OVO

Two obsessed “Lord of the Rings” fans devise a way to meet their favorite celebrities: create a phony charity and invite the stars to host “fundraising events.” Meet the stars and pocket the cash – a heist made in heaven! Until they told one lie too many… Strap yourself in for a wild ride through the scams, schemes, pseuicides, fake identities, faux charities, phony male appendages, movie stars, big business shafting the underdog, law enforcement apathy, and snarky hilarity in this outrageous true story.

On Thanksgiving Day, November 23, 1939, Franklin Roosevelt carved the turkey at the annual Thanksgiving Dinner at Warm Springs, Georgia, and wished all Americans across the country a Happy Thanksgiving. Unfortunately, his greeting went unanswered in some states; many Americans were not observing Thanksgiving on the same day as the President. Instead, they were waiting to carve their turkeys on the following Thursday because November 30th in many states was the official Thanksgiving Day. Two Thanksgivings? Why were Americans celebrating a national holiday on two different days?

Thousands and thousands of cheesecake and nude photographs were taken during the late forties and early fifties. Virtually all of these pictures are the same in the respect that they could have been taken anywhere at anytime. They have no identity: they depict unknown models in unknown locations. The inside of any room looks pretty much the same as any other room. A stretch of beach, a grove of trees all look the same no matter where the location. The Spiderpool on the other hand is readily identifiable; it is a real place anchored in time and space. No where else on earth, as far as we know, looks anything like it. We can almost tell when and where it is. It has a character and an enchantment which speaks to us across the span of fifty years. It demands that we learn more about it. So we find ourselves on a quest that is equal parts mystery, nostalgia, and enigma; searching for a tangible link to the golden past. Join us.

SchoolTool is a project to develop a common global school administration infrastructure that is freely available under an Open Source licence. SchoolTool will provide a robust and reliable means of managing their school or classroom, saving time on routine tasks like managing class rosters, tracking student attendance, assessment and demographic information, helping teachers coordinate their schedules and reserve resources like projectors and computer labs. The system will be accessible through a web interface or specialized desktop applications. SchoolTool‘s interface will be easily translated for use around the world and accessible to people with disabilites.

What would it take to convince you that fraud favoring the election of George W. Bush occured in the 2004 Presidential election? Would finding garbage bags full of tampered records do the trick? Or do you need more evidence, lots more, a great big whole bunch more?

The Orphanage of Cast-Off Mascots.

Dr. Condoleezza Rice completed a six year tenure as Stanford University ‘s Provost in 1999, during which she was the institution’s chief budget and academic officer. As Provost she was responsible for a $1.5 billion annual budget and the academic program involving 1,400 faculty members and 14,000 students. Among those she served as Provost is Professor Ben Barres. Professor Barres works in the Department of Neurobiology and Developmental Biology at Stanford. Professor Barres is also a female-to-male gender crosser.

Could it be that Dr. Rice is okay with people of non-traditional sexuality? Here’s a quote, with added emphasis, from the 2002 National Commemoration of the Days of Remembrance: “As our world prevails through these difficult days, and as we pray for peace for all the children of Abraham, it is important to recall not just the Holocaust’s horrors, but also its heroes [...] We draw strength from these names – all familiar to our lips – and we gain inspiration from their stories. Less often, we think of the other heroes, the countless ordinary Jews, Roma, Jehovah’s Witnesses, gay people, and disabled men and women who defied the machinery of murder with quiet acts of courage and piety. Their names are mostly unknown to all but Him, yet their lives too instruct. ”

Condoleezza Rice’s personal style was rated highest by gay men (5.3), but gay women were relatively unimpressed (3.5). But whatever queer people think of her, what does she think of queer people? What crosses her mind when her boss talks about an ammendment to the Constitution to issure that the more than 1,000 rights, benefits and responsibilities that are available to married couples remain unavailable to same-sex couples who are denied the right to marry?

Dr. Rice, your boss has already said that since he doesn’t read, he relies on you for information about the world. Now is a good time to give him a nudge in the direction of more, not less, civil rights for tax-paying queer citizens of the United States of America.

Some fine grown-up type writing going on at GOD’S WIFE: The Story of a Sex Worker.

I loves me some Chris Ware art. There is no online Acme Novelty Library, but there is one Web site that Ware designed: the Ragtime Ephemeralist.

