The first half of our trip to Montezuma Well is up at Rosetta Stones, in which we have a look at the tectonics of the Verde Valley and get our eyeballs on some hella sweet lake-deposited limestone. Enjoy, my darlings!
Month: April 2016
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Supernatural S1 E1 (Part 1): When Your Brother Breaks Into Your House and Ruins Your Life
****Update: Additional insight from Zeroth inside!****
Welcome to our first Supernatural analysis! How many daddy issue can two brothers have? How badly will Dean fuck up Sam’s life? How many women can one pilot episode stuff in a fridge? We’re about to find out!
Zeroth and I will be doing a full recap for this inaugural episode. After that, we’ll only be doing a summary and then pulling out the juicy bits so that most of us will still be too young for a nursing home when we finish this series. Let’s get started then, shall we?
****CAUTION: HERE BE SPOILERS. PROCEED AT YOUR OWN RISK**** Continue reading “Supernatural S1 E1 (Part 1): When Your Brother Breaks Into Your House and Ruins Your Life”
Analyzing SPN: Introduction
So. Last week, I mentioned a fun new project I’d be unveiling this week. My friend Zeroth and I will be analyzing Supernatural episode by episode. We’ll be presenting the pilot episode for your enjoyment tomorrow. Today, I’ll introduce you to our methods and aims so you can spend more time enjoying our analysis and less time trying to figure out what the fuck we’re talking about.
So, first, Supernatural: for those who haven’t watched the show, it’s basically about two brothers who travel the country tracking and fighting all sorts of supernatural entities. You’ll encounter everything from ghosts to terribly mauled Native American legends to angels and demons. It’s very strongly influenced by the horror movie genre, although it’s not afraid to play around in other genres, and has a healthy propensity for laughing at itself. It’s gone on for eleven seasons and been renewed for a twelfth, so yeah, it’s been a pretty successful formula.
Why Supernatural? Continue reading “Analyzing SPN: Introduction”
Donate to ETEV and Get Exclusive Access!
I’m still looking for a part-time job to supplement my writing income so I can stop begging off you all, but we’re not quite there yet.* I’ll need your help to make it through this month.
I don’t want to keep asking for funds without offering donors a little something extra, though, so I’m going to give donors exclusive early access to some content here. Once a week, we’ll have a password-protected post available to donors only. Anyone who has donated over the past three months will get an email with a password to unlock that content. I may even throw in a second tier for donors who have given more than $25 to keep Misha and I alive.
Those posts will remain exclusive for around 30 days, after which I’ll release them to the general public. New donors will have retroactive access to content that’s still locked.
If you can’t afford to donate, you can still help us out by sharing this post far and wide.
For those who want to support ETEV in other ways, there are many!
“The List of Ugly Realities” – Escape Chapter 17: Marrying into the Jeffs’ Family
This is a short chapter, but it gives us quite a bit of insight into Merril’s thirst for power, Warren Jeffs’ creepy early years, and FLDS hypocrisy and dysfunction.
Content note for forced marriage, child abuse, and spousal abuse.
Merril wants more power and prestige within the FLDS, and of course, the way to get it is by bartering your young daughters into sexual slavery. He’s already married one off to ancient prophet Rulon Jeffs. Now he sacrifices pretty Paula. As she’s married off to a man 60 years her senior, “Her still smile barely [hides] her despair.” All Carolyn can think about is how she and Paula had joked in school about “having to marry an old man who was a rest-home patient.” This is Paula’s nightmare: her new husband is so old and weak he has to sit throughout the ceremony. It’s one thing to marry someone older for love: it’s quite another to be sold off, with no choice in the matter. Continue reading ““The List of Ugly Realities” – Escape Chapter 17: Marrying into the Jeffs’ Family”
Quick Hits: The Bible Backs Me On Abortion. Plus: Why Vaginas Are Not Like Milk Cartons
A couple of things have crossed my radar recently that don’t really merit posts of their own, but I want to share them with you, so here we are. It’s an odd combo, I grant you. But there is a common thread here: both of these issues are tied together by religious views of (cis) women.
