Think about it...

"I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world."

"The meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discouraging rational inquiry."

"It has become almost a cliche to remark that nobody boasts of ignorance of literature, but it is socially acceptable to boast ignorance of science and proudly claim incompetence in mathematics."


-Richard Dawkins

Spoiled

I said I would work late tonight since Ursula had to go on an unexpected trip to Florida. It seemed like a good idea at the time, some extra dough and since it is so slow this month I could work on something like a new comic or whatnot. Well now that the time is here I don't feel like staying at all! I have so much to do before leaving for Montana. I can't believe how things just creep up on a person. And I am not at all inspired by any one or thing in the news...Montana looks pretty, it will so nice to get away, there is too much sickness and death surrounding A&M. I just heard, after lunch, that an MD's son died suddenly over the weekend, he was 22. And about two weeks ago I found out that a 25 year old who works in Admin had a misdiagnosed brain tumor. She is doing well with radiation, but still!!!


My dad and Di are watching Suzie (my dog) while I am in Helena, I am sure that's going cause my dad to complain for years to come.

AST-W

I couldn’t tell you how I did on the AST-W for sure (it was a four hour test, but I finished in three, is that a good sign, I can’t remember). I nailed the essay but the multiple choice part gave me a headache. First off there is so much rhetoric and bullshit. They try to trick you by putting two correct answers, but one is more correct, according to the practice test guide they posted on the DOE website. Hopefully the majority of the answers I picked were more correct answer.

After that I was walking home minding my own business when who do I see…Juan Valdez and his mule! I had to get my picture taken with him. So I waited in line with baited breath. He was a man of few words, but his eyes spoke volumes.

Pictures from Rasha's Memorial

The rest of the images are posted at picasa

Nodding off at the front desk...

I am oddly, incredibly tired this morning. No particular reason I can think of, but I can't keep my eyes open or a thought focused in my head. It sucks too because today is one of those rare days where the phone is quiet and the people are sparse. I could get so, much done up here, like studying for my ATS-W test (which some how creeped up on me and is suddenly tomorrow). I tried doing jumping jacks because Josh said that they would get the blood flowing, but now I think he was just fucking with me. It seemed like a good idea until one of the MD's passed by mid jack. He didn't say anything, but if looks could be translated into words his said "what the fuck you crazy bitch?!?"

While I am trying to dust off my slumber read this:

"A friend, an intelligent lapsed Jew who observes the Sabbath for reasons of cultural solidarity, describes himself as a Tooth Fairy Agnostic. He will not call himself an atheist because it is in principle impossible to prove a negative. But "agnostic" on its own might suggest that he though God's existence or non-existence equally likely. In fact, though strictly agnostic about god, he considers God's existence no more probable than the Tooth Fairy's. Bertrand Russell used a hypothetical teapot in orbit about Mars for the same didactic purpose. You have to be agnostic about the teapot, but that doesn't mean you treat the likelihood of its existence as being on all fours with its non-existence. The list of things about which we strictly have to be agnostic doesn't stop at tooth fairies and celestial teapots. It is infinite. If you want to believe in a particular one of them -- teapots, unicorns, or tooth fairies, Thor or Yahweh -- the onus is on you to say why you believe in it. The onus is not on the rest of us to say why we do not. We who are atheists are also a-fairyists, a-teapotists, and a-unicornists, but we don't' have to bother saying so."-- Richard Dawkins, following a list of excerpts from hate mail sent to the editor of Freethought Today, after she won a separationist court battle, in "A Challenge To Atheists: Come Out of the Closet" (Free Inquiry, Summer, 2002)

Isn't he smurfy!?!

I have a crush…

On Richard Dawkins

“Many of us saw religion as harmless nonsense. Beliefs might lack all supporting evidence but, we thought, if people needed a crutch for consolation, where's the harm? September 11th changed all that. Revealed faith is not harmless nonsense, it can be lethally dangerous nonsense. Dangerous because it gives people unshakeable confidence in their own righteousness. Dangerous because it gives them false courage to kill themselves, which automatically removes normal barriers to killing others. Dangerous because it teaches enmity to others labeled only by a difference of inherited tradition. And dangerous because we have all bought into a weird respect, which uniquely protects religion from normal criticism. Let's now stop being so damned respectful!" R.D. -Septemeber 2001

I picked up The God Delusion the other day at B&N and I always knew I like Richard Dawkins, but now I am in love.

5 Reasons you should love him too:

1. is a really smart guy

2. is an atheist

3. has his PHD from Oxford which gives him tons of creed, I have to admit I am turned on by intellectual prowess. Plus, he is a professor there too, who doesn't want to do an Oxford professor (your are only lying to yourself if you say you don't)

4. has a bloody cute British accent

5. believes Atheists can be happy, balanced, moral, and intellectually fulfilled and they should be proud, not apologetic, because atheism is evidence of a healthy, independent mind

Sorry Teri Garr, but I think I found a new bedroom poster. I will always love you but…it’s time.


"...isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?" -Douglass Adams from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

The Velvet Bore Mine

In order be less of a homebody, and see the people I care about more, I went to McCarran pool to see Blue Velvet, well much to my chagrin it turned out Blue Velvet was last week and this week’s film was actually The Velvet Goldmine. Not a movie I was interested in seeing, but I was there, the film was there, it just sort of happened. It cost me precious time and a little more respect for Christian Bale. This the second movie he’s been in, where I found my self thinking more oftern then not, 'when will this fucking movie have mercy on my soul and roll the credits?'

Yes, I could have left, but then I wouldn’t have been able to say with total unabashed certainty that, Velvet Goldmine SUCKED! It was an excuse for Todd Haynes [Molesting...I meant directing Jonathan Rhys Myers, left] and Michael Stipes (who co-produced this snore feast) to see a lot of hot boys making out and waving their cocks around. It was like soft core porn, with a good sound track, A-list actors, and full- frontal. It had this wanna be Citizen Cane thing going on (blatantly) except there was no mystery to solve, or maybe there was but I lost interested. The flashbacks got so convoluted I didn’t know who was having them anymore. In one scene Bale’s character has a flashback to a flashback that Toni Collette’s character had earlier. And Collette was having flashbacks to events she wasn’t even there for. Plus Collette, who is British, was supposed to be American; but half the time she had a British accent (which I hate, if you can’t do the accent don’t do it, but please don’t go in and out of it, thank you Helen Hunt!). It was so bad it made me want to assault people. Maybe that is why Bale beat up his Mum; perhaps he caught a scene on Showtime as he walking out the door.

Bottom line:By trying to encompass the lives of multiple characters and achieve a dream-like menagerie, "Velvet Goldmine" gets lost in it own confusion. Though it strives to be "Citizen Kane," it's only a glam-drenched, decadently, adorned toilet, that Orson Wells might have shat on while writing some of his masterful script.

In: J.Lo Out: Michael Phelps

Poor Jennifer Lopez. The new mom is training for a triathlon, but everyone is too busy watching the Olympics to notice.

Lopez, who appeared on "Good Morning America" Aug. 18 to discuss her preparations for the Malibu Triathlon, was overheard saying after the segment that she “couldn’t understand why everyone is talking about that swimmer,” according to a GMA source. “She couldn’t come up with (eight-time gold-medal winner Michael) Phelps’ name, and then she yammered on about how she was the one training for a triathlon just six months after giving birth, and how that was the big story right now, not ‘the swimmer.’

“She said, ‘I am Jenny from the block, who the hell is he?’ and she was pissed!” a GMA insider told MSN.

Later we received part of the tape from GMA, sent anonymously. Apparently the camera never stops taping, even during commercials, however, the footage is not allowed to be aired or sold without all parties’ permission, an MSN rep was told when investigating the credibility of such a tape.

