100 Things I Learned From My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic

(In no particular order)



1. Friendship is magic

2. Brushing apples isn't nearly as fun as brushing ponies

3. Rainbow Dash is living the dream

4. Ponies are sexually dimorphic: females have round faces and males have square faces

5. REAL men wear gowns (from a prostate commercial of all places!)

6. *twitch-a-twitch --> something BAD happens

7. You WILL love Fluttershy or you will regret it

8. Dragon eggs can't hatch without unicorn magic

9. What's with the tin can?

10. Stick a cupcake in your eye

11. Doughnuts are the equivalent of alcohol (at least for dragons)

12. Pegasi have cute little chicken wings

13. Celestia's hair blows about even in the absence of wind

14. Rarity doesn't know she's naked

15. Forest animals can't clean their own homes in spring, ponies have to do it for them

16. Bears like to go to the beach but no one can agree on what they do when they get there

17. Pinkie Pie is the only one in her family without drab colours

18. Doctors in Equestria do hip replacements

19. Hitler didn't like ponies

20. The population of Equestria is vegetarian, so the population of wild animals is kept in control through some other means

21. Ponies celebrate several as yet unidentified winter holidays

22. I watch it for the plot!


















23. Celestia toys come in pink and sometimes blue but never white for some reason

24. You shouldn't hit books, you should read them

25. Gilda has to watch you like a hawk because she can't watch you like a griffon

26. Cheerilee was in fewer episodes than a lot of characters yet she still got her own toy at McDonalds

27. Believe it or not, Fluttershy was quite shy as a child

28. Rocks can't just be found in the ground like on Earth, they have to be farmed

29. Pinkie Pie never did get her sasparilla

30. Applejack has an accent even though she lives within walking distance of everyone else

31. Applejack loses her accent when she sings

32. Boots are worn on all four feet but slippers are only worn on the front two

33. Pinkie Pie barely teeters on the edge of sanity

34. Applejack is a terrible liar (Pinkie Pie can tell when she's lying but not anyone else)

35. Rainbow Dash can clear the skies over Ponyville in ten seconds flat and is the only known pony to create a sonic rainboom but she still can't escape Pinkie Pie

36. A single bathtub can contain all the water in Ponyville for seven hours without anyone finding out where the water has gone

37. Pinkie Pie's hair changes depending on her mood

38. Grown men and little girls have more in common than is socially acceptable to admit

39. If there was a contest for the best singer in Equestria Twilight Sparkle would win hands down

40. Whoever played the guitar for the Cutie Mark Crusaders should go pro

41. Pinkie Pie is not affected by gravity or distance

42. Scootaloo is the cutest

43. The groundskeeper at the Grand Galloping Gala doesn't have a cutie mark despite being very old. He must not have any special talent

44. Celestia and Luna DIDN'T lez out to create Twilight Sparkle after all

45. The Grand Galloping Gala blows and Celestia knew it yet she still invited Twilight Sparkle, her loyal student, to crush her dreams and call it a lesson

46. Celestia created a glaringly sub-optimal world where the inhabitants must literally change the seasons, possibly because she enjoys watching ponies toil miserably and attack each other every time the seasons have to be changed (at least until Twilight came along and took control of the situation)

47. Equestria has seasons and bird migration, so we can assume it has distinct hemispheres

48. Ponyville is in the northern hemisphere as birds migrate south for the winter

49. Seasons in Equestria happen in reverse of seasons on Earth

50.













51. Losing a friend's trust is the fastest way to lose a friend forever!

52. Gold is used for money but jewels are eaten by dragons

53. The "Cupcakes" fanfic isn't nearly as gross or horrible as people make it out to be, although the author was trying way to hard to make it out to be, and the story doesn't make sense in light of Pinkie Pie's admission that all ponies are vegetarian.

