New Site, New Feed, New Everything

In a few short hours, AmateurScientist.org will be a whole new place. If you've subscribed to this feed in a reader, you're going to have to switch to the following URL if you want to keep up:

http://www.amateurscientist.org/rss

That's right. The new AmateurScientist.org will be hosted on Tumblr, the blogging platform of choice for elitist hipsters, artful pornographers, and OCD-level minimalists. Since we fall under all those categories, it seemed like the place to be.

It's been a good long road on this here Blogger-hosted site, so we're not simply making it disappear. You'll still be able to find all the previous posts here.

But we hope you'll enjoy the new site and its associated feed. In addition to looking like a futuristic magazine from the magazine future, it will also be home to much more regular comedy content than ever before. Plus, it will be the central hub for the ever-expanding universe of Amateur Scientist Industries.

Onward and upward!

The Amateur Scientist Podcast: Episode 122

What's so special about the McRib? Who's trying to whack Randy Quaid? Why does Colorado hate extraterrestrials? Who hurt George W. Bush's fragile feelings? Why are pagans ruining our museums? Why does Sylvester Stallone know about our president? Are toxic oil dispersants making us sick? Who is Mr. Bojangles? The answers to all these questions and absolutely no more on this week's show.

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Alien Pyramid Challenge

You may not know this, but our own Richard Peacock is an indie video game developer. In fact, his Alien Pyramid Challenge is one of the best titles available through Xbox Live Indie Games. The gaming blog A Rant with Good Grammar just posted an interview with Richard about game development, programmer working conditions, and his thoughts on design. READ IT!

Dentana

No, it isn't a merperson. It's just a fish with human-like teeth.

Scientology Watch

MINUS: Under suspicious circumstances, the great director Paul Thomas Anderson has indefinitely postponed his plans to make The Master, a film loosely based on the life of L. Ron Hubbard, in which master thespian Philip Seymour Hoffman would have played the titular nutball.

PLUS: Mad Men actress Elizabeth Moss has filed for divorce from her husband of eleven months, Saturday Night Live's Fed Armisen. Possibly baseless rumor mongering has it that Moss' devotion to Scientology may have played a role in the divorce. In any case, she's on the market, fellas.

TOTAL: A wash, though it's probably more likely that I would have watched and enjoyed The Master than that I will marry Elizabeth Moss as part of my larger scheme to get closer to a Hamm sandwich with Don Draper and Christina Hendricks.

When Gay Sex is Outlawed...

For several years, many U.S. states had laws against sodomy, the illicit use of human genitals for anything other than creating a child who will one day Google the word "blowjob". But in 2003, the Supreme Court struck down Texas' anti-sodomy law, thereby rendering similar laws in all other states moot.

But despite all that, the official platform adopted by the Republican Party of Montana in June still includes a stance in favor of outlawing "homosexual acts". Granted, homosexual acts are a grave danger to the Montana economy. It's a state full of wide open spaces just begging to be turned into hot man-on-man orgy grounds. Plus, with such a low population, it's rare for members of the opposite sex to even meet, let alone procreate.

But not all Montana Republicans are in favor of the platform. At least one state legislator says that it has no place in the modern GOP and that anyone wanting to arrest gays should join another political party. Plus, there's no legal means for the state to re-outlaw buttsex, mouthfucking, and mutual masturbation after the state supreme court struck down its sodomy laws in 1997.

However, it's good to know some Montana Republicans are still thinking long and hard about sodomy. It's all over their minds like semen on an upper lip.

The Mouse Problem

Christine O'Donnell, the newly minted Republican senatorial candidate from the great tax haven of Delaware is forging ahead with her plans to become this news cycle's Sarah Palin. She's a political outsider, she's pissed off about the D.C. status quo, and she's willing to say any crazy thing it takes to rile up the rabid right-wingers. It's a brave stance to take, especially since with each passing day, it's looking more and more likely that O'Donnell accidentally lobotomized herself sometime in the early '90s.

Weirdly, it's not so much what O'Donnell's saying now that makes her seem like a glue sniffer. It's the seemingly bottomless well of ridiculous quotes from all of her TV appearances in the last fifteen years. First, she took to MTV to decry masturbation. Then she was on Politically Incorrect discussing her dabbling with witchcraft. On C-SPAN, she lamented the taxpayer money spent on trying to help self-destructive AIDS patients. And now, we've learned that during a 2007 appearance on The O'Reilly Factor, O'Donnell warned the nation of a monstrous horror lurking in our laboratories.

"American scientific companies are cross-breeding humans and animals and coming up with mice with fully-functioning human brains," she said, sniffing suspiciously.

Here's the thing: This is bullshit. It never happened, and it's a little mind boggling how someone could possibly think it did.

However, the inverse may, in fact, be true. While no human-brained mice are intelligently dropping their turds in the box of Christmas ornaments we keep in our attics, there is evidence that some fully-functioning humans may demonstrate mouse-like behavior: