Happy Blasphemy Day!

The Center for Inquiry is sponsoring a Blasphemy Contest to honor Blasphemy Day. The kicker is a 20 word limit on each entry. They are asking for limericks or haikus, but I had another idea. But 20 words was very restricting.

My entries were as follows:

Psalm 14 - The fool hath said in his heart, there’s no Easter Bunny.
They’re corrupt, they’ve done abominable works

Psalm 18 - I will love thee, O Easter bunny, my strength. The Easter Bunny
is my rock, my fortress

(Yes, its borderline plagarism of the word of god. But its also satire, so hopefully I don't get disqualified.)

The 20 word limit excluded my personal favorite:

Psalm 25 - Unto thee, O Easter Bunny, do I lift up my soul. O my Easter Bunny, I
trust in thee

22 words, Easter Bunny dammit!

This is a lot of fun, I may have to continue to add to the word of Easter Bunny. "In the beginning the Easter Bunny created both the heavens and the earth..."

Press release by Fuego

We are just starting to market the book, the press release can be found here.

• HTML Version: http://www.prlog.org/10357315-fuego-publications-launches-its-burnworthy-series.html
• PDF Version: http://www.prlog.org/10357315-fuego-publications-launches-its-burnworthy-series.pdf

As with everything, any and all feedback is welcome.

Are you FAKKING kidding me?

I sent my new Padre account rep the following email on Saturday:

“Dear Mr. Wuller,

I received my season ticket renewal package today and I could not be more disappointed. For the last few weeks, all Padre fans have heard was how 2010 prices would be going down and season ticket holders would receive more value for their money. The cover letter in the season ticket package reinforces these messages, and even states "We have reduced 86% of season ticket prices and kept the remainder flat (with 2009 prices). We know the economy remains challenging, and we're doing our part to keep PETCO Park affordable."

Imagine my dismay at seeing that our ticket prices were not reduced, were not even flat at 2009 levels, but actually INCREASED by 11%! I'm insulted and angry. Clearly the value spin is nothing more than that, marketing spin!

I can only hope there is a mistake in the invoice I received. If not, I doubt I will be renewing my seats for 2010. Please contact me as soon as you can to clarify my invoice, you have my email address and my phone number is listed below.

Regards,Mike”

I received this response today:

“Good Morning Mr. Dark,

Thank you for your email regarding your 2010 renewal package.

I apologize if the message sent out by the Padres is unclear. When comparing
prices for our 20 Game Season Ticket Holders we look at the price compared to
NON-Season Holders.

In the Left Field Lower Box section the price per ticket will be $27 but for you it will be $20/ticket. We have also lowered the price for Season Ticket Parking from $18 to $10, and your tickets for Opening Day will be lowered to $20 (down $8 from last year).

Please let me know if you have any other questions at all. I am always happy to
help.

Jeff Wuller

Account Specialist”

That explains it…NOT! It makes it worse! While the seats in lower left are going down for the general public from $28 to $27, the 20 game season ticket holder price is not going down a $1 as well, not staying flat, but going up $2! And this is after stating 86% are going down and the rest are flat. Except for you Mike.

What’s the message here? Is it:

• Since I haven’t quit on the team already, I probably never will so go ahead and gouge me next year.
• My loyalty in being one of the handfull of remaining season ticket holders is worth less than nothing.
• An agent is running the show and using the media for spin is covered in Agent 101.
• 20 season ticket holders are not real season ticket holders.
• all of the above.

I could not be more disappointed. Before Saturday, I never even considered dropping my season tickets, never wavered on my support for my team. But this is wrong.

On the bright side, I really can't afford them anyways.

Pharyngulization

I love how Pharyngula fans attack pointless online polls and flip the results around. In the latest edition, CNN had a poll asking if you believed in god, and when PZ posted it, 31% said "No". In reviewing the comments, "No" climbed as high as 68%! That's Pharyngulization! Too funny.

