Good Reason

It's okay to be wrong. It's not okay to stay wrong.

Page 82 of 126

Friday Random Five is always… wrong ong ong

25 January 2008 / / Comments Off on Friday Random Five is always… wrong ong ong

Can I revive the Five one… last… time…?

Hello, This One Is for You by Herrmann + Kleine
Album: Putting the Morr Back in Morrissey
This album has nothing to do with Morrissey — it’s just a bit of ambient glitch. It’s twinkly like stars, it has some beats, and some computer effects. I like this stuff now, but I’m not sure how I’ll feel about it in six months. Undemanding. Good for work.

Other Voices by The Cure
Album: Faith (Deluxe Edition)
Yes, I did buy Faith yet again, with the bonus album of extra bits. I love everything about it, from Robert Smith’s yelps to the insurgent bass to the echo-ey vocals. And they’re all here on this song.

Carry That Weight by The Beatles
Album: Abbey Road
A bit before my time. I didn’t know this song by name, but there’s no mistaking that sing-along chorus. Funny how Beatles songs are in our collective cultural memory.

Mr T. by Regurgitator
Album: Unit
A slow grind from the Gurge. Can’t explain the name.

Silhouettes by Prefab Sprout
Album: Faron Young (7″ Single)
An unusual b-side with a funk groove to it. I think the Sprout were playing with a lot of styles at this point.

Westboro Baptists picket Heath Ledger

25 January 2008 / / 6 Comments

Well, well, well. Fred Phelps and the Westboro Baptist Church are planning to picket Heath Ledger’s memorial service. You know them; they’re the ones with the “God Hates Fags” signs. Apparently protesting the funerals of US soldiers isn’t bringing in the attention like it used to, so they’re kicking it up a notch.

Doesn’t look like they’re actually going to make it to Perth (the likely spot of the funeral).

In a news release from the church, Shirley Phelps-Roper says that she and other members will picket Ledger’s memorial services in the United States, not those held in his native Australia.

Too bad — there’d be all kinds of fun. But flying the entire congregation over would be expensive and time consuming. Then there’s accommodation. Would other Christians billet them? I think even the Potter’s House people would hesitate to have them over.

One thing I will say: the WBC folks are truly living their religion. They have absolute faith that they’re going to heaven and everyone else to hell. The theology they’ve settled on is certainly one of the possible Christianities that one could derive from the Bible, and who are other Christians to say that their theology is wrong? Other Christians claim to believe that homosexuality is a sin, but they don’t act like they mean it. The WBC folks have taken a normal mainstream Christian belief to its logical conclusion.

For my part, I notice that everyone creates gods in their own image. That’s why I’m sort of encouraged to see humankind make the transition from Old Testament genocidal maniac to New Testament groovy love god. Everyone picks and chooses from the scriptures according to whatever’s inside of them. By that standard, the Westboro Baptists are very scary people indeed.

Stellarium: coolest app in the solar system

21 January 2008 / / 3 Comments

I always wondered how I could find out what stars and planets were in the sky on any particular night. And now I’ve found Stellarium, a free application that shows you that very thing.

You can specify where you are and the date and time, and it’ll render the night sky in glorious Star-O-Vision.

Click for a larger image.
But there’s more. You can zoom in on objects, like planets or nebulae. Try speeding up time and watch Jupiter rotate.


Or you can go to other places and see what the sky looks like from there. Here’s how Saturn looks right now, if you’re standing on Mimas, one of its moons.


Here’s a fun one: try going back in time to the day you were born, and find out what sign the sun came up in. You may be surprised. (Bill Nye explains.)

Youngest Boy and I now spend part of our night sitting on the kerb with the laptop, looking for constellations.

Daniel font sighting: Baywatch!

20 January 2008 / / 5 Comments

The Daniel font (download here) has been sighted yet again, this time on the cover of the Australian editions of the Baywatch DVD.


No, not that ‘Baywatch’ logo — it’s those small black letters that say ‘season 2’, etc. Sorry the photo’s so crap; it’s difficult to take a good picture from a mobile phone when you’re all excited.

Here’s the spine view.


I’m so proud.

Liberal fascism?

18 January 2008 / / 1 Comment

There are only a couple of people on my automatic ‘punch in the face’ list. One is Jonah Goldberg. (The other’s Dinesh D’Souza.) It’s not anger. I’m not a violent person. I’d rather go verbal than mano a mano. But when someone has made the choice to argue the opposite of what everyone else knows to be so in a perverse attempt to rewrite history — truth be damned! — really, you can’t have a normal discussion with that person. It would just give them an opportunity to spew crap. Spewing crap is what they’re good at, and it’ll only make it worse. But a punch in the face transcends discourse. And it may provide that person with the reality check that reality never gave them.

