All apologies for the lack of cat pictures of late. Lucy and Rupert have simply been unphotogenic of late, refusing to pose long enough to be photographed. But there’s always the archives.
Meanwhile, Smithsonian Online has a short history of the domestic house cat.
Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon makes some keen observations as to why Fundies get so irate over Harry Potter. She touches on a few points I’ve brought up before: that the themes of the Harry Potter books contradict the top-down authority of a Biblical hierarchy, and do so chiefly by demonstrating that rebelling against authority and thinking for yourself is inherently good. But they also fear Harry Potter because they can’t stomach competition. As Amanda puts it:
But mostly, I think that the woman above [in the video clip, which you should watch because it’s a hoot]’s uneasiness with the portrayal of magic and Lev Grossman’s uneasiness with magic that doesn’t explicitly come from god is what, in the end, upsets the religious nuts the most about Harry Potter. For one thing, they admit that outright. But mostly, it’s because fantasy fiction is a threat to religious faith, particularly those faiths that insist on the literal truth of the Bible. Harry Potter doesn’t lay claim to be the truth, yet in many ways, the narrative is much more coherent, cohesive and therefore believable than the Bible’s stories of magic and mystery. Which makes it undeniably obvious that it’s completely possible that someone just made the entire Bible up just as surely as J.K. Rowling made up Hogwarts.
also, for the Biblical literalism crowd, Harry Potter isn’t fantasy. They believe magic is real. In some ways this is a failure on their part to grasp the difference between reality and fiction, but it’s more a side effect of believing that a book of fairy tales is a true depiction of actual events. If you’ve already internalized the necessary logical contradictions needed to believe that a talking snake doomed mankind by offering your great great great to the nth grandma some magical fruit, then you’ve already accepted the idea as a given that magic is real. Sure, Herod called up some ghosts, Giants used to live in the Earth and angels flap their wings overhead. But, more importantly, demons are underfoot, everywhere, and they are really good at convincing you to do things you’ll be sorry about later, like talking back to your father or masturbating or thinking for yourself. And we all know that sort of freewheeling behavior leads to crack smoking, baby sacrifices and midnight graveyard orgies with the Devil. QED, Amen.*
William Lobdell, staff reporter for the LA Times, writes about how covering the religion beat for the newspaper cost him his faith. He lobbied hard for the job and then was confronted by an endless parade of child molesting priests, outcast Mormons whose only sin was not being Mormon enough and worst of all, Benny Hinn. It’s a sad story because you see in William Lobdell what you see in a lot of people these days. They desperately want to believe in God as away to give structure and meaning to their lives, to do good deeds and use their faith a s a motivation for creating positive change. But then reality set sin. They see how people let themselves be used by church leaders for the usual pathetic power games, or worse, to cover up and excuse their own twisted, all too human hearts:
On a Sunday morning at a parish in Rancho Santa Margarita, I watched congregants lobby to name their new parish hall after their longtime pastor, who had admitted to molesting a boy and who had been barred that day from the ministry. I felt sick to my stomach that the people of God wanted to honor an admitted child molester. Only one person in the crowd, an Orange County sheriff’s deputy, spoke out for the victim.
On Good Friday 2002, I decided I couldn’t belong to the Catholic Church. Though I had spent a year preparing for it, I didn’t go through with the rite of conversion.
I understood that I was witnessing the failure of humans, not God. But in a way, that was the point. I didn’t see these institutions drenched in God’s spirit. Shouldn’t religious organizations, if they were God-inspired and -driven, reflect higher standards than government, corporations and other groups in society?
I found an excuse to skip services that Easter. For the next few months, I attended church only sporadically. Then I stopped going altogether.
Luckily, Mr. Lobdell realized that faith was a crutch propping up institutions that have neither God nor people’s needs in mind, but are just corrupt organizations designed to make money and control the week and desperate. And he walked away. he decided that he didn’t have to be part of that system. It may make it harder to be a force for positive change in the world without an established apparatus with all its infrastructure and support to fall back on but it is still possible. Hopefully, Mr. Lobdell will see that and maybe help us Atheists make some noise and spread some of his hard-won reason and knowledge.
Link via Amanda at Pandagon.
38 years ago today, mankind walked on the Moon. The Moon!
