Wondrous Apparitions, Provided by Magicians.

Holy crap! We still have aviation pioneers!

::wibble::

First, Carl Zimmer's Science Tattoo Emporium. A gallery of tats based in maths and sciences. There are some really lovely taxonomies here, and a couple of applications of sigil magick based on circuitry, for druidevo and you other people what like that sort of thing.

Second, Tools for Photography as Ritual Magic. The artist creates a unique pinhole camera for each of his photographic series, including totemic elements related to the subject of the series. Among his cameras are one built with an 'underwater' filter containing an altar to Yemaya, two which include human skulls as part of the works, one made with a piece of girder from the World Trade Center, and one which uses a solution of HIV-positive blood as a filter.

Third, and most mundane, I like to play Scrabble, and one can play Scrabble over the internet with a ranking and ratings system here. If you would like to play with me, look me up. My name over there is Orbiting. After two games, I am rated at 666. :)

I don't usually like to journal about bodily functions other than the occasional declaration that I have become a plague zombie, which I think is necessary because it lets you know why I haven't been journalling and because it alerts people to the possible necessity to keep weaponry on hand in case my brain runs out my ears and I decide to go visiting. Anyway. I don't usually go there, but this is kinda neat. ( Read more... )

I had the evening off yesterday, which allowed me to get most of my God Auction shopping done. It's a very sexay basket for the high bidder this year. So far, I've got a nice bottle of wine, some silver goblets, a gorgeous carved candle, 1/4 lb of Dean and Deluca chocolates (which are the most attractive chocolates ever in the history of chocolate), and a copy of The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. I'm hoping to add some music ('cuz it's all about dancing this year), some certificates for ballroom dance lessons, perhaps another book or two, and a nice altar cloth at the very least, and perhaps some deity statuary, if I can find anything good. I'm also open to suggestions, provided that they will fit in the basket. So that's all good.

In the course of the shopping, I also had the best store-made sushi ever (also from Dean and Deluca), and got to sample the chocolates (so I can verify that they are beautifully tasty as well as merely nice to look at).

Then, I came home, and discovered that there is a completely satisfactory spread of videos about Tesla coils on YouTube. I love that. One ends with a title card that reads "If you want to see 8 foot sparks, go to our website." And really, who doesn't want to see 8-foot sparks? I ask you.

I also remembered that I had library books out, including Fragile Things by Neil Gaiman. It's a collection of short stories, some of which are wonderful, and some of which are mediocre. I adore Neil Gaiman, though, because he writes with such a matter-of-fact tone, and can get away with writing things like (in a story that blends Sherlock Holmes and the Cthulhu Mythos) "We called her Victoria, because she did defeat us in battle some seven or eight hundred years ago, and we called her Gloriana, because she was glorious, and we called her 'The Queen' because human mouths were not shaped to pronounce her true name." Delightful! (I wish I could get away with that sort of sentence.)

loltheorists.

Jesus may have walked on ice, or: how we have no effing public dialogue at all about the you know, vague possibility that religion is, you know, myth rather than historical fact. The weather part of this is actually sort of nifty, but the reporting on it is rather crap.

Also, special bonus funtime poll: At the moment I happened to click on it, the poll attached to this story indicated that 35% of its respondents believed that every word of the Bible was literally true. Now, I understand that this sort of poll is much like a livejournal poll, which is to say, designed for the amusement of some of its readers rather than with the intention of producing any useful information, but still. That tells me that 35% of the people who bothered to click in either a)haven't read the Bible and are just bullshitting, or b)are simultaneously not very good at maths and also crap at critical reading.

Favorite line in the article: "Tabgha is the town where many archeological findings related to Jesus have been found." Why, oh why, am I not in the journalism business? Even setting aside the fact that well, as far as I know anyway, there aren't any archeological findings related to Jesus that haven't been later determined to be frauds, um, well, it's thing with the findings being found.

The foundation of my personal irrational faith is that once upon a time, in a time now lost to history, there were copyeditors. I can't prove this, but hey. As the curator of Hellenistic, Roman and Byzantine Archaeology, Israel Museum says in another story in the news today (which gives the implication that authentic finds from Jesus' life are being shown in museums while burying the little note that none of the items shown have any relation to Jesus way down in the last paragraph of the story), "But there is still a lot of archaeology going on, and new discoveries are being made all the time".

I think I just took the worst written opinion poll ever created in the history of polling. Now, to back this up, I studied survey and questionnaire design in college as a psych major. Now, I never did do any graduate studies, and I was perhaps not the best of students, but I do like to believe that I know something about data-gathering and creating this sort of instrument. And I would also like to think that the major polling organizations would know something about it, too. And yet.
( The false assumption, the double-bind, and other ways to spend a lot of money to get crap data... )
( EDIT: My letter to Zogby Interactive, in which I am probably too high-handed. But what do you want? Not enough caffeine yet for proper politeness. )

Happiness increases likelihood of success. What a clever day to stumble across this story this is.
Sheesh.
Grumble.

But this is fun: Spices in gingerbread act as amphetamine precursors. This might explain kittenpants' latest fascination with spiced tea...