The Atheist Blogger

In my random stumbling around on the internet, I found a bunch of creationist websites that contained photos of various creationists as part of some kind of “about our team” page. Now some of these pictures are just plain and boring, but there are a few that simply cry out for a funny caption. So I’ve decided to create a caption competition in order to correct this massive lack of creationist captions, and here is the first picture.

So dear reader, what exactly is Eric Hovind reaching for? Why does he have a look of terror on his cute creationist face? Why is he clinging to that rock so desperately? The answer to those questions is up to you.

Now onto the issue of a prize. As a student I generally don’t have any money, which means I cannot promise a prize, although I do have an extra signed copy of Ray Comfort’s latest masterpiece “You can lead an atheist to evidence, but you can’t make him think”. To be quite honest, such a book would be better off as a booby prize instead, but it is all I can offer at the moment. Perhaps I could get some cheap badges made, I’m open to suggestions.

So really, it’s a double competition now: Whoever comes up with the best caption and a great idea for some cheap (but cool) prizes will win…er…one of the prizes (and a copy of Ray’s book that I will sign / doodle in). You have a week to do so; off you go!

On Valentine’s day, I took 3 of my student group up to London in order to protest the Vatican’s interfering in Italian politics, and their general views on women and homosexuality. It was a great day out, and we managed to attact quite a few protestors for the march, which started at the Natural History Museum, and ended at the Italian Embassy. It was great to meet some famous people there, like the political activist Peter Tatchell (who performed a citizen’s arrest on Robert Mugabe twice), and the President of the National Secular Society, Terry Sanderson.

As promised, I took loads of photos, and those of you who have me on Facebook can simply view the two albums there. For those who don’t use Facebook or haven’t added me, I have installed a cool plugin for the blog that makes my facebook albums available through a special gallery. If you wait for the entire page to finish loading before clicking on anything, each picture should appear in a nifty JavaScript viewer which you can use the arrow keys to move through.

Album 1 (60 photos)

Album 2 (22 photos)

My student group is currently planning a trip to the Darwin Exhibition at the Natural History Museum, which we will hopefully do next weekend, although tickets are selling out faster than we originally thought, so we may have to do it in early March.

Human error will always be the bane of technology, and the more people who look at something, the more errors will be found. This is certainly shown to be true when you compare something like Windows to Linux (the latter being more stable and secure because of all the people who can look at the code). Another example cropped up in Wales the other day:

Lost in translation...

For those who don’t live in the UK, Welsh road signs are put in both English and Welsh since both are official languages of the country, and us English-born chaps are too arrogant to learn Welsh. The English in the sign above is perfectly readable. Unfortunately the Welsh reads:

I am not in the office at the moment. Please send any work to be translated.

Apparently the English people who make the signs needed a translation and emailed what was needed to their Swansea council colleagues. The “out of office” auto-response replied, and they assumed this was the translation they needed.

Of course, there are two people at fault here. Firstly there are the people who make Welsh road signs and yet don’t have anyone who speaks Welsh on their team, or anyone to confirm the translation. Secondly, the person who thinks that out of office auto-responses should only be in Welsh, when they know full well that people are emailing them for translations.

It’s common sense really…*sigh*.

Comedy website Something Awful have a load of photoshopped reverse magazines that PZ Myers pointed out. A “reverse magazine” is the process of taking a well known magazine (New Scientist etc) and rewording the title / front cover so it covers exactly the opposite of what it should. There are quite a few religion / belief based ones which I found amusing.

1. New Scientist to Old Scientist, with the great science behind Flat Earth. Alas the last gathering of online Flat Earthers (or FE’rs as they liked to be called) have abandoned ship, but their website and forums can still be viewed in the Wayback Machine.

Read more…

Ewan (guy who looks after the server) found this earlier today and I couldn’t resist posting it: