This article is a bit late, I guess the show has already opened by now. But I can’t see how parading Galileo’s remains can be seen as anything but a despicable show of disrespect.

“The laymen and masons that were attending the ceremony thought that
they should have some souvenir of Galileo’s body,” Paolo Galluzzi,
director of Florence’s Galileo Museum, told Reuters in an interview.

“They thought that having a piece of the man would have been a homage to
his tradition. The idea of having relics of science is very similar, is
a mirror of the relics of religion,” he said.

What a tremendous shame. One of the greatest minds that ever lived has a portion of his body on display, ogled by crowds as a carnival freakshow. While we are at it, I offer the following video to the organizers of this show as an equally classy show of behavior: chimpanzee facefucks a frog.

Part of me wants to write, the rest of me just wants to unplug from this shitpile of a world. Why am I so down? Because the 2010 BP Gulf of Mexico Oil Catastrophe (R) is simply the latest amazingly depressing news story that only breaks through my toughened bad news hide because of the scale. If the government is estimating x, the reality is 5-10x, if not more, in terms of the volume of oil in the water. We’ll never know of the damage, really, to the oceans. If reefs start dying that much faster, what will be the reaction? ONE. GIANT. COLLECTIVE. YAWN.

Biodiversity, it seems, is overrated. So is human existence, in my opinion. What a waste. Other than being a hedonist, is there any real way to get through your week without burying your head in either the blessed calm of ignorance or the burning repulsion of unending shame? Really, how do people do it? I’m beginning to understand, if not admire, addicts of all stripes. Find a place to shelve your sorrows and push everything else out of the way to get there.

I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be such a downer. But I’m just tired of all the shitty news, endless stories of powerful pricks who are fucking with the odds of the survival of human civilization, to the extent we ever really were civilized. To the extent that there are many, many, amazing people out there doing incredible things, I want them to win. I want the people on the side of love, of peace, of humor, of free will, of knowledge, of openness, of allowance, of progress to fucking win this seemingly endless shitfest power struggle that is reality at this juncture. Let it be known.