Apocalypse Soon: Christians Give Finger to Heathen Mayans and End World First

This headline might come off as something crafted by the funny folks at The Onion (who need to shy away from television and stick to the printed word), but no.  I wish to God it was, but no.  This is all too real.  This is the End of the World, conveniently dated to mark your calendars.

The Cosmicomicon, since its founding all those innumerable, uh, months ago, has been and shall ever be dedicated to discussion of the dark, the weird, the cosmic, and the horrifying.

Well, nothing says darkly weird cosmic horror better than a bunch of Christian loonbags begging God to hit the reset button and unleash the Rapture, dispatching Jesus (who apparently is only the same actual entity as God when not running errands) to hover over the earth in his finest whites, and pluck out all those who willingly said the magic prayer of salvation (and MEANT IT!), then hand deliver the elect to the Big Cake and Punch Social in the Sky.

Meanwhile, the rest of us "unsaved" non-Evangelicals - including Catholics, Lutherans, Methodists, Mormons, Unitarians, Branch Davidians, Christian Scientists, Scientologists, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Whos, Druids, Deists, Taoists, Shintos, Sikhs, Wiccans, Walrusi, Zoroastrians,Vegans, Las Vegans, Hipsters, Sportos, Motorheads, Geeks, Sluts, Bloods, Wastoids, Dweebies, Dickheads, and ESPECIALLY the Jews - are left to deal with the rise of the AntiChrist, who formerly was - I was told as a child - none other than the inspired former Soviet President (and ironically, slayer of the atheistic USSR) Mikhail Gorbachev...

Yes, this was required reading at my childhood church

... but now is probably Barrack "Secret Muslim" Obama, with someone like George Soros or Michael Moore running a close second (as the below results of a 3 second Google search show, Obama IS in fact in the running for AntiChrist, and isn't just AntiChrist evil, but MUSLIM AntiChrist evil).

But hey, at least we get to see a Hydra, will enjoy less traffic and more parking (at least in the Red States), and get to witness the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse.  This should make Notre Dame fans happy; and let's face - due to their emphatic embrace of the papacy - there's going to be a LOT of Notre Dame fans left hanging around for the Obama (née Gorbachev) Monster Show.
 
And all of this is going down in two months.  Less.  May 21, to be exact.  The billboard by my house says so.  The EBible Fellowship says so.  Hell, the BIBLE says so (according to EBible Fellowship, *ahem*, "math").

6.21.11.  Chalk that, and then eat shit, Mayans.  Your dirt worshiping asses are a year too late.  Our God wins.

I wouldn't normally bat an eye (or baseball) about yet another declaration of Armageddon from wacky Christian nut jobs breeding their way to supremacy in this country.  But this new Salvo For Salvation literally parked its stupid ass up the block from my house and dared me not to snicker, or semi-publicly mock on my semi-read blog.

Same billboard, but from a different location... This movement has some cash behind it.

You think I'm kidding?  Read this, and weep.  Or laugh.  Or laugh til you weep. 

Or actually, prepare yourself for the end, which includes staying home and spending as much time with friends, family, house pets, and materials things as possible.  Much like the "unsaved" of all Catholic and Protestant-based denominations (not to mention those who dare believe in religious traditions that weren't lucky enough to come from Israel), exactly ZERO dogs go to heaven.  Nor do plasma televisions.  Baseball card collections do make it past the Pearly Gates, however, as everyone knows that God is a Yankees fan.

But do stay home and make every precious, prayer-filled moment count before The End.  I vigorously encourage this, cuz, well... I want to take advantage of less traffic and more parking as soon as humanly possible.  I don't have time to wait until the end of the world, and I, like Jesus, have errands to run.

Birthed From Poison - Not ET, But Something Possibly Just as Extraordinary

To follow up on my posting yesterday:  Those amazing little guys up above, discovered in the brine choked, ominously-named Mono Lake in the shadow of God-kissed Yosemite National Park....