54. Gummy has no teeth, and since alligators regrow lost teeth that means Gummy is either a mutant or Pinkie Pie is constantly pulling out all his teeth

55. FOREVER!!!!!

56. Cows are intelligent creatures that are none-the-less exploited for their milk

57. Rarity's fashion logo is actually pretty creepy

58. Fluttershy is a year older than Pinkie Pie

59. Fluttershy is off limits to pranks

60. And then I said "Oatmeal? Are you crazy?"

61. Though Fluttershy's stare can put even horrible monsters in their place the animals at the Grand Galloping Gala still run away from her

62. Either Granny Pie taught Pinkie to laugh at scary things after the sonic rainboom incident or she's very different from other members of her family

63. Canterlot has a back entrance (the front is a sheer cliff)

64. Prince Blueblood is said to be Princess Celestia's nephew, so he is either Princess Luna's son or Celestia has other siblings that were never introduced

65. If he is Luna's son that means he's over 1000 years old or was born sometime while she was trapped inside the moon and he was let out for some reason, and that ponies can have children of different species, somehow

66. Neither Celestia or Luna aged at all in the past 1000 years, yet Luna is noticably younger, meaning she must be younger by several tens of thousands or even millions of years

67. Assuming Celestia and Luna created Equestria together (since they "created harmony" together with their sun and moon raising), Celestia had to wait a long time before doing anything (according to # 66)

68. Since both sisters are different ages they couldn't have existed forever, so something or somepony must have brought them into existence

69. Celestia needs the Elements of Harmony to defeat her sister, so even though she's older she's the weaker of the two

70. It needs to be about 20% cooler

71. Twilight Sparkle never gets a turn

72. Pillow fights are fun!

73. FOREVER!!!!!

74. Spike is right handed

75. Pony language is written and read left to right and includes such symbols (letters?) as a horseshoe, star, unicorn head, clockwise spiral, and lightning bolt

76. Ponyville uses both the imperial and metric systems

77. Twilight Sparkle's balloon in the opening song appears nowhere else

78. All the ponies in this town are crazy!

79. Short tails are in this season

80. It was under "E"

81. Newborn dragons suck their tails even though the sucking reflex is a mammalian trait

82. Hot sauce bottles are poorly labeled

83. Many of the tools in Equestria are clearly designed for use by humanoid hands despite none of the inhabitants possessing such features

84. The Ponyville library, where Twilight Sparkle lives, surprisingly has few books yet all the furnishings one would find in a home; also, no one is ever seen going there to use the library as a library, only to visit Twilight

85. Pony names often match their personality/talent/cutie mark, meaning ponies are either named presciently or naming a pony has a deterministic effect on their future development (this brings up interesting consequences with such ponies as Granny Smith, who would be called "granny" even as a little filly!)

86. It wasn't nearly that cold at the top of the mountain after all

87. Equestria is sometimes a country

88. The Apple family either has a high percentage of twins or someone got lazy when drawing the crowd scene (the blue ponies with the yellow manes are triplets, two are wearing the same green scarf, and at least two other ponies have the exact same cutie mark!)

89. The Great and Powerful Trixie is a tragic pony who is homeless and had to live in a cart that she had to drag around herself, which is now destroyed, and even though she was just hiding behind a jerkass facade because she's sad and alone no one in Ponyville cut her any slack, except Twilight Sparkle, when she did nothing worse than Rainbow Dash (who has her friends to reign her in, Trixie has no one), and certainly nowhere near as bad as Gilda, yet Gilda got a Pinkie Pie party whereas Trixie only got derision and the obsequious fawning of mindless sycophants who got her into serious trouble through no fault of her own

90. Haters gonna hate

91. Pinkie Pie eats like a black hole

92. Princess Celestia may have created Equestria, but she doesn't know what parasprites are

93. The introduction of horses was actually the single greatest benefit to the lives of the Plains Indians

94. Fluttershy is literally afraid of her own shadow

95. Good Lord, Fluttershy repeats

96. If Rainbow Dash were a human she would be willing to do some freaky things

97. Pinkie Pie sometimes doesn't understand what she is doing or why she is doing it

98. It's a bad idea to encourage Sweetie Belle to sing, especially at bed time

99. Whatever you do, DO NOT FEED THE PARASPRITES!

100. Since there is no official Trixie figure I will have to carve, sand, paint, and sand again Twilight Sparkle to look like Trixie



Pinkie Pie inspired the most things on this list, 19, and Twilight Sparkle inspired the second most, 12.