Imagine wielding the kind of power PZ has in his hands! I would not be able to contain myself and would attack all sorts of stupid polls. Imagine a SF Gate poll asking if the Giants should trade Cain or Linecum for pitching with a 95% "Yes" vote due to all of the Padre fans attacking the poll. Get them outa here! Or a LA Times poll asking if the Dodgers should trade more prospects for proven major league veterans with a 95% "Yes" vote! Keep up the good work Ned. Not that I would expect these polls to ever affect the team's policy decisions, but you never know!

Oh so close last night

Chase Headley had a monster game with a single, three doubles and a homer. A triple short of a cycle, so close. Heath even blew the save to get Chase another AB in the 11th. When Chase roped it down the line in that AB, I was hoping for a funny carom or the RF crashing into the wall, but alas, just his third double of the evening. Total bases 10 and 11. Nice. But ooohhh so close.

Sure a cycle is truly an irrelevant feat, a statistical oddity at best, completely meaningless at worst. But its the little things like this that make baseball so much fun! Just one cycle is all Padre fans want. Well that and one measly no-no. Is that too much to ask?

The Channel 4 broadcast just mentioned a Padres player has had three legs of a cycle 320 times. 320! Who knew? That averages 8 times per the 40 seasons, which is pretty close to the nine times this year it has happened. 9 times? I certainly don't remember that.

I don't think you should count the times when a guy gets his third hit with his last AB. Sure he has three legs of the cycle, but he never had a chance at a cycle. How many times did a Padre player come to the plate with a chance at a cycle? That has to be a much, much lower number.

Stories like this scare me

I found this link at The Reason Project: The Nightmare of Christianity

I am very afraid this will become an all too familiar story: person brought up in a ultra rigid religious way, and hence completely without touch to the rest of the world, finds out about the rest of the world and cannot reconcile the two, leading to personal confusion, distrust, hatred and violence. This may be the new frontier of the spiritual war. That part is not too surprising honestly.

But there was one line in the article that stood out :

"Murray had been indoctrinated so thoroughly into charismatic Pentecostal
culture, however, that even while he railed against his religious upbringing, he
could not abandon his ingrained attraction to religiosity."

An attraction to religiousity. Seems to hit home pretty hard. Isn't the creation of alternative (read fake) churches a continued attraction to religiousity? Even irrelevance itself, is that nothing more than continued religiousity?

As I read the New Athiest books, one thing that always struck me as over the top was the railing against teaching religion to kids. Indoctrination. Please. I let my kids believe in Santa, in the Easter Bunny, and in God and heaven. They are the comforts of childhood, harmless. I rationalized that I was indoctrinated, and I felt it had no effect on me as it means next to nothing to me now. But do I have a continued attraction to religiousity? Heck, the novel is about nothing but the attaction to religiousity!

What does it mean? I'm not sure, but it sure keeps me thinking! And that is the most important part of all.

Let's hear it for...

your 4th place Padres! Out of the cellar! The sun's a little brighter up here in 4th, birds chiping, the sounds of children's laughter, even the air smells cleaner. Its nice to be out of the cellar.

And since the disaster of the Cardinals series, the Pads have won 5 series in a row, 4 of which were on the road! If you take out both home and away sets against the Cards, the last team to beat the Pads in a series was Atlanta on August 3-5. That's 8 series wins and just two series losses since August 6. (I am damn sick of writing the Cardinals in the post, are you sick of hearing about it? Something must be done next year! Beating the Cards has to be a priority.) Its definitely progress.

And has the Wade LeBlanc we heard about for three years finally arrived? Lets hope so.

And I'm also sick of starting sentences with and.

Irrelevance link of the day

I was reading the always fun TMQ, and he included a link with the following write up:

The map contains about 100,000 dots. The dots are not stars; each dot represents
a galaxy, and galaxies are thought to average about 100 billion stars each. Thus
the area depicted contains holds roughly 10 to the 15th power stars, a number
far too huge to bother attempting to fathom. And the map merely shows galaxies
nearby. Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is at the center of the map. On the cosmic
scale, a place with 100 billion stars is a dot.

In that context, view the photo, and revel in irrelevance!