Episode 177 – The One Where Beaster Day Makes A Splash!

In This Week’s Show, episode 177, Jesus is proud to announce the winners of his ice-cream naming contest on Facebook. New flavors include Strawberry Stigmata, Messiah Marmalade, and Gun.

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify | Android | Stitcher | Blubrry | TuneIn | RSS

In This Week’s Show, episode 177, Jesus is proud to announce the winners of his ice-cream naming contest on Facebook. New flavors include Strawberry Stigmata, Messiah Marmalade, and Gun. Now, grab a beer and help us test the god hypothesis — because, while Mithras (the Persian god of light)  hasn’t struck us down yet, we are trying his patience! Shea’s Life Lesson This week I learned that if you drink a bottle of wine before you walk the dog it sort of feels like you're trying to solve a crime. Jenn’s Actual Lesson Did you know that Mithraism, the worship of Mithras, has no written narratives or theology from the religion that have survived? The deity was absorbed into several other religions throughout history and is thought to be an inspiration for the sacrifice/resurrection story of Jesus. But before we get to all that, let’s have a beer!

This Week’s Beer

The Boot | Abita Brewing Co. From: Kevin - who’s so badass he sent a 6-ier!
  • BA Link: http://bit.ly/2GNMgn7
  • BA Rating: 3.47/5
  • RB Link: http://bit.ly/2prMwk7
  • RB: 29/50 Overall, 44/50 Style
  • Untappd: http://bit.ly/2DIKMXY
  • Untappd: 3.56/5 after 10,808 ratings
  • Style: Kölsch
  • ABV: 4.8%
  • Aaron: 8
  • Jenn: 5
  • Shea: 9
  • Steve: 5

This Week’s Show

Round Table Discussion No new Patrons, or iTunes reviews. We need to thank the folks over at Talk Heathen for giving us and WyoAIDS.org a shoutout on their call in show! Find more about them at talkheathen.com Speaking of calling it - you can do that at 513-760-0463 - Just like this Fossil Fishie did! And we have some updates! It’s been months in the making, but it finally happened: “Mad” Mike Hughes finally launched himself in his homemade, steam-powered rocket, and — in a shocking turn of events — didn’t blow himself the fuck up in the process! The flight, which reached a speed of around 350 miles per hour according to one of Hughes’ assistants, sent the 61-year-old limo driver to a height of roughly 1,875 feet — or a little less than a quarter of Wrathful Studio’s altitude. So, is the Earth flat? No. And 1900 feet isn’t even close enough to the altitude required to see it’s curvature. His next plan — presumably titled Project Insight — is for a gas-filled balloon that would take him and his rocket into the atmosphere before ignition, with the actual launch happening in mid-air taking him… through the balloon I guess?.. and to an altitude of 68 miles… because he clearly hadn’t Wile E. Coyote’ed this shit enough already… Regarding last week’s 31 thousand dollar dining room debacle. Dr. Snoozefest would like you to know that it was neither his wife, nor he, who was at fault, but in fact Jesus because of the sermon on the mount… or something. The quote was a confusing and forever-taking, but it ended with "I take responsibility," so at least there’s that. Finally, that knob on YouTube who thought she’d get some sweet-ass likes by testing a kevlar vest with a .44 has been sentenced for murdering the fuck out of her boyfriend in glorious 1080i. She’s released on time served plus 10 years probation, she can never own a gun, and she can’t profit from the video … which seems to indicate it’s still online and monetized… wtf!

