Oddball question….
I’ve heard that, in the early days of pumpkin pie, it wasn’t made with the pumpkin in the filling – the pumpkin was put in the crust, and then another type of pie used to fill it (possibly pumpkin, possibly other.)
Does anybody know where I might find a recipe that has a pumpkin-based crust?
Clout
The Catholic church has declared that, unless changes are made in Washington D.C., it will have no choice but to suspend social services in that district.
Now, what changes does it want? Does it want the city to evict any abortion providers there? Does it feel that the city’s crime rates are evidence that their services aren’t doing anything, and they would be better applied elsewhere? Does it feel that the politicians who work there are too sinful to service the district?
Nope! What it wants changed is a proposed ordinance that would make it necessary for the Church to extend the same benefits to married gay employees that it does to married straight employees.
This ordinance would not make it necessary for the Church to perform or provide space for gay marriages. It would only make it necessary for them to not discriminate against gay employees. Employees. They can feel free to sermonize against the evils of homosexuality all they want. They can feel free to tell those employees, day in and day out, that they don’t deserve to have their relationships recognized, or to receive the blessings of the Lord. They can feel free to bar their doors to gay couples who want to get married.
All they have to do is recognize gay married couples as having the same legal rights as straight ones. Because it’s the law, and… well, they’re not that exempt from the law.
What was it that Christ said again? Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s? At any rate.
If they’re required to do this horrible, despicable thing, they’re going to cut off all services to D.C. charities, leaving thousands without support just as winter’s rolling in, because they simply can’t stomach the idea that the gay employees providing those services have the same legal, secular rights as the straight ones.
And they expect to win this fight. Why? Because they hope desperately that they can throw the blame on the politicians, instead of themselves. The politicians, by taking the rights of the gays over the well-being of the homeless, those heartless bastards. The gay community itself, for not backing down and asking the politicians to stop when the threat was made. Everybody except the Church, at least in the eyes of the faithful.
They’re turning the homeless and needy of Washington D.C. into hostages, ladies and gentlemen. Think about that for a minute. “Do what I want, or I will do something you don’t want me to do that harms an innocent third party.” What is that? Hostage taking. Extortion.
And if they do get away with it – which they just might – it will send a very, very dangerous message. They will see that they can get away with all manner of similar stunts.
“This neighborhood is home to an abortion provider. We’re outta here – we’re pulling a Lot, and not even looking back to make sure the Lord will smite you, ’cause we know he will.”
“This state recognizes gay marriages. We simply cannot, in good faith, provide services in Iowa anymore. The faithful may still enter, for to do otherwise would be contrary to God’s will, but the doors of the church are otherwise barred. So sorry – blame your politicians. Connecticut too, by the way. We’re just packing up and moving to Maine. Anybody who voted in support of it? Welcome to excommunication, and GTFO.”
They can’t get away with this. Yeah, everybody on the outside who hears about this think it’s ridiculous, but the people inside who are true believers… many of them will probably accept that this is a Sodom and Gomorrah situation, and the Church’s judgment. I really hope they don’t, and believe that eventually this sort of jackassery will result in a schism of substantial proportions. Already, the attitude of organized Christian churches in general is driving many otherwise faithful individuals away from the churches, Catholic or otherwise. Eventually, they’re going to have to split up… or they’re going to cause a new Reformation.
Can’t wait for that to happen, as long as there’s not as much burning of villages in the process.
Guest post: Good News/Bad News
After a dead week up here, we get a guest post from Vorex, sometimes commentor, sometimes political debator with myself off the list. I’ll post my own response later on, but for now, thanks for chiming in, Vorex!
~~~===~~~
Followers of climate change politics will not be surprised that recent news out of Stockholm indicates a practical impossibility of any binding agreement at Copenhagen. It really shouldn’t have taken a disagreement on how the thing would be funded, the fact that every nation in the world is turning up with a ‘you go first’ attitude has made it clear that these talks would be ultimately fruitless. So in the absence of the political will necessary to address this on a global scale what do we have? Well, there’s good news and bad news.
The good news is that it won’t be as bad as some are saying. No matter how bad warming gets it won’t be the end of life on Earth. That’s remarkably hard to do without physically breaking the planet, and even then it’s a job and some. It won’t even be the end of human life on Earth … we’re now so numerous and so technologically equipped that we could probably survive, in some form, even an acute disaster like a catastrophic asteroid impact. We’d manage the gradual creep of climate change. Some of us, anyway.
