It was a dark and stormy night...

I just vacated my temporary internship position at the Smithsonian...

I just received the first round of comments and corrections paper that I submitted for peer review...

Holy crap, does this situation sound somewhat familiar?

The irony! The irony! I could make such a Sternberg joke right now! ;-) But peer review is not for whiners.

(Actually, the bulk of my paper survived and I found the criticism to be well founded. After going to SAA this year, I actually disagree with parts of my own paper now.)

Ah, back to the drawing board. That's the name of the game. Plus, I'm working on other articles and projects - while sitting in the hot tub. A strong stomach for rejection - I has it!

(I'd better have it...)

Ding-Dong! Verily I Try... (or Christmas and Hunter-Gatherers)

I just read a rather amusing article that gave me one of those "lightbulb" moments, about miscommunication and miscues. I've just figured out (for the umpteenth time) another variation on How Much I am Out of Step with Other Women:

“One Christmas, I received a tub of Porcelana Fade Cream from my husband’s great aunt,” says Ryan-Sigler, a 46-year-old teacher from Lynchburg, Va. “I was at the tender age of 36 and the cream was supposed to ‘fade brown spots.’ I have to say that was the worst Christmas gift I’ve ever received.”

From body shapers to Botox, nose hair trimmers to the dreaded Thigh Toner, there are some gifts it’s better to neither give nor receive. Out-of-the-blue self-improvement gifts often relay a not-so-merry message. Happy holidays — you look old! Merry Christmas, you’re getting fat!Or season’s greetings, isn’t it about time you took care of that lady ’stache?

As I read this, I had one of those *gasp* moments, realizing that my reaction to such a present would have been very different. Porcelana Fade Cream, the "worst Christmas gift" ever? Why? I'd use the face cream (which I would never buy for myself, preferring to mix witch hazel with potting soil and cucumbers, or to use real oatmeal with a low-price facial scrub). I'd probably thank the woman and, if I liked the cream, hint at another jar for next year! What's the big deal? It's a free skin product! So what if it's for age spots and I don't have any? I have moles - would it work on them? Would using it prevent age spots? Let's find out!

Sooner or later, we'll all have to deal with that lady 'stache or our weight gain (weight accumulates around the organs as one ages, which is why even former stick-figures like me have to start watching their weight after forty) or the Thunder Thigh syndrome. So if someone gave me one of those cheesy Thighmaster contraptions, I'd probably laugh and give a demonstration. Can I use it while shimmying?

With than in mind, I now certainly hope that nothing that I gave anyone insulted them. (I doubt it, though. Paradoxically, I am pretty attuned moms' needs when it comes to finding them weirdly appropriate gifts - the hand-held LED message fan was a big hit at the Secret Santa exchange with the mother who promptly signaled "Ice cream in freezer" at her husband behind her kids' backs! I was rather proud of myself for finding that one!)

What do we Americans have to give to each other, anyway? Goofy presents can be fun. I would just assume that the Thighmaster was a joke present. Lady 'stache - okay, not the most diplomatic present, but useful. I would, however, draw the line at nose hair clippers. LOL!

Also, the plastic surgeon who gave a friend's wife a discount for breast augmentation because the friend said "she really wants one" fell for one of the oldest ploys since the beginning of the Twentieth Century. Sorry, you set yourself up for that one, Doc. He goes on to say:

I tell this story as a cautionary tale now. When people talk about defects in their body, they’re often not asking for an operation. They’re asking for a hug and a kiss and reassurance they’re OK.

As I read this article, which is informative but also hilarious, I realized that I'm discovering more and more scenarios in which my reactions just don't gibe with the reactions of other women. For example, this howler finally expressed everything I was afraid to say about women's obsession with shopping:

The idea for Kruger's new study arose from a personal experience. He and his now-wife were traveling with friends through Czechoslovakia. When they arrived in Prague, the women immediately wanted to go shopping, an impulse that the men did not understand.

"We thought, 'Why do you want to go shopping? You can go shopping anywhere. There's a thousand years of culture here,'" he said. "They were adamant. They put their foots down. They took the credit cards and left."

That wasn't the end of it. When the women returned, Kruger said, they were full of joy and pride as they showed off their loot, even though many of their purchases came from a chain store that had outlets in other countries.

"For them," he said, "It was just the thrill of the chase."

Yes, I could never figure out What the hell gives? with buying the same old crap you can buy anywhere else. Normally, I look askance at "evolutionary psychology" - much of it strikes me as ad hoc justifying of sexist stereotypes, with about as much content as "Marxist criticism" (something exists, "Marx predicted it," "this is what he really said," repeat ad nauseum) which in my opinion is not too far from "Nostradamus predicted it." (As Eric Hoffer said, "Marx was not a Marxist.") However, this explanation seems to make sense:

The results fell into the gendered trends that Kruger was expecting to find: Overall women tended to behave like foragers, and men acted like hunters. To him, that made sense.

When groups of hunter-gatherers arrived in a new place, he said, the women were eager to scope out the landscape for patches of food that they would return to again and again. Foraging was a daily and social activity, and kids often came along.

To determine whether a plant was perfectly ripe, women developed a fine attention to colors, shapes, sizes, textures and smells. All of those senses come into play when trying to find shoes that match a new dress or clothes to buy as gifts.

Well, it could be confirmation bias, but it dovetails with so much of my anecdotal experience that I can't help falling for it. And thanks for the "(most)" MSNBC! Thank you!

My method of shopping is to whip through the store with the idea that "I'll know if if I see it." (Notice I did not say, "when." I have walked out of plenty of stores without buying anything. If I say this in front of other women, they express the same shock that they'll invariably express when I say things like, "I'd rather chop wood than do the dishes," or "I think I could have majored in military history.") I practically run past the racks and shelves, until one or two items make me stop and examine them further.

No one can riffle through a rack of clothes faster than me - most of it I don't like and won't buy, so there's no point in looking at it. My goal is to get as much as I need as possible while spending as little as possible, with the fewest trips to the dressing room as possible, since I'm usually dragging with me a large bag containing a heavy book (because I feel insecure without one - don't ask me why, I even brought a book to the casino once).

