Hoo boy, it’s amazing the kind of uproar that new-fangled Twitter thingy can cause. It seems earlier today the words “No God” became what the Twitterettes call a “Trending Topic” and all hell broke loose. Theists were confused, upset, outraged, and horrified that the phrase “No God” could be the number one trending topic. Meanwhile us atheists were quite amused at the ruckus it was causing and some of the stunning tweets it was generating from the True Believers™.

The common assumption among the theists was that this was all due to us nasty atheists out on a God bashing spree, but the truth is it all got started when someone posted that cloying cliche: “No God, No Peace, Know God, Know Peace.” Apparently Twitter has a funky way of determining what the relevant words in a tweet are and, as the phrase was repeatedly retweeeted by the faithful, it made “No God” a trending topic. Which then led to what is the other amusing aspect of this thread: The numerous clueless TBs who kept posting tweets such as this one:

@TechNoteDaGreat How did no god become a tt

I can answer that. In part it happened because a lot of clueless Twats Twits Tweeters kept asking how it became a Trending Topic. Every time one of these morons used the words “No God” in their tweets asking how it became a trending topic they helped to bolster that trend. Many of the outraged felt they should do something to knock it from the top spot yet they kept using the words “No God” in their tweets thus helping to ensure it stayed number one. You’d think the logic of this would be self-evident, but it left many TBers confused and angry.

Personally I had a great time watching the thread grow and taking potshots at some of the more stupid arguments being tossed into the fray. Pascal’s wager, which I saw stated in hip-hop terms for the first time ever, was a popular one as was the “without God there’s no purpose, no love, no blah blah blah” line of reasoning. Which isn’t to say they didn’t have anything new that I hadn’t heard before. For example. did you know that God is the reason you wake up in the morning? It’s true! According to many TBers who say it ain’t the alarm clock that wakes your sorry ass up, but God. ***Dave asked if that meant he could blame God if he overslept and was late to work. Sounds logical to me. A comment that probably would’ve gotten him lumped in with us Godless heathens had he not sent it straight to me.

Anyway, the point I wanted to get to is this: I’m sometimes accused of being overly harsh or rude to the True Believers™ when they come around. I’m told I am disrespectful and intolerant and that I should be more like the even-handed Christians I’m accused of bashing. I always find that amusing when I come across tweets like the following which I’ve placed after the jump to tidy things up.

In a recent interview Brad Pitt admitted to being Godless:

Brad Pitt was raised as a Southern Baptist, but apparently, his faith didn’t stick.

The 45-year-old actor doesn’t believe in God, he told Bild.com.

“No, no, no!,” he declared, when asked if he believes in a higher power, or if he was spiritual. “I’m probably 20 percent atheist and 80 percent agnostic. I don’t think anyone really knows. You’ll either find out or not when you get there, until then there’s no point thinking about it.”

Which is just wishy-washy way of him saying he’s an atheist. Not that this proves anything at all beyond Pitt being an atheist, but I like his movies and so it’s cool that he’s a heathen.

I was just talking about this on the live feed and thought it would make a decent blog post. Can we please stop giving attention to the nutcases who are claiming the world is going to end in 2012? The folks at the Salt Lake Tribune just published an article on this nonsense in part, I suspect, because of the impending release of the Roland Emmerich disaster film based on it.

What caught my attention, however, was this comment by associate professor Lynn Clark:

It’s not a religious film per se, but its religious imagery and end-of-days tribulations will resonate, experts say, with audiences—particularly young people—who take their spiritual cues from pop culture.

“Hollywood movies tend to succeed if they don’t underestimate [the sophistication of] their audience,” said Lynn Clark, associate professor of new media at the University of Denver. “There is an urgency for [spiritual discovery] that is part of the undercurrent of young people’s lives these days.”

Youth may not be avidly reading their Bibles and attending church in large numbers, but Clark said they do look to the entertainment industry to initiate religious discussions.

Really young people? Are you really taking your “spiritual cues” from pop culture? It would explain a lot. And can Hollywood ever really underestimate the sophistication of their audience? When stuff like Paul Blart: Mall Cop not only being made, but doing semi-respectable business at the box office I’d have to say that you could never underestimate the sophistication (or lack of it) of the audience.

And if you’re going to look to the entertainment industry to initiate religious discussions surely there are much better movies out there to do that with than 2012. Granted I can’t think of any off top of my head at the moment, but surely there’s something out there.

This is an interesting little video put together by the folks over at Slate. It attempts to show how the coverage of the moon landing would be different had it happened this year instead of 40 years ago. The resulting clip is both funny and sad at the same time:

Walter Cronkite just passed away the other day and I think all the reflection on his amazing career made folks realize just how infantile and shallow television news coverage has become in recent times. I think part of that has to do with the advent of 24 hour news channels with their constant struggle to fill the day with enough “news” to keep their ratings up. Back when CNN and Headline News got started they did a pretty good job, but it didn’t take long before competition came along and the Powers That Be realized that shallow infotainment pieces generated a lot more ratings for less cost than more traditional reporting did. It says something when Ted Turner, the man who started both channels, publicly admits he can’t stand to watch them anymore:

On Headline News: “Headline News used to be straight news anytime you wanted it. It’s unwatchable now. It’s heartbreaking.”

On celebrity news: “The media are too busy with Michael Jackson. The greatest fear we could possibly have today is an uninformed electorate. That is what really scares me.”

[...] On CNN: “It will be on in my hospital room when I die. That, or the Cartoon Network. Scooby- Doo has been very good to me.”

Think about that for a moment. Ted Turner puts Cartoon Network on an equal level as CNN as something that he may be watching when he dies. That says a lot about the quality of the news reporting at CNN to me. Not that CNN alone is to blame. FOX News is arguably the most to blame for dragging the quality of the 24 hour news channels down since the day it started. When you combine the shittiness of the current 24 hour news channels with the fact that more and more newspapers are cutting back or folding up shop altogether, well, it doesn’t bode well for a properly informed electorate in the future.

Of course that assumes the electorate has any desire to be properly informed in the first place, which is a whole other can of worms in itself…

Burger King’s ads aren’t known for their subtlety, but they’ve reached a new low with this one for a new sandwich they’re calling the Super Seven Incher:

Click to embiggen!

The ad copy reads as follows:

Fill your desire for something long, juicy and flame-grilled with the NEW BK SUPER SEVEN INCHER. Yearn for more after you taste the mind-blowing burger that comes with a single beef patty, topped with American cheese, crispy onions and the A1 Thick and Hearty Steak Sauce.

Maybe it’s just me, but after seeing a not-so-subtle image of a woman giving a sandwich a blow job it made me cringe to read the words “fill your desire for something long, juicy, and flame-grilled.” It’s the same cringe I got after Quiznos’ talking oven suggested that it somehow talked “Scott” into having sex with it. I’ve not had a big desire to eat at a Quiznos since they planted the idea that their employees might be having illicit sex with the ovens they cook the food in.

OK, in all honesty I should admit that I generally didn’t have a desire to eat at Quiznos even before they put that ad out, but the ad certainly isn’t helping to change my mind.
As it turns out we may never see this ad here in America, outside of the millions of blog entries like this one it’ll inspire, as according to the folks at Sociological Images the ad was created for a Singapore franchisee. Maybe it’s a much more subtle message in Singapore. I wouldn’t know as I’ve never been there, but it’s hard to see how anyone could miss the suggestion being put forth.

I declare today a National Day of Mourning as the inventor of one of my favorite shirt styles, Alfred Shaheen, has died at the age of 86:

As tourists from the US to Hawaii after World War II, many began to bring home colorful but cheesy looking shirts and sundresses that would be cause for much amusement among friends.

Shaheen began to change that in 1948 when he opened Shaheen’s of Honolulu and began designing, printing and producing “aloha” shirts, dresses and other ready-to-wear clothing of better quality.

Among those seen in Shaheen-designed shirts of that era was Elvis Presley, who wore one for the cover of his 1961 soundtrack album “Blue Hawaii.”

Such Shaheen originals now sell for more than £500

“Before Shaheen came along, there was no Hawaii garment industry. There were mom and pop stores but no real modern industry,” Linda Arthur, a professor of textiles and clothing at Washington State University said.

I loves me some Hawaiian shirts. Those and t-shirts comprise the majority of my wardrobe. OK so I’ll admit that until I saw this news story I didn’t even know someone had invented Hawaiian shirts, but it’s still a bummer to hear he’s passed on.

... my good friend JethricOne, who is a moderate Christian himself, sent me the following email last night:

At [my daughter’s] confirmation class this evening, she drew a picture of an anime Jesus for an assignment.
When she told me, I couldn’t resist thinking about the song “Drop kick me Jesus through the goal posts of life” (and it’s ilk of bad religious music) and was inspired to write the following:

Jesus is the hero of my anime
When reading right to left he’s going to show me the Way
It doesn’t matter if my friends are nasty, or rude
Cuz Jesus is my spike-haired holy ninja dude.

I was standing in a line, when someone pushed on ahead
It really made me mad, and I wished that he were dead.
But then a 2-D image flashed across my mind:
A smiling chibi spirit, that told me to be kind.

...refrain…

I saw a special toy, but I didn’t have the cash.
I thought I might just grab it, and then make a hasty dash.
But then that mighty warrior with his flame haze book of might.
Showed me 10 commandments and made me do what’s right.

...refrain…

I was worried about dying, with a lump inside my throat.
Somewhere’s a shinigami with my name upon a note.
But I thought about my Light, the one who came to me.
And by His side I’ll walk through life and he will set me free.

Having listened to more than my share of Christian pop music, I must say that the above is almost indistinguishable from the real thing. Being a long-time anime fan myself it’s doubly amusing.

Over the weekend we stopped into the local Target store and I was stunned to see huge advertising displays featuring the weirdly cute fuzzy Japanese monster-thingy known as Domo all over the place. That’s a pic of him over on the left. I’ve known about him for years and have a QuickTime movie file on my PC which contains every single one of the short animations he featured in used as station identification shorts for NHK TV in Japan. He’s been fairly popular among anime fans for years, but almost no one outside of the anime subculture knows who the hell he is.

Or at least I didn’t think they did. The fact that Target has licensed him to sell Halloween stuff seems to suggest he’s gone mainstream. Not only was I surprised to see Domo all over the place, but a little kid that walked in with us immediately knew who he was and started calling out his name, “Look mom! It’s Domo!” According to his Wikipedia entry it seems Nickelodeon licensed him in 2006 for 26 two-minute shorts which they just started airing this year. If they were half as warm and fuzzy as the Japanese originals then they were probably a sensation with the kids, as the one child I saw this weekend would attest. And now Target has snapped him up.

Turns out I wasn’t the only person surprised by this as reporter Tom Horgen over at StarTribune.com wrote a big article about him:

In 2003, an American licensing company named Big Tent approached Goda and NHK about bringing Domo to the United States in a bigger way, a deal that eventually led to the Target campaign.

“No, no, no,” Goda remembered saying at the time, hesitant about Domo’s American fate. Goda was unaware that Domo already had a following outside of Japan.

Today, Goda said he’s excited about Domo going mainstream in this country. But he understands why some of the character’s cult followers might be perturbed.

“It’s really difficult to balance the popularity and keeping the core fans,” he said.

But after Goda finally saw Domo in his new American setting, he was pleased.

“When we saw the Target store in Portland and saw Domo surrounded by all that American stuff, I was so happy,” he said.

In fact, Goda has been a fan of American pop-culture since he was a kid. His favorite character? That would be Snoopy, created by Minnesota’s own Charles Schulz.

Like Domo, Snoopy is a cuddly troublemaker and a man of few words. He’s also been a mainstream icon for decades, one that even anti-mass-market geeks like myself have loved.

Earlier in the article Tom brings up the possibility that early fans of Domo here in the states may feel he’s “sold-out” by becoming a mascot for Target:

When underground sensations like Domo hit the mainstream—he also has a deal with Nickelodeon—it can render the original uncool, or even result in cries of “sellout.”