Google/Blogger/whoever huffed and puffed and made this post disappear so I have to put it up again.

The Single Biggest Load of Crock Ever

I turned on the radio yesterday at 4 AM and found Coast to Coast, a program that I occasionally listen to. Sometimes they have on some really good guests with really solid evidence backing up their claims. They also spend most of the first hour dealing with news and analysis that the mainstream media doesn't want you to hear, allowing one to get multiple perspectives on stories instead of the homogenised fluff you get almost everywhere else (sometimes it's scary how all the news programs use the exact same words in their stories. The first and only time I ever heard the word "optics" used in the manner it was on the news was when the President and his wife did something outrageously asinine that pissed off a lot of people. EVERYONE in the news said "they need to fix the 'optics' of the situation, because the American people are too stupid to know what's good for them." I still don't know what "optics" means, but I guess it's similar to lies. Usually when I talk about it I say "cock-dicks" because these news people wetting themselves to President Zero* is just too rediculous.).



Sometimes Coast to Coast has the most unbelievable guests dug up from the bowels of wherever unbelievable people come from (Malibu). These include "Major" Ed Dames, whose apocalyptic solar flair dubbed the "Killshot®," was supposed to wipe out the earth every time he's come on for the last twenty years. He also promised original host Art Bell a quantity of gold he was supposed to find using his mind powers for twenty years too. Neither the gold or the Killshot® has materialised yet. There's also Alex Jones (enough said, though his Endgame film was pretty damn scary), and Brian Greene, whose "string theory" isn't a theory and isn't even wrong, because it makes no predictions and cannot be tested in any way, yet it doesn't stop him from turning every program he's on into a debunking exercise.



Yesterday they had "Dr." Judy Wood, who must have got her degree by mugging an actual doctor. She is by a wide margin the worst of them all. She is a 9/11 truther who stretches even the credulity of that moniker. Claiming the government used dumptrucks full of thermite to cut the steel support beams that was shipped in with no one in the buildings noticing it is one thing, but Wood's science fantasy is so outrageous and so treasonous that I had to watch two hours of anti-9/11 truth videos on the internet afterward to keep myself from losing my mind. It didn't completely work, because here I am writing about her today. If Wood's story is correct then EVERYTHING we know about physical sciences is COMPLETELY wrong. Continue reading if you dare.



Judy Wood is a member of a group called Scholars for 9/11 Truth, and as such, is the only person in the group with any experience in engineering and thus the only person in the group to actually have any authority to make claims about the destruction of the buildings on 9/11. The theory she and others in the group espouse is so horribly rediculous that other founding members left the group to found Scholars for 9/11 Truth & Justice to promote their controled demolition theory. Founder James Fetzer is now a pariah in the 9/11 truth movement. Just like with CSICOP and Greenpeace, when founding members quit it's a good sign the group has failed in its original mission (one of the CSICOP founders left after he found a stash of documents they were hiding that demonstrated astrology is real, a Greenpeace founder left when he noticed the group was focused on eliminating capitalism and not helping the environment).



Besides telling blatant lies on the radio such as Larry Silverstein saying "pull it" meaning destroy WTC 7 instead of pull the firefighters out, even though third generation demolitions experts say again and again that "pull it" is not a demolition term, and saying the official story makes no sense when it is the first time ever in history the US government's story makes absolute perfect sense, and claiming to care only about "physical evidence, not theories," Wood concocted the mother of all fairy stories to explain 9/11, and neither the host George Noory or a single caller called her out. Here's the story in a nutshell:



The government used Star Wars masers fired from the moon to destroy the towers. The masers (microwave lasers) resonated at such a frequency that pools of metal remained molten for months at the site afterward, and it resonated with the worker's steel-toed boots, melting them but leaving there feet unharmed. The frequency was such that only three buildings were damaged with surrounding structures left completely untouched (actually, several buildings on the site and surrounding area were damaged). A cop car was hit by the maser and the front half melted completely leaving the other half untouched, something fire cannot do, only special frequency maser weapons (actually, as one expert explains the front half burning: "There's grease, oil and gasoline, and once the fire gets going, rubber hoses and tires. If the fire gets to the gas tank, the tank will go. If it doesn't, it won't. But engine fires are pretty common in cars and they don't always involve the gas tank." Also, the burned cars that were blocks away from the towers were not burned in situ, they were burned near the towers and removed to other locations once their use as evidence in the investigation was over. That's why there are parking lots filled with burned cars surrounded by untouched structures, and why the cars are often cut open or have holes from where tools were used to examine and tow them and remove any trapped passengers.).



