Have You Seen Religulous?
We saw it this afternoon at the Magnolia, here in Dallas. The theater was full, and it was being shown on two screens. It’s a splendid film, and what a lift it gave us to be among those who are willing to look at absurdity and see it for what it is. I imagine many will say: “I thought it was great–except for the parts about Christianity.” This speaks to a central point of the film, which is that believers of all sorts are ready to laugh at and ridicule the beliefs of others, even as they show themselves to be blind to the incredible aspects of their own. I hope this film encourages more people to reject the thought that “all doubt (and questioning) is of the devil.” But failing that–I hope it brings a renewed sense of purpose to those who already see the dangers represented by beliefs that undermine the power of reason while reveling in the prospect of a looming apocalypse.
I see your interracial gangbang and raise you facebook
Social networking sites have overtaken porn sites in popularity on the internet.
Tancer, in his new book, “Click: What Millions of People are Doing Online and Why It Matters,” said analyzing web searches did not just reflect what was happening online but gave a wider picture of society and people’s behavior.
“There are some patterns to our Internet use that we tend to repeat very specifically and predictably, from diet searches, to prom dresses, to what we do around the holidays,” Tancer told Reuters in a telephone interview.
Tancer, general manager of global research at Hitwise, an Internet tracking company, said one of the major shifts in Internet use in the past decade had been the fall off in interest in pornography or adult entertainment sites.
He said surfing for porn had dropped to about 10 percent of searches from 20 percent a decade ago, and the hottest Internet searches now are for social networking sites.
“As social networking traffic has increased, visits to porn sites have decreased,” said Tancer, indicated that the 18-24 year old age group particularly was searching less for porn.
“My theory is that young users spend so much time on social networks that they don’t have time to look at adult sites.”
Additionally:
Tancer said the current obsession with celebrities was also reflected through web data, with celebrity websites garnering more attention than sites devoted to religion, politics, well-being and diets combined — and no sign that this is waning.
Which impacts politics:
This celebrity mentality had also overlapped into the November presidential election in the United States with surfers looking for images of Republican vice presidential candidate Sara Palin rather than looking for her policies.
“A lot of the focus around the candidates in general is image based. People want to know how tall Barack Obama is and also to search for their families,” he said.
“You have to get far down in the search terms to link the search for a candidate with any issue.”
my boss is a total . . . .
The gender of a boss, or bosses, has different effects on male and female workers. The study found:
- Women who had only one female boss reported more psychological distress (such as trouble sleeping, difficulty focusing on work, depression and anxiety) and physical symptoms (such as headaches, stomach pain or heartburn, neck and back pain and tiredness) than women who worked for one male boss.
- Women who reported to a mixed-gender pair of supervisors also reported more of these symptoms than their peers who worked for a single male boss.
- Men who worked for a single supervisor, regardless of the supervisor’s gender, had similar levels of distress.
- Men who worked for a mixed-gender pair had fewer mental and physical symptoms than those working for a lone male supervisor.
Dear Clusterflock
When you hug people do you purposefully hold your breath so you don’t smell them?
It doesn’t count if you are interested in them. We are talking about generic, nonsexual hugs here. You can see the data in graph form here.
many days go by
A study has been conducted on the amount of time men and women spend getting ready over their lifetimes.
The time women spend putting on make up and getting dressed works out at 3,276 hours over their lifetimes while men only devote 1,092 hours to looking their best.
A survey of 1,000 women also showed that 67 per cent thought that the time spent getting ready was actually a chore.
Only a third of women said they enjoyed preening themselves.
(via marginal revolution)
R.I.P Nagasaki
His left hand points to the direction of the blast and his right hand points to where death came from.
63 years ago today Nagasaki burned and 75,000 people perished with one bomb.
Schoolboys and farting
I was perusing my favourite dictionary this morning while doing 300 crunches to make my abs look awesome, and came across this gem:
randle (răn’dəl) - n. a nonsensical poem recited by Irish schoolboys as an apology for farting at a friend.
