Desert Bus, for the Children

I think I have mentioned, if only in passing, Loading Ready Run (LRR), a sketch comedy troupe from Victoria in Canada. They produce really excellent comedy which you should all go watch here. More importantly however this week they are doing one an incredibly charity event in the name of Child’s Play.

Child’s play is a charity set up by Gabe and Tycho of the webcomic Penny Arcade. It works across the globe, although mostly in the USA, to improve the lives of sick and injured children in hospitals by providing them with Toy and games. Not quite working to alleviate world poverty, but valuable work nonetheless. It’s been going since 2003 and has raised millions of dollars in that time thanks to the philanthropy of the gaming industry. In the last two years LRR have contributed over $80 000.

They have achieved this mostly through an event called Desert Bus for Hope (DBfH, sorry for all the acronyms and hyperlinks), which is happening for the third time in the coming days. DBfH is a gaming marathon whereby four members of the crew constantly play ostensibly the most boring video game every created, Desert Bus. Desert Bus simulates driving in a bus from Tuscan to Vagas and back, an 8 hour round trip along a perfectly straight road. The only thing that keeps the player involved is that the bus steers slightly to the right, forcing the player to continually correct it. The more the public donates to Child’s Play, the longer the crew plays this game. The donation needed per hour goes up each time, so as the marathon gets longer the amount needed to increase the length of the marathon increases. That being said last year they went for over five days and raised over $70 000.

Yesterday, at 6:20 PM (PST), or 2:20 AM (GMT) Desert Bus for Hope 3 started. Having been going for 18 hours already, they have so far raised almost $18 000 dollars. The aim of course is to beat last year’s total by a considerable amount. This is not possible however without the donations of ordinary people worldwide. As in previous years the even is being streamed live on Ustream here. You should all go and check it out, watch the stream for while, donate some money if you have any to spare and generally support the event. They auction off things and give challenges, so it’s well worth checking it out.

Again, please do support the event in any way you can, it’s a great way of forcing a group of Canadians to do your bidding in the name of charity if nothing else.

Poor Bill Nye

To be honest, I have very little to talk about this week, so, as normal when I don’t have much to say, I went and looked around on the BBC website and then Reddit to see if I could steal a story from there and write about it. Thankfully Reddit provided me with a solution to my troubles!

Bill Nye was booed, actually booed, in Texas recently for making that laughable claim that the moon does not actually emit light, and merely reflects light. This appalling piece of science clearly offended members of the ‘moon is a small ball of burning gasses’ sect of retards down in Texas. Well actually it offended some Christians because Nye made the equally laughable claim that the statement in Genesis 1:16 that ‘God made two great lights -- the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night.’ Is in fact wrong, how silly of him. We all know that the bible is the infallible word of God and any apparent scientific truth which appears to contradict the bible is clearly false. Well that or we need to skilfully reinterpret the words of God to be contingent with reality, which is exactly what Jethro! (probably not of Jethro Tull fame) did. In a comment in the aforementioned news article he said: If Nye claimed that Genesis 1:16 said God created two "light sources," then Nye is wrong -- it says: "God made two great lights..." That the "lesser light" is reflected light, does not make it any less a "great light." Aside from the fact that he put a comma in where it’s not needed, he managed to misquote Nye; Nye never said ‘light sources’ and the article never actually claimed that he did, Jethro! completely lied to get his point across. His point is still wrong because the moon is a reflector, not a ‘light’. If everything that reflects light is a ‘light’ then, well everything that isn’t black is a reflector. Jethro! failed pretty hard there huh?

Back to the actual story instead of taking the piss out of people who comment on these news stories (because that is a little too close to home given that I’m writing a blog about the damn thing), not only was Nye booed, several people stormed out of the room in fury at Nye’s attempt to educate their children. One woman even yelled “we believe in God” on her way out, just in case we thought she was an extremely stupid atheist who didn’t like it when people insulted a book that she doesn’t believe is in any way important. I’m not even sure why she decided to yell that, I mean it’s not like you have to believe that every word in the bible is absolutely from the mouth of the Almighty Himself and therefore any science which contradicts it is the work of the Devil. Christ (if you’ll excuse the irony of my choice of profanity) if that were the case most people I know who are devout Christians would be burned at the stake for heresy.

This story really proves that people are stupid. It actually worries me that there are so many people out there who would choose to believe what it says in a book, which claims to be the word of God but cannot be proven as such, over science that is extremely well founded in reality. The fact that some people willingly choose to believe the creation myth of a random tribe from the Levant who happen to have survived long enough for their wacko religion to survive, over something that is scientifically proven is pretty worrying. You don’t even need to believe the bible is the direct word of God to be a Christian; most don’t, most Christians simply say the bible is a human attempt to understand God, rather that his dictated Word. Admittedly they’re deluding themselves (in my not-very-humble opinion), but at least they’re not failing as hard as the fundamentalists.

Most Christians today say that the Genesis stories are just that, stories. They don’t claim to make any statement about how the world was created, instead they simply teach people about the true nature of their God. The claim that Genesis is how it really happened is laughed at by most Christians let alone us cynical Atheists.

And now for something completely different; given that I have had the last week off I have been investigating a website called Loading Ready Run. It’s basically a bunch of people doing funny sketches and putting the videos on the net. I discovered them from the new videos on the Escapist website called Unskippable, which is done by the same people. You should all check it out. You should also check out Neutral Milk Hotel; they’re a band from the 90’s who probably kicked off the whole indie music thing in a big way. Their album ‘In the Aeroplane Over the Sea’ is pretty sweet. You should all listen to it.