America's religious heritage

You will find numerous editorials (1,2,3,4 just to give you a small variety) from the redneck right trying to support things like ten commandments monuments at courthouses based on their historical context and the religious background of this country. Our founding fathers did have their weaknesses but one of them was not religious zealotry. They drew up a government based on the Enlightenment in Europe and they themselves were mostly Deists.

Despite the fact that we have a historically-religious-tolerant country that formed out of a secular government movement we now find ourselves in one of the most religious nations on earth. So therefore there is no correlation between a state religion and the number of people who consequently practice it. Having the ten commandments at a courthouse is not only contrary to what our laws are based on but a state endorsement of religion seems to have no influence whatsoever on the direction of the culture or society.

If we were actually basing our laws on Leviticus in the old testament our prisons would be overflowing. Well it is more like the graveyards would be full of tiny caskets, as biblical law states all smart alec kids must be put to death. The supreme court will hear this case on Wednesday and will probably find some technicality again so they can throw it out. They are quite simply afraid to do their job and defend the first amendment. If they decide the monuments stay, then the positive side is that perhaps the evangelicals will actually read them for once and know what they are defending. Check out this survey to see what percentage of them can actually recite them now.

What about Bert and Ernie?

I am sure you were shocked to find out that Spongebob Squarepants and Shrek's friends are gay. Apparently tonight Marge Simpson's sister Patty came out of the closet as well. My gosh, the next thing you know they will be saying that Smithers and Stewie are light in the loafers as well. The evangelicals will probably start attacking the Simpsons in about 9 months as they don't seem very fast on the uptake. Shrek 2 was released last summer and they are just now urging for a boycott of it.

This wacky group even wants to boycott Disney since Mickey and Minnie aren't straight enough for them. There really aren't that many straight cartoon characters if you think about it. Most of them seem to either be asexual or have interesting eccentricities that at the very least could be interpreted as divergent from mainstream behavior. Kids like funny characters, and adults also for that matter. They also like to watch villians who commit all sorts of violence in cartoons. Straight people are boring to watch, if these people have their way, all cartoons will be like G.I.Joe. (Then again with Joe it might be a case of don't ask don't tell)

PS - Another Hitchhiker trailer went online this weekend. This is the UK version. You can find it and all alternative versions of the preview here.

The Futile Experiment

I recently added a DVD box set of classic Warner Brothers gangster films to my home library. It has some great 1930s movies with Bogart and Cagney and is a lot of fun. What has stood out for me the most upon watching them however is a reminder of what a complete and utter failure prohibition was. And even that is an understatement. Read this chapter from Peter McWilliam's fantastic book Ain't Nobody's Business if you Do to get every last detail about what a true disaster the noble experiment was.

Now I suppose every country is entitled to a mistake or two in their history. However, just like every parent in the history of time has told their kids, you need to learn from your mistakes! Now the long standing "War on Drugs" has already illustrated we didn't learn anything from prohibition but now it looks like it is about to get worse. The so-called "morals voters" are proposing to clean up our filthy country again. Now outside of Utah I don't think there are many groups proposing banning alcohol again so they at least have learned to be realists. Instead they will take on the less-politically-correct vices and easier targets of gambling, smoking, gay rights, abortion, video games, Janet Jackson, pornography and even sex toys.

When these legislators and zealots stop the rhetoric and actually produce supporting evidence or case studies that demonstrate the societal benefits to banning these activities then we should start to listen. Until then we have history to go on and the moralists haven't faired too well. For those who support banning these things let me put it in terms you can understand. Let's say tomorrow all religions were banned from this country. Would you stop praying? stop believing? Thats what you are asking others to do when you ban their vices and lifestyles. It hasn't worked in the past and it won't work in the future.

This site now featuring revolutionary 3D!

As Hitchcock once said, "3D movies were a 9-day wonder and I came in on the ninth day." The fad came and went very quickly in the early 50s. That was when Hollywood panicked about the introduction of TV and tried every trick in the book to be different from the new medium. The technique is still used in film from time to time as a marketing gimick or novelty though. I will never forget seeing a film called Treasure of the Four Crowns as a youngster in the 80s. I walked out of the theatre with my eyes in pain from having them poked repeatedly with spears for 90 minutes!

