You have to admit it

Two grown men calling out God's name while covered in baby oil and glitter is pretty gay.





Liberace didn't glitter this much. Inexplicably, Joshua Mills looks even MORE flaming without the glitter.

It's like Rosie O'Donnell lost some weight and ran face first into an ugly stick.

Just like the "Prophet or madman" apologetic for the divinity of Christ, there's only two explanations for Joshua Mills. Either he's a con artist pretending to sweat glitter and baby oil, or God approves of gays, made one a prophet and is fairly fabulous himself.

I'm not terribly comfortable with the second option, only because it would mean God has a very strong resemblance to the annoying gay male sidekick from "Will & Grace." I have nothing against gays, but I think I'd prefer Joshua be a con artist.

Glittering Flaming Con Man for Christ!

Joshua Mills claims he sweats supernatural oil and gold dust:
https://web.archive.org/web/20111012050409/http://unreasonablefaith.com/2011/07/21/glittering-miracle/

His web site is a riot:

Joshua Mills "about" page

During his services signs and wonders are commonplace with manifestations of supernatural oil and gold dust, creative healings, supernatural weight-loss, financial miracles, Angelic visitation and heavenly encounters.

Check out Joshua's head shot on the link above. The only way he could be more flaming would be to have a "Friend of Dorothy" pin on an ascot and a cardboard cutout of Margaret Cho in the background.

And he loves male angels.
http://churchwarnings.blogspot.com/2008/07/joshua-mills-angels-dripping-oil-manna.html

Joshua Mills also sings!
http://www.myspace.com/joshuamillsmusic

Oh, and he talks about miraculous teeth whitening. That's right, Jesus will give you white teeth: Xpmedia: Teeth whitening Joshua Mills

http://slaughteringthesheep.wordpress.com/2010/03/25/joshua-mills-teeth-whitening-miracle/

Apparently Mr. Mills decided the feather from "Forest Gump" was a message from God:
http://www.therisinglight.com/tag/joshua-mills/

Do people actually take loons like this seriously? Please tell me the guy from Borat or a similar comedy performance artist is behind this. The idea that people are actually dumb enough to fall for such a shoddy, obvious act is too depressing to contemplate.

Is Stacey Campfield Gay?

All joking about Stacey Campfield's flaming appearance aside, there is some speculation about the sex life of the driving force behind Tennessee's "don't say 'Gay'" bill.

First, there's Stacey Campfield apparent terror of homosexuals. There's no rational basis for banning Tennessee teachers from mentioning homosexuality aside from blatant fear mongering. Most of the people I've met who oppose discussion of homosexuality seem to think merely talking about it will trigger a rush of man-on-man orgies in the classroom. This attitude is perplexing to me. If someone I do not want to have sex with propositions me with a sex act I find repugnant, I'm not going to dive in and engage in it no matter what sweet nothings the person mutters. The idea of "enticing" an allegedly straight person into a homosexual act is absurd. No one who is completely straight is going to have sex with someone of their own gender. The only way a man can seduce another man with sweet nothings or lewd suggestions is if the "straight" man is at least a little gay.

Being a gay man who is attacking the rights of homosexuals would be incredibly hypocritical, but Stacey Campfield is no stranger to hypocrisy or at least profound contradictions.

The article What the Heck is Wrong With Stacey Campfield? points out:

it is hard to escape the contradictions underlying his geniality. He is a family-values conservative who has never married, a fathers’ rights advocate with no children, a professed preservationist who has been cited by the city for property neglect and sued by his tenants (though he is quick to point out that he has also won a suit of his own against a tenant), an advocate for education who litters his blog with spelling and grammatical errors, and a legislator who rarely manages to get his own legislation out of committee. He proposes bills more likely to generate headlines than laws.

So if he's gay, how did he become a Republican? In his own words:

I was very much just more of a fiscal conservative and really the social issues weren’t as key to me as the fiscal side was. But after I got up there, the more I studied and the more I looked at stuff, the more I realized that social issues have huge impacts on the fiscal issues. You can go down through it, you can say, unwed parenthood or something like that, that’s somebody else’s problem. Well, it is until they need social services or they need something else.

That sounds a bit like how the average Log Cabin Republican gravitated towards the GOP. The problem is the Tea Party era GOP makes it hard to be a fiscal conservative and a social progressive / moderate. That puts you in something of an outsider position. Campfield appears to have that very kind of an outsider position in the GOP. He was cut from the Republican governor's news mailing list.

We have a man pursuing a homophobic agenda, in a political party known for the wide stance problem of closeted homosexuals, who isn't married and has no children. He appears to be on the track to marginalization within the GOP despite the success of his "Don't say Gay" bill".

