Tag I Like Me

A Positive Review

I know this is bad form, but I really like this review of something I wrote:

If it is a Poe, it is a pretty clever one: goes suspiciously overboard only 3-4 times

I might need to add “goes suspiciously overboard only 3-4 times” to my bio.

New Venue

I’ve been invited to be a contributor at Secular Perspectives, a blog associated with the Washington Area Secular Humanists.

My first piece is up now, and begins thus:

Have you ever watched a movie where some people are stuck in a broom closet or a train compartment, and wondered “Gee, I wonder how they managed to fit the camera operator in there with all those people”?

The trick, of course, is that they don’t: there’s a set with four walls that make the closet, and they remove one of the walls to allow the camera to shoot the scene. Then they can replace that wall and remove a different one, to shoot the scene from another angle.

All of these pieces of film are then edited together so that as you’re watching the movie as it cuts back and forth from one shot to the next, you’re also seeing scenery and props jumping in and out of existence (with the occasional revealing mistake — glasses inexplicably filling up, cigarettes magically growing longer and shorter, and so forth).

A similar phenomenon goes on in arguments and claims about gods.

They Liked It

If I may boast for a bit, it looks as though the folks at the ACA liked my April Fools piece, enough to mention it on the latest episode of The Non-Prophets (about 6:00 through 6:30 minutes into the episode). (You can listen to the intro to hear where the phrase “Dillahunty International Studios” comes from. Short version: it’s really the host’s apartment.)

Welcome, del.icio.us Readers!

So I took a glance at the web server log, and found that my old article
How Not to Embarrass Yourself In an Argument With an Atheist somehow managed to make its way to http://del.icio.us/popular/.

So take a load off and stay a while. There’s beer and sodas in the fridge.

Oh, and a lot of people commented that the study I mention at the end of that piece is bogus. I don’t remember which study it was, nor could I find it now if I tried, but I’m not at all surprised that it turned out to be flawed. If it hadn’t, it would’ve been huge news.

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