When Facebook Memes Attack!

"The "Rules" : Once you've been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 25 random things, facts, habits, or goals about you. At the end, choose 25 people to be tagged. You have to tag the person who tagged you. If I tagged you, it's because I want to know more about you. Copy and paste this and then go to the notes section of your profile."

1. My body's sleep schedule seems to run on a 25-hour rhythm. If I have no pressing reason to get up for an extended period of time, I'll be waking up at 9am, then 1pm, then 4pm, then eventually later, until it cycles all the way back.

2. I'm in the Army reserves. It's like no other job on this planet.

3. English is my second language.

4. I'm the only person I know that shaves with a straight razor. They've got a bitch of learning curve, but once you're through it, the result is phenomenal.

5. Apparently, I was "Most Promiscuous Brother" of AEPi's Ottawa chapter, 2007/2008. There was a vote. For once, I abstained.

6. Karaoke is my guilty pleasure.

7. I don't leave answering machine messages. There's no reason why, I just don't. I've probably left 5 in the last year.

8. I've had my M2 license since I was 16. If I don't do my final road test soon, it's going to expire.

9. I procrastinate. It's ridicu... fuck it.

10. I'm teaching myself - slowly - guitar.

11. Songs that recurringly get stuck in my head:
"Proud Mary," Ike and Tina Turner
"City Blues," Brian Wilson and Eric Clapton
"You Can't Hurry Love," either the Phil Collins cover or The Supremes' original.

12. Dvorjak and Dr Dre are next to each other in my iTunes. My taste is eclectic.

13. I've been to Israel 15 times, and I'm STILL eligible for Birthright.

14. I put all my private thoughts in a blog, but I don't share it with people I know in real life. Tried that once, it didn't go well; for their own good, nobody should ever know what I'm actually thinking.

15. When I have the time, I take hot showers that last easily 45 minutes, sometimes 60. I'm not even masturbating in there, just chillin'.

16. Questionable Content. Favourite web comic.

17. If I've got the time, the money, and the means, I have never turned down a road trip.

18. I've been to the fundamentalist Christian "Creation Museum" in Kentucky. Great shit.

19. I've been arrested.
Once.
While on a public bench.
For trespassing.

20. I love my bathrobe. It's big and purple, and I'm wearing it right now. I take it anywhere I'm staying for more than a night. I've driven across Tennessee in it, and I was the one driving.

21. I've elevated public nudity to high art, and I don't have to be drunk to streak.

22. My addiction, aside from nicotine, alcohol, and carnal sin, is raw oyster. Sit me down in front of them, and I'll eat oysters until you run out of shellfish, or I run out of money.

23. My cell phone and laptop don't get turned off.

24. I'm swearing off Hamilton Karaoke bars for at least two weeks. Those of you who were there know my reasons.

25. I am the least organized person you will ever meet. At my last place, all my floorspace went missing.

26. I'm terrible at math.

27. I'm invisible.

Not even three-fifths!

"Mr Rising, you're actually ineligible to cast a vote for Barack Obama."
...
"No, it's not a curtailment of your rights, Mr. Rising."
...
"Yes, but that doesn't extend to Canadians."
...
"Mr Rising, you don't get three-fifths of a vote."
...
"Mr. Rising, it's not because you're black."
...
"Because you're not black"
...
"I seriously doubt that you're black 'from the waist down,' Mr Rising."
...
"Please put your pants back on, Mr Rising. We're all very impressed."


My point is, the Man's keeping me down. You'd better cast votes for the two of us. And did you know that it's illegal to take off your pants at a voter registration kiosk?

Untitled (Until further notice)

It's been a while since I've taken a hit of the sweet catharsis that can only come from airing my most intimate thoughts into the ether of the blogosphere. I think I'll shelve the decorum for the best summation I can make of the few weeks since my last entry:

Jesus fucking christ.

I drove to Alabama with Nez, Bryan, and J-Dogg, skipping two nights of sleep on a 45-hour, 85 mile-per-hour nonstop meander through the United States.

I went to Ken Ham's Creation Museum in Kentucky.

My ballin' blue minivan (don't fucking say it) broke down in Mountain Brook, AL, two miles from our destination.

I fixed it and got back to Ottawa a week ago.

Then I drove to Toronto a few days later. Because I felt like it.

I met up with Tall Penguin for an in-person mea culpa (here) over the bookstore bible incident (here, here, and here).

I drove back to Ottawa, making it into the city just in time to start my new job at 7am. A ten-hour shift on zero sleep is a feat made possible only through the wonders of Adderall. The perscription is mine; deal with it.

But despite the sporadic foray into my favourite rubber-stamped prescription psychostimulant, the fact remains that I haven't actually gone to sleep since Wednesday evening. Before that, Monday night was the last time my head hit a pillow.

Understandably, I'm beyond the stage of delerium. I'll be making posts on my adventures in more detail when I'm somewhere close to lucid. Until then, here's a rough sketch of the weeks to come:

Heading down to Amherst, NY for the Center for Inquiry's CFI On Campus 2008 Student Leadership Conference, an apparent coming-together of young collegiate agnostics, atheists, and freethinkers from Canada and the USA.

After that, I'll likely be heading down to Washington, DC. Sophie's there on an internship with the U.S. Congress, and I've rallied a loose fellowship of fraternity brothers for a pilgrimage to the chapter at George Washington University.

That's all for now. I need a shower badly; I smell like sex and Marlboros, dish soap, cheesecake, and the unmistakable aroma of chopped liver. Don't ask.

Lavender-fresh Jesus.

God bless Wal Mart.

I just got a new air freshener for my car. This is what happens when I'm allowed to get bored.

That, and it's a convenient cover for our atheistic stroll through Kentucky's Creation Museum next weekend.



Also, my exhaustive research has concluded that you cannot set fire to Genoa salami with a butane jet lighter. I'm moving up to procuitto and acetylene.

Sweet Home Alabama: Answers in Genesis

I'm running on a cumulative 3 hours' sleep over the last two days, so bear with me. This is important. It's come to my attention that the Creation Museum, fundamentalist Christianity's answer to Poe's Law, is on the outskirts of Cincinnati, just across the Kentucky state line.

From their web site:

Walk through the Garden of Eden. The Tree of Life, central to the garden, stretches out its branches, laden with ripened fruits. Come face-to-face with a sauropod, a dinosaur of incredible dimensions. His monstrous frame moves through the low-lying thicket as he grazes on plants. Introduce yourself to our chameleons. Examine bones, a clutch of eggs from a dinosaur, an exceptional fossil collection, and a mineral collection. Walk through the Cave of Sorrows and see the horrific effects of the Fall of man. Sounds of a sin-ravaged world echo through the room. Finally, see the sacrificial Lamb on the cross, and the hope of redemption.

The themes of the exhibits resound in the theater presentations: Men in White, Six Days of Creation, The Last Adam, and Dinosaurs and Dragons. Our Special Effects Theater, complete with rumbling seats and rising mists, takes visitors on a fantastic quest to find the real purpose and meaning of life.

And I'm going. No word yet on whether that will constitute Kentucky's token streak, but I'm leaning towards taking a pass on this one. The state-to-state tour of gratuitous nudity is meant to be just for shits and giggles, and as suiting as it would be to streak through the "Garden of Eden" historical exhibit - replete with Adam, Eve, and their dinosaur neighbours - we're not really looking to spread a message. Also, it would be a phenomenally quick way to get arrested.

A tentative date has been set. My odyssey begins out of Ottawa on Friday, June 20. My housemates Bryan and Ross have all but dropped out of the coming trip, but it's looking like my pimpin' minivan will be full anyway: Zach and DK (of bible-shuffle infamy) will meet me en route through Toronto, and Sam (hereafter, Nez Deux) will join the fellowship as it passes through Dayton, Ohio.

Cooties

I actually kind of like this one, but it brushes on a bit of a serious topic. Cootie prevention and sex education.

