Get Cynical

For more than 10 years, I have spent only Godless dollars. Using a red pen or stamp, I mark a circle and slash over the word “God” (as pictured above) on every bill that passes my way. When I make a withdrawal from the bank ATM, I immediately “de-God” each of the crisp new $20s. When I spend the $20s, and receive $1s, $5s, or $10s in change, I “de-God” each bill before passing it along. No merchant or business has ever refused to accept this “godless” money.

I probably spend at least fifty “godless” bills per week. That adds up to more than 2,500 “godless” bills per year.

Assuming that each dollar bill changes hands at least 20 times in the life of the bill, I estimate that my “godless” money passes through at least 50,000 people per year. In the past 10 years, I have thus circulated enough “”godless” money to reach a half-million people.

(via Boing Boing)

The Stardust closed today.

LAS VEGAS — The Stardust, the neon-wrapped casino with a mobbed-up past whose 1,065 rooms once set the standard for size on the Las Vegas Strip, witnessed its last roll of the dice Wednesday.

Wistful longtime employees and loyal gamblers gathered for a last farewell to the iconic 48-year-old institution, which is to be razed early next year to make way for Boyd Gaming Corp.’s planned $4 billion Echelon Place resort.

The Stardust opened July 2, 1958, as the world’s largest hotel and catered to middle America with $6-a-night rooms and low-minimum stakes gambling.

From LiveScience.com:

The complex digestion process ensures that almost no useful energy goes unused. The average bowel movement is three parts water to one part solid matter. Bacteria make up 30 percent of the solid stuff. The same goes for indigestible foods like cellulose and extra fiber. The remaining 40 percent contains various inorganic wastes, fats and used-up body substances like red blood cells, which are released from the liver in an orange-brown compound called bilirubin.

Errr…

(Thanks, I think, Jabbwocky)

The differences between muslim veils.
(via Linkfilter)

BURJ AL ARAB – The Arabian Tower of the Jumeirah Beach Resort. With 321 meters, this is the world´s tallest hotel, only 60 meters shorter than the Empire State Building. This all-suite hotel stands 27 double-height storeys high and comprises 202 duplex suites. Your transfer to the hotel may be arranged by one of the world´s largest fleets of Rolls Royce Silver Seraph.

(Thanks Wrenchy)

From USA Today:

The federal government’s “no sex without marriage” message isn’t just for kids anymore.

Now the government is targeting unmarried adults up to age 29 as part of its abstinence-only programs, which include millions of dollars in federal money that will be available to the states under revised federal grant guidelines for 2007.

The government says the change is a clarification. But critics say it’s a clear signal of a more directed policy targeting the sexual behavior of adults.

“They’ve stepped over the line of common sense,” said James Wagoner, president of Advocates for Youth, a Washington, D.C.-based non-profit that supports sex education. “To be preaching abstinence when 90% of people are having sex is in essence to lose touch with reality. It’s an ideological campaign. It has nothing to do with public health.”

Abstinence education programs, which have focused on preteens and teens, teach that abstaining from sex is the only effective or acceptable method to prevent pregnancy or disease. They give no instruction on birth control or safe sex.

(Thanks to a reader who sent this in to me. Sorry, I lost the email but not the link)

Good!

After a brief moratorium, YouTube is once again a leading source for fake news.

Thousands of clips from the Daily Show and the Colbert Report reappeared on the video site Tuesday after being yanked over the weekend due to a copyright complaint from Viacom, Comedy Central’s parent company.

Full episodes of the programs, on the other hand, were no longer available through the site.

From Ask Metafilter:

Like one of those strong-man competition guys (the ones who lift those big boulders and carry around telephone poles), or some other freakishly stong person, could one of them actually kill himself by ripping off his own head? Or would other physiological factors make this feat impossible?

There’s a name for this?

Russian reversal is a type of joke by Yakov Smirnoff which frequently appears in many online communities, in particular Slashdot. The general form of the Soviet Russia joke is that the subject and objects of a statement are reversed, and “In Soviet Russia,” or something equivalent, is added. For example:

In the US, you can catch a cold.
In Soviet Russia, cold catches YOU!!

(via Kottke)