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Markers

Today I'm going to get a tattoo, and then go see Modest Mouse. In between, I'll probably stop at the little grocery store with the huge beer selection and pick up a few liters of Belgian ale.

Could I be any more of a hipster ?

Update:
I got an archeopteryx on my outer calf. Though the guy who did it said a calf is typically not a very painful place to get one, this was ten times more painful than either of the two I have on my shoulders (the little one on my ankle doesn't count - I was drunk, and it only took two minutes). I was literally writhing at times. OMFG. It was outrageously painful: literally blindingly painful at times. Hold your breath and clench your whole body painful. I was trying to think of painful dentist visits to distract myself. But I don't remember even flinching at any of the others. Usually with tattoos you go through waves of pain and numbness as your endorphins ebb and flow - it hurts a bit and then you get a bit of a headrush and the pain fades for a while. Not this time. I guess I have extremely sensitive calves.

Mrs. C is going to get a huge back piece ~~done~~ started tomorrow. I hope her back is tougher than my calf!

I haven't had a really good look at it yet, so I don't know if it was worth the pain. I hope so.

HD Tetris

Inane New World

Via ThinkProgress, conservative radio talk show host Glenn Beck:

So here you have Barack Obama going in and spending the money on embryonic stem cell research, and then some, fundamentally changing – remember, those great progressive doctors are the ones who brought us Eugenics. It was the progressive movement and it science. Let’s put science truly in her place. If evolution is right, why don’t we just help out evolution? That was the idea. And sane people agreed with it!

And it was from America. Progressive movement in America. Eugenics. In case you don’t know what Eugenics led us to: the Final Solution. A master race! A perfect person. …. The stuff that we are facing is absolutely frightening. So I guess I have to put my name on yes, I hope Barack Obama fails. But I just want his policies to fail; I want America to wake up.

So, as you can tell by the little thing on the left side of this page, I'm reading Brave New World right now. Pretty good, though half of the joy comes from seeing what 1932 thought the future would look like: surprisingly, it looks like 1932 with helicopters and eugenics. Some other things this book has taught me:

The Feelies obviously got their name from this book
Bauhaus' song Silent Hedges contains several lines taken directly from this book. The song itself is nearly opaque, but knowing that some of the lines are from this book, I can at least pretend I know what he's singing about... after 20 years of not even being able to pretend.
Glenn Beck is an idiot.

Losing Our Religion

msnbc.com:

A wide-ranging study on American religious life found that the Roman Catholic population has been shifting out of the Northeast to the Southwest, the percentage of Christians in the nation has declined and more people say they have no religion at all.

Fifteen percent of respondents said they had no religion, an increase from 14.2 percent in 2001 and 8.2 percent in 1990, according to the American Religious Identification Survey.

Our plan is working! Bwahahaha!

Gallup asks Americans: Would you vote for an atheist ?

Progress!

However...

A March, 2007 survey done by Newsweek shows that 62% of people would refuse to vote for any candidate admitting to being an atheist. Republicans were, predictably, the most bigoted at 78%, followed by Democrats at 60% and independents at 45%.

Or maybe not.

(image from friendlyatheist.com, who links to a USAToday article on the topic of America's declining religiosity - interactive charts and graphs!)

Just for recordkeeping

I wrote this little poem a couple of months ago in a thread about the poem read at Obama's inauguration. I'm putting it here so I can find it if I ever want to read it again.

Feel free to ignore this post.
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