AMOROUS EPHEMERA

• A dog named Sex
• Emotional Pornography
• I came, I saw, I brought pictures of Brett Favre’s diddle-stick (Bonus Favre-penis coverage is available from the one and only Ricky Sprague here)
• Muhammad: Sex Life of the Prophet
• Pornistan
• The Unfortunate Sex Life of the Banana

AURAL LIFE

• Frank Zappa’s congressional testimony re: the PMRC — now on CD
• Microtonal music is “”music using microtones—intervals of less than an equally spaced semitone. Microtonal music can also refer to music which uses intervals not found in the Western system of 12 equal intervals to the octave…“
• Satan’s Violin Lesson
• Spectral Music “is a musical composition practice where compositional decisions are often informed by the analysis of sound spectra. Computer based sound spectrum analysis using a Fast Fourier transform is one of the more common methods used in generating descriptive data. Using FFT analysis, features of a particular sound spectrum can be visualized using a spectrogram. Spectral composition focuses, then, on bringing out these features, interconnecting them, and transforming them.”
• Tipper Gore and the danger of anal vapors

BACK HOME ON THE FARM

• Strange crack forms in the Upper Peninsula
• The Humongous Fungus
• The Saint Ignace Mystery Spot

BIG MONEY

• The New York Times knows nothing about “the rule of law”
• Gail Collins in the New  York Times back in April: “Paying a lot of taxes should be a badge of honor. It proves you made it into the league of big money-makers, not to mention the fact that you’re supporting the upkeep of the Grand Canyon. If the I.R.S. had been doing its marketing properly, little kids would dream of growing up to become really big taxpayers.” Umm…is Gail retarded, or simply another journalist with horrible observational skills? Her last sentence reeks of out-of-touch, imbecilic clod. (Gail — please come visit Portland, Oregon. EVERY person under 40 here acts as though being governed and paying an exorbitant amount of taxes is awesome.)

COSMONAUTICA

• Daniel Kalder on Yuri Luzhkov: Better a Thief Than a Drinker of Blood
• New Russian crime groups playing by dangerous rules
• Odessa Twister shenanigans
• The Death Star of Minsk

DEEP-FRIED DYSTOPIA

• Black Tea Party activist states his case
• Glenn Beck and Jon Stewart are after the same rainbow’s end, my huckleberry friend
• “Even if I am crushed into powder, I will embrace you with the ashes….”
• Solving the Mystery of the Benevolent Autocrat
• The extreme politicians of South Carolina
• The Left’s Unlikely Alliance with Islam
• The new al-Qaeda mission statement: tone down all the apocalyptic cha cha cha and focus on street fights
• Which Central Asian “Stan” will blow up next? (Very sensitive headline by the Guardian, no?)

DIVINE ILLUMINATION ON DEMAND

• 36 Arguments for the Existence of God
• Is God dead, or simply bored with us?
• John of God — FAITH HEALER!
• Lithuania’s Hill of Crosses
• Natalie Angier: My God Problem
• Neurosurgical Patients Get Closer to God
• Sam Harris: There is No God, and You Know It

DWELLING ON THE THRESHOLD

• David Icke: The Sleeper Must Awaken!
• Machine Elves 101: Why Terence McKenna Matters
• Reservoir Drugs

GURGITATE TO EMANCIPATE

• Food — the Silent Tsunami
• Jackie B talks about forming a relationship with your food (speaking personally, I’ve gotten quite intimate — on a spiritual level — with loaves and hams)
• Rats as food: the pinnacle of culinary achievement
• The 30 Saltiest Foods in America

LOVE: A MANY-LAYERED QUILT

• Fractal Love
• Japanese Love Machines
• Love bugs and the hubris of genetic research!
• The Mathematics of Love
• The Museum of Broken Relationships “grew from a traveling exhibition revolving around the concept of failed relationships and their ruins. Unlike ‘destructive’ self-help instructions for recovery from failed loves, the Museum offers a chance to overcome an emotional collapse through creation: by contributing to the Museum’s collection.”

MOVING PICTURES

• Is it just me, or does Karin Longworth’s Village Voice review of Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood come off as snooty, ignorant and arrogant? An excerpt (BTW, I implore you to imagine Longworth’s words as spoken in an upper crust, Cape Cod/equestrian debutante voice): “…this Robin Hood preaches about ‘liberty’ and the rights of the individual as he wanders a countryside populated chiefly by Englishpersons bled dry by government greed.” Ha ha, indeed Ms. Longworth, indeed! How primitive and unsophisticated for one to value individual liberty. The untamed, teeming and savage middle class requires taxation and governance, ASAP. Any lunkhead can see that! Pip ho, equestriettes!
• Sly Stallone’s porn film

OREGONIAN PERMUTATIONS

• Has Oregon caught California’s disease?
• The ghouls who terrified a young girl in Troutdale in May received fluffy, light bullshit sentences on Friday (BONUS BITTERNESS: I posit that these felons are the same pieces of dog-shit that burglarized my own home 30 minutes earlier that same May day, though the Troutdale and Portland police don’t really seem to give a shit). And a quick note to the incarcerated cum-stains — in the future, I’ll be watching your “careers” with much interest.  I’ve got my Google alerts readied for all three of you. Got that, Mr. Colindres-Munoz — ye of the Fake Door-to-Door Salesman bit? I remember your rodent face quite well — satellite dishes, wasn’t that your shtick?)

TRANSGRESSIVE GRAMMAR & UNMITIGATED VERBOSITY

• Does Your Language Shape How You Think?
• Don’t confuse grammar with meaning
• Stock British phrases

VOID WANDERING

• A LIST OF SECRET-POWER SITES IN THE UNITED STATES
• Island of the Dolls: Mexico’s Creepiest Tourist Attraction
• Swirling Vortex of Doom
• The Nine Hells of Beppu

Amorous Ephemera

• Flashing tourist (NSFW)
• Man-beast erotica in advertising
• Raquel Welch turned 70 over the weekend
• The truth as rendered by Yakov Smirnov (NSFW)

Big Athletica

• Does Brett Favre’s invulnerability, and the endless agony it puts him through in terms of retirement choices, make him Faust? (Pal Rob introduced this theory to me last night.)

Cosmonautica

• Russians love Ernie Hemingway

Deep-Fried Dystopia

• 18% of people think the economy is fit as a fucking fiddle
• Does speaking truth to power even work?
• Hitchens: “…I pause to take part in a thought experiment, and to ask myself: Am I in favor of the untrammeled ‘free exercise of religion’? No, I am not.”
• Jacob Weisberg on Obama, re: gay marriage: “How dismal that America’s first black president will be remembered as shirking the last great civil rights struggle.”
• Los Angeles school named after Al Gore full of toxic contaminants
• Seattle police, whom I’ve found to be quite friendly, nevertheless have much blood on their hands right now

Divine Illumination

• Sean Carroll expounds on Stephen Hawking’s recent God talk

I’ll Show You the Life of the Mind!

• “Writing is a solitary occupation. Family, friends, and society are the natural enemies of the writer. He must be alone, uninterrupted, and slightly savage if he is to sustain and complete an undertaking.” — Jessamyn West

Look at That Pussy!

• If you live in Austin, Texas and find yourself in dire need of kittens, here’s the place to go

The Road to Hell is Paved With Misspent Tax Dollars

• Light rail hijinks in Seattle
• Welcome to Portland, a city run by 16-year-olds prone to penis humor

You said…, originally uploaded by marcos_dtorres.

I like this pic a lot…

Rosenbaum argues that the complexities of agnosticism shouldn’t diminish its place in religious debate, where “New Atheism” and religious fundamentalism compete regularly to produce the most belligerent quips and sound bites. Enough of that, says Rosenbaum. It’s time to put on our baking gloves and prepare the Agnostic Loaf of Mystery.

He writes:

Agnosticism doesn’t fear uncertainty. It doesn’t cling like a child in the dark to the dogmas of orthodox religion or atheism. Agnosticism respects and celebrates uncertainty and has been doing so since before quantum physics revealed the uncertainty that lies at the very groundwork of being.

That’s an eloquent statement, whereas a lot of chatter in the atheist world is bratty and juvenile. Atheist discourse often reeks of fraternity/sorority shenanigans; drinking games set against a backdrop of “secular rebellion.” Worse, atheists tend to focus on Bible-bred insanity while avoiding the more prickly domain of Islam. Wimps.