Oh, and Campfield appears to assume most women are sluts.

Check out the tinycatpants article linked above. It sounds like Campfield appears to think women are trolling the Earth, seeking men to shag briefly in order to bind them into paying for a child that may or may not be his. It's a bit paranoid but professing such a fear would allow a closeted homosexual to offer a token explanation for why he doesn't have a girlfriend. Animosity towards women doesn't mean you're gay*, but the Republicans are the ones who often claim that Lesbians are "Man Haters." It's another red flag.

None of this of course constitutes proof that Stacey Campfield is gay. It's all speculative to circumstantial at best. There are a lot of red flags but as the jury in the Casey Anthony murder trial could attest, numerous red flags don't necessarily constitute solid evidence.

Is Stacey Campfield gay? No one knows, but I doubt anyone would be surprised if he were caught demonstrating a wide stance or exploring Santorum in a private bath house.

* OK, using Rush Limbaugh, the guy who was caught smuggling illegal Viagra on an "All Boy's Fishing Trip", may not have been the best example to use when claiming animosity towards women isn't necessarily an indicator of homosexuality.

Tennessee

Where they think banning the word "Gay" will make Stacey Campfield less flaming.

Where, exactly are his eyes directed while he's holding up that sticker?

Yes, he's still a creep

The Billboard Douche has been ordered to take down his billboard.

Normally a BarMitzvah has kosher food

A Jewish friend has commented on the fact that Max Ultimate Food has a very, er, flexible definition of what constitutes appropriate food for Bar & Bat Mitzvahs. Their highly inappropriate sample menu includes things like burgers with cheese, lobster and crab. The pigs in a blanket are iffy, as it's conceivable they're made with all beef franks and no cheese, but given the colossal lack of clue in the rest of the menu I'd be inclined to doubt it.

My commented screen capture is below. Please forgive any rough edges, as I had to stitch it together from multiple screen shots. I do not have a graphic designer's screen.

UPDATE:
A friend pointed out that I missed the prosciutto in the "First Course" when marking up the image.

Killed Someone? Let God Cover For You! | The American Jesus

Killed Someone? Let God Cover For You! | The American Jesus

This is GREAT NEWS for prosecutors who are finding their death row cases overturned by DNA evidence. If they can prove the inmate probably "Found Jesus" after committing the crime then they can argue that a DNA mismatch is to be EXPECTED and proves NOTHING about the innocence of the people on death row. A DNA match on the other hand, proves the prisoner never REALLY converted and thus deserves to be executed even sooner.

You heard it here, unbelievers. Converting can CHANGE YOUR DNA! We’ll all go out and knock over some convenience stores, leave lots of hair and skin samples behind, then have a “genuine born-again experience” and change our DNA. It’s the perfect crime!

I will have to brew a batch of this

FARK.com: (6285506) Gueuze: complex, funky, idiosyncratic, multifaceted, pungent, satisfying, intense, crisp, dry, acidic, refreshing, tart, fruity, oaky, sour, musty, vinous, lemony, strawlike, cidery, grassy, haylike. That's an awful lot of words for beer

Not the way to get your kid to sleep

Not the way to get your kid to sleep
Originally uploaded by flakingnapstich

Not the way to get your kid to sleep

Caleb and the raven

Caleb and the raven
Originally uploaded by flakingnapstich

Caleb and the raven

Kirk Cameron's manager sent a threatening letter about this photo

Warning: Criticizing washed up, has been actor Kirk Cameron for mocking a man with a terminal illness and using a silly photo of Kirk Cameron to do it will get you threatening letters from Kirk Cameron's manager Mark Craig.

Kirk Cameron is an asshole, and so is his manager Mark Craig.

Imbibing quarts of bathtub gin

Make: Online | How to Make Your Own Gin Without a Still
I've been making my own gin by steeping juniper berries. I'm looking forward to trying this recipe. All I need is some 100 proof vodka.

Measles Outbreak In Europe, Especially France

"Oh, but they won't sell as many vaccines that way. Never mind, then... "

The profit on a singe vaccinatio­n is about 10 to 25 cents. The cost of a single measles case can be thousands of dollars. If "big pharma" really was determined to make people sick to profit from it, they'd be doing everything they could to NOT vaccinate.

But hey, you stick with the naive belief that a merciless profit motive is driving them to turn away billions from treating measles, whooping cough and polio in order to scrape together a relative pittance from vaccinatio­n. I'm going to invest in "big pharma" stock. The anti-vax movement is going to be making money for them hand over fist in the next few years.
About Personal Health
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

SA rapture man apologises

SA rapture man apologises: "The SA follower of the US evangelist who predicted the end of the world is being ridiculed, but still believes the end will come on October 21."

