John Auchter repeats the concept that the machines are listening to us, which I continue to insist is a myth. However, should the fellow donate $25 to the candidate, it will indeed be Katy-bar-the-door time. I’ve heard several people say they’re sorry to have donated to a candidate because of the spam that results.
I’m not entirely sure you have to actually donate, however. As a journalist, I was never a member of a political party, but after I retired, that ethical constraint was lifted and I’ve since regretting declaring a party because of the flood of junk mail it unleashed.
And I do kind of wonder how many email and texts Abdel Farrah el-Sisi has been getting since he made that donation to Trump’s campaign.
Joy of Tech, on the other hand, makes the absolutely correct connection between searching for products and courting spam.
Also suggesting a pretty good prank if you know someone prone to leaving their phone around and unlocked.
Deflocked (AMS) had a banana peel gag based on how old banana peel gags are, and the answer is that they go back to about 1870, when the fruit was first made available in the US and became extremely popular.
This Mental Floss article goes into depth on the gag itself, noting that “A fresh banana peel might seem non-threatening, but a rotting banana peel was a slime-covered booby trap” and continuing
Which, you’ll note, rather undercuts Mamet’s dreams of riches, though I suppose it was harder to sue companies back in them that days.
Pedro X. Molina (Counterpoint) cautions us against slipping on this rotting thing, but we’re not doing politics today, so please don’t look at it.
Still on the topic of potential lawsuits, Lola (AMS) presents a thought-provoker, because it would be possible to argue that you’re safer on a carnival ride than on a ride at an amusement park because it’s just been set up and the county insists on inspecting the rides.
Unless, y’know, the county doesn’t, but then they probably don’t insist on inspecting the rides at the amusement park, either.
Oh well. Whether you’re headed to the county fair or an amusement park, you’re sharing the road with self-driving cars. I wouldn’t worry too much about the roller coasters.
Getting there is half the fun.
Juxtaposition of the Day
I mentioned Jones Beach the other day, but I haven’t been there since I was little, nor have I braved the crowds of Atlantic City in half a century or so, though I did go to Old Orchard Beach a few years ago, which is long enough that you can walk away from the crowds, a factor also true of the dunes in Southwestern Michigan, where we could find a dune that’s ours (and softly she would speed the stars ’til morning.)
Of course, if you go in the off-season you avoid the crowds, and, while it may be too cold to go in the water, the sand won’t burn your feet, either.
I can segue into the Barn (Creators) because I was on a beach in California that had a sign saying babies had to be diapered to go in the water, which made me wonder how the herd of sea lions were handling their sanitary needs.
Rory might be less aghast if he’d seen Kevin Costner in Waterworld, but I don’t think many people, and even fewer sheep, did. Anyway, salts in a swimming pool would be diluted to a safe level, so no worries.
We’re still all at sea and I’m not sure what motivated Jeremy Banx to speculate about what if Noah indeed had brought dinosaurs on the Ark, but there is so much absurdity packaged in this cartoon that I find it absolutely delightful.
It starts with the age of the Earth and the Flintstone Theory, which is that dinos and humans existed simultaneously, plus the belief that Noah really did build an ark and managed to cram every animal on Earth into it.
Except the unicorns, and Charles Addams’ estate should get 10 cents every time someone rips off his gag on that topic, and 25 cents from everyone who thinks Shel Silverstein was Irish.
But my rant mode is wide and also takes in the nincompoops who can’t distinguish between folklore and history. Obviously, the Ark is folkloric, as are Adam and Eve, but I’d be a little cautious in dismissing David and Goliath. After all, most of the Iliad is folkloric, but there really was a city of Troy destroyed in warfare.
Those who haven’t read histories written in ancient times ought to sample a few. If you believe that, because Jesus wasn’t born of a virgin, he didn’t exist, the counter is that because Washington didn’t chop down that cherry tree, he didn’t exist either.
And if you believe everything in Suetonius, you might as well believe everything said on Fox and Friends.
