It’s not only my birthday today… it’s the one-year anniversary of the death of Jerry Falwell. Today is a day for cake.

I’m sitting at my computer listening to watered-down classical music at 64 Kbps.  Not without reason though–NASA has shitty hold music.

NASA has announced that astronomers have found an object in our galaxy that they have been hunting for half a century.  They will reveal the object soon and I will be covering the events of the press teleconference as they happen in this post.

Despite the crappy quality of the hold music, I’m excited.  Did we find bacteria on one of Saturn’s moons?  Did we find a reclusive binary companion of our sun?  Did we discover a new black hole close enough to obliterate us one day?  Am I going to be disappointed for having too high of an expectation?  The voice that just interrupted the cheesy classical music says I’ll find out in “one to two minutes.”  Woot.

This music sounds familiar.  Is it a Vivaldi that I’ve forgotten the name of?  Is it the same hold music that COX Cable has that I listened to for hours yesterday?  Oh geez… I hope the cable and Internet don’t go out again today while I’m listening to the conference.

Yay!  It started!

Ooo!  We’ve discovered the age (<140 yrs.) of the remains of the most recent supernovae in our galaxy!  We’ve apparently not had our galaxy’s “share” of supernovae, but “a dozen or so” have been reported over the past millineum.  The supernova is ~26,000 ly away in the direction of the centre of our galaxy and has thus been obscured from our vision except with very large telescope.  After a lot of talking about particles and the new Large Hadron Collider in Europe, the first speaker basically said it’s a bigass muthafucka (or, the energy of the particles of the supernova is more than we’ll ever be able to create on Earth, even with the LHC).

The last speaker is explaining how supernovae create heavy elements from lighter elements.  He theorises that our interest in supernovae is a self-interest.  The heavy elements, “like the iron in our blood,” are very important to us, so supernovae are very important to us.  Line of the day:  “We’re all stardust.”  ♪This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, the Age of Aquariuuuuuuuuuus!♫

He’s now explaining how if we sat on the crust of a giant pizza, we wouldn’t normally see a mushroom toward the middle of the pizza due to all the mozzarella cheese in the way.  I’m guessing he’s hungry, but the analogy is good.

“It’s like one of those crime scene shows where they study a death.  It’s a stellar death, alright, and the corpse is still warm.”

I like this guy.

On to some questions!

What can we find out from this supernova that we can’t find out from others?

It’s close enough to be followed for more than a couple years, unlike the recent supernova that we saw explode in the Large Magellenic Cloud.  This is the first supernova we’ve seen between the explosion state and the dying remnant state. It’s a rare find.

Does this discovery pave the way to have the moon crickets shipped off of Earth?  Does it have anything to do with the [racist term] supernova of 2007?

Pass.

How is it expanding so fast?

14 KM per second is unprecedented for the expansion of a supernovae remnant after 140 years.  This must mean the density of the matter around it is very low.   It’s a bit unusual to see one moving so fast 140 years later, but it’s not impossible.

This brings the total of young supernovae remnants to 10.  Where are we going to find the other 50?

And then my cable cut out.  Dammit!

Well, it’s back to the shitty hold music from COX Cable.

The conference will be replayed on a loop for the rest of the week.  You can access it toll-free at 866-501-2957; 203-369-1825 for the international crowd.

It’s not moon bacteria or green space vixens, but it’s still pretty damn cool.  Thanks, NASA, for making life awesome again.  Thanks, COX Communications for sucking the awesome back out of it.

I found this video from Hovind parrot, VenomFangX a few moments ago.  I’m not really bulimic, but I think I might have chronic vomiting disorder now that I’ve watched all 11 eye-gougingly painful minutes of VenomFangX’s “Why I am not an Atheist”.  It’s so self-pleasing (something Jesus was adamantly against, if I remember correctly) that he might as well curl up into a ball on camera and lick his own taint for 11 more minutes of my precious time.  Drinking game rules below the fold.