This man spent $140,000 of his life savings on billboards promoting Harold Camping's absurd May 21, 2011 Rapture date. Now he has bought into Camping's wild claims of an "invisible" or "spiritual" judgment, as if Camping had any credibility left. It's "Sunk cost" thinking at its finest.

How convenient for Camping that the May 21 event turned out to be something vague, undefined and supernatural with no detectable evidence in the real world.

Con Man Camping Still at it

Harold Camping has been manipulating his followers for decades with false promises of an imminent Rapture. His repeated date predictions have all failed and now the false prophet has defended the failure of his much trumpeted May 21 date with another blast of shoddy rationalization, claiming that the world will now end in five months. As one critic commented "Third time's the charm."

The general idea seems to be that some sort of vague spiritual event occurred on May 21, and the five months of tribulation Camping predicted will instead be skipped as an act of divine mercy. The October 21 date he picked for the actual destruction of the Earth still stands. He's claiming he was just wrong about the Rapture happening on May 21.

So what happened on the 21st?

"We've always said October 21 was the day," Camping said during his show. "The only thing we didn't understand was the spirituality of May 21. We're seeing this as a spiritual thing happening rather than a physical thing happening. The timing, the structure, the proofs, none of that has changed at all."

Ahh, vague spiritual BS. That's what happened. It's like talking to a psychic or ghost hunter. Let's do some more digging to see if Camping elaborates:

Saturday was "an invisible judgment day" in which a spiritual judgment took place, he said. But the timing and the structure is the same as it has always been, he said.
"We’ve always said May 21 was the day, but we didn’t understand altogether the spiritual meaning," he said. "May 21 is the day that Christ came and put the world under judgment."

What, pray tell, is "an invisible judgment day" supposed to be? Does this mean God has randomly decided to just skip the bulk of the nasty, horrible things predicted in the Bible? Fark commentators take a stab at explaining Camping's "Invisible Judgment Day"(tm) and end up doing a better job illuminating the issue than Camping himself.

In the mean time, Camping's ministry has whitewashed the Family Radio Web site, scrubbing it of all mention of the failed May 21 prediction. It's a very Orwellian memory hole.

Bob Hansen, one of the poor fools who were promoting the idiotic May 21 date, granted an interview to discuss his reaction to the failed prediction. It's a very depressing example of "Sunk Cost" thinking. People who have invested a good deal of their time and resources, often burning bridges with  friends and family, have trouble accepting evidence that all their effort and sacrifice was wasted. Instead of admitting they were wrong and trying to make amends, they instead rationalize their decisions and try to find ways to excuse the failure that should have forced them to realize they'd been misled. This is the same psychological phenomena that keeps people trapped in Multi-Level-Marketing scams and Pyramid schemes.


PZ Myers has his own take on the matter that includes a lot of interesting links and a general condemnation of religion as a whole.

Then there's a chilling quote from Camping:

I don't have any responsibility. I'm only teaching the Bible. I'm telling ... this is what the Bible says. I don't have spiritual rule over anybody ... except my wife as the head of the household.

Given such control over his wife, it's no surprise that instead of leaving the fraud, she's instead said she's "a little bewildered" at the complete and utter failure of is prediction. Apparently she's been wallowing in the false prophet's nonsense for too long to see clearly anymore. That, or she's afraid of him. He is pretty old school in many of his Bible interpretations.I wouldn't be surprise if he used a literal rod to beat his wife and children when they disobeyed.

The really chilling part of the quote is how Camping washes his hands of all responsibility for what's happened. It doesn't matter that it was his web of lies that ruined so many people financially and rent so many families asunder. Camping apparently believes it's THEIR fault for believing him. I wonder how many con artists use the same logic to absolve themselves of responsibility for cheating lonely old widows out of their savings.

In all of this only one group is really coming forward to try and help the people who were fooled by Camping. Atheist to Rapture Victims: You're Not Stupid. Funny how a group that's usually stigmatized by the religious is reaching out, while Camping is desperately trying to extend his exploitation of these people for another few months. Fark commentators disagree with the claim that Canning's followers aren't stupid.

I wonder what Jesus would think of this whole affair.

Most Annoying

Dear nature. The cold weather and rain is hampering my efforts to smoke my annual spring cigar.

