Blog Archives
Style, class, bravado.
Found this in my spam filter:
One of the more impressive blogs Ive seen. Thanks so much for keeping the internet classy for a change. Youve got style, class, bravado. I mean it. Please keep it up because without the internet is definitely lacking in intelligence.
Now I’m not one to turn down gratuitous ego stroking, even from a spambot, but what really made me laugh was that this comment talking about how classy I am was on the post titled “Oh look, more angry depressing shit“. That’s me, keeping it classy!
So tired
Spent the day driving all over California. But it was a good day, a fun day spent with good people.
That’s all I have for now.
Ex-gays and the Anoka-Hennepin School District
Doesn’t it sound like the world’s most awkward band name?
I found this article very interesting. I’ve written about Minnesota’s Anoka-Hennepin School District before, and probably will again. It’s nice to see the school district standing up to the Parents Action League, gives me hope that maybe there really will be a better future for the children in those schools.
The Parents Action League is classified as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a title they wear with pride. That probably tells you just about everything you need to know about them, really.
Something the PAL was pushing for pretty hard in their list of demands was including “ex-gay” material in the school libraries and counseling offices, and generally providing access and credibility to ex-gay organizations. Frankly you start to wonder if someone has a money interest, there. Read the rest of this entry
Forged in the heart of a star
In my last post I mentioned our connection to the stars and the universe, and I’ve been thinking about that some more. Consider for a moment that every atom that makes up your body was part of a star once. Think about some of the implications.
There’s a young Earth creationist group whose favorite tactic is the phrase “Were you there?” They train children to ask this question in schools, at museums, anytime someone talks about something happening millions of years ago. It’s every bit as childish and annoying as you imagine, all the irritation of a four year old repeatedly asking “why?” with none of the actual curiosity.
The thing is, from a certain point of view it’s a perfectly honest answer to say “Yes”. Yes, I was there when the dinosaurs died out, and so were you. The atoms that make up my body were already here, in the air, the ground, the oceans, and the plants and animals, even in the dinosaurs themselves. Scattered across the world, unbinding from one molecule and binding into another, and passing down through the ages until the time when, for a brief while, they would come together to form me. The same is true of you and everyone else who’s ever lived. Read the rest of this entry
Full of stars
Phil Plait of Bad Astronomy has once again blown my mind. If you never click another link on this blog, click this one. It’s a pan & zoomable hi res image of the Milky Way disc. There are a billion stars in that picture.
Pick any random spot and zoom in and feel amazed. I liked zooming in on the galactic core, but there’s no boring spots that I saw (except for the blacked out sections hiding the alien civilizations ;þ). There’s so much going on in there, and every pixel represents an area vastly larger than that ever occupied by humans throughout our entire history.
Naturally, it had to be taken from Earth, since we can’t get any cameras far enough away to make any difference. Which means there’s still much more of our galaxy not visible in that image. Read the rest of this entry
Just punching the clock
It’s never easy to confront your weaknesses. In the movies it’s always played up as a big dramatic turning point to stand up and do that, and then everything’s okay. Facing them once makes them go away, and everything’s just fine in the epilogue and the music plays and the credits roll.
In the real world, that kind of personal change doesn’t happen quickly or all at once. It’s not one dramatic moment that shifts how you deal with the world instantly, it’s doing that over and over again. Sometimes it gets easier with repetition, and sometimes it doesn’t, it’s just as hard every time.
This blog is coming up on one year now, and I really don’t know if, on average, it’s any easier than when I started.
Each time I sit down to write here is unique. Sometimes I just bang out 500 words like they were already there just waiting to be typed, others I’m practically screaming with frustration by the second paragraph. I haven’t quite worked out what makes the difference.
Fiction is much, much harder than what I’m doing now, just sitting and typing whatever wanders into my head. It seems like the more structured something is, the harder it is for me to write.
I really should work on that space opera serial some more. The plan there is to have a very solidly developed setting and characters, and then totally improvise the story. I figure I could write one installment a week, or two weeks, or once a month, whatever, and just keep going until I write myself into a corner. Maybe if I just spend, say, 45 minutes every day going through my notes for it and adding a little to them I can be ready to start soon. I’ll give that a try.
