Toadfish Monastery

Had my big end-of-the-everything piano recital. Lotsa fun.

Discovered that loose bits of chewed-up salad can bear a frightening resemblance to loose flaps of tissue when hanging out in the back by the wisdom-tooth-holes. That was a fun tooth-brushing session.

Wisdom teeth yanked.

Currently, Italian ice. Soon, more non-chewy foods.

75.126.127.218 seems to be it...

I've got more space than I know what to do with - I'd be happy to host a backup if you need me to.

No worries, MB. I'm pretty sure the important stuff will get resurrected sooner or later.

Quote from: beagle on July 17, 2008, 07:14:30 AM
Ah right. Wonder why they picked the plague rather than classical Greece and Rome. Perhaps they didn't want to courrupt American youth with tales of evil polytheists. Or they figured you'd watch it on HBO anyway.

I believe there's another AP exam for what they call "World History" (it's true that the Greeks and Romans didn't exactly confine themselves to Europe). Also, the plague is apparently a very popular place to start - in my first two years of high school, there were two required history courses for everybody. (APs in later years are very optional. And "challenging.") The first went from prehistory to... um... whatever the teacher could cover... and the second started at the plague and went to... um... I think we finished World War I?

APs have an actual standardized curriculum, though. And I had an excellent teacher this past year.

Yes, goat, it's his wife, who is apparently a terrifyingly independent woman/black panther to some folks out there.

EU plot to teach us some history about that continent from the plague till the end of the USSR.

Quote from: Sibling Zono (anon1mat0) on July 16, 2008, 04:50:16 PM
That one is funny, but I see the current one as a tool that some in the right will use to say that even the new yorker thinks Obama is a muslim terrorist or something of the sort. Leave it on internal pages with the title of an article about the nonsense and it works perfectly, but leaving it on the front page with no caption, and you get the average passerby reading it in a completely different context.

I disagree. The media frenzy has made the intentions of the cartoonist perfectly clear to the public, and the debate has moved away from that. No way the right could use it, except to convince more uneducated rednecks they already have convinced anyway.

Same for the average passerby - even without the media coverage. I see three possible responses:
1. Ha, that's funny, it parodies the false rumors the right has been circulating about Obama.
2. What terrible racism and ignorance that picture exhibits!
3. See, cousin, I told you he was a Muslim!

Responses 1 and 2 do nothing to detract from Obama, and there's no hope anyway for the one that responds with 3.

Quote from: goat starer on July 16, 2008, 02:36:49 PM
I dont think tolerance and humility are incompatible with having a good rant. Bill Hicks was thoroughly offensive whilst ranting on stage but that was ok because it was 'comedy'. I thought the PZ blog was quite funny and falls into the same category.

That's the part I disagree with.

I love reading rants, and I agree with you completely about their necessity and permissibility. I thought PZ's rant was funny, and I happen to agree with it personally.

I can't claim to have read much of PZ's blog, but I associate it more with posts like this. That's written in a fun way, too, but it presents a rational debunking of some of the obscene logic perpetrated by the ID crowd. And it's that sort of rational, intelligent discourse I want when I read Pharyngula.

I might be mistaken about the nature of the blog, in which case I retract any objections I ever had to PZ's rant - but given that Chatty refers (or referred) people to it is a source of reasonable, rational, polite atheism, I suspect that's not the case.

Here's another New Yorker cover from back during the primaries:



I thought that one was funny, and this one's funny, too. The New Yorker is a magazine with a readership that really does consist mostly of "elitist" liberals, I think. The target audience understands the joke, I think, understands what it's a commentary on, and though reaction may be varied, I don't think many people who subscribe to the New Yorker were genuinely offended. Unfortunately, the mass media latched onto it, and people who had no idea about the New Yorker's usual political platform and preferred form of satire got all wound up.

Politically, though, it can't do Obama any harm.

Visited my orthodontist. Found out everything's fine, he tweaked my retainer a bit, told me to make an appointment for next summer.

And told me he wanted me to get my wisdom teeth yanked before I go to college. That's gonna be fun.

Bob, I most certainly do - I'm -4 in one eye and -4.75 in the other, which makes me totally dependent on glasses to function in any way that involves seeing more than a few inches in front of my face. I haven't finished growing yet, so I don't know what my vision will be like in ten years or so when I would potentially qualify for lasik.

Many factors, much time, just harvesting information now (as always).