• First, you’ll want a preliminary shot to prepare you for the shitty audio.  I had this same microphone stuck to the side of my old beige CRT in 1995.
• When he pseudo-surreptitiously calls Atheists bad people or immoral people (saying it without explicitly saying it, but not hiding it well at all), take a shot of your favourite beer.  Liquor will kill you with this game.
• When he uses the same pseudo-surreptitiousness to say that Atheists (and other irrational people) have no meaning and no substance to their lives–showing that he was clearly never an Atheist to begin with–take a shot.
• When he grins/giggles during arrogant remarks, take a shot.
• When he makes a grammatical error or a bit of drawl enters his voice, take another shot.
• When he makes a straw-man representation of what Atheists (and other rational people) believe, take a shot and punch the back of your hand as hard as you can.
• When he makes a straw-man representation of what Atheists (and other rational people) do, take a shot and punch the wall as hard as you can.

This should send most people to their graves with alcohol, but for the heavy-hitters here’s a few bonus rules:

• After any statement that implies that Atheists recognise the existence of God but choose to go against him–again, a sign that he was never an Atheist to begin with–take a shot.
• When he changes voice to ask a rhetorical question and slips into a bout of the worst acting since Gigli, take a shot.
• When he makes an analogy that doesn’t make sense, take a shot.
• When he takes the belief of one Atheist to represent all Atheists, take a shot.
• For every verse that “proves” that Jesus was God, take a shot.
• For every ID argument directly stolen from Kent Hovind and his ghouls colleagues, take a shot.
• When he says that he can prove God by proving that the universe is not a turtle, drink the rest of your beer and cry for the sake of the world.

Good luck and don’t drink and drive!

This is for entertainment purposes only.  Playing this drinking game assumes the risk of alcohol poisoning.

Again… another title that should speak for itself, but I’m going to write something under this one too.  Feel free to stop reading now… you already have the gist of it.

The Pope, completely disregarding the well-being of Africans sweltering in the AIDS-ridden desert, completely disregarding the rights of women not to have 18 children, praised the Catholic ban of condoms.

That’s not what I want to pick at.  It’s old news–tragic news, but old.  You’ve heard that rant millions of times.

What I do want to pick at is the reason why he’s jizzing on his ruby red slippers over the condom ban:

What was true yesterday remains true even today.

- Pope Benedict XVI

Here’s some stuff that was “true” yesterday:

• Earth is flat.
• The stars, sun (not a star), moon and planets go around Earth affixed to crystal spheres.
• The moon gives off its own light.
• The sky is a solid firmament.
• Earth was created on Sunday 23 October 4004 BCE.
• If not enough virgin and enemy blood is spilled on the Aztec Pyramid of the Sun in every 52-year cycle, the sun won’t rise and the gods will die.
• All diseases and maladies are caused by bad bile, bad blood, black magic, gods, demons and djnns.
• The waves are caused by Poseidon and Neptune churning the seas.
• The whole of Earth was created by an egg hatching on a wizard’s knee as he lay in an infinite plan of water.

According to the Pope, all this is true today!  It was true then, it must be true now.

Tradition does not create fact.

I knew it! I just KNEW it! Putting your penis in a collapsed star feels MUCH better than having intercourse with the rings of Saturn! Thanks, Xenu!

from www.funnyordie.com posted with vodpod

Frank Zindler recently asked the blogosphere what they wanted to see in American Atheists, Inc. as they shift directions following the dismissal of Ellen Johnson.  High on my list of improvements that AA needs to make before I consider rejoining are these:  more member involvement in decisions, less bureaucracy in general, join the Secular Coalition of America and stop being so belligerent about partnering with other organisations, but most of all, administrative transparency.  I want to know what any organisation I’m involved with is planning on doing and saying before they do and say it and I want to know why.

If that’s too much to ask of Mr. Zindler or any of the other American Atheists higher-ups, I would suggest a career change.

After Mrs. Johnson was fired, I thought the organisation would head toward a brighter future.  I was wrong, boy howdy!  I was ever so wrong!

Let us examine the evolution of the press releases, shall we?

First, the news was vague:

1.  Ellen Johnson is leaving her post as President of the organization.

“Is leaving?”  So she’s deciding to leave of her own accord?  Good.  After causing such an uproar in the Atheist community, it was the most dignified and respectable way for her to go.  She realised her mistakes and stepped down to focus her strength on raising her children.

Very responsible and very noble of her.  It’s Nixonesque… in a positive way.

BUT WAIT!

