Mortality Sucks

For the most part, I do my best to avoid talking about personal matters on the blog.  Blogs are inherently something of an ego trip, and while I may have convinced myself that some small portion of the world may care about my opinions about faith healing or Godzilla, I'm not far enough down my own rabbit hole to think that anyone wants to read my life story.  I made it a rule from the beginning that I would never ever post anything about any drama going on in my own life - I have friends to help me deal with that so I have no need to turn to the internet for it.

Tonight, I'm going to break that rule.

One of my cats died today - he had to be put down.  I know, I know, that's the sappiest first-world yuppy problem, right?  Doesn't matter.  I loved that cat, and more importantly my wife loved that cat.  His name was Tigger, and I caught him from the wild about nine years ago when he emerged from an abandoned garage near my parents' house.

Tigger the Cat, aka Sluggo, Mr. Underpants, El Tigre, and Fart Nards

He was...a cat.  Hobbies included sitting on tall things, chewing his toenails loudly, and carrying around a rainbow-colored rattle mouse.  His original role in the household was as a gift to my wife, and he got the point that he followed her around everywhere.  I'm not going to go on about him, but rest assured that he was an awesome cat for all of the reasons that anyone who owns a cat thinks their cat is uniquely great.

He started having some health issues before Christmas and despite our best efforts he went downhill very quickly.  We never got a firm diagnosis as to what was wrong with him - he just started wasting away day by day.  We did extensive - and expensive - tests for the better part of a month.  Today he went in for more lab work and they found that his liver had failed.  He had already lost more than half his body weight, could barely stand, and was unlikely to survive any aggressive treatments.  We had to let him go.

I'm kind of very extremely childishly sad that he's gone.  It's a shitty thing, to have something...someone... you care about sicken and die so suddenly.  A few weeks ago he was a happy, chubby cat and now he's just gone.

In one respect though, I feel good about it.  He died with peacefully and without pain in the arms of people who cared about him.  Plus, I can honestly say I have nothing but good memories of that cat.  That's a perk of pet ownership - you never have arguments with them.  There's no bickering, jealousy, or grudges with a cat.  They just want hang out with you and rub their buccal glands all over your stuff.  It's an amazing thing, really, to have a critter running around in your life that you feel 100% positive towards.  It means when he's gone you don't any regrets, no "coulda'-saids" or "but-I-meants" to haunt you.

It's not nearly so easy with people.  There's no afterlife in which to make amends, no matter how much we may wish there was.  The time we have is incalculably precious because it's the only time we have.  I can't help but think today that instead of a cat passing away, it could have been my wife or one of my parents, brothers, or friends - members of  the occasionally complicated, sometimes difficult, but always worthwhile network of relationships that I'm privileged to be a part of.  It's not nearly so easy to maintain those relationships as it is to be buddies with a cat, but it goes without saying that it's more than worth the effort.

I like to think that atheists...well, materialists in general, have a more...tangible, I suppose, grasp of the beauty, worth, and fragility of life than the folks who spend their days hoping for heaven.  If this is the only life we get - and I honestly believe that it is - the it's all the more important to say and do good things for the people in our lives while we have the chance.  We all lose sight of this sometimes, but tonight, at least, I can see it very clearly.

I promise the next post won't be so maudlin, but please allow me the final indulgence of posting one last picture of my pal.

Eons of matter flowing from spot to spot throughout the universe,

combined with millennia of random feline sex,

gave us nine years of this pudgy cat with underpants and a cowlick.

I miss you already, buddy.   

Mulling Some Changes

As my handful of readers may or may not have noticed, I haven't been posting on the blog regularly for several months. There are a couple of reasons for this, not the least of which being that my job currently involves staring at a computer screen for about seven and a half hours a day. Needless to say, that kind of puts me off of sitting around at the computer when I get home.

I've also been getting kind of tired of trolling around on cryptozoology, conspiracy, and new age websites in my free time looking for things to post about. It's not that I don't find the subject matter interesting anymore per se, it's more that I don't want to burn through the time I do spend on the internet visiting websites that annoy me.

The long and short is that I'm thinking about taking the blog in a different direction for a while. A few years ago I posted about how much I loved watching Monstervision with Joe Bob Briggs when I was a kid and that should be a pretty strong indication of what I have in mind. I love the hell out of B-movies, so -for a while at least- I'm going to be dredging up the oddest films from my collection to review for your pleasure. There's no firm timeline yet, but I'm going to try to have my first review up by next weekend. Here's a little preview:

Nunchuks + Pornstache = Awesome

In the meantime, why not check out the new and improved website for Joe's Awesome and Tommy Hates Everything, a hilarious podcast by a couple of my pals. If you're lucky, you might even find an episode with your old pal Skippy in it.

