Pollywogs!

Cutting back on the grocery budget.  Kelley and I average about $70 a week on groceries, so at $35 a person isn’t too bad.  I’m interested in how much others spend per person per week.  How about ‘including eating out, minus alcohol’.

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Czech men and women consume the most beer.  Men average about 100 ounces a week, with very few heavy drinkers.  And a medical survey says:

“If this is so, then beer intake should be associated with some general measure of obesity, such as body mass index or with indices of fat distribution such as waist to hip ratio or with both.”

But they said: “The association between beer and obesity if it exists is probably weak.”

A study published earlier this year suggested some people are genetically predisposed to develop beer bellies.

Teh win…

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Sounds good on paper, ‘in the field’ so to speak, not so much:

The FDA found “reasonable assurance” the device was safe, and a sub-agency even called it one of 2005’s top “innovative technologies.”

But neither the company nor the regulators publicly mentioned this: A series of veterinary and toxicology studies, dating to the mid-1990s, stated that chip implants had “induced” malignant tumors in some lab mice and rats.

If the FDA says it is safe, it simply does not mean a thing.  Well, it means that some large corporation strong-armed the government once again…

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Insanity.  Simple, pure insanity.

Given the overwhelming display of force deployed by Arpaio’s deputies, one would have expected the arrest of a mass murderer.

Instead, the crack SWAT boys nabbed 26-year-old Eric Kush. Let me tell you, Kush is really a bad, bad guy.

He was wanted on a misdemeanor warrant for failing to appear in Tempe Municipal Court on a couple of traffic citations.

Oh, and they also burned a house down, smashed a car,  shot up the neigbhorhood, and killed a puppy!  All in a day’s work when you’re part of a SWAT team and you’ve got some unfocused rage to vent.  Hey, I’m a fucking cop, out of my way bitches!   I’m off to shoot someone and break some things!

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What a whiny, rich cocksucker:

Proposed a month before Sept. 11, 2001, Cape Wind remains in limbo. It’s been frustrated at every turn by a handful of yachtsmen, Kennedy included, who don’t want to see windmills from their verandas. Many millions have been spent spreading disinformation and smearing the wind farm’s supporters.

The towers would be at least five miles out and barely visible from shore on the clearest day, but the summer plutocrats resent any intrusion on their waterfront vistas — and, equally, any challenge to the notion that they control everything.

“But don’t you realize — that’s where I sail!” may stand as Kennedy’s most self-incriminating quote.

Aww, those poor rich bitches.  Not in my back yard.  Waa waa waa…

I’m rich, don’t you realize?  Not just rich, but fucking rich!  I can do what I want!

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Apparently, salt tenderizes steak.   Not a little salt, but apparently PAINTED with salt for two or three hours, then rinsed and patted dry.  Apparently the salt is pulled inside the tissue and breaks down the protein?

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This is neat: a reverse anthropological expedition into London by Vanatu natives!  Perspective, ahh what a refreshing breeze you are…

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Giuliani, an asshole’s asshole:

 ’Basking in the lasting glow of his Sept. 11 leadership while campaigning in Pinellas County and Orlando on Friday, Giuliani stressed national security and electability, rather than the sort of hot-button social issues that are thought to be critical to winning the Republican nomination.

For me every day is an anniversary of Sept. 11,” Giuliani said’

Oh, wait…he knew the buildings were going to collapse but only told a handful of people, only cared about body recovery until the Bank of Nova Scotia gold and silver assets were recovered (the firefighters are pretty pissed about all of those bodies ending up in the dump for some reason), made piles of tactical crisis management mistakes (but said all the right things (smile for the camera!)).  Giuliani is a failure!

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I’ve been reading a pile of neat books, and am continually struck by interesting quotes I wish I could share.  So, I’m going to share a couple passages from the old medium, the printed word:

From the Freedom from Religion Foundation’s ‘Freethought Today’ newsletter, and excellent article titled ‘The Jesus Myth’:

‘One of the problems faced by Christian scholars is that there is no record of Jesus’ existence in any contemporary sources…Educated theologians know this perfectly well, yet they maintain the pretense of apostolic authorship and keep the truth hidden from lay congregants.