So, in an earlier age, I would have been a hunter rather than a forager/gatherer? Or is this really a false dichotomy? It's something that fascinates me. I don't think human beings change so fundamentally that there could not have been "tomboy cavewomen" who preferred running around the savannah to digging for grubs and roots with the kids, while certain sensitive men preferred to tend fires or look after children. After all, Native American tribes accepted that there were "lucky charm" gay people, and men who preferred to dress and act as women, and the occasional woman who struck out on her own. I am willing to bet that our recent ancestors and even Neanderthalensis, Homo habilis, and the Australopithecines displayed much more individual diversity than we give them credit for. I'll bet that back then there were, as there are today, loners and jabberers (once speech had been invented), laid-back types and control freaks, drama queens and eye-rollers, honest ones and smarmy used-carcass salemen (or women), and those who later would become the bookworm type, like me.

Jared Diamond expresses doubts about The Hunter stereotype in this unforgettable passage, one of my favorites, from The Third Chimpanzee:

What food did our early ancestors get with those crude tools, and how did they get it? At this point, anthropology books usually insert a long chapter entitled something like "Man the Hunter." The point here is that baboons, chimps, and some other primtes occasionally prey on small vertebrates, but recently surviving Stone Age people (like Bushmen) did a lot of big-game hunting. So did Cro-Magnons, according to abundant archaeological evidence. There's no doubt that our early ancestors also ate some meat, as shown by marks of their stone tools on animal bones and by wear marks on their stone tools caused by cutting meat. The real question is: how much big-game hunting did our early ancestors do?... The mystique of Man the Hunter is now so rooted in us that it's hard to abandon our belief in its long-standing importance. Today, shooting a big animal is regarded as an ultimate expression of macho masculinity.* Trapped in this mystique, male anthropologists like to stress the key role of big-game hunting in human evolution....

As an example of the purple prose spawned by this men's locker-room mentality, consider the following account of human evolution by Robert Ardrey in his book African Genesis: "In some scrawny troop of beleaguered not-yet-men on some scrawny forgotten plain a radian particle from an unknown source fractured a never-to-be-forgotten gene, and a primate carnivore was born. For better or for worse, for tragedy or for triumph, for ultimate glory and ultimate damnation, intelligence made alliance with the way of the killer, and Cain with his sticks and his stones and his quickly running feet emerged on the high savannah." What pure fantasy! [Yeesh, that was pretty bad!]

Western male writers and anthropologists aren't the only men with an exaggerated view of hunting. In New Guinea I've lived with real hunters, men who recently emerged from the Stone Age. Conversations at campfires go on for hours over each species of game animal, its habits, and how best to hunt it. To listen to my New Guinea friends, you would think that they eat fresh kangaroo for dinner every night and do little each day except hunt. In fact, when pressed for details, most New Guinea admit that they have bagged only a few kangaroos in their whole lives.

I still recall my first morning in the New Guinea highlands, when I set out with a group of a dozen men armed with bows and arrows. As we passed a fallen tree, there was suddenly much excited shouting, men surrounded the tree, some spanned their bows, and others pressed forward into the brush pile. Convinced that an enraged boar or kangaroo was about to come out fighting, I looked for a tree that I could climb to a perch of safety. Then I heard triumphant shrieks, and out of the brush pile came two mighty hunters holding aloft their prey: two baby wrens, not quite able to fly, weighting about one-third of an ounce each, and promptly plucked, roasted, and eaten. [Awwwww!] The rest of that day's catch consisted of a few frogs and many mushrooms... For most of our history we were not mighty hunters but skilled chimps, using stone tools to acquire and prepared plant food and small animals. Occasionally, men did bag a large animal, and then retold the story of that rare event incessantly.

I'm feeling more and more like a woman as I read this! LOL, men bragging and making something appear more difficult than it really is - girls, ain't it the truth?

*I wish to add, however, that the overwhelming majority of hunters in Minnesota also consider this to be an enormous responsibility, and feel a great respect for and kinship with the big animal. Most hunters in this state are extremely careful with their guns, respectful of people's private farms, and support local conservation efforts. The recent poaching of an eight-point buck known in this state by a jerk who wanted to act out his own Man the Hunter stereotype caused hurt and anger among hunters, who respect nature and the law, and expect others to do so.

My Kindle Confront[s] Kent Hovind's Dissertation

UPDATED: Note the post name correction. *Uggghhh* Excuse me, I marvelously cannot type lately. (How I aced a recent typing test with 98 percent accuracy is beyond me.)
---
Kent Hovind's diss--um, er, ertation, if you want to call it that, is now online. I loaded it onto my Kindle, which has new PDF-reading ability, and began the Text-to-Speech function.

When I read, "As an evangelist, God has given me..." (was God the evangelist?) I knew I was in for the long haul. My Kindle, in fact, started reading aloud in two ways: first in its normal voice, and then, in a silly high pitched whine.



Rather like that. Then, it let out a gasp and refused to read further unless I gave it some chocolate. Nobody else touches my chocolate!

I looked at the page (74) and read for myself (otherwise, I would never have believed it):

Bring back a Mars rock or a Jupiter rock, I'll eat it or lick it.

The best. Line. In a "dissertation." Ever! Bwahaha! My Kindle now demands pop-rocks.

Where can I find pop-rocks? I haven't seen those things in years. I offered to go to the Science Museum and pick up some freeze-dried ice cream, but Kindle won't hear of it.

Shimmies to Pharyngula

LATER: It just gets better and better:

page 87: "God created the plants on day three before he created the sun on day four. If you think plants are going to survive billions of years without the sun, you need to study more biology." Now, how can you argue with that? Bwahaha!

Are Four Legs Better than Two?

This commentary cracked me up: "Animals make the perfect humans."

In case there are a few on two legs who aren't convinced, allow me to present my case.

Your dog is a great food tester. If she won't eat it, you'd better not either.

No cat snores as loudly as a human.

Your cat, dog, horse or bird doesn't care if you're young or old, rich or poor, fat or thin. She loves you just as you are.

No animal has ever tortured himself by trying to be perfect.

No herd of horses or pack of hounds will ever ask you to clap your hands in unison. Nor will any animal -- even in front of a TV camera -- introduce another as "the lovely and talented ..."

Humans routinely breed past the food supply. Most animals are too smart to do this.

Some animals are monogamous. Some are not. They accept their fundamental natures. When it comes to humans, the kindest way to approach this is to understand that monogamy is contrary to nature but necessary for the greater social good.

Animals do not pay for sex.

