Quick Hitts

I deal with Christmas differently than most atheists.
I celebrate it. I put up lights and a tree and give gifts and say “Merry Christmas” and mean it. I’ve played Santa Claus on several occasions, with the full costume, enjoyed it, and will probably do it again.
Devout Christians rail against how secular the holiday [...]

I’ve subscribed to Wired for years. At a buck an issue, it makes for good bathroom reading. If it goes up to a buck and a quarter, though, I’ll let my subscription lapse.
You can study good design by A) studying good design and learning from it and B) studying really bad design and [...]

The Republican Part is in shambles. They are now a minority in congress, and more importantly, they’re regarded as far-right fundamentalists by many Americans. They’ve allowed the fundies to take over the party, and the results have been disastrous.
They’ve abandoned their core principles. They claim to be the party of small government, [...]

I swear I’m not going out looking for stories about cops shooting dogs. They’ve just become so common that I stumble across them every couple of weeks in the course of casual surfing.
This time it was in Pittsburgh. A sheriff’s deputy, looking to serve papers on someone, went into the wrong backyard, where [...]

The 1969 Woodstock Festival was the defining moment of my generation. Nearly a half million people attended, and twelve million of them will eagerly tell you about being there.
I’m wondering if the inauguration of Obama will be this generation’s defining moment. How many hundreds of thousands of people will be crowding the capital [...]

It’s over.  Finally!  I enjoy the theater of politics (and am fully aware that it is nothing but theater) but this was like watching Warhol’s movie “Empire” (a single eight hour shot of the Empire State building) without taking a pee break.
The Good
In every election there is fraud, chicanery and a bit of honest [...]

More than a half century ago Emma Goldman said “If voting changed anything they’d make it illegal.”
Now we’re all being encouraged to vote vote vote, rock the vote, get out the vote, make your heard, push for change, to blah blah blah blah blah…
I used to think people who didn’t vote had no right to [...]

My company just laid off about 20% of their workforce, and I was one of the causalities. Now I get to go job hunting in an economy that’s sinking faster than Palin’s image as a folksy soccer mom. Oh joy.
This is the reality of working in IT. For every IT worker [...]

Here’s a list of things atheists didn’t do over the past month or so.
An Atheist did not set fire to his 11 year old niece for wearing lipstick. She has burns over 90% of her body and is not expected to survive.
No atheist decreed it was OK to kill the owners of Satellite TV [...]

Lately I’ve been doing spectacularly lousy at poker.  My bankroll was down to 20% of what I started with.  I was paying $2.00 Sit-n-Gos, and I was losing them more often than not.  I was getting disgusted and bored and tired of the whole thing.
Full Tilt announced Matrix Tournaments, which give you four sit-n-gos for [...]

Maryland cops are now putting the names of peaceful activists on terrorist lists.
This follows on the heels of five paramilitary strikes against protesters just before the Republican National Convention.  Groups with no history of violence were violently raided by SWAT teams, handcuffed, fingerprinted, and terrorized by police thugs.  The cops then stole their political literature, [...]

The left and the right disagree on most issues. Usually, one side is right and the other is wrong. Quiet often, both sides are wrong. There have been rare instances where both sides agreed, but on side reached the right conclusions for the wrong reasons. But in my forty years as [...]

A few years back the game “Would You Rather…” was inexplicably popular. “Would you rather have needles shoved in your eyes, or eat a dead rat that was rotting in a ditch?” The goal was to come up with the most disgusting selections possible. It was stupid, gross and pointless and I refused to play. [...]

Introducing The Smartenizer, a bi-weekly newsletter that will make you a bit smarter with every issue.
Each issue of The Smartenizer will inform, educate, and smartenize you on a different subject. It will help you tweak, tune and optimize your bullshit meter. It will point to resources you can use for further smartenization. [...]

The latest episode of The Quick Hitts Podcast is now available.  It’s titled “Atheists Are Coming For Your Children, but it’s not just a simple rehash of this post.  In fact, it contradicts it.  In the conclusion of that post I said fundies would be powerless to stop us from converting their children.  But after [...]

Watching pros play poker is often confusing. Some of their decisions seem strange, counterintuitive, and just plain wrong. This is especially true of Gus Hanson, who frequently makes plays that would seem clinically insane if it he didn’t consistently wins huge amounts of money. Watching him go all in with nothing in [...]

I like to buy from sites that feature lots of customer reviews.  It’s one of the reasons I buy most of my electronic stuff from NewEgg.  (The other reasons: their selection is great, their pricing is excellent and their shipping is amazing.  Hint: pick the very cheapest shipping, and it still usually arrives the next [...]