2.  Ellen Johnson is no longer President of the organization.

WHOA WHOA WOAH!  Hold on there!  That’s a significant change in wording!  All of a sudden, she’s no longer leaving, being the object performing the action, she is simply “no longer the president!”  This could mean anything!  Anything at all!  Did she quit?  Was she fired?  Was she consumed by a tiger?  Did she get plastic surgery and a name change and now ‘he’ is the president of the organisation?  What a gripping cliffhanger this is turning out to be!

3.  Johnson stated that she was “fired.”

Her “personal reasons” were that you changed the locks on her and left her high and dry?  Really?  That sounds more like a “personal issue” of Mr. Zindler to me.  (Sorry, Frank.  One thing you’ll have to learn as you run American Atheists is that all the positive things the organisation does reflect well on the whole Atheist community and all of the negative things the organisation does fall solely on your head.)  You didn’t have to be honest about firing Ellen.  You could have opted for Dan Silverman’s approach of vagueness to the point of meaninglessness.  You, however, decided to say that she left her position (she didn’t leave… she was ejected from her position) for “personal reasons.”

Many of us called for apologies from Mrs. Johnson and showed concern and disgust for her call to political apathy by Atheists, but none of us wanted her to be fired.  At least not the more rational of the bloggers.  She had a fantastic 13-year career with American Atheists and her few recent faux-pas were not justified grounds for firing her.  A firm reprimand would have been nice.

And then after Ellen spilled the beans that she was fired, Zindler ‘fessed up.

4.  Ellen Johnson was involuntarily removed from the office of President of American Atheists, Inc. and from the office of President of the other four corporations.

It took a lot of pussyfooting around, but the truth came out.

Frank, here’s what I want from American Atheists, Inc. in the future.  I want members to be consulted regarding major changes in policy and major statements.  I want members informed in advance when major events such as this occur.  I want to know why all major decisions are made, including the firing of staff.  As a member of the rationalist community, I want to know your rationale for doing things like this.

Once more, if that’s too much to ask, find a new job.

Hat tip to Hemant.

I think the title will speak for itself, but I’m going to write a post anyway.

Hillary should be very pissed and hurt for winning in Indiana.  The group of Republicans who voted for Hillary, pushing her past Obama in the primary, voted for her as a joke.  Carrie White won prom queen and Hillary Clinton won in Indiana.  Neither of them were popular or deserving of the title, and both elections ended in hundreds of children dying in a crepe-paper-fuelled inferno.  Well, maybe not that last bit.  But don’t say I didn’t warn you when it happens.

Rush Limboob,  everyone’s favourite lard-assed conservative lunatic, called out his cult followers unthinking drones mindless Republican zombie horde fans to make a mockery of the Democratic primary system and, indeed, the entire American election process by ordering them to flock to the Democratic polling stations and vote for Hillary Clinton.  This caused Hillary to unfairly win in Indiana and kept her on the campaign trail where she can continue fucking the party in the rear.

Rush Limbhitler’s campaign, “Project Chaos,” is a reprehensible move by a scared-shitless conservative.  Rush Libaauuuugh (the sound you make when puking) is so scared that Barrack Obama will defeat John McCain that he tampered with a federal election and should be pulled from his radio show and made to serve the maximum time in a federal prison.

“Rush Limbaugh was tampering with the primary and the GOP has clearly declared they want Clinton as a candidate.”

- John Kerry
Why does he still matter?

While there is no law (yet) against voting for Hillary Clinton (Maybe one of my more legal-savvy readers could draft one…) there are certainly several reams of paper in the US Code of Law written on tampering with a federal election.

Why don’t we prosecute this one?  Tampering with an election is not only despicable, it’s illegal.  Oh… that’s right… the government won’t uphold the laws against election tampering because the overwhelming majority of our elected representatives, and the corporations who purchased those positions for them, are guilty of having forced, non-consensual anal sex with democracy as well.  I almost forgot.

What’s so wrong with letting candidates win on their own merits?  I thought that’s what democracy was.  Is it really just a room full of fat business men chuckling while they choose our Presidents for us and we while away our time doing silly things like campaigning and voting?  I must be so naïve to think that possibly… just possibly… democracy wasn’t a game for pundits and journalists to play when pushing around their power to scare the sheepish Americans into following their every whim.  I guess a green little independent journalist like myself doesn’t understand that democracy is just a façade to hide the fact that our voices are essentially insignificant.  All hail the American Fascist Party!  Democracy is dead!  Demokratie ist tot! Demokratie bleibt tot! Und wir haben sie getötet.