Animals cannot damage the water table. Humans are doing this all over the world even as you read this.

No animal is ever a hypocrite.

A cat doesn't care if another cat is black or white, so along as she catches mice.

A dog may steal from you but will never lie to you.

And so on.

With all due respect to the valid points that she makes, she is wrong on a couple of points:

Animals do pay for sex. Many animals exchange gifts of food, for example, for sex. Others just force the female. Nature isn't always pretty.

No animal is a hypocrite? Tell that to my cat. After having a moderate-to-severe urinating problem (he didn't want to go inside the box), we had both of them neutered and I, who had lavished praise on little Newton for any box-doody, began rewarding him with food if he used the box. Well, I'm happy to say that Newton has had a complete attitude change - if anything, he's turned into the happiest little puppy that a cat could be - running at my heels with his face upturned, wagging his tail, and "barking" - but he also learned to scratch in the box whenever he wants a treat (which is constantly now). Actually, random rewards are best - I did try that, but you know how cute they can be when they want something!

What a little shit! Plus, I cannot eat cheerios without both of these characters (they're tuxedo cats, but I think they more resemble killer whales) in my face, running over my feet, jumping on the counter, meowing, etc. These little twinks get breakfast, then also get a taste of my cheerios before I have any breakfast. And since I loathe eating in the morning, cheerios or oatmeal is about all I can stomach. (Yes, they have to lick my oatmeal bowl, too!) I admit it; I let them manipulate me.

Animals aren't "too smart" to overbreed - any animal can and will overbreed. That's why we get our little darlings fixed. (If you own a female cat, you know the routine: "Meeeeoooaauur! I want to have a million kitty-brats!")

Do I need to mention that, even if your dog will eat it, you'd better not? (Cats, too. Loki throws up on the floor, and there's Newton, running over to see what's tasty. He'll even eat his own barf. Eeeaaauuugh!)

But for the most part, this article is true. Animals don't care if you're ugly or pretty, fat or thin. Animals work well with disabled people, and people with autism or brain damage respond positively to them. They love without condition, without reservation; I never felt judged by an animal, or alone in nature. Also, it goes without saying that animals have a sense of humor; every single cat I ever owned sure did. They were all sweeties, and I swear they were laughing at me, and playing tricks on me! Animals are happy "just because," and this year, I resolved to do just that.

One of the reasons we made a social contract with domesticated animals years ago was to "borrow" their power, speed, senses. In return, we feed them, care for them. We have broken this contract. They have not.

Man, that's the truth.

This New-Fangled Halloween

Halloween is coming - and you know what that means. It's the time of year for book burnings. So, what's going up in flames this year? Harry Potter? Porn? The Ultimate Sudoku Challenge? Nope - this year, it's Bibles.

Come to our Halloween book burning. We are burning Satan's bibles like the NIV, RSV, NKJV, TLB, NASB, NEV, NRSV, ASV, NWT, Good News for Modern Man, The Evidence Bible, The Message Bible, The Green Bible, ect.

These are perversions of God's Word, the King James Bible...

We will also be burning Satan's popular books written by heretics like Westcott & Hort, Bruce Metzger, Billy Graham Rick Warren Bill Hybels , John McArthur, James Dobson, Charles Swindoll John Piper, Chuck Colson, Tony Evans, Oral Roberts, Jimmy Swagart, Mark Driskol, Franklin Graham, Bill Bright, Tim Lahaye, Paula White, T.D. Jakes, Benny Hinn, Joyce Myers, Brian McLaren, Robert Schuller, Mother Teresa, The Pope...

Man. It sure is confusing, trying to keep up with the book-burners these days. But that's not all - if you want to see a true Halloween horror, check out this ministry's website, via this page (scroll down for the link - I'm not linking directly to these nuts). It looks like they licked a piece of candy-corn and wrote it on a puddle of melted crayons.

Since the author freely admits that he cannot read Hebrew, Greek, or Latin, how does he know that the King James Version is the only faithful English rendering of the Bible? Easy! The KJV tells him so! Wow. Such logic makes me weak in the knees.

Speaking of weak knees, apparently they don't make ghosts like they used to.

Ouch! That's awkward. I can see this Halloween shaping up to be just peachy. Therefore, I thought I'd rent The Shining again just to revisit a classic piece of horror by my favorite director. Wow! Was I disappointed!



Give me a break. This movie wasn't really that scary at all! What a rip-off. I don't remember it being so...so heartwarming. So now how is one supposed to have a scary Halloween?



Good old Mary Poppins! Yes, as I recall, it was this movie (and not Alien) that made me jump high enough to stand straight up on my theatre seat backrest.

But seriously folks, you can have a great and spooky Halloween without any television. Just go to hulu.com and check out their huluween specials, or my favorite classic shows: "Night Gallery," "Alfred Hitchcock Presents," and "Outer Limits." (They also have "Dark Shadows," but it's the 1990s remake, not the original series, which I love - but I have parts of that on DVD.)

When I was very small, I saw part of a TV show that scared the living crap out of me so badly that I had to leave the room - it was worse than the famous third story from "Trilogy of Terror," which I actually could sit through. ("Trilogy of Terror" is not at Hulu, but you can watch it on YouTube.)



This particular program, I remember, had something to do with red, glowing eyes following a man on the street in the dark before attacking him. Then, there was a scene in which a man trapped in a basement watches in helpless terror as a creature with two glowing red eyes reaches its hairy paws into the window to pull the bars open and come in. I remember that, knowing that the show was about to end, I waited outside the room until all the scary noises had died down, then ran in to see the very last scene: a dark puddle of something on the floor, out of which, suddenly, two red eyes opened and glowed.

Not having any idea what the title of this show was, or if it was a TV movie or part of a series, I searched IMDb and Google and YouTube for this show that had terrified me, without any luck, until a few weeks ago I stumbled upon it by pure chance at Hulu! I could not believe that I had finally found that silly show that had made me scream bloody murder! (And no, it didn't have the same effect on me now.)



It was a "Night Gallery" episode, "There Aren't Any More MacBanes," starring a very young and weird Joel Gray, and (coincidence upon coincidence) including a walk-on role by a young Mark Hamill, who was later to cause me so much adolescent-girl-puppy-love-trauma as Luke Skywalker in Star Wars. Too funny! It's a small Hollywoorld!

This year, the ghosts are not on the television - the ghost is our television! Television is dead. We can rebuild it; we have the technology. The average ghoul who wants more control over her Halloween viewing now has more choices than ever before. Between Netflix, Hulu, and LikeTelevision, along with all the online world news/entertainment channels to be had, and online mp3s of Old Time Radio shows, this promises to shape up to be a happy (and cheap) Halloween after all.

(What's that, you say? "Twilight Zone"? I didn't forget TZ - I have the entire collection on DVD. I don't even need an internet connection - I can watch it whenever I want! Bwahahahahaha! *evil laughter*)

Shimmies to Ed Brayton at Dispatches, and Book Patrol at Seattlepi, and all my ghosts and ghoulies out there.

P.S. Any "Twin Peaks" fans out there? You can watch seasons one and two for free at IMDb.

The Shimmying Cowboy

And, ladies and gents, to continue our celebration of Revisionist History Month, did you also know that cowboys of the old west were individually tutored by older cowboys in dance and choreography?



Next up: Stamp collecting intelligent design advocates - finally out of the closet!

Madonna on Toast? That's Nothing...

Chewbacca lives in this guy's cabinet!

Chewie's trying to send a message to the world: Please, my children! Please! No more Vader cakes! Eeeeaaaaggghhh!




The Vader-cake cult may seem like harmless fun, but it causes a great disturbance in the Force.

The next thing you know, the FAIL demon will take root in your life, causing epic FAILS even in the games you play to pass the time.



And causing you to think you can see, ahem, Russia (or someplace) from here:

Or causing all kinds of inappropriate Star Wars allusions...

(That's Jodee, not Yodee, right? Ha ha.)

...and causing a brave young ID Jedi to fall on his, er, lightsaber.

Nice job, Luke. Way to "battle the Emperor." By the way, what look are you going for? You look like the Emperor. I thought that intelligent design was "young and rebellious"?

Oh, dear. (Chuck Colson on the left; Jonathan Wells on the right.)

Well, anyway. Here's a photo of the Darwinist stormtroopers with their helmets off.

I was going somewhere with this, but now I have no idea. We'll just end it here, okay? ;-)

UPDATED: Well, even if your whimsical blog post is undirected, trust an intelligent design advocate to supply the closure. Dembski's traipsing toward another EPIC FAIL. Forward and dorkward, Mr. Isaac Newton of Information Theory. *Sheesh*.

But let’s grant that the evolutionary process, as governed by the Darwinian selection mechanism, is not goal directed, i.e., that it is not seeking targets (which, of course, leads to the question how a non-directed process is, nonetheless, finding targets in nature). In that case, it makes sense to think of Darwinian mechanism as a grammar-checker — living things must pass the grammar-checker if they get to survive and reproduce.

see more pwn and owned pictures

No. Dembski still thinks that natural selection is a centralized force, like gravity*. It's not. Natural selection is the term we use to describe the outcome that we see arising from billions of changes and interactions in the environment. I wrote about this in my paper:

To imagine an “animal in its environment” is to imagine a static environment and an objectified animal, and by analogy an inert record in a passive archives, and consequently a Platonic view in which “true knowledge must remain fixed” (Mortensen, 1999, 6). In contrast, Moore argues for the dynamic overlap of object and context. Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins argued the same when he wrote that animals and insects do not merely live in, but effect, shape, and become their environment, which in turn shapes their descendents and competitors:

It is legitimate to speak of adaptations as being “for the benefit of” something, but that something is best not seen as the individual organism. It is a smaller unit which I call the active, germ-line replicator. The most important kind of replicator is the “gene” or small genetic fragment. Replicators are not, of course, selected directly, but by proxy; they are judged by their phenotypic effects. Although for some purposes it is convenient to think of these phenotypic effects as being packaged together in discrete “vehicles” such as individual organisms, this is not fundamentally necessary. Rather, the replicator should be thought of as having extended phenotypic effects, consisting of all its effects on the world at large, not just if effects on the individual body in which it happens to be sitting [emphasis mine] (1982, 4).

Dawkins is not saying that birds and nests do not have natures; he is saying that genes replicate themselves by living in birds which, in response to finding themselves in one environment, die or develop a new strategy by building nests, thus changing that environment, thereby improving their chances of reproduction, which increases the chance of the gene’s replication. Bird, nest, behavior, gene, and environment do not collide like billiard balls, but overlap and combine. They exist as objects in themselves and also as functions and relationships across these objects. Yet both preservationists and conservationists in ecology envision “a bird” that “builds” a “nest,” and in archives, “a creator” that “creates” a “collection.” This is not exactly incorrect—it is our experience—but it is naïve, mechanistic, Newtonian. This is where [Mark] Greene et al perhaps meant to place their condemnation of “absolutes,” because given sufficient time the nature of anything changes.

Because we as human beings are accustomed to viewing our creations as artificial (even destructive) and ourselves as uniquely technology-dependent, weak and silly beside our animal cousins, we ignore how animals also change and even pollute the environment for themselves and other animals through their own constructions. Dawkins is saying, and Moore is implying, that the bird’s nest or the archives is a behavior as well as a structure, and that successive generations of birds are no less dependent on their increasingly sophisticated nests than we are upon our structures. Birds too are silly and weak without evolution’s technologies—the nest, the hard-shell egg, the beak. Beavers cut down trees to build dens, flooding a field to create a pond, chasing away some animals and inviting others, drowning plants to be replaced by others. Who, then, is polluting? What, then, is “natural?” Is a beaver’s dam natural, therefore eternal, but an archives artificial and thus infinitely plastic, and Greene seems to claim? Building nests, dams, houses, and archives are all behaviors that recreate context—is it really impossible to say, without appealing to naïve neo-Platonism, that nests, dams, houses, and archives indeed each have a nature? This author argues that they do, and that the nature of archives evolves. Archives change, but archives remain distinct from, say, orchestras, or dance performances, as traffic noise is distinct from tubas (Herbert, 1985, 135). Is it not then reasonable to say that archives are what we archive, whatever that may be and however we may go about archiving it (Kaplan, 2000), and however that may change?