J.LO: I sing, I act, I dance, I grew up in da Bronx…on the block and I get a new mattress when ever I stay at hotel! Does that pussy swimmer do all dat? I didn’t think so, and I had two babies while training for a triathlon, that is three different sports not just swimming. It’s because I am a strong Latin American woman, dat’s why I don’t get the attention I deserve.

Lopez is planning on donating money raised for her race to the Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles.

J.LO: I bet Mr. Swimming beauty is not donating his gold metals to sick children; he doesn’t even care about his fans. But Jenny from the block does, she remembers the little people! She remembers where she came from…the block!”

To help drum up attention, she started a blog to share tips on training. “Touch up makeup prior to your run” hasn’t made its way into any posts, despite Lopez being spotted arriving in Central Park with her makeup artist later in the day.

one funeral and three weddings

This year has been full of death. My mom in November, Peggy in June, and Rasha in August. But for the rest of the year (or at least next three months) my life will be full of weddings, preferable but still a kind of a death, a death of something I can’t quite wrap myself around. It’s hard to think anything but ‘what’s that point’?!? A downer I know, but life is so conventional. I am tired of the rites and rituals that we deem civilized. Besides none of them will be as life affirming as Rasha’s funeral. And now that it’s over I feel kind of depressed. There’s nothing to work towards anymore, nothing I can do that would be extreme enough, everything is slow, and takes time and dedication, my mind is so fragmented! There is never enough time! How do people do it? Work, make art, take a class, and have a social life? I am such a proponent of prescription speed, I know it would be dangerous, but what isn’t, I would be so productive!


I am sure the weddings will be great and I will have fun and look pretty in my dresses, but it is hard to change modes, go from down to up (maybe it’s a gravity thing). I have to finish the pictures form the funeral so I can post them, but the sunlight was so bright, I have to fix a lot of them. I need a polarizing filter.

Rahsa's Memorial coverage

This article appeared in print in the Sunday Agusut 17th edtion of the New York Times

Press Release/Memorial Service

August 14, 2008
Rasha Shamoon: Celebrating a Life
Rasha Shamoon, 1976–2008
At about one a.m. on Tuesday, August 5, Rasha Shamoon, 31, received what would be fatal injuries when she was struck by an SUV while riding her bicycle home to Greenpoint, Brooklyn. When the paramedics arrived, she was not breathing. They revived her and transported her to the hospital.
For the next several days, her friends and family gathered at New York Presbyterian/Cornell Medical Center and waited for news. She never regained consciousness. On Saturday, August 9, Rasha was declared brain dead. On Monday, August 11, she was removed from life support after many of her organs went to help other people.

In the days since then, an amazing force has come together to honor Rasha and the deeplove of life she embodied. Her many, many friends have all worked tirelessly with herpartner, Josue Cedeño, also a longtime resident of Greenpoint, and with their families to put together a celebration of Rasha’s life in her community. We are having a New Orleans-style parade and wake that we have put together for this Saturday, August 16, 2008. The Hungry March Band will play the processionfrom St. Anthony–St. Alphonsus Catholic Church in Greenpoint to Coco 66 at 66 Greenpoint Ave. Rasha’s family and friends will come together to celebrate her life and the love we all have for her.

Rasha was a special person, and the love and concern that have surrounded her and her partner and family since she was first struck by the car are not surprising. She was born inBaghdad, Iraq, on September 1, 1976, to an Iraqi Catholic family. The Shamoons emigrated in 1978, going first to the United Kingdom. They lived in Edinburgh, Scotland,for a year and Coventry, England, until April 1982, when they immigrated to the UnitedStates, living first in El Cajon, California. They moved to Massapequa Park, New York,on Long Island, in 1985.

Rasha graduated from Massapequa High School in 1994. She attended James Madison University, in Harrisonburg, Va., where she earned a dual bachelor's degree in biology and psychology in 1998. She moved to New York City, living first in Manhattan, then the Bronx, before she and Josue came to Greenpoint in 2003.

