Take a little walk to the edge of town

• So I’ve now got 945 followers on Twitter @SlacktivistFred. Anybody know another 55 people who might like to click that “follow” button?

• The Pledge of Allegiance is creepy. Requiring this ritual recitation of a loyalty oath at all public meetings is the kind of thing you should expect in North Korea, not in a free country. It’s creepy and weird and impossible to do in a way that’s not creepy and weird.

“Hey, honey, let’s reaffirm our wedding vows to celebrate our anniversary.” That might be nice. “Honey, I insist that every day you stand, place your hand on your heart, and reaffirm our wedding vows before breakfast” is just creepy control-freak behavior that has nothing to do with anything like love or devotion.

• “Tyler (Texas) man says he found fossils from Noah’s flood.”

OK, we’re gonna need everyone to step up for this one. Geologists, biologists, paleontologists — we need you on the actual age and identity of these fossils here in reality. Biblical scholars, theologians, rabbis — you folks need to address the garbled hash these people are making of the story of Noah. English majors — you’re handling genre, story forms, storytelling and basic literacy. Let’s go, people, this is not a drill.

“We have something in our yard that dated back to when God destroyed the earth. I mean, how much better could anything be.” Yikes. Let’s get to work.

• Prosperity Gospel + Left Behind + Heaven tourism + anti-abortionism + television = White American Christianity in its purest distillation.

• Witzelsucht.

• Since we’ve been referencing the music of 1994, here’s a wonderful thing: DrFaustusAU is doing a Nick Cave/Dr. Seuss mashup of “Red Right Hand.”

I’m not sure if this reveals something innocent and Seuss-like about Nick Cave or if it reveals something creepy and Cave-like about Dr. Seuss, but it works.

• “Let Love In” sounded like the name of a pop album full of upbeat, Oprah-esque sentiment about learning to find happiness. It would’ve been a great album title for, like, Point of Grace or Rebecca St. James or any of the other top CCM acts in 1994. But instead it was a Nick Cave album, full of stuff like this: