Shit that Pissed me off This Week – 1/4
Woman Accused of Scamming People in the Wake of the Newton Massacre
There’s no better way to show compassion for your fellow human beings than by trying to make money off of their misfortune. In this case, a woman allegedly convinced people to donate money for the funeral of one of the Newton victims but kept the money for herself.
She, of course, denies that she had anything to do with the scam – even though it was run from her own personal gmail account.
Now, let’s be fair. Her account might have been hacked.
Maybe she got this message on her computer!
That still means some asshole was using her account to profit off of the murder of a bunch of kids. Who did it isn’t really the point, is it? Someone decided that they needed money and figured that they’d make it the easy way.
Let’s hope they never find themselves in need of real charity.
How Can I sing about Christmas?
When The Dregs perform our Holiday shows, we sing a lot of inappropriate music. Songs like “Do you Have what I Have” and “I Want a Hysterectomy for Christmas” are Dregs fan favorites. So popular, in fact, that we get requests for them all year round.
But we also sing some traditional stuff every year and this year especially, I had more than one person ask me how I dealt with singing religious lyrics. It’s a fair question that comes from the knowledge that I’m not a Christian and I’m pretty darn vocal about it.
The question primarily comes from other atheists. I get it. As a non-Christian, we all get bombarded with religious music at this time of year. For every rendition of “Let is Snow,” we have to listen to eight versions of “Oh Holy Night.” We get tired of constantly being told to fall on our knees because we just don’t want to do it.
I may be an atheist but I still really love Christmas. I don’t just like it. I love it. I love the decorations (christmas lights are pretty). I love the way everyone is a little bit more cheerful this time of year. When I’m talking to people on the phone at work, they are a little more patient with issues. They are a little more pleasant and understanding.
I don’t know if it is because they are anticipating they will find a set of Indiana Jones blu-rays in their stocking or because they are super excited their savior was born in a manger over 2000 years ago. I expect the former is more common than the latter but I don’t really care.
Happy New Year from Geeks Without God!
This week’s episode is our six month anniversary! I was pleased to discover that New Year’s day fell on a Tuesday so we could do our yearly recap show on the day itself. Sure, New Year’s Day is an arbitrary assignment but we all made one more trip around the sun so today is as good a day to celebrate as any!
The show features just the three hosts and we talk about cool stuff that happened in 2012, what we are looking forward to in 2013 and the “proper” way to refer to 2013.
I’m also going to remind everyone that you can still donate to Camp Quest today! We have made our goal but it would be super cool if we could exceed it – even by $10. So give something! Just because you can!
And have a Happy New Year!
Shit that Pissed me Off this Week – 12/28
The Pope Communicates his Growing Irrelevance to the World
After the Catholic church’s spectacular failure to stem the tide of tolerance, The Pope has decided to make opposition to gay marriage the major thrust of Catholic activism in the coming year. In fact, he said that it is (I shit you now) a “threat to world peace.”
WHAT?????
I really want to understand what kind of thinking would suggest that allowing two people who love each other the right to marry would ever threaten world peace. I would think that stable, loving homes would be a benefit to world peace. I don’t have any data to prove this but goodness knows that the pope has no data to prove his point either.
He doesn’t need data, though. Because he’s infallible.
Infallibly wrong.
He’s also a very affordable line of cosmetics!
And, as usual, he is wasting the vast resources of his church on Gay Marriage. At what point is he going to start focusing on issues that are actually important to his church?
Like the fact so many people think the guy leading his church is a dick?
Merry Christmas from Geeks Without God
Yeah, sure. I said it. Merry Christmas.
It’s Tuesday morning and it’s Christmas and just in case you are done with your family Christmas festivities, Geeks Without God is there with you. We talked about Christmas for this weeks’ show and honestly, we all like Christmas.
We realize that makes us poor foot soldiers in the war on Christmas but so be it. We will be filled with the spirit of secular Christmas today and you can too by listening to our podcast. It’s even extra long because we spent a lot of time talking about Christmas cookies.
However you celebrate the holidays (and whatever holiday you celebrate), enjoy this week’s episode!