What a cool freaking word! So I immediately postponed my crunches and consulted my OED to find out more… but nothing. Nothing more on the internet either—just amateur dictionaries that have the same definition word for word.
RATS! I want to know if the nonsense poem has specific words or any nonsensical uttering will do. Am I allowed to rip one into the face of my good pal and then recite Jabberwocky and everything will be hunky-dory again? Also, why would this randle placate the poor feller who has just been farted upon? It would have to be a pretty awesome poem to keep me from wailing on my assailant.
On Vengeance
Females, older people, working people, people who live in high-crime areas of their country and people who are at the bottom 50% of their country’s income distribution are more vengeful.
&
The findings suggest that vengeful feelings of people are subdued as a country develops economically and becomes more stable politically and socially and that both country characteristics and personal attributes are important determinants of vengeance.
it’s only — a year — a-way!
Y’all. We’re a year away from clusterflockstock.
candyman candyman candyman
and yet…
he’s not quite the scariest.
clusterflock wall of shame, Rick Neece, for Danny, 1987
I was once flipping channels on the TV late one night (actually, it might have been Danny flipping and I just wasn’t asleep yet). He happened across “Charlie Rose,” talking to a man I thought I recognized. “Go back.” I said. Charlie was talking to Harold Bloom who was talking about the “aesthetic” of literature. He said something like, “In the words of the divine Oscar Wilde, ‘all bad poetry is sincere.’ And if Maya Angelou’s poem, delivered on the inauguration of Bill Clinton, is any indication, Ms. Angelou’s poetry is most astonishingly sincere.”
So with that thought held in mind, here is my “sincere” offering. A poem I wrote Danny, in 1987, on the occasion of his 25th birthday:
Read more
clusterflock wall of shame, Cooper Renner, April 20
Although I already humiliated myself with “He came and went / with utter smoothness,” I’ll contribute this as well.
Intro: This whole “poem” was a 14-liner, I think, though only the first 8 lines are coming to me now. I’m pretty sure I wrote this as a high school junior.
“April 20″
It glinted in my eyes,
Or was it that it shone
The night the moon fell from the sky
And vanished all alone?
The lights in the sky glowed.
I think a tear was in my eye.
Or was it the grass that was mowed
The night the moon fell from the sky?
clusterflock wall of shame, Cindy Scroggins, Bus Stop
Okay, my ego is even bigger than I thought, because the idea of someone seeing me being written about (poorly) in a bad newspaper for a mediocre performance in a mediocre play is turning my stomach. I also don’t know that this scan would be legible on the site. So, Deron, I leave it to you whether you want to post this or not.
For the record, I was 17. I’m the girl on the left in the picture. This was at New Mexico State University in 1976, I think. Jesus.
Read more
clusterflock wall of shame, Lost
I [someone from WBNTV] can’t believe I am sending this.
It is an early attempt at bathos haiku and nearly speaks for itself.
I even titled it — Lost
one small glimmering
rose shard wrested from my heart
small though choice reward
clusterflock wall of shame, Kris McCracken, Sprite of love
Hello Deron,
I think that is a great idea, and very much understand the difficulty of jumping off the deep end on your own. I have been meaning to post some of my ‘early work’ on my blog “for a laugh” but just find it too uncomfortable to do. I know that I have plenty of rubbish material, but it’s still ‘mine’!
So, upon seeing your post, I tentatively went through some of my old notebooks and re-read various bits of prose, poetry, comics, ‘notable’ quotes and so on to try and find something appropriately embarrassing to make your job a little easier. Well, let’s just say that there was no shortage of embarrassing!
I already knew that my writing was a bit pretentious and ‘grand’ between the ages of 14 and 19 (and on occasion a bit later), but those old notebooks hammered the point home. God the whole process has been utterly embarrassing, and I’m doing this solo!
So anyway, here is a particularly cringeworthy poem that is dated 15 April, 1994, which makes me 16 at the time. That, however, is no excuse for the following monstrosity.
