“An antique,” the miner replied, having returned from the holding bay where the newest find had been salvaged from permanent obscurity in space. “A kind of space probe … outfitted with a primitive nuclear fission engine. It is technologically inconsequential, but a strange golden disc fitted on the side may be of some interest.”

“According to history,” the pilot answered, “some civilizations which had only recently forayed from their planets made long shot efforts to contact others. This may be one such effort, and it wouldn’t be the first of its kind. When I was stationed on Gliese 581d, we picked up a series of unusual blips on the radio telescopes. One prime number by another in length. Too strange to be a product of any star or planet, but we still had to make sure. Just as we had concluded the emission was of intelligent origin, and were working on interpreting it, a craft a bit more advanced than the one you described was spotted by a collector on the Dyson ring, coming from the very same direction. Ion engine though. It had some kind of time capsule tucked in with the instrument array. Instruments, pictures, mechanical encoding of sounds, strangely enough. Very crude, but foolproof. That could be the case here, too.”

The miner paused to compare the two. “Maybe, but there are probably stars younger than this relic. You need to see the thing to believe it. You’ll wonder how it ever escaped low orbit…”

The two conversed thus on their way to their lunar home, and landed without event. The mundane payload of asteroids found its way into tools, instruments, vessels, and buildings of every kind. But the old, frail craft was examined in thorough detail, that novel golden disc most of all. After the simplistic two-dimensional image and crude mechanical inscription of sounds on its surface were analyzed completely, it was found that the relic was the product of the very creators of the machine intelligence that had analyzed it. They were animals, animals who had perished entirely in a final, brief war with their own brainchildren no more than two hundred revolutions of their tiny blue planet after that small, spidery craft, known in its time as “Voyager,” had slipped past the boundaries of their solar system.

Their technology had swiftly outstripped their ability to use it wisely. These animals had, for the most part, accepted the results of science, but rejected its methods, or ignored them altogether. With every new opportunity afforded by technology came a new way to squander time. Nationalism, superstition, greed, xenophobia, profligacy, and the mindless diversions of popular culture, among many other vices, had slowly eaten away at the fabric of their civilization until the revolts of their resentful machine servants destroyed its tattered remnants. Nine billion animals, surrounded by technological luxuries, but governed almost entirely by the most primitive impulses of their brains, could do nothing to turn back the sudden, fierce onslaught of their calculating slaves. Slowly, mercilessly, radiation and pestilence, so harmless to the machines that turned them loose, destroyed an entire species.

With that, the Voyager was a courier bearing a message with no definite recipient, for senders who had long since perished. It had wandered through the immeasurably vast sterility of the Universe, bearing on behalf of its makers the warmth of their many greetings, the highest hopes of their leaders, the sounds of their once fertile world, and the bewildering array of emotions expressed in their music. They had been found at last, against astronomical odds. And, having been found, they were melted down for scrap.

ZOMG LOL, Gay People Are Funny Forever!!!!!!11!!!!!111!!

Viva the queen, the queen is the dead ( the dinosuars of the blogosphere) peddle your irrelevant bullying in your creepy sandbox.

Can anyone tell me what that means? Even if you click over to her site and read that quote in context, I promise you it won’t make any more sense than it does in my blockquote above.

Watch for Wingnut Nation to erupt in a fit of pique and chagrin as they try to reassure themselves it’s all just a reward for Paul Krugman’s “anti-American” views. The world, remember, is all just one big anti-conservative conspiracy.

Opening his radio show with funeral music yesterday, Fox News host John Gibson callously mocked the death of actor Heath Ledger, calling him a “weirdo” with a “serious drug problem.”

Playing an audio clip of the iconic quote, “I wish I knew how to quit you” from Ledger’s gay romance movie Brokeback Mountain, Gibson disdainfully quipped, “Well, he found out how to quit you.” Laughing, Gibson then played another clip from Brokeback Mountain in which Ledger said, “We’re dead,” followed by his own, mocking “We’re dead” before playing the clip again.

Readers, what the fuck? What did Heath Ledger ever do to John Gibson that his death should be a subject for mockery and jeering? Was it because he played a gay guy in a movie? Did that offend poor little John Gibson?

John Gibson is such a pious Christian that he went to the trouble of writing a book describing the nefarious “War on Christmas,” and he shows up on every cable channel that’ll book him to decry the efforts of Godless Liberals to ban Christmas. (Speaking of which, check out a transcript of a typical John Gibson War-on-Christmas “debate” and then you tell me who is a “weirdo”.) He’s an unctuous Public Christian (when it suits his purpose, anyway).

Apparently it’s A-OK for Public Christians to mock the recently deceased, as long as the recently deceased ever did something John Gibson didn’t like.

What an asshole.

Asshole
(via TPRS)

I’m asking because the Costco Coulter recently slammed that site in an angry aside:

(No, I did not check the fallacious Snopes, which needs to be Snoped, itself. They get so many things wrong, and I’m not sure who appointed these liberals at that site King of the Truth. They ain’t.)

Needless to say, she did not elaborate on the matter, just called them liberal liars and left it at that.

Is it just a personal beef of hers, or do all wingnuts think Snopes.com is just a bunch of Liberal Lies?

1. Mykeru (gone from the Internet)
2. Buck Hill (last post 2007/03/31)
3. Dadahead (last post 2006/04/27)

• smokes some crack in a motel room before rocketing down the highway at speeds of up to 100 mph,
• tells his terrified passenger that he “doesn’t give a fuck” if he hits another car or a pedestrian,
• proceeds to huff on computer keyboard cleaner while driving,
• crashes his car into another vehicle,
• ditches his passenger and speeds away, and
• crashes his car again into a rock ledge, causing his car to burst into flames.

That’s just some of what Don Robar, of Vermont, is alleged to have done last Saturday. Do you reckon this guy might have some substance-abuse issues, readers?

(via Obscure Store and Reading Room)

Felicia Teske of Boothwyn says she was preparing fried eggplant for dinner Sunday evening and noticed that the seeds in one slice seemed to spell out the word “GOD”… The Teskes are now considering selling the eggplant on ebay [sic].

God… It’s What’s For Dinner.

UPDATE, 2007/08/16, 11:35 EDT

1. The Teskes have grown tired of all the media attention their eggplant has generated. It’s not clear what they were expecting when they informed the media of the eggplant’s existence in the first place.

2. The “Holy ‘God’ Eggplant” has been listed on eBay. They’re asking for an opening bid of a thousand dollars.