MMA vs. Boxing - A Brief Primer

Later this evening, multi-time UFC champion Randy "The Natural" Couture will be fighting professional boxer James "Lights Out" Toney in what is being billed as an "Mixed Martial Arts vs. Boxing" match at UFC 118. Toney, a decorated but declining competitor in the boxing world, has worked hard to hype the bout as a definitive clash between two of the world's most popular combat sports. The early UFCs were about which martial art could beat which, so this boxing vs. MMA bout is a compelling throwback that has emotions running high among fans of both sports.

James Toney has long been making derisive statements about the Ultimate Fighting Championship, and since the bout with Couture was announced a few months ago Toney's heat machine has gone into overdrive. Like him or not, Toney doesn't mind playing the villain and is a master at generating publicity. Visit any MMA forum and you'll see numerous posts calling for Toney's head on a pike. Most MMA fans, myself included, expect Couture to smite James Toney relatively easily. The "Pros Pick" feature on the respected MMA site Sherdog.com shows that 50 out of 54 professional mixed martial arts fighters surveyed expect Couture to win this bout, likely in the first round.

I don't hang out on any boxing boards, but a quick jaunt over to EastSideBoxing.com shows that this bout is not only on the radar of boxing fans, but that a large number of boxing proponents are picking Toney to win. It's also evident that many boxing fans think of mixed martial arts as something akin to professional wrestling - a sort of sideshow, non-sport that only attracts the uneducated and the bloodthirsty.

Still, in spite of all the hype and the vast promotion machine at the UFC, there's something pretty basic that's being overlooked. "Boxing vs. MMA" is a bout that has been contested before, and the results tend to be pretty predictable. While it's true that no professional boxer with Toney's championship pedigree has competed in MMA, he's still walking a trail that his boxing brethren have blazed before him. ¹ Let's climb in the time machine and take look at how straight boxers have historically fared in MMA:

Gene Lebell (Judo) vs. Milo Savage (Boxing) - 1963


In what may have been the first widely publicized mixed martial arts match, judoka and professional wrestler Gene Lebell fought middleweight boxer Milo Savage. The match was made after Lebell responded to an acerbic article in Rogue magazine entitled "The Judo Bums", in which boxing proponent Jim Beck offered $1000 to any judoka who could defeat a boxer in a mixed skills match.

The bout, an edited version of which is posted above, ended in the fourth round when Lebell threw Savage to the mat with a hari goshi and put him to sleep with a rear naked choke.

Royce Gracie (Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu) vs. Art Jimmerson (Boxing) - 1993


At the very first Ultimate Fighting Championship event, BJJ expert and future UFC Hall-of-Famer Royce Gracie took on former middleweight Golden Gloves champion Art Jimmerson in a match that would go down in infamy. The first few UFC events were bare-knuckled, but Jimmerson, apparently worried about injuring his jab hand, came out for the bout wearing a single boxing glove.

Though he was apparently expecting a prolonged stand-up exchange, Jimmerson was easily taken to the mat by the smaller grappler and submitted almost immediately upon finding himself in a vulnerable spot.

Steve Jennum (Ninjitsu) vs. Melton Bowen (Boxing) - 1994


The early UFCs were full of delightfully unlikely match-ups, and UFC IV proved to be no exception as Steve Jennum, an American ninja (seriously) and the improbable winner of the 3rd UFC tournament, took on professional boxer Melton "The Punisher" Bowen. Bowen outweighed Jennum by 10 pounds and had competed in 38 pro boxing bouts to Jennum's single pro MMA bout.² he bout was a one-sided affair that saw Bowen being taken down twice, absorbing a large number of punches on the ground, and ultimately submitting to a straight armbar.

Okay, so I guess that about wraps it up. While boxing unquestionably forms a very important part of a modern mixed martial artist's toolkit, it doesn't have the versatility as a standalone style to compete in MMA. Still, just for fun, let's throw in one last video.


Tim Sylvia (MMA) vs. Ray Mercer (Boxing) - 2009


Standing something like 13 feet tall, Tim Sylvia is a former UFC Heavyweight Champion who began his career with 16-0 rampage through several different leagues. In 2009, Sylvia faced off with Ray Mercer, a 48 year-old pro boxer who was making his professional mixed martial arts debut. The predictable result?

Mercer laid Sylvia low in less than 10 seconds.

Wait, what!?!

Yeah, it turns out that professional boxers can hit people really hard. Must come from all that training to hit people really hard, coupled with the way they hit people really hard for a living. Who'd have thought?

The moral of the story is this: James Toney has a chance, a small chance, of winning his match with Randy Couture tonight. Style vs. style calculus is valid to an extent, but it only goes so far. Anything can happen in a fight. That's why we watch.

It's incredibly likely that Couture is going to drop Toney on his skull and pound him out (or submit him) very, very quickly this evening. However probable it is, though, that outcome is not a certainty. James Toney has 44 KO victories in professional boxing, and Couture has been knocked down (though not out) in 3 of his last 4 fights. That's enough of an X-factor to make this interesting, and I can't wait to see what happens.

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1.) Alliteration is awesome.