... have just turned the biological world sideway, as - for the first time in scientific history - a terrestrial life form has been discovered that utilizes arsenic (read as: "FUCKING POISON") to create DNA and synthesize proteins.  Or, put simply, they turn poison into life.

This is a truly earth-shattering discovery, as the GFAJ-1 strain of extremophilic bacteria shows that life doesn't necessarily need to cleave to the Big Six building blocks essential for most known life, those being carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, calcium, and phosphorus.  So, if that's possible on Earth, held in the thrall of the Big Six for eons, what does that mean for the prospect of life developing in different, non-Earth-like environments spread across 11 dimensions?  Class?  Yes, that's right.  It RAISES the prospect.  It basically announces that the sky - and limitless light years beyond the sky - is truly the limit, and the possibilities endless. 

As we delve deeper into the land and sea with one hand, while reaching further into space with the other, we are going to keep finding new discoveries that challenge the status quo.  How we handle these sharp 180's will dictate how we evolve and grow as a species.  Do we roll with the New Knowledge, or shut down and pick up our pitchforks?  I think I know how it'll go down, but don't want to jinx it...

I also like the ideas of finding a "second genesis" and a "shadow biosphere" discussed in the linked NatGeo article, which was the scientific inspiration of the exploratory mission on Mono Lake.  Sounds like something out of a Lovecraftian or other "weird fiction" story.  We dig shit like that.  It serves as inspiration for what WE do.

Overall, I think this exciting discovery again reminds us that sometimes the biggest secrets are found within the smallest amongst us.  And, sometimes, we can find the alien, the bizarre, and truly otherworldly right in our own backyard, if we keep our eyes and ears open and tuned to the proper frequency.

The Weird is all around us, as we spin like madmen at 1.3 million miles an hour around our sun, around our galactic axis, around the center of the universe and all space and time, where Azathoth slumbers in his easy chair to the sounds of muzak piping.  In these strange and uncertain times, lets remember to appreciate the extraordinary and the bizarre that is close to home while still peering into the furthest abyss, and never stop searching for the truth as we can comprehend it.  It's what we do, we fragile, smart-mouthed "bags of mostly water."  Why stop now?  Why not boldly go, and see where we end up?  Why not touch the face of God?

When Viewing the Universe With a Certain Set of Eyes... What Will We See?

How about Azathoth chilling at the center of the Milky Way, for starters.

"Azathoth" (c) by Paul Carrick (http://www.nightserpent.com/)

What else could you call a roiling, gaseous bubble of elemental forces stretching 50,000 light years from tip to tip, that is billowing out of the center of our galaxy?

We were unable to see this until the development and deployment of the Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope, which specializes in the search for gamma radiation, as well as elusive "dark matter," the eldritch stuff that makes up 80% of our known universe, yet has baffled scientists for almost a century.  While on quest, Fermi detected a powerful expulsion of  gamma rays, which are invisible to the naked eye (and capable, apparently, of turning pencil neck scientists into hulking green monsters in tattered purple jorts when agitated), coming from this impossibly massive, bubbling shape towering both above and below our very own galactic plane.  Now, suddenly, we're able to see these mysterious, energy-emitting shapes, which definitely moves us forward in our understanding of the seemingly limitless dimensions of elastic space and time.

Which begs the question:  If this was there all along, looming large, and was only recently seen, what else is out there, or even right HERE, that we cannot see, but is most definitely THERE? Will we see ghosts?  Will we see God?  Will we see GODS?  Should we see ghosts and Gods?  Can our mind handle the knowledge of the things that move unseen around the most likely through us, or are we best left to shortsightedness, boxed up in three ordered dimensions?  Will the extra magnification and the far reaching lenses we send into the very womb of the unknown spacial abyss build us up as a human race, or tear us down with madness and the crushing realization of our own innate insignificance and flimsiness compared to our distant cousins long forgotten, who grew up on the other side of the universal tracks?