When you heat water it explodes violently in a steam explosion, and since there was no steam explosion planes or bombs couldn't have destroyed the buildings. (I have nowhere else to put this, but here's a PDF of an investigation that demonstrated that, far from fire not being able to melt steel, 22 multi-story buildings have fully or partially collapsed from 1970 to 2002 as a result of fire, 7 were concrete, 6 were steel, 5 were masonry, 2 were wood and 2 were of unknown construction.)



When the Keebler Elves drill a hole in the top of a tree to make their home it doesn't take the whole tree down (even though the Keebler Elves are fictional characters in a cartoon world designed to sell cookies, which, by the way, I used to inhale the buttery tasting multi-coloured chocolate chip cookies as a child, and they live in the base of a tree, not the top. Anyone who has ever bought a bag of Keebler cookies can see the logo focuses on the base of the tree, not the top. Every commercial shows the elves home in the base of the tree), so a plane hitting the top of a building can't knock it down. When you fill a pot with water and put it on a wire rack over a fire the rack doesn't explode, it melts slowly then gives way so the fire is not on the bare base of the pot (I thought water reacts violently to heat? Why are you heating it? And why are you using a rack made of some metal that melts below 100°? What is it made of, caesium?).



"Planes cannot turn buildings into powder in midair and leave no remains." The buildings didn't collapse because no debis was found (and carted away in truck loads for weeks afterward). The buildings exploded into coarse dust that fell to the ground where it spontaneously disintegrated into fine dust that was blown back up into the air. The dust was "smaller than DNA" so "nothing could stop it" and it got through breathing masks and killed people (if it's so small why didn't it just diffuse through peoples' skin directly into their blood?). The buildings didn't fall down, they fell up like a tree (even though trees grow up, they don't fall up). The frequency of the maser was such that it disintegrated steel and concrete yet left paper completely unharmed.



That's basically it. If I'm leaving anything out it was far too stupid to remember. I must say, this fairy story is maybe the single most offensive thing anyone could say to the victims of 9/11. This goes above and beyond the crap the normal truthers are pushing, by a lot.



Here is a ten minute video about Wood and other truthers:







*Long time readers know that I come up with joke names for the presidents. Clinton is Billy Boy, Bush 2 is Capital Bush, and Obama is Zero. Bush 1 is the Devil.

Osama bin Laden is Dead

10:47 pm EDT, the White House announced Osama bin Laden was killed by US forces. We have his body.



11:35 pm EDT, the President himself came on television with a very short speech that was good. It doesn't seem like the kind of thing that should have taken an hour to write, and included most of the Pledge of Allegiance at the end, but it was a good speech.



A "special operations team" (no specifics given) operating under the Joint Special Operations Command in concert with the CIA acted on months of intelligence to kill bin Laden in a firefight in a small compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. They have his body. DNA tests will be conducted to confirm his identity and a video is almost certainly going to be released to provide proof to the world that bin Laden is in fact dead.



This news comes almost four months before the tenth anniversary of 9/11.


No Americans were killed in the actions that ended the life of Osama bin Laden. Five people died in the attack, including bin Laden, one of his thirteen sons, and one of his numerous wives who was used as a human shield at one point. Osama bin Laden was shot above the eye. His body was taken aboard the USS Carl Vinson (CVN-70) on the Arabian Sea where it was identified, washed, and given a proper Islamic burial at sea, supposedly so his grave doesn't become a martyr's shrine.


The compound bin Laden was living in is said to be eight times larger than any other building in the city of Abbottabad, which the other wiki says has a population of 120,000. It had a three story house with eighteen foot high walls. The property is estimated to be worth $1 million. This is a substantial sized compound in a substantial sized city. How anyone could miss something this obvious for this long is beyond comprehension.