2.) Steve Jennum was an alternate at the UFC 3 tournament. He replaced an injured Ken Shamrock in the tournament final against Canadian judoka Harold Howard. Jennum defeated Howard to become the tournament champion, despite not having competed in the tournament proper.

A Lesson in Skepticism

While taking a client out shopping this afternoon, I suddenly found myself face-to-face with a 7-foot high, walking red jelly bean. ¹ The towering creature lumbered towards us, its comically exaggerated chef's hat blocking out the sun as it menacingly spread its stubby arms, no doubt intent on seizing us up and stuffing us into its smiling maw. Certain that we were being attacked by a monster, I tensed myself for battle as the beast stalked ever closer.

Luckily, physical combat was averted when an older gentleman wearing a Jelly Belly t-shirt appeared and informed us that we had wandered into a promotional event. The monster, it turned out, was Mr. Jelly Belly himself. The older man gave us each a sample of honey-flavored jelly beans and asked us to take our place in a queue that was forming. My client and I had a hurried discussion, then got in line.

I didn't take my eyes off Mr. Jelly Belly.

We stood in line in the clingy July heat for a good thirty minutes, but this was offset somewhat by the various free samples being handed out. Nothing topped the initial honey beans, although the 7UP-flavored ones were surprisingly good. I also given one that was meant to taste like some manner of peach booze, but it didn't really light my fire. There came a point when we were both ready to go, but we were so close to the front of the line -for what, we didn't yet know - that we had to stay. We were compelled.

In any event, it finally became apparent that we were in the midst of a promotion for a product called "BeanBoozled". According to a brochure I was given, the gimmick is this: In any box of BeanBoozled beans, the majority are regular, tasty flavors, but a few are intentionally vile "gag" beans.² It's less a snack product than a sinister game of tastebud roulette. I'm not entirely sure how marketable I think that is.

Turns out we were standing in line to spin a wheel of fate that would determine which color jelly beans we'd get to sample, but allegedly each jar of like-colored beans contained a mixture of outwardly identical traditional and "gag" beans. For example, if you were handed a black jelly bean, it might taste like licorice or "skunk spray". If you bravely ate the mysterious jelly beans with which you were presented, you'd be rewarded with filthy lucre in the form of a swanky-cool sticker, a fruit gel, and a bag of mixed, non-gross jelly beans.

I was a little dubious. I paid attention to the folks ahead of us in line, and I noticed that for all the hemming and hawing, all the theatrics and anticipation, no one seemed to get a gag bean. People would worry over their handful of beans, ask the lady handing out the samples if she was serious that the trio of milky white jelly beans might really be flavored like "dirty diapers", cast anxious glances at their friends...and finally gulp them down to find that they were really coconut all along. I smiled at my companion.

"There aren't really any gross ones," I assured him. "It's like that Halloween party game when you're supposedly sticking your hand in a jar of eyeballs but it's really just grapes. It's all about anticipation."

He nodded, and we smirked to ourselves as the last couple of people ahead of us spun the wheel and ate their (non-disgusting) jelly beans. By the time it was my turn to spin the wheel of fate, I was pretty sure I had the game all figured out. I spun the wheel and it settled on "Peach...or Barf". My client and I exchanged mock-worried looks as the Jelly Belly lady dealt me out a couple of beans with a tiny plastic scoop. This was going to be super-cheesy easy.

"Now you may want to try just a sliver..." she began as I popped them unthinkingly into my mouth.



I have to commend the small army of scientists working at Jelly Belly for their masterful recreation of the taste of vomit. It was truly a thing of grotesque beauty.

I walked away today with a free bag of mixed citrus Jelly Bellies and a new appreciation for what it does and doesn't mean to be skeptical. Being a skeptic doesn't mean being unthinkingly cynical and disbelieving, it means taking in all the evidence you can and using it to come to the best possible conclusion. It also means that acknowledging that we can consider all the available information and still be wrong if the information is insufficient or our analysis is wanting. We all know that, but we also all forget from time to time.

I sure remember now.


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1.) A word of explanation - I work with mentally disabled folks, and a fair amount of my job involves community integration activities to boost their confidence and ability to interact with new people. That said, I won't use my client's name here to protect his privacy.

2.) Fairly or not, I place the blame for "joke" jelly beans squarely on J.K. Rowling for her creation of "Every-Flavor Beans" in the Harry Potter novels.

Vacation Time

Hey everybody. Your old pal Skippy is heading to the wilds of Pennsylvania on Thursday to attend the wedding of a cousin-in-law I may or may not have ever met. I not worried though - I've never met a vacation I didn't like. The Girlfriend is also pretty happy to have an excuse to force me out my usual Hawaiian shirts and into a tie.

In any event, the in-laws' house exists in a bizarre alternate reality where 28.8kb modems still exist, so I'm not going to be online at all until at least next Wednesday.¹ I haven't exactly been machine-gunning posts lately, so its not going to be much of an interruption. That said, I'm going to turn on moderation for all comments while I'm gone because I don't want the place to be swamped with loons and spam when I get back.