Headlines

HL1 - You Scream, I Scream… http://bit.ly/2GvQrGs We all scream for a dead, frozen, jew-zombie! Wait. Wut? Toronto chain Sweet Jesus, which first opened in 2015, announced plans to expand into the U.S. in October. But some Christians aren't thrilled with the company's presence down South. "The company's name and logo are seriously offensive," the petition written by actual adults on Christian site Return To Order said, forgetting to preface “seriously” with “very yes much bigly”. "The first S in the word Jesus is a lightning strike, reminiscent of the Nazi-style used by the SS, and the "T" in "SWEET" is often shown as an inverted Cross on the company's various products ... We cannot remain silent while Our Lord is blasphemed!" They said of a frozen confectionery, not the thousands of molester-priests hiding in their institutions. For the record, the S looks like melting Comic Sans. "Even if this were some innocent faux-pas, it would still be unacceptable! However, this is anything but a mere mistake. Both in their promotional materials and menu selection, it is plain to see that [owners] Richmond and Todai have every intention of mocking Christ and Christianity. If anything could qualify as 'hate speech', this is it!" Says the partition, which links to Activist Mommy, the self-proclaimed proud runner-up for Queerty’s 2017 Worst Person of The Year Award. But yeah, she probably knows what hate speech looks like, she writes enough of it. HL2 - Dick Embigginers! - https://n.pr/2Gr3PM5   YouTube announced that it will place more restrictions on firearms videos hosted on its website. "We routinely make updates and adjustments to our enforcement guidelines across all of our policies," a spokesperson for YouTube said in a statement. "While we've long prohibited the sale of firearms, we recently notified creators of updates we will be making around content promoting the sale or manufacture of firearms and their accessories, specifically, items like ammunition, Gatling triggers, and drop-in auto sears." Without going into all the nitty-gritty details these changes ban channels that
  • seek to sell guns or gun accessories like bump stocks or extended mags,
  • produce content enabling the modification of guns, especially anything that increases fire rate,
  • provide instructions for the making of silencers, high capacity mags, ammo (not entirely clear if this includes reloading), and,
  • show users how to use or install anything mentioned above.
So that’s a pretty long list of stuff the ammosexuals will have to abstain from. Luckily they are, for the most part, supporters of abstinence-only programs and are sure to accept this reasonable precaution taken by a private company on their own e-property… No? Ok… Video creators receive 30-days notice so that they can delete or edit their videos but some have reported their content has already been removed. Spike's Tactical, a Florida-based manufacturer, posted on Facebook, "The Liberal Left will slowly chip away at our freedoms and erode our rights, and the first step is to squelch our voice. To say we're f*cking pissed is an understatement." Side note; according to the American Bar — or as Shea knows them, the people who make lawyers — the First Amendment "limits the government's ability to suppress speech," but doesn't bar such suppression by private companies. Like Alphabet, Google’s parent company, which also owns YouTube. Like others, InRangeTV, which has some 144,000 subscribers on its YouTube channel, has chosen to publish videos on an adult website called Pornhub. InRangeTV also posted some crying-man-baby bullshit about the first amendment on its Facebook page highlighting that it’s stuff is down but “how to make meth” isn’t. YouTube responded by deleting the offended meth channel too. I took a … quick … look at InRangeTV’s PornHub channel and learned some interesting stuff. In a surprisingly forward-thinking move 43-year-old InRangeTV has marked itself as gender non-binary, bisexual, and in an open relationship. Their turn-ons include “Digital Rights”. They’re an up and coming channel with 9 views and 1 comment from DaddyRollingStone “A golden age of internet porn and guns has begun” HL3 - Jesus Should’ve Taken The Wheel… - http://bit.ly/2GeW2h5   Jenn often talks about Jesus being involved in every part of Georgian life. Unfortunately, he’s a tad irresponsible when it comes to cars that aren’t broken down on someone’s lawn. Please to meet Bakari Warren. While out and about with her two kids, 5 and 7, she realized that not only had Jesus not taken her wheel, but enticing him to do so would be the best way to forever engrain his righteousness in her kids' minds. So, taking the next, we’ll call it logical, step she told her kids to buckle up — which, side note, they fucking should have been already and if you’re in a car now without a seatbelt this is the sound of us judging you — and then she drove her SUV right the fuck into a concrete pole, presumably, Fight Club style. No word has been given on what the kids wished they’d done before they died… luckily, because no one died. When asked if they thought she did it on purpose, one daughter replied “Yeah because she turned. Her eyes was closed and she was saying, blah, blah, blah, ‘I love God,’ she didn’t want us to just have a car accident. She wanted us to know that God is real.” The kids are staying with their grandparents, who I’m sure is less Jesus-y than their mom…, while Warren is in jail. Unfortunately, there’s been no word as to why, if Jesus was gonna save them from the car wreck, she asked them to put on their seatbelts, but let’s all just take a moment and be glad she did.

