Something is wrong with this website.  It keeps crashing Firefox.  That’s not cool.

I broke down and re-did the FB site using wordpress for the back end system. Spent a little time importing my old stuff in (wasn’t too hard at all really). Hacked up a theme, and here we are.

apparently i don’t care about this site anymore.  here’s a quick summary of things i don’t remember.

1. Ministry concert (no pictures)
2. Puerto Vallarta, Mexico trip (maybe 2 or 3 pictures)
3. Montezuma’s Revenge (you wouldn’t want to see any pictures)
4. The Rentals (1 bad cell phone picture)
5. A recent obsession with the Smashing Pumpkins.
6. Nose bleeds.

Telluride, CO

The Fiery Furnaces w/ Deadboy and the Elephantmen

This makes me want to have kids (not really) and watch this show with them.

http://pancakemountain.com

Atheists identified as America’s most distrusted minority, according to new U of M study

MINNEAPOLIS / ST. PAUL (3/20/2006) — American’s increasing acceptance
of religious diversity doesn’t extend to those who don’t believe in a
god, according to a national survey by researchers in the University of
Minnesota’s department of sociology.

From
a telephone sampling of more than 2,000 households, university
researchers found that Americans rate atheists below Muslims, recent
immigrants, gays and lesbians and other minority groups in “sharing
their vision of American society.” Atheists are also the minority group
most Americans are least willing to allow their children to marry.

Even
though atheists are few in number, not formally organized and
relatively hard to publicly identify, they are seen as a threat to the
American way of life by a large portion of the American public.
“Atheists, who account for about 3 percent of the U.S. population,
offer a glaring exception to the rule of increasing social tolerance
over the last 30 years,” says Penny Edgell, associate sociology
professor and the study’s lead researcher.

Edgell also argues
that today’s atheists play the role that Catholics, Jews and communists
have played in the past—they offer a symbolic moral boundary to
membership in American society. “It seems most Americans believe that
diversity is fine, as long as every one shares a common ‘core’ of
values that make them trustworthy—and in America, that ‘core’ has
historically been religious,” says Edgell. Many of the study’s
respondents associated atheism with an array of moral indiscretions
ranging from criminal behavior to rampant materialism and cultural
elitism.

Edgell believes a fear of moral decline and resulting
social disorder is behind the findings. “Americans believe they share
more than rules and procedures with their fellow citizens—they share an
understanding of right and wrong,” she said. “Our findings seem to rest
on a view of atheists as self-interested individuals who are not
concerned with the common good.”

The researchers also found
acceptance or rejection of atheists is related not only to personal
religiosity, but also to one’s exposure to diversity, education and
political orientation—with more educated, East and West Coast Americans
more accepting of atheists than their Midwestern counterparts.

The
study is co-authored by assistant professor Joseph Gerteis and
associate professor Doug Hartmann. It’s the first in a series of
national studies conducted the American Mosaic Project, a three-year
project funded by the Minneapolis-based David Edelstein Family
Foundation that looks at race, religion and cultural diversity in the
contemporary United States. The study will appear in the April issue of
the American Sociological Review.