago when Mike Drrrr and I were playing Kings Quest VI, and one of the characters exclaimed "Zounds!" Now, Mike and I thought that was pretty funny, because we'd never heard such a silly phrase. Many, many years later, I found out it was apparently a British word.

Even more later, I learned the derivation of the word. A long time ago, there was an exclamation that went "By Gods Wounds!" That was a slightly unwieldy phrase, so it was later shortened to "swounds", which was eventually slurred to become "Zounds!"

An Art History 10 test is composed of 4 sections. There are 5 short answer questions, 5 slide identifications, 3 comparisons in the form of short essays, of which two count, and a long essay about one of four topics.

One of the comparisons on the final was to compare the Parthenon to some big ass church or another. I'm not sure which one it was. And I'm not sure what the point of the comparison was supposed to be. But I'm going to tell you what I wrote about, because it had me laughing clear through the rest of the comparisons, through the essay, through turning in the final, and all the way back to my dorm room.

In contrast to the big ass church, the Parthenon did not have windows. This is surprising, considering how much the Greek Gods liked to go out and play, compared to how much the Christian God wasn't much of a people person. You'd think that the Greek Gods would want to be able to look out and see the people they like interacting with, while the Christian God wouldn't want any of that common crap interfering in his place of worship. But upon closer examination, we see that the windows in that big ass church are stained glass windows. These stained glass windows are effectively filters, protecting the church goers from reality by straining everything through these colorful religious images before they get to the eye. Further, the lack of windows in the Parthenon forced the Greek Gods to actually go out and interact with people in order to see what was really going on. Churches are, in fact, a huge conspiracy, so that the world that god sees is stained with the images on the glass, making the world look better than it really is. It's all a cover up.

Yes, there are some logical inconsistencies, and yes, I worded it a little better on the test (which is strange, because I had less time, then), but you get the basic idea. And I still find it really amusing. I'm sure it will make the person grading the test laugh. At least I hope it does. All I needed to do was pass the test, anyway.

I'm not Christian. Can you tell?

I went out for my walk, and as nearly half-way home when, to put it bluntly, I was accosted by a small mob of seventh and eigth graders who were preaching Christianity at me. It was a rather odd experience, and I came out of it with the realization that I need to either refine my arguments against religion or lower the language of said arguments so they can be understood by seventh and eigth graders -- a contingency which I hadn't counted on using them against when I had originally formulated them.

The whole thing started innocently enough, but then they asked me if I was a Christian, and they rather did not approve of my answer to that. They asked me who made me, and I asked them "From what perspective," and they did not like that. I told them that from my perspective my parents had me and their parents them, and from their perspective god had created the heavens and the earth and said "let there be light!"

They agreed with that point. God indeed had said "Let There Be Light!" Perhaps some of the most sensible words he did utter. But when I asked those kids why god had created the heavens and the earth first, and then turned on the lights, they got angry. They didn't approve of me calling "their God" "crazy" and "narrowminded."

They asked me if I served the devil, and I said no, and they didn't like my asking what was wrong with serving an angel. And again they didn't like me calling their god crazy when I pointed out that God was the one who had created evil.

They decided I was going to burn in hell, and I agreed that if there was a hell, I would burn there; But if there was a heaven, and those children did go there, they would *poof* evaporate in a puff of nothing.

Heaven, after all, is hotter than Hell, assuming that a soul has no mass. The lake of molten brimstone cannot be hotter than the boiling point of brimstone, which 444.6C, while in heaven "the light of the Moon shall be as the light of the Sun and the light of the Sun shall be seven fold, as the light of seven days." Obviously, with heaven being 49 times as hot as earth, or at least 525C, which is quite a lot hotter than Hell could possibly be. They didn't understand that argument, but I doubt they would have liked it if they had understood it.

Finally I gave up, as I could not get a word in edgewise. I layed down on the driveway and let the kids yell at themselves, until finally some parent came out and sent the children scurrying and apologized to me.

Certain ideas and words in this following letter originated with Vonnegut. Don't assume them to be entirely original.

It's the night before Christmas and all through my house my parents are shouting a bit, and my brother is being his usual self. Christmas is celebrated in my house because. Not because my family is religious, nor because we are remembering the birth of a baby, but because.

It has come to my attention that the world's economy is dependent upon a mythological being who could not physically exist. I can't bring myself to be happy about most holidays anymore, I find it terribly difficult to be festive.

My brother still gets excited about Christmas, and about Thanksgiving and Halloween and The fourth of July. He doesn't get excited about the meaning of the holidays, instead he get's excited the modern method of celebration of said holidays.

While my brother runs around excited, I tend to get gloomy around holidays. I tend to sit and ponder the real meaning of the holiday and why the holiday came to be and why the holiday has been mutated into a modern method of making money.

Get a load of this: The 11th of November is Armistice Day. Most people nowadays have probably never heard of Armistice Day... The reason that no one has heard of it is because it isn't a very festive thing, not very happy, and it forces people to remember...

On the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month people stood silent and remembered the moment in the 1918 that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering each other.

But that isn't a very nice thing to remember, and so very few people remember about armistice day, because it isn't a nice thing to remember or think about.

Christmas has become very important. The stores talk about how the holiday season is so important to keep them running the rest of the year. If it weren't for a tiny baby who were born in a barn so many years ago, the world's economy as we know it simply could not exist.

I don't know if I'm thankful that that baby was born or if I'm angry at that baby. All I know is that the baby isn't what's important anymore. Sure, the baby is remembered in nativity scenes, et al, but what does that mean? People know that a baby was born, but that's about all...