Runester

I was pretty shocked at the news revealed on the latest Kicked in the Dice Bags. Part of me knows that break-ups, infidelities, and heart-breaks happen. But I always want to assume the best, because each time a relationship ends like that … it feels like “another one gone.” Something valuable, rare, and precious was lost.

Also, parts of the story hit close to home, with certain similarities between Jonathan’s story and a close friend or two.

Apart from the actual topic of the episode in question, is the side topic of privacy in the new age of mass publication. Jonathan and Chris chose to share something that is usually considered private. What they did is not new, nearly every memoir dishes dirt on affairs, drug use, infidelity and other ’sordid’ events. The tabloids make their profits by exposing these details in the lives of others. So, why shouldn’t modern publishers – bloggers, tweeters, podcasters – do likewise and share everything (or near enough)? Besides, hasn’t most of the shame already been rubbed off? Is there really much embarrassment left when a couple has a child out of wedlock, or a man admits to a long standing affair, or when in-the-bedroom matters are discussed and shared? The answer is no. For better or worse, we live in an age in which privacy is shrinking, at least among a certain age/class and this loss of privacy has nothing to do with Big Brother putting a camera in every TV and everything to do our innate desire for attention and voyeurism facilitated by a technology that lets us publish anything … even our dirty laundry.

On the other hand … how many secrets should have been told? How much unhappiness is the result of keeping a secret; of not admitting that we are unhappy with a relationship, or that someone has suffered abuse, or that a close friend/family member has an addiction problem? In other words, if there is any silver lining to this trend (which I’m not convinced there is) then I’d look for it there – the shedding light on those secrets that corrupt and corrode by being kept.

But, still. Modesty evolved along side human civilization for a reason. Maybe it’s archaic and withering as no longer necessary. Maybe it allows the social lubrication, the ‘illusion of goodness’ that let’s us form peaceful social groups and accomplish great tasks. Maybe, without this illusion we won’t be better off, but so jaded by ourselves and our fellow’s that we’ll turn away from congress with them in disgust.

Wouldn’t that be ironic? If the bitterest poison was not lies or propaganda or secrets but the raw truth?

First, let’s be honest here. I’m a technologist. I’m not a marketer and I’ve never (successfully) started a business with, you know, actual customers. But, that’s why I’m so fascinated by marketing and business models. It’s interesting because it’s so different than what I do! Marketing people can look on in fascination while I ‘fix’ their Excel by hitting the [Scroll-Lock] key. I look on in fascination while they spread the message of their client and motivate real people to spend real cash. Compared to what I do, they might as well be sorcerer’s.

Second, as I’ve recently blogged about, the book publishing business is going through a weird revolution. [From other online articles and blog's, it appears to mirror music and news, as well.] While from a consumer choice perspective, this is a ‘golden age’ – very few people are making any money from it. It turns out that without the few large publishing houses able to sell mass appeal books (and act as gatekeepers, which is a downside) that the half-a-million new books published every year garner very littler per-book attention. For every one Stephen King or John Grisham, there are literally tens of thousands of small time authors who will make nothing but the advance on their book. They will never see a dollar or dime of royalty money. Further, their publishers cannot afford to publicize or market their books! The author must, themselves, market and spread the word and organize book signings and arrange for all of the travel and even build and market the web site associated with the book, etc. etc. etc.

So, what does the publisher actually do? Well, there’s the ‘gatekeeper’ thing, which is supposed to be a type of intrinsic guarantee of quality. There’s also the editing, printing, and distribution through well established sales channels. There is certainly value in getting your book published through a traditional publishing house. But, if you thought that it would be it and you could just go back to writing your next book … think again.

The kicker is, even with the author having to shoulder the marketing, the average book only sells about 3,000 total lifetime copies! [Obviously, some more and some less, thus the average.] That means that no one is getting rich writing books, unless they happen to be the top 1% of 1% of authors. The other way to riches is to hope that auxiliary properties based on your work will generate real money, like a movie or video game. A comic book would be great publicity, but probably not garner you any great amount of money. And, for every book published in every year, only 1/1000th of that number of movies are made in Hollywood – and not all are based on current books. So, the odds of getting your book turned into a movie just aren’t that good.

Third, there’s been a great deal of discussion and blogging and tweeting and the like on different ways for people to market in this crazy new landscape. One school of thought is that the product should be ‘free’ but with a monetization model based on one of the following three tried-and-try patterns: 1) Advertising. This is how Google gives away free search results and email, then sells ad space and is very profitable. 2) ‘Freemium’, a portmanteau that refers to the premium-for-pay upgrade many services offer. Like how FlickrPro costs money but Flickr is free. The pro subscribers subsidize the free users. That is also the model the Drop.io is attempting to use; everyone can make as many drop’s as they want with 100MB of storage and a max connection count of 10 – but if you upgrade you can get more space or a subscription for a premium version of their product. We have yet to see if their model will work, but in order to work the upgrades and the premium service would have to more then make up for the resources they’re spending on giving away the free version of their service. 3) Loss-Leader, as in Verizon FiOS is giving away a free netbook computer if you sign up for their FiOS service. That’s crazy! A free $300 netbook, just for becoming a subscriber? Well, they’ve obviously calculated the average lifetime value of their customer and know that value is much more then the one time cost of a netbook. Even with churn and people who just want to take advantage of the offer, they will more then make up for the cost of those netbooks. [It still boggles my mind that they are now giving away laptop's for for free ... even if they are just 'netbooks' ... but in my day, those were valuable and not considered tchotchke's.]

There’s a fourth pattern, not discussed in the original essay I read, which I call “building a valuable network.” This is basically what Monster.com does. They give away their job search service, because they need the enormous list of potential employees to sell their actual for-profit service, which is an employee search feature sold to businesses. In other words, Monster only needs the applicants to make their real product valuable. Their ability to offer applicants to employers doesn’t mean much if there’s not hundreds of thousands of applicants available to offer and the best way to get those applicants is to offer them the “find a job in your area” service, for free! [Monster also advertises to applicants and offers premium for-profit services for those applicants that want to pay. They have an affective multi-path marketing plan that makes their 'free' service quite profitable.] Another example would be a free service that gathers user data and uses this database as a resource they can resell. This may be problematic with the way users feel about having their information sold, but it’s still done all the time. Again, the free product or service is simply a way to gather or generate the actual product or service that is then sold for a handsome profit.

So, can we put all of this together? I think we can. I believe that there are already people out there that make money as “writer’s” but not from selling books. They use their free or near-free book sales to distribute their message and market themselves. They then offer a ‘freemium’ service, such as a weekend seminar or an onsite presentation. They may also use it to subsidize other, premium products and/or subscriptions. They use their customer information as a marketing list for other products, even products owned by other publishers. They write, publish, and market a book .. but the book isn’t their product. In any case, they’re making money.

=-=-=-=-=

In a previous blog post I asked whether or not having a non-profit as an RPG publisher wouldn’t further the general goals of having a long lasting entity hold the intellectual property of something like a game, and act to foster the community of players and publishers that have a stake in the survival and even success of that game. Here, I’m going to ask whether or not one of these monetizing schemes can turn something that’s hard to profit on, an RPG, profitable.

I’ve already seen the ‘freemium’ method used. Several companies will give away an electronic edition of their core rules for nothing or very close to nothing ($1 or $5). Then, they hope that if you like the core rules, you’ll come back for supplements and settings, which they sell at a nice mark-up. This probably has some success, but I’ve never seen a huge response to this. I’ve only seen an actual subscription model used once or twice, and I believe the publisher already has to have a well known property and/or author before they can successfully sell a subscription. In a way, a subscription is like a promissory note. They promise to produce something of value at regular intervals, and you promise to keep paying for what they produce. If it’s a new author or new company or even a new product, the public may not believe or trust the promise and will not be as willing to pay in advance for it.

I’ve also seen two new models come forward in RPG’s but not other fields, like books or music. One is the ransom; in which an author writes a product and than says that until he raises a fixed amount, say $2,500, he’s not going to release it. But, that once he does raise that sum, he’ll give it away for free. Again, if the author and product are known they can be expected to be good and an audience will gather knowing their money isn’t wasted. Interestingly enough, the initial investors are subsidizing all of those that will subsequently download the product for free … so it’s a kind of ‘freemium’ service, inverted, and with no special price for those that actually pay the premium. A related model is the patronage, where a small group of investors are gathered with a minimum entry fee, and they not only get special access to the product but have an intimate hand in directing it’s growth and production. In this case, the patrons usually get a beautifully printed hard-bound copy of the book (or at least the ability to purchase such) and then the product is sold for less as an electronic copy only to the non-patrons. In the patronage model, not only is the special access being sold as a premium service, but the special relationship with the designers and the ability to influence the final product.

One of the big advantages of the patronage and ransom model, is that the consumer testing is built in. There’s no need to through a product out there and hope that someone, somewhere wants it. In both cases, if there is not sufficient interest then the author is free to move on to something else. If there is sufficient interest, then the audience is built-in and marketing is successfully happening before the product is even ready to be shipped.

=-=-=-=-=

I now imagine a hybrid, in which an author or small group of authors, form a not-for-profit company as caretaker for a set of intellectual properties tied to a game. The authors then use patronage and ransom (or some hybrid variation) to profit, up front, from the production of their product. After the price has been paid and the product produced and all of the special version/access/service agreements satisfied, then the not-for-profit get’s the rights to the work so that it can be kept available and actively advocated for. The back catalog then acts as the free product that markets both the authors and their IP, while advertising the next project they’re working on. It can even be stated in the contract that certain rights are reserved by the author, such as movie or video game rights. That way, just in case one of the IP’s goes big, the author will still see the lions share of profit. But, there will never be an ‘abandoned’ property, because even if the author walks away from it, the not-for-profit can continue to make it available and assign those rights that it has.

I bet something like this may even work for traditional fiction, as well. How many fans clamour for a book that the author spends years and years and years ‘working on’ but never produces? What if the fans could directly pay for it, and act as patrons for the project? The author gets much needed feedback from the very consumer he needs, and he gets an infusion of cash well before the books sells.

Anyway, these are some of my thoughts on how to do the (seemingly) impossible: make money by writing gaming books.

So, in the middle of an important phone call, my stupid phone went dead. It’s a Blackberry Curve 8310 and I’ve had it for just over two (2) years. I’m pretty sure the battery is kaput. So, I decided to go and buy a new battery. I mean, I really wanted a new phone … like an iPhone 32GB 3G S … but those things cost a ton, even with a new two (2) year commitment.

I was going to be good, and just buy a replacement battery. Really.

First I got turned around in traffic, and it took me way too long to get to the nearest AT&T Store. I then waited for fifteen (15) minutes only to have them tell me they don’t stock those batteries … I could always try the Best Buy further down the street. OK, no problem. I’ll keep going.

At the best buy, there were three (3) guys behind the counter, two (2) of which were assiduously not looking at the line of customers piling up. One (1) was actively helping people. Funny how one guy can stare straight ahead and tap, tap, tap on a computer screen while NEVER looking up at the four (4) people waiting for assistance; and how the other guy can, apparently, be manually entering some paper form into some online form … one. painful. line. at. a. time. … while also never looking up at a the line of people waiting. But, the one guy who was helping people finished with his current customer and pleasantly turned towards me.

Guess what? They don’t stock the batteries either. He recommended I go to the AT&T Store! After I explained that they had sent me here … he just recommended, I either order a battery online and wait or go down to the Verizon store, further down the street. I wasn’t going to get mad at him … besides it not being his fault, he was the only sales rep actually trying to help customers and he was a charming young man, to boot.

So, down the street I went.

I didn’t have to wait at the Verizon Wireless store, the sales rep was ready to go. But, they don’t stock the batteries either. Oh, and have I checked out AT&T or Best Buy? It gets worse … the batteries are $59.99 plus shipping. WTF? You know what, I wasn’t that happy with the phone’s behavior recently anyways. It’s been picking up tons of static and interference when I make phone calls; and then there’s that “drop in the middle of a call and shutdown” – but that last one may have just been the damn battery. Which I can’t get.

