Domestic divination
The Housewives’ Tarot, designed by Headcase.
I wish I’d known
A New Hampshire Vermont town has repealed an edict against fortune tellers on the books since 1966.
“When the ordinance was lifted, I actually felt a large weight lifting from my shoulders,” said Maria Pawlowski, a tarot card reader. “It was very oppressive to have to refrain from something that was as natural to me as breathing.”
I wonder if she saw it coming.
It occurs to me . . .
. . . that I may have been in one of them hypnagogic states you hear tell of.
a question.
Twice in the past 5 years, I have heard a voice whisper my name in my ear. This happened as I was in bed, waking up. I was awake so it wasn’t a dream. I’m pretty sure the voice was female, and no, I’m not schizophrenic. Anyone else ever experienced anything like this?
Erotic Magic Workshop
There’ll be workshops, after a fashion, at clusterflockstock, and this is by way of “drumming up” interest in a “workshop” I plan to offer.
“Content” is still “in development”, but I have privately shared with a couple of my fellow ‘flockers a description of my newly invented “Gettin’ It On Ritual” (the core of my Erotic Magic Workshop), and responses have been positive. To share the details in a public forum would only cheapen and coarsen something already crude and vulgar, so I invite those of you planning to attend clusterflockstock to “pencil in” my Erotic Magic Workshop.
Exact time and location will be announced at the event itself when I holler, “Hey, y’all, I’m fixin’ to show my Gettin’ It On Ritual! . . . (Yeah, that’s okay. If you’re still workin’ on your barbecue, just bring it with you.)”
Find of the Day
My housemate found this slip of paper stuck in her door handle in the Albertson’s parking lot.
And the Albatross begins to be avenged.
About, about, in reel and rout
The death-fires danced at night;
The water, like a witch’s oils,
Burnt green, and blue and white.
(From The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Grasa de Pantera Classics Illustrated edition.)
Oh Heavens
(This is a kind of companion piece to an earlier one — A Few Important Religious Ideas — that appeared in elimae.)
I don’t know much about it, but it’s going to be great!!
I don’t like family visits that last more than a couple of days, but in heaven something will make me like that for eons.
I guess I’ll like the new body they give me. I’m betting they will have food that tastes great but only puts “spiritual” weight on you.
I’m sure I’ll still be “me” and I’ll still know it, since I’m the one who did all the work of arranging to end up there in the first place. I mean, if I turned out to be some other totally different kind of being, why would I give a shit if I saw grandma again—which is a big part of the pitch for going.
Read more
Letters To Those Who Have Been Left Behind
Here’s a fantastically insane blog hosting letters written by Christians to non-Christians about why all the good people have up and disappeared from Earth and the lowly heathen jerks have been left behind.
Dear Friend,
Are you looking for me? Is the world looking for millions of missing people that have just vanished in an instant? Are all little children around the globe part of the missing group? If so, I can tell you what has happened. Don’t believe the very convincing lies you will hear. Don’t believe UFO’s got us. Don’t believe some cosmic reaction erased us.
The truth is - are you ready for this? - we’re at a wedding. Yup. In fact, we are the “bride.” The “groom” is Jesus, the Messiah, the Promised One from the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. (Hear, O Israel!) He has come to take His cride, the true Church and all little innocent ones, out of this world because of what is coming.
Yes, yes, I know. There are all sorts of Christians running around now insisting that this explanation CANNOT be the correct one because THEY are Left Behind. This may include some very visible Christians, like maybe a Pope or something. What does this tell you? It tells you that any “Christian” left behind was a phony. They may have said they believed, blah blah blah, but God knows the heart of men, and He has seen that they are fakes.
It’s like fan fiction, only 1000x more pathological.
(thx Sean)
Everything That Rises Must Converge
okay, the coincidences on the site are starting to freak me out. yesterday I posted about the Temecula chicken right after Sheila posted about Renner driving through Temecula and last night, as I was falling asleep, I was thinking about how Trojan refers to themselves as Trojan Brand, and how odd that was, thinking “can you imagine if it was Coca Cola Brand, or Toyota Brand” and they put it on the packaging? (Deron Bauman)
Okay, and I thought that Deron had posted the Temecula chicken story in response to my own post about being stopped by a trooper in Temecula!
This is yet another example of what Alek Lindus and I term ‘convergences’. And there are an awful lot of them going around lately.
Speaking of which, just after I’d posted the Temecula ‘aliens’ anecdote, I read Jack Lindus’s comment on Alek’s recently posted portrait of him over at enigma janitor.
‘Scuse me while I resume work on my universal field theory. It all fits together.
I think that maybe Alek is orchestrating this from that island of hers. Like Prospero.
Cheneyhenge
Best. Gothamist post. Ever. By John Del Signore:
Dick Cheney Visit to Neutralize Tonight’s Manhattanhenge
Manhattanhenge, the visually stunning phenomenon that occurs twice a year when the sun sets in perfect alignment with Manhattan’s street grid, is happening tonight. It’s just too bad that Vice President Dick Cheney has arranged to be in town at the exact moment of the sunset, to speak at the New York Republican State Committee Dinner and simultaneously smother the golden light under his all-encompassing shroud of darkness.
Of course it’s no coincidence that the famously secretive Cheney would time his visit to Manhattan to coincide with Manhattanhenge – he’s long been devoted to ensuring the triumph of darkness over light; as he once told Tim Russert, “We also have to work, though, sort of the dark side, if you will.” So don’t be alarmed when tonight’s sunset is suddenly eclipsed by a frigid black miasma – that’s just Cheney taking the podium . . .
The hour approacheth. I’m scared.
clusterflock by the Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre
The custom clusterflock video is here!
Dream
Last night I dreamed I was watching a a small plane writing with white smoke on a blue sky. What was it writing?
