(NOTE: This was originally published for Freethought Fort Wayne’s blog. I think it is totally appropriate and fun to re-post here. - Andy)

My friend Dave is an outspoken atheist and lived in Indy. He out this hilarious email last night to a bunch of friends, and gave me permission to share it with you:

About 2am last night I heard two guys arguing vehemently outside one of the buildings of my apartment complex.

Obviously I walked outside and became belligerent with them.

I ridiculed one for wearing a snow cap and asked them why they couldn’t have their big discussion inside. One said it was about God, and his girlfriend will get upset. So instead of getting angry I offered to join in. If I wasn’t going to be sleeping I might as well be arguing. Ten minutes later my neighbor comes outside and asks us to keep it down—but I’m getting ahead of myself.

The guy with the snow cap left pretty quick after my opening shots, and I was left with a nut. It started out simple enough; he claimed the Big Bang Theory was too new to be believed, I said I don’t know or care at the moment whether it’s true, and asked for a positive reason to believe in his god. He gave me the ole’ deer-in-headlights, obviously expecting to get me tangled up as only two drunks who know nothing about science can get when trying to talk about science.

We moved on and he brought out the tired “but you can’t refute God” and I shot back “can you refute unicorns?” He paused for a second, understandably since I did just bring unicorns into the argument and I don’t think he’s taken a philosophy class or ever heard of William of Ockham.

Eventually we made it to evolution, and I did my best with what I know. Of course, it wasn’t too difficult; all I had to explain to him was that exhibiting two dead pieces of bark, which were laying conveniently at his side, and yelling to me that they couldn’t reproduce did not actually refute the theory of evolution.

He then claimed “they” found pyramids in Bosnia, made well before the Egyptian pyramids, and that that somehow disproved evolution as well. This was a couple of breaths after he laughed at carbon dating.

We treaded back a bit when I asked him why I should believe in his god over anyone else’s, and he said polytheism was silly—well, once I explained to him what it was and brought up Greek mythology—and he said it was stupid to believe in a god like Zeus and a 2,000 year-old myth. I recoiled and waited for him to correct himself. He said nothing and I waited another few beats (deer, headlights, go!) and said “wasn’t 2,000 years ago the birth of your savior?”

He changed it to 5,000 and moved on.

We visited materialism next and I told him desire for a higher being, no matter how much it made your life complete or kept your grandmother smiling and in the kitchen and she makes really good pie—it meant nothing in relation to what was or wasn’t the truth, and I brought up the 9/11 conspiracy almost by accident; a casual throw-up to an example of crazy people who disregard truth because they want a certain outcome…

FAIL. He was a 9/11 truther. I spent the next few minutes defending Bush (lemme tell you I loved that) and the government against conspiracy theory. I really don’t know the temperature at which steel bends or breaks, ergo I failed. But not so much as I finally got him off his do-it-yourself-home-course-in-structural-engineering for a bit to get him to admit that he cares more about what makes people happy—which Jesus does—than he cares about the truth.

I said: “So you’re accusing Americans of plotting and executing the worst terrorist attack our generation has seen more because it makes you happy rather than it’s the truth?”

Yeah, I admit that one wasn’t too fair. And anyway that’s when the belligerence came. He accused me of science and I accused him of being willfully ignorant, and as I was walking away, doing that thing where you’re trying to get the last, petty little remark off before your commence the angry storming, and he said this, which caused me pause:

“I hope you’re happy with your new body in seven years, because that’s what science says you’ll have!”

“Huh? What…What the [EXPLETIVE DELETED] are you talking about?” I said.

“Your new body. Seven years. I hope you’re happy with it!”

“Is it thin and sexy?”

He rolled his head and guffawed a little—like how dare I make fun of his final blow that should’ve surely set my reality to crumble—and he said:

“Yeah…I hope you’re happy because you’ll…science says you’ll have a new body so explain that!”

I walked away, finally. Just kidding, we exchanged obscenities for a few minutes before I did make it back to my stoop. I found a friend sitting and smoking a cigarette. The new-body-creationist did come over at one point to say “hey, man, we should talk when we’re sober. I really think we should have a conversation when we’re sober” and I said sure, fine, call me. He left and I recounted much of the story to my friend, who is a biology major and pre-med. I got to the 9/11 truth stuff and he stopped me:

“Yeah, that guy’s an idiot, but do you know the temperature at which steel melts? It just didn’t add up when…”

I sighed.

There was more conversation but apparently I’m the only person up at 2 AM in my apartment complex who doesn’t believe the government was behind 9/11. Fail lined the streets tonight, gentlemen, in places both expected and unexpected.

So for Waffles’s next achievement, I know he’s been talking about learning some more advanced video editing techniques. Well, here’s an example of something homemade (from YouTube user dwlieu) that ought to serve as a motivational example of, um, that:
 

 
Shot by shot, it’s perfect; it demonstrates an appreciation of discipline and precision in choosing shots, and an understanding of how to correlate logically with the music. And there’s an irreverent wink or two in there, like Quark clinking the latinum together.

And there’s always this one:
 

 
Though this person cheated a bit by using shots from Voyager (Voyager crashing into the time ship from “Year of Hell”) and DS9 (the big fleet from one of the Dominion battles). Still perfectly plotted, though.

Tags: Video editing, WIN

Congrats to Waffles for becoming a celeb in the blogosphere today. He’s achieved the most popular thread to date at the Freethought Fort Wayne blog by getting a positive endorsement from PZ on Pharyngula. Waffles’s atheist coming-out story is honest and moving, and reveals the real perils of religious education. If you haven’t already, read it.

Tags: Freethought

This is absolutely adorable — a fan video featuring some pretty good homebrew special effects, with kindergartners running around as the Doctor, Captain Jack, Davros, and a dalek. It’s great.

For my grump du jour about superfluous technology in the classroom, I need to talk about the actual consequences of that value-added bullcrap they shrink-wrap with textbooks. This semester I bought about half of my books from the Amazon marketplace, whose sellers often have new copies for the price the campus bookstore charges for used. Now, my chemistry textbook that I ordered from there did indeed come shrink-wrapped with a little cardboard “Student Access Kit” with a password that gives you access to additional features from the book publisher on the web, and I thought that was what I needed for access to the premium content on the prof’s site that’s the only way you’re allowed to submit homework.

But now I find out that the campus bookstore sells the book shrink-wrapped with two Access Kits: the one I have for the publisher’s website, and another one for the supplemental materials that form an extension of WebCT (the school’s own online work space). The latter is the one I need to do my homework, costs an extra twenty bucks to order separately, and, now that I’ve done so, will get to me a couple days after the first assignment is due. (I was actually going to stop by my prof’s office yesterday and show him the problems I was having logging in, as he’d invited me to, but I figured it would be pointless, since yesterday WebCT was…down.) Granted I should have resolved the problem earlier, but I didn’t understand that the resolution of the problem was ordering another product; to wax Rumsfeldian, the little yellow kit, instead of the blue kit I already had, was an “unknown unknown.”

I think it’s reasonable to speculate that these packaged Cracker-Jack treats are, at least in part, an effort on the part of the publishers to fight resales. It would be nice, though, if professors would stop encouraging them by requiring the damn things to pass the class, and if the publishers wouldn’t tempt them with products and packages that lend themselves to this use.

Anyway, a skein of geese just flew past the window, so I’m happy again.

Tags: Classes

I’m not a particularly big fan of heavy metal, or zombies, but this video is really fascinating. It’s a music video for a song by ANJ, a Russian metal band. It’s a tribute to Mikhail Gorbachev, which includes big-breasted women and zombies, and Gorbachev as some sort of Conan the Barbarian hero, cranial bird-poop-shaped birthmark and all.

