Musikmeme courtesy of greygirlbeast

The Meme: List ten musical artists that you like, and then go answer the questions.

1) Gary Numan
2) Skinny Puppy
3) VHS or Beta
4) The Faint
5) The Dresden Dolls
6) Radio 4
7) Beck
8) The Sisters of Mercy
9) Iron & Wine
10) Thomas Dolby

What was the first song you ever heard by 6? "Party Crashers"

What is your favourite album of 8? Floodland, for gods' sake. But I really, really like Vision Thing, too.

What is your favourite lyric that 5 has sung? "Coin-operated boy / he may not be real experienced with girls / but I know he feels / like a boy should feel / isn't that the point?" That's my biography in a nutshell, folks.

How many times have you seen 4 live? Only once, but it was PHAT.

What's your favourite song of 7? "The New Pollution"

What is a good memory you have concerning the music of 10? Seeing the video for "She Blinded Me With Science" for the first time ever on MTV when I was seven and thinking, "I want to be him when I grow up!"

Is there a song of 3 that makes you sad? You can't possibly be sad listening to VHS or Beta.

What is your favourite lyric that 2 has sung? "Walls trapped within yellow eyes the cutter's drooling face rips apart cuts to the heart" ($2 for anyone who guesses which song it's from--NOT YOU, siliconedreamer!)

What is your favourite song by 9? "Dead Man's Will" (that song damnear brings me to tears everytime I hear it.)

How did you get into 3? aRvin played "Night on Fire" for me and I flipped out, thinking it was the fabled true Second Coming of Duran Duran.

What was the first song you heard by 1? "Cars"

What's your favourite song by 4? "Paranoiattack"

How many times have you seen 9 live? Never!

What is a good memory you have concerning 2? Seeing Skinny Puppy perform "Glass Houses" FUCKING LIVE in Chicago. I jizzed. I literally did.

Is there a song of 8 that makes you sad? Oh, god yes: "When You Don't See Me."

What is your favourite song of 1? "Cars", "The Sleeproom", "Please Push No More", "Absolution", "My Centurion", "In a Glass House", "Deadlines", "Tracks", "Conversation"...this list will go on forever if I don't stop myself.

This is disgusting.

University of Minnesota study shows "Atheists identified as America’s most distrusted minority"

Here's the best quote:

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.”

Oh, well naturally: I don't believe in a God, so it just boggles the mind that I could still follow a basic ethic of right and wrong!

Here's the deal, people. My sense of altruism and morality comes from one place: the simplest of basic reasoning. Humans are social creatures. We work best in groups, though we're all capable of doing stuff on our own. In order to get along properly in social groups, some very simple rules have to be adopted in order for everyone to work together properly. In the past, delegating ultimate authority to one Big Cheese in the group--a king or queen, a priest or priestess, a great warrior or great mother--was one such means of doing so. But this is the 21st Century and we all live in an egalitarian, democratic nation that generally looks down on that kind of strongarm method. So instead we've worked out some unbelievably common-sense rules for social interaction that mostly come down to "If I help you out, you'll help me out, and we can both achieve our common goals." That is, literally, as basic as it gets. You don't need a God to tell you that.

However, here's another quote from the article that definitely puts things into perspective:

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.

Well, what a surprise. Midwestern yokels distrustful of "furriners" and "them people who ain't like us." NEVER WOULD'VE THOUGHT.

The stupidity of people in this country--at the dawn of the 21st Century, with the fucking Singularity knocking on our doors--astounds me. Literally astounds me. Not that they're religious. I know of a lot of very, very intelligent religious people whose faith complements their lives and gives them comfort and value. But for every one of them, there are 2,000+ uneducated bumpkins for whom religion is not an explanation or interpretation of reality but reality itself. That mindset is positively MEDEIVAL. The fact that such a sizable proportion of people in this nation can still think that way points out that this country has absolutely failed when it comes to preparing its citizens to face living in a globalized, 21st-Century world.

Disgusting.