OkCupid.com analyzed over 500,000 first contacts on their online dating site to see how certain keywords and phrases affected reply rates. The results could be considered a set of rules for what you should and shouldn’t say when introducing yourself online.
Thinking of mentioning religion? The graph below shows reply rates of messages containing the listed keywords, plotted against the average reply rate of 32%.
We got this email from my son’s indoctrination camp (grammatical errors included):
It is my unfortunate duty to inform you that we have a confirmed case of the H1N1 virus . . .
We understand that there a considerable number of students and staff who became ill on the last day of camp or just after returning home. . . .
While getting people sick is not something we want and definitely not something we like, the riches of Christ being shared at camp far outweighs the risk of illness and that we’re praying for all those who are affected that they will be well soon.
God moves in mysterious ways. Like why didn’t He send the swine flu to the Atheist Kids camp?
And I don’t let the camp staff off the hook. Why didn’t they pray before the camp that no one would get swine flu instead of waiting till it was too late and praying for them to get well again?
“It was meant to be,” my wife says, although fortunately our own kid is not sick . . .
My son’s at a church camp in San Jose for the next week. He doesn’t actually go to the church, but friends of his do, and he’s been to this camp with them before and liked it.
He left yesterday morning, which was Fathers Day. That’s the first thing I don’t like about this camp, that they take the kids on Fathers Day.
The next thing I don’t like is that they collect the kids’ cell phones when they arrive, so they can’t call home except in cases of emergency.
“I thought churches were supposed to teach kids to honor their parents,” I say to my wife. (She’s not sympathetic to this line of inquiry. She thinks all churchgoers are good people although I’ve never been able to see the correlation.) “They’re probably up there right now telling the boy his dad is going to hell . . .”
“Tomorrow is Good Friday, right? Isn’t today something too?”
“I have no idea, Mom.”
“I’m gonna call the church.”
”Be disloyal. It’s your duty to the human race. The human race needs to survive and it’s the loyal man who dies first from anxiety or a bullet or overwork. If you have to earn a living, boy, and the price they make you pay is loyalty, be a double agent — and never let either of the two sides know your real name. The same applies to women and God. They both respect a man they don’t own, and they’ll go on raising the price they are willing to offer.”
Obama still has the approval of the people, but the establishment is beginning to mumble that the president may not have what it takes.
Gee — do you really think so? What was your first clue? The loud noise of nest eggs being crushed all over America every time he opens his mouth?
President of the United States is not a job for a dilettante three years out of the Illinois state senate. Before I was elected president, I served as governor of Virginia, minister to France, secretary of state under George Washington and vice president under John Adams.
I also wrote the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom and, in my younger years, at age 33, a little something called the Declaration of Independence.
President Obama’s accomplishments? I’ll step aside and let one of his supporters enumerate them:
A 3-year-old Virginia boy was rescued Saturday after spending the night in the woods with only his puppies to keep him warm. . . .
Around 300 people helped search for the missing child, and a command center was set up at the local Baptist church.
“God really protected the boy,” Grace Baptist Church Pastor Dave Kline said. “We are happy that we were able to help.”
God is “dog” spelled backwards! I say God could have saved everyone a lot of time by not letting the boy get lost in the first place.
Good thing he had his puppies to keep him warm!
Don’t try this with kittens!
— Lightning 
P.S. That is a photo of me keeping my owner warm when I was a puppy.
Many years ago, when I worked on construction sites, I learned that the people you see on picket lines are not necessarily union members. If a union man doesn’t feel like walking a picket line, he can pay a “professional picketer” to walk in his place.
Yesterday, I learned that this same technique is used in the Muslim world. If a Salman Rushdie knighthood or a Danish cartoon doesn’t generate enough spontaneously enraged fanatics, you can hire some professional enraged fanatics, like Islamic Rage Boy here.
Click through on the photo or link to see him in action . . .
In memory of the Rev. Falwell, here’s one of my favorite Woody Allen quotes, from Hannah and Her Sisters
But the worst are the fundamentalist preachers. Third-rate con men telling the poor suckers that they speak with Jesus. And to please send in money. Money, money, money! If Jesus came back and saw what is going on in his name, he’d never stop throwing up.
Farewell, Falwell!
When the government says ‘Islamic militants,’ it sends a message to the public that Islam and militancy are synonymous.
No, that’s not correct. What law school did you go to?
If Islam and militancy were synonymous, then you could just say “Islamic” or “militants” and “Islamic militants” would be redundant, like “past history” or “unexpected surprise.”
So actually, when the government says “Islamic militants,” it sends a message that Islam and militancy are not synonymous, although you can’t help noticing that most terrorists are in fact Islamic . . .
Dinesh DiSouza, a noted conservative pundit, was moved in the aftermath of the Virginia Tech shootings to say this:
Only the language of religion seems appropriate to the magnitude of tragedy. Only God seems to have the power to heal hearts in such circumstances. . . . Atheism seems to have nothing to say to people when there is serious bereavement or tragedy.
That’s not true. For example, one famous atheist response to tragedy is this: So it goes.