Luckily for me, I grew up in sensibly secular Canada. Sex education was a mandatory part of Physical Education, which, in the province of Ontario, is a required credit for a high school diploma. Phys Ed was a ninth-grade course, so at the tender age of 14, high school freshmen learn a few things about sex.

The basic mechanics of it were fairly straightforward. By the time we entered high school, most kids my age already knew a fair bit about sex. There were probably a few in the class who were sexually active, but at that age, I would call it a fair bet that most of my classmates were probably sitting firmly at third base, if that.

Still, there was useful information to glean from Sex Ed. We got to see nasty pictures of terrifying diseases. We learned how all the parts work (not that I can honestly still remember what my vas deferens does, but no matter). Most importantly though, we learned about contraception and disease prevention. Abstinence was taught as one of the methods to protect yourself, but it was never implied that taking that route was morally superior. Trained volunteers even demonstrated how to roll a condom onto erotic vegetables.

Did I come out of that class behaving any differently than I had before? Not really. It was still another year or two before I finally got laid. But I did come out with a sense of normalcy about it.

Fast forward one year.

My Jewish youth group (hey, I wasn't born an atheist) had held that year's International Convention in Toronto. Of course, being a hormone-addled 15-year-old, I spent the entire time chatting up every single nice Jewish girl and her chest.

One girl that I had really started to fall for was this stunning blonde cheerleader from Alabama. She's actually one of the smartest people that I've met, but I didn't really know that at the time. Her name wasn't actually Sophie, but since there's a good chance that she'll feature in some more personal stories, she's going to have to remain Sophie as far as you people are concerned.

After she convinced me that she wasn't joking, there actually are Jewish people in Alabama, we actually started to hit it off. While I never worked up the courage to make a move while she was in Toronto, I did get her email address.

We kept in touch after she went home, talking on MSN nearly every night. It was only a matter of time before a conversation turned to sex. Funny how that happens when you're 15 and thinking about it constantly, eh? When I told her about my school's Sex Education sub-course the previous year, she was absolutely floored.

"Your teacher actually advocated condom use? If that happened here, they'd be fired so fast!"

I was stunned. To me, Abstinence-only sex education was something you read about, a policy that mythical fundamentalists in a far-off land taught their spawn. Yet while my classmates were learning how to play safe when the clothes came off, her classmates were instead taking a class-wide abstinence pledge.

She was as appalled as I was. She could barely believe that we Canadians, who I had always considered to be a fairly middle-of-the-pack bunch, were amazing enough to adopt such a progressive policy as teaching young adults how to safely do something that they're going to do anyway.


I was going to try and conclude with something profound and thought-provoking, but it's past 5:30am, and I'm fucking tired. Just roll that around in your head for a minute. Having your education determined by religious doctrine isn't something that happens to someone else. It happened to Sophie.




Update: Hours after writing this, I find this article in the Schenectady Gazette, via Salon.com. Turns out, there's a classroom's worth of parents who are outraged by the way their grade 7/8 snowflakes are being taught Sex Ed. They're mobilizing the suburban mommy militia, and taking torch and pitchfork to the school district administration.

The crime? While teaching students the facts about sex, the curriculum actually acknowledged the fact that we have body parts that can give pleasurable feelings. Masturbation was even mentioned!

When will school administrators realize? If we don't tell them that it can feel good, they're not going to find out! It's that simple. A doctor said so:

Dr. Michael Rochet, a physician, said the school district should search for alternatives for Planned Parenthood programming because he believes the instruction will facilitate curiosity among students. [emphasis mine]

“It will lead to more sexual activity,” he said.

Rochet said he wants parents and educators to get together and work on a program for the coming school year that can be molded to the community’s needs, as opposed to taking on programming of an organization that’s already developed.

“We don’t have to follow everybody else. Let’s lead the pack,” Rochet said.

In an effort to ensure parents would have a say in their children’s participation, the district issued forms so that parents could decide to have their children excluded from the instruction.

Here's why they should not have this option: their children will have sex. If not now - they are in middle school - then in a few years. It's a fact. Especially in Montgomery County, where the teen birth rate is the second-highest of any in New York state.