I bring this up as you will need to get your old red and blue glasses out of storage because there will be a secret, less-than-a-minute, 3D sequence in the new Hitchhiker's film. Well only secret to those not in the know such as my readers. The sequence featuring a Simon Jones cameo, the original Arthur Dent, will be your cue in the film to put on your fashionable cardboard glasses.

So as you stand in line for the film on April 29th with glasses in hand, you must show no sypathy for all those unfortunate, unprepared filmgoers who have come empty handed and then insist on borrowing your prized glasses. Just tell them they should have been reading skepticklish. And just to make sure you don't forget to find your 3D glasses (everybody has a pair somewhere) you will have to find them right this second to view the picture below:

Once you find your glasses you can view hundreds of 3D pictures like this one at anachrome.com . They will sell you a fancy pair if you really don't have one already. There doesn't really seem to be much demand yet for 3D internet. But this is still a relatively new medium. The WWW might have to put on some type of dog and pony show in a few more years to keep our interest.

Time to fly north for the Winter

The weather here in my town in Arizona today featured thunderstorms and a high of 59 degrees. Where I moved from, in Seattle, they had clear skys and a high of 61 today. Winter has just been lousy all around this year in the desert and the only nice thing about the rain is that it keeps the snowbirds in their trailers. Well we have all heard the joke;

Q:How do you know when a snowbird is complaining?

A: Their lips are moving!

Well ok I confess I just made that zinger up, but Arizona's soggy winter has just given them something else they can compare negatively with life back home.

I am getting a bit tired of all the jokes about how I have brought the rain from Seattle down here. In Seattle for February they have had 1.1 inches of rain so far this month. Their February average is 4.09 . In my town, as of yesterday we have had 2.2 inches when our average is 1.04 for the month. The Mariners started spring training down here last week and have been forced inside to get some workouts in.

So, to my friends and family in the Northwest, enjoy your sunny weather. Not only do you live in the most enlightened place in the country but right now you are enjoying the best weather as well.

Not much has changed in 20 years

The eighth graders at my school are doing reports on their favorite fiction authors right now. As an example I pulled out a similar report I had done when I was in the eighth grade 20 years ago. In cleaning up my house this weekend I coincidentally found it. My grade-A report was dated May 28, 1985 and was on who else: Douglas Adams. Funny how if I was given the same assignment today I would pick the same author.

If I think back to what my other favorite things were when I was in eighth grade, the only thing that has been constant over the years has been my favorite author. Everything else that was a favorite of mine back then has long since been forgotten. Of the stuff that I can even remember : My favorite band was Duran Duran. My favorite TV show was Knight Rider. My favorite movie was Star Wars. (well ok, I still like that one)

Even though DNA ceased to be a novelist in his later years his occasional published and broadcast thoughts on science, technology and atheism (or all three at once) continued to greatly influence me. (Here is a great video of a lecture he made following his global trek investigating endangered species. If for nothing else, worth watching for the chinese condoms story) He inaugurated the H2G2 site on the web which was the predecessor to Wikipedia, which is such a mind-bogglingly useful site one wonders what the Internet was like before it.

What is most ironic about me finding this old report on DNA written when I was 13 is one paragraph in particular that I wrote. I will quote myself verbatim:

The latest project for Douglas Adams is a new movie based on Hitchhiker, which Paramount plan to start filming this month. Adams was asked to write a screenplay for Hitchhiker in 1982 but with so much in progress he did not get it finished until late in 1984. He sold the sreenplay (sic) to Paramount and it is to be
directed by Ivan (Ghostbusters and Animal House) Reitman.

That new movie project I mentioned back then is one I am quite sure DNA wished he had never started. He once said, "The Hollywood process is like trying to grill a steak by having a succession of people coming into the room and breathing on it." Well it has taken over 20 years but we are now just a few months away from having a medium-rare Filet Mignon.

Bring back Betamax!

