Pictures from the British Museum

What can possibly motivate someone to try to document in pictures a trip to such an enormous museum? Ignorance? Hubris? Or just the sense you get walking into such place, feeling that you have to somehow capture all the incredible beauty that lies within, even if your efforts can only scratch the surface? Given the choices, we'll take the third option, and so we present a brief glimpse of our seven hours well spent at the British Museum.

I Am So Done with Christmas

I had a good Christmas Day, but I'm sure glad it's (mostly) over for another year. Between the media's daily obsession with retail spending and the AFA's daily obsession with retail marketing, you'd think that the reason for the season was to buy more God-endorsing crap this year than the year before. And while that might be as good a reason as any other in these modern times, the combination of angst and anger it engenders can be exhausting.

Christmas Eve Cat Blogging

I see you when you're sleeping.

Pictures From Bath

You'd thought we'd forgotten, didn't you? Well, we don't blame you for thinking that we were never going to get around to posting more pictures from our trip to London back in October, but in a burst of holiday enthusiasm, I present you with A Day in Bath, a chronicle of our day trip to that beautiful city.

Godless

More fallout from Mitt Romney's big speech:

A spokesman for the Mitt Romney campaign is thus far refusing to say whether Romney sees any positive role in America for atheists and other non-believers…

I imagine the campaign would have a problem here, given that Romney flatly asserted that "freedom requires religion", whatever that means. I realize that Mitt's not campaigning for my vote, but is it too much to ask that a GOP presidential front-runner not go out of his way to insult other people's theology while defending his own? Apparently so.

Personally, I could care less about Romney's specific religious beliefs, and it scares me that a large enough contingent of Republicans apparently care a whole lot and think that where you believe Jesus will show up next is an important consideration for civil government. What also scares me is that, religion aside, he seems to have very few strongly held beliefs, and the ones that he does hold (e.g. torture is a good thing and we should do more of it) are repugnant.

"Bad News for This President"

That's what Ed Henry on CNN just said about the new National Intelligence Estimate on Iran that concludes that Iran stopped work on it's nuclear weapons program more than four years ago. Of course, a non-nuclear Iran is great news for everyone else in the world (except for Dick Cheney, of course), which just goes to show how upside down this administration is.

A Box of Rattlesnakes

Nobody puts together a better obituary section than the New York Times, and today, when it really counted, the writers didn't disappoint. The Evel Knievel quote that they set off in the print version perfectly captures his life in 13 words: "I knew I could draw a big crowd by jumping over weird stuff."

And while we all know about his jumps over the fountain at Caesar's Palace, the London buses, and the Snake River Canyon, leave it to the Times to get the details of his first, somewhat more modest, but no less weird, attempt:

When he was 27, he became co-owner of a motorcycle shop in Moses Lake, Wash. To attract customers, he announced he would jump his motorcycle 40 feet over parked cars and a box of rattlesnakes and continue on past a mountain lion tethered at the other end. Before 1,000 people, he did the stunt as promised but failed to fly far enough; his bike came down on the rattlesnakes. The audience was in awe.

Weren't we all. Rest in peace.