Teen birth is a greater policy issue, but it's not the reason the course should be obligatory. Disease is. If teens have a baby, their life is ruined. If someone passes on a sexually-transmitted disease, it has endangered the health and well-being of everyone within six degrees of sexual separation. For the same reason that schools can mandate vaccinations against Polio and Co,
it has a duty to mandate Sex Ed as an innoculation against stupidity. A student with Polio would be a danger to the school at large; so too, the student who might be imbued with the wond'rous gift of herpes.

Teach them when they're young, so when they start, they won't be idiots.

Code Indigo

I got back into Ottawa about 90 minutes ago. I'm skipping tonight's sleep to try and get my schedule back into some semblance of sanity. Besides, I'd just have to wake up in two hours anyway.

In slightly more interesting news, I have a confession to make. Those of you who frequent Pharyngula or Tall Penguin - both phenomenal blogs - may have noticed the story of a Toronto-area Indigo bookstore that found its entire Bibles and Bible Study section relocated to relevant shelves around the store. That was me and DK [full name withheld to protect the guilty] on Saturday afternoon.

For those barbarians who don't frequent either blog, here's where it gets interesting:

Dr. P. Z. Myers is a professor of biology in Minnesota (I think), and author of the extremely high-profile blog "Pharyngula." He's an ardent atheist and a friend of Richard Dawkins, who wrote "The God Delusion." They were both actually interviewed (under a false flag) in Ben Stein's intelligent-design schlockumentary "Expelled."

But I digress.

Assuming Dr. Myers to be the kind of person who would get a chuckle out of the absurdity of the whole thing, I sent off an email:

Bookstore Mischief in the Frozen Northlands

---

PR. [redacted] <[redacted]@gmail.com>	Tue, May 20, 2008 at 3:51 AM
To: pzmyers@pharyngula.org
Dr. Meyers, Let me open with the a trite cliche: I'm a long-time reader, but a first-time writer. The attached images are sent not as a triumphant head on a platter (before you recoil, I should mention that it's not to be taken in the literal sense), but as a supremely gratifying act of minor mischief. Indigo is Canada's most prominent bookstore chain, akin to stateside purveyors such as Barnes and Noble, selling everything from political treatises to new-age acupuncture schlock. The bookstore has always represented - at least to me - the democratic marketplace of ideas, where thoughts and arguments rise and fall on their merits. These arguments were very well classified by shelf: politics, business, inspirational stories, and the rest. But something was out of place, that my friends and I couldn't help but correct. The bibles, which span so many topics in the course of their thousands of pages, were relegated to a shelf of their own, separate from all the composite sub-topics that comprise their entirety. Whether out of civic responsibility, or out of the resolute boredom of university students with nothing but time to kill during the summer, we took it upon ourselves to rectify this error. Surely it was an error. To make a long story short, bibles that once filled a row found their respective ways to the shelves of such relevant topics as Fiction, Humour, Sexuality, Erotica, Cuisine, Parenting, Mental Disorder, Parapsychology and the Occult. In the bibles' place, the Bibles and Bible Studies section now holds one solitary copy of Sam Harris's treatise, Letter to a Christian Nation. If a single person can be persuaded that the answers to their questions lie not in a bronze-age text, but instead in the faculties of their own reason, then I'd consider it an afternoon well spent. If not, at least it felt pretty damned good. The accompanying photos are of the Bible shelf after our labours. Do with them as you wish; my only regret is not having the foresight to have taken a picture before we started. Sincerely, PR [redacted] Undergraduate, [redacted] University Ottawa, Canada (The bookstore itself was at Yonge Street and Eglinton Avenue, in the city of Toronto) 3 attachments 17-05-08_1857.jpg 398K 17-05-08_1858.jpg 456K 17-05-08_1856.jpg 386K

And that, I'd expected, was the end of it. I probably should have known better. En route to Ottawa tonight, I got a call from DK. I hadn't mentioned to him that I'd sent the email, and he was calling to tell me that we were - and I quote - "in the fucking news!"