Over the long weekend I managed to sort through all my stuff to see what goes and what will stay in preparation for my big move in a few months. Without hesitation I decided to toss out my whole lot of VHS tapes. VHS is a technology that was garbage from the get go and I am happy to announce I am now well rid of it. I was amazed that technology hung on as long as it did actually.

Since my VCR broke six months ago or so I haven't missed being without my tapes at all. It is funny how for years and years I both collected and made my own tapes and thought of them as a prized collection. I spent hours compiling my favorite shows and so forth. Now it seems like the sooner I can get them in the dump the better. It is a bit of a shame they have no value today but I got plenty of use out of them over the years.

My audio cassettes will also end up on the rubbish pile. Considering I haven't listened to any of them in at least four years they are well past the expiration date. I never bought commercial audio tapes but I had dozens of elaborately constructed "mix tapes." Now as all I listen to is digital music and watch digital movies the lesson this has taught me is that life is too short to spend much time fussing with constucting your own CDs. Just make them quick and dirty as everything will end up in the trash in a decade or so anyway.

My missionary position

They are spreading everywhere like a disease. I have seen them all over the world in my past travels and I have a feeling I will run into them again in my travels this summer. You know who I am talking about: the young fresh-faced white boys in suits and ties with nametags walking in pairs through the streets of the third world.

Mormons and others don't have much success converting people in the USA and Europe so they have headed to more fertile ground and seem to be having some effect. When I look at the surface of the issue I suppose I really have no problem with converting people from one wacko relgion to another. Unfortunately the local culture is often tied in with beliefs and much more than local religion ends up getting tossed out as well. Douglas Adams wrote about running into missionaries in Last Chance to See and commented on how they should keep their nonsense to themselves.

So when I see those clowns down south, I will just try to avoid eye contact. Thats how they get you after all. If they are heading toward me on the sidewalk I will do whatever it takes to avoid there magic conversion powers, even if it means jumping into traffic.

So that's why people pay for cable

If it weren't for all those bad movies shown 100 times a month I would subscribe to HBO and Showtime for sure. Out here of course we have no cable so I would have to get one of those dishes and get 300 channels I don't want. Showtime is worth getting for the P&T Bullshit show of course and HBO is worth getting for the Bill Maher Show.

Maher got himself in hot water with the evangelicals with some of his comments in an interview on MSNBC this week. Well as is obvious from the headline of the article linked above, the crazy christians missed the whole point of what he said. The headline reads, "Bill Maher : Christians have neurological disorder." I put the quotes around it here but if you look closely at the article there are no quotes around that statement in the headline or in the article. That's because he didn't say that of course. He made a blanket statement about all religious people. So I can't figure it out, either the christians just always like to play the victim and pretend they are singled out and persecuted or they can't stand to be lumped in with all of those others heathens.

Maher featured in the classic film CANNIBAL WOMEN IN THE AVOCADO JUNGLE OF DEATH

Bill Maher is providing a voice of reason and hopefully on HBO he can get away with it. As you recall some of his comments didn't go over so well on his show on ABC a few years back and they fired him. I was amazed that a confessed atheist and libertarian was allowed to host a network show for as long as he did actually. Nowadays the ABC news department is doing one-hour promotions for fraudulent Brazilian faith healers and "objective" reporting on UFOs.

Thanks Bill for not playing it safe even though you have been burned before. However I must take issue with your thesis, as it is probably us non-believers who have the neurological disorder. Humans are by nature a story-telling and pattern-forming species. The large majority of folks worldwide seem to subscribe to some creation story or another. So for those of us who don't we must have got our neurons crossed somewhere along the way. This is however, a disorder I can live with quite easily.

Skepticklish - Hall of Fame

Anybody who is worthy of their own post on skepticklish will find themselves linked into this page. There are obviously many folks missing, those included so far just happened to be newsworthy at some point since this site's inauguration

Click on the individual's name for a link to a Wikipedia article.

Click on the date for a link to my post.