Despite my best of intentions, I ended up buying a new phone.

I bought a Blackberry Tour, which is their 3G Blackberry – similar to AT&T’s Blackberry Bold. The price, with a two (2) year service contract and $100 mail-in-rebate was listed as $149. I’m trying to be rational here. A new battery for my old phone, which has been sounding like crap for the last two weeks, was going to be $60+ and here was a brand new, much faster phone with access to a much faster data network and it was only $90 more? Furthermore, unlike the mythical replacement battery, I could actually walk out of the store with this, working. So, I said yes.

I immediately began regretting it. I don’t like to spend big money … and to me that means anything more then $100. More then $200 and I get physically sick. I’m not kidding. I love my iPod … but I visibly blanched when I had to pay for it! This was almost as bad as that. The truth is, after looking at the bill, I had to actually pay $250 for the phone but state sales tax on all $500 of the phones retail value (at 6.25%, that’s another $30). Verizon will cover $250 of that $500, because I signed up for the two (2) year plan. In a week, when I’m sure I want to keep this phone and it’s proved useful and without any major Verizon-induced-tomfoolery, then I can mail in the UPC from the side of the box and wait five (5) weeks for my $100 rebate check to arrive.

So, I pay $280 TODAY … and eventually get $100 back … and did I mention that there was a $35 activation fee? Somehow that “$149″ doesn’t look as wonderful as it did when I was standing there.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

While my sales rep was entering my info and pulling a credit report, there was a woman standing next to me working with another rep. That rep was asking for the last four (4) digits of her Social Security Number (SSN) so that they could access her account. She specifically requested that they use some other number, not her SSN, as her account / access number. The two young people behind the counter, both looking to be in their early 20’s, were giving her a hard time and being pretty disrespectful. They insisted that her SSN was the only possible number they could use to look up and access her account. She insisted that they find a different number. Finally, she simply declared that she was going to pull her business from Verizon and find another provider – and there are plenty to choose from!

This whole conversation really angered me, especially when the clerks were snickering and attempting to bad mouth her, quietly, after she left. That was it, so I loudly declared that federal law prohibited private businesses from requiring SSN’s as account numbers. I grew a little heated, but they were smart enough not to argue with me.

For the record, I was not entirely correct. According to the Social Security Administration’s own website:

Giving your number is voluntary, even when you are asked for the number directly. If requested, you should ask why your number is needed, how your number will be used, what law requires you to give your number and what the consequences are if you refuse. The answers to these questions can help you decide if you want to give your Social Security number. The decision is yours.

So they are allowed to ask for it, and she is allowed to ask what they are going to do with it and she is allowed to refuse to give it to them. But, she has to live with the chance that she will be refused service; which is exactly what she did. Finally, and here’s the kicker, the young man of the pair didn’t understand why it was a big deal – everyone uses SSN’s … why did she complain? I pointed out that millions of identity records are stolen every month. It matters.

Do you know what really galls me? When SSN’s were first introduced and discussed, there was a very real fear that they would become a kind of “federal identity card” and could be used for tracking citizens movement around the country or tracking their buying and selling. Sounds paranoid, right? I mean, that would never happen … except that it is exactly what American’s were thinking about, shortly after WWII and the tight strictures placed on the German people by the Fascists. So, they were assured that SSN’s and the new Social Security Cards would not be used for that, they would only be used for tracking this new federal benefit. Yet, here we are, only a few generations later and your SSN is the key to nearly every account, service, line of credit, and transaction, public or private.

And, of course, they’re being stolen by the millions and traded and bought and sold and real people are really suffering.

So, next time someone asks you, casually, for your SSN … make a big deal out of it. Because it is a big deal.

For whatever reason, I looked up Oubliette in WikiPedia. I’ve always been fascinated by the concept. The beauty of the word itself – and the horror behind it’s meaning. As is often the case with WikiPedia … once you start, it’s hard not to keep finding something that catches your attention and one click after another and you’ve lost half the morning reading and learning.

Well, not a total waste, then!