The bad news is that it’s not all going to be OK. Oceans will rise, and become more acidic. Sea life, much more abundant than land life, will be affected. Changing climactic conditions will alter the viable range of plants, including food crops. Land will be submerged, some of it highly valuable, some of it highly populated. Most of it problematic. The people of the future will live in a world which is geographically and ecologically quite different to today.
One of the many distractions taking place in this arena is the question of whether warming is anthropogenic, that is to say are humans responsible? I don’t see that it really matters. The implication in the question is that if it’s not our fault then we don’t have to do anything about it. It equates ‘natural’ (in the sense of not man-made) with ‘benign’ and couldn’t be more wrong. The eruption at Pompeii was ‘natutral’, the recent pacific tsunami was ‘natural’, hurricane Katrina was ‘natural’ and the meteor impact which lead to the K-T boundary was ‘natural’ … but is it safe to say that we would expend significant resources on each of these events had we known with certainty they were coming.
For that matter, every mass extinction to date has been entirely natural … and yet managed to wipe out vast swathes of life on earth. There remains a debate as to whether we are currently experiencing a mass extinction event (the Holocence) and whether this is anthropogenic or not. Ultimately, again, I think the question is irrelevant. Wherever the extinction event came from (if there is one) we can either act to prevent it, or not. It’s either worth it, or not. Those are really the only two options.
The same is true of climate change. We are currently in an advantageous climate, and we can either work to preserve it (regardless of the source of change) or not. Politically, it would seem that we have chosen ‘not’.
Ghosts
So, you thought you’d get off that easy? Hah! No such luck – there’s one Friday left in October, and I’m gonna use it. And what, pray tell, do you think I’m going to discuss on this, the evening of Halloween?
What else? The spirits crossing between our world and the next… the very origin of the holiday.
Ghosts – those spirits of the dead, our little connection to the hereafter. Now, I’ll be the first to say – I’m a believer. I’ve got too much in the way of family experience with them, and my own experiences at that. When you *see* something pushing down the bed that isn’t actually there, you start believing (for the record – we’re pretty sure it’s one of our cats who passed on.)
Now… do ghosts necessarily mean that we’ve got souls and those sort of things bopping around? Not necessarily. Go back to quantum theory, as discussed in my Quantum of Lovecraft post. Places like Gettysburg were events of massive death and emotional strength… while it is plausible that disembodied spirits exist there, it’s also plausible that some sort of shift in the temporal dimensions may be giving us a vision of the past. For your typical ‘repeating’ haunting, this is a perfectly logical explanation – that we’re somehow seeing a traumatic incident in time, a loop in history that keeps on showing itself off time and again. However, there are other types of ghosts, apparently – ones who think more, who interact with people. On a related topic, you have the ‘demons’ and ’shadow people,’ supposedly inhuman spirits that have their own purposes for humanity.
Again, quantum theory gives us a possible explanation. Creatures that are capable of crossing over between universes where they brush together, where there’s a little overlap… possibly even creatures that can stay in our universe by sliding themselves into one of us.
Of course, quantum theory isn’t the only possible explanation. There’s the standard supernatural – fallen angels and wandering souls – and there’s also more common physics. By our understanding of physics, it’s not possible for energy – or information – to be truly destroyed; all it can do is change form. By that logic, there’s no reason for consciousness to necessarily be any different, if the force behind it is strong enough. The human body generates a small electromagnetic field, and our thought processes take place on an electronic level. All sorts of signs indicate that human consciousness is an aspect of energy, not physicality. Based on that, while consciousness could convert, it’s also possible that this conversion would simply be to an energy form – passing from a physical life to an energetic one. With that possibility (which covers a lot of different phenomena, like astral projection and psychic phenomena), it becomes plausible that sufficient willpower or purpose would allow a ’spirit’ to remain in the world until it’s decided to ‘move on.’
So ghosts aren’t that implausible. Are they real? I have no way to prove it. So far, there’s no way to disprove it. There is a lot of evidence of some sort of phenomena though (and I’m not counting television appearances, for the record.) Go out and take a look for it, if you want, make your own decision. But I will say one bit of advice.
Remember that if ghosts are real, all evidence indicates that it takes a huge amount of dedication and emotion to pull it off. And that often it involves negative emotions. Just because you’re dead, it doesn’t mean you’ve become a good person – anybody who believes in ghosts should bear in mind that Casper’s more likely an exception, rather than the rule. Be careful out there, or you might end up like Micah from Paranormal Activity.