This is the tragedy, that the discussion of a comprehensive and universal archival theory gets bogged down in retrograde dualism: record versus archives, natural versus artificial, and eternal first principles or naïve postmodernist relativism. It is a trap. Dualities usually are, and are worthy of suspicion if not outright avoidance because the mind so readily falls into them. In theory, Eastwood and Duranti hope for a place of stasis, of security, a Promised Land, whereas Greene and his colleagues evidently fear a reissuing of the Ten Commandments that would forcibly unite distant tribes (Greene et al, 10). Neither path leads to a legitimate theory, and all of these brilliant thinkers who each have a part of the answer tragically miss the point.

*Which, of course, is really a curvature in space-time, anyway.

Animals Are More Sensitive to These Things

Richard Dawkins shares a funny story with Pharyngula about the inauguration:

Make of this what you will. We were watching the ceremony on BBC TV. Our two little Coton de Tulear dogs, Pamba and Tycho, were being quiet and good. But as soon as Rick Warren came on, they leapt up and started barking. Shoulder to shoulder they stood, and barked and barked and barked their little heads off, directly at the TV screen. As a result, we couldn't hear a word of what Warren said. As soon as Warren stopped speaking, these two splendid little dogs stopped barking, quietly settled down, and we were able to enjoy the rest the inauguration. Afterwards, we drank a grateful toast -- to Pamba and Tycho and President Obama.

I guess animals are just more sensitive to certain things than humans are. When I played Rick Warren's speech on my laptop, our kitties Loki and Newton, who were joyfully (and naughtily) playing with the cord of the blinds, suddenly disappeared from the room. ;-)

Shimmies to Pharyngula and to President Obama

Klaatu Barada Stinko

In the poetic justice department:

On my last Friday at work, Santa gives a sci-fi fan the best present ever: The remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still has jumped the snark.

Klaatu barada stinko

If you’re looking for chuckles this holiday season, bypass the miserably unfunny “Four Christmases” and go where the real comedy is — “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” a clumsy, moronic remake of Robert Wise’s brilliant 1951 classic about an alien invader trying to save the human race from its own self-destructive impulses.

What did poor Wise do, incidentally, to deserve such treatment? His chilling horror masterpiece “The Haunting” was already put through the meat-grinder with an effects-heavy 1999 remake, and his thriller “The Andromeda Strain” was revisited with ill results in a SciFi Channel re-do earlier this year. What next — a hip-hop reinterpretation of “The Sound of Music”? (Granted, Queen Latifah could totally tear up “Climb Ev’ry Mountain,” but still…)

The new “Day” can’t be bothered to include the thought-provoking dialogue of the original, choosing instead to bury the audience with special effects that are visually impressive but no substitute for an actual script. And what words do remain are so exquisitely awful that they provide some of the season’s biggest laughs.

My personal favorite? Astro-biologist Helen Benson (Jennifer Connelly) takes alien Klaatu (Keanu Reeves) to see a Nobel Prize–winning scientist and notes that her colleague was honored “for his work in biological altruism.” What would that entail, exactly? Helping frogs cross the street? [guffaws mine]

Yes, Hollywood, that is an excellent question—what did Robert Wise ever do to you? Why do you keep picking on his work? He’s one of my favorite directors of all time! Hands off of West Side Story! You just keep your grubby little committee red-tape we-gotta-update-it-for-the-youngsters, Far And Away-will-be-a-hit paws off of The Hindenburg and Blood on the Moon and Run Silent, Run Deep!

If you’re going to remake his films, why don’t you pick on his least admirable Star Trek: The Motionless Picture*?

Try this on for size: Star Trek: The Emo[tion] Picture

Kirk: George, I mean, Sulu, I wish you’d shut up about being gay. Just shut up about being gay, all right? For five seconds?
Sulu: Even if I’m referring to your jacket? Oh, excuse me—robe.
Kirk: Jacket.
Sulu: Robe, captain. [Said so that it sounds like “Rogue captain.”] The belt is tied around your waist.
Kirk: That the particular cut of this jacket. It suits me better.
Sulu: Better get a bucket before you throw up!
Kirk: George, I’m just sick and tired of hearing about your sexuality all the time!
Sulu: Ohhhhh. You know what, Bill? It’s called having fans. Because I’m not the one [Kirk: That’s what I’m talking about! …Oh—hey, I have fans, too!] talking about my sexuality. They talk about my sexuality. I can help it if they talk about my sexuality. I don’t talk about my sexuality at all.
Kirk: Yes, and you don’t talk to me at all! You didn’t even invite me to your wedding. We [Sulu: I sent you that fucking invitation via FED EX! What, can’t see the ground over your beer-gut robe?] don’t communicate anymore! What do you have against me? Why don’t we talk anymore?
Sulu [giving up]: You don’t send me flowers, Randy Sally. [aside] He has fans, too.
Kirk: Because you didn’t invite me to your wedding!

Heh. I envision some spectacular special effects coming up after that.

*credit to Lenny Flank for the pun.

Being John Maverickish

Hey, remember this little gem, Being John Malkovich, in which John Malkovich goes through his own consciousness portal after everyone else has been there?



Well, it occurs to me that this is what must have happened to John McCain.

"I'm a maverick! Maverick! Maverick!"

In fact, after watching the debate between Joe Biden and Sarah Palin, I think that Palin went through John's portal with McCain.

"MAVERICK! MAVERICK! MAVERICK! MAVERICK! MAVERICK! MAVERICK! MAVERICK! MAVERICK!"

Yeah, enough already, Walnuts. There I was trying to play Palin Bingo while your Veeper wannabee was going off onstage. I should have just made my own bingo card entirely consisting of the word "maverick" and awarded myself a macrame wall hanging, and called it a night.

Raymond Queneau News of the Day Segment - Inaugural

Reported this day, Wednesday, September 24, 2008:

Look, let’s just cut through the brass tacks and get down to red tape, shallweeee? (If I mention this guy’s name once more, people are going to think I’m raising his secret hate child.)

Give it to me straight. Will the economy improve if we stick our money into all these “fungible commodities” I’ve heard so much about, and if so where do I do that? Nasdaq, Dow, or Pillsbury? Is fudge a commodity, and if so, is trading in it fungible or fudgeable (or possibly both)? And what about fungi?

If we “flag the molecules” the way we did with those Kuwaiti oil tankers, how long is it before we start doing it for quarks (being that Palin’s electrons apparently don’t stay in their orbitals), and is this woman charmed or just strange?

