Saturday, June 5, 2010

Dealing with Traveling Evangelists: Preach The Boot

Here's a great story about two effective ways to deal with traveling evangelicals. You can impale them on their own spear:



Or you can satirize them:



In this second scenario, a student set up next to the evangelist and preached the word of the boot, and it's protection from the evil wetness. Shamed, the evangelist had little to say except "You're all going to Hell!". Like their cousins the Teabaggers, they have little defense from satire, because most people can't tell the difference at a glance. For the greatest example of this, read Mark Twain's The War Prayer.

The victims in the pictures are Brother Jed and Sister Cindy, who, those of you who've gone to college in the last 50 years know, travel around the country delivering their folksy fire-and-brimstone Christianity. I remember spending part of my afternoons mocking Cindy mercilessly. The big burr up her ass then was rock-n-roll, and it was going to send us to the LAKE...OF...FIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIRE!!! We'd bring a jam box and sing along to Stairway to Heaven while she ranted. I also recall one year a huge transvestite dressed for Halloween showed up and confronted Cindy, who literally curled up into a ball until the, um, guy(?) left.

Jed wasn't much fun then, looks like nothing changed. They must have found a fountain of youth somewhere, they don't look to have aged a day in 20+ years. But then, they came pre-aged.

Friday, June 4, 2010

Science and Intuition

Good science often starts with intuition. Bad science ends with it.