Hopefully, one day soon, we’ll go back there, and then on to Mars. I sincerely hope I live long enough to see Mars Landing Day. The fact that I can wish for that and there’s a possibility of it coming true is just amazing.
With all the political shenanigans going on, we often forget that we live in a really wild and wonderful age, when things that were science fiction, if not outright fantasy, in our Grandparent’s day are now reality.
Ron Charles, Literary Critic for the Washington Post, has a problem with Harry Potter:
But all around me, I see adults reading J.K. Rowling’s books to themselves: perfectly intelligent, mature people, poring over “Harry Potter” with nary a child in sight. Waterstone’s, a British book chain, predicts that the seventh and (supposedly) final volume, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” may be read by more adults than children. Rowling’s U.K. publisher has even been releasing “adult editions.” That has an alarmingly illicit sound to it, but don’t worry. They’re the same books dressed up with more sophisticated dust jackets — Cap’n Crunch in a Gucci bag.
Many of those adults who are reading Harry Potter may not have time to read Serious Literature, because they’re too busy trying to figure out how they’re going to pay their overly bloated mortgage, keep their kids in a school that isn’t hamstrung by NCLB, or pay for health care. Perhaps if our American Culture wasn’t so money obsessed and corporatized, adults would have some extra leisure time to read other novels as well. But they don’t and so most of them won’t. But some will. Surprising as it may sound– shocking, even to lit snobs like Charles, some of us Harry Potter fans also read other Serious Literature (though I will be setting aside Against the Day for Deathly Hollows. That’s just how it’s going to play out).
Johann Hari boarded the National Review cruise to see what Neocons say when they think no one else is listening:
Some people go on singles cruises. Some go on ballroom dancing cruises. This is the “The Muslims Are Coming” cruise - drinks included. Because everyone thinks it. Everyone knows it. Everyone dreams it.
It’s like a cruise through an alternate reality, where Muslim Hoards are devouring Europe, the founding fathers fought a revolution to escape the tyranny of a king so they could establish a firm and resolute Executive President and we’re not only winning in Iraq but mystically redeeming our loss in Vietnam (due not to the Vietcong but to Liberal Commie appeasement, naturally) and everyone wets themselves in anticipation of bombs falling on Iran. Oh, and a black man thinks the KKK are just upset because they don’t have all the benefits that minorities have.
To my left, I find a middle-aged Floridian with a neat beard. To my right are two elderly New Yorkers who look and sound like late-era Dorothy Parkers, minus the alcohol poisoning. They live on Park Avenue, they explain in precise Northern tones. “You must live near the UN building,” the Floridian says to one of the New York ladies after the entree is served. Yes, she responds, shaking her head wearily. “They should suicide-bomb that place,” he says. They all chuckle gently. How did that happen? How do you go from sweet to suicide-bomb in six seconds?The conversation ebbs back to friendly chit-chat. So, you’re a European, one of the Park Avenue ladies says, before offering witty commentaries on the cities she’s visited. Her companion adds, “I went to Paris, and it was so lovely.” Her face darkens: “But then you think - it’s surrounded by Muslims.” The first lady nods: “They’re out there, and they’re coming.”
Link via at Boing Boing.
Mathew Nisbit at Framing Science asks a pertinent question of us Atheists, and then proceeds to piss all over everyone who has an answer. But you can’t be an apologist for theists and not get something wrong. First, the pertinent question: “How do we make sense of human values and how do we move forward in a post-religious age?”
He’s actually quoting someone else (Philip Kitcher, who has a new book Living with Darwin: Evolution, Design, and the Future of Faith), but it is a common question I’ve heard asked by a variety of people. Now, the something wrong:
As I’ve argued, one of the reasons I find the New Atheist PR campaign so troubling is that it is has radicalized a movement that feeds on anger and fear and that offers little more than complaints and attacks.New Atheism turns on a binary discourse of us vs. them. In the rhetoric of the New Atheist movement, you’re either with us or your against us.