The crap I’m talking about is, of course, Goldberg’s book, ‘Liberal Fascism’. Sadly, No! has done a great job taking down the Doughy Pantload’s premise, which is basically the associative fallacy spread over 400 pages: Nazis and Fascists liked organic foods, liberals like organic foods, ergo liberals are fascists. Fascist states are totalitarian, and totalitarians tell people how to live their lives. Liberals would like to tell people what to do (e.g. the environment, good parenting); ergo, liberals are totalitarians. Utterly fallacious, and remind me again whose vision of the state involves legislating people’s bedroom behaviour?

You might enjoy Jon Stewart’s interview with Das Lodenhosen, if your eyes don’t hurt from all the rolling.

Chick tracts

17 January 2008 / / 2 Comments

Don’t you love Chick tracts, in an awful way? PZ at Pharyngula has reminded me of this one about why evolution is a filthy devil-spawned lie. It’s called ‘Apes, Lies, and Ms. Henn‘.

If you don’t feel like clicking through, this panel nicely sums up the passive aggression of Extreme Christianity.


That’s right; I’ll pray for you — because you’re going to Hell.

I plan to use that line as I drop the boys off at school. Bye, boys! Remember not to believe in evolution instead of Jesus, or you’re going to Hell! Lucky for me I don’t ‘believe’ in evolution.*

While we’re on the subject of Chick tracts, here’s one of my favourite parodies: This Is Your Death!

It has a special place in my heart because of this idea on its back page:

1. Enjoy life while you can.
2. Be nice to others; they only get one life, too.

Believe it or not, it was the first time I could really grasp why lack of belief in an afterlife might not automatically lead to a life of psychopathic hedonism. I can now see why that was stupid, but a lifetime of church can do that to a person.

*Instead, I accept it as an accurate explanation of what’s happened in life on Earth, supported by overwhelming physical evidence.

Scrabulous lawsuit — we knew it couldn’t last.

16 January 2008 / / 12 Comments

Hasbro sues the makers of Scrabulous. On the plus side, you’ll never have a reason to use Facebook ever again!

I have to agree with this writer: Hasbro has missed an opportunity here. If they aren’t providing an online version of Scrabble, someone’s going to fill the void. All those users = pent-up demand. Figure it out.

Furthermore, I doubt that Scrabulous deterred many people from buying a real copy of the game. If anything, it made Scrabble bigger than ever. Hasbro ought to have employed the game designers, had a grerat version of Scrabble ready-made, and collected the ad revenue. Maybe even made extra features for paid subscribers. Now, who knows if they’ll shut it down like they did eScrabble, without providing an online alternative.

The games are still up for now — better finish them fast, or conveniently forget them if you’re losing.

Is ‘crack’ a dirty word?

12 January 2008 / / 1 Comment

I can see why this video for the Chemical Brothers Salmon Dance would bleep ‘fuck’ and ‘bitches’. Also ‘nigger’ (but why only the once?).

But why is ‘crack’ garbled at 1:52? Are drug words swears now?

Kind of. Just as drug themes are considered dangerous in movies and rated accordingly, it seems that even the mention of drugs needs to be controlled.

I hate that kind of thinking. Hearing about crack in a song wasn’t enough to make me want to try it, but it might just drive those other poor weak-willed souls over the edge. There’s a kind of elitism in censorship.

My radio version of Everlast’s Ends went through an even more skittish committee; not only did they garble ‘crack’, they also munged the words in [brackets]:

  • Shoppin’ sprees get her on her [knees]
  • If you broke she’s spittin’ / If you’re rich she might [swallow]

Thank the stars that the ears of young listeners have been spared. The times I offended my mother by saying crack, knees, and swallow.

On Australian radio they just play it as is. We’re not as afraid of words.

Award for most loaded ‘generally’ in a news article

10 January 2008 / / 2 Comments

I got a BA in International Relations from the dear old BYU, and somehow the CIA failed to hire me. Probably because I became a real linguist instead of a “linguist”, which is what they used to call an “interrogator”. But this article from BYU NewsNet explains why the campus was always awash in G-men (or perhaps they were just G-men impersonators):

The CIA, FBI and National Security like to recruit from BYU because of its honor code and the lifestyle of most of its students, according to Kinjo. They said that if a person drinks, does drugs, has explicit sex or gambles, it can put them in a compromising position. Generally, BYU students don’t get involved with those things.

I can neither confirm nor deny!

So explicit sex is right out. What other kinds of sex is there? Can you have implicit sex? Because I can tell you right now that a lot of that was going on.

Nutbars: behold your god.

9 January 2008 / / 2 Comments

Why are people suddenly surprised to find that Ron Paul is a paranoid bigoted conspiracy theorist? I knew he was a John Birch-style extremist as soon as I saw the John Birch-style extremists lining up to form his fanbase. I’ve lived among these people, heard them popping off about quitting the UN, going back on the gold standard, and abolishing the Federal Reserve and the income tax. No matter how much sense they seem to make on individual issues, you can smell the aroma of bat guano a furlong away.

People have been trying to figure out whether Ron Paul is the new Howard Dean or the new Ralph Nader. Neither; he’s the new Lyndon LaRouche.

« Older posts Newer posts »

Meta

© 2026 Good Reason

Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