DiSouza also forgot to add that if you leave out platitudes, pleasant myths and happily-ever-after fairy tales, religion has nothing to say to people either . . .
My wife makes an occasional visit to one of the local Buddhist temples, and sometimes she “encourages” the rest of the family to join her.
“Thanks for coming along,” she says on the drive over.
“You made us come,” our son says from the back seat. Then after a pause, “But you’re welcome.”
A German opera house announced that it would cancel its staging of Mozart’s “Idomeneo” because Berlin police concluded that staging the opera — which includes a scene in which Jesus, Buddha, Poseidon and Muhammad are beheaded — would pose an “incalculable security risk” from jihadists. Germany, recall, proudly opposed the Iraq war — but still narrowly missed a Spain-style terrorist attack on its rail system this summer.
A leading Muslim spokesman in Germany explained that he was all for free speech, as long as it didn’t offend Muslims. The Germans’ all-too-typical appeasement of terrorism no doubt makes them “safer” and “creates” fewer terrorists.
And all it cost them — for now — is Mozart.
Grandma died today. Or, maybe, yesterday; I can’t be sure.
Just kidding; it was yesterday, but I never get tired of that joke.
Grandma was 94 years old. She was quick-witted almost to the end.
She died at St. Jude Medical Center, the same hospital where I was born. She was 47 when I was born, the same age I am now. It’s the circle of life.
Grandma was a Presbyterian. Everyone else in the family, except me, is Catholic. The Catholic chaplain at St. Jude anointed Grandma before she died. I’m not sure what that means, but I know that my mom asked the priests at her parish to do it and they wouldn’t because Grandma was not a Catholic.
“He said he was deeply sorry,” Andrew savagely caricatured the inflection, “but it was simply a rule of the Church.”
“Some church,” he snarled. “And they call themselves Christians. Bury a man who’s a hundred times the man he’ll ever be, in his stinking, swishing black petticoats, and a hundred times as good a man too, and ‘No, there are certain requests and recommendations I cannot make Almighty God for the repose of this soul, for he never stuck his head under a holy-water tap.’ Genuflecting, and ducking and bowing and scraping, and basting themselves with signs of the Cross, and all that disgusting hocus-pocus, and you come to one simple, single act of Christian charity and what happens? The rules of the Church forbid it. He’s not a member of our little club.
“I tell you, Rufus, it’s enough to make a man puke up his soul.”
One of Grandma’s brothers, who died at the age of 21 many, many years ago, is reputed in family circles to have had the highest IQ ever tested. Some family members believe he was the world’s smartest man, with the possible exception of Einstein.
How did he die? He stepped in front of a moving car.
True story.
There’s more to life than a high IQ, you see. I, for example, am a person of average intelligence, but I always look both ways before stepping into the street.
As we were walking out of the hospital last night, my wife, who’s Asian, said, “I’m not much about dying.”
“I’m not sure what that means,” I said.
“Chinese doesn’t like it,” she said.
She insisted on stopping at a restroom on the way out to wash her hands, not because of germs, but to get the spirits off. She made me do the same.
“You can’t bring that into the house,” she explained.
When we got home, she made me take all my clothes off and run them through the washer.
I’m looking over this flyer for a church group meeting that my son’s going to next week. It’s being held at a member’s house in a gated community, so the flyer has directions, as well as an entry code for the security gate.
“Jesus wouldn’t like gated communities,” I say. “He was very welcoming to all people. This is racist. They’re trying to keep out blacks and Mexicans.”
Of course you know this means war.
Muslims are offended by cartoons portraying them as violent fanatics. Naturally, they’ve responded with violent fanatacism. I’ll say one thing for these people, they know how to stage a lively protest. Yesterday, a few protestors got so enthusiastic that they had to be killed.
Hamshahri, a prominent Iranian newspaper, has launched a cartoon counter-offensive: a competition for Holocaust cartoons.
Hey, I’ve got an idea! You have a drawing of Hitler standing at a podium, big swastika behind him, addressing a packed hall of Nazis, and he says
“I think I may say, without fear of contradiction . . .”
HA HA HA HA HA!
(Okay, I stole that from an old New Yorker cartoon, but how many people in Iran take the New Yorker?)
. . . the proponents of intelligent design use a ploy that works something like this. First you misuse or misdescribe some scientist’s work. Then you get an angry rebuttal. Then, instead of dealing forthrightly with the charges leveled, you cite the rebuttal as evidence that there is a ‘controversy’ to teach.
Continue reading How the Intelligent Design Hoax was Perpetrated
They [Islamist radicals or, as Hitchens calls them, Islamo-fascists] gave us no peace and we shouldn’t give them any. We can’t live on the same planet as them and I’m glad because I don’t want to. I don’t want to breathe the same air as these psychopaths and murderers and rapists and torturers and child abusers. Its them or me. I’m very happy about this because I know it will be them. It’s a duty and a responsibility to defeat them. But it’s also a pleasure. I don’t regard it as a grim task at all.
I want to say to the meek: Once we finally get rid of the death tax, you’re not inheriting anything.
An open letter to the Kansas School Board on an alternative theory of Intelligent Design, i.e., that the universe was created by a Flying Spaghetti Monster.