This Week’s Stories

Creepy, Creepy Facebook https://cbsn.ws/2E6drXc https://cbsn.ws/2E67RnQ Facebook is the 900- billion pound gorilla of social media and it’s been abusing its position at the top for years. It’s no secret that when you join Facebook, you are not the customer, not at all in fact. You. are. the. product. You, and all of the information they can glean about you, is what Facebook sells, and sell you they do, to the tune of nearly 16 billion dollars in net income in 2017 (on over 40.5 billion in revenue). They know so much about all of their members that it’s creepy. Just the other day, I got a notice on my phone showing me people that I might know. It is a student who works for our department, who at the time, I didn’t even know his last name. I asked him about it and he said that he didn’t specifically list on his FB acct. that he works for the university at all, much less our department, but somehow, FB was able to piece together that we worked together. Creepy. Most everybody knows by now that nefarious actors have been using FB’s ability to use that data it collects to micro-target advertising in order to influence the political process. Cambridge Analytica’s data-scraping of FB profiles allowed them to build detailed voter profiles and then exploit that information by showing people ultra-targeted ads to help convince the fence-sitters to vote for Dumpster fire. Many Russians have been implicated in doing much the same thing, but also in creating shill accounts on FB and Twitter also specifically to influence our elections. Old news now right? Well, it’s worse than many thought. Turns out the FB has also been collecting contact names, telephone numbers, call durations, and text messages from people who have been using Facebook and Messenger on Android devices. Now, of course, FB says that this was only done with users who opted in to have their data scraped and that the data is, “to improve people's experience across Facebook”, but to me it’s still creepy as hell and to my mind this kind of shit should be specifically disallowed, unless the user (product) specifically and purposefully turns it on, never by clicking a default accept button. But then, I’m not a fucking creep. This “feature” was introduced in 2015, and according to FB, “If you chose to turn this feature on, we will begin to continuously log this information.” The data collection can be disabled in a user’s settings at which time they say all of the data that was collected will be deleted. So, should we all just delete FB from our computers, phones, and lives? Well, that’s not so easy, is it? Even if you delete your FB account, FB doesn’t just dump all of your data in the digital dustbin, but rather, they keep, "backup copies for a reasonable period of time.” They also retain copies of “some material” from deleted accounts w/o personal identifiers. Also when you delete your account your user-generated content (photos, posts, etc) is dumped, but all of your log data is retained–forever. Data about you posted by friends, family, etc. will remain with FB for as long as those individuals remain. It’s also hard to just delete FB since in the last few years, so much of what we do with our lives ends up there. For many of us, it’s become THE way to keep in touch with people we would otherwise have long let go, and there’s no real reasonable alternative, is there? The moral of the story is pretty simple. Whenever you use a service that doesn’t cost you any money upfront or continuously, YOU are the product. Whether it’s FB, Twitter, Snapchat, Flickr, etc. If they aren’t charging you to use the service, then they are making money via advertising, and you are what they’re selling. It’s up to us as consumers to be vigilant in making sure that we don’t release more information to the world that we’re comfortable with. Second Half Quiz: Weird Easter traditions around the world! The Guardian - http://bit.ly/2E6bQkd 1.) In which country is it traditional to craft, and then consume, a lamb made of butter on Easter Sunday? Denmark, Spain or Poland? This seems to be more of a Russia thing than Poland, sorry Guardian quiz. Russians usually dig into a large piece of butter that’s in the shape of a lamb. This tradition is based on the religious idea that lambs are lucky since they’re the only animals whose form Satan couldn’t take.