Your homework while I'm away is to read John Githongo's article Fear and Loathing in Nairobi from the current issue of Foreign Affairs.


1.) There's no internet access, but their basic cable service is superior to mine. They have the National Geographic Channel -and- Toon Disney! (You know you love Darkwing Duck.)

Finding that happy median...

I've been informed that this is a pretty good representation of my interactions with others.

As usual, Dilbert contains a kernel of truth - It's very easy for a skeptic to come across as a know-it-all chode. I personally have a severely limited capacity for self-censorship, so I can only imagine that the effect is rather amplified for the poor folks that have to deal with me in person on a regular basis. The Girlfriend in particular suffers under the burden of this aspect of my personality. Immediately coming to mind is an incident from last summer in which I guilelessly gave voice to my disgust when one of her friends, coincidentally a new mother, explained to me that she'd recently had her newborn baby's neck popped by a chiropractor to cure him of his frequent burping and bowel movements.

I'm not always an especially tactful fellow, and I told this woman something to the effect of "babies are made for pooping and burping, and if you're going to let a chiropractor manhandle him then you may as well toss him into the gorilla pit at the zoo." I stand by what I said, but I'll admit that the main point of my message was likely canceled out by the inelegance of my delivery. Subjecting an infant to the quackish antics of a chiropractor is tantamount to child abuse...but I doubt I changed this mother's mind with my snarky comments.

The problem of stalwartly presenting a position while not driving people away with an off-putting tone is a difficult one. Skeptics shouldn't hem and haw when laying out arguments based on essentially settled matters of science (be it the age of the earth, in inefficacy of chiropractic, or the uselessness of horoscopes).¹ We should also strive not to present ourselves in such a way as to drive off the undecided masses. Everyone likes to play to their base, and I like a good roasting as much as anyone, but sneering and snark isn't always helpful in winning over new people to your side. On the other hand, winning people over is meaningless if you dilute your facts into oblivion in order to do so.

PZ Myers and Chris Mooney fired many broadside at each other a few months back over this very subject. It began when Mooney wrote in his book Unscientific America that overly abrasive skeptics may be driving the average American towards an anti-science stance with their vitriolic tone. Myers responded with a book review that basically accused Mooney of wanting to water down the facts in order to avoid offending people. This all resulted in a very public pissing match between the two, with skirmishes erupted across the blogosphere as their supporters rallied and railed. The only problem is that both of the were right.

Mooney is 100% correct that the ham-fisted approach can be counterproductive, but Myers is likewise spot-on in his claim that apologizing for the facts or acting like there's a controversy when there really isn't one (i.e. evolution vs. creationism) is misleading and ultimately harmful. ² A skeptic can fiercely condemn the pseudoscientific without giving the middle finger to everyone who isn't firmly in his camp from the start.

It's not much of an exaggeration to say that the future of skepticism rests largely on effective communication. The charlatans certainly have no problem getting their message to the masses, so skeptics must do the same. Skeptics have the more difficult task, however, because we face a problem the charlatans, hucksters, and fakirs don't: sometimes we must tell people what they don't want to hear. It's easy to get someone to listen to you if you're promising them easy wealth, eternal youth, or a posthumous paradise. Convincing people to give up those "comforting delusions" isn't nearly so simple.

I propose that the goal all skeptics must strive for is to lay out our positions strongly and with no undue equivocation, but to do so without breathing fire and driving away the people who might hear us out. This goal is certainly attainable - look at the writings of Carl Sagan or Martin Gardner - but it doesn't come easily. I've been writing this blog for years now and I still don't always hit the tone I want. Until then I just have to work on finding that happy median.


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1.) Neither should we feign certainty about matters that are not yet so clear-cut.
2.) Bluntness has its place as well. The "New Atheist" movement has used very direct, aggressive argumentation to send to pasture certain sacred cows that deference and circumspection would have been ill-equipped to handle. It's a matter of using the right tool for the right job.

Remembering Martin Gardner

Martin Gardner

1914-2010

Another hero is gone. Martin Gardner, the world's most famous "recreational mathematician" and a titan of critical thinking, passed away Saturday at the age of 95. A true polymath, Gardner was the author of dozens of books and articles about a bamboozling array of subjects ranging from L. Frank Baum to L. Ron Hubbard. His book Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science, though dated a bit by its specific subject matter (How many folks here in 2010 have ever heard of Alfred Lawson?) is one of the best works on pseudoscience available and has remained in print almost continuously since 1957. If by some chance you've never read any of his work, I heartily recommend the aforementioned Fads and Fallacies, as well as two of his more recent books, Did Adam and Eve Have Navels? and When You Were a Tadpole and I Was a Fish.¹

With Martin's passing we've lost not only one of the most articulate proponents of critical thinking, but also perhaps one of the most interesting men on the planet. He'll be sorely missed, but his legacy will live on through his five decades of literary work and the countless lives his writings have touched.


