Via lonemagpie and Pharyngula come two memes, the results of which seem to fit together fairly well.

( What is Your World View? )( The Atheist Test )

Current Mood:  cheerful

Via littlebun and unknownlegend comes a whimsical slice of memery.

What type of Fae are you?

At least I wasn’t a bloody pixie.

Current Mood:  thoughtful

At some point whilst I was alseep the name Unity Kincaid popped into my head and for the rest of the night my dreams consisted of people saying that name to each other. I wake up, hit Google and (re)discover that she was a character in Sandman.

Um, dreams, Sandman, spooky.

Current Mood:  nervous

… that creationists couldn’t get their feet any further down their throats, they come up with a real gem. Via Pharyngula, we learn that the according to the big brains at Answers in Genesis, only creatures with red blood are alive. Good one guys.

Current Mood:  giggly

I’m officially middle aged now as today I wore novelty socks bought for me by my wife.

However, they were Welsh Dragon socks and Wales did beat Scotland today (they seemed to be overpowering the Scots in the parts I saw, though the last Scottish try looked like a classic from what I saw on the news) so I see a new superstition in the forming.

Current Mood:  happy

Via sharikkamur and ignoring my obvious lack of at least one vital qualification:-

Which Mythological Goddess am I?

Maeve

Indeed, you are 70% erudite, 87% sensual, 70% martial, and 62% saturnine. Maeve was once thought of as a historical queen but is now considered part of the Celtic mythology. She is usually depicted as either a winged sprite, a beautiful elf, or a human woman dressed in only the finest robes.

She was said to carry two tree-dwelling creatures on either of her shoulders; the squirrel and the raven, resembling her closeness to nature and mysticism. She also frequented the area which was said to hold the entrance to the Otherworld, which is now called the Cave of the Cats.

Maeve is known for an insatiable sexual appetite and boasting openly of sleeping with thirty men in one day. Once she meets the hero Fergus Mac Roich, ‘Son of Great Horse’ who himself has a sexual appetite large enough to satisfy her, the tale says that ‘She used to know thirty men every day or go with Fergus once.’ So that’s good for her.

She is most famous as a protagonist in the story of the “Cattle Raid of Cooley”, which tells of another dispute between her and her husband, the Connaught chieftain Ailill, with whom she would constantly quarrel.

My test tracked 4 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender:

	You scored higher than 21% on erudite
	You scored higher than 67% on sensual
	You scored higher than 84% on martial
	You scored higher than 56% on saturnine

Link: The Mythological Goddess Test written by Nitsuki on Ok Cupid

70% erudition is only higher than 21% of other people? Too many smart folks taking this test…

Current Mood:  relaxed

“… reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.”

— Richard Feynman

If you thought that biological evolution was the only science being attacked by the religious nutjobs in the US, think again. A Bush appointed fuckwit in the NASA press office is trying his best to wedge religion into astronomy: [via Bad Astronomy]

The Big Bang is “not proven fact; it is opinion,” Mr. Deutsch wrote, adding, “It is not NASA’s place, nor should it be to make a declaration such as this about the existence of the universe that discounts intelligent design by a creator.”

Makes me want to hit something.

“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the universe….”

— Albert Einstein

I haven’t been posting much recently. So little in fact that pink_weasel has stolen all my funny stories for herself and put them in a friends locked post, so not much point in me linking to it.

Anyway, here’s a small victory for reality:

After you die…
In the Ground

After death, you will cease to exist. In all likelihood, your carcass will be deposited in the ground.

Take this quiz at QuizGalaxy.com

As in a warning about spoilers to be found elsewhere. See last paragraph.

Had today off work, decided that a Monday was the least painful day to try some Christmas shopping, so went up to Oxford/Regent Street. It wasn’t much worse than a normal Saturday (so slightly worse than hell itself then) and I actually had a fair amount of success.

Books in Borders (with £5 off thanks to the voucher in Saturday’s Guardian) for brother and mother. More books in the BBC Shop (always worth a look as they often have recent BBC releases at cut prices and older releases that you can’t find elsewhere anymore) for father and, um, myself.

Then to the Apple Store to buy wife’s present. That place is like some sort of strange cult. They were even running training sessions for iTunes upstairs. iTunes for heaven’s sake, one of the simplest-to-use pieces of software ever written. I wondered whether they could identify me as a Windows using apostate via mystical means? And when I got to the front of the queue I realised that the only PIN I could remember was that of my debit card, so good as I’m not building up a debt but bad as in I can’t play games with the interest free period and keep my savings intact for another month’s worth of interest.

And to make Lettice very happy I bought the Christmas Radio Times. Out came the pink highlighter as soon as I got home. I hope we get some good DVDs for Christmas because other than Doctor Who the telly looks dire this year. And speaking of RT and DW, there’s a ten page feature that spoils the Christmas special in just about every detail. Still, some people will like the pictures of David Tennant in his jim-jams. Oh, and a chance to win one of the actual Daleks from the ‘05 series…