What do you call a Unitarian Universalist without any eyes?
A Untaran Unversalst.
Category: Pop Culture
Stupid geeky joke with a religious twist
One Sunday morning the Higgs Boson walked into a Catholic mass. The service is about to start, and the Higgs boson shouts, “Stop!”
The priest turns to look at him, and says, “Why should I stop?”
The Higgs boson says, “Because you can’t have mass without me.”
(This joke appears to have been told first by science comedian Brian Malow.)
Excessive cuteness
Litterboxcam has gone the way of all mortal things, and is no more. What to watch instead when one is trying to procrastinate? Carol pointed me to Puppy Live Cam: Holly’s Half Dozen. The best thing is it prevents me from procrastinating for too long: I can only stand watching it for about a minute before I have to go back to work or be overwhelmed by excessive cuteness.
Pee on Earth Day at GA
Carol describes how she celebrated Pee on Earth Day at General Assembly in this blog post. We’re staying in a motel in downtown Phoenix, so she couldn’t just go outdoors and pee; her solution to the problem of urban peeing involves a plastic container and a convenient (and grateful) palm tree.
My new hero
My new hero is Dr. Megavolt:
I want a huge Tesla coil and a suit like that. Wow.
It’s beginning to look a lot like…
Having grown up a New England Yankee in the Puritan heartland, there’s always a part of me that feels Christmas to be an abomination. It was my Puritan ancestors who made Christmas illegal for a short time in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. And the Puritan strain in me thinks there should be only one holy day, and that’s the sabbath, and adding any other holy day is idolatry or worse.
But I’m also the product of several generations of New England Unitarians. Unitarian Louisa May Alcott created the ideal for a liberal religious Christmas in her book Little Women: a home-based family celebration devoted to selfless giving, guilt, and helping others. Unitarian Edmund Hamilton Sears created the ideal for a liberal religious Christmas carol in “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear”: a song where the Christmas story is really a story about peace, social justice, and a twinge of guilt upon feeling that you’re not doing enough to make the world a better place.
So I both hate Christmas, and like Christmas. It’s no wonder that when Christmas Day rolls around, I’m ready to ignore the holiday and go out for Chinese food.
Shameless promotion
If you’re looking for the perfect last minute-Christmas gift, there’s this great book by Carol Steinfeld called Liquid Gold: The Lore and Logic of Using Urine To Grow Plants. Perfect for bathroom reading, the first half of the book has all kinds of bizarre and funny tidbits about how people have used urine over the centuries — as well as tidbits about the current state of peeing, including urinal video games. The second half of the book gives you serious information about how you can make your garden greener using urine.
So this is the perfect gift for the twelve-year-old boy on your gift list who likes pee jokes (and every adult American male is actually a twelve-year-old boy who likes pee jokes). It is also the perfect gift for the gardener on your list. And if you order by Wednesday, Carol can ship it to you via priority mail so you get it in time for Christmas (for an extra $4 in postage over the special Internet price of $12).
To get it in time for Christmas, call the phone number on Carol’s Web site. If you want it signed, she can sign it for you. And of course I think this is a great book, my sweetheart wrote it.
A Cthulhu Christmas
What better way to continue the Elder God Party’s presidential campaign than by having Cthulhu infiltrate the nation’s Christmas celebrations? This is the way to get a leg up (or, um, tentacle up?) over Newt and Mitt, by grabbing the hearts of voters just before the Iowa caucuses:
Craig is my hero for sending me this link!
Ode to pie
I like pie
for breakfast
and for lunch.
Pie makes me
happy, keeps
me sane, and
when this slice
is gone, I’ll
cut myself
another
slice, and have
some pie again.
Palindrome day (sort of)
Today is another exciting day for a certain kind of geeky person who uses the U.S. convention of writing dates: a one- or two-digit number for the month, then a one- or two-digit day for writing the date, followed by a two-digit number for the year. Given that convention, today’s date is a palindrome: 11/22/11. There have been eleven other such palindrome dates this year: 1/1/11; 11/1/11 through 11/9/11; and 11/11/11. The last time we had such palindrome dates was in 2001: 10/1/01 through 10/9/01; 10/11/01; and 10/22/01. And of course we’ll have more such palindrome dates next year.
But palindrome days are less interesting than they might be, because they are dependent on conventions for writing dates that vary from place to place. In Europe, the convention for writing dates reverses the month and date. If you’re bored over the Thanksgiving holiday, you can figure out the palindrome dates for 2011 in Europe.
Update: UUpdater offers another way of looking at palindrome dates in a comment.