Well, that’s all for tonight. Just some random thoughts. Maybe something more interesting tomorrow. Take care everyone.
In which I wander among many topics
Was looking over my site stats, as I do sometimes, and I saw a referral from Daily Pagan News, who promoted my post “Curses“. Thanks for the link!
One of the first things I saw from DPN’s home page was this.
Gave me a chuckle. It was sourced to another tumblr page called teenwitchwendy. I’m not going to check that one out just now, because that leads to link-jumping all night and I have stuff to do. But the name made me think.
When I was a teenager, I knew a lot of pagans. Some Wiccans and Druids, but most of them weren’t so structured and simply called themselves “Pagan”. They were a diverse bunch, happy to agree on the broad outlines of the universe and just sort of fudge the details.
More than once somebody, usually an older person who was kind but not really “part of the group”, expressed the opinion that this whole “alternate lifestyle” thing was just a phase and everyone would grow up and become conservative Christians just like them. Now I haven’t kept touch with most of those people, but as far as I can tell that hasn’t happened. Sure, we all grew and changed, but I’m not aware of anyone who actually did that. Read the rest of this entry
Oh look, more angry depressing shit
A friend sent me this link, calling it “blog fodder”. I guess that much is true, but sometimes you read something and just want to kill the messenger.
Georgia passed the “Women as Livestock” bill. I had to check the date on that, but it says March 31 so I guess there’s not much hope that it’s just a very bad April fools prank. It bans all abortions past 20 weeks. There was a slight concession made for cases when the fetus was dead, not expected to survive, or likely to kill or physically injure the woman. What she wants, how she feels about things, her own pain and suffering? Irrelevant, they aren’t addressed at all. She’s just a vessel, nobody cares about her wishes.
For extra fun, they stipulate that during an abortion procedure the fetus must emerge alive. Seriously, these shitheads give us the bullshit line of “fetal pain”, and then set up the law to cause as much as possible.
Man, fuck Georgia. Read the rest of this entry
Horrors from the past!
So I was going through some old papers today and I found something remarkably awful: Angsty teenage poetry! I’m guessing I must have written it when I was about seventeen, give or take. And because I didn’t get any blog post written today (and I’m feeling a bit cruel) I’m going to share it with you. Flee while you still can!
“Confusion (The Self)”
What is this place?
Who are these people?
I know all their faces
know the sound of each voice
I know all their memories
every thought, every choice
I remember the touch
of their skin and their hair
it’s all so familiar
but when was I there?
I savor the flavor
of their blood, sweat and tears
I’m tasting their souls
all their hopes, all their fears
I love them all dearly
this alien flight
can’t wait to kill them as
we make love tonight
is this my mind, my soul,
or some rampant dimension of the self?
is this me?
what am I?
Yes folks, that’s the real deal there. I don’t remember writing that and I have no idea what was going on at the time. But I’m sure whatever it was I was dramatic about it.
Anyway, that’s all for tonight. Hopefully I’ll have something new for you tomorrow.
Random thought for the day
Ever see Mallrats? The second of Kevin Smith’s New Jersey series, and usually considered the weakest, it had a character who was a teenager writing a book about sex, which she researched by having lots of sex with different men that she carefully recorded.
I’d completely forgotten about the movie and the character until out of the blue this morning when I suddenly thought: “Her results are going to be skewed because all her subjects were guys who were willing to have sex with a 15 year old girl.”
Considering the already pessimistic tone she had for the content of her work, that can’t have changed things in a happy direction.
Jury cop out post
I have jury duty today, which means you get whatever I could toss together quickly last night. Since for me it’s “last night” right now as I write this, I’m having a little trouble with tenses.
Jen at Blag Hag is having her annual blog census this week. I took it, and was fascinated by the “Gender” question. It said “Check all that apply” and offered these options:
- Male
- Female
- Genderqueer
- Transgender
- Transsexual
- Agendered / Neutrois
To be honest, it makes me feel a little boring. Read the rest of this entry
Testing!
The post I’ve been working on is taking longer than expected, and I’m getting sick of working on it tonight. But I thought of something neat: MMS can send to email, and WordPress allows posting by email, so it should be possible for me to post from my phone!