And how can we know where the oil and coal are going anyway if the electrons in the atoms that comprise it are either 1) everywhere at once, or 2) only there (i.e., in the U.S.) when we observe them (e.g. in the U.S.)?

The conclusion is inescapable: we must build more colliders in the United States to observe petroleum molecules! They’re larger than subatomic particles, and so easier to “see,” and besides, McCain (inventor of the dingleberry) will love that.

And incidentally, Palin opened her mouth and five days later the Large Hadron Collider went offline until spring. Coincidence? Obviously she went back to work too early; she should be there, being a mother to Schroedinger’s cat (litter, and litter – is that weird? I just noticed) instead of shaking her pom-poms because a body kissed a body coming thro’ the rye. (Yes, another working uterus, who would have thought it possible. If there’s one thing this world doesn’t see often, it’s women getting preggers! “Life happens,” now isn’t that a blessing? When men get pregnant, and it’s not Tom Cruise, I’ll put down my latte. Until then, I have a paper to write. Oh, and the word “precious” signals the start of a drinking game. Just so you know.)

Just don’t get me started on Joe Biden.

(Nice one, Joe. I see where the misnomer “Joe Blow” should have came from, just not how it was never invented for you, and I see why they didn’t add the suffix “hard,” since you do it so effortlessly.)

Or how much I shamefacedly admire this dastardly female criminal – and how much I hope, for the sake of poetic justice, that she also works at Galactic Pizza. Because that would rock.

The debates are off, the gloves are on! Nay, you say?

Well, the advantage of being a man running with a woman is that he can always change her mind. Right?

Well anyway, according to the WSJ (the Farmer’s Almanac for snarky people), what happened is that Eliot Spitzer turned wonks into rats fleeing the ship where they, like Cassandra, then turned into hedge fund traders, but did anyone listen to them? No! Who got blamed?

And so we're back to where we started. Silly Ben. In fact, that should be a TV show. (No! No! Bad idea, bad idea!)

Keepin' It Surreal

I came across the one and only preacher whose gospel touched me. Oh, it touched me. In the funnybone!

Has this man who inserted his own dialogue been reading Robert Desnos or something...?

The Creationist's Nightmare

UPDATED: Ray Comfort blames the California wildfires on gay marriage, and then exhorts his critics to "get out more" because unbelievers "life in a fantasy world."

Great idea. I'd love to get out more and travel the world. Ray, I suggest you check out Albania, which for five centuries has had women pretend to be men:

For centuries, in the closed-off and conservative society of rural northern Albania, swapping genders was considered a practical solution for a family with a shortage of men. Her father was killed in a blood feud, and there was no male heir. By custom, Ms. Keqi, now 78, took a vow of lifetime virginity. She lived as a man, the new patriarch, with all the swagger and trappings of male authority — including the obligation to avenge her father’s death.

She says she would not do it today, now that sexual equality and modernity have come even to Albania, with Internet dating and MTV invading after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Girls here do not want to be boys anymore. With only Ms. Keqi and some 40 others remaining, the sworn virgin is dying off.

“Back then, it was better to be a man because before a woman and an animal were considered the same thing,” said Ms. Keqi, who has a bellowing baritone voice, sits with her legs open wide like a man and relishes downing shots of raki. “Now, Albanian women have equal rights with men, and are even more powerful. I think today it would be fun to be a woman.”

The tradition of the sworn virgin can be traced to the Kanun of Leke Dukagjini, a code of conduct passed on orally among the clans of northern Albania for more than 500 years. Under the Kanun, the role of a woman is severely circumscribed: take care of children and maintain the home. While a woman’s life is worth half that of a man, a virgin’s value is the same: 12 oxen.
The sworn virgin was born of social necessity in an agrarian region plagued by war and death. If the family patriarch died with no male heirs, unmarried women in the family could find themselves alone and powerless. By taking an oath of virginity, women could take on the role of men as head of the family, carry a weapon, own property and move freely.

They dressed like men and spent their lives in the company of other men, even though most kept their female given names. They were not ridiculed, but accepted in public life, even adulated. For some the choice was a way for a woman to assert her autonomy or to avoid an arranged marriage.

"Albania Custom Fades: Woman as Family Man," by Dan Bilefsky, New York Times, June 24, 2008 (requires subscription).

However, this venerable tradition of gender-swapping is now threatened by feminism! I wonder what Ray Comfort would make of that? Which is more evil - transsexuals, or feminists?

A big world, isn't it, Ray? And real confusing too, when you cling to moral simplicities and black-and-white absolutes. So, where are the floods and fires in Albania?
----
Remember Ray Comfort and Kirk Cameron, and their "atheist's nightmare," the banana?



(Of course you remember. This video is among the Top Ten Belly-Laughs of all time. I was down for the count for a full half-hour after seeing it. I laughed so hard that one side of my body went numb, and I thought I was having a stroke!)

Well, due to the banana having that artificial "tab" (bred via artificial selection), we may see a banana shortage in the coming years, and no only due to higher gas prices:

By sticking to this single variety, the banana industry ensures that all the bananas in a shipment ripen at the same rate, creating huge economies of scale. The Cavendish [currenly the only banana found on the market] is the fruit equivalent of a fast-food hamburger: efficient to produce, uniform in quality and universally affordable.

But there’s a difference between a banana and a Big Mac: The banana is a living organism. It can get sick, and since bananas all come from the same gene pool, a virulent enough malady could wipe out the world’s commercial banana crop in a matter of years.

This has happened before. Our great-grandparents grew up eating not the Cavendish but the Gros Michel banana, a variety that everyone agreed was tastier. But starting in the early 1900s, banana plantations were invaded by a fungus called Panama disease and vanished one by one. Forest would be cleared for new banana fields, and healthy fruit would grow there for a while, but eventually succumb.

By 1960, the Gros Michel was essentially extinct and the banana industry nearly bankrupt. It was saved at the last minute by the Cavendish, a Chinese variety that had been considered something close to junk: inferior in taste, easy to bruise (and therefore hard to ship) and too small to appeal to consumers. But it did resist the blight.
Over the past decade, however, a new, more virulent strain of Panama disease has begun to spread across the world, and this time the Cavendish is not immune. The fungus is expected to reach Latin America in 5 to 10 years, maybe 20. The big banana companies have been slow to finance efforts to find either a cure for the fungus or a banana that resists it. Nor has enough been done to aid efforts to diversify the world’s banana crop by preserving little-known varieties of the fruit that grow in Africa and Asia.

