Last month, the Confraternity of Catholic Clergy wrote a press release urging Catholics to do nothing in order to ensure that no one ever stick a nail through baby Jesus again.
This was scheduled for Aug. 1. And since PZ seems be his usual cheerful godless self, I was going to chalk another mark in the “prayer doesn’t work” column.
But then I noticed the NB at the bottom of the announcement:
Read More
In case you woke up this morning thinking, “Gee, I wonder what Bill
Donohue is waxing wroth over today?”, there are a couple more items at
the
Catholic League website:
First of all, he’s
predictably pissed
that the
University of Minnesota Morris
code of employee conduct can’t be used to fire PZ Myers for being rude
to a piece of bread on his own time.
Apparently in Billy’s world, if you have a beer after work, you can be
fired because your employer has a rule against drinking on the job.
I was more intrigued by the other headline,
Eucharist Mocked in R.I. Play,
about the play
You’re Eating God
that just completed its run in Providence, RI.
According to
one review,
The title of the piece by Rachel Caris comes from one
of its lines, which one character delivers after seeing another
character ravenously eat a pile of Eucharistic hosts. People do
strange things when they’re hungry. And that’s inevitable after living
four months in a 1960s backyard bomb shelter.Caris’ play mocks the mentality of the Cold War, and
satirically questions the conventions of Catholicism. And while there
is social, political and religious commentary, at heart Eating serves
up a character study, where the characters — mother, father, son,
daughter, grandmother and grandfather — are all quirky from the start.
And they get quirkier with every passing captive and stir-crazy day in
the bomb shelter.
Sounds like fun. I wonder if Caris will be touring within play-going
distance of here.
But according to BillDo,
Catholic schoolboy traditions are fair game for a play
that pokes gentle fun at Catholicism. But that is not what this play
is about: There is nothing gentle about mocking the Eucharist. This
should be known even to those who are not Catholic.
So now it’s not even okay to eat prop hosts to make fun of catholic
superstitions? I can’t express my feelings properly because I can’t
find the Unicode code point for “world’s smallest violin”.
I’ll leave the last word to Christopher Hitchens, from his
introduction to
The Portable Atheist:
A terrible thing has now happened to religion. Except in the places
where it can still enforce itself by fear superimposed on ignorance,
it has become one opinion among many. It is forced to compete in the
free market of ideas and, even when it strives to retain the old
advantage of inculcating its teachings into children (for reasons that
are too obvious to need underlining), it has to stand up in open
debate and submit to free inquiry.
Miraculous apparitions are all the rage these days, and I finally got one of my own. Some people get Jesus, others the Virgin Mary or the name of Allah. Phil Plait got Vladimir Lenin. I got…
BillD has recovered from the vapors, and posted the expected press release about PZ being mean to a piece of bread and a couple of books.
Of course, being a devout follower of the teachings of Jesus Christ, Donohue turned the other cheek and blessed PZ.
Ha! Whom am I kidding? Apparently the worst he could do, since it’s no longer legal to burn people alive for stabbing bits of bread, was to contact the University of Minnesota and demand that they investigate “a bias incident” that he committed on his own time, and not while on university business.
Ecce douchebag.
The Ronald Reagan Legacy Project wants to
put St. Ronny’s face
on the $10 bill. Either that, or half of all dimes.
I suppose it makes sense to put it on a small denomination, given the
amount that actually trickled down, but I have a better idea: if
people want to put Reagan’s name on money, let’s have the Ronald
Reagan Memorial National Debt. After all, he did more to increase it
than the 39 presidents who came before him, combined. Three times
more, in fact.
CNN has
a poll
(usual disclaimers, yadda yadda) about which denomination should be
consecrated this way. At the moment, “None” is leading, with 54%.
If you write a software package, and want it to be usable by as many people as possible, it’s important to translate it into other languages. But like documentation, localization (l10n) is one of those chores that programmers don’t want to do. But if it’s a web app, why not ask the users to contribute translations?
It just occurred to me that the Bush presidency will officially end in roughly one Friedman Unit. Whee!
I’m going to perform a magic trick for you. Think of a card, any card. Got it? Okay, now click on the awesome magic hat of awesome magic stupendousness:
Ta-da! I told you I was going to do a magic trick, but I gave you two for the price of one: not only did the hat turn into your card, I also made your card look just like the hat! Isn’t that amazing?!
“No,” I hear you mutter, “what would be amazing would be if someone with a double-digit age actually fell for that.”
George Bush has long been opposed to timetables for withdrawal from Iraq. So when prime minister Nouri al-Maliki started pointedly looking at the clock and asking whether American troops didn’t have a plane to catch, obviously Bush couldn’t just set a timetable for withdrawal. However,
President Bush and Iraq’s prime minister have agreed to set a “general time horizon” for bringing more U.S. troops home from the war, a dramatic shift from the administration’s once-ironclad unwillingness to talk about any kind of deadline or timetable.
Of course, the thing about a horizon is that no matter how long you walk toward it, it never gets any closer.
According to Fox News
and
Variety,
(… ← help yourself to a grain of salt) Yoko Ono has lost
her suit against the makers of
Expelled: No Intelligence Involved Allowed
for the unauthorized use of John Lennon’s Imagine. The
movie will be rereleased in theaters.
In related news, Expelled has gone from 9% on the
tomatometer
to 8%, which puts it in the same Outback as
Kangaroo Jack.