I have titled it: “Sprite of love”. I have no idea why. I hope that I was drunk. The spacing is true to the original handwritten draft.
Read more
The Coat Hanger Project
Some hospitals refuse to treat women for abortion-related illnesses like profuse bleeding because, as one health official put it, “they look at these women as sinners.” In a few instances, according to women’s groups, doctors have performed post abortion dilation and curettage without anaesthesia as a punishment for these women.
From International Herald Tribune
The 50-year-old grandmother has lost count of the number of pregnancies she has terminated in this largely Roman Catholic country where abortion is illegal and strictly taboo, but where about half a million women end their pregnancies every year.
The backstreet abortions performed by healers like Minda may become more common as a United States government aid program plans to stop distributing contraceptives in the Philippines in 2008. This will leave birth control up to the government which under the influence of Catholic bishops advocates unreliable natural birth control methods rather than the pill and condoms.
More at The Coat Hanger Project
Thank you, Christopher Walken
I must say, our Christopher Walken experiment is going quite well. Thank you to all who have participated so far, and please feel free to continue doing so, new and old. I’m excited to see what this will become.
ever feel like punching yourself in the face?
A transcript of Chris Matthews and David Shuster on Hardball discussing Obama’s diner problem.
SHUSTER: Well, here’s the other thing that we saw on the tape, Chris, is that, when Obama went in, he was offered coffee, and he said, “I’ll have orange juice.”
MATTHEWS: No.
…
When Matthews said “No” in response to Shuster’s revelation that Obama ordered orange juice in a diner, he sounded as though he had just been told that Obama had punched a nun in the face.
(thanks, Katherine)
feedback request
I’ve been thinking about adding an anonymous user profile to clusterflock with the intention that 1) people who read clusterflock and would occasionally like to post something can 2) we could do a sort of anonymous PostSecret type thing of our own in which clusterflock readers, or bloggers for that matter, could post things about themselves or their experiences that might be too personal otherwise 3) so we can get a lot of posts I can go ahead and delete.
So, of course, if you have opinions about it, I’d love to hear them. What I’m really interested in, though, is what this clusterflock anonymous user / profile would be named.
You know, ’cause if I had my way, I’d probably name it HD 1.
Dolls Get Breast Implants in Miss Bimbo Game
A web site that encourages girls as young as seven to give virtual dolls breast implants and put them on crash diets has caused concern among parents and children’s activists.
I’m just sayin’
Now I know many of you out there read clusterflock through our main feed and don’t bother much with the comments. But this thread about fighting is worth reading. What you may not know is that while people come for the the posts they stay for the comments.
We do have a comment feed, incidentally. We just like to hide it.
P.S. Cindy, if you pay for airfare, then I’ll be happy to come down there and throw a “hey baby” your way. And if Daryl is around, then I figure we can talk about Dawkins after that.
nice guys finish first
A study using the prisoner’s dilemma — a game that forces people to cooperate, reject, or in this case punish — showed that “when faced with a nasty opponent, turning the other cheek and continuing to cooperate — or at least not handing out punishment — paid off more in the long run.”
an experiment in higher teacher salaries
Okay, this is what I’m fucking talking about. Instead of speculating about whether paying teachers more will result in better education, why not run an experiment where you pay teachers more and see if that results in better eduction.
The school, which will run from fifth to eighth grades, is promising to pay teachers $125,000, plus a potential bonus based on schoolwide performance. That is nearly twice as much as the average New York City public school teacher earns, roughly two and a half times the national average teacher salary and higher than the base salary of all but the most senior teachers in the most generous districts nationwide.
Sociocultural Implications of the “Drag Queen Name” Phenomenon
Should we draw any sociocultural conclusions from the astounding response generated by Deron’s invitation to Kottke’s audience to join in the pseudonymous fun that Rick started here with “your drag queen name?” ?
Probably not.
But I think we might consider planning a talent show as part of flockstock (or whatever we’re calling our clusterflock gathering) — and feature an award for best drag performance.
What May Happen in the Next 100 Years.
Interesting Reading (via Digg)