There are a number of problems with this short paragraph but the main one is pretty glaring: Pissing off religious people is easy. Pretending otherwise is disingenuous. As if we weren’t so strident and there, Theists would respect our freedoms and wishes to exist, eventually. In time. Once they get used to us being, you know, around. So yes, pissing off religious people– how easy is it? You don’t even have to call them out on their fairy tale nonsense, their history of repression and violence, or their adherence to outdated and reactionary ideas. Hell, where I live, you can do it just by buying beer on Sunday. If we New Atheists (who are a lot like the Old Atheists, only more vocal, which is Mathew’s real gripe) come off as tad angry, it’s because we’ve gotten tired of being told we’re bad people and treated like second class citizens because we don’t believe in the popular fairy tales of the day. There’s only so many times you can be called Evil and treated by older relatives like puppies who have just messed on the rug because you don’t want to get up early on Sunday and go play Eat the Magic Carpenter with them, before you just decide to be the asshole they already think you are by having the lack of decorum not to drink wine while pretending it’s the blood of their imaginary friend.
Where did the week go? Seriously, I had grand plans. I was going to rant about the government, pontificate about the Pope and generally chew the scenery. Then Wednesday night we went and saw Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. I’ve been on a nice little buzz ever since and have let the other stuff fall by the wayside (except for my real writing.* News about my novel will be forth coming).
Harry Potter was great! I had some trepidation going in– after all, translating a 900 page novel into a 2 1/2 hour movie means some pretty big ideas are bound to be omitted but all in all, a satisfying movie. Thing’s moved rather fast, Harry wasn’t as whiny as he was, for as long as he was in the book and all the high points of the story were hit and in an effective manner. Any film maker out there wondering how to turn that giant door stop of a novel into a cohesive movie that still maintains the spirit of the author’s intent should use Order of the Phoenix as their model. Sure, I would have liked to have seen a few more character moments but what is there is great. the actors have all grown into these roles and I think that is the key to the success of the picture. Doing so much with so little is not easy and these actors, al of them children, manage to do something other actors twice their age have problems with. Bravo to them!
Now it’s off to play Super Mario Bros. 2 on the Wii get some writing done!
It’s hard being a satirist these days. No matter what great little idea you come up with to poke fun at the powerful and well connected, it pales in comparison to the tinfol hat, bat shit snorting insanity that actually is the Right Wing Media. Take Bill O’Reilly’s latest fantasy:
A “national underground network” of pink pistol-packing lesbians is terrorizing America. “All across the country,” they are raping young girls, attacking heterosexual males at random, and forcibly indoctrinating children as young as 10 into the homosexual lifestyle, according to a shocking June 21 segment on the popular Fox News Channel program, “The O’Reilly Factor.”
Titled “Violent Lesbian Gangs a Growing Problem,” the segment began with host Bill O’Reilly briefly referencing for his roughly 3 million viewers the case of Wayne Buckle, a DVD bootlegger who was attacked by seven lesbians in New York City last August. Deploying swift, broad strokes, O’Reilly painted a graphic picture of lesbian gangs running amok. “In Tennessee, authorities say a lesbian gang called GTO, Gays Taking Over, are involved in raping young girls,” he reported. “And in Philadelphia, a lesbian gang called DTO, Dykes Taking Over, are allegedly terrorizing people as well.”
In Bill O’Reilly land, lesbian gangs wielding pink pistols are terrorizing heteros and children, driving them into a life of depredation, sodomy and crime. I think it’s the pink pistols that really puts it over the top. If I wrote a story in which I described this sort of thing, no one would believe it. Honestly, I couldn’t have come up with something so bizarre and perverse if I tried. I haven’t heard anything so fucking weird since the last time I read Naked Lunch. Thing is, William S. Burrows was out of his mind on heroin when he wrote about talking assholes and jism drinking alien sodomites and even then he meant them to be satirical fantasies. But Bill O’Reilly was stone cold sober, people. Think about that. Even more far fetched, Papa Bear wants you to consider this, not just as a fantastical bit of absurdest commentary, or as some dark and perverted fantasy, but as an actual, factual and verifiable event in the material world. David Neiwert, via the link above, has all the pertinent details on how this is complete fascist bullshit, in case you’re concerned.
We need stronger satire people, because reality is catching up.
Just saw Transformers and it was everything I expected: big and loud. Cars turned into robots. Things exploded. A good time was had by all.
One question though: What is this?
Update: Phil Plait, the best bad astronomer around, reviews the science of the movie. He too wants to know what’s up with this whole Cloverfield thing.