Rant mode off, but we’ll stay in the water:
First Dog on the Moon generally veers from politics to sociology but often with a heapin’ helpin’ of ecology, and this episode makes use of a story in his paper, the Guardian, that included a link so that you, too, can swim with the sea lions.
And speaking of separating folklore from fiction, is it necessary to point out that sea lions don’t actually talk or operate computers, despite First Dog suggesting that they do? Or that this in any way undermines the other things he’s telling us?
Finally, today’s Bizarro (KFS) sets off one more rant. I got a laugh out of the cartoon, but there’s some real inconsistency behind the gag.
People complain about men being afraid to show their feelings but then mock classic country-and-western songs for being about men being completely open about their emotional issues. I don’t mean the faux-country soft rock schmaltz playing in your dentist’s office, but real old classic C&W songs like
Before the Next Teardrop Falls
Last Friday, I included a classic Ned Miller country song in which his father taught him “never be afraid to cry,” and that’s part of the genre.
Even when the singer is making intentional fun of his own pathetic situation:
Point of pedantic clarification: two of every animal on Earth.
Also seven of every “clean” animal, but that brings confusion as to whether it’s seven total or seven male/female for a total of fourteen. And even then the concept of which animals were “clean” and which weren’t didn’t come about until much later with Mosaic Law so its inclusion in the Noah’s Ark story is anachronistic…
Maybe it was six female and one (happy) male??
Small rant time (you ranted, so can I): I have VERY little patience or tolerance for Christians who get so hung up as to whether all of the stories in the Bible are things that 100% literally happened that they completely miss the point the stories were trying to make.
I mean come on, I was raised in the church and even as a kid the story of Noah’s Ark in particular was so cartoonish like there’s no way it could have happened without a ton of divine intervention (everything from building the ark to gathering the animals to caring for them for 40 days on the water to how did the carnivores not eat everything to where did all the water go to WHAT WAS THE POINT people kept right on sinning anyway) that it was hard to accept even with a tiny kid brain.
And don’t even get me started on the whole “there were dinosaurs on the ark but they all died afterwards anyway” craziness that some die-hard Fundies ascribe to. Again I say, what was the point?
As I said, yes, but I still maintain that it’s just as foolish to believe that because some of it was folklore none of it happened. Troy happened. And George Washington existed. An atheist is just a fundamentalist who faces the other direction — agnosticism is the “scientific” attitude in which you never announce certainty because you know how often it gets upended.
If you spend a few moments with Perfesser Google you can come up with a lot of flood stories that predate the Bible–not just Gilgamesh, and not just in the Middle East. Floods happen, and a really big flood that decimated the population would be a significant bit of history to be passed down. I also found a Time article that brought in Geza Roheim’s hypothesis that dreams of floods were caused by people sleeping with full bladders. And I haven’t strayed from comic strips–I remember a Calvin and Hobbes strip that depicted exactly that.
Finally, that’s a wonderful definition of an atheist.
You’ve gotta watch those algorithms, like in the Joy of Tech. The other day a fairly ridiculous and readily disprovable meme came up in my Facebook feed. So I dropped in a comment with a fact check disproving it. Set aside the exhausting feeling of a buncha conservatives dismissing facts as made up, my feed was instantly converted to tons of awful conservative BS claims. One comment can hijack your feed for a while.
I have a “fundamental” problem with your complimentary view of agnostics. Regarding major questions, agnosticism is wimpy (might or might not, ho hum) and not helpful.
Atheism, in contrast, demands extraordinary proof for extraordinary claims and, absent such proofs, denies the existence of deities.
Absence of evidence is not proof of nonexistence. It’s not even proof that the evidence doesn’t exist. Did the moons of Mars pop into being on August 12, 1877 when Asaph Hall discovered them? Or were they there before that?
Actually, scientists using the matrilineal / mitichondreal lines of DNA have kind of traced things back to an Eve – in Africa.
And by tracing changes in the Y chromosome, they traced male descent back to an ‘Adam’. Also in Africa, but a somewhere between 10 and 100 thousand so years younger than Eve’.
I guess “Adam” liked older women.