Crude Awakening by Jane Fulton Alt

Awful yet beautiful.

From the artist (link):

Living on the shores of Lake Michigan, I am acutely aware of the disastrous toll the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has taken on all forms of life, especially as our beaches opened to the 2010 swimming season. This environmental, social and economic catastrophe highlights a much larger problem that has inflicted untold suffering as we exploit the earth’s resources worldwide.

We are all responsible for leading lives that create demand for unsustainable energy.
We are also all responsible for the solution and we must work together to protect the balance of life.

Via Clusterflock

Selfish punk

Via I have seen the whole of the Internet

What is the etymology of the word “soccer”?

It’s not an Americanism:

“Soccer,” by the way, is not some Yankee neologism but a word of impeccably British origin. It owes its coinage to a domestic rival, rugby, whose proponents were fighting a losing battle over the football brand around the time that we were preoccupied with a more sanguinary civil war. Rugby’s nickname was (and is) rugger, and its players are called ruggers-a bit of upper-class twittery, as in “champers,” for champagne, or “preggers,” for enceinte. “Soccer” is rugger’s equivalent in Oxbridge-speak. The “soc” part is short for “assoc,” which is short for “association,” as in “association football,” the rules of which were codified in 1863 by the all-powerful Football Association, or FA-the FA being to the U.K. what the NFL, the NBA, and MLB are to the U.S.

Reblogged from Kottke

Excited and nervous

I leave on Thursday for my whirlwind trip to Asia. I’m excited and nervous.

To get ready, Tina and I have been getting things done that we should have done long ago. You can start calling her Secretary Tina Serafini, as she is officially the r25 productions, inc. secretary.

We also finally got a joint banking and savings account. It’s only been two years since our wedding.

I have been updating the arsenal of equipment I’m taking with me. I now have a 24-105 mm lens, a couple new flash accessories, more batteries, memory cards, and luggage to carry it in.

I’ve been booking jobs right up until I leave. Tomorrow I’m shooting a few stills at The Merchandise Mart. Wednesday I’m shooting a short video segment with Lori Stafford of Fiserv. And I have another editing project to complete and a brochure to layout before I go.

While I’m on the road, I’ll be taking work along, but it’s not going to be easy. I know I’ll have Internet access at certain places, but I have no idea how much access I’ll have the entire time. My work typically depends on access to the Internet.

Plus, I’m not going to want to work on those projects while I’m gone. I’m going to want to work on traveling, shooting and soaking up the experience abroad.

Tina and I are seriously considering adopting a dog. We’re meeting with one tonight. I think I’ll elect our dog our treasurer, just to round out the company.

Our efforts to conceive have been frustrating. Thinking we would have become pregnant by now, we put off adopting a dog thinking that adjusting to a dog and a baby would have been a lot for us to handle.

Now, we’re like, “Fuck it. Let’s get a dog.”

I’ll let you know if the next Wittifini will be a K-9 later tonight.

Favorite blog quote of the weekend

Masturbation by Klimt, drawing 1913

Here’s reality. A penis fits nicely in the hand, and a hand is usually better at stimulating the clitoris than a penis in the vagina, and our anatomy is such that our arms are of the right length to comfortably reach our genitals. Therefore, masturbation is a moral sexual act. We can extend this to point out that a man’s hand can stimulate a clitoris and a woman’s hand can stimulate a penis, and therefore, mutual masturbation, as is being practiced by tens of thousands of teenagers on this Friday night, is also a rightful act. There is no practical difference in anatomy or physiology between mutual masturbation between a heterosexual couple and a homosexual couple, so these acts are also entirely natural.

~ PZ Myers, Honesty about sex is going to disqualify a lot of professors of Catholic dogma (<– read the whole post. It’s GREAT!)

Clicking on the image above will take you to the wiki on masturbation.

Atheism: Brutal Truth vs. Getting Along (via Biodork)

This is my first time using the WordPress “reblog” function. It seems that any blog on WordPress can be reblogged with a touch of a button.

I was particularly touched by Biodork’s take on the spectral differences within the atheist camp. Surely two categories may not be enough. She breaks it down into the friendlies versus the “dicks.”

On one hand, I’m often a “dick” (PZ said it, not her) and other times I want to take the friendlier, Hemant Mehta approach.

The friendlier version that I take derives from the sheer fact that my family are all believers, and they have even kvetched about my bouts into supercilious diatribes against belief.

I personally don’t want to constantly come off as we perceive “believers”, in that they can be “dicks” to us. They don’t understand that their “love” is often taken as unrealistic superstition and hateful. But sometimes fire must be fought with fire.

That’s where the unfriendly version comes from — roughly speaking. It’s that I spent so much time learning about religion, which is something that I have come to disagree with. There’s often anger involved with that, and it comes off as such.

I like that Biodork agrees that there isn’t a “right” way, and perhaps there’s not a “right” way to be an atheist. Sometimes you’re a dick and sometimes your as sweet as high fructose corn syrup.

Check out her blog!

One of the things that is hard for me to get my head around as a burgeoning skeptic is the the internally divisive nature of atheism.  Some atheists are hardliners in their rejection of religion and theism, and others are personally atheistic while tolerating religious belief and practice in others.  At first it appeared to me to be an atheist vs. humanist philosophy: both rely on secular reasoning and believe that religion is a divisive force, b … Read More

via Biodork

Pack Leader … more than meets the eye!

Via The Daily Wh.at