The article on Oubliette lead to an article on Immurement – to be sealed up within a room or cave and left to die. While this is, itself, terrible to even consider what really struck me was the reference to immurement as a way for a mason or archetect to successfully complete a construction project. For example, a challenging bridge would keep collapsing until the master mason agreed to sacrifice his wife by sealing her into the stone bridge  – and then it stands firmly ever since.

What does this mean? On the one hand, these are not virgins being sacrificed or random women but specifically the wife of one of the men charged with building the project. Is this some kind of metaphor for the level of committment required of the builder that he sacrifices his marriage to his project? I’d like to think so, because while the dissolution of a marriage is sad, it’s not nearly as bad as bricking your wife up in the bridge or tower you were paid to build.

So, I am REALLY hoping that these stories are just very striking metaphors for men who lost their marriages to their jobs and of the (sometime) necessaty of doing just that in order to be the best at what they do. On the other hand, I have this nigling sense that there is more to it then that and that I am (perhaps) missing something obvious.

What do these stories mean? Why would a man be required to sacrifice his wife in order to complete a project? Why do the stories stay with us, generation after generation? Other then the striking and strikingly disturbing images, there must be something deeper that they touch.

Do we sacrifice our spouces to our pursuits? Is this a warning, something we should avoid at all costs … or (more disturbing still) is it a sort of promise that those that are willing to make that sacrifice are the succsessful ones that complete the great projects and live on in the glory of what they’ve accomplished?

I’m sitting comfortably in my easy chair, wearing my pajama’s with the little booty slippers and covered in my handmade quilt. I’ve got a laptop with wireless, high-speed Internet access and a TV remote in my hand. My belly is full of Chinese take-out (sesame chicken!) and I’ve got a bottle of water nearby, along with my smart phone.

Life is pretty good for me. And, for this I am grateful. When it’s cold or wet outside, I have a warm safe place to sleep. I also have decent employment, friends, and a great family. Though I am not where I thought I would be, at this age – life has treated me pretty fair so far.

But, there is still something fundamentally wrong. I can’t put my finger on it, directly. It’s like one of the old blind men that tried to describe an elephant. One felt the leg and declared “elephants are like trees!” and one felt the trunk and declared “elephants are like snakes!” and the third felt the flank and declared “no, elephants are a like a stone wall.” It’s not just that their limited viewpoints gave them pieces of the truth. It’s that even taken together, those pieces do NOT represent what an elephant is “like.”

I have a friend who spent six years in the US Army. He reports that the same term is used for those soldiers who experience actual combat. It’s called “seeing the elephant.” Because, only those that have actually experienced it can know what it means to experience it. Everyone else is just blindly feeling along the smallest portion of what that experience means.

Therefore, that thing which is wrong is vaster then my ability to perceive. I am blind and feeling along the edge. I know “it” in stories that reflect portions of “it” but I have no ability – at least so far – to stand back, open my eyes and see “it” in all it’s horror. Furthermore, I have no faith that even if I could … I’d ever be able to communicate that to you. Maybe you’d have to see the elephant for yourself.

So, here’s a story that shows the shadow of “it.”

When acid is thrown on a person, the results can be horrifying. Nitric, hydrochloric, or sulfuric acids all have a catastrophic effect on human flesh. It causes the skin tissue to melt, often exposing the bones below the flesh, sometimes even dissolving the bone. When acid attacks the eyes, it damages these vital organs permanently. Many acid attack survivors have lost the use of one or both eyes. The victim is traumatized physically, psychologically and socially.

An acid attack on your body would dramatically change your life. Most survivors of an acid attack are forced to give up their education, their occupation and other important activities in their lives. This is because recovering from the trauma takes up most of their time and because the disfigurement they have to bear debilitates and handicaps them in every conceivable way.

The scars left by acid are not just skin deep, victims are most often faced with social isolation and ostracisation that further damages their self esteem, self-confidence and seriously undermines their professional and personal future. Women who have survived acid attacks have great difficulty in finding work and if unmarried, as many victims tend to be, they have very little chance of ever getting married, which in a country like Bangladesh is socially isolating.

http://corrosion-doctors.org/Acids/acid-attack-1.htm

Acid attacks are a big problem in Bangladesh. The statistics say there are more attacks here than anywhere else in the world, but that may only be because Bangladesh documents its cases more thoroughly than other countries. The Acid Survivors Foundation meticulously documents every case it finds. In 2005, the organization claims there were 211 recorded incidents involving 267 victims. That is significantly less than the 487 people hurt in 2002, the worst year on record, but that is cold comfort.

