If you’re a student of culture, a number of things have likely piqued your curiosity; like why so many modern people get drunk about ancient religous stuff.   Take Mardi Gras, for example – go to any Mardi Gras celebration and 98% of people there will be Protestants, so they haven’t fasted for Lent in over 400 years, and 85% won’t know why they are getting drunk at all, but they still act like they are getting ready to starve for 40 days – if by starving we mean not having yards of beer for 11 straight hours.  

It’s a real mystery but at least it gets people thinking about religion and its relationship to Brazilian strippers.

A few weeks later, give or take, we have St. Patrick’s day, a celebration of a guy who wanted to drive out pagan head dresses, hot wiccan chicks and drunken bacchanalia; really, everything that was great about the Celts.  Who in their right mind wants to celebrate that?

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At the University of Indianapolis, communications major Katie Stam is supposedly known for her scholarship, leadership and volunteer work – and not her great legs, despite the fact that this is the one thing virtually everyone else on planet Earth knows about her.

Why are the students and administrators at U of I so jaw-droppingly dumb? Science has no explanation for that.

She’s an aspiring journalist, which may explain their blindness. When most people see journalists, they only see sanctimonious left-wing shills who talk about the thrill that runs up their leg when they dream of Barack Obama and issue pithy platitudes like, “I’d like to say it one more time: ‘Mr. President.’”
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Carrie Prejean, Miss California, USA
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Scheana Marie Jancan
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It’s not often you can boil down complicated abstract ideas of science or culture into simple concepts everyone can understand.  Gems like “for every reaction there is an equal and opposite reaction” don’t come along every day.   But every time someone asks me what science is like I simply say “You’ve seen The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra.  It’s like that” and they nod knowingly.

What?  You haven’t seen it?   Read on my friends.   In a few key phrases you will know everything you need to know.  Science wisdom, as distilled by quotes from one of the greatest science films of all time (and it’s fun for Halloween too) – The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra. It’s also PG and totally safe for older children, unless your kid is prone to irrational fear of Skeletorama-motion plastic props and utters sentences like …

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I’m taking a moment away from crafting “Journey To The Center Of The Uterus”, my opus on reproduction and culture, to discuss something of equal import – namely, orgasms.

It will shock you to know this, but nearly 50% of British women don’t have orgasms. Are they frigid? No, not at all, as my 1999 layover at Heathrow can attest. Science funding is the issue, as we shall see.

As we have discussed in articles like Science Wants To Give You Better Orgasms and Would Female Orgasms Kill Men?, (1) orgasms are tricky business but scientists know what they are doing. Fewer scientists means fewer orgasms. Britain is in the throes of a science funding meltdown so the problem for British women will only get worse. With fewer scientists there can be fewer studies on important stuff like this.

What are we talking about?

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Kendra Wilkinson
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There is a good reason Americans stink at chess – our unfailing optimism. No matter how bad things get with the economy or the environment or (insert your pet cause here) Americans will always believe that, because we have Jessica Alba, we beat the pants off of everyone else. Russians, for example, don’t think that way. Half of Moscow is populated by women hotter than Jessica Alba and they’re all on a Russian dating site hoping to meet an American mechanic who will get them a green card and raise their kid.

Scientists, American or otherwise, are not afflicted by that kind of sunny disposition. People have a perception that science is a happy wonderland where you come up with an idea and everyone rallies around you and supports you while you try to prove it. Nothing can be further from the truth. Science is done by falsification.

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I was puttering around the attic of the Cashominium, trying to sort through some old boxes, and I came across something you all might find interesting. Before any of this makes sense, I need to give you a little family background.

Like many, the Cash family has been here a long time (a long time for America, anyway – here a hundred years is a long time and in Europe a hundred miles is a long distance, so it’s all perspective) but we are not blueblooded fancy-pants Mayflower descendants or anything like that. We arrived just over 160 years ago. The mid-1800s were a popular time to leave Europe, what with land and opportunity here and there being the place where guys like Napoleon were still fashionable and ‘reform’ meant killing a lot of people, but we weren’t the working poor that left because of lousy potato crops or anything so dire.

More predictably, legend has it that old Jebediah left Britain under some questionable circumstances – namely a scandal involving a woman.

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