Then what am I going to put on my yogurt?

Now, for more serious matters: I have not been able to get this story out of my mind. A 61-year-old grandmother discovers her 16-year-old granddaughter in bed with another girl - normal teen-age experimentation it sounds like to me - and beats her granddaughter with a cane and a belt as punishment. The granddaughter is in a hospital; that bitch grandmother is in jail, where I hope she becomes someone's bitch.

What a rigid lunatic!

I couldn't stop thinking about it, and I needed some cheering up, so I turned to Margaret Cho for some perspective. This is from "Notorious C.H.O.," which I watched on the bus on the way to New York City to protest the Republican Convention with a bunch of other peace activists. (Actually, laughing your ass off at 1 a.m. is not the best way to get to sleep on a long bus ride.) The entire show is up at You Tube in ten parts (and thank you for that!).

Margaret describes how her otherwise conservative mother had an open mind about being gay: "I tell you gay story about Daddy!"



I hope someone shows this video to that poor girl in Pennsylvania, so that she and her friend don't think they're alone in being gay (or being straight and experimenting as normal kids do).

Shimmies to JanieBelle - who I understand is now quite the shimmier herself!

Million Dollar Maybe

First of all, take a moment to visit my new addition to the blogroll.

What is Intelligent Design?
Intelligent Design (ID) is a scientific theory that says evolution's naturalism is wrong: an Intelligent Designer is responsible for the origin of the universe and of life and its diversity.

Isn't the "Intelligent Designer" just another way of saying "God"?
Of course not. The Intelligent Designer could be advanced aliens or the Christian God. We don't say which.

If it could be either aliens or God, why does your logo show the Christian God?
We had to pick one or the other, and it just happened to be that one. We definitely don't rule aliens out. We even have an alternate version of our logo in case that turns out to be the case:

Do you really believe it could be aliens?
No. [Geez, Richard Dawkins got in trouble for entertaining this idea even only hypothetically!]

Is Intelligent Design scientific?
Yes, didn't you see that we italicized scientific all over the place?

How do you recognize when something is designed?
Something is designed when it is really complex, has Irreducible Complexity, or looks like it's designed.

What is Irreducible Complexity?
Irreducible Complexity means that something requires all its parts in order to function, so therefore it couldn't have possibly evolved.

How do you recognize when something is Irreducibly Complex?
Something is Irreducibly Complex when proponents of Intelligent Design can't imagine how natural selection could have produced it.

Speaking of intelligent design - In what is surely a publicity stunt rather than a serious challenge, Bushnell and Field and Stream are offering $1,000,000 for a clear, precise photo of Bigfoot.

We’re not saying we believe in Sasquatch, but if anyone’s ever going to capture an image of one, we’re guessing it’ll be a hunter with a trail camera. That’s why Bushnell is offering a chance at $1,000,000 to the first person using one who snaps a verifiable photo of the beast.

But just in case no Bigfoots wander your way, the editors at Field & Stream magazine are giving away great Bushnell gear for the best trail cam shots in the following categories: Deer photos, non-deer photos, and funny photos. There are three winners every month, and three grand prizes at the end of the year, so enter your photos today!

BONUS CATEGORY: For all you jokers out there – we’re giving away an additional Bushnell Trail Scout Pro camera for your best attempt to cheat Bushnell out of their $1,000,000 prize. So go grab your gorilla suit and head to the nearest woodlot. Just don’t get mistaken for a bear.

And no blobsquatching! Go ahead and fake that hernia! (Now BF enthusiasts claim to spot a "hernia" on the right thigh as the creature walks - but I think it looks like a bunching up on the costume.)

Oh, and don't do as Roger Patterson did and steal a camera and film (or video, today) to capture that million-dollar baby!

Roger Patterson was a incorrigible con-man apparently obsessed with female Bigfeet and who had already self-published a book mentioning one just one year before he allegedly captured "Patty" at Bluff Creek, California (in the nick of time, apparently, to go on tour with the film and pay off some debts). In fact, after capturing an alleged Bigfoot on film he was promptly arrested for nonpayment of the camera and the film - just two of the many items/money he stole or bilked from other people. And why would Roger Patterson swear on his deathbed that the film is legitimate if that was a lie? Well, he was dying of cancer and he wanted his wife to get the proceeds from the film.

Look, I had a Bigfoot phase too, when I was around twelve - and the legend still fascinates me, as old ghost stories and tall tales fascinate me. But it's now been thirty years since the Bigfoot phenomena peaked, and forty years since Patterson staged that tired old chestnut, the Patterson-Gimlin film. (The time to investigate that tired old film was right after it was shot, and even the late Rene Dahinden, one of the "Four Horsemen of Sasquatchery," and the only Bigfoot hunter I have any respect for, admitted that the Bigfoot hunters "didn't do our jobs" to investigate Patterson's and Gimlin's claims. No, they didn't - but Patterson also kept the location a secret for a long time, and to this day know one knows where he had the film developed.)

It's high time that someone coughed up a real creature, or produced some fossil evidence on par with what we have for other creatures that migrated to America (including human beings), or quit talking about Bigfoot. We know about the evolution of the bear in the United States, but* there has never been one fossil of BF found anywhere. All we get is more "enhancements" and theories pulled out of people's asses, such as below:



*Apes don't have butts like the "creature" in the Patterson-Gimlin footage. (Notice also that the buttocks don't move.) The "creature" in this film is problematic for many reasons (try to get a close-up glimpse of the heels - FAKE!), but the major objection is, this is an "ape" top-half with a human bottom-half. How an anthropologist like Dr. Meldrum can not realize this is beyond me. (Even the Smithsonian's John Napier, who was willing to entertain the idea of Bigfoot's existence, called this film a fake.)

Of course, the contest also calls for a good fake! Hmmmm....but that won't win me the million dollars...

Star Wars: A New Pope

A parody that made a Christian laugh and an atheist snigger guiltily, "Am I a bad person if I find this funny?"



Gee, imagine. Art and humor uniting people (if even momentarily). Can we risk that?

I'm gonna send fellow librarian Claw of the Conciliator some shimmies and check out his sci-fi posts. I mean, he liked Donnie Darko.