With a certain set of eyes, what else will we discover, and will we be glad in our discovery?  Will we one day long for the blindness of ignorance and our old sets of eyes, that saw little, yet kept us safe and blissful in our limited sight, right to the campfire's edge?

Art by Kris Kuksi

What else lurks in the limitless void of darkened chaos that has so far gone unglimpsed?

Hallowmas Eve - Day Four: Gut a Gourd, Save a Turnip - or, The Devil is WAY Stupid

There are times when I just fall to the floor, overwhelmed by the immense stupidity that seems to plague humanity at every turn.  Not that I'm some MENSA-grade rocket scientist (the math was always too confounding), but at least I TRY to be intellectually curious and relatively creative, endeavoring to give back a little to the world and the silly creatures that currently top the food chain.

But then I come across an artistic work or unselfish act that relights my faith in humanity, and thinks everything just might turn out okay for us as a species.

Today, it was jack o'lanterns.  Other days, it might be a painting or an inspired piece of prose or even a clever Internet meme.  But, today, it was was jack o' lanterns.  One of them which looks like this:

That someone can look at a round, orange gourd, and find THIS inside of it, fills me with glee and bolsters my opinion of homo sapiens (squared).

More here, courtesy of our friends at The Guardian in the UK.

In closing (and to add volume to this posting without lifting a finger other than to "cut" and then immediately "paste"), I offer a bit of odd and supernatural back story on the ol' carved pumpkin, with this one overriding moral:   Don't be a cheapskate, and always pay for your drinks.
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People have been making jack o'lanterns at Halloween for centuries. The practice originated from an Irish myth about a man nicknamed "Stingy Jack." According to the story, Stingy Jack invited the Devil to have a drink with him. True to his name, Stingy Jack didn't want to pay for his drink, so he convinced the Devil to turn himself into a coin that Jack could use to buy their drinks. Once the Devil did so, Jack decided to keep the money and put it into his pocket next to a silver cross, which prevented the Devil from changing back into his original form. Jack eventually freed the Devil, under the condition that he would not bother Jack for one year and that, should Jack die, he would not claim his soul. The next year, Jack again tricked the Devil into climbing into a tree to pick a piece of fruit. While he was up in the tree, Jack carved a sign of the cross into the tree's bark so that the Devil could not come down until the Devil promised Jack not to bother him for ten more years.

Soon after, Jack died. As the legend goes, God would not allow such an unsavory figure into heaven. The Devil, upset by the trick Jack had played on him and keeping his word not to claim his soul, would not allow Jack into hell. He sent Jack off into the dark night with only a burning coal to light his way. Jack put the coal into a carved-out turnip and has been roaming the Earth with ever since. The Irish began to refer to this ghostly figure as "Jack of the Lantern," and then, simply "Jack O'Lantern."

In Ireland and Scotland, people began to make their own versions of Jack's lanterns by carving scary faces into turnips or potatoes and placing them into windows or near doors to frighten away Stingy Jack and other wandering evil spirits. In England, large beets are used. Immigrants from these countries brought the jack o'lantern tradition with them when they came to the United States. They soon found that pumpkins, a fruit native to America, make perfect jack o'lanterns.

(Courtesy of History.com)

The Possibilities of the Infinitesimal

From the unthinkably massive yesterday to the amazingly ephemeral today...

I've often pondered the possibility that our entire reality - everything we know about our expanding universe and all space/time - could possibly be taking place inside the nucleus of an atom making up the "body" of what we know as God, or some other unknowable Entity from which Everything was birthed.

Seeing photos like these only reinforces these mind bending notions.

What if we're living inside the nucleus of an atom...

And a whole reality lives inside the nucleus of our atoms...

With another plane of existence living inside the sub-atomic Quarks of those atoms...

Populated by a whole ecosystem of life forms living inside the Neutrinos...





With another entire Multiverse existing in particles our clumsy human brains haven't even discovered yet?

What would that do to us as a species, our understanding of who were are, what is out there, and what It All means?

Who says monsters only cast large shadows?