To Insure POOR Service

• To start with, don't make a reservation for your group of 9, and don't check the restaurant in advance to see if they even have a table large enough for 9 gamer-sized individuals.
• Trickle in by singles and twos across a 20+ minute window.
• Don't tell the wait staff how large your group is, and make sure you neglect to mention to them when the last of your party has finally arrived. 
• While half the party still hasn't arrived, have one person walk over to the take-out counter and order there, instead of at the table. Don't mention to the rest of the group that you've done so. This way the wait-staff thinks you'll all eventually do the same, and your group of friends won't realize there's any confusion or reason for the delay.
• When you get handed a menu, loudly make jokes about the part where it says the restaurant practices Halal (Islamic Dietary Law), and especially mock where it says "all the meats on our pizzas are slaughtered by hand by Muslims, unlike our inferior competitors who use cheap prepackaged ingredients." 
• Repeat such jokes frequently, especially any time the waiter is standing right behind you. 
• Sit silently and spinelessly when you know you should instead be telling your friend to shut up. 

Don't Burn Some Books!

No need to worry, folks. The Dove World Outreach Center has called off their Quran burning event upon learning that New York Muslims have caved to pressure to move their community center away from the proposed site near the former World Trade Center site.

The usual suspects at the Westboro "God Hates Fags" Baptist Church will do the Quran burning instead.

Peaceful as a Dove (that's soaked in gasoline and lit on fire)

I'm all for Freedom of Speech. I understand that one man's art is another man's blasphemy, or the other way around. I've been involved in a good deal of both. As a general policy, I'm largely in favor of legalizing anything that doesn't hurt anyone, and decriminalizing (but probably still regulating) anything that only hurts yourself.


Just the same, I can't help but wonder if maybe the folks at the Dove World Outreach Center  have a different definition of "World Outreach" than I do, and I'll bet money that there's is an immensely ironic meaning. We also probably don't envision the same iconography and symbolism when we talk about Doves, either.

via RAW: 

Florida church’s ‘Burn a Koran Day’ brings Islamist threats

...

"On September 11th, 2010, from 6pm - 9pm, we will burn the Koran on the property of Dove World Outreach Center in Gainesville, FL in remembrance of the fallen victims of 9/11 and to stand against the evil of Islam," 

Sad, so very, very sad.

Unless they're affiliated with Dove Chocolates, they should probably change the name of their organization.

Sinfest: Zombie Jesus

Thus ends the holiday season Jesus marathon.


Sinfest: The Webcomic To End all Webcomics

Great Zombie Jesus!

Today the Christian's celebrate the death and subsequent undeath (so-called resurrection) of Jesus. From our modern vantage point we now know that there are only a handful of ways that the dead can walk the Earth. There are vampires, zombies, and of course folks like Keith Richards, Dick Clark, and Leonard Cohen. Since Jesus was seen walking in broad daylight we can assume that he was not a vampire or a music industry celebrity, so he must have been a zombie.

The case for Great Zombie Jesus is strengthened when we look at the rituals of his followers, the Great Zombie Army. Great Zombie Jesus had his followers eat of his flesh and drink of his blood. This is how the zombie pathogens are transferred from generation to generation in an attempt to maintain the Great Zombie Army. Through the miracle of transubstantiation, consubstantiation, and even the sacramental union (all popular definitions of the Eucharist Infestation) people are eating the flesh of the Great Zombie Jesus and drinking his blood in an effort to be more Christ like, ergo, zombies.

Many a Sunday I spent in the presence of the Great Zombie Army as they feasted on the flesh and blood of Great Zombie Jesus while chanting and groaning in off pitch monotones. How I managed to escape infection I may never know. Perhaps I had a natural immunity to the pathogens. The liturgy was quite clear. Great Zombie Jesus will come again. He will judge the living and the dead. His kingdom will have no end because it is made up of zombies that can't die, eternal life.

So this Easter remember, aim for the head and torch the bodies. If they have no teeth and their bodies have all of the body and blood of Great Zombie Jesus burned from them, they can't infect you.

LOL Jesus

How to be like Jesus

Had to share.

NSFW: Saturnalia

One of my favorite holiday pieces.

Saturnalia - watch more funny videos

The Bad Landlord

Imagine for a moment, a hypothetical landlord. He owns an apartment building with 50 tenants.

One day, this landlord hears the the government is remodeling the Food Pyramid. The new pyramid specifically says people can eat pork. Nothing in the law being passed forces anyone to eat pork, it just specifically calls out that eating pork would fulfill your needs for items from the "meat group". Eating pork is okay, it says, implying there's no shame in it.