The "news" that he was referring to was Dr Myers's blog, Pharyngula, which posted a bemused half-chastisement for the world to see. (the actual chastising was in the form of a short "While I don't condone this..." before going on to extol how the whole stunt was, in fact, kind of funny.)

Ambitious vandalism!

Category: Humor
Posted on: May 20, 2008 8:18 AM, by PZ Myers

A couple of college students in Toronto (what is it with those ferocious godless heathens coming out of that city?) took offense at the patent absurdity of the "Bible and Bible Studies" section of a large bookstore at Yonge and Eglinton, and decided to help organize the shelves by filing their contents more appropriately. They quietly moved the contents to other places in the bookstore, like Fiction, Humour, Sexuality, Erotica, Cuisine, Parenting, Mental Disorder, Parapsychology and the Occult. Then they sent me a photo of the end result.

That's Sam Harris' Letter to a Christian Nation sitting all alone there.

I can't really condone this kind of behavior — think of the poor clerks who have to look everywhere to find and restore the bibles to their little ghetto — but it is funny. It's also godless Canada, so maybe nobody noticed for a few weeks or months. Maybe nobody cared.

---

Here's the other side of the story.

...For the record, this blog receives an average of 57 000 page views per day. This posting alone received about 150 comments from readers, ranging from acclaim to irritation. The one comment that stood out, the "other side of the story," was a comment from a girl who actually works at that Indigo:

I work in that bookstore and I was the one who came upon those shelves just after it happened. I blogged about it and one of my readers just sent me the link to this site. My manager wasn't really impressed and although the scavenger hunt was fun, it ate up a lot of our time on a busy Saturday afternoon.

To the culprits: By the time I reached the shelves, the copy of "Letter to a Christian Nation" was gone. They were just empty, so your prank looked more like the work of fundamentalists. Not sure it accomplished your goal.

Posted by: tall penguin | May 20, 2008 12:13 PM

While it was a bit of an inconvenience to undo the havoc we'd wrought, she was clearly amused enough to post about it on her own blog, Tall Penguin:

Sunday, May 18, 2008

Spreadin' the Word...

In my bookstore job, I walk the floor for hours, helping customers find books. As I walk through my department I tidy up the shelves and clean up the messes the dear customers leave behind. As I was walking through the Religion department late yesterday afternoon, I noticed that two whole shelves of Bibles were missing. I immediately called my manager to see if perhaps they'd been moved or someone was working on this; unlikely considering it was a Saturday and we do nothing but sell on a Saturday. He said that it seemed likely they were stolen.

Loss Prevention was alerted and the three of us surveyed the empty shelves, wondering how someone could walk off with 40 bibles without our noticing. We each went back to our respective jobs, feeling a little dismayed that this theft had happened. And Bibles even. Granted, it is the most stolen book.

So, I'm walking through the Cooking department, and there on the shelf where the books on cocktails and alcoholic beverages are, are 3 Bibles. I smile. I tell loss prevention and the scavenger hunt begins. I put on my fundie thinking cap and set out to all the areas in the store that a Bible-thumper would think were in need of the Good Word. And sure enough, there they were. Bibles were found in Sexuality, Erotica, the Teen section, War and Sci Fi/Fantasy.

My manager was happy that we'd recovered the merchandise but was understandably a little peeved at someone's thinking that they were doing a good thing. Whether this was a fundie Christian or just someone out to play a little game, we'll never know. But it made for a very interesting night.

While she doesn't seem too upset about it, I think I might send an apology to her. She was clearly an innocent bystander, and I do feel a twinge of guilt for putting the peace and quiet of her afternoon shift in the crossfire.



....And that's all for now. I'd been thinking about starting a blog for a while (God knows I've definitely got the talent to put out something that people would enjoy reading when they should be doing something productive with their time). Being peripherally involved in a blogosphere maelstrom might be a good way to springboard into that.

All the best,
PR. [redacted]


As an afterthought, I'm kind of glad that Dr. Myers had the discretion not to post our names in his blog, or the photo with me and DK standing triumphantly in front of the vandalised bookshelf.