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Hip hooray! James Randi makes (his first?) public statement on religion, including… “Since religion shows up as a part of so many arguments in support of other fantastic claims, I want to show you that its embrace is of the same nature as acceptance of astrology, ESP, prophecy, dowsing, and the other myriad of strange beliefs we handle here every day.”

By the way – if your religion (or other strange belief) can demonstrate even one teeny weeny little miracle, James Randi will give you one million dollars. So how about it, all you Christians, Buddhists, Hindu and Moslems – put up or shut up. Really.

Entirely missing from the July 20 edition of the Library of Congress’ Today in History or even a mention at www.nasa.gov is the most important event in history thus far, the first successful landing by humans on another celestial body. On this day in 1969 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin ‘Buzz’ Aldrin delivered humanity out of our cradle planet. Hats off, gentlemen.

Christians in Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Georgia and Wisconsin all want to have a government founded on and following the Ten Commandments. They should take a page from the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda, who have the same values and goal.

After spending a good part of a year searching for some to view the Cremaster film series, all five films are coming to Cinema 21 in Portland this weekend. Just in time for me to be out of town. So you (and you and you) should go see them and tell me if they are as remarkable as they look. I, meanwhile, will be crying for missing them on the big screen at a nice theater. Boo hoo.

I use pine for e-mail. For many years I’d heard that pine has no filtering capabilities of its own, that one had to use something like procmail to put e-mail into different folders or delete spam. I was pleased to learn this is incorrect and a simple how-to is available for sorting (and deleting) e-mail by ‘to,’ ‘from,’ ‘subject’ or even the complete text of the message. Now pine is more compatable with Spam Assassin. Hooray.

DEAFBASE has begun training an artificial intelligence to chat (unfortunately in English, not in American Sign Language) about being Deaf. From the press release: “Because this has never been attempted specifically for deafness issues, that may raise ethnicity and moral issues when it comes to answering concerned parent’s questions when confronted with deaf baby or child.” If you have expertise in Deaf issues and can spare some time to teach a bot, meet Alice.

Live Journal is a place people can talk about their lives. ljdrama is a place where people can go to make fun of the people at Live Journal. And Something Awful is a place people can go to find out about a place where people can go to make fun of the people at Live Journal. Which makes pleasant a place people can go to learn about Something Awful, which is a place people can go to find out about ljdrama, which is a place where people can go to make fun of the people at Live Journal, which is a place people can talk about their lives.

The Dozenal Society of America (formerly The Duodecimal Society of America) is a voluntary non-profit organization for the conduct of research and education of the public in the use of Base Twelve in numeration, mathematics, weights and measures, and other branches of pure and applied science. The Dozenal Society of Great Britain states its goal even more plainly: “We want to replace decimal numeration by dozenal.”

Some music I like came to me at random. I was in the dressing room of a small clothing store when I first heard Atari Teenage Riot. But it was searching for music ‘like’ Atari Teenage Riot that brought me to Shizit. And most of the music I like comes to me that way – through recommendations and leads.

People who like Severed Heads like other music too – see here.

A pharmaceutical company published a pamphlet that included a depiction of a deity in a business suit. Rioting mobs claimed this is why they stoned vehicles and staged rasta rokos (whcih I think are a kid of traffic blockage). Two people from the company in question were arrested and all the pamphlets were seized. The company was asked to “apologise to the people who were hurt by the advertisement material” and to “clarify its stand on promotion of products.” None of the rioters were arrested. Before you click through, guess which religion was “hurt” by looking a picture (or not looking at a picture but knowing someone somewhere might look at that picture).

On behalf of all of us at pleasant, please allow me to wish the very best for Mick Foley and his family during this difficult time of transition. On July 7th, 2003, a home owned by the Foley family burned to the ground. Fortunately no one was harmed.

Unlike nearly everyone I know, I am not opposed to genetic modification of humans. Some conditions, such as cystic fibrosis, have genetic causes, and if a genetic cure is found I welcome it.

I acknowledge there are ethical as well as medical and scientific difficulties to genetic research. The article linked below is one of those difficulties, deserving of discussion and advocacy among Deaf people and their friends and family. According to the International Genetics Congress, this is is the world’s first reported case of an embryonic deafness test.

Australian news source ‘The Age’ states a hearing couple with recessive genes for deafness used ‘in vitro fertilisation’ (IVF) to screen out embryos that might become a fetus that might become a baby that might be deaf. The couple failed to achieve pregnancy.

Between 1984 and 1994 I clipped articles out of the newpaper. What did they all have in common? At the least it was that I found them interesting at the time. But they also tended to be about the strange and the new; cults, science, anomalies. With the advent of the World Wide Web my information needs were met elsewhere, and my clipping days ended. I have recently donated all thirty-four pounds of them to Fortean Times.

Here in the modern world of the future I do not collect strange and new information, I post links to it in pleasant. But there was a transition period where I was ‘clipping’ online articles. I called the collection “My Brain” and said this about it: My Brain concerns itself with the blurring of the lines between the body and the mind, society and the individual, technology and biology, physiology and behavior. These stories come to you without permission and in no particular order, just like real life. You might want to keep this URL under your hat – that’s where I keep my brain, anyway. I eventually deleted even this no-space-filling collection, but Archive Dot Org has my brain preserved in amber. I have measured a circle, begining here.

There’s one fake Walt Witman, one fake Betty Boop (herself being fake), a fake G. W. Bush and Tony Blair, you got a fake Hercule Poirot (also fake), but of course there are more fake Elivs(s) than any other fake person.

Men who Look Like Kenny Rogers Dot Com. Really.

Ernest Hemmingway Lookalike Key Lime Pie Eating Contest [1] [2] [3] [etc]. Really.

Spiders are creepy.

In today’s world of religious conflict, thank goodness there is at least one thing that can bring the faithful together. It’s religion doing what religion does best.

View the dress code for women at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty College before you come back to pleasant, young lady! Thanks to Mary for the link!

Kentucky lawmakers recently failed in their court case to post the Ten Commandments in a courthouse. The cost of their failure was to pay $121,524 to the ACLU for the cost of their successful opposition. Maybe they should have clarified which ‘Ten Commandments’ they wanted to post. Then again, Kentucky has paid nearly $700,000 to the ACLU for various failed religious lawsuits in the past ten years… so I say keep at it, boys, you’re spending tax money well.