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1.) Did Adam and Eve Have Navels has a special place in my heart, as it kept me sane through two weeks of jury duty a couple of years ago.

Real Freakin' Mature...

I live about two blocks away from the Phuoc Hau Buddhist Temple. I'm familiar with the place only because I pass it on the way home from work every day. It's relatively small and never seems especially busy, but the property is adorned with some pretty elaborate statuary.

Well, it was adorned with elaborate statuary.

Lately the place has been the target of vandals that see fit, on an almost weekly basis, to sneak onto the property at night in order to break and/or spray paint everything they can lay their hands on. The most recent property destruction took on a religious cast: this past weekend the Temple's sign was defaced with a spray painted cross and the message "Budduh's (sic) in hell".

I'm confident that the vandalism is just the work of some punk kids having "fun" on the weekends, but it stills leaves a bad taste in my mouth. According to the Wave 3 news story linked to above, the place has been vandalized several times in the past but the head monk advised members not to call the police. Apparently the congregation is largely composed elderly Vietnamese folks with limited English skills who are concerned about calling too much attention to themselves. Given southern Louisville's occasional penchant for intolerance, I can't really say I blame them.

It must take a real brave bunch of people to terrorize one of the most isolated populations in the community.

Congratulations, Dr. Laemmle!

I found out this afternoon that Dr. Phil Laemmle is being inducted into the University of Louisville College of Arts and Sciences Hall of Honor tomorrow. I only had Dr. Laemmle for one or two classes in college, but he's an unforgettable guy. His enthusiasm for and exhaustive knowledge of political science, combined with a genial bluntness*, made him a favorite of all the poli-sci undergrads. The course I took from him revolved around using programs like SPSS to sort and analyze hard data - a far cry from the largely rhetorical international conflict and terrorism courses I favored - and it's no exaggeration to say that I never would have made it through the final paper of my senior seminar without his patient tutelage.

Dr. Laemmle had a profoundly positive effect on the educational lives of who-knows-how-many students and I'm happy to hear that he's being honored by the University. It's hard to think of anyone more deserving.


* I ended up having to complete several extra hours to graduate because I took too many political science courses. Dr. Laemmle helped me to set up my course load for my last two semesters to minimize the amount of extra courses I'd have to take...all the while reminding me that I was a "dumbass" for getting myself into that predicament.

A mystery from the past explained...?

When I was little kid back in the 1980s I was introduced to video games by way of the Atari 2600 owned by my older brothers. I have a lot of very fond (but equally hazy) memories of sitting in my parents' den playing games like Yar's Revenge, Vanguard, Adventure, and Hero on a black and white TV. ¹ Those games were freakin' awesome, and I honestly think that early video games were great stimuli for young imaginations. Seriously, how else but through incredible mental effort could you assign coherent meaning to games like this? Coming up with a storyline to go along with the action onscreen was half the fun.

That being said, my younger years were haunted by a pair of bizarre games that I never understood at all. SwordQuest: Earthworld and SwordQuest: Fireworld both seemed like they ought to be awesome. The cartridges were adorned with pictures of an armored hero and heroine brandishing impressive looking weapons and the games even came with cool, full-color comic books. ² Unfortunately the gameplay itself was completely indecipherable, to the point that I defy anyone to fire up a ROM of either of them without reading any hints or tips online and actually figure out what in the holy hell is going on. You spent the entire game wandering through differently colored rooms, occasionally finding yourself in a too-bizarre-to-describe action sequence, then you'd go back to more wandering. As far as I can remember you couldn't actually die...but you couldn't ever really progress either. I'd eventually give up, only to return to the game a few weeks later and repeat the process.

I didn't find out until I was 25 years old that the Swordquest games were actually part of a high stakes real-life contest, but even then the mystery only deepened. It turns out that the Swordquest games really are the stuff of gaming legend, and the truth behind them is weirder than any story my young mind ever concocted to explain the motivations of few moving pixels. With that I'll defer to the always hilarious James Rolfe, because this week he's posted a gut-busting video in which he explores, and explains, the real world mystery that is Swordquest.

Check it out.


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1.) I also utterly destroyed any collector's value that the joysticks may have otherwise held by mercilessly chewing on them.

2.) The Fireworld comic in particular burned it's way (har, har) into my impressionable young mind. For reasons I can't explain, the briefly-shown blue centaur stuck with me for years.

Snow Day!

Here in Kentucky 4 inches of snow is somehow utterly paralyzing, meaning that the "blizzard" we got late last night was enough to buy me paid day off work. As you can see, I utilized this unexpected free time in the most productive way possible.


The snowman was originally intended to be a 7 foot high, multi-headed Calvin and Hobbes-ian monstrosity, but time constraints and my distressingly non-watertight boots necessitated a scaling back of my vision. He actually kind of favors me.

