Floating Boy, LLC

Atlanta, GA

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George Carlin has died

Legendary comedian George Carlin passed away Sunday night at the age of 71. He will be missed, but never forgotten.

George Carlin’s HBO stand up special was one of the first things I remember watching on TV. I only got to see him perform live once.

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San Jose, Peurta 3

Waiting to fly back to Atlanta, and I just dropped $12 on the worst sandwich ever. If you ever come to San Jose, don’t eat at the airport. I was too busy surfing and hanging out to take any pictures while in Costa Rica, although I did get a few shots of Sebastian the peeping-tom howler monkey. To be honest, they don’t really “howl” as much as they grunt and show you their balls.

San Jose, Peurta 3

Originally uploaded by wrenchpilot

./shawn

Notice of Creative Hard Disc Drive MP3 Player Class Action and Proposed Settlement

I randomly checked my hotmail account and found this today. I’ll probably file a claim, but I seriously doubt I’ll buy another MP3 player from Creative. Even if it is half priced.

> > SUMMARY EMAIL NOTICE To: From: Settlement Claim Administrator Subject: Notice of Creative Hard Disc Drive MP3 Player Class Action and Proposed Settlement > > > > * * * > > > > SUMMARY EMAIL NOTICE > > > > If you purchased in the United States between May 5, 2001 and April 30, 2008 from a retail store in the United States (including Creative's and others' on-line retail stores) a new Creative brand hard disc drive MP3 player ("Creative HDD MP3 Player"), a proposed class action settlement may affect you. A hearing has been scheduled in United States District Court, Central District of California to approve the settlement. Under the settlement, you may have the right to make a claim for a discounted MP3 player or a discount certificate. You also may choose to exclude yourself from the settlement. Alternatively, you may file written objections to the settlement or seek to intervene and appear (or have your own attorney appear) at the court hearing. If the settlement is approved and you do not exclude yourself, you give up the right to sue for the claims the settlement resolves, and you will be bound by the terms of the settlement. To learn more about or exercise any of your rights, please read below and visit www.creativehddmp3settlement.com. > > > > The lawsuit is Talwar v. Creative Labs, Inc., United States District Court, Central District of California, Case No. CV 05 3375 FMC. In the suit, plaintiffs allege that in the sale and marketing of its hard disc drive MP3 players Creative stated that purchasers of the drives would receive approximately 7% more usable storage capacity than they actually received and misrepresented the number of songs and number of hours of music the players could hold. Creative has denied and continues to deny each and all of plaintiffs' claims, and denies that anyone has been harmed or deserves compensation. The Court has not made a decision on the merits. > > > > You are a member of the plaintiff class if you purchased in the United States between May 5, 2001 and April 30, 2008 from a retail store in the United States (including Creative's and others' on-line retail stores) a new Creative brand hard disc drive MP3 player. > > > > As part of the settlement, Creative will make certain disclosures regarding the storage capacity of its hard disc drive MP3 players. > > > > In addition, if you submit a valid claim, you will receive either a 50% discount off the price of a new 1 GB MP3 player, or a discount certificate good for 20% off the price of any single item purchased at www.us.creative.com. To receive the discount player or discount certificate you must submit a claim form available at www.creativehddmp3settlement.com by August 7, 2008. You may submit a claim for each Creative HDD MP3 Player you purchased. > > > > If the settlement is approved, plaintiffs' counsel will apply for an award of attorneys' fees and expenses not to exceed $900,000, plus incentive awards for the two representative plaintiffs in the amount of $5,000 each, to be paid separately from and in addition to the relief available to plaintiff class members. > > > > All claims of plaintiff class members which were or could have been asserted in the litigation, based upon the facts alleged in the litigation will be released. This means that if you do not exclude yourself from the plaintiff class, you will give up the right to sue for the claims the settlement resolves, and you will be bound by the terms of the settlement. > > > > You need not take any action. If you wish to exclude yourself from the plaintiff class, you must submit an exclusion request to plaintiffs' counsel: Brian R. Strange/Gretchen Carpenter, Strange & Carpenter, 12100 Wilshire Boulevard, Suite 1900, Los Angeles, CA 90025. If you exclude yourself, you will not receive the benefits of the settlement, and you cannot object to the settlement or intervene. > > > > If you wish to object to the settlement, intervene or appear (or have your own attorney appear) at the hearing, you must file your objection with the Court and serve it on the parties' counsel, as follows: Brian R. Strange/Gretchen Carpenter, Strange & Carpenter, 12100 Wilshire Boulevard, Suite 1900, Los Angeles, CA 90025 (counsel for plaintiff); and Daniel K. Slaughter, Stein & Lubin LLP, 600 Montgomery Street, 14th floor, San Francisco, CA 94111 (counsel for Creative). To exclude yourself, object or request to intervene, you must follow the detailed instructions set forth in the Long Form Notice at www.creativehddmp3settlement.com. > > > > All objections, requests to intervene and requests for exclusion must be received by June 9, 2008. > > > > DO NOT CONTACT THE COURT OR CREATIVE CONCERNING THIS NOTICE OR THIS LAWSUIT. If you would like more information about this notice or this case, please visit [http://www.creativehddmp3settlement.com](http://www.creativehddmp3settlement.com). If you do not have internet access, you may request additional information by mail from counsel for plaintiff, as set forth above. > >