Terra.cl has 35 gorgeous pictures of the volcano Chaitén erupting at night.  Chaitén erupted from 2 May to 4 May.  4,000 people were displaced and one woman was killed.

Terra .cl has more. at Tormenta eléctrica en erupción del volcán Chaitén.

H/T: WIRED Science

I just sat through two hours of hellfire and brimstone through music… and loved it.

Giuseppe Verdi, Atheist and renowned opera composer, wrote his Requiem in 1874 following the death of his long-time friend, poet and novelist Alessandro Manzoni.  It is taken from the Roman Catholic Mass for the Dead.  On its completion, it was criticised for being too theatrical (Verdi wrote mostly operas) and irreverent.

I have heard Verdi’s Requiem many times, although this was the first live performance I attended, and I have a strong feeling that the irreverence is intentional.  This is supported by at least one of his many biographers.

Verdi focused on the “Dies Irae” section of the Mass and centred his entire Requiem around it.  “Dies Irae”  is a poem from the thirteenth century that is often struck from the Requiem Mass due to its intense imagery of damnation and Judgement Day, something the Catholic church now likes to under-emphasise for P.R. reasons or something of the like.  Verdi used and emphasised the movement to lambaste the doctrine of Hell that was touted out by the church to strike fear into its followers and keep them in check.  Verdi’s “Dies Irae” movement is terrifying and chilling with trumpets surrounding the performance hall and large bass drums framing the stage.  It can only be described as powerful and discomforting… and any time you can make believers feel uncomfortable listening to Christian doctrine is time well spent.

Of all the requiems I have heard, I most thoroughly enjoy Verdi’s Requiem and its intense musical stylisations.

Now I’d like to critique this individual performance, so humour me while I don my fag-hat.

Tonight’s performance by the Roanoke Symphony Orchestra and Chorus was exceedingly impressive.  The chorus was intense and very well disciplined.  With over two hundred voices, I was amazed at how crisp and controlled the pianissimos were in the opening “Requiem and Kyrie.”  The talk-sung lines of the “Dies Irae” were also very well controlled and exceptionally creepy.  I had chills running up and down my spine for the entire first hour of the Requiem, and not just because of the nauseatingly powerful perfume-marinades of the octogenarians I was crudely sandwiched between.

John Hugo, the Chorus Master, must have prepared the gigantic chorus with rigorous training involving bullwhips and cattle prods.  Nothing else–well, almost nothing else–could account for such vocal precision.  The chorus consisted of the Roanoke Symphony Chorus, the Jefferson Choral Society, the Radford University Choral Union and the Liberty University Concert Choir and Chamber Singers.  I loved the irony of Jerry Falwell’s students participating in the performance of such a famous musical attack on the church.  If I recall correctly, they also participated in the chorus during the equally blasphemous–and equally impressive–Carmina Burana last year.

The orchestra, led by the inimitable conductor, Maestro David Wiley, was fantastic and covered their few mistakes well.  Maestro Wiley, as always, was as much fun to watch as his orchestra was to listen to.  With ninja-like moves (You would understand exactly how accurate this description is if you have ever attended one of his performances.) he was able to keep the entire orchestra and the massive chorus under his complete control.  The fiery Maestro is notorious for running out of limbs while directing his orchestra and bringing in an entire chorus by raising an eyebrow.  He was even able to hush the audience from jumping into spontaneous applause between movements with just an outstretched finger.  The 293 musicians on stage and the potential 2,240 audience members responded to every twitch of the Maestro’s muscular system.

Unfortunately, the four soloists were not at the same level as the rest of the performance.  The mezzo-soprano, Eugenie Grunewald, and the bass, Robert Honeysucker (yes… Honeysucker), were very good, so they are immune from my critical wrath tonight.  The tenor, Drew Slatton, left a little to be desired, but his arm was in a sling, so he has a sympathy vote from me and I’ll let him slide this time.  The soprano, Carter Scott, is a talentless, vain bitch.  There… I said it.  Allow me to cover her vanity before I lambaste her painfully obvious lack of talent.  Remember:  my fag-hat is on and I’m about to bust a cap in this sista.