My thoughts on Avatar

Last weekend I finally had a chance to see the new James Cameron flick Avatar. (Perhaps you've heard of it...?) I can honestly say I didn't have much in the way of concrete expectations for the film, not because I though it would suck, but because I just plain couldn't figure out what the heck it was about from the trailers. Maybe I'm just getting old, but the commercials made it look like a video game and didn't do much to motivate me to look online for answers. I ultimately decided to see it for the dual purposes of satisfying my curiosity about the 3D effects and getting in some man-to-man time with my future brother-in-law. (And, coincidentally, avoid going furniture shopping with The Girlfriend's parents.)

As of this writing, Avatar's official box office earnings total somewhere in the area of one and a half a billion freakin' dollars. It's being lauded by some web denizens as the greatest movie ever made, while others have branded it "subtle, dangerous and truly offensive" due to its environmentalist message.¹ Other folks...folks who are probably taking the film way too seriously...have started online discussion boards about what "Avatar can teach us" and how to live their lives more like the 12-foot tall, blue, bipedal kitty cats in the movie. In other words, this film has really captured people's attention. Plus it's in 3D. Who doesn't like 3D?

Seemed like it was worth a look, so I dropped $10 a pop for tickets to a 3D matinee showing (and another $4.75 for a freakin' Diet Pepsi) and sat down in the hopes of having my mind blown.

Alas, when the credits rolled three hours later my mind remained sadly unblown...but I wasn't sure why. I'd enjoyed the movie. It was visually stunning, with eye-catching designs and unquestionably the best integration of CGI and live action I'd ever seen. The characters were appealing, the performances were good (especially the Colonel), and the action scenes were exciting.² Hell, the 3D effects even worked.³ Yet, as I sat there in the theater waiting for the crowd to disperse, I couldn't help but think that even though I'd just seen a good movie - nay, a really good movie - it just wasn't the revolutionary film it was being made out to be.

I'm not exaggerating to say that I spent the next hour trying to figure out why Avatar just didn't resonate with me in the way that I'd hoped. I puzzled and puzzed til my puzzler was sore, but when it finally dawned on me it seemed utterly obvious. Avatar is a really fun film, but it's held back from actually being epic by the utter simplicity of its plot.

If I were to sum up the plot of Avatar in two sentences, it would read thusly: A fella' takes a job with an unsavory corporation devoted to plundering an otherwise pristine wilderness for its resources. Said fella' actually has a heart of gold, and when he finds himself living amongst an isolated people who dwell in the area slated for environmental destruction he begins to have second thoughts about aiding his greedy bosses.

Doesn't that sound familiar? It's like something I've seen before...but not recently. It sounds like...



Yeah, that's right: The plot of Avatar is actually the plot of FernGully: The Last Rainforest with a coat of sci-fi painted on. James Cameron's years-in-the-making sci-fi "epic" borrows the bullet points of its plot from an 18-year old cartoon about fairies and talking bats.

Okay, I'll concede that I'm exaggerating a bit, but the fact remains that in Avatar you can tell who's good and who's bad after they've been onscreen for 5 seconds and you can guess the ending about 45 minutes in. For all the complexity of the visual effects, the narrative is almost weirdly simple. Maybe I've seen a few too many movies I know I've seen way too many movies, but I had hoped for at least a tiny wrinkle in the plot of a film that had otherwise been so masterfully produced.

In closing, Avatar is a landmark accomplishment in terms of special effects, and it's certainly worth seeing, but it isn't necessarily the awe-inspiring masterpiece that it's been made out to be. I liked it, I'd watch it again, but I simply can't count myself among the folks claiming that it's the most deeply affecting, poignant film ever made.

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1.) Seriously. Check out the comments of the user "Nancy, age 56" on the Christian Answers review of the film. Another user on the same site accuses the film of being "anti-American" even though it takes place in space.

2.) I realize as I'm proofreading this that noting that "the performances are good" reads as a pretty tepid endorsement. I'm too lazy to go back and alter the main body of my text, but I suppose I should amend that by saying that the actors deserve lots of kudos for interacting so naturally with a world that was often almost entirely added in during post production.

3.) Ever seen Friday the 13th Part III? It was originally shown in 3D and featured numerous gimmick shots of crap sticking straight into the camera. Avatar is almost entirely devoid of gimmicky shots like that, and the 3D effects mostly come by way of depth of field. That is to say, rather than looking like something is popping out at you, it looks like you're looking into the background of the film. Color me impressed.

Seriously...?

Okay, so I know I've not been around lately, but the end of the year is pretty hectic around here. Today I don't have a post so much as a question, and I hope you guys can give me the straight dope on this little wonder that I recently encountered:

The Holy Bible: Stock Car Racing Edition

Is this...somehow... for real? That is to say, is it intended to be some kind of parody, or are people actually meant to take an NIV Bible covered with checkered flags and interspersed with Nascar anecdotes to be a serious theological treatise? I assume that this has been written in earnest, but I'm holding out hope that it's a hilarious Edward Current-style bit of satire.

What's Christmas Without the Krampus?