But this landlord, he feels that eating pork is not okay. It's against his religion. So he decides to protest it. His protest is, however, a little odd. He calls up the government and says "if you officially say pork is okay, I'm going to lock all my tenants out of the building. I will turn them out on the street."

Leaving the legality aside for a moment (If we must, we can assume all his tenants were on month-to-month, so he's within his legal rights, but still certainly disrupting 50 lives.)

• Would that seem reasonable to you?
• Does that feel like he's protesting, ...or threatening/blackmailing?

Don't get me wrong - I think the guy has every right to not eat pork himself, and to discourage others in any socially acceptable way. (I am a vegetarian, after all.) I just don't think that kicking out tenants for this bizarre reason is justified. He's turning people out on the street because the government is doing something he doesn't like, something that is totally unrelated to those people. So, no, it doesn't seem reasonable to me, and I'd certainly think a lot less of that landlord after that.

In fact, I'd have to question his motives. Perhaps he's just sick of being a landlord, and wants to do something else with that property. So, he's grabbing at this "convenient" excuse to push everyone out of his building. I think whether or not he's going to keep being a landlord to these people is unrelated to some government food pyramid. And if I were one of his tenants, I'd be angry as hell. Even if the government bowed to his coercion, I'd start looking for a new place to live. I'd lose my ability to trust that landlord.

Would it make any difference if a few details were altered?

• If instead of 50 tenants, he had 68,000?
• If instead of a landlord, he were the head of the Catholic Church in Washington DC, and the "tenants" were the homeless and ill people the church charities were taking care of?
• If the local government paid the church over 2 million dollars a year to care for them, and had been doing so for years?
• If instead of it being "eating pork is okay" that he's so upset about, the message were "gays and lesbians getting married is okay"? (Eating pork and gay sex are equally "abominations before the eyes of the lord" in the old testament, after all.)

To me, none of that would excuse any of it, in fact, every point there seems to argue that church is acting more disgracefully than the bad landlord.

US Catholic Church now playing political hardball, critics say

The church's role in politics came into sharp relief this week when the Washington Post reported on Wednesday that the Washington, D.C., diocese threatened to cease its charitable activities if the D.C. city council went ahead with a plan to allow same-sex marriages.

I don't have any sympathy for the church in this one. No one's trying to force the Catholic church to perform gay and lesbian weddings. If they were, then the church could argue that it's religious freedom was being imperiled. Under the new DC city council decision, any given church can still refuse to marry anyone, for any reason. If they don't like your politics, your sex life, your public statements, if you aren't part of their church, they can refuse to marry you.

Marriage is a thing shared by many religions, and even atheists can be married, so I don't see why any one religion should be able to set a general rule that excludes some group of people from being married by the other religions, or by a justice of the peace.

The Church is just behaving like the bad landlord in my example, threatening to disrupt the lives of thousands of people, if the church doesn't get it's way. Nothing would drive me away from religion faster than the church playing games with my life. Well, except perhaps the church using the threat of intentionally making my life worse as a way to coerce the government into keeping someone else's life from getting better. I would feel used. I would feel like all the church tells me about salvation and righteousness and loving your fellow man was a big fat lie. I don't live in D.C., and I'm not Catholic nor homeless nor gay, and I feel sickened by this.

The Adventures of Lil Cthulhu

That's my kind of children's story.

Makes me want to eat some cultists. Yummy.

AWPC: Blasphemy Day

I like the Mad Max quote.

Well That About Wraps It Up For God

I just finished reading The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. I must say, it was really good, and I now agree with nearly everything he had to say.

In the past, I've been turned off by Dawkins' appearances in videos I've seen, because of his sometimes self-righteous condescension and hyperbole. In those videos and interviews, he's made sweeping (and seemingly insulting) statements that came off as if he was claiming every person of faith is crazy, and I've often felt like he's presenting a strawman version of mainstream faith, with no data to back it up.

In the book, however, not only does his smugness seem toned down, but he actually presents the factual case that mainstream faith includes a great deal of craziness - and, more dangerously, aids and abets the more radical craziness that technically isn't part of mainstream religion, but hides amongst it's ranks. He also took the time to lay out what he really means by the "imaginary friend" line that is so often thrown around - which I'd previously assumed to be just a joke or insult - and makes an interesting case for it. Being not so pressed for time, he's able in print to elaborate on this positions, and present a lot more evidence for them. I was impressed, and swayed, as I've never been by those videos.

Perhaps it's just his accent. Here in the former colonies, we generally assume that any man with that accent is either a snobby upper-class elitist, or about to be strangled by Darth Vader. I think this works against Dawkins.

Updates on The Holy War in America

Those right-wing nutjobs are scaring the crap out of me again, making overt attempts to steer the development of culture and society away from science.

Lots of things to do this morning, so no time to elaborate my views on what I just read, but here's two quotes with links, so you too can feel the sinking sensation in the pit of your stomach...

---

via RAW:

US House Representative Wally Herger, of California’s 2nd congressional district, expressed “enthusiastic approval” of a town-hall attendee who described himself as a “proud right-wing terrorist,” newspapers in northern California report.

...

“Amen, God bless you,” Herger reportedly replied to the comment. “There is a great American.”

Doesn't that make you sick to your stomach?

---

via the Guardian

...the training at the seminary is aimed at producing infantry for a religious war against science and reason; proof of this, and in Dembski's own words, lies in another of his exam questions for the same course:

You are the Templeton Foundation's new program director and are charged with overseeing its programs and directing its funds. Sketch out a 20-year plan for defeating scientific materialism and the evolutionary worldview it has fostered if you had $50,000,000 per year in current value to do so. What sorts of programs would you institute? How would you spend the money?

The Dembski fellow he mentions, by the way, is the same "Professor" at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary who requires online trolling to pass his courses, as I'd blogged about previously.

Every Series Should Have An Exit Plan

I've been meaning to write this since last Thursday. Honestly, I've been meaning to write it for several months, but until late last week I kept holding off because I feared they were going to screw it up. Even if I'd told you, there'd be no way you could have gotten up to speed to catch it while it was on the air.

Season 5 of Lost freakin' rocked like nothing else I've ever watched.
The four seasons before it were awesome, too, but the fifth was something special. I love the way the show reinvents itself every season. Spoilers in white text.

• 1st Season is about being a castaway on a haunted, monster-infested island full of psychopaths and con men, spiced with flashbacks about how everyone's life sucked before they crashed on the island.
• 2nd Season is about mad science experiments on the haunted island.
• 3rd Season is about the mysterious and creepy fanatics who run the island.
  
• 4th Season is about a war and rescue, and the flash-backs become flash-forwards.
  
• 5th Season is about time-traveling to the freakin' garden of Eden so you can murder God.
  

I kid you not about that 5th Season plotline. It just blew me away. It's a show known for it's bizarre mythology and surprise twists*, yet the 5th Season went way above and beyond even that reputation.

Plus we're getting answers. Every season of Lost raises about 100 questions, so at this point, 500 questions have been asked. Even sharing the questions here would be a spoiler. What's the Monster? Where'd the Polar Bear come from? Are they all dead? What's in The Hatch? What do The Numbers mean? How'd that Pirate Ship end up on the mountain? What happened to the Dharma Initiative? How come food keeps being dropped? What's with the giant foot? Who or what is Jacob? Charles Widmore? Why doesn't Richard age? What did Kate do with Aaron? Are Bernard and Rose going to be Adam and Eve? Are they the two corpses in the cave way back in Season 1? etc., etc., etc. The list goes on.

In season one, we got like 2 answers. In season two, we got about 6 new answers. season three about 18 answers, and I was starting to dispair that they'd never resolve anything, because I hadn't noticed the math of what was happening. Season four gave about 54 answers, which is when I noticed it trippled every season. And yes, season five answered more questions than any single season had asked, about 162 questions answered this season.

My faith has been resored. By my math, season six will answer 486 questions, for a grand total of 728 questions answered, but only 600 asked. The Age of Aquarius is upon us, my friends, and the path to true enlightenment lies with Lost. Watch the show all the way through, and 128 questions about your life and the nature of the universe will be made transparent to you. This is not some silly joke. It makes sense, because they fucking time traveled to the garden of eden and killed God! It's my new religion. In fact, I'm going to speak what once was blasphemy - I predict that by the end of the sixth season, I'll even prefer Lost to Twin Peaks.**

What makes all this possible is that a couple seasons ago, they got the network to sign a contract, giving them a guaranteed run of six seasons. Prior to that, the writers kept building up the mysteries, dragging their feet, and avoiding giving any answers. They didn't want the wind to escape their sales, or to jump the shark. Once they had that contract, they were able to work out an exit plan, and fine tune the rate of plot revelation. They were even free to resolve the entangled love triangles, and ditch the usual network-mandated-tropes. Season five could have just been more regurgitated Sawyer-Kate-Jack-Juliette angst, with everyone cheating on everyone else, because some jerk in a suit thinks that's what put butts on couches week after week. Instead, this season just made a nod in passing to the complicated back story between them, and then said loudly "they've grown past that". Thank you, JJ Abrams and company.***

Of course, one can only imagine what Twin Peaks would have been like if the network had signed a 6-season contract with David Lynch and Mark Frost and just left them to work their magic. Every serious series drama should be allowed to follow this model.