The stylization is really amazing — part of it is done in that old Soviet-grandeur feeling with dark colors, lots of depth, and kind of a stiff, sweeping movement of various events in a really big, epic magnitude. It reminds me of the TV commercials for the new Stolichnaya vodka branding (see examples here and, my favorite, here).

Anyway, it’s bizarre, and strange, but it really draws you in:

GORBACHOV: THE MUSIC VIDEO - BIGGER AND RUSSIANER from Tom Stern on Vimeo.

From the sharp-witted people over at cectic.com. Click to enlarge.

I’m going to bitch again about misuse of technology in the classroom. In one of my classes today we were dismissed a few minutes after arriving because the prof couldn’t get the desktop PC that projects the Powerpoint slides to boot. This despite the fact that almost all of the students had printouts of the presentation sitting in front of them, and the classroom has a perfectly good blackboard, and the professor possesses a larynx. And, for that matter, the fact that a few students probably had laptops with them with Powerpoint that could have been plugged into the projection system.

I had a film class canceled once for a similar reason, which I can almost forgive, what with the presentation being the point of that class (although the prof’s lack of preparedness or skill with the required equipment I can’t). But for lack of outline slides is a stretch. Fortunatley, most of my profs haven’t been so Eloi, and anyway, I’ve noticed that I learn and remember better in classes where the professor eschews slides entirely and writes on the board or on an overhead instead.

Tags: Classes

The kid is Betty in First Presbyterian Theater’s production this summer of Mister Roberts. She was about five weeks old here, and going through the climbing on things and leaping off them stage.

Tags: LOLCats

That headline sounds sort of like a romantic comedy starring Hugh Grant and Cameron Diaz, doesn’t it?

Just today I ran across a couple things that really set me against Sarah Palin. I was never going to vote for her and John McCain, anyways, but for a long time I just thought she was an unwitting pawn in McCain’s campaign. After watching her speech last night at the Republican National Convention, I realized that she isn’t unwitting. She seems pretty smart. Which got me to thinking,then she KNOWS she’s a pawn? What does THAT say about her character?

First of all, I’m surprised not many people have mentioned that she’s Pentecostal. She’s not just a “sway your hands, feel the love of God” kind of Pentecostal. This is a video clip of her church:

Wasilla Assembly of God Clip

It is reminiscent of the cast of characters from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, isn’t it? I didn’t see the snakes, but I’ll bet they’re there somewhere.

Also, while I was reading Dooce, Heather provided a link to this AP report, breaking down her speech last night with some facts. And, mind you, this isn’t some liberal rag, this is the freakin’ Associated Press. Here’s a factoid:

PALIN: “I have protected the taxpayers by vetoing wasteful spending … and championed reform to end the abuses of earmark spending by Congress. I told the Congress ‘thanks but no thanks’ for that Bridge to Nowhere.”

THE FACTS: As mayor of Wasilla, Palin hired a lobbyist and traveled to Washington annually to support earmarks for the town totaling $27 million. In her two years as governor, Alaska has requested nearly $750 million in special federal spending, by far the largest per-capita request in the nation. While Palin notes she rejected plans to build a $398 million bridge from Ketchikan to an island with 50 residents and an airport, that opposition came only after the plan was ridiculed nationally as a “bridge to nowhere.”

(Link to the AP Report.)

…And there are many more of these reports.

Some say she looks like Tina Fey (pshaw), some say she looks like Laura Roslin (mmkay), but I think she’s not nearly as cool as either of them.

Good for her that she has five kids, one an infant with a disability, good for her that she’s being supportive of her pregnant 17 year-old, but is she really? Did Bristol have a choice when the campaign announced that she would be marrying the baby’s father and keeping the baby? Or is this the case of some mysterious campaign advisor speaking for her?

We’ll see how this goes. I like to think that the American people aren’t silly and can see this choice for veep as a blatant pandering to the miffed Hillary supporters, so I hope this won’t be a roadblock for the Obama campaign. But then again, this guy was president for the last 8 years, so anything will seem like a marked improvement.