In 2004, Rasha earned her first master’s degree, in biology from Hunter College of theCity University of New York. In May 2008 she earned another master’s in psychology(mental health counseling) from Brooklyn College. She was also a popular instructor of biology and human anatomy at LaGuardia Community College, Pace University, and Hunter College. The Department of Psychology at Brooklyn College and the Brooklyn College Foundation are establishing the Rasha Shamoon Memorial Scholarship to honor Rasha’s dedication, intelligence, and spirit.

Rasha was very active in the Greenpoint YMCA, where she and Josue were soon to receive their black belts in shotokan karate from Sensei Brian Singh. Rasha was a talented musician who played bass guitar and drums in several bands in New York City, most recently Quick Release. Rasha and Josue were also members of Transportation Alternatives and Times Up, progressive cycling organizations in New York City. She rode in several citywide bicycling events, including the Transportation Alternatives Century, a hundred-mile ride around the five boroughs.

She is survived by her partner, Josue Cedeño, a business analyst for Citi, of Greenpoint,Brooklyn; her mother, Samira Shamoon, a retired homemaker and social worker, and her father, Dr. Adel Shamoon, a retired orthopedic surgeon, both of Marion, Massachusetts;her sister Dr. Suhair Shamoon, a dentist of Marion, Massachusetts; and her sister and brother-in-law Dr. Saba Shamoon-Michaud, a pediatrician, and Dr. Jeff Michaud, an OB/GYN, and their children, Mira Cristina Michaud, 7, and Joel Shamoon Michaud, 5,of Mattapoisett, Massachusetts.

-Mike Haskell

_________________________________________

A Celebration of Rasha's Life

St. Anthony-St. Alphonsus Catholic Church862 Manhattan Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11222 US
Saturday, August 16, 11:00AM
This celebration and tribute will be an all-day event at multiple locations. Please join us in saluting our beloved Rasha.

Date: Saturday, August 16th from 11 am onward
Host: Josue Cedeno, 917-664-6672

Saturday's Schedule:
11 am: Catholic Funeral Mass at St. Anthony-St. Alphonsus Catholic Church
Location: 862 Manhattan Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11222

11:45 am: New Orleans-Style Jazz Parade with the Hungry March Band
Click here for map/route

In case you can't view the link, the procession walks from church south on Manhattan Avenue to Noble St., then to West St. and north to Greenpoint Ave., ending at the wake location, Coco 66.

12:15 pm: Arrive at Coco 66 for wake celebration:
Location: 66 Greenpoint Ave., Brooklyn, NY 11222

At the wake there will be presentations, readings, live music, speeches, reminiscences and food and drink. Coco 66 will run a cash bar, and we will have snacks. Full meals from the menu will be available from the restaurant next door.Please contact Josh Koehn, the emcee, ASAP at celebraterasha@yahoo.com if you would like to speak, sing, or perform at the wake. If you would like to write something for Josh to read, he will be happy to do so.Please bring:Brightly colored umbrellas and scarves for the New Orleans-style parade and any printed pictures of Rasha that we will add to a large collage at Coco 66. We will also have some extra umbrellas and scarves available.

Condolences for Josue Cedeno and the Shamoon family can be sent to:Josue Cedeno146 Freeman St./Apt. 2-RBrooklyn, NY 11222Josue asks that any memorial donations in Rasha's honor be made to Transportation Alternatives. Use this link to their support page and please ask that a notification be made to Josue at josuecedeno@yahoo.com.