2.) In which country is it traditional to compete to crack each other's Easter eggs? Ireland, Romania, Nigeria? The eggs are often red and are sometimes cracked on other people’s heads while shouting ‘Christ is Risen’. In England, the game is played between pairs of competitors who repeatedly knock the pointed ends of their eggs together until one of the eggs cracks; the overall winner is the one whose egg succeeds in breaking the greatest number of other eggs. The world egg-jarping championships have been held each Easter Sunday at Peterlee Cricket And Social Club County Dorham England, since 1983. 3.) Where might a German family hang its Easter eggs? On an Easter tree, above the fireplace or on your car mirror? The tradition in Germany to decorate the branches of trees and bushes with eggs for Easter is centuries old, but its origins have been lost. The egg is an ancient symbol of life all over the world. Eggs are hung on branches of outdoor trees and bushes and on cut branches inside 4.) In English speaking countries, when should you traditionally decorate your eggs? Good Friday, Easter Sunday or the Saturday before Easter? The Easter egg tradition may also have merged into the celebration of the end of the privations of Lent in the West. Historically, it was traditional to use up all of the household's eggs before Lent began. Eggs were originally forbidden during Lent. 5.) What do Easter bunnies symbolize? Good fortune, fertility or chattiness? The first Easter Bunny legend was documented in the 1500s. By 1680, the first story about a rabbit laying eggs and hiding them in a garden was published. These legends were brought to the United States in the 1700s, when German immigrants settled in Pennsylvania Dutch country, according to the Center for Children's Literature and Culture. While the US has the Easter Bunny, Australia has the Easter Bilby bringing the eggs. One of the reasons behind this change is to create awareness of the bilby which is an endangered species. Plus, Aussies aren’t super fans of the rabbit after they decimated the land thanks to their invasive introduction. Since bilbies are also called rabbit-bandicoots, it’s close enough.

6.) Which leader presented his wife with a jeweled Easter egg called Peter? Nicholas II of Russia, John Major or Napoleon Bonaparte? Better known as a Faberge egg, one is one of a limited number of jeweled eggs created by Peter Carl Fabergé and his company between 1885 and 1917.

7.) Where is it traditional, on Easter Monday, for young men to wake up girls they wish to court by drenching them with water? Canada, Latvia or Poland? (Also the Czech Republic and Slovakia) Also called Dyngus Day. After all the water had been thrown, the screaming girls would often be dragged to a nearby river or pond for another drenching. Sometimes a girl would be carried out, still in her bed, before both bed and girl were thrown into the water together. Particularly attractive girls could expect to be soaked repeatedly during the day. They may also be whipped with switches made of pussy willows. Ladies, get their revenge on Tuesday when tradition has it that they can then throw dishes or crockery back at the boys. One Easter Sunday, men aren’t allowed to cook or even stand in the kitchen or else his mustache will go gray and the Easter bread dough will fail to rise. 8.) What would you be most likely to see on hanging from a Papua New Guinean Easter tree? Hair, Liquorice or Cigarettes? At the front of the church for Sunday service is a small tree or if they are unable to have a tree several branches are tied together, on which sticks of tobacco and packets of cigarettes are hung. After the service, these are distributed amongst the congregation. 9.) In what country might you see young girls, dressed up as witches, trick-or-treating on Maundy Thursday? Argentina, Sweden or Ireland? Maundy is the term used for Jesus washing his disciple's feet before the Last Supper. It comes from the Roman term "Mandatum", which was a rite performed during the mass of, you guessed it, food washing. I couldn’t find anything about Trick or Treating type activities related to Maundy Thursday, though. I think the quiz writer is getting this confused with the Scandinavian Walpurgis night, traditionally on April 30th. Also in Finnish tradition, witches fly down to Germany to party with the devil on Easter. 10.) In which US state is it traditional to light a large fire on Holy Saturday? New York, Texas or Hawaii? Well, it’s Texas, bc they will light a big ass fire for whatever reason. But I can’t really find how this is unique to Texas. Traditionally, large fires are lit at dusk in numerous sections of Northwestern Europe. These regions include Denmark, parts of Sweden as well as in Finland, Northern Germany, some eastern provinces in the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Austria. The only Texas related info I could dig up involved the town of Fredericksburg. Each year the residents have Easter Fires the night before Easter, commemorating a peace treaty with the Comanche Indians. In 1847 when the original treaty was signed, the Comanches lit signal fires on the area hills. One mother calmed her children's fears by telling them the smoke came from the Easter Bunny who was dyeing eggs. And that is why the Easter Bunny went extinct. It died dyeing eggs with smoke. Finally, I definitely want to move to Norway, at least for Easter. There it’s a 5 day bank holiday that is celebrated by reading crime novels and watching crime TV shows. Even the seasonal milk cartons come mystery stories printed on them!