This is the time of year when religious blogs around the internet light up with complaints about how culture has "taken Christ out of Christmas". Tons of complaints.¹ I'm not really concerned about that, since I rather suspect that for most folks, even people who self-identify as Christians, Christmas is really about nostalgic tradition and love for one's family moreso than religion. That being said, I can certainly commiserate with folks who lament the crass commercialization of holiday sentiment and the replacement of long-lasting, cherished traditions with hokey corporate contrivances. (I'm looking at you, Olive the Other Reindeer.)

In that vein I'd like to call attention to an awesome holiday tradition that has been utterly abandoned here in the States, one that I would dearly love to see revived. Readers, I ask you...

Who took the Krampus out of Christmas?

You'd better watch out, you'd better not cry...

The Krampus is a traditional companion of Santa Claus in certain parts of Europe, especially Austria and the surrounding region. Just as Santa brings gifts to the good children, the Krampus brings stone-cold whuppin's to the bad ones. Commonly pictured wielding a fistful of switches and carrying a huge basket in which to carry off all the really rotten kids, the Krampus is a fearsome figure who probably does a bit more to discourage naughtiness than the threat of St. Nick filling one's stockings with coal.

I really get a kick out of the Krampus. ² I'm not a fan of threatening children with supernatural evil to encourage good behavior, but, unlike the earnest visions of hell propagated by religious folks, the Krampus is thought of as a rather tongue-in-cheek character.³ It's like telling someone that Frankenstein will get them if they're bad - it gets the message across, but it's not going to scar any little kids for life. Going one step further, folks in rural Austria actually dress up like the Krampus on the night of December 5th and parade around town making mischief and playfully "birching" passers-by. Halloween in December? That's something I can really get behind!

The Krampus is a weird, fascinating twist on the usual, saccharine sweet version of Christmas most people are familiar with...he's like the Grinch with balls. He's also a memorable exemplar of pre-Christian traditions being incorporated into the mythology of Christmas, a delightful byproduct of the social construction of this particular holiday. On a simpler note, the Krampus is just plain fun.

Come on people, isn't it time we put the Krampus back in Christmas?

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1.) In some ways the better question might be "who jammed Christ into everyone else's Solstice celebrations", but that's not especially relevant to my point.

2.) I like the Krampus even more because the Nazis took a distinctly anti-Krampus stance in World War II. A 1934 article from the New York Times (Available here...for $3.95) discusses how Nazis in Austria tried to stamp out the local Krampus traditions.

3.) Check out all the Krampus swag, both vintage and modern, on this site. Why in the world can't you get Krampus greeting cards stateside?

I Love Highbrow Entertainment...

In case anyone is wondering about my weekend plans (and I'm sure you all are), I'm taking The Girlfriend to the theater tomorrow night to see a musical adaptation of one of the great works of modern film. Oh yes, that's right: We're going to see Evil Dead: The Musical. I have a sneaking suspicion that tomorrow's night at the theater is going to have a slightly different feel to it than the time we saw Cats.

I Hab A Code....

Translation: I have a cold. Not just any cold either: all this week I've been doing my best impression of the Masters of the Universe Slime Pit.

A Chilling Taste Of Things To Come...

For those of you who are wondering why the blog has been neglected lately, I've been working on a review of Barrie Wilson's book about Christian origins, How Jesus Became Christian. I wasn't especially impressed with it - While Wilson is right that Pauline Christianity is rather removed from the apocalyptic Judaism preached by the historical Jesus, he overreaches in his conclusions and mucks up his thesis with bombastic language and a heaping helping strawman arguments.

The going has been slow. I have numerous concerns about the book, but a lot of them are relatively nuanced and require a lot of explanation. Since keeping things concise is not one of my strong suits, I'm afraid I'm going to end up with a gigantic commentary that will be long on background explanation and short on real meaty content. I've also contacted a couple of Bible-literate friends for their opinions on the book, just in case my objections to Wilson's thesis turn out to be specious.*

So why am I, an atheist, bothering to come to the defense of Christianity? I'm not. I think Wilson has been a bit overzealous in conclusions and I hope to convince my readers of the same. A specious argument is a specious argument, no matter how attractive its conclusions may be.

* I cannot tell a lie: I've also been distracted in no small measure by Batman: Arkham Asylum.

Ew...Gross...

Animal Planet recently (and by that I mean in the last few months) started running a show called Monsters Inside Me which deals with human parasite infestations. It's a little bit light on the science side of things, but it's still pretty fun and it provides more than enough fodder to ruin lunch for my coworkers the next day. It's no Parasite Rex, but it's still worth a look if you have an hour of free time on Monday night.

My point? Well, other than the fact that it's fun to learn about nasty beasts like hookworks, threadworms, flukes, and cornea-eating amoebas, I think there's an extent to which the very existence of of these horrid little critters raises a theological question for religious folks. (Before I start I should say that I know this is reaching a bit and that I'm making it mostly facetiously, but it's still interesting to think about.) See, according to the three big monotheisms, everything was awesome at the beginning of the world: God created the world and it was perfect. There was no evil. (Some really odd creationists even claim that there was no death in God's perfect world and that predatory animals like sharks and tigers were herbivorous before the fall.) But, these creationists also claim that all of the creatures that exist today also existed at the beginning of time in more or less their present form.

