More Tom Leher

The hits just keep on comin'.

The Vatican Rag

This is funnier, and not as anti-Catholic as it might seem, if you put in context during the Second Vatican Council. It was all big news at the time. Liturgy and many traditional doctrines were being questioned, and that left an opening for brilliant satire.

I first heard this about 1965 when the vinyl LP record was played for me by a friend, the son of a very liberal Congregational church minister.

About one and a half.

First you get down on your knees,
Fiddle with your rosaries,
Bow your head with great respect,
And genuflect, genuflect, genuflect!

Do whatever steps you want, if
You have cleared them with the Pontiff.
Everybody say his own
Kyrie eleison,
Doin' the Vatican Rag.

Get in line in that processional,
Step into that small confessional,
There, the guy who's got religion'll
Tell you if your sin's original.

If it is, try playin' it safer,
Drink the wine and chew the wafer,
Two, four, six, eight,
Time to transubstantiate!

Make a cross on your abdomen,
When in Rome do like a Roman,
Ave Maria,
Gee it's good to see ya,
Gettin' ecstatic an'
Sorta dramatic an'
Doin' the Vatican Rag!

Ave Maria,
Gee it's good to see ya!

Tom Lehrer at DJB.

Democrats

From last night's Democratic presidential candidate's debate, Connecticut Senator Christopher Dodd:

"They ought to be able to have those loving relationships sanctioned," Dodd said on gay civil unions. "... I believe civil unions are appropriate and proper. I don't support same sex marriage."

-Reuters

I'm sick to death about word-salad remarks like this. What, exactly, is your point, Senator? If there's any reason why you think some people deserve only partial civil rights, please explain.

I don't need need to single out Dodd here, Obama and Clinton have been as bad.

Actually. it's kind of familiar. I can recall many similar, half-assed comments regarding racial equality in the 1960's.

I can't imagine Dennis Kucinich as a real President of the United States, but I really admire that when he stakes out a position, he embraces it and holds to it without equivocation.



Just had to vent for a moment. So no links. There's better thinkers and writers over there on the sidebar. That's why they're there.

Picture

Boys kissing

Credit dconklin.

Thisbe
O wall, full often hast thou heard my moans,
For parting my fair Pyramus and me!
My cherry lips have often kiss'd thy stones,
Thy stones with lime and hair knit up in thee.

Pyramus
I see a voice: now will I to the chink,
To spy an I can hear my Thisby's face. Thisby!

...

Pyramus
O kiss me through the hole of this vile wall!

Thisbe
I kiss the wall's hole, not your lips at all.

- William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream.

More.

Forbidden love

Yet another fundie attempt at book-banning. This one's particularly funny.

(Bentonville, Arkansas) A Bentonville, Arkansas man is demanding the city pay him $20,000 for the pain and suffering of his sons after they discovered a book on lesbian sex in their local library.

"[They were] greatly disturbed" said Earl Adams his letter to the city. "[We had] many sleepless nights in our house."

-365Gay.com

The boys, aged fourteen and sixteen, stumbled accross the book while looking for material on military academies.

Yeah, right.

One commenter at Pam's House Blend quipped:

He could tell his sons were traumatized because when they got home from the library, they locked themselves in their bedrooms and moaned.

In a strange sort of compromise, the library board removed the book, but said they would look for a "more appropriate" book about lesbian sex. Otherwise,"The Whole Lesbian Sex Book" will be returned to the shelves.

Book-banning at Dirty John Bonny earlier here (balls), and here (Harry Potter and Fahrenheit 451).

Banned books at the American Library Association.

Planet

First possibly Earthlike extrasolar planet found.

The search for extra-solar planets has become so fine-tuned that observers are now beginning to find smaller, rocky bodies.

Credit fathero9.

Philip Plait at his Bad Astronomy Blog is positively gushing:

But remember, Gliese 581 is cooler than the Sun, so at this distance the planet would actually be very temperate: models show it would be between 0 and 40 Celsius! If that doesn’t grab you, then consider this:

That is warm enough for water to be a liquid.