  Final Scores
  • Aaron: 3!
  • Shea: 2
  • Steve: 2

Next Week's Beer

Beer: Citra Pale Ale - Upslope brewing
  • BA Link: http://bit.ly/2HRgRQ7
  • BA Rating: 3.95/5
  • Style: Pale Ale
  • ABV: 5.8%

Faith In Humanity Restored

Mike Pence’s homophobia is so well-established that even Donald Trump reportedly makes fun of it. And like other homophobic, nazi, rabbit lovers we’ve talked about on the show, that means he needs to write a children’s book. Pence’s Book, I’m a Nazi and So Is My Rabbit, a working title I’m sure has been outdone before it event went on sale. If you haven’t heard about this yet you really do owe it to yourself to watch Last Week Tonight’s video in the show notes and Bonus Cat Video area. For the record, we too appreciate Pence’s pet rabbit’s name, Marlon Bundo, which Oliver admits is “an objectively good name for a rabbit.” Unfortunately, it’s all downhill from there. Charlotte and Karen Pence’s book, actually called “A Day in the Life of the Vice President” would be wholesome fun, except that the book’s tour includes a stop at Focus on the Family… and it was written by a hateful homophobic fuckfaces. Fortunately, Oliver’s team preempted the books launch with their own children’s book featuring Marlon Bundo finally finding his one true love in another male bunny! The book is real and you can buy in several formats. While the print version is sold out — fantastic news for the Trevor Project and AIDS United, the charities receiving the proceeds of Oliver’s book — the audio version features voices from Jim Parsons, John Lithgow, Jack McBrayer, and RuPaul! So you should go get a copy! To top this off with some delicious irony (or realism), Marlon Brando’s words from 1976: “Homosexuality is now so much in fashion it no longer makes the news. Like a large number of men, I, too, have had homosexual experiences, and I am not ashamed. I have never paid much attention to what people think about me.”

Bonus Cat Video

How to download all of your Facebook data: https://youtu.be/ldb8wgD_hJE Download the data Google has on you: http://bit.ly/2E5Takz Last Week Tonight: https://youtu.be/rs2RlZQVXBU Popcorn Rice: https://youtu.be/K-yazBBF3gE If It Fits. I Sits: https://youtu.be/fS2fsa1fuIw Homemade Sukiyaki: https://youtu.be/OdNqWcUdm6I Big Cats Get St. Patrick’s Day Popsicles https://youtu.be/BuIhrlnwYjU In case the title doesn't make any sense, check out Beaster Day! https://youtu.be/jHbJxpDGLsM

Join The Discussion

We’d love to hear from you! To comment on a show or suggest a brew visit our web, twitter or Facebook pages. As always, we’d love to get a good rating on iTunes, Google Play, or Stitcher!