canspice.org

There are only three webcomics worth reading on a regular basis:

• The Perry Bible Fellowship - Three- or four-panel cartoons that start off normal and cute but usually end up being smutty or disgusting or shocking in some excellent way. Fine examples would be Kitty Heaven, Astronaut Fall, and Freaking Vortex. And PBF gains points for revealing the truth about why there are telescopes in Hawaii.
• Dinosaur Comics - The Google description for Dinosaur Comics is “sexy exciting dinosaur comics for the thinking man or lady”. Hilo theatre fans may appreciate A HISTORY OF HYSTERIA. The Everest Eliminator segueing into Bible II segueing into Reprise Comics is quality. Also, sexy is distracting, ON THE MOON.
• xkcd - “A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language.” The whole set of comics is probably best summed up by Angular Momentum. xkcd caters to math nerdry, but there’s also history nerdry, physics / pop culture nerdry, Unix nerdry, Perl nerdry, and astronomy nerdry. The best ever comic ever written (well, not quite, as Calvin and Hobbes comics win by default) is Science. Bitches.

All three have RSS feeds (PBF, DC, and xkcd) so subscribe to them now.

The Canucks picked up Brent Sopel the other day. Filling out the defence and bringing the mullet back to Vancouver means things are looking good in V-City again!

From the CBC:

Prince George RCMP have issued a public alert after a moose attack in the city on Thursday morning.

A female moose with two calves attacked a 60-year-old woman while she was walking her dog. The woman was taken to hospital with minor injuries while her dog, a cocker spaniel, was so badly injured that it had to be euthanized.

Earlier this month, a moose with calves chased a man in a residential neighborhood that backs onto a hillside.

I would hereby like to claim name creation rights for the musical genre known as “nickelrock”. Nickelrock, whose foremost member is Nickelback, is characterized by crunchy guitars and cheesy sap lyrics. If you hear a song and it sounds like Nickelback, it’s nickelrock. Synonyms for this genre are “shite” and “christ is that Nickelback on the radio again?”

In early January sextuplets were born in a Vancouver hospital. Born after 25 weeks of gestation, the survival rate for the babies was not incredibly high — for single births the survival rate is about 80%, and it’s even lower for multiple early births.

Since then, two of the babies have sadly died.

And were it not for the actions of the BC government, more of the babies would have died. See, the parents are Jehova’s Witnesses, and they don’t believe in blood transfusions. Three of the sextuplets were seized against the will of the parents, and two of them were given transfusions.

The parents are upset, saying that their religious freedoms have been trampled on. They’re right, but it doesn’t matter, as the government’s duty to protect its citizens trumps the individual’s religious freedoms in Canada. In 1995 the Supreme Court ruled on a similar case, stating

while the right to liberty embedded in s. 7… may very well permit parents to choose among equally effective types of medical treatment for their children, it does not include a parents’ [sic] right to deny a child medical treatment that has been adjudged necessary by a medical professional and for which there is no legitimate alternative.

See, in Canada you have the freedom to believe in whatever religion you see fit. But when you try to shield your unwilling children behind the cloak of religion when they’re dying, the government has a duty to protect them. You can choose to pull the wool over your eyes and believe that the Bible forbids blood transfusions (erroneously, some biblical scholars say), but to do it to your children when they don’t have that choice…

As Phil Plait says,

There are so many reasons to fight fundamentalist religion. Your very life — and the lives of your kids — should be at the top of that list.

Hat tip to the Bad Astronomer for the headline ripoff. :-)