1. The Fetus in Jewish Law; or How My Position On Abortion Turns Out to be Many Centuries Old.
I’ve always supported abortion rights, but I used to be a lot more conservative about it. I’d got infected by the prevailing American squeamishness, and figured abortion should have some restrictions. I was never one of those life-of-mother-only people, but I thought abortions past, say, about four months into the pregnancy maybe should be restricted to threats to the mother’s health and problems with the fetus and so forth. Then, as I began to learn more about what pregnancy does to a woman, and as abortion foes made inroads on abortion rights, I decided fuck restrictions. I actually got to a point where I figured a pregnant person should be able to have an abortion any damned time they pleased, up to and including right around labor. Until that fetus was actually on its way out, it had no rights to use another person’s body whatsoever. And the formerly conservative part of me sort of cringed at that. I mean, it’s pretty extreme, right?
Turns out that Jewish rabbis have been ahead of me for centuries. Continue reading “Quick Hits: The Bible Backs Me On Abortion. Plus: Why Vaginas Are Not Like Milk Cartons”
Marvelous Metazoans: Watching the Realm
For our Frivolous Friday* fun, let’s have a sneak peek at one of the most remarkable spots in Arizona, and try to identify this adorable critter who seems to be the master of it.
Alas, I didn’t have my wonderful Sony Cyber-Shot camera back then. Otherwise, you’d get a much clearer view of the critter, and be able to zoom in to drool all over the utterly luscious limestone. But at least it gets the gist of the scene right, and hopefully there’s enough detail to make out what species our darling rodent is. Continue reading “Marvelous Metazoans: Watching the Realm”
Saturday Song: Mondays
A delightful bit of synchronicity happened when I asked for theme ideas on Facebook. See, I’d just finished watching the Gilmore Girls episode that has got The Bangles in it, and then Suzanne came up with a Monday theme, and there was really only one song I could choose:
Suzanne has already put in Stormy Monday by The Allman Brothers Band. I think you can see the general shape of things: this week, we’re going to do songs about Monday. It doesn’t have to necessarily have Monday in the title, as long as it has a general Monday vibe to it. Take that theme and run, my darlings! Continue reading “Saturday Song: Mondays”
Adventures in Christianist Earth Science Education XXVb: A Thermonuclear Load of Creationist Nonsense
In our last edition, we saw Christianists trying desperately to sneak God into matter and energy. Today, the creationist nonsense gets positively explosive. Hold tight, kiddos.
The SPC folks explain that nuclear fission can be used to blow things up as well as power stuff. They’re quite blasé about the effects of an atomic bomb explosion. They’re all about describing the heat and light of the chain reaction; not so much about telling us what it does to living things like, oh, y’know, innocent human beings. They’re also quick to handwave away the problem of nuclear waste. But considering how enamored the American Right is of fossil fuels, this amuses me greatly: Continue reading “Adventures in Christianist Earth Science Education XXVb: A Thermonuclear Load of Creationist Nonsense”
Adventures in Christianist Earth Science Education XXVa: Atomic Bombs of Creationist Crap
Let us return to this week to A Beka’s Science of the Physical Creation. Now that they have thoroughly butchered the history of chemistry, it’s time to address matter. It appears the creationists are okay with it. The SPC writers even define it correctly, explaining that it
1) Occupies space
2) Has inertia
3) Can’t be created or destroyed
4) Ordinarily exists as a solid, liquid, or gas.
It’s a limited and somewhat outdated description, but perfectly serviceable for an 8th grade textbook.
They’re careful to explain that mass does not equal weight, and do so with the easily-understood example of a book on Earth vs. the Moon: the weight will change, while the mass remains the same, cos of gravity.
So far, so science.
They desperately try to insert some religion into the mix when they get to atoms, but the best they can do is interject that the founder of modern atomic theory was a Christian. But the poor dears have to immediately admit that the Christian! John Dalton actually got the idea of atoms from Democritus, not the Bible. And when they briefly talk about alchemists being “men who tried to produce gold by chemistry and often wizardry,” you get the sense they think wizardry is not a bunch of fanciful crap based on superstition, but an actual thing that works (only not for making gold). But that’s about as much as they can manage when explaining elements and atomic symbols. They bang on a bit about how John Dalton was a Bible-believing Quaker, but even in the special text box they set aside for him, they can’t tie his work directly to his religion. Continue reading “Adventures in Christianist Earth Science Education XXVa: Atomic Bombs of Creationist Crap”