- Blog
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Friendly Substitute Atheist
Oh, hey. Over the holiday, Hemant Mehta finally went on his honeymoon, and once again called upon me to run the Friendly Atheist site. So once again, I wrote a whole lot of articles and posts. Some of them I’m really quite proud of. Others, you know, sometimes you just gotta feed the beast. To…
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The Big Sticker
So my wife’s dad (who is a really good guy all-around — just today he paid for two strangers’ layaway at Walmart without their even knowing because he’s just that kind of guy) bought my 4-year-old boy this giant-ass wall sticker-poster-thing of a T-rex and some other dinosaurs from a company called Fatheads. It’s freaking…
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My Top Ten Ranking Positions
1. 2 2. 1 3. 3 4. 10 5. 6 6/7. 5 & 8 (tie) 8. 4 9. 7 10. 9
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If You Have Anything Bad to Say about Phil Collins, I Don’t Want to Hear It
The time has come for us nerds who really like Phil Collins to stand up. My friend and erstwhile musical collaborator Chris Seiler, who currently works as a sea, air, and space museum tour guide, has thrown down the gauntlet with this anecdote, originally posted to Facebook: This will sound strange, but if you have…
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Oh You Are Sick of Self-Love, Snarker
In a previous post, I responded to the recent discussion going on in Internet-land about snark vs. smarm by essentially declaring a plague on both their houses, lumping them together into the category of “snide.” Still, I didn’t feel like I’d quite gotten across what my problem was with snark and snideness, and then today…
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Life. Don’t Talk to Me about Life.
Because it’s not really a thing. Here’s Ferris Jabr at Scientific American: No one has ever managed to compile a set of physical properties that unites all living things and excludes everything we label inanimate. There are always exceptions. Most people do not consider crystals to be alive, for example, yet they are highly organized and…
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The Sublimity of Bagpiping for a Penguin
This is quite possibly the greatest photograph ever taken. Gilbert Kerr of the Scottish National Antarctic Expedition, playing the bagpipes for/at/in the presence of a penguin. Amazing. This photo was taken in March of 1904, and it’s hard to imagine a more sublimely absurd picture. Hat tip to @terracolta, who characterizes the penguin as “indifferent.” Oh,…
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The Sublimity of Bagpiping for a Penguin
This is quite possibly the greatest photograph ever taken. Gilbert Kerr of the Scottish National Antarctic Expedition, playing the bagpipes for/at/in the presence of a penguin. Amazing. This photo was taken in March of 1904, and it’s hard to imagine a more sublimely absurd picture. Hat tip to @terracolta, who characterizes the penguin as “indifferent.” Oh,…
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www = IRL
No doubt you’ve seen some manifestation of a species of essay wherein the author goes cold turkey on the Internet for some length of time, and proceeds to discover themselves anew or some such. The proliferation of these pieces, and the moral or revelatory high ground they often claim often makes me roll my eyes…
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And Now for Sports
Via Vector Belly, h/t Ana Jenkins.
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And Now for Sports
Via Vector Belly, h/t Ana Jenkins.
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Tony Stark and Me and Our PTSD
On an episode in May of this year of the podcast The Incomparable, which is a great panel discussion show about whatever bit of culture, entertainment, or literature strikes their fancy, the topic was Iron Man 3. Somewhere in the middle of the conversation, Guy English takes the temperature of the group concerning the introduction…
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Shattering My Dreams of Disunion
A piece in The Economist argues that despite popular fatigue with our country’s countless foreign entanglements, Americans ought to appreciate those entanglements, which enable us to maintain our world primacy, and therefore our ability to enormously influence the workings of the world to our advantage. I am sympathetic to this position. I take solace that it is currently…
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Walking on the Video Star Killed the Ocean (Two New Cover Songs)
Here’s two cover tunes I cooked up in my almost nonexistent spare time: my own little versions of The Buggles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star” (which I’d always meant to cover, and was spurred to do so when Emily Hauser dissed the song on Twitter), and Toad the Wet Sprocket’s “Walk on the Ocean,” which…
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