Which is what I’m trying now, if you can read this, I’ve successfully posted to my blog from my phone, and that’s awesome.
Lazy Sunday.
I never managed to get any writing done at all today. Oh well, slacking off is what we have weekends for! Should be back tomorrow with something. Have a good night everyone.
Unearthing another old horror from the Catholic Church
You know, if any organization could properly be called “evil”, it must be the Catholic Church. It’s rare that a month goes by without some new atrocity coming to light, usually something related to covering up, enabling, or blaming the victims of child rape, but occasionally it’s something different, like telling Africans that condoms spread AIDS, or excommunicating a doctor for saving a little girl’s life, or ordering hospitals to let women die rather than terminate a lethal pregnancy.
This is bad even by those standards. Read the rest of this entry
The American Life League: Fun with Numbers!
Can’t believe I forgot this in my last post! On the bright side it lets me get two posts out of one subject, so that’s handy. (On the down side, it’s kinda dull)
In that video, the American Life League shows some numbers for abortions provided (329,445) and birth control pills dispensed (315,399,600). No sources are given for these numbers, nor is there a time frame provided, though I was able to find the abortion figure from Planned Parenthood’s report for 2010.
Trying to figure out the birth control figure was interesting. As you know, unless you’re a right-wing media personality, most birth control requires a woman to take a pill every day, regardless of whether she’s having sex or not. So on average a woman requires 365 pills every year. Simple enough.
Depending on what you use for the length of the year, whether you count leap years etc, 315,399,600 gives us 863,517.04 to 864,108.49 women who could be provided birth control over a one year period with that number of pills. For simplicity’s sake, let’s round that off to 864,000 women over one year. This is all still assumption, of course, because neither sources nor time frames were provided. But I wanted to run with it a bit because the perspective is interesting.
According to the US Census, in 2010 there were 308,745,538 Americans, of which 50.8% were women. That gives us 156,842,733.304 women in America. Since we’re already rounding off to the nearest thousand, let’s call that 156,843,000. That means that huge number of birth control pills, 315,399,600, is enough to provide 0.55% of American women with birth control for one year. A little over half of one percent, just five or six out of a thousand women.
Meanwhile, Planned Parenthood’s own information tells us that they provide various forms of contraception to 2.2 million people every year, about 39.5% of which are oral contraceptives. I fiddled with that a bit and came close to AL’s figure, but not quite there. Curious. You’d think all contraception would be equally evil, but for some reason the pill is worse.
It’s almost as if female sexuality is considered weird and bad, while male sexuality is normal. Thwarting God’s Will by taking a pill to get an erection is fine, but doing it by taking a pill to prevent ovulation is bad.
This is boring and getting depressing, so I’m going to wrap it up. Planned Parenthood is one of the few organizations out there that seem to genuinely make the world a better place with everything they do, or at least everything they aim to do. Their website is wonderful, filled with useful information that everyone should have access to, and I strongly recommend that you visit it. Maybe make a donation while you’re there.
You can click on over now, I’m done here.
The evil addictions of Planned Parenthood!
I’m running into Poe’s Law here. I genuinely have no idea whether or not this is a parody. If it were just the videos I’d assume it was, but after looking over the website a little I find it hard to believe that anyone could work this hard on a parody. Here’s the video:
It’s just amazing, isn’t it? I saw this Monday on a post by Christina at WWJTD, who probably wrote more coherently about it than I will. Frankly I’m tempted to just point and laugh.
If you don’t feel like spending six and a half minutes of your precious life watching this shit, and I can’t say I blame you, it directly compares Planned Parenthood to drug dealers. Seriously. Saying that PP gets kids addicted to sex so that they can sell abortions. I am not making this up, it’s right there in the video. You see why I’m not sure whether they’re joking or not? Read the rest of this entry
Abducted
I was kidnapped on Monday, and my day trip turned out a bit longer than expected. So now I’m playing catch-up, which probably means short posts, in theory, but I saw a video Monday that was so crazy I might have to do a detailed break down of it.
Anyway, should have something else up today, sorry for the delay!
The Adventures of Leo Tarvi 