Priceless
We got a brochure in the mail for a Chinese auction sponsored by Oorah. Two of the slots in the auction caught my eye:
- Eretz Yisroel—round-trip airfare to Israel, seven-night hotel stay for two, and a one-week car rental.
- Priceless Bracha—round-trip airfare to Israel, seven-night hotel stay for two, and a blessing from a Gadol.
I must therefore conclude that a Gadol’s blessing has a market value equivalent to a one-week Israeli car rental. Who knew?
A timely observation
Ladies and gentlemen, Eric Naggum:
We can only be glad there is no daylight loan time, or we would face decades of too much daylight, only to be faced with a few years of total darkness to make up for it.
The jig is up
Now that members of the Texas and Georgia state legislatures [PDF] have caught on, I suppose there’s no point in denying it any more. Yes, indeed, modern cosmologists and evolutionary scientists are blindly and unscientifically following kabbalistic teachings that the world is billions of years old. Likewise, we crafty Pharisees are responsible for hiding anti-Biblical kabbalistic doctrines in the guise of Copernicus’s theory of heliocentrism and, later, Einstein’s theory of relativity. It’s all true! They found us out!
Also, that stuff about the banks? They got us dead to rights. Next time your mortgage payment comes due, just make the check out to me and send it over here; you’ll get faster service that way.
The graphic designer's revenge
How did the American Library Association get away with using the original Mac OS menu font on their Bill Gates poster?
I didn't know those were among the symptoms
I just got a spam email with the subject line “Bird flu—the ‘New Oil & Gas’ for investors”.
A conversation with my wife
(Scene: Oak Square, Brighton, in 90° heat)
“Do you want me to push the stroller?”
“No, it’s OK, I’ll push the stroller.”
“But what will people think, seeing me just walking alongside my 8½-months-pregnant wife while she pushes a double stroller with two children?”
“Do I look pregnant?”
“No, that dress just makes you look fat.”
The happiest atheists in Oklahoma
American Atheists reports on a legal case, in which a high-school student’s refusal to say the Lord’s Prayer with her basketball team escalated into trumped-up assault charges against the girl’s father:
In closing argument, Edwin told the jury that it really should not be necessary for an Atheist to tell them it is wrong to lie under oath, as he reminded them the Christian school officials and the police had done in their sworn trial testimony. “Thou shall not bare [sic] false witness against thy neighbor. Ninth Commandment. Eight if you are Roman Catholic,” Kagin said.
The jury believed the Atheists. Unanimously.
The night of the verdict, tornados of unusual violence descended on the panhandle of Oklahoma. The home of the Principal who had brought the false charges against Chuck Smalkowski was severely damaged.
This fact has no relationship whatsoever to the verdict.
To paraphrase Homer Simpson: “God bless those atheists.”
via Pharyngula
Life --- art
So when was the last time you had this dizzy sensation that your country had not merely degenerated, but passed into some terrifying Dimension of Suck, making you want to curl up in a fetal position and wait for a meteor strike to rescue you from the pure psychotic ludicrousness of it all?
In my case, it was about the time I read this.
Attention, teenagers!
The next time you hear your elders decry the loose morals of your generation, you can blame them for setting a bad example.
Doctors said sexually transmitted diseases among senior citizens are running rampant at a popular Central Florida retirement community, according to a Local 6 News report.
A gynecologist at The Villages community near Orlando, Fla., said she treats more cases of herpes and the human papilloma virus in the retirement community than she did in the city of Miami....
A doctor blamed Viagra, a lack of sex education and no risk for pregnancy for the spike in sexually transmitted diseases at The Villages.
(emphasis added)
At last, a domain for the decadent
WASHINGTON, April 1 (AFP)—After years of tussling with Congress over establishing an .xxx top-level domain for pornography, the International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has unveiled a compromise: a new top-level domain encompassing not only pornography, but any Internet content deemed “not safe for work”.
While everyone has their own opinion about how to define pornography, the new .nsfw domain will be governed by simple and objective standards. Any employer who believes that the content available on a Web site is not safe for work may file a complaint with a special ICANN committee, whose members are nominated by the United States Chamber of Commerce. The committee has the authority to reassign any IP address to a new domain in the .nsfw hierarchy. Employers can filter access to all these domains, and be assured that their workers are not endangering themselves on the Internet. Consumers will be allowed to access .nsfw domains from home, of course, but if they have trouble reaching them, they will not be able to get help from their Internet service providers, since the ISP’s technical-support workers will have their access filtered.
If the owner of a site believes that he or she was put in the .nsfw domain by mistake, he or she can petition the NSFW Board of Appeal, which meets to hear such disputes in the bar of the Raffles Hotel, in Singapore, from 10:00 a.m. to noon every February 29.
A spokesperson for the Electronic Frontier Foundation could not be reached for comment.