So what does that mean?

It means that God created botflies to live in His perfect world.

The Botfly: Proof of a malevolent God or just natural selection?

Consider how the botfly makes its living: It lays eggs in a host (or sometimes plants them on an intermediary which then infects a host) which then hatch into hideous, barbed larvae that proceed to pupate painfully inside the host before chewing their way out to fly off and repeat the whole disgusting process.** Botflies don't fit into any possible vision of a perfect world. They're nightmarish monsters that cause unimaginable pain and suffering in their hosts. I can't fathom how such a beast fits into an idyllic, God-created Eden with no evil or suffering. If Cthulhu was real and ruled the universe from the sunken city of R'lyeh then maybe I could conceive of a god that would consider botflies an integral part of a perfect world, but if I believed that an omnibenevolent Yahweh was in charge of the world I wouldn't have a handy explanation for the existence of botflies. It would be, as they say, a conundrum.

Luckily I don't believe in Cthulhu or Yahweh, so I do have a handy explanation for why botflies exist. See, while the botfly certainly doesn't fit into a scheme wherein a benevolent deity is running the universe with an eye towards everyone's best interests, it certainly fits into a competitive world wherein species are driven by selection pressures to strive for evermore effective ways to pass on one's genes by any means necessary. Imagine that: natural selection provides an explanation for a phenomenon on which the three majors religions are at best mute and at worst nonsensical.

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* We're all familiar with anti-evolutionist groups among the Christians, there are also such factions in Islam . I suspect there are also fundamentalist Jewish folks that don't believe in evolution, but they don't seem to have much of a web presence.

** Here's a disgusting video of some botfly larvae being removed from a human host. I can't overstate how vomitous it is, so only watch it if you're really curious.

A Total Non-Sequitur...

I took a few sociology classes in college and a at least two of them involved discussions of the work on one Jackson Katz, an "anti-violence educator" who has made a career of dissecting the way masculinity is presented in the media. His body of work includes at least two films: Tough Guise, in which he explores changing media depictions of what it means to be a man, and Wrestling With Manhood (with Sut Jhally), which makes a more specific argument that American professional wrestling (circa 2001) presents young men with a skewed, hyper-aggressive version of masculinity.

I always cringe a little bit when I see the media being blamed for complex social problems, but Katz and Jhally make some good points throughout both of these films.* One thing addressed quite succinctly in Wrestling With Manhood is the intrinsic homoeroticism inherent in professional wrestling and other high-contact athletic events. An especially instructive comparison is how wrestling matches between female performers are often obviously intended to be sexually titillating (or at least provocative), whereas their male counterparts, interacting with each other the same way, are presented as ultra macho and tough. Check out the clip below to see what I mean.

Wrestling With Manhood: Homophobia

That clip is played mostly for laughs, but it's also fairly illustrative of how we socially construct people's roles in society and arbitrarily assign labels to various actions and outlooks.

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*There are also a few boners thrown in. For example, in Tough Guise Katz lambastes the film First Blood as presenting a barbaric version of manhood, but he fails to note that the film (and even moreso the book of the same name upon which it is based) is about the psychological violence done to John Rambo by his experiences in Vietnam. The point of the movie isn't just that Rambo is some bad-ass killing machine, it's that he's been robbed of a normal life precisely because his time in the army left him bereft of other options and ways of being. That actually seems to line up fairly well with some of Katz's own claims.

15 Books

CB clued me in on the whole "15 Books" meme that's apparently all the rage on the interwebs these days so I thought I'd give it a try. The rules are simple - name 15 books that have stuck with you, but don't take more than 15 minutes to think of your list. Here's mine:

Demon-Haunted World by Carl Sagan
Dinosaur in a Haystack by Stephen Jay Gould
It by Stephen King
Jesus - Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium by Bart Ehrman
The Godless Constitution by Isaac Kramnick and R. Laurence Moore

The Album of Dinosaurs by Tom McGowen
The Time-Life Mysteries of the Unknown series
Pale Blue Dot by Carl Sagan
Journey into Darkness by John Douglas
Your Inner Fish by Neil Shubin

Flim-Flam! by James Randi
Stiff by Mary Roach
The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson
UFOs Explained by Phillip J. Klass
Satanic Panic by Jeffrey S. Victor

(Dis)honorable mention goes to The Malleus Maleficarum by Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger.

I realize that using the entire Mysteries of the Unknown series is a bit of a fudge, but I spent my youth poring through those books and others like them, utterly convinced of their scolarship and validity. They remain important to me do this day as a wonderful example of how high production values and heaping piles of anecdotes don't constitute real evidence. That's a simple lesson in hindsight, but sometimes it's not an easy one to learn.