So what we may have here is a terrestrial planet with liquid water on its surface.

Link.

The barely-spoken part is, of course, the elephant in the room: life. When we find it it will rock the world.

The Eagle Nebula

I think that one of the greatest indictments against the Abrahamic religions is just how parochial they are.

When their sacred texts were first laid down, planet Earth was it - the only game in town, the only arena. So the gods took interest, and intervened, sometimes hugely and often cruelly.

But now we know that little Earth is just one planet next to one of the one hundred billion stars in our own galaxy, again one of billions.

Biology happened here without teleology; it was the result of random processes constrained by natural law. It's reasonable to conclude that it most probably did, and will, happen elsewhere.

There's lots of fuss (Dynamics of Cats, at ScienceBlogs) over this. It's fun watching in real time, via the Internets tubes, as people smarter than I try to figure it all out.

Editorial

Looking at the logs.

Traffic dropped precipitously here around Easter weekend. This graph shows pageloads from March 22 through April 22. You can't see the detail, but it goes from over a hundred per day to dozens or less.

I suspect that there was some tweak in The Google's algorithms.

Dunno why, but this page, with the David Hockney painting, is very popular, accounting for about a third of the traffic over the past few days.

Recent search terms that made me smile:

antrozous pallidus adaptations

does heated coke, vinegar and baking soda make a bigger explosion than vinegar and baking soda

bonny dance

For Earth Day, a late post

Tom Lehrer again, with Pollution

About two and a half.

If you visit American city,
You will find it very pretty.
Just two things of which you must beware:
Don't drink the water and don't breathe the air.

Pollution, pollution,
They got smog and sewage and mud.
Turn on your tap and get hot and cold running crud.

See the halibuts and the sturgeons
Being wiped out by detergents.
Fish gotta swim and birds gotta fly,
But they don't last long if they try.

Pollution, pollution,
You can use the latest toothpaste,
And then rinse your mouth with industrial waste.

Just go out for a breath of air,
And you'll be ready for Medicare.
The city streets are really quite a thrill.
If the hoods don't get you, the monoxide will.

Pollution, pollution,
Wear a gas mask and a veil.
Then you can breathe, long as you don't inhale.

Lots of things there that you can drink,
But stay away from the kitchen sink.
The breakfast garbage that you throw in to the bay,
They drink at lunch in San Jose.

So go to the city, see the crazy people there.
Like lambs to the slaughter,
They're drinking the water
And breathing the air.

He was brilliant.

Tom Lehrer

The Elements by Tom Lehrer

Tom Lehrer (Wikipedia) was a 1960's-era singer-songwriter, satirist, and Harvard mathematics doc-student.

About One and a quarter.

Follow the bouncing ball.

There's antimony, arsenic, aluminum, selenium,
And hydrogen and oxygen and nitrogen and rhenium,
And nickel, neodymium, neptunium, germanium,
And iron, americium, ruthenium, uranium,
Europium, zirconium, lutetium, vanadium,
And lanthanum and osmium and astatine and radium,
And gold and protactinium and indium and gallium,
And iodine and thorium and thulium and thallium.

OK. It's impossible. I suspect that he had it written out phonetically. Keep in mind he's playing the piano at the same time.

These are the only ones of which the news has come to Ha'vard,
And there may be many others, but they haven't been discavard.

And after stringing all those together to scan and rhyme, the bending of the words at the end is delightful irony.

The Illinois rainforest

From NewScientist.com:

Researchers have uncovered a 300-million-year–old-fossilised rainforest, buried deep below ground in a coal mine in Illinois, US. It is by far the largest such forest ever found and provides an unprecedented look at the ecology of one of the world's earliest tropical forests.

There are club mosses (of the class Lycopodiopsida, they survive today; but now they're tiny) that grew a meter thick and more than forty meters high.

We're really spinning the dials on the Wayback machine, here, folks. We're talking close relatives of ferns that are 130 feet tall, from about fifty million years before the age of the dinosaurs.