Michael Shermer : 9/25/04
Edgar Martinez : 10/4/04
Richard Dawkins : 11/10/04

Andy Rooney : 11/21/04

Penn Jillette : 12/7/04

Teller : 12/11/04
Julia Sweeney : 12/17/04
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. : 1/15/05
Johnny Carson : 1/23/05

Salman Rushdie : 1/25/05

Arthur Miller : 2/12/05

Carl Sagan : 2/16/05

Bill Maher : 2/19/05

Douglas Adams : 2/22/05

Simon Cowell : 3/21/05

James Randi : 3/25/05

Richard Feynman : 5/4/05

Nick Park : 10/7/05

Howard Stern : 10/20/05

Ricky Gervais : 3/9/06

71 days and counting!

After a 20 year wait you think I would be able to wait just a few more months for the Hitchhiker's film but after seeing the trailer today I don't know how I am going to make it until April 29th when it premiers in the USA.

There is absolutely no way that something you have been waiting for since you were a kid is ever going to live up to expectations. It will either be a good or a bad movie and that is not the point. What is so special is that Hitchhiker's will finally have been adapted for every major type of media. More importantly, Douglas Adams spent many of his far-too-few years on bringing the story to the silver screen. To me, attending this film will be like saying thank you to Douglas for brightening my life over the years.

That said, if the trailer is anything to go by it will be a fantastic film. I too raised an eyebrow a year ago when I heard Mos Def would play Ford Prefect but after a quick glimpse in the trailer it looks like there will be great chemistry between him and both Arthur and Zaphod. It will not be the radio series, it will not be the books, it will not be the TV show, it will not be the computer game, it will not be the stage play and that is exactly what will make it great. The medium is the message and I always shudder whenever I hear somebody walking out of a theatre saying, "It wasn't as good as the book." Bringing material to a new medium means it needs to take into account the strengths and weaknesses of that format. A film, no matter what its source, needs to be judged on if it was a good film or not, end of a story.

Having written now for radio, newspapers, and the Web, I like to think I have found the right length and style for an effective blog. (Now if only I could get the content sorted out) If you have browsed blogs I am sure you have visited many long-winded and confusing sites with no relevent links. The writing might have worked fine in a textbook but not on the web. My site is far from perfect but I purposely think about the audience and the medium when I put each word down. Douglas Adams had experience writing in all mediums (he discusses that in this interview) and is the author of the new film's screenplay so he can take all of the credit if it is a success, but if it blows we can all just blame Disney!

First Contact

In the deepest sense the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is a search for ourselves

Carl Sagan

The answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything as we all know is of course 42. Today we actually might have got some clues as to what the question is. The announcement today of evidence of life on Mars, if it bears true, must certainly be the most important discovery in the sciences since DNA.

Just think, of all the generations to come before us we will be the first to have proof that we are not alone. Granted this isn't "intelligent life" but if even some sort of life can form on our inhospitable neighbor, who knows what else is possible in the cosmos. I am sure it is just my wishful thinking that this revelation might finally knock some sense into people and knock the religion out. Few have paid attention to any of the other scientific revolutions so why start now.

It is a shame Sagan will not be alive to see any extraterrestrial life but since there is probably nobody more responsible for setting us on our recent expedition to look for it than I propose we call the new life form Saganians! That is if they can't simply speak up for themselves and tell us their name.

Cloudy Skys

This has been a lousy winter for stargazing out here in the desert. It is supposedly usually quite clear this time of year but this winter it has often been cloudy! I was planning on going to the Kitt Peak observatory near Tucson again this coming three-day weekend but the forecast does not look good. Last time I was down there in June I was booked for the night program but it was cancelled because of stormy skys.

Well so I will just have to setup for a garage sale this coming weekend. I have all sorts of junk to sell, come on by if you need old VHS tapes or CDs. In the mean time until the skys clear up you can vote for the best Hubble images of all time online. (PS - The picture above is not a hubble image but one of the first stills from the new Hitchhiker's movie)

The death of a playwright

Arthur Miller died yesterday. He was plain and simply the finest American Playwright of all time. Not just for the few plays he has done that everybody has heard about but for a large body of work, including one play you are probably not familiar with but that is currently being produced into a film.