Shit that Pissed me off This Week – 12/21
In the wake of a tragedy like the school shooting in Connecticut last week, Mike Huckabee decided the best way to deal with it was to be an insensitive prick. Rather that recognizing that what happened was a random act of violence by a clearly deranged individual, Huckabee decided that all of this could have been avoided if people could only pray in schools.
I get that Huckabee is a religious man but in this particular case, he’s trying to come up with a reason that has absolutely no relationship to the tragedy at hand.
The secondary implication, mind you, is that if we were praying in schools, god wouldn’t let this shit happen. God just sits back and watches because we won’t let Christians pray on school property. As soon as prayer can happen on school grounds, god will strike down the gunmen before they can kill a bunch of innocent children.
Oh but wait! Prayer is allowed on school grounds! It is public prayer that isn’t permitted! So not only is Huckabee a dick, he’s lying.
Huckabee isn’t alone in this either. Bryan Fischer says God didn’t protect those kids because “god won’t go where he’s not wanted.” Eric Hovind also tweeted that the entire affair was probably because the shooter grew up in a school without god.
Dear God: I thought you were omnipotent. Turns out you are just a dick.
I don’t want to sugar coat this or these fucks might get the wrong idea. What they are saying is tone-deaf insensitive grandstanding and if we lived in a just universe (we don’t), they would never be allowed to speak into a microphone again.
Alphabetical Movie – Kiss Kiss Bang Bang
By strange coincidence, I am writing about this movie just as I’ve been thinking about movies I call “gift movies”. By that I mean movies that I like to “give” to people.
If you are a movie fan to any degree, you have movies that fall into that category. You love it too much to keep it to yourself. The Dish has always been a film that falls into that category for me. I’m always eager to give that movie to another person.
I don’t mean “give” in the physical sense. Rather I mean giving the opportunity to share the experience of watching that film with as many people as possible.
Time for a Tuesday Morning Cuppa Geeks Without God
We recorded this week’s episode almost two months ago and I’ve felt awful that it hasn’t gone up until now. I mean, we always knew it wasn’t going up until mid December but Brianne was a lot of fun and when you know you have a fun episode waiting out there, you want to post it now!
Brianne Bilyeu writes the Bidork blog on Freethought Blogs, which I enjoy a great deal. She does a lot of photoblogging, which is something that I wish I had more time to do. We talked about photoblogging a big on the podcast.
In fact, we talked about all sorts of stuff. The conversation is sort of all over the place. And a lot of fun. So have a listen if that’s your thing!
Reality Hurts
In the wake of yet another senseless slaughter, I’ve seen many of my friends argue that something should be done and they offer up their opinions as to what the solution should be. They argue for more guns or fewer guns. They argue for more god. They argue for more mental health care. They argue against “politicizing” the event by arguing for or against guns, god or mental health care.
What everyone is trying to do is come to grips with something that makes no sense. Who would kill twenty children deliberately? How could anyone do that? We don’t understand and we want to find something that will create a just universe where these things will never happen again.
Do I support reasonable restrictions on gun ownership? Yes I do. I want to be clear that I don’t believe that people should not be permitted to own guns. I do believe that some restrictions on dangerous weapons may help reduce the amount of damage a crazy person with a gun can do.
Butt-Numb-a-Thon 14
Having prefaced my rundown of BNAT 14 by talking about Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation and an important breakfast experience, it is time, finally, to write about the festival itself.
I’ve read a few comments by folks who didn’t attend complaining about the lineup. I guess that is subjective. For me, I described it as a prozac year. There was not a single film that blew me away but I enjoyed everything. The highs weren’t quite as high but the lows weren’t all that low.
Typically BNAT will feature a fairly even mix of new and classic films. This year featured only four premieres, which is quite low. I love classic film, though, and watching great old movies on the big screen is nothing to complain about. It is something to celebrate. We are all there because we are film fans and I would never complain about watching films from any era. If you are the sort of person who would complain about that – Butt-Numb-a-Thon isn’t for you.
We had a lot of previews and trailers and I’m not going to write about them at all. I loved seeing all of them but I’ve seen a lot of kick-ass trailers that didn’t translate into kick-ass films so I’m not going to write about them. I’ll stick to the full length films that we saw. Eleven in all. Well….more like ten and 97/100ths.
Grail Diary 