In this first ever television history of disbelief, Jonathan Miller leads viewers on a personal journey exploring the origins of his own lack of belief and uncovering the hidden story of atheism. The series is titled “Jonathan Miller’s Brief History of Disbelief” and will consist of three segments. In “Shadow of Doubt,” Miller visits the absent Twin Towers to consider the religious implications of 9/11 and meets Arthur Miller and the philosopher Colin McGinn. He searches for evidence of the first ‘unbelievers’ in Ancient Greece and examines some of the modern theories around why people have always tended to believe in mythology and magic. In “Noughts and Crosses,” Miller wonders how (with the domination of Christianity from 500 AD) disbelief began to re-emerge in the 15th and 16th centuries. He discovers that division within the Church played a more powerful role than the scientific discoveries of the period. He also visits Paris, the home of the 18th century atheist, Baron D’Holbach, and shows how politically dangerous it was to undermine the religious faith of the masses. In “The Final Hour,” the history of disbelief continues with the ideas of self-taught philosopher Thomas Paine, the revolutionary studies of geology and the evolutionary theories of Darwin. Miller looks at the Freudian view that religion is a ‘thought disorder’. He also examines his motivation behind making the series touching on the issues of death and the religious fanaticism of the 21st century.

The above will be shown on Ruper Merdock’s Fox Network, replacing regularly scheduled prime-time programs. No, scratch that, it will be on BBC4. All TV is the same, anyway.

The End of Faith by Sam Harris is quite a read. “The End of Faith provides a harrowing glimpse of mankind’s willingness to suspend reason in favor of religious beliefs, even when these beliefs inspire the worst of human atrocities. Harris argues that in the presence of weapons of mass destruction, we can no longer expect to survive our religious differences indefinitely. Most controversially, he maintains that “moderation” in religion poses considerable dangers of its own: as the accommodation we have made to religious faith in our society now blinds us to the role that faith plays in perpetuating human conflict.” Here’s the first ten pages, and here’s an interview with the author.

Ghyll is a role playing game only defined by entries in a wiki-based encyclopedia, and it’s the players’ responsibilities to write that encyclopedia.

Greetings, international readers! You may have heard that we in the USA just elected an illiterate tyrant to the highest office in the land. While this may be the case, it is also quite possible that there has been widespread tampering with the machines that counted the votes. So please don’t hate us or kill us yet. And please tell your news agencies to broadcast this story, because it is not being broadcast appropriately here.

The Joy of Micropamphleting + 250 Free Business Cards = Fun

On September 11th, 2001, religion (represented this time by Islam) did what it does best and killed thousands of people by demolishing buildings full of innocent people. A few year later, science (represented this time by NASA) did what it does best and explored the surface of Mars by remote using two small rovers. The connection between 9/11 and Mars is that on each Mars rover a curved piece of metal the size of a credit card and adorned with the American flag was cut out of debris from the World Trade Center.

E-mail like this is why I love my brother…



Wake up

Get pissed at the country

Download immigration forms for Canada and the UK

Find out that I am eligible to immigrate to either

Get more pissed off

Go to the church of Slayer

Enjoy a "greatest hits" type set

Venue would not allow the blood wall

Ponder my next move



… I only wish we lived closer together.

Daily Rotten for November 3, 2004, has a fine compilation of articles on the failure of voting machines in US elections, and how these failures appear to favor Republicans.

I suggest that this is another case where the weird, smart, progressive people invent something (computers) and the normal, dumb, regressive people take it over (Nov 2, 2004 elections). It happened with surrealism changing into advertising, it happened with the idea of one party rule (Republicans took this page from first generation communism), it happened with all world religions (all religious founders were, by definition, rebels in their day), it happened with most forms of popular dance and music, and so on.

I do not know that this is a process that can be halted, or even slowed. But I do know that we weird, smart, progressive people do not halt or even slow down in inventing things. Sometimes (with the telephone and the Internet and somewhat with radio) the cat gets out of the bag before the bag gets closed too tight. So to my fellow mutants, I say keep doing what you’re doing, make sure you give it to fellow mutants first, then move on to the next solution when the old solution becomes the new problem.

In the wake of Vietnam, the US military were demoralized and prey to some fairly crazy ideas. They thought they could train ‘super soldiers’ with psychic powers. In 1979 a secret unit was established by the most gifted minds within the US Army. Defying all known accepted military practice – and indeed, the laws of physics – they believed that a soldier could adopt the cloak of invisibility, pass cleanly through walls and, perhaps most chillingly, kill goats just by staring at them. Entrusted with defending America from all known adversaries, they were the First Earth Battalion. And they really weren’t joking. What’s more, they’re back and helping to fight the War on Terror. Why are they blasting Iraqi prisoners-of-war with the theme tune to Barney the Purple Dinosaur? Why have 100 de-bleated goats been secretly placed inside the Special Forces command centre at Fort Bragg, North Carolina? In his new book, The Men Who Stare At Goats, Jon Ronson describes the connections between 1970s new age bullshit and the torture of prisoners in Iraq. Read excerpts via the Guardian [1] [2], mirrored at Religious News Blog [1] [2]. See also www.jonronson.com.