In 1991 while I was living in London I saw a West End production of an Arthur Miller play called The Ride Down Mt. Morgan. It was the play's premiere and I remember thinking it was a real man's kind of story. Not that it was about football or something but that it really honestly delved into some emotions unique to us guys. The original show starred Tom Conti but the play never really took off after that, Miller rewrote parts of it and it had a so-so broadway run with Patrick Stewart and now Michael Douglas will star in the film. Perhaps it was too smarmy for some folk's taste.

If you are in England as an American you will find yourself constantly challenged as to why the USA deserves its spot as world cultural dictator. The Brits seem a bit insecure about their place in the mix because aside from the occasional Full Monty or something there artistic culture doesn't get much play globally lately. I generally agree with them that 90% of the movies/tv/music and plays that come out of the USA are total rubbish and if the rest of the world had any taste they would ignore it. But the problem is they don't, so as an American overseas you just have to grin and bear it. Ironically, it is actually much easier to avoid US popular culture in the USA than overseas.

My point is this though, while in London in 1991 I was frequently embarrassed by some of the American cultural imports, including the sickening Our Town, which was also playing in the West End at the time starring Alan Alda. It was not bad enough that every high school in the USA had to perform that horrible play, now it would be forced on the young drama students in England. When I was sitting in the theatre watching The Ride Down Mt. Morgan however I was quite proud to be watching a masterpiece from one of our own. Miller was able to arm me with a little ammunition when the inevitable America-bashing would start at my local pub later that evening.

Oh, and I forgot to mention he was an atheist and very outspoken against evangelicals so of course it goes without saying he is more than worthy to join the skepticklish hall of fame.

Even Napoleon had his Waterloo

The flight from Waterloo, Iowa to my town here in Arizona is not a non-stop one so I have spent much of the past day and a half traveling. I am safe back at home at any rate and back to work tomorrow.

Sorry but I will not be revealing what my whereabouts will be for next year just yet. I have to discuss things with friends and family first but after them, skepticklish readers will be the first to know. Keep watching this space.

Decision Time

I just have a moment to update readers. I am in Chicago with a friend now, finished with the fair and am pondering an offer. I will be back in Arizona tomorrow and will update you a bit more when I have made a decision. So basically things did not go perfectly with my expectations but they are looking better than they were 24 hours ago. Watch this space for more.

I got a golden ticket!

So they are pulling out all the stops at this jobfair and are even providing an internet center where I can keep all of the skepticklish readers up to date with my progress here in Iowa. Needless to say I don't have an offer yet.

This morning when I showed up to the fair they had a folder with my name on it and all sorts of prized yellow interview invitations. Schools that had read your information ahead of time and liked what they saw were able to request you to drop by their table and arrange an interview.

I found several "golden tickets" as I dubbed them, from schools in Kuwait and Colombia. Neither spot, I was particularly interested in living in. Thank goodness some of the other schools saw the light when I came around to meet them face to face and they gave me some of their precious interview slots.

So tonight and tomorrow will be very intense and I will try to give you another update when I can. I am also trying to squeeze sleep into my schedule as well somehow.

Weekend excursion to the heartland

My big trip of the year is coming up this weekend. I fly out to Waterloo, Iowa on Thursday. I just thought it would be a nice change of pace from the nice 70+ weather here to head out to where it is below freezing. For this trip, I am using up my only three personal days, and because of the cost of it I was only able to have a cheap vacation this past December. However in the end I know it will be well worth it.

So what really is bringing me to the middle of nowhere in the dead of winter you ask? It is the University of Northern Iowa's International School Job Fair. It is the major job fair for all the prestigious schools around the world. There are 127 schools registered to attend and I am open to working at most of them. I imagine I will probably not be visiting the tables of schools in Muslim countries or overtly religious institutions, but I should have my hands full all weekend with all the rest.

So I will give you a full report when I return, sooner if I am able to get online during my short trip and happen to have some spare time. The major problem for me now is packing for this trip. When I moved down here from Seattle almost two years ago I donated all my sweaters and warm jackets to Goodwill!