This is why I hate Scientologists: They are 100% cultists, even if some happen to be famous and pretty. This is why I was sickened to hear that Will Smith is now in the fold after aggressive courting from Tom Cruise. How anyone could get sucked into a cult is beyond me. It's frightening, but in a way it's comforting—if I understood the attraction perhaps I'd be more susceptible to these intellectual terrorists.
This is pure karma.
Eat me.
African catfish are living the dream, hunting on land (sorta) in a real-time example of Darwin's theory of evolution. Fish aren't right-wing or left-wing (they don't grow wings till they've been around a few millennia), they don't vote Democrat or Republican (they're registered independents)—they just gotta eat, God bless ’em. Watch them here.
Wednesday at three seconds past 1:02 a.m., the date will be 01:02:03 04/05/06. I'm told this will never happen again, so enjoy it. Then again, 1:03:03 04/05/06 will never happen again either—so treat each second like it's your last. Except for when you're sleeping. Because, you know, come on.
I guess born-agains (as opposed to us did-it-right-the-first-times) would 
claim this skull is either just a deceptive rock formation, is the skull of a guy who died in the past 200 to 500 (not 200,000 to 500,000 years) or was put in the terra firma by God to test our faith. Or, regardless of your take on God, evolution is so fucking real you'd have to be a chimp not to believe in it. (And frankly, I'm pretty sure even chimps could be taught how to grasp the concept of Darwin's theory.)
Gawker points out that Ad Age Media Guy Simon Dumenco has written a compelling column on why "Celebrity Is Dead" using the infamous masturbating cat video that is making the rounds as a purr-fect example. Simon says, "...all’s I know is that M.C. Fluffy’s performance is a lot more interesting than anything that, say, Eminem or J.Lo have done lately." Me-OW! Simon's claws are out for mainstream pseudo-stars like Paris Hilton and Jessica Simpson, who just might be on their ninth lives. (Warning: If you don't want to see a cat masturbate, don't watch. This kitty is a total dawg!)
Today, in between painting a wall and shopping for cool, modern furniture at a stock sale, I went to see the highly controversial Bodies: The Exhibition installation at the South Street Seaport in NYC. The show uses real dead bodies, preserved forever via plasticization, to enlighten attendees on every detail of the human anatomy. Some people despise it because it's unseemly to view corpses that were not given a proper burial. To them, I say—go to any museum and check out the mummies and Neanderthals. Others dislike it because it's gross. Can't argue that—if it icks you out, it icks you out. Still others object to the fact that the bodies in this particular exhibit (there are others) come from the Dalian Medical School in northern China, so they are unidentified or unclaimed and are presumed therefore to include possible political hits and those who never wanted their bodies displayed in this manner.
I went a day after my eleventh anniversary. The tickets cost $27 and the lines for people who had not bought tix in advance were long enough that I could envision some fresh meat becoming available for use inside thanks to exhaustion, the chilly weather or old age. Inside, I tore through the exhibit in about 35 minutes. I'm fast with museums and things. To be honest, it barely held my attention.
The first thing I did notice and rolled my eyes at was this trend of people pointing in and around the body parts, getting sooo close to touching the "DO NOT TOUCH" corpses that finally a fingertip would flicker over a rib and I could imagine the person was feeling exalted for ignoring the rules and touching a dead person with cool, calm, scientific detachment.
Overall, I found the show to be mostly very respectfully assembled and a marvelous teaching tool for kids, but two things disturbed me in ways that were not black-and-white. First, the political-prisoner idea nagged at me. How undignified if someone were killed off by the Chinese government only to end up in a dead zoo for foreigners to gawk at their rubber genitals? Also, the extensive use of fetuses was kind of sad and also seemed to me to 
be an amazing opportunity for anti-abortion activists—you can see all the body parts are present and accounted for at nine weeks, so all it takes is leaning over to a kid looking at these displays and saying, "Can you believe people have abortions?" In fact, when I was leaving, I flipped through a book meant to record viewers' thoughts. On the page on which I wrote my succinct, "depressed" take, a girl had written, "I would never have an abortion in a million years after seeing this."
I was thinking more, "I'll never speak out against China from Beijing in a million years after seeing this."
Allegedly, there is a genetic marker 
for homosexuality in men. But the gene in question is found in our mothers. Whenever my sister and I find some unpleasant health issue that we've inherited from our mother, we tell her sarcasticaly, "Thaaanks, Mooom." In this case, I can honestly say, "Thanks, Mom!" because if I weren't born gay I'd have found my way into an ex-straight ministry eventually anyway.
