Bits and Pieces

Assorted bits and pieces of news that I’ve been meaning to blog about:

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FtBConscience 2, the online Freethought Blogs conference, is happening this weekend! You can watch sessions live and even participate by sending in questions and being part of the chat rooms, and you can also watch sessions later, as they’re all being recorded. Here’s the schedule as it stands now. Speakers and panelists include Dale McGowan, Jamila Bey, Rebecca Hensler, Debbie Goddard, Amy Davis Roth, Ania Bula, Anne Sauer, Dan Fincke, Heina Dadabhoy, Elyse Anders, Popehat, Chana Messinger, Julia Galef, Paul Fidalgo, Vyckie D. Garrison, and many more, plus of course many many many FtB bloggers. Should be awesome!

The Godless Perverts Story Hour, with blasphemously sexy performances from Juba Kalamka, Dana Fredsti, Virgie Tovar, Simon Sheppard, Kate Sirls, ad hosts David Fitzgerald and me, is going to be livestreamed as part of the FtBConscience 2 conference on Saturday, February 1 at 7:00 pm Pacific time ***SHARP*** (9:00 pm Central time). The Godless Perverts Story Hour is an evening about how to have good sex without having any gods, goddesses, spirits, or their earthly representatives hanging over your shoulder and telling you that you’re doing it wrong. We’ll be bringing you depictions, explorations, and celebrations of godless sexualities, as well as critical, mocking, and blasphemous views of sex and religion. The evening’s entertainment will have a range of voices — sexy and serious, passionate and funny, and all of the above — talking about how our sexualities can not only exist, but even thrive, without the supernatural. We’ll have performances for about an hour and a half, and will then do a half hour Q&A with all the performers. If you’re in the San Francisco Bay Area, come see it in person — Center for Sex and Culture, 1349 Mission Street, San Francisco (near Civic Center BART). $10-20 sliding scale donation; no-one turned away for lack of funds; benefit for the Center for Sex and Culture.

Seth Andrews at The Thinking Atheist podcast has done a show about the Bill Nye/ Ken Ham debate, Bill Nye and the Creationist Guy, discussing the question of whether this debate is a good idea with several atheist thinkers — including me, as well as Matt Dillahunty, Dr. Richard Carrier, David Silverman, Ed Hensley and AronRa. Check it out!

Alex Gabriel on the Godlessness In Theory blog has written a very thoughtful and good review of my upcoming book, Coming Out Atheist: How to Do It, How to Help Each Other, and Why. (Scheduled for publication in mid-April, in all formats — print, ebook, and audiobook.) The review has an interesting analysis of the comparisons that get made between coming out atheist and coming out queer, and Alex has smart and perceptive things to say, as he so often does.

A Better Life: 100 Atheists Speak Out on Joy & Meaning in a World Without God, the gorgeous and long-awaited coffee table book with photos and stories of atheists in our natural habitats, is now out and available for sale. Great pictures of A.C. Grayling, Jamila Bey, Rebecca Goldstein and Steven Pinker, Cara Santa Maria, Daniel Dennett, plus of course me and Ingrid, and many more. It’s a great accomplishment: we’ve been enjoying the heck out of it, we’ve have been discovering all sorts of cool atheists we didn’t know, and finding out all sorts of interesting things about atheists we do.

And in News of the Weird: About a week ago, I was on Facebook going on about how I had a long layover at O’Hare Airport and wanted to get my nails done, but the airport information guy told me — wrongly, as I discovered too late — that there was no nail salon in O’Hare. I was hyper-dramatically griping about how this was the worst tragedy anyone had ever experienced in all of human history and how future generations would mark it as an international day of mourning and how someone should write a ballad… and someone did. The Day that Information Guy Told Greta She Could Not Get Her Nails Did, by Dana Logsdon. (To the tune of “Ode to Billie Joe.”)

This is one of the oddest things that’s happened to me in a while. And I already lead a somewhat odd life. Thanks, Dana!

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Bits and Pieces
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4 thoughts on “Bits and Pieces

  1. 2

    the airport information guy told me — wrongly, as I discovered too late — that there was no nail salon in O’Hare.

    Why doesn’t that surprise me. It’s like O’Hare is some kind of bureaucratic fuck-up magnet – among other things, I memorably had an outbound flight changed from the B to the C terminal with no announcement until Last Call. >.>

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