Quickies
Skepchick Quickies 5.7

- Tame you women with new snake oil wonder – From Tort.
- Dear Planned Parenthood – “I sit here and write this in the same way I would try and write to my own mother, expressing gratitude for how she has helped me. Thank you. You have helped me throughout my best and my worst.”
- Image of Virgin Mary appears in bird dropping – From Emory.
- 7 “ancient” forms of mysticism that are recent inventions – From cerberus40.
The image of the Virgin Mary is clearly a case of ‘paradoodya’.
Very sad to see states cutting funding to Planned Parenthood [http://goo.gl/Eu0MT] and by doing so taking away women’s rights. All because Republicans, as a platform, believe that abortions shouldn’t even be discussed as an option even though it a safe and legal way to end pregnancy.
Any oval object with at least 3 bilaterally symmetric layers is an image of Mary. For example, most sunflower seeds. I saw one on a urinal in an airport yesterday, should have auctioned it on Ebay. Damn.
Good frickin’ grief, how are they even convincing women to take that “anti-nagging” potion?
“Honey, you’ve been a bit of a nagging bitch, try this so we can get some quiet around here, okay?”
I don’t see a Virgin Mary no matter how hard I look, but I *do* see an unusually distinct velociraptor head.
As a new skeptic and former yoga teacher I have to comment on the information on yoga. Certainly some gymnastic exercises may have been added fairly recently, but Hatha Yoga (which is what cracked is talking about) has been around at least as long as the text, Hatha Yoga Pradipika, written somewhere around the 1400’s. Hatha Yoga includes all of the current yoga “brands” Astanga, Iyengar, Bikram, etc.. It’s all Hatha Yoga. It’s usually misrepresented as a style all its own.
RE: Holy Shit bird dropping story
Reporter Shannon Dillon of KBTX-TV deeply regrets denting her boss’ car door in the parking lot and getting this assignment. It was an accident, and she hopes that we can all be adults about this. Please.
COTW, right there.
COTW +1!
Apparently the Cracked article went light on the sources and may not be very accurate. Shocking, from such a respected journal.
They’re actually promoting drugging women into being more compliant and less able to think or stand up for themselves? Who else thinks this is just a lighter shade of GHB?
Thankfully, it looks like woo. Not that that makes the sentiments any less disgusting.
The woo factor sort of makes it worse in a way. They’re (attempting) to use jedi mind tricks to subdue women. Makes me want to pull a Han. *twitch*
Ramji: Well, Cracked is hardly a scholarly journal–and that’s still a far cry from the more extreme claims made by practitioners that they are practicing a 5000-year-old meditation technique.
On other news, after reading that article, I clicked on several others, including “The 7 Sleaziest Mating Rituals in the Animal Kingdom”. At the bottom of the article’s first page, there was an ad for a dating site specifically for Christian singles. I found this amusing to no end.
freemage: True … not close to 5,000 years old. But it’s an important claim to make because the popular opinion seems to be that older is better …. :)
Hey, I’ve got a cure for the “nagging” they are complaining about. If husbands would take responsibility for their own chores, health care, and drinking problems, the wives would shut up.
<whinge>Hello? Have you missed all the PrivWhinges in the other threads? We men are entitled to blame other people for all our problems.</whinge>
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Can the placebo effect by proxy work here? If the guy thinks he’s getting nagged less because of the (probably) harmless sugar pills his wife is taking, maybe he’ll try to validate the treatment by actually doing the stuff he’s being nagged about, resulting in less nagging. Meanwhile, his wife can toss the pills in the trash when he’s not looking. Years later, they can discover all this, and either have a good ROFL or get divorced. Win-win.
Why do these women stay married to these idiots? What head-space would these women have to be in to go along with taking “anti-naggin” pills?
Can we COTW comments on other sites? If so, the Virgin Mary bird poop comments had this:
“I agree it looks a little like a vulva, but how can you tell who it belongs to?”
Holy shit.
Sheesh, the cracked.com article’s treatment of Norse religion is utter crap. Yes, many of the stories and myths are from writings well into the Christian era, and Snorre wrote down some of it. But he didn’t write it all and archaeological and other evidence exists to support the current understanding. Yes, there may be bits that are fabricated or just morphed during 200 years of retelling, but oral transmission in an oral culture, especially of poetry, is relatively accurate and apart from Snorre’s standard attempt in the collection of sagas to make the Norse gods ancient chieftains there’s really no motivation for a significant invention of elements of Norse religion.