Just Draw Whatever Comes to Mind

Automatic Drawing is the practice of letting your mind float free, while you let your hands draw whatever they will, believing that the resulting image will be the result of contact with the spirit world. Not sure what Sigmund Freud will think about this image.

Out Of All The Things To Be Real

Ladies and Gentlemen … the Hoff-sicle.

Movie Review: We Are Wizards

I highly recommend that any and all nerds out there check out the documentary We Are Wizards. It is hilarious. The film follows fans of the Harry Potter series, including several Harry Potter themed rock bands and the operator of a fan page that was sued into oblivion by Warner Brothers.

Brad Neely of “The Professor Brothers” recorded an incredibly funny commentary for the first Harry Potter film called Wizard People, Dear Reader, (download here) and he too, got some interesting letters from the Warner Brothers legal department. He escaped unscathed, though, with a lot of great stories at Warner’s expense.

By far, the strangest person in the movie is this bat shit crazy Christian lady named Caryl Matrisciana that does believe that wizards and black magic are, in fact, real; that it penetrates children’s minds and, I dunno, makes them cut themselves or something. (BTW, nobody else in the movie thinks magic is real). Apparently, she is worthy of inclusion because made a movie intended to scare people away from all things Potter, called Harry Potter: Witchcraft Repackaged. Well, I actually just saw my first Harry Potter film a couple of weeks ago, and it was nowhere near as scary as she was.

Join Oprah in the Afterlife

Yeah, it’s from the Onion. But, as I always say, ‘It’s funny cause it’s true!’

 

Spell Check is My God Now

And tells us what to think, apparently.

I mean, it must be a message from some all knowing entity, right?

Christine O’Donnell and the Witchcraft Claim

This clip from a 1999 episode of  Bill Maher’s Politically Incorrect has made the rounds pretty successfully in the last few days. In it, Christine O’Donnell claims that she “dabbled” in a little witchcraft back there in high school. Did she? Or is just blathering to sound all cool?

So, does she appear to know something about witchcraft? Or did she just see a couple of people that may have scared her a little bit? One second she claiming that she actually practiced witchcraft, and the next she says, “I know what they told me they do.” Almost like she’s making it up as she goes along.

One of my fist dates with a witch was on a satanic alter and I didn’t know it … and, i mean, there was a little blood there and stuff like that …

Quite frankly, she doesn’t sound like someone that’s “dabbled”, or gone so far as to have read a book. She sounds like someone that’s heard stories from a church group that’s just as ignorant as she is. She thinks that a witch will, on a first date, bring a girl back to a blood covered Satanic alter? For a picnic? Really? Firstly, that’s just bad manners. Secondly, witches do not worship Satan, he’s a Judeo-Christian creation. But, it probably doesn’t do any good coming from me.It would be nice if a Wiccan said it. So, here’s a Wiccan saying it:

I really have to question what she is talking about because witchcraft and Satanism are two different things… witches or Wiccans do not believe in Satan. We don’t even believe that Satan exists. Satan is a Christian deity of some kind. He is part of the Christian religion not ours. We worship nature; we work very closely with nature. We do not have blood on our altar and we have little to do with Satan. So I don’t know what Ms. O’Donnell is talking about. I wonder if she knows what she was talking about.

–Diotima Mantineia from “The Witches Voice”

And, according to Anton Levay, founder of Church of Satan, “sacrifices” in Satanism are purely symbolic.

Yeah, she’s nuts.

Want to learn about how nutty evangelical Christians got over imaginary Satanist cults in the 80’s and 90’s? Read Remembering Satan by Lawrence Wright.

Bionic Bigfoot

Of course, there’s no way this could be the real Bigfoot: it’s not blurry. Everyone knows that the real Bigfoot is blurry, that why the pictures of him always appear to be out of focus!

This Bigfoot is better, though. It’s Bionic!

Lee Majors was perfectly cast as the Six Million Dollar Man. No matter how much slow motion running footage they took of him, his hair never moved.

The Door Knockers and the Demonic Paper

We don’t get much for door knockers in our area anymore. It’s a shame. They can be fun to deal with at times.

The last time we got an early Saturday morning visitor, though, we tried to hand them a FfRF pamphlet, the fun little non-tracts that Dan and Lori have for sale at their site. We figured we could do a little, I’ll take yours if you take mine swap. They wouldn’t take it though. I swear they actually backed away in terror of the little piece of paper. You could see their posture change, and the speaker of the two folder her arms and assumed a cold demeanor. It was very amusing since the “speaker” had to that point been trying to impress us with stories about how she gave speeches in front of large crowds of people, and now she was recoiling from a pamphlet with some other person’s views printed on them.

We did learn later that JWs are highly discouraged from owning any written material not published by the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society, outside of the odd fix it manual or cook book (talk about repression). This lady did seem to take it to a ridiculous level, though. I don’t believe they’re actually taught that touching the paper itself will harm you. Perhaps it was being out in the world that was agitating her. Life is so scary when you’re not completely surrounded by your own self affirming culture.

Tea Baggers Killed My Love of Conspiracy Theories

I use to love conspiracy theories until I learned there was such a huge pool of crackpot nut jobs that not only took them seriously, but are willing to make themselves into very public spectacles because of them. It use to be a lot of fun to say claim that the only reason the government required driver’s licensees was to fool Americans to sign up as organ donors, so that the government can take the organs and sell them to China for a profit, and then the organs would be used to make a race of atomic men that would in turn be interbred with space aliens to make super soldiers, but it’s another thing all to together to believe it.

Welcome to Crazy, AZ

Excellent NYT article on how crazy Jan Brewer, AZ governor, is getting.

Looks like she announced this on live TV:

“Our law enforcement agencies have found bodies in the desert either buried or just lying out there that have been beheaded,”

She has apparently stated using Glenn Beck as a public speaking model? Throw out crazy ideas, see who bites. To refute the claim, the Times did what Brewer did not do: they checked with local medical examiners.

“The Arizona Guardian Web site checked with medical examiners in Arizona’s border counties, and the coroners said they had never seen an immigration-related beheading. I called and e-mailed Brewer’s press office requesting documentation of decapitation; no reply. “

What can cause a seasoned politician to spout such easily disprovable rumors and conjecture on live TV? Well, the damnation she might get have gotten in the past for stick a size 12 shoe in her mouth is just no longer there. No matter how low she sets the bar,  there is an audience out there ready to back her. Thanks to the incredibly low bar set by Fox News and the Tea Party gang, there is no longer any public embarrassment to being a public nut job and off the cuff statement like this are starting to become common place especially with the popularity of Facebook and Twitter as a promotional tool.

Crazy statements follow this pattern
1. make a nut job statement in public
2. don’t follow up, or try to delete
3. profit

And profit they do. They rise succeed in rising the anger those desperately looking to be angry, and after that the cause of the anger, be it real or imaginary, can be ignored while the anger itself is reaped for the emotional bonding it causes. These are the verbal equivalency of drive by shootings. They fling projectiles at a desired target, with no willingness to stick around to take accountability