The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster
Poised to give "creationism" and "Intelligent Design" a run for their fundamentalist money, Pastafarianism — the argument that the universe and its contents were created by a Flying Spaghetti Monster who performs all sorts of miracles with His Noodly Appendage — is a fast-growing faith-based explanation for everything, including the inverse correlation between global warming and the pirate population. There's talk of suing for inclusion in any science curriculum that teaches other religious hokum masquerading as science.
Small Clue County
About all we can tell you is that this is a cartoon. Sort of. very nicely done. Describing an imaginary European metropolis, a centuries-old crime, the footprint of a Giant, frog-kissing, and such. When you figure it out, let us know.
A Salute to Jean Shepherd
In the mid- to late 1950s, a teenager in New York could fall asleep with the radio on, listening to Jocko spinning rock and roll, Symphony Sid playing jazz, or Jean Shepherd, the writer and ranconteur whom Marshall McLuhan once called "the first radio novelist," improvising utterly American fables about such things as a young boy "running wild through the streets of Secaucus." Jim Clavin's tribute site brings it all back, with audio clips galore and other memorabilia. We remember you, Shep. Excelsior!
Gary Drevitch/Freelance Dad
Ye Executive Director gave his biological clock away to the school rummage sale decades ago. But — perhaps because he has lived as a freelance all his life -— he enjoys this blog by a wryly sensible father of two, who annotates intriguingly the perils and pleasures of parenthood in the demented 21st-century United States.
Alan Sokal/Social Text
In its Spring/summer 1996 issue, the journal Social Text, highly regarded in postmodern circles, published an article by New York University physicist Alan D. Sokal titled "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity." A few months later, in the journal Lingua Franca, Sokal revealed that he'd created his essay, whose scientific component was sheer gibberish, as a parody of pomo discourse. The resulting scandal rocked the academic left, and reverberates to this day, not just in the States but internationally. Sokal went on to expand on this in a devastating critique of pomo pretension, Fashionable Nonsense (1998), co-authored with fellow physicist Jean Bricmont, which we commend to your attention. But you can start your engagement with this venture into the "sociology of knowledge" with the link above, where you'll find the original essays and much subsequent commentary.
The Postmodernism Generator
Want to try this at home? Use The Postmodernism Generator. It will give you a randomly generated essay in typical, plausible postmodern style, complete with footnotes. Since, according to postmodern theory, authorship and originality are dead white European male (DWEM) concepts, just put your name on the results and submit it somewhere. Call us old-fashioned (or maybe neo-primitive), but by our lights anyone who publishes this stuff automatically loses all rights to complain.
The Ig Nobel Prize
The march of progress includes jaunts down some odd byways: the invention of the combover, the odor of stressed frogs, the kncidence of nosepcking among teenagers, fake-testicle implanst for neutered dogs. These worthy if eccentric investigations earn recognition from the Ig Nobel Prize Committee, brought to you by the Annals of Improbable Research (AIR).
Wikipedia
The ongoing collective creation of a fluid-state encyclopedia surely constitutes a cultural phenomenon. Web-specific, started in 2001, Wikipedia describes itself as "a free-content encyclopedia that anyone can edit." (Yes, that means you.) In the English version, they presently have 478242 articles going.
Gulag: A History
Lest we forget the monstrousness to which leftist ideology can lead, some attention to the Soviet "gulag" system -- in which far greater numbers died than in the Nazi concentration camps -- will prove salutory. Start with Ann Applebaum's Gulag: A History; then spend time with Wikipedia's extensive entry on the subject. Remember: No one has ever been held accountable for these crimes against humanity.
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
The right does its thinking and planning in beer halls; the left, traditionally, in cafés. Does this tell us something? Speaking of beer halls: Either you believe that the Nazis were really nice folks and all that incredible Holocaust stuff was just some melodramatic guff a bunch of sly Jews cooked up to gain people's sympathy -- or you don't. For the record, the Café's position on this is that the Holocaust did indeed take place, that it stands as one of the defining events of the twentieth century, and that those who seek not only to deny it but to make of it a Jewish plot -- like the repellent David Irving -- are among the very sickest of the world's dangerously insane. We recommend a visit to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum as an antidote to that virulent poison.
The Urban Legends Reference Pages
Want to know what other nonsense your fellow citizens are all too ready to believe? Curious about the latest idiocy circulating on the cultural rumor mill? Want to compare those to historic examples thereof (like the blind albino alligators in the New York City sewer system)? Visit The Urban Legends Reference Pages and/or The AFU & Urban Legends Archive for the unreal skinny. Many people who buy this guff are eligible to vote. Be very afraid.
NNDB
They say: "NNDB is an intelligence aggregator that tracks the activities of people we have determined to be noteworthy, both living and dead. [I]t mostly exists to document the connections between people, many of which are not always obvious. A person's otherwise inexplicable behavior is often understood by examining the crowd that person has been hanging out with." They presently have 11,000 people under scrutiny, from Richard Kostelanetz and Ornette Coleman, both very much alive, to the late Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. So we're not exactly sure what they mean by "tracking." Nor do we find any way of determining thereby anyone's "in crowd." Still, they may make this work, so keep an eye on it.
a softer world
Joey Comeau and Emily Horne's a softer world promises "a new comic every Friday," and they deliver. The "comics" are terse, 3-image triptychs (think highly-condensed fotonovela), made with a square-format camera, then captioned. Sample: "everyone else laughs when my mother says the fur in her coat is from small dogs, but I've seen her long thin knives" Look also at the "over-qualified" section, a set of untypical cover letters to accompany job applications. These folks seem to come from Nova Scotia, which probably explains something (or not).
