A Quest to Be Useful, Honorable & Compassionate.

Great Grey Shite This ice cold motherfucker is what’s called a “predatory songbird.” It really should be called a “Murder-Bird”, because the homicidal little shrike feeds on small mammals and other birds and, I swear I am not making this up, often impales them on thorns or barbed wire fences. That is some sick shit, right there. It’s scientific name, Lanius excubitor, literally means “sentinel butcher”.

Let’s talk about Brenda Howard for a sec because I feel like all of the people shouting that “het”-partnered bisexuals don’t belong at Pride are missing a good chunk of their Pride history.

Brenda was:

A bisexual, polyamorous woman and activist

In a “het” relationship with partner Larry Nelson

Known as the Mother of Pride for her work in organizing the first LGBT Pride events

A participant in the Stonewall Riots

An active member of the Gay Liberation Front, Gay Activists Alliance, Coalition for Lesbian and Gay Rights, BiPAC, and BiNET USA,  among others

Co-founder of the New York Area Bisexual Network

Founder of the first Alcoholics Anonymous chapter for bisexuals

An incredibly important figure in the LGBT community, who paved the way for Pride and LGBT activism as we know it today

“Het”-partnered bisexuals don’t just belong at Pride, they were integral to its creation.

“The Book of Mormon, engraved upon metal plates, was dug up out of the ground in some out-of-the-way corner of Canada by Joseph Smith, a man of no repute and of no authority, and upon this extravagantly doubtful document the Mormon Church was built, and upon it stands to-day and flourishes…Evidently one of the least difficult things in the world, to-day, is to humbug the human race.” 

 “The book seems to be merely a prosy detail of imaginary history, with the Old Testament for a model; followed by a tedious plagiarism of the New Testament. The author labored to give his words and phrases the quaint, old-fashioned sound and structure of our King James’s translation of the Scriptures; and the result is a mongrel — half modern glibness, and half ancient simplicity and gravity. The latter is awkward and constrained; the former natural, but grotesque by the contrast….Whenever he found his speech growing too modern — which was about every sentence or two — he ladled in a few such Scriptural phrases as ‘exceeding sore,’ ‘and it came to pass,’ etc., and made things satisfactory again. ‘And it came to pass’ was his pet. If he had left that out, his Bible would have been only a pamphlet.”

“The book is a curiosity to me, it is such a pretentious affair, and yet so ‘slow,’ so sleepy; such an insipid mess of inspiration.  It is chloroform in print.” 

Were some of the stone flakes we attribute to our clever ancestors actually created by lil’ ol’ monkeys? Researchers from Oxford University recently documented capuchin monkeys gleefully banging rocks together - probably to get at minerals inside. The flakes they create look pretty similar to those we’ve attributed to human tool makers. 

Read the full story from Christopher Joyce. Read a fun rumination on monkey and human tool use by Alva Noe. (And read the study in Nature.)