---

*: In Zack And Miri Make A Porno, there's a scene where the cast is distracted. They should be watching sex, but instead they say something to the affect of: "I missed it this week. What happened?" "They're off the island. Then they're on the island again. I don't know what the fuck's going on." "I think they're in Hell." They're discussing Lost, and that's a pretty good summary of the 4th season, which was airing while Zack and Miri was being filmed. The first several seasons you spend a lot of time just wondering what the heck you're watching. Eventually it all comes together.

**: Unless they drop the ball. Time-travel is generally problematic in film and television, full of plot-holes and fridge-logic, so there's some tiny fear that some glaring flaw in the sixth season could still marr all that went before it. But if they keep it on the course that Miles (one of the characters) thinks it's on (namely, that the A-Bomb fulfils destiny and creates the time loop), they'll dodge that bullet. And even if they screw that up, they can still save it by just showing us a Richard flashback episode (that reveals his origin story to be Captain of the Black Rock ) and explicitly revealing that Jacob and that guy who played Adams in Deadwood are the smoke-monsters, or God and Lucifer, or Anubis and Set, or some combination of the three. And if they get all of this right, then, with tears in my eyes, I'll say that yes, it's better even than Twin Peaks.


***: Which means now I'll probably have to go catch his version of Star Trek on the big screen. Which, by the way, everyone tells me is much better than they expected.

Irretrievable Easter Egg

Thank you Brad for sharing how to make an irretrievable Easter egg.

Blasphemy of the Day

Death & Taxes:NSFW

This has turned into a pretty serious fucking day.

Did taxes. With my wife as a full time student leaving me as the primary wage earner who doesn't make much, the damage didn't hurt as bad as it had in the past. No matter. Taxes suck. Take it from those who've got it. If people had voted for me and my voluntary tax plan...

Went through a stack of paper work that resulted from our company getting purchased last year. New insurance, new investments. I started to fill out my life insurance beneficiary form and had to stop. Primary beneficiary: spouse. No worries there. What about secondary? Say the two of us die when we fall onto the railroad tracks while stumbling home from the pub some evening. Who gets the insurance money and gets stuck making the (cheap) funeral arrangements? I will almost certainly out live my parents and most likely my sister as well. No kids to take care of it. No nieces or nephews either. Shit. Maybe one of my friends' kids? I set it aside to ponder later. I had never thought about it before and hadn't planned on thinking about it today.

But the big serious fuck all event of the day came with the mail. A Valentine's Day present for Jake and Krys from her aunt. Just looking at the package I knew there was some serious fucking shit inside. Ripping it open with my pocket knife the horrible nightmare scenario manifested. 23 Minutes in Hell along with a card wishing us a happy Valentine's Day and urging us to consider our immortal souls.

God Fucking Damn It! I grew up with a Christian mom who dragged me to church at least twice a week. My grandfather spent several years of his retirement as church janitor where I would spend every fucking day of my early childhood not spent in school at the church while my parents went to work. I used to fucking read the Bible during breaks in elementary school. I've spent way too much time around Christians and spending eternity with them sounds like the number one reason to sell my soul to Satan. Bargain basement pricing! Very motivated seller.

I live a pretty decent life. I don't deliberately fuck people over. I don't pick fights. Never stabbed anyone. Never shot anyone. Never slept with anyone's spouse without permission. I smile a lot, try to treat people in a friendly way a good percentage of the time. I say I hate kids and then let them play with my toy tractors (kept in a crate with a bunch of knives and a stack of Playboys) when they come over. All in all people consider me a decent guy. Either that or everyone refuses to say otherwise out of fear. I just don't know.

So if my wife's aunt's god desires to see me tormented for all eternity for not accepting his bastard* easy riding** son of a whore*** half breed as my LORD**** and savior while a lying, cheating, stealing, warmongering, hateful piece of shit like George W. Bush receives forgiveness as a Christian, then I will take the lash to the back and the branding iron up the ass for all eternity just to not have to hang around some smug jack ass of a mafia don deity who pretends to 'Love Everyone'.

For you Christians who have a more enlightened view and think that I will get into heaven, I'd say 'over my dead body' but...

So instead I say, pass.

*Born and raised in the absence of his father. Bastard.
**Easy rider refers to the boyfriend of a whore. Not her pimp, just the guy who gets the easy ride.
***His mom wasn't technically a whore but under the laws of that time she would have been classified as such.
****The LORD bullshit really gets to me. Hierarchy. Slavery. I kneel before no man or god. The good ones will get a hearty hand shake or a big hug. I have no need for a master. YesSir. NoSir. CanIHaveAnotherSir? If Jesus sucks my cock like a pro I might yell out, "OH LORD!" or "OH GOD!" Everybody sing along! ComeInMyEye My Lord, ComeInMyEye. Oh Lord, ComeInMyEye.