The first thing I noticed, before she even opened her fire-engine-red mouth, was that she thought she was better than every other human being in the concert hall.  She was wearing a blue sequined dress with a sheer white shawl over her shoulders.   For those of you who don’t regularly attend concerts, when there are almost three hundred people on stage and they’re all wearing black, white and gray, you do not wear blue.  It would behove you more to be naked on stage than to be wearing a coloured, sequined dress among a sea of black and white.

Halfway through the second hour of the concert, she decided to remove her shawl to reveal her pasty, pointy shoulders.  This is completely inappropriate in a classical concert, not to mention that the straps on her dress would be most fitting at a middle school homecoming dance.  Her whole ensemble looked like a pageant dress… a pageant dress from a Miss Southeast Missouri competition held in a high school gymnasium.   To complete the picture, she was slathered in prostitute-red lipstick which I must assume she applied with a paint roller as if she were painting the side of a barn.

The picture next to Carter Scott’s obviously self-written bio–which was more padded than her chest–was clearly taken twenty years ago and was photoshopped into oblivion even then.  Seriously, I don’t know what it is with sopranos and refusing to look their age.  My mom is a fabulous soprano and she doesn’t wear hooker make-up or dig up decades-old headshots and hope that the audience is nearsighted.

I could excuse the vanity and the inflated program biography if she had the talent to make up for it.  She didn’t.  True, Verdi is a challenging composer and the solo soprano parts are incredibly nerve-wracking, but if you can’t do it, don’t, and she couldn’t do it.  She could never just hit a note.  She had to “scoop” up to a note from a few steps below it at the start of every phrase.  This was made especially unbearable because her thick-as-gravy (the kind of gravy that you choke on and die from) vibrato.  If you remember the fat opera-singing duck from the cartoon Duck Tales, envision her as a skinny-ish soprano with failed lip implants and you have the “critically acclaimed” Carter Scott.  I don’t know if it was the constant “scooping” of notes, the unbearable and inconsistent vibrato or the painfully flat notes in what would have been one of the most beautiful parts of the Requiem that did it for me, but something about her slip-shod performance tonight made me want to spork out my eyeballs.  Her bio mentions three Verdi operas in which she received “critical acclaim.”  Being such a Verdi aficionado, why was her voice nervous and fluttery for the first hour of the Mass?

Scott sang much more confidently in the second hour, but one can assume she had a few gulps of gin during intermission to calm her nerves.  Her nervousness was gone, but it was replaced by a new impediment:  she was consistently half a beat behind the chorus any time they were supposed to sing in unison with the soprano.  In one section, I believe it was the “Agnus Dei,” the four soloists are supposed to sing in unison, each in their own octave.  The four-octave split is generally very impressive.  Once again, she came in late, throwing off the mezzo-soprano who then dove to a flatness of almost a full step.  This sent the entire chorus scurrying about the scale like mice trying to find which soloist was not involved in the train wreck to take their pitch off of.  Not only was the “critically acclaimed” Ms. Scott ruining her own performance, she had to drag other people down with her.  Within a measure, everyone was back on their feet and none of the seventy-and-older crowd seemed to notice or mind or be awake, but a few of us music fags in the audience cringed and gritted our teeth.

Maybe she just had an off day.

Apart from the disaster of a soprano, this was one of the most impressive performances of Verdi’s Requiem I’ve ever heard.  If I was wearing a hat, it would be off for Maestro Wiley and Chorus Master Hugo right now.  Bravo, sirs!

Giuseppe Verdi wrote twenty-six operas, his most famous being Aida, La traviata, Rigoletto and Otello.  He was an Atheist, philanderer and all-around badass.

Frank Zindler is temporarily taking over the position of president of American Atheists, Inc.

He commented on my post about Ellen’s resignation:

You are most welcome to share your thoughts and criticisms with me at any time. As Acting President of American Atheists, Inc., I need all the advice and information I can get if I am to navigate successfully between the Scylla and Charybdis that loom up not only before my organization but threaten all separationist and reality-based organizations in these perilous times.

For reason,

Frank R. Zindler, Acting President
American Atheists, Inc.

I talked to him via email about my concerns with the the organisation’s previous administration,  and he had some good replies.

Since no one seems to have a shortage of opinions, you can leave them here and dialogue with others about them.  I will send Mr. Zindler a link to this post so he can read your comments.