Declan Chellar December 31st, 2007
The story about the priests fighting each other at the traditional birthplace of their Lord and Saviour has inspired this month’s new word (just about making it with barely over two hours to go before January):
Ecumaniac: (n) a priest who, instead of promoting Christian unity, decides to fight priests of other Christian demoninations, often with broom handles.
Fly, child of mine! Be free!
Declan Chellar December 31st, 2007
How did parents feed small children before aeroplanes were invented?
Declan Chellar December 30th, 2007
If religion is so great, how come there are so many bullies, paedophiles and bigots in the priesthood? Couldn’t You arrange it so that holy water burned their skin? That way they’d be exposed fairly early on. Or maybe You could have people like that turn into pillars of salt when they are two-faced enough to take holy orders. You don’t seem to do much stuff like that any more. You know, biblical stuff.
Declan Chellar December 30th, 2007
The town of Bethlehem is situated in the West Bank. In that town there is a Christian church called the Church of the Nativity, supposedly built over the grotto where Jesus was born. This church is shared by three different Christian factions, viz, Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox and Armenian, and it would seem that the church is sectioned off for each faction. I use the word “faction” deliberately and you’ll see why if you continue reading.
Each year priests and worshippers from all three factions come together to worship at the birthplace of their Christ but this year, they had an interesting way of worshipping their saviour. Deacons and priests from the Greek Orthodox and Armenian factions started fighting each other with brooms during cleaning of the church because someone from the Greek Orthodox side wanted to put a ladder over the Armenian section of the church. Spitting in Jesus’s face on the event of his birthday. Charming. I think this calls for a “Dear God”.
The irony for me was not that Christian priests were fighting each other at the birthplace of the “Prince of Peace”, but that they were separated by Palestinian police. That’s right, Muslims!
Curious aside: while looking into this story, I looked for Bethlehem on Google maps, but only got a result within the USA. So I looked up Israel. The curious thing was that on the map of Israel, Gaza, the Golan Heights and the West Bank, there are no towns or features. It’s one big blank.
Declan Chellar December 21st, 2007
It used to be that I didn’t have enough porn and my penis was too small.
Now, apparently, those aren’t a problem any more and since I haven’t noticed any physical changes lately, I supposed standards of measurement have changed. These days, I don’t have enough drugs, according to spam comments sent to my ballog and spam sent to my e-mail address*.
I had a poke around the interweb to see if I could find out how much spam costs businesses every year. Janine Warner says the cost is in the order of billions of US$ annually in computer processing alone. Information Week reported in 2005 that the annual cost of loss of productivity in the USA alone was $21.58 billion. That was roughly the entire GDP of Nicaragua.
According to an article on The Register from June 2006, 64% of spam servers are based in Taiwan and 23% are in the USA (research done by a company called Ciphertrust). That’s not to say that the spammers themselves are Taiwanese or American, but that they use equipment and services in those countries. Countries which are not doing a lot to shut down those services and equipment.
The World Bank’s global GDB figures for 2006 state that the USA’s GDP in that year was $13,201,819,000,000 representing 19.75% of the whole world’s GDP of $66,822,997,000,000.
Assuming the cost of spam to US productivity applies proportionately to the whole world, then $21,580,000,000 is 19.75% of $109,266,000,000. That rounds down to $109 billion worldwide. If Ciphertrust are to be believed, the USA is responsible for $25 billion of that and Taiwan is responsible for $70 billion. How come the UN isn’t issuing sanctions?
Spam is kind of like TV advertising. Everyone I know changes channel as soon as the ads come on and everyone I know deletes spam. However, someone out there must be following spam links and actually buying the crap otherwise the spammers would have given up long ago. That guy must spend his whole life in his house, high on pharmaceuticals, yanking so hard on his newly enlarged member while looking at gigabytes of porn that he shakes the strap loose on his fake Rolex.
Step 1: find that guy and bitch-slap him.
Step 2: find the spammers and castrate them.
Step 3: get the governments of the world, particularly Taiwan and the USA to shut down those servers.
* I don’t use my personal e-mail address to register on any websites. That means one of my stupid friends got a virus or trojan on their computer which picked out my e-mail from their address book. If I find out who you are, you’re off my Christmas list. Gobshite.
Declan Chellar December 18th, 2007
Does everyone really have a guardian angel? If so, how come so many children across the world die horribly of diarrhoea?
Declan Chellar December 12th, 2007
I spotted a photo article on the BBC news website today entitled “Day in pictures”. I’ve decided to be cheeky (Who? Me?) and make up my own captions.
In Pakistan, the police have employed Ninjas to keep an eye on Benazir Bhutto.
An Indian extreme sports enthusiast had a lucky escape by landing in a muddy river after both his main parachute and his backup inverted during his descent.
Japan’s leading karaoke conductor practises (you have to be a bit educated to get this one… karaoke means “empty orchestra”).
Photographic evidence is found that oil pollution is not caused by leaks from tankers, but is in fact spread by two blokes, dressed as ducks, with huge shovels.
Africa celebrates its first Gay Pride day with a brightly coloured military fancy dress parade (note the third bloke along copping a sneaky look).
Bored US troops in Iraq invent the game of “Pin the 9mm on the Donkey”.
Prince Charming tries the slippers on the two ugly sisters and finds to his relief that they don’t fit. What must Cinderella’s feet be like?
And finally, Santa makes a mental note to avoid inviting children who are suffering from the common cold after one of them sneezes heavily.
Declan Chellar December 12th, 2007
I don’t know whether I believe in agnosticism.