Honestly, I agree with some of the theoretical underpinning of incarceration. The US has gone way, way, fucking overboard in implementing it, to the territory where human rights violations live (see: untreated medical conditions, horrific overcrowding, the current hepatitis epidemic, trust me it goes on like this for a long time). One thing I’ve always had a soft spot, however, is the prison break.
Yes, I know there’s bad people in there, see sentence one.
But Cracked fucked up. They put together a list of awesome prison escapes, and they didn’t mention PAPILLON. There is NO motherfucker in the world more dedicated to escaping and living his life than Papillon. Perhaps every word in the book wasn’t true. But even if only one in five of the fucked up things he went through in that book actually happened, he’s still dragging the world’s biggest pair of balls behind him everywhere he escapes from. Let’s just say this: Henri Charriere, AKA Papillon, was sentenced to a life sentence at a penal colony in French Guiana. He ended up living free and happy in Venezuela, most decidedly not a French penal colony.
That is pretty awesome.

Governor Bobby Jindal of Louisiana is a national disgrace, and Chris Matthews, despite his other idiotic failings, sees that clearly. The guy is a creepy mix of horrorshow handpuppet and pathetic drowned goat, and he talks like Forest Gump is handing him lines real-time from under his podium, Police Academy-style. Wait, that was a blowjob. Great now I’m picturing the retarded Howdy Doody getting blown by Tom Hanks.
Jindal has a long list of horrible shit in his pocket, but first and foremost is his insistence that bible shit be taught alongside science. I’m all in favor of having more instructional choices in our high schools. You want a comparative religions class? Great! That would be awesome. But science departments deserve to be used to teach science. Inserting “intelligent design” or whatever else creationists have decided to call it into science classrooms is fucked beyond belief.

What can I say I'm a wild man.

Phil Plait of Bad Astronomy and the JREF gives us a speech he wrote almost five years back:

I know a place where the Sun never sets.

It’s a mountain, and it’s on the Moon. It sticks up so high that even as the Moon spins, it’s in perpetual daylight. Radiation from the Sun pours down on there day and night, 24 hours a day — well, the Moon’s day is actually about 4 weeks long, so the sunlight pours down there 708 hours a day.

I know a place where the Sun never shines. It’s at the bottom of the ocean. A crack in the crust there exudes nasty chemicals and heats the water to the boiling point. This would kill a human instantly, but there are creatures there, bacteria, that thrive. They eat the sulfur from the vent, and excrete sulfuric acid.

I know a place where the temperature is 15 million degrees, and the pressure would crush you to a microscopic dot. That place is the core of the Sun.

I know a place where the magnetic fields would rip you apart, atom by atom: the surface of a neutron star, a magnetar.

I know a place where life began billions of years ago. That place is here, the Earth.

I know these places because I’m a scientist.

It goes on, read the whole thing, it’s great.

Neat.

Let me show you it

Did we dress up like whores? Check! Check! Check!

Did we dress like whores? Check!

does anyone understand how happy I was when I finally got my tiny plastic sword? anyone?