This is in Vermilion County, Illinois. I thought that all the coal mining in Illinois was way, way, south; but this is to the east of Champaign near the border with Indiana. 300 million years ago (we were part of Pangea at the time), presumably a super-sized earthquake led the forest to be submerged, and then be buried in mud and sediment.

The fossilised forest lay preserved on top of a layer of coal that, when removed by miners, left the ancient forest visible on the mine ceiling.

Execrable is a cool word

For another Sunday, another atheism post.

The execrable Dinesh D'Souza wrote:

Notice something interesting about the aftermath of the Virginia Tech shootings? Atheists are nowhere to be found.

He goes on with the usual shit about how atheists lack morality, empathy, and the ability to give succor.

A Virginia Tech atheist responds at Daily Kos:

We atheists do not believe in gods, or angels, or demons, or souls that endure, or a meeting place after all is said and done where more can be said and done and the point of it all revealed.

We don’t believe in the possibility of redemption after our lives, but the necessity of compassion in our lives.

We believe in people, in their joys and pains, in their good ideas and their wit and wisdom.

We believe in human rights and dignity, and we know what it is for those to be trampled on by brutes and vandals. We may believe that the universe is pitilessly indifferent but we know that friends and strangers alike most certainly are not.

We despise atrocity, not because a god tells us that it is wrong, but because if not massacre then nothing could be wrong.

[My paragraph breaks.]

Go read the whole thing. It's a short but eloquent and profound essay.




Back to bunnies, bats, blasphemy, and boys kissing shortly.

Picture

Another lion

Used with permission.
Thanks to melaniumom.

Related: Lions at Dirty John Bonny.

The kids are all right

From The Pew Research Center (the Pew polls folks):

The majority of U.S. young people (aged 18-25) appear to accept the fact of evolution (linky: Pew).

And they're not taking home the message to hate the queers, either:

Young people are twice as likely as their elders to approve of gay marriage: 52% of those age 18-29 favor it, compared with only 22% among those 65 and older.
(linky-link: Pew)

Last Wednesday, more than a half million K-12 and college students participated in the the Day of Silence, one of the largest student-led actions in the country.

And,

Despite their packed megachurches, their political clout and their increasing visibility on the national stage, evangelical Christian leaders are warning one another that their teenagers are abandoning the faith in droves.
(link: The New York Times)

In 1992 at the Republican National Convention. Pat Buchanan declared the culture war:

There is a religious war going on in our country for the soul of America. It is a cultural war ...

I think I can see who's winning.

The Who - The Kids are Alright (1979)
About three.

Related Shrinky-dink: Ed Brayton's Dispatches From the Culture Wars at ScienceBlogs.

John Bonny

Anne Bonny

I heard today from the real John Bonny, who lives in Burnley, England, and had found his way here.

Are you related to Anne Bonny the pirate or are you a long lost relative of mine?

Sadly, no. But thanks for visiting.


[Update: Name and quote used with permission.]

Bat news

Ana Popa-Lisseanu

From NPR's Morning Edition

Giant Bats Snatch Birds from Night Sky

Giant noctules, or Nyctalus lasiopterus, are among the largest bats in Europe.
Researchers in Spain have found that these bats catch and eat migrating songbirds on the wing.

"They wrap the prey between their wings and the tail membrane," [Ana] Popa-Lisseanu says, "so they make kind of a cage for the bird."

Then they eat what they can while they drop like rocks, abandoning the prey when they approach the ground.

"It makes complete sense," [Peter] Marra [of the Smithsonian] says, "because there's so much biomass that it's not surprising that there's a species taking advantage of it. And it's really neat that a bat is doing it."

Really neat.

Bats at Dirty John Bonny.

Picture

Romper

(Credit milkaholicshop.com)

Reluctantly, the editorial board here at Dirty John Bonny had to modify the original image to conform with the rule that patches are always worn on the right.

It's frustrating, really. Over ninety-percent of found images follow the rule, and then these outliers crop up.

Boys kissing

Collect them all, trade 'em with your friends!











[Arrgh! The original post was eaten by Blogger. This is a recreation built from the Google cache.]

[OK, there, there; all fixed; all better now. Ignore that gripe.]