This Fluff Was from Its Screening Room Untimely Ripped

Red [and they mean that] alert! Red alert! There has been a security breech [sic] at the Expelled moon base! We need to raise a lot of money to encircle the moon with our space ships and prevent the Reds from seeing this film before it opens in Februar - uh, April, and in - well, wherever it's supposed to be playing.

We already had our first security breech [sic] and are asking YOU now for your support to stand up for EXPELLED: No Intelligence Allowed. Hosted by Ben Stein, EXPELLED contains a critical message at a critical time. As an underdog in Hollywood right now, we need your support.
Recently Robert Moore, a film critic from The Orlando Sentinel pretending to be a minister, snuck into a private screening, did not sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement, and criticized the film the next day in his article.
Moore compared Stein, who is Jewish, to Holocaust Deniers and charge that Stein's linking of Darwinism to the Holocaust was "despicable." Stein states, "The only thing I find despicable is when reporters sneak into screenings by pretending to be ministers. This is a new low even for liberal reporters."

As someone who's been a film reviewer, this just makes me want to cry with laughter. If someone had made a film with this plot, I wouldn't have believed it. I would have ripped that film for being utterly preposterous.

Robert Moore was invited to attend the Expelled screening! We don’t sneak into films just to ruin anyone’s premier (or preview), honest.

This reminds me of the drama that ensued when I was the only person (as far as I know) on the fucking planet to review a hideously sophomoric novel that tried to be both a Philip Marlowe rip-off and a public service announcement about wife battering. The (very liberal) author, having just whined on MPR about how nobody was reviewing his book, slammed me in the next issue of Twin Cities Revue for my “subjective” “trashing” of his “art.” Well, the only claim to objectivity this hack had was a correspondence writing course, which he actually bragged about in his author’s bio! Holy cow, you do not do that! To get the last laugh I snuck into his disastrous book signing at Barnes & Noble and giggled in a corner as his blank-faced friends stood figeting at his lonely table. Good times. :-)

Ben Stein’s paranoia has now reached a fever pitch. I’m sure in response to this “news” we’ll get a flutter of breathless blog posts from self-styled evangelical gadflies who think that education consists of puerile arguments launched from one side to the other in “Crossfire” fashion while engaging in the same repetitive, popular foolishness, the madness of the crowd.

As for me, upon reading Christopher Hitchens’ thoughts on anti-Semitism in the latest Atlantic Monthy, I had this to say at AtBC to one of the writers for Expelled (isn't the internet wonderful?) about Ben Stein:

"You may be interested in Christopher Hitchens' essay about anti-Semitism (Hitchens is particularly enraged by it) in the current Atlantic Monthly. What is particularly revealing, in my opinion, are the parallels between it and the arguments made (including those by Ben Stein) against evolutionary theory:

Political anti-Semitism in its more modern form often de-emphasized the supposed murder of Christ in favor of polemics against monopolies and cartels, leading the great German Marxist August Bebel to describe its propaganda as “the socialism of fools.” Peter Pulzer’s essential history of anti-Semitism in pre-1914 Germany and Austria, which shows the element of populist opportunism in the deployment of the Jew-baiting repertoire, is, among other things, a great illustration of that ironic observation. And then there is the notion of the Jews’ lack of rooted allegiance: their indifference to the wholesome loyalties of the rural, the hierarchical, and the traditional, and their concomitant attraction to modernity. Writing from the prewar Balkans in her Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, Rebecca West noticed this suspicion at work in old Serbia and wrote:

'Now I understand another cause for anti-Semitism; many primitive peoples must receive their first intimation of the toxic quality of thought from Jews. They know only the fortifying idea of religion; they see in Jews the effect of the tormenting and disintegrating ideas of skepticism.'

The best recent illustration of that point that I know comes from Jacobo Timerman, the Argentine Jewish newspaper editor who was kidnapped and tortured by the death-squad regime in his country in the late 1970s. In his luminous memoir, Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number, he analyzes the work of the neo-Nazi element that formed such an important part of the military/clerical dictatorship, and quotes one of the “diagnoses” that animated their ferocity: "Argentina has three main enemies: Karl Marx, because he tried to destroy the Christian concept of society; Sigmund Freud, because he tried to destroy the Christian concept of the family; and Albert Einstein, because he tried to destroy the Christian concept of time and space." [emphases mine]

"Note that Albert Einstein has now been replaced by Charles Darwin. Note also that 'Darwinism' is, as was Jewry, portrayed simultaneously as a hideously strong force about to overwhelm the nations, and as on the brink of collapse.

Anti-Semitism is an elusive and protean phenomenon, but it certainly involves the paradox whereby great power is attributed to the powerless. In the mind of the anti-Jewish paranoid, some shabby bearded figure in a distant shtetl is a putative member of a secret world government: hence the enduring fascination of The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. (Incidentally, it is entirely wrong to refer to this document of the Czarist secret police as “a forgery.” A forgery is a counterfeit of a true bill. The Protocols are a straightforward fabrication, based on medieval Christian fantasies about Judaism.)

"ID has its lengthy record of straightforward fabrication as well.

That is perhaps what distinguishes it from other forms of racism. Almost every tribe or ethnicity has a rival tribe or ethnicity that it views as inferior or dirtier or more primitive: the Hutu with the Tutsi, the Sinhalese with the Tamil, the Ulster Protestant with the Irish Catholic, and so forth. The “other” group will invariably be found to have a different smell, a higher birthrate, and a lazier temperament. These poor qualities are sometimes attributed even by Jews to Jews: elevated German and Austrian Jews once wrinkled their nostrils at the matted sidelocks and large families of the poor Ostjuden who had come from the backwoods of Galicia and Silesia; and Ashkenazi-Se­phardic rivalry in Israel sometimes recalls and resembles this hostility. But garden-variety racists do not usually suspect the objects of their dislike of secretly manipulating the banks and the stock markets and of harboring a demonic plan for world domination.

"Note now this quote from Stein [from his infamous New York Times column]:

Just as a tiny example, years ago a close friend, now deceased, was a trader in London for a big financial house. As he told it, one day I.B.M. came out with stellar numbers. The boss of the trading floor said, “O.K., the guy who’s getting the prize is the one who can make us money selling I.B.M. short.”
So the traders grabbed for their phones and started to put out any bad thoughts they could dream up about I.B.M. They called journalists, retailers, anyone. They sold huge amounts of I.