Last year 178 women and 89 men were attacked with acid. Fifty-three children under the age of 18 were among the injured, many because they were sleeping next to the intended victim. The most frequent motive for the attack was a dispute about land, property, or money (46 percent), followed by crimes related to rejection or refusal of love, sex or marriage (15 percent), marital disputes (12 percent), disputes within the family (10 percent), and dowry disputes (5 percent).

http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,406485,00.html

Acid violence is a particularly vicious and damaging form of violence in Bangladesh where acid is thrown in people’s faces. The overwhelming majority of the victims are women, and many of them are below 18 years of age. The victims are attacked for many reasons. In some cases it is because a young girl or women has spurned the sexual advances of a male or either she or her parents have rejected a proposal of marriage. Recently, however, there have been acid attacks on children, older women and also men. These attacks are often the result of family and land dispute, dowry demands or a desire for revenge.

http://www.acidsurvivors.org/

I had heard about acid attacks for some time now, but I didn’t fully understand what they meant. I needed to “see” for myself. So, I used the Internet and did a little research, complete with photo’s of survivors. This is NOT something you want to do if you have a delicate constitution or cannot live with seeing how much damage throwing acid in someones face can do to them. Having seen the photo’s and read some of the articles I still cannot claim to “know” about this issue. It is unlikely that I will ever work along side someone who’s been the survivor of such an attack or ever have someone in my family face such a horror. But, I can empathize with what I see and what I know, as limited as that is.

Part of the revulsion is not the way the survivors look; no, not that at all. It’s in the horrible knowledge that humans are capable of this and more then capable, willing and able and guilty. It’s the level of absolute injustice that perpetrators are rarely caught or sentenced. It’s the grief that the survivors live with physical and psychological scars for the remainder of their lives. It’s the terrible truth that within every human heart is some dark place, in which we are similar to both the survivors and the perpetrators. Though we’d like to call them monsters, and their deeds are truly monstrous, they are humans like us. They are motivated by greed, jealousy, resentment, lust, rage, and the desire for revenge – like us. If they are capable of this, then so are we. Maybe our culture or religion or law or history restrains us, for the most part. But even then, not entirely.

Even we lucky few, in the land of law and plenty, have our share of mothers murdering their children and husbands murdering their wives and every sort of deceit, infidelity, and human predation imaginable. We may not have 200+ acid attacks each year, but not because we’re above them or incapable of such cruelty.

We live in a world in which humans – creatures of rationality and morality, can do these terrible things and allow others around them to do these things. And, things worse then these. There is something very wrong, here.

But, if there is darkness in the human heart, there is also light. If there is horror in the human condition, there is also grace. If there are hero’s in this world, it’s those that recognize the terror and instead of succumbing to it or hiding away from it or deluding themselves that they live in a world of rainbow’s and puppy dogs … they roll up their sleeves and help to correct that injustice, horror, and grief around them. To the best of their ability, at least.

For the better part of a decade, Monira Rahman has fought to provide treatment, counseling and rehabilitation to the victims of brutal acid attacks in Bangladesh. This weekend, Amnesty International Germany will honor Rahman with its annual human rights prize.

Many Bangladeshis also know that there is a hospital in Dhaka, the capital city, where acid survivors can receive free medical treatment and legal assistance and that a telephone hotline is available to connect them with these services. They know that there are new tougher laws against acid crimes. It’s a public awareness that has been created through countless posters, brochures, radio announcements, TV spots, newspaper articles, theater performances, and public rallies — all the work of the seven-year-old Acid Survivors Foundation and its tireless executive director, 41-year-old Monira Rahman.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,406485,00.html

There is so much wrong with this story … but let me begin with the scientist.

“What I’ve seen so far is not compelling in the least, and I think the pictures cast grave doubts on their claim,” Jeffery Meldrum, a Bigfoot researcher and Idaho State University professor, told the Scientific American. “It just looks like a costume with some fake guys thrown on top for effect.”

Meldrum said the DNA test likely won’t prove anything and, at best, might yield a gene sequence that doesn’t match any other known primates.

So, first he (Jeffery Meldrum) claims that this looks like a costume and a fake. Then he goes on to point out that the “at best” the DNA sample may not match any other known primates. Really? That would be pretty astounding, wouldn’t it? I mean, if it just turned out to be Brown Bear or Gorilla fur or something, then there’s nothing to see here. If the sample had no DNA at all, then there would be nothing to see here. But, if the sample contains DNA and it’s similar to other primate DNA but from no known species … how is this not news?

For the record, the story insinuates pretty heavily that this is a hoax and the jerks involved are highly non-credible sources. But, having said that, I still have something to complain about. More then once, on “paranormal” type shows, scientists have devised tests for the “other then normal” phenomenon that they are presented with. Unfortunately, the tests are nearly always one sided. While a failure would disprove the phenomenon, a success would not prove it. This is the same thing presented here! If the DNA comes back as any normal animal then the professor would point and say, “See! A hoax!” but if it comes back as an unknown primate, he would say, “Well, that doesn’t prove anything.”

I’ve seen the same thing with ESP tests. If the testee scores equal to or less then the odds would predict – he’s a sham. If he scores more, then this is not proof and more tests would need to be conducted. Interesting …

So I have not posted in a very long time. Bad me. That doesn’t mean that nothing has been happening – on the contrary! Here is a brief summary.

Bad News – A good friend of mine was diagnosed with a cancerous growth in the bone on his leg. This was a very scary thing to hear, for both his family and for all of us that know and love him. It’s terrifying to realize that in my twenties I kept hearing about different friends getting married or having kids … and now in my mid thirties the news is about illness, divorce and death.

Good News – The cancerous growth was removed and the prognosis is excellent! The expert opinion is that he is going to be A-OK and with some monitoring and follow-up, will live a good long time.

Great News – My brother has proposed to his new girlfriend and given her a beautiful engagement ring!

Weird News – my gf and I went to see Body Worlds 2, at the Boston Museum of Science. It’s a display of real human bodies and body parts that have been ‘plastinated’ and put on display. It was interesting to walk around and see human skeletons, bones, brains, hearts, lungs, livers, and much else besides. It was more then worth it!

Etcetera – A co-worker / associate of mine wanted to point out that his latest blog entry contained some clever ‘atheist’ quotes from famous historical people. The quotes are thought provoking, and the page is low-key and non-pushy.

What annoys me about this and most other efforts by atheists is the interestingly filtered view of history they tend to display. While very few Christians are or have ever been rabid, violent, or offensive – that is ‘Christianity’ itself is displayed. While the Crusades and the Inquisition are often mentioned, I rarely ever see a reference to the Abolitionists, Women’s Suffrage, the Red Cross, or the modern Civil Rights Movement. These were all organized by Christians and supported by Christian values and advocated from Church pulpits.

Do you know what else I rarely see a reference to in all of this ‘xtians just leave us poor little atheists alone’ material? I rarely see references to Mao, Pol Pot, or Stalin. These were Communist atheists who attempted to create new ‘perfected’ states and killed millions of their own citizens. The combined (estimated) body count? 34 million people. So, ‘godless’ governments killed more people and in significantly fewer years then all of the Crusades and the hundreds of years of the Inquisition – combined. Funny, how this rarely comes up.

So, on the one hand not all Christians (or religious folk in general, regardless of faith) are the intolerant devils poisoning our culture and retarding the liberalizing progress of our society; and on the other hand not all atheists are the thoughtful, progressive, tolerant vanguard trying to pull society up and out of the tar pits of superstition and violence.

Snow has been in the vet’s care for one and one-half days. They needed to wash our her scar and today they were going to add two stitches for two small areas that had opened Monday night. She is in good hands and should be able to come home tomorrow morning.

—

On a totally different topic, here is my addition to pop-culture. It’s rude but witty, and totally ripped off of someone else, I’m sure.