On the inimitable Sploid, a meditation on gay penguin love, and the zookeeper Eichmans who want to enforce society’s prejudices for “babies” upon them.

Supposedly, the ban on the depiction of Mohammed (the prophet, not the oil baron or the gas station attendant or the goat-herder) was put in place to prevent Mohammed being a figure of worship to take away from the god of Islam. They didn’t want a repeat of the status of saints or the Virgin Mary in Catholicism.

But the universal uprising (four months late) over the cartoons published by a few newspapers run by non-muslims in the West suggests to me that this strategy has backfired. By giving Mohammed a special place in non-depiction, Islam has turned him into an invisible idol, idolized by his absence. Remember, they’re supposed to be focusing on submission to the will of their god, not on his prophet.

Of course the fact that muslims refer to him as the Prophet and always put Peace Be Upon Him after his name and are required to name him as a prophet of their god suggests that it’s not just in non-representation that Mohammed has been idolized in practice if not in theology.

Islam is hardly unique in such conceits, but it would be a good thing for thoughtful muslims to remember as they charge the gates in the name of non-idolatry…that’s pretty much the definition of idolatry you’re displaying, there.

Looks like another attempt to eat your way to health has died. Low fat diets, in a long term, extremely large study, do nothing to affect your rates of cancer or heart disease.

The $415 million federal study involved nearly 49,000 women ages 50 to 79 who were followed for eight years. In the end, those assigned to a low-fat diet had the same rates of breast cancer, colon cancer, heart attacks and strokes as those who ate whatever they pleased, researchers are reporting today.

Even if they weren’t low fat enough, or didn’t cut out enough of the right fats, there should have been some measurable benefit for that many people over eight years. Instead, we’re left with body shape, smoking, activity level, and family history being the most important factors. Three of those you can control, but I’ve read the fourth matters as much or more.

One thing this means is that people who want to grab a study involving four or five subjects and mandate whatever the latest health fad is for everyone–for the children–need to enjoy a warm, tall glass of shut the fuck up. Yeah, if you dramatically reduce the variety of food you eat, eat more than you need, and stop exercising a la Morgan Spurlock, you will be worse off. But what if a later study says that certain fats excised from school diets turns out to be necessary for proper development in children?

We’re all going to die. We’re all going to die in different ways. Sure, don’t do anything stupid, but don’t live your life as if the next news report is going to save your life–it won’t. Being born is terminal.

I’m gonna have a cookie and do something nice for somebody tomorrow.

I’ll just brush my teeth afterwards.

Hey, remember the “don’t be stupid” bit?

So looks like the Dutch are gonna backstop the Danes on the whole Mohammed Cartoon controversy. They have a site that does the equivalent of Something Awful’s Photoshop Phriday, in which various people have satirical fun with found images, usually centered around a theme.

The site Retecool has this week’s Foto Fuck Vrijdag and imagines an alternate universe in which Mohammed is on every ad there is. It’s so not safe for work or anybody with a thin skin.

Hat tip: Nobody’s Business

Since you guys are determined to take mortal offense at anything poking fun at you, I thought I’d mention some of the things I like about Canada or Canadian migrants to the US.

1. My great-grandmother. From Nova Scotia. She moved to Boston. From all accounts she was the better half of the relationship that produced my grandfather.
2. Gay marriage. Hope Harper doesn’t screw that up. One of the places your civil liberties drastically exceed ours.
3. Mike Meyers. OK sometimes he goes into lame territory, but Wayne and Garth are classic.
4. Kids in the Hall and their diaspora.
5. Dan Ackroyd (I’m sensing a theme).
6. Rush. Where would American high school geeks be without them?
7. Tolerant attitude towards certain drugs in some places.
8. I happen to like moose and beaver.

Hope that keeps you happy for a bit, or at least dries the sniffles from my last post.

Tyler Cowen offers his hypothesis:

I doubt if people have fewer delusions, so presumably they have moved into stories which cannot so easily be refuted. This would include delusions about the future (e.g., extreme forms of transhumanism?), delusions about politics, and delusions about religion.

Or maybe it was a fad among a certain type of people, and they’ve moved on to trying to debunk evolution. And it was never that easy to refute them: trust me, I’ve seen the attempts, and their belief was absolute–until the next thing came along, and now they can’t be shaken in their new beliefs, possibly until George Bush leaves office.

I suspect the decline of the fad may have something to do with the end of the Cold War. Now terror arrives in truck bombs and hijacked planes, not missiles from the sky.

But at some point, I predict, the fad will rise again. Maybe not in the same form, but it will be back. In the form of alien abduction stories, it was going pretty strong during the run of the X-Files, and that wasn’t so long ago.

Now we can turn our attention to serious problems, like El Chupacabra.

Radley Balko has caught Tyler Cowen’s meme of asking for recommendations for new music. Radley did one better and at least provided up front some of his likes, which actually makes it possible to determine whether anything you listen to will appeal to him. (In light of Tyler’s more recent listings of his suggestions, I sincerely doubt he’ll like anything I listen to–and I kinda doubt Radley will get a lot out of mine, either, though you never know.)

But I think just listing some suggestions and inviting people to track back isn’t a bad idea. So consistent with the iPod theme, though I own no iPod, here are some key ones I think more people ought to love, linked to the iTMS when possible.

Continue reading →

So I got the DVDs for the new Battlestar Galactica’s first season, including the opening miniseries. Watching the miniseries with a much higher resolution than my tape of the broadcast showed me something I had to go back and make sure I saw. Turns out I’m not the first one to spot that in the first scene with Laura Roslin in the miniseries, a Firefly class transport is shown coming in to land. So if you’ve seen Serenity, as I think you know you must, you’ve seen rather a lot of those ships.

Just a cool little bit brought to you via Zöic, the same company that did the effects in Firefly, the short-lived series that begat Serenity. Interestingly, they developed the handheld-camera-films-spaceships technique that is so characteristic of Battlestar Galactica for Firefly, though it wasn’t used at quite the same level.

The only thing else I think is, thank the Lords of Kobol that they didn’t carry forward the kid Boxy into the series. He really didn’t work in the first Battlestar Galactica, either.

Now I have to wait ’till January for more. Suck.

Until a week or so ago, I thought that the White Sox were one of those mythical teams of bygone days that didn’t exist anymore, like the Black Sox…

…or the Red Sox.

/me ducks

I just got through watching Rashomon, and I’m sure at some point I’ll have insightful things to say about it. But in the meantime:

1. Women throughout time have had really, really weird ideas about fashion. Those eyebrows really freaked me out. Much worse than metrosexual crab people.
2. During the woman’s story, the composer was just a wee bit “inspired by” (in the John Williams “completely ripped off” sense) Ravel’s Bolero.

I enjoyed it, but seriously, those eyebrows remind me of the old women I see who’ve shaved theirs and tattooed some weird arch over their eyes in a color unrelated to their actual hair.