Camping's Crazies

I think Camping's Crazies are planning a mass suicide or terrorist act for May 21. Watch the news. Some of these jokers are probably going to try to bring about the end times with some acts of their own. They'll consider it an act of mercy, sparing the "Left Behind" from months of misery by ending their lives just before the Rapture. I'll bet a few even plan to use a terrorist act to scare people into last second repentance. Remember, these jokers believe that there will be no additional salvation after the Rapture, so anyone "Left Behind" will be screwed. If however they can scare people into repenting at the last second, getting in just under the wire so to speak, BOOM! A saved soul!

Beginner books for brewing beer

While most brewing books have an obligatory "How to brew" chapter, there are two primary beginner texts for homebrewers.

How to Brew: Everything You Need To Know To Brew Beer Right The First Time

The Complete Joy of Homebrewing Third Edition. It's best read with the companion volume The Homebrewer's Companion

While they both cover a lot of the same information, they have two distinct approaches. Papazian takes a far more artistic, poetic tack. In one of his books, he waxes poetic about a Prickly Pear Mead and how he brews a batch every year. He buries a few bottles at the top of a nearby mountain to be aged by nature.

Palmer takes a more scientific approach and gets to the nuts and bolts.

You get pretty much the same information from both books, with the main difference being the writing style and organization.

I subscribe to two brewing magazines. Zymurgy, edited by Papazian, reflects his attitude towards brewing, while "Brew Your Own" reflects a more Palmer oriented approach, including a series of articles scientifically testing various homebrew traditions and urban legends.

SEO, it's Not Black Magic

Spin, spin, spin, for many firms it's all about the spin. Overblown claims are common on the Internet, especially when dealing with the touchy issue of Search Engine ranking.  The perception is that the better a site fares in Search Engine rankings the more money the associated business / charity / whatever will make. Many firms exploit this perception by making wild promises about how they'll boost your ranking in various search engines.

More is not better

The House Rabbit Network (HRN) is a New England based animal rescue group. Their web site, rabbitnetwork.org gets a lot of traffic from people seeking information about keeping rabbits as pets. Starting in 2007, they started getting traffic from a new and unexpected source. "Adult" search terms started directing people to rabbitnetwork.org.  It didn't take long for the webmaster to figure out what was going on.

The HRN web site had recently added "How to Sex Your Rabbits", an article about determining the gender of a rabbit. It's one of the better online articles on the topic and a lot of other rabbit related sites were already linking to it. The large number of links to the article gave it a higher Google page rank. The text contained phrases like "bunny" and "sex" which caused people seeking, er, "mature" content to be directed to the site. To make matters worse, people began posting the URL to adult themed forums.

From the view of many SEO "experts" this was a grand success. The site was getting more traffic from a larger and more diverse audience. From the view of the rescue group, this was an annoyance.  The increased traffic didn't negatively impact server performance or increase bandwidth costs, but it didn't result in people donating to the 501(c)3 registered charity or increase rabbit adoptions from HRN's foster homes.

People who stumbled across the site while searching for mature content weren't interested in a pet rabbit.

Misdirection to kill a campaign

In February 2008, the UK chain Marks & Spencer was engaged in a battle with the British union "Unite." As part of the conflict, Unite chose to engage in what they called "cyber-warfare." While the article was light on details, the union was probably spending £500 on Google Adwords.  The trouble hit when someone posted the article to the news aggregation site digg.com with the headline "Union to hijack global search engine - Google!." The headline depicted the relatively straightforward purchase of some paid search results as a form of black hat hacking. As a result, a large number of digg.com members searched for "Marks & Spencer" on Google, clicked the link to the Union grievances and then went back to digg.com to ask "Who the heck is Marks & Spencer?"

In short order the £500 had been burned up and searches for "Marks & Spencer" no longer resulted in an ad directing people to Unite's grievances page. A lot of people saw the ad, but few of them knew who Marks & Spencer was. As a result, the campaign had little effect on Marks & Spencer's bottom line.

The relatively low cost of advertising in search results may level the playing field a bit, but if a competitor can burn up your paid clicks it won't benefit you very much. Did the digg.com link help Unite's campaign? Not really.  Many of the paid search results went to people who had no involvement in the battle between Unite and M&S. Unite would have fared better if they'd not spoken to the press about the campaign.

Better means people want to go there

In both these example, the traditional "More is Better" SEO criteria was met. Both HRN and Unite got more traffic and more attention. From a practical standpoint, neither of them benefited.  Unite's money was burned up serving ads to people who didn't even recognize the name "Marks & Spencer". HRN didn't place any more rabbits.

The most useful image on the Internet

Upon reflection I think this image may be the most useful one to be found online at the moment. It has so many applications.