Fuck, man~how’s it going?
A Shivery Little Vignette
The wonderful English actor Roy Dotrice was probably happier bombing the German Army (yes kids, there was a thing called World War II) than he was being shot down and placed in a Konzentrazionslager for the rest of the war, hosted by his former targets.
A few years later he was enjoying a holiday motoring trip with his wife and small daughter, exploring remote regions of rural England. They liked finding forgotten little villages and searching out a different place to sleep each night. “My wife spotted a little old stone house from another century,” he once told me. “‘Isn’t it perfect?’ she said.”
They decided instantly to book it as that night’s lodging. Its owner lived a short ways away. Roy said that, looking back on what happened, “I recalled just the faintest feeling that the owner was, well, not telling us something.”
Dick Cavett reveals all.
it’s only — a year — a-way!
Y’all. We’re a year away from clusterflockstock.
Clusterflock/Scottish Socks Video
Ok, people. So far Deron, me, Cindy, and Sheila are hip to the idea of getting The Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre to create a custom video for us. They need funds to help pay for their trip to Edinburgh and we need adorable puppets to speak our names in Scottish accents, talk about clusterflock, and basically be our bitch. Anyone else interested in pitching in?
Socks Video Star
The Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre are looking for help to get them to Edinburgh for The Fringe Festival in August. For $200 they will create a custom video for you and upload it to YouTube. I’m thinking a clusterflock socks video could be brilliant. Anyone interested?
Bush: Magic and Grand Theft Auto Will Boost Economy
Washington, DC — In the waning days of his tenure, President George W. Bush faces dismal economic worries highlighted by rising gas prices, plummeting housing values, and stagnant American Idol audience participation.
Mr. Bush’s job approval ratings are sliding toward an unprecedented value lower than 0.1%. This would be the first time below-zero numbers have been used to rank a U.S. president, although they are commonly applied to TV reality shows and fast-food chicken sandwiches.
“If there was a magic wand to wave, I’d be waving it, of course,” the President said in a White House Rose Garden Q&A session Tuesday, “But there is no magic wand to wave right now.”
the solution to soaring gas prices: god
How we didn’t realize this sooner is beyond me. Apparently, since our federal leaders aren’t doing much about the rising costs of gasoline, there is but one logical conclusion: ask God to lower them. I mean, duh.
“God is the only one we can turn to at this point,” said Twyman, 59. “Our leaders don’t seem to be able to do anything about it. The prices keep soaring and soaring.”
Gas prices have been driven relentlessly higher this year by the bull market for crude oil, gasoline’s main ingredient. A gallon of regular now costs $3.89, on average, in California, while the national average has hit $3.58.
To solve the problem, Twyman isn’t begging the Lord for any specific act of intervention. He is not asking God to make OPEC pump more oil. Nor is he praying for all the speculative investors to be purged from the New York Mercantile Exchange, where crude oil is traded.
Instead, he says anyone who wants to follow his example should keep it simple.
“God, deliver us from these high gas prices,” Twyman said. “That’s all they have to say.
Given the massive logjam in the world’s unanswered prayer queue (I never did get my Beeman pellet gun when I asked for one), I can’t see God getting around to this anytime soon, but I could be wrong. Maybe stillborn babies, widespread regional wars, disease, poverty and child abuse don’t rank all that high in God’s world. Maybe God truly cares about gas prices, because the religious right is where most of his prayer energy comes from, and they do love their Escalades and Navigators.
I think I’m onto something.
i have a bum jedi outfit
If you don’t laugh at Dave Hil: Jedi Master, then I regret to inform you that you are either a defective person or bitter that you can’t attend a local Jedi school.
Cista mystica
PERGAMON. Mysia. Ca. 160-150 B.C. Cistophoric Tetradrachm. Within an ivy-wreath: cista mystica with serpent coiling from open lid. (Stack’s Catalogue of Coin Galleries Auction December 2004)
Cista (or cista mystica), a basket used for housing sacred snakes in connection with the initiation ceremony into the cult of Bacchus (Dionysus). In the Dionysian mysteries a serpent, representing the god, was carried in a box called a cista on a bed of vine leaves. This may be the Cista mentioned by Clement of Alexandria which was exhibited as containing the phallus of Dionysus. The cista mentioned in the mysteries of Isis may also have held a serpent, the missing phallus of Osiris. The fertility festival of the women of Arretophoria included cereal paste images ‘of serpents and forms of men,’ in other words, phallic symbols.
Did Unitarianism become too dogmatic for someone?
Dudeism.com: The Church of the Latter-Day Dude
(via Winston of Nobody Asked . . .)
I kill you!
A pretty amusing account of an Indian tantrik attempting to kill an atheist with curses and spells on live television.
Now the tantrik wrote Sanal’s name on a sheet of paper, tore it into small pieces, dipped them into a pot with boiling butter oil and threw them dramatically into the flames. Nothing happened. Singing and singing, he sprinkled water on Sanal, mopped a bunch of peacock feathers over his head, threw mustard seed into the fire and other outlandish things more. Sanal smiled, nothing happened, and time was running out. Only seven more minutes before midnight, the tantrik decided to use his ultimate weapon: the clod of wheat flour dough. He kneaded it and powdered it with mysterious ingredients, then asked Sanal to touch it. Sanal did so, and the grand magic finale began. The tantrik pierced blunt nails on the dough, then cut it wildly with a knife and threw them into the fire. That moment, Sanal should have broken down. But he did not. He laughed. Forty more seconds, counted the anchor, twenty, ten, five… it’s over!
(via boingboing)
Weekly Picture 110
Man Waving, Mustang Ridge, TX, 2.26.2008
the atheist apocalypse
Now with 100% less destruction and anger and vengeance and world-endingness.
(click to embiggen)