Thank you,

Alison Domzalski

I miss you Rasha

September 1, 1976-August 9, 2008

Void

A close friend of Josh & mine got hit by a car yesterday. She is now brain dead. She is gone but still there. I can’t believe it. She lived with such a zeal for life and experiences. She loved her friends sincerely. She got or was about to get her black belt in karate, she just finished her second masters. Her first was in biology her second was in sociology. She drew and painted, played bas and the drums, she was good at everything she tried. She was so opened I never felt judged or embarrassed when I shared some of my insanity with her, in fact I believe it made her love me more. When I think about her family’s anguish about what her boyfriend of 8 years is going through I get sick. Her mother reminded me so much of my grandmother yesterday (my grandmother lost her son and you could see it in her face always).

There is so much pain in this life, so much random inequity. Life is all about learning to lose things. If we live long enough we lose control of our bladder, our minds, our independence. I have always felt like I didn’t quiet belong here, not like I am an alien, but when I was really young 4/5, I was convinced everyone was hiding something from me. I thought they took another form when I left the room, like they became furry monsters (I guess Sesame Street shaped my reality then). I wasn’t scared of them I just felt left out, like I was the only person in the world that didn’t change. I used to try and sneak up on people, to expose their ruse, but they were too quick. Anyway, I have a point and although this will sound self absorbed, pointless, and not what one is supposed to take away from these tragedies, I feel like I should have died instead. If there had to be one less person in the world why take someone who loved to live so much, why not take someone who just sees deterioration? Yes life is not fair we all learn that one way or the other.

When my mom died in November I felt imbued with purpose. I missed her and still do but I felt like life was short and I needed to try and make mine better. Now I just feel angry and closed off. Like I want to go live in a padded room and be as isolated as I feel, no joy no pain. It’s kind of Zen really. If I replace padded room and medication for green forest and meditation people would think it was a good thing.

I know I will feel better in awhile and maybe inspired by her lust for life. I just don’t right now.

Straight Talk 2

Grrrr

Blogger won't let me post my comic, it keeps saying internal error!

According to that sad lonely lady, Jewish lightning is when an owner sets their house or business on fire to collect the insurance money. My father, looking ready to bite this woman's head off, actually remained calm long enough to hear about her fucked up life. By then he was too interested to alienate her. Besides whoever thinks of a Jew committing insurance fraud? I can see if she said cheap Jew or small dicked hairy stingy Jew, but a Jewish arsonist insurance frauder ...that's just silly. It's like saying sober Irish or abortion pushing Catholic conservative.

The Dark Knight sucked!!!

Was Batman’s voice too deep? No he just talked too much. Since when did the mysterious, dark, brooding batman become such a chatter box? And who edited this prolix picture? It was like someone started to edit it, but then they got bored, so s/he stopped. There was no pay off at the end, except that is was over. Heath Ledger was fine as the joker, but geezus he people think he is second coming of Christ because he OD afterwards. Just thinking about the movie makes me both angry and sleepy so I will just say; my father (who abhors corny feel good films and musicals) said he wished he had gone to see Momma Mia instead.

My father had these thoughts on the Dark Night; he said Rachel was a slut because she kissed two men in the same movie, he wanted Batman to die, he felt Morgan Freedman under used; he thought way too many people knew Bruce Wayne was Batman so he shouldn’t even bother hiding his identity, and he almost cried when the Joker burnt all that money!

I know this is going to be an unpopular position to take but who wants to be popular with people that genuinely enjoyed that movie? Not me!

Aside from that I had a nice time upstate, my father took me to eat at the Lobster Pier, this seafood restaurant we used got to with my mom. We got there and found it didn't open for about 40 more minutes. This odd woman told us if we got out of the car she would knock on the back door and they would let us in early, I could already tell she was lonely and wanted to talk to us. Over the the next 40 minutes we learned what Jewish Lightning was, all about her daughter who either was killed by her abusive boyfriend or killed herself, about both her husbands, and her son who had a drug problem.

I will elaborate on the Jewish lightening comment, but after lunch, because Ursula will be in soon and she is all encompassing. Also I am finished with my new comic strip but I sent it to myself in the wrong format. Either Josh will figure out how to send it to me at work or I will have to post it later tonight.