Supposedly "SEAL Team Six" lead the charge in attacking the compound, though this has not been confirmed.


According to WikiLeaks, Al-Qaeda has made a statement that they have a nuclear device hidden in a European city and that they would detonate it if bin Laden was caught or killed. Report of this document started panic in some of a "nuclear hellstorm." There is nothing more to report on this at the time.



This is a breaking story. Updates will come as they are made public.

Tearful Farewell to Sri Sathya Sai Baba

Sathya Sai Baba's newphew R.J. Ratnakar Raju performs the last rites of the spiritual guru.

Image from India Today



Sai Baba was buried on 27 April with full state honours at the Sai Kulwant Hall. An estimated five lakh people (500,000) came to pay their respects, including the Prime Minister Manmohan Singh (who also visited Baba at his 85th birthday celebration last year). Baba's nephew, and member of the Sri Sathya Sai Central Trust, R. J. Ratnakar performed the last rights.



From Daily News & Analysis India:



Earlier, a little before 9am, the glass casket in which Sai Baba's body was lying in state from Sunday night was removed and the body was wrapped in national tri colour for a brief while.



Men of the Andhra Pradesh Armed Police sounded the last post and fired 21 shots in the air as a mark of respect.



Then the Tricolour was removed and verses from Hindu, Christian, Islamic, Sikh, Judaism and Buddhist scriptures were read out by leaders from these sects. Later, they joined in sprinkling the sacred ash at the samadhi spot as 'mangal aarti' was performed.



With Sai Baba's body draped in his favourite saffron robe, the last rites were performed by Ratnakar, who wept inconsolably, while priests recited vedic chants.



Sai Kulwant Hall will now become the Mahasamadhi Mandir. Radio Sai offers a streaming radio broadcast of the proceedings (I have not listened to the whole program yet), and an email message announces a video of the proceedings will be put up shortly, so devotees in all time zones can have final darshan of Swami.

(The title of this post is adapted from an IBN Live article.)

Mind Over Matter

The sixth episode in the 1980 television program "Mind Over Matter" with Kit Pedler. Features interviews with such luminaries as Lawrence LeShan, David Bohm, Brian Josephson, Geoffrey Chew, Charles Tart, Elizabeth Rauscher, and Fritjof Capra.



Mr. Pedler's own views:



"I think a scientist would have to be massively ignorant or a confirmed bigot to deny the evidence that the mind can make connections with space, time, and matter in ways that probably have nothing to do with the ordinary senses, and also he'd find it difficult to deny these strange effects are compatable with current thinking in physics, and may, in the future, become part of an extended science in which they are no longer viewed as paranormal but as normal."



Runs 26 minutes.

Message of Condolence

From The Dalai Lama:

April 25th 2011

I am saddened by the passing away of Sri Sathya Sai Baba, the respected spiritual leader. I would like to convey my condolences and prayers to all the followers, devotees and admirers of the late spiritual leader.

The Dalai Lama

(The Urban Mystic does not know when regular posting will begin again, or when anything will resume regularity for that matter.)

Love All, Serve All

So many questions. I was sick and confused yesterday. Terrified of flying and drowning I was looking forward to the day that, in spite of those fears, I could afford to go to Prashanti Nilayam to have Baba's darshan, reassured in his earlier statement that he would be around another ten years.



Why did Baba choose to leave more than a decade early? Was his mission finished, or did he see the world falling apart as evidence that humanity no longer wished to listen to his message?


I know Baba produced often several Shiva Lingas every year as part of a big celebration (Lingodbhava). What did they do with them all? Is there a warehouse full of them somewhere or do they give them away?



Who will run Prashanti Nilayam now? Who will run the Sri Satya Sai Central Trust, estimated to hold assets worth $8 billion? Looking back at other gurus who started organizations, Yogananda, Ramakrishna, their organizations quickly became corrupt after their founders were no longer around to supervise everything. Will the same thing happen to Baba's organization? Will the millions helped by his charitable projects be neglected in coming years?



I made this picture late last night. Believe it or not, this is the first time I have ever drawn Swami.