The synoptic gospels now accepted into the canon are only a small remnant of perhaps hundreds of proto-Christian gospels extant during the first few centuries B.C.E and C.E.,…as reference works, the New Testament writings are hardly more reliable than fairy tales.

 …

For a possible hint of Jesus’ historicity, Christian authorities relied heavily on a single brief paragraph in the works of the respected Jewish historian Flavious Josephus, who was born in 37C.E…if anyone was in a position to report the wonder-workings of a local holy man…it was Josephus.  Yet in all his voluminous works, the single paragraph (regarding Jesus) says only that Jesus ‘(insert typical bible propaganda here)’…The problems with this famous passage are many.  First of all, it is noticeably out of context with the surrounding material.  Second, it did not appear in the early copies of Josephus’ works,nor in the second-century version…(it only appears in) the fourth century, and is first quoted by Bishop Eusebius, the enthusiastic advocate of what he called ‘holy lying’ for the greater glory of the church, known to have been responsible for many interpolations, revisions and blatant forgeries.’

 Further reading of Jesus, born of Mithra, Adonis, Dionysus, and so on and so on…especially Dionysus, fuck he was Jesus’ twin…oh wait, that shit happened like 400 years before Jesus…good thing they didn’t have Google back then or those bitches would have been caught plagiarizing like a mofo…

A minor selection from ‘The End of Faith’, by Sam Harris:

“And while Protestant reformers broke with Rome on a variety of counts, their treatment of their fellow human beings was no less disgraceful.  Public executions were more popular than ever: heretics were still reduced to ash, scholars were tortured and killed for impertinent displays of reason, fornicators were murdered without a qualm.  The basic lesson to be drawn from all this was summed up nicely by Will Durant: “Intolerance is the natural concomitant of strong faith; tolerance grows only when faith loses certainty; certainty is murderous.”

There really seems to be very little to perplex us here.  Burning people who are destined to burn for all time seems like a small price to pay to protect the people you love from the same fate.  Clearly, the common law marriage between reason and faith -wherein otherwise reasonable men and women can be motivated by the content of unreasonable beliefs- places society upon a slippery slope, with confusion and hypocrisy at its heights, and the torments of the inquisitor waiting below”

So many years, and still the same bullshit from fundamentalists year after year.  The more I read this book, the less I care for the idea of freedom of religion.  I’d rather have ‘freedom from religion’.  You can do all the religion you like in your home, but keep it away from me.  And you better fucking not drag me out of my house in the middle of the night and burn me on a stake either, you fucker…

Witches are made of wood, they float in water and they burn…

Speaking of witches, a selection from ‘Drawing Down the Moon’, by Margot Adler:

“In my fifteen years of contact with these groups I was never asked to believe in anything.  I was told a few dogmas by people who hadn’t ridded themselves of the tendency to dogmatize, but I rejected those.  In the next chapters you will encounter priests and priestesses who say that they are philosophical agnostic and that this has never inhibited their participation or leadership of Neo-Pagan and Craft groups.  Others will tell you that the gods and goddesses are “ethereal beings”.  Still others have called them symbols, powers, archetypes, or “something deep and strong within the self to be contacted,” or even “something akin to the force of poetry and art.”  As one scholar has noted, it is a religion “of atmosphere instead of faith; a cosmos , in a word, constructed by the imagination…”

 

 Finally, from ‘The Truth’, by Al Franken:

 So, to Tom DeLay, the Schiavo case wasn’t so much about Terri Schiavo as about Tom DeLay.  And he was determined to make the most of it.  Where other Republicans confined themselves to vague generalities about the possibility that Terri was aware of her surroundings, DeLay felt no compunctions about making a case that was both laughably and tragically false on its face.  The St. Petersburg Times, reporting on March 21 on DeLay’s leadership in the Schiavo matter, quoted his argument for reinserting the feeding tube:

She talks and she laughs and she expresses likes and discomforts.  It won’t take a miracle to help Terri Schiavo.  It will only take the medical care and therapy that patients require.

In other words, given proper treatment, there was no reason Terri Schiavo couldn’t live out her lifelong dream of being a Rockette.

Wise man, that Tom DeLay.  Did I say wise?  I meant RETARDED COCK-SMOKING ASSCLOWN CUNT.