Survival Arts

Quote of the Day

I think the hidden benefit of Islamic extremism is that it freed the atheists from their closets. The old mindset in the United States was that almost any religion was good, and atheism was bad. But since 9/11, atheism has moved above Islam in the rankings, at least in the minds of Christians and Jews in the United States.

Ask a deeply religious Christian if he’d rather live next to a bearded Muslim that may or may not be plotting a terror attack, or an atheist that may or may not show him how to set up a wireless network in his house. On the scale of prejudice, atheists don’t seem so bad lately.

Scott Adams, Dilbert.Blog, "Atheists: The New Gays"

[Y]ebisu sold now as "Sapporo Reserve" in the U.S.?

A few days ago I ordered an Ebisu/Yebisu beer at Tanto Japanese Restaurant (an izakaya) in Campbell, California, and was told by the waitress that it's now being sold under the label "Sapporo Reserve":

Yes, that's a Japanese beer sold at a Japanese izakaya, served in the glass of a Korean competitor, Hite.

Spam payload of the day

Gmail's spam filters are pretty good, and I usually delete the contents of my spam folder unread, but I felt like checking the payload of one, which contained this gem:

"...the pimp needed to dance, so conformists should never self-destruct and could do party tricks... A mastadon near the inferiority complex, some somewhat incinerated bottle of beer, and a hardly snooty football team are what made America great! Another fried football team graduates from the load bearing mortician. white-hot honkies imitated one fascist. A photon sells an accurately radioactive burglar to an apartment building from a chain saw...."

Ah, crunchy spam goodness! Was this an autogenerated non sequitur, or actually composed by a real (addled) person?

Quote of the Day

The world and the universe is an extremely beautiful place, and the more we understand about it the more beautiful does it appear. It is an immensely exciting experience to be born in the world, born in the universe, and look around you and realize that before you die you have the opportunity of understanding an immense amount about that world and about that universe and about life and about why we're here. We have the opportunity of understanding far, far more than any of our predecessors ever. That is such an exciting possibility, it would be such a shame to blow it and end your life not having understood what there is to understand.

Richard Dawkins, from an interview with Sheena McDonald