That seems kind of stupid considering Domo was created to advertise a TV network, but I suppose some folks who don’t know his history may fall into that trap anyway. Still it’s kind of neat to see something I’ve been a fan of for years suddenly being popular in the United States. If it makes it a little easier (and not to mention cheaper) to finally pick up a Domo plushie then so much the better.

One of my favorite comedians has died:

LOS ANGELES, California (CNN)—Comedian-actor George Carlin, known for his raunchy but insightful humor, died of heart failure Sunday in Los Angeles, his publicist said. He was 71.

Jeff Abraham says Carlin went into St. John’s Health Center on Sunday afternoon, complaining of chest pain. Carlin died at 5:55 p.m. PDT, The Associated Press reported.

Carlin, who had a history of heart trouble, performed as recently as last weekend at the Orleans Casino and Hotel in Las Vegas.

“He was a genius and I will miss him dearly,” Jack Burns, who was the other half of a comedy duo with Carlin in the early 1960s, told the AP.

Carlin was best known for his routine “Seven Words You Can Never Say On Television,” which appeared in 1972’s “Class Clown” album.

When Carlin uttered all seven at a show in Milwaukee in 1972, he was arrested for disturbing the peace, the AP reported. The comedy sketch prompted a landmark indecency case after WBAI-FM radio aired it in 1973.

The case was appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court where the justices ruled on a 5-to-4 vote that the sketch was “indecent but not obscene,” giving the FCC broad leeway to determine what constituted indecency on the airwaves.

“So my name is a footnote in American legal history, which I’m perversely kind of proud of,” Carlin said. “In the context of that era, it was daring.”

“It just sounds like a very self-serving kind of word. I don’t want to go around describing myself as a ‘groundbreaker’ or a ‘difference-maker’ because I’m not and I wasn’t,” he said. “But I contributed to people who were saying things that weren’t supposed to be said.”

The title of this entry is what Carlin said he’d like folks to say upon hearing of his death so it seemed only appropriate. The following is a bit called “Modern Man” from one of his HBO specials:

He was a funny man and I’ll miss him greatly.

Get ready to cue the various editorial cartoonists depicting his arrival in Heaven in spite of the fact that he was an avowed atheist.

This was too delicious not to share. It seems a producer for Bill “Douchebag” O’Reilly’s show The O’Reilly Factor attempted to do some ambush journalism on Bill Moyers at the National Conference for Media Reform. Moyer’s handles the situation very well indeed and then when the producer, Porter Barry, attempts to leave several of the other journalists start their own ambush interview of Barry:

It’s always nice to see the schoolyard bullies get a little of what they give out.

Update: Here’s all that Bill “Douchebag” O’Reilly bothered to use on his show from that confrontation:

Compare that to what was recorded above and you’ll see Douchebaggery at its finest taking place. And what the fuck is this bullshit about a Body Language Expert on O’Reilly’s show to analyze the clip? How is that in any way relevant to what was actually fucking said? It’s not, but it’s typical for what O’Reilly tries to pass off as journalism.

The internet is all abuzz this week about Aliza Shvarts, a Yale student who issued a press release claiming that she artificially inseminated herself, then took various herbs in order to induce a miscarriage. Repeatedly. Yale responded with a release stating that Shvarts was a performance artists, and that her announcement had been the art piece, forcing people across the world into a discussion of what is and what isn’t art. Shvarts has since released another statement claiming that at least portions of her original statement are true.

Which leads me to ask, like many other people across the world, just what defines art?

My initial, instinctive, answer to that is, if someone created it and says that it’s art, it’s art. Tolstoy wrote a whole book on the subject. At one point, he says,

Art begins when one person, with the object of joining another or others to himself in one and the same feeling, expresses that feeling by certain external indications. To take the simplest example: a boy, having experienced, let us say, fear on encountering a wolf, relates that encounter; and, in order to evoke in others the feeling he has experienced, describes himself, his condition before the encounter, the surroundings, the woods, his own lightheartedness, and then the wolf’s appearance, its movements, the distance between himself and the wolf, etc. All this, if only the boy, when telling the story, again experiences the feelings he had lived through and infects the hearers and compels them to feel what the narrator had experienced is art. If even the boy had not seen a wolf but had frequently been afraid of one, and if, wishing to evoke in others the fear he had felt, he invented an encounter with a wolf and recounted it so as to make his hearers share the feelings he experienced when he feared the world, that also would be art. And just in the same way it is art if a man, having experienced either the fear of suffering or the attraction of enjoyment (whether in reality or in imagination) expresses these feelings on canvas or in marble so that others are infected by them. And it is also art if a man feels or imagines to himself feelings of delight, gladness, sorrow, despair, courage, or despondency and the transition from one to another of these feelings, and expresses these feelings by sounds so that the hearers are infected by them and experience them as they were experienced by the composer.

What is the world coming to? Word has it that Kentucky Fried Chicken is about to start offering grilled chicken on their menu:

Doug Hasselo, KFC’s chief food innovation officer, says, “This is transformational for our brand.”

Louisville-based KFC, a subsidiary of Yum Brands Inc., hopes grilled chicken will lure back health-conscious consumers who dropped fried chicken from their diets, or cut back on indulging.

KFC announced last year that fried chicken at all its U.S. restaurants had zero grams of trans fat per serving after the chain switched cooking oils.

KFC says the grilled chicken has significantly fewer calories and fat, plus much less sodium, than its original recipe fried chicken.

Why it’s sacrilegious I tell you! Next thing you know we’ll have cats and dogs living together! Total anarchy!

And another part of my childhood passes away:

Dungeons & Dragons co-creator dies at 69 - Yahoo! News

MILWAUKEE - Gary Gygax, who co-created the fantasy game Dungeons & Dragons and helped start the role-playing phenomenon, died Tuesday morning at his home in Lake Geneva. He was 69.

He had been suffering from health problems for several years, including an abdominal aneurysm, said his wife, Gail Gygax.

Gygax and Dave Arneson developed Dungeons & Dragons in 1974 using medieval characters and mythical creatures. The game known for its oddly shaped dice became a hit, particularly among teenage boys, and eventually was turned into video games, books and movies.

I’ve not played D&D for years, but I spent years in my teens and early 20’s playing it along with a host of other pen and paper RPGs. I have many fond memories of hanging out with Bill, Bob, Tom, Mark, Daryl, Dan, and Herb rolling dice and consuming vast quantities of pizza and pop and arguing over rule interpretations. Probably explains my addiction to video games like World of Warcraft which is, in many ways, a pale imitation of those older days.

And, yes, I realize the title for this entry is a really bad joke, but you know I had to use it.

It’s a sad day for toilet paper obsessives everywhere as Dick Wilson, best known as the neurotic grocer who defended Charmin bathroom tissue from the groping clutches of lonely housewives, has passed away:

The man famous as TV’s “Mr. Whipple” died of natural causes at the Motion Picture & Television Fund Hospital in Woodland Hills, said his daughter Melanie Wilson, who is known for her role as a flight attendant on the ABC sitcom “Perfect Strangers.”

Wilson made more than 500 commercials as Mr. George Whipple, a man consumed with keeping bubbly housewives from fondling toilet paper. The punch line of most spots was that Whipple himself was a closeted Charmin-squeezer.

The first commercial aired in 1964 and by the time the campaign ended in 1985 the tag line and Wilson, a former Canadian airman and vaudeville veteran, were pop culture touchstones.

Seriously though, what the hell was up with those housewives? I mean, check this out:

The second woman in that first commercial looks like she’s on the verge of having an orgasm or something. Which just shows that people in commercials come from an entirely different planet.

I’m not a big fan of The View and haven’t been ever since former host Star Jones publicly derided atheists and said she’d never vote for one. So it shouldn’t be any surprise to me to find out that yet another host of the show is an idiot. This time it’s Sherri Shephard who starts off her idiocy by saying she doesn’t believe in the Theory of Evolution. Then when newly added host Whoopi Goldberg challenges her on it by asking if the world is flat Shephard confirms her status as a moron by saying she doesn’t know and tries to use the excuse that she’s too busy being a mother to worry about it…

It also shouldn’t come as any surprise to find out that Shephard is a conservative. Now that I think on it, does anyone know of any liberals who are dumb enough to argue that Evolution isn’t real?

Link via The Daily Background.