Soldier Sues Army, Saying His Atheism Led to Threats

Army Specialist Jeremy Hall said he did not advertise his atheism during his service, but his views became apparent during his second deployment to Iraq. An officer told him, and others, they would be punished for not being Christians like the founding fathers, nullifying religious freedom to believe or not believe.

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Richard Dawkins Writes Letter to Darwin Critic

Richard Dawkins writes a letter to a man who has just seen the movie, “Expelled.” The man writes to Michael Shermer originally, “Now I truly understand who you atheists and darwinists really are! You people believe that it was okay for my great-grandparents to die in the Holocaust!”

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How the hell are ya?

Long time no see.  I’ve done my “random-once-a-year-backend-website-upgrade” and now for my “single-post-acknowledging-the-upgrade-see-you-in-a-year-post”.

wtf

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

I did it their way.

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.

Pancake Mountain

The Evens - Vowel Movement

**

Fiery Furnaces - Mouse House, Moose Hoose**

**

Arcade Fire**

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

http://pancakemountain.com

Will you marry me?

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

What: U of M study reveals America's distrust of atheism
Who: Penny Edgell, associate professor of sociology
Contact: Nina Shepherd, sociology media relations, (612) 599-1148 Mark Cassutt University News Service, (612) 624-8038

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.

God Dies

No one ever came to me and said, “You’re a fool. There isn’t such a thing as God. Somebody’s been stuffing you.” It wasn’t a murder. I think God just died of old age. And when I realized that he wasn’t any more, it didn’t shock me. It seemed natural and right.

Maybe it was because I was never properly impressed with a religion. I went to Sunday school and liked the stories about Christ and the Christmas star. They were beautiful. They made you warm and happy to think about. But I didn’t believe them. The Sunday School teacher talked too much in the way our grade school teacher used to when she told us about George Washington. Pleasant, pretty stories, but not true.

Religion was too vague. God was different. He was something real, something I could feel. But there were only certain times when I could eel it. I used to lie between cool, clean sheets at night after I’d had a bath, after I had washed my hair and crubbed my knuckles and finger nails and teeth. Then I could lie quite still in the dark with my face to the window with the trees in it, and talk to God. “I am clean, now. I’ve never been as clean. I’ll never be cleaner.” And somehow, it was God. I wasn’t sure that it was … just something cool and dark and clean.

That wasn’t religion, though. There was too much of the physical about it. I couldn’t get that same feeling during the day, with my hands in dirty dish water and the hard sun showing up the dirtiness on the roof-tops. And after a time, even at night, the feeling of God didn’t last. I began to wonder what the minister meant when he said, “God, the father, sees even the smallest sparrow fall. He watches over all his children.” That jumbled it all up for me. But I was sure of one thing. If God were a father, with children, that cleanliness I had been feeling wasn’t God. So at night, when I went to bed, I would think, “I am clean. I am sleepy.” And then I went to sleep. It didn’t keep me from enjoying the cleanness any less. I just knew that God wasn’t there. He was a man on a throne in Heaven, so he was easy to forget.

Sometimes I found he was useful to remember; especially when I lost things that were important. After slamming through the house, panicky and breathless from searching, I could stop in the middle of a room and shut my eyes. “Please God, let me find my red hat with the blue trimmings.” It usually worked. God became a super-father that couldn’t spank me. But if I wanted a thing badly enough, he arranged it.

That satisfied me until I began to figure that if God loved all his children equally, why did he bother about my red hat and let other people lose their fathers and mothers for always? I began to see that he didn’t have much to do about hats, people dying or anything. They happened whether he wanted them to or not, and he stayed in heaven and pretended not to notice. I wondered a little why God was such a useless thing. It seemed a waste of time to have him. After that he became less and less, until he was…nothingness.

I felt rather proud to think that I had found the truth myself, without help from any one. It puzzled me that other people hadn’t found out, too. God was gone. We were younger. We had reached past him. Why couldn’t they see it? It still puzzles me.

An Essay by Frances Farmer

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