The braver, more honest atheists fess up to this shortcoming. Penn Jillette, for instance, recently went out of his way to praise Christians in a discussion about his TV show Bullshit:

[we] have been brutal to Christians, and their response shows that they’re good fucking Americans who believe in freedom of speech. We attack them all the time, and we still get letters that say, “We appreciate your passion. Sincerely yours, in Christ.”

Jillette explains that Bullshit avoids criticism of Islam for a simple reason, one that offers a sad, illuminating commentary on the world: He (and partner Teller) don’t want to endanger their loved ones.

It’s awful that such a deterrent exists in 2010, isn’t? Complete batshit insanity.

Still, contrast Jillette’s approach with most atheist bloggers, who chortle at Islamist suicide bombers and snake-handling Pentecostals from behind their Dawkins_IZ_Gawd (and, um,  Iced Borscht)  screen names. As a Catholic friend recently observed, it’s not exactly “bold” to participate in “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day” from the comfort of one’s Mid-Century modern bachelor pad. (The friend, a journalist who has covered various religious beats in New York State, was unimpressed by my enthusiasm for Everybody Draw Mohammed Day, henceforth known as EDMD.)

While he makes a good point, I disagree with the notion that EDMD was frivolous and sophomoric. Even some of its cowardly aspects contributed to an overriding positive: the mitigation, on whatever tiny level, of a despicable form of intolerance.  (Nick Gillespie makes my point more articulately here, and Paul Berman‘s Flight of the Intellectuals provides a brilliant, if dispiriting, analysis of how Western society — powered by the engine of modern-day “journalism” — gleefully invites Islamism to castrate it).

I don’t mean to suggest that atheism should become a gloomy reservoir for bland introspection. It already has bland introspection in spades; once you get past all the blasphemy board games and kitschy crap, you’re left with an army of killjoys yammering on about epistemological incongruence.

But the killjoys may be on to something. For instance, when I “arrived” at atheism, it didn’t feel like some hedonistic emancipation from God. Yes, I had finally found an “answer,” but the answer was anti-climactic and dull, as many “truths” are. Contrary to popular belief, the road to atheism isn’t a hip grindhouse flick — it’s not paved with priests’ skulls or set to the music of surf rock. Atheism is mundane, normal…unremarkable. But it has a certain undeniable power. Isaac Asimov once said:

I am an atheist, out and out. It took me a long time to say it. I’ve been an atheist for years and years, but somehow I felt it was intellectually unrespectable to say one was an atheist, because it assumed knowledge that one didn’t have. Somehow it was better to say one was a humanist or an agnostic. I finally decided that I’m a creature of emotion as well as of reason. Emotionally I am an atheist. I don’t have the evidence to prove that God doesn’t exist, but I so strongly suspect he doesn’t that I don’t want to waste my time.

Back to Rosenbaum, though. He writes:

I challenge any atheist, New or old, to send me their answer to the question: “Why is there something rather than nothing?” I can’t wait for the evasions to pour forth. Or even the evidence that this question ever could be answered by science and logic.

Stultifying. But if you peel back the foreskin of this wrinkly catechism, you’ll always be in arm’s reach — and often at the business end — of a sentient creator. Eventually you’ll be tempted by one of several “God-centric” positions, and none of them will be more ironclad than the “certainty” of atheism.

One of my favorite arrows in the atheist quiver is the idea that our minds go straight to the theory of a sentient creator without contemplating esoteric concepts that might be more plausible. We’re stuck on “sentient creator.” That’s the best we can do. Rosenbaum looks into this matter by referencing agnostic blogger John Wilkins:

…there are really two claims agnosticism is concerned with as important: Whether God exists or not is one. Whether we can know the answer is another. Agnosticism is not for the simple-minded and is not as congenial as atheism and theism are. The courage to admit we don’t know and may never know what we don’t know is more difficult than saying, sure, we know.

I’ll put the brakes on here. While the constraints of life and its short window of opportunity sometimes depress me, it’s not an existential crisis. When my time comes to kiss the gallows, I understand that my corruptible body will transform into a snack bar for maggots.

And I’m fine with that.

More analysis of Rosenbaum’s Agnostic Manifesto is available here, courtesy of rock-solid peckerwood Jacob Grier.