Royally f’ed up….
http://www.johntunger.com/legal-defense-fund.html
So… lemme get this straight. It’s not art. But you’re selling it as art. And you’re pretending to be the original designer so you can claim the cred for being an artist.
A prime example of “let’s just out-money the sucker, then we’ll get what we want.” MPAA tactics in reverse.
It’s alive!!!
Ah, the mad scientist. Where would horror be without Dr. Frankenstein, Jekyll, Sardonicus, and the countless other souls who pushed the bounds of science into God’s domain, only to perish for their efforts? Of course, there aren’t any real mad scientists out there… are there?
Well, Tesla’s neighbors might have argued. Besides his somewhat fanciful claims that he could split the Earth with a few well timed explosions, his experiments in broadcast power resulted in massive Tesla coils, hundreds of feet tall, that drew down lightning on the land around them. Of course, then he told his backer that he was planning on offering electricity to the world for free. Yeah, guess how quickly those checks stopped being signed.
And, of course, one could easily list Oppenheimer and the other men behind the Manhattan Project as mad scientists, albeit rather more successful ones. Oppenheimer even had the necessary flair for the dramatic. “I am become Death, destroyer of worlds,” anyone?
Even the fictional mad scientists aren’t necessarily that out there, in the long run. Dr. Jekyll’s mysterious salts and ethers that warped the physical form and drove men mad? Well, what would you say cocaine and other exotic drugs are? It seems the good doctor accidentally may have created one of the first designer drugs. And even Baron Doctor Victor von Frankenstein, who raised the dead, seems to have had a real-life counterpart.
But, of course, there aren’t any real mad scientists around today. Tesla and the like… they were from an era when science was expanding so rapidly that anything seemed possible. These days, we’ve got a better grasp on things.
And then you hear about DARPA, and their efforts to make cyborg insects, and maybe it’s not so far-fetched after all. The mad scientists just have the government signing their checks now.
Mad science. Is it really a bad thing? Is there a boundary beyond which man wasn’t meant to explore? That’s one of the hardest questions, and one that’s inspired an entire field of study (scientific ethics). Some people have very strong opinions that scientists go too far, too fast – people like Mary Shelley and Michael Crichton. Other people think that science isn’t going far enough fast enough, that it’s being held back unfairly by people’s fears. What’s the answer? Really, it’s rather hard to find one. The only answer everybody seems to agree on is that if something goes wrong, you can blame the scientists.
Is it any wonder that some of them go a little mad?
Speaking of returning unholy, cobbled together bits of the dead and buried to animate mockeries of life, take a look at http://darklylit.wordpress.com, or search for DarklyLit on iTunes and take a listen. It’s a new podcast I’m working on, where I’ll be doing free readings of public domain dark fiction, and discussing it on alternate weeks. I’ve got the permission of Nox Arcana to use their music on the podcast (go listen to them now – www.noxarcana.com – they’re great), and I hope to help bring some of the classics back to the public eye. This week, I pretty well just introduce the podcast. If you’d rather wait until I’m in the thick of things, then tune in next week for my reading of The Tell-Tale Heart.
Just in time for Halloween.
Bear vs Bigfoot
http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D9BD3UD80&show_article=1&catnum=-1
Video here.
See? He’s on all fours. And he went for the beer, not the jerky.
Creepy Cryptids
So, I had a couple requests for some cryptids – specifically, Bigfoot and the Beast of Bray Road. Knowing a little something about them, I figured I’d do this one this week. Bigfoot is one of the best known cryptids out there – an unidentified hominid that roams the wild places of North America. But first, what’s a cryptid?
Cryptids are, put simply, critters that mainstream science doesn’t recognize as existing. These creatures, and the field discussing them (cryptozoology) haven’t been accepted by most scientists, and there’s a great deal of debate over whether or not they even could exist. Famous cryptids include the mountain gorilla, the okapi, the coelocanth, and the platypus – all creatures that science insisted didn’t exist despite sightings by locals in the areas they were reported from. Eventually, somebody brought back a body, and in most cases people accepted that it really was real.
Except the platypus. They needed a live one for that – the assumption was made that it was just stitched together body parts, despite the lack of stitching.
Now, as for Bigfoot… we all know what it is. But, as I’ve been told that some folks haven’t heard any evidence about it that makes it seem more reasonable than Christian Science (AKA Young Earth theory, that sort of thing), I’m going to go into a bit more than that.
I tend to believe that Bigfoot is real – or, more accurately, that Sasquatch is. I don’t agree with the folks out there who hit the lunatic fringe though, like some folks who insist that Bigfoot exist in an extra-dimensional space out of phase with our reality, but occasionally step through to snag a Faygo or something (I wish I were kidding. Really, I do. But I’m not.)
I can’t prove that Bigfott exists, of course – if I could, I wouldn’t be blogging about this. All I can do is shoot down some of the most commonly cited ‘evidence’ against Bigfoot’s existence. So, let’s go to it!
Myth #1: The Bigfoot legend has only been around since the ’50’s – if this thing was real, why wouldn’t we have heard about it before?
Rebuttal: Well… we have. It wasn’t in the mainstream consciousness, but it was there. There are stories from lumber camps about massive hairy men basically busting up the camps. There are stories from the native Americans about them – where do you think the word Sasquatch came from? So this myth doesn’t really fit.
Myth #2: There can’t be a tiny little population of Bigfoots existing in Oregon forest – there wouldn’t be enough of them for a full breeding population.
Rebuttal: This is the most common one I’ve heard. And it’s been thoroughly, thoroughly debunked. Bigfoot sightings might be concentrated in Oregon, but they’ve been seen all throughout North America… almost. You see, some folks went and did an analysis of all the sightings out there, and they actually found that the sightings were concentrated in areas that have a set of common characteristics. The Coastal north-west, northern California, parts of Oklahoma, Georgia, northern Florida… they all have reasonably similar levels of humidity and similar climates. They’re all places that have fairly similar animal life, and all areas that lack one critical ecosystem element… a major apex predator. In places where grizzlies are common, Bigfoot doesn’t show up. In colder areas, Bigfoot doesn’t show up… except for a little bit in Wisconsin/Michigan. But that I suspect is misidentified – more on that later.
Myth #3: The footprints are all obvious fakes.
Rebuttal: If they’re all obvious fakes, I’d love to hear the explanation of why at least one forensic anthropologist – who specified in studying primate footprints – is convinced that many of the footprints he’s examined are proof of an unidentified large primate? I’d also like to know how it is that our hoaxers have made footprints that perfectly fit a natural bellcurve in the size. Now, it could be simple random chance. But you’d think that they’d just tend to get bigger and bigger, as they try to one-up the footprint before, rather than having a natural curve that seems to fit… a natural breeding population. Oops. I’d also like to know why many experts examining the footprints can see evidence of a natural foot movement, complete with a bending foot.
Now, are some of them fake? Undoubtedly. Of course some of them are. But showing that Exhibit A is false doesn’t mean that Exhibit B, C, and D aren’t still valid.
Myth #4: Bigfoot is merely a misidentified black bear.
Rebuttal: More on this later.
I could go on about this much, much longer – books have been written on the subject by far more knowledgeable people. but I’m going to move on for a moment to the Beast of Bray Road.
The Beast of Bray Road is the name that was attached to a wolf-man like creature in the Michigan/Wisconsin region. We actually had a sighting in our area a year or two back, when a man out collecting road kill carcasses for the county saw something tall and black stealing a deer carcass from the bed of his pickup, loping off into the woods carrying the carcass in its arms. More info can be found at wikipedia here, and in several different books (I recommend the Eerie Radio episodes on the topic.)
And this brings us to one of the major issues with both Bigfoot and the Beast of Bray Road.
This isn’t a black bear. Black bears don’t walk – they can stand and stagger, but they don’t walk, they don’t stride. Black bears don’t jump ditches on two legs. And yet, both Bigfoot and the Beast of Bray Road have been cited doing just those things. Black bears don’t have shoulders – and Bigfoot does. The Beast of Bray Road doesn’t have shoulders as much as the more bear-ish sloping of the body but, again, black bears don’t grab things in their arms and walk off with them. They take them in their jaws and drag them away, at least for significant distances. So few creatures are truly bipedal – which both Bigfoot and the Beast seem to be – that its being a misidentified creature we already know about seems highly unlikely, at best.
Can I prove they exist? Nope. But I think the proof is out there that something is there. Something that deserves real, sincere study, rather than laughter from the same scientific establishment that doubts its own first-hand observations if they don’t agree with their own convictions.
