From Fortean Times:
15 May. St Dymphna's Day. She is the patron saint of the insane, but she too is just in the mind, probably derived from ma dompna ('my lady') the traditional address of a mediaeval poet to his lady-love.
Makes perfect sense that the patron saint of the insane would herself be imaginary.
"He's the big Mac Daddy of ancient Greece, always gittin' down at the sacrificial feast"
etc etc
When raincoaster checks the ol' raincoaster stats, she looks for many things: total hit count, most popular blog entry, signs of the coming Apocalypse…it's like necromancy, but you don't have to wash your hands afterwards unless you get very excited. Among the things that she looks for are links through which readers have clicked to arrive at raincoaster, the blog. And this one from yesterday particularly caught her eye.
It appears to be a Google translation of this post, a roundup of search engine terms that brought people to the blog. This is known as a feedback loop, and is sneakily effective in gaining new readers and hooking back the old ones, even if they were only looking for Narnia Mango Somali Porn.
Oops, I did it again!
Anywhoooo, the words on this page that were beyond Google's ability to translate were quite interesting. In the interests of creating a new, more selective feedback loop, and in the interest of confusing the Chinese, I will here list all terms in that raincoaster post found untranslatable by Google:
Narnia, Ian McKellen, Fatman, pervs, snotflower, creamer, ventibrevemocha, lattes, buggers, cholesteral, patchouli, eggnog latte, decaf, comin', Pablo, Sandford Tuey, raincoaster, voyeur, appy, tiaras, 9.11, WhiteSpot, Hogwarts, Deuel, Cates, vagina, spankin', Conference, shebeen, Wuthering, screencaps, jocari, Doktari, sumpin', slimin', spay, watchin'.
Did you ever do those assignments in school where you were supposed to use each of a whole snotload of words in a sentence? I was terribly literalminded, and always tried to get them all into one sentence, which drove my teachers nuts, but even I would have to admit defeat when faced with the above list.
FYI Here are today's search engine items that led here. I must say, we're getting better. Classier, weirder, and less Somali-porn-based. Some Somali trivia: You know Iman? When she left Somalia she took everything worth looking at with her.
beautiful agony, shit eating, dorks, eagle cam in Vancouver, Canada, Juvénal Habyarimana -site:africadatabas, Celebrity Censorship, jesus lego, birthday animation, cocaine corner, Giant Squid
Via BoingBoing.
The Vatican never actually abandoned the practice of keeping pet scientists, a fact which I welcome with equal parts relief and shock, for they have been very quiet lo these last four centuries. I didn't think they'd ever recovered from the Galileo PR disaster.
But there are scientists at the Vatican, and one, Brother Consolmagno, is in fact an astronomer, and not only is he over that Galileo thing, he's also over that Copernicus thing, and he's right out there giving interviews to The Scotsman in which he says…
"Religion needs science to keep it away from superstition and keep it close to reality, to protect it from creationism, which at the end of the day is a kind of paganism – it's turning God into a nature god. And science needs religion in order to have a conscience, to know that, just because something is possible, it may not be a good thing to do."
He also had a few pithy points to make about Papal PR as well.
Brother Consolmagno, who was due to give a
speech at the Glasgow Science Centre last night, entitled "Why the Pope has an Astronomer", said the idea of papal infallibility had been a "PR disaster". What it actually meant was that, on matters of faith, followers should accept "somebody has got to be the boss, the final authority".
"It's not like he has a magic power, that God whispers the truth in his ear," he said.
raincoaster 