Here’s an amusingly phrased frog story - it gave me a smile anyway, although I was hard put to pin down exactly what was funny about it when I came to think on it.
Anyway, here is the species in question, White’s tree frog, or Litoria caerulea.
Litoria caerulea
Daniel Florien over on Unreasonable Faith has been collecting coming-to-atheism stories. This was my brief capsule description:
I was brought up Roman Catholic, including going to parochial school, and was quite into it in my pre-teens - altar boy and all that. Reading the Bible and the various extra-scriptural stuff, I just couldn’t find a way to make it make sense. I tried, though. I even rewrote many of the parts that didn’t make sense, which didn’t go down well with the nuns.
Finally I gave up on Christianity. I examined other religious traditions, hoping they’d do better. They didn’t, although I did have to admit they were interesting to learn about (and made me realize anew that the Catholic tradition I’d grown up with was as weird as any of them). I wasn’t concerned much with community, but I love mythology and ritual. I just wanted it to make sense, and none of it ever did.
Giving up the ‘belief in belief’ was the hardest part. Syncretic paganism satisfied me for a while, rolling my own rituals and riffing on any mythology that appealed to me at the time, but I couldn’t really escape the fact that I was just making it up for the fun of it. I slowly shaded over into purer types of fun, like Discordianism and Sub-Genius.
Finally I just left it behind, coming to enjoy my little rituals as pure OCD indulgence instead of trying to force them into meaning anything, enjoying the myths on the same level as any other type of fiction, and drawing on science and hard-headed skepticism for compiling knowledge.
I’ve been much happier and more centered ever since.
more cat pictures
Bringing this blog to its 200th post is Xenopus laevis, the African Clawed Frog, which is currently the subject of a major study of disease-resistant genes which may provide strategies for avoiding extinctions of many frog species in the wild.
African Clawed Frog
As most of my friends know, I’ve been struck by lightning four times - once directly, once off a tree, once off a railing and once through a land telephone line. I was also once briefly chased by ball lightning but it didn’t catch me. (Some of my theist friends say God’s throwing it at me, but if that’s the case He has been getting feebler each time and has given up or died for some years now.)
Apart from the first, which knocked me out for some indeterminate period of time (I suspect it was only a couple of seconds though) and gave me blinding headaches for a week, none of them did me any lasting harm, so I guess I’m pretty lucky. You might say that a really lucky person wouldn’t have been struck at all, but it does give me a story to tell that not many people can match.
The downside to that, of course, is that I’ve got no actual proof that it happened. There’s a medical report with an EKG in my military service record from after the first one, but it didn’t show anything unusual, so I don’t suppose that counts for much. That’s why I have to envy this lady who got struck in the same manner as my #3, with one important difference: she was filming the storm at the time!
Now that’s lucky! Her camera even kept working! The most fortunate aspect of all of course is that, like me, she took no harm from it. I hasten to add that lots of people struck by lightning (most, I expect) are hurt or killed by it, and anyway it hurts like you wouldn’t believe, so I strongly discourage my readers from trying this for themselves!!!
If you were to travel to the North Island of New Zealand, hike up to the 800 meter altitude mark, take a walk in the broadleaf forest, and turn over a few damp rocks and rotting logs, you may be lucky enough to spot a tiny (30-odd millimeters long) frog named Archey’s frog, or Leiopelma archeyi. You’ll have to be quite lucky because there’s estimated to be only a few hundred of them left.
Or, if that seems like a lot of effort in order to bother the little cuties in their native habitat, here’s a picture:
Archeys Frog (Leiopelma archeyi)
Over on Pharyngula, there’s some beautiful foofooraw going on because some kid took a host out of a Catholic mass to show to his friends, and the Catholic community went crazy over it. Apparently the kid actually received death threats for kidnapping - or whatever the technical term is for absconding with a bit of cadaver - the body of Christ.
That’s the host, for those who don’t know - it’s a bit of unleavened bread which, according to Catholic dogma, actually turns into the flesh of Jesus when the priest prays over it. I grew up believing this kind of insanity.
So PZ chewed them out (sorry!) for getting so psychotic about the treatment of a cracker, and offered to demonstrate some more creative sacrilege if Pharyngulistas would send their Tentacular Overlord the requisite officially transubstantiated cracker. (No, a regular Wheat Thin won’t do - it would taste better, trust me, but it isn’t officially Carne de Christo until the guy in the black frock mumbles over it.)
Long story short, I’m tempted to go to Mass and take Communion for the first time in decades. (I did attend a funeral, three weddings and a couple of baptisms, but passed on the Jesus Snacks.) I’m just bursting with curiousity; what will PZ do with the Bits-O-God that he receives?
Still, I suppose don’t need to subject myself to the mind-numbing tedium of a Catholic Mass personally; the Pharynguloids include a sufficiency of potential Christ-nappers I’m sure. Besides, I wouldn’t go to make my mother happy, I’m not going to go for this far less noble (albeit funnier) purpose.
But really, what can you do to the supposed Body of Christ that’s less respectful than chewing him up, swallawing him and eventualy pooping him out? That kind of thing would definitely be considered less than respectful if you did it to Great Uncle Alberts corpse, much less God’s.
I’m tempted to make a bumper sticker along the lines of “It’s a Child Not A Choice” :
Hungry ghosts leer;
Eyes that blind and
Hidden iron hearts
In cold steam bodies.
Opaque, the air;
Unseen the line
That bound them
That kept me safe.
The world is water;
Outside the deluge
Stealthy fog within
No air can clear.
Even I stream, sweat;
Wiretight small
On my juddering wheel
Only my mouth is dry.
B.T. Murtagh
I know I’ve been hitting the Aussie frogs a bit much lately, but on the Fourth of July we must of course have an American frog! So here we go, live from Minnesota it’s the Western Chorus Frog, Pseudacris triseriata. They’re little (about an inch long) but awfully cute! Don’t you agree?
Pseudacris triseriata
I won’t go into details, but I’ve had a pretty lousy week. Some big things, a lot of little ones, and the cumulative effect was that I ended up getting kind of depressed.
Some good stuff was happening too, though - again, a couple of big good things and some little ones, so it was mostly just me and my cyclical brain chemistry, as usual,
Then I saw this commercial for and by the Discovery Channel, and suddenly the good stuff jumped into the foreground and the bad stuff into the background. (Oh, and this xkcd suddenly made sense!)
So thank you Discovery Channel, and I’ll be seeing you later! ;) Boom-de-yada, boom-de-yada…
 | Troy on Struck by lightning |
 | Liam on How I became an atheist |
 | True Bob on Friday Frog - 200th post! |
| True Bob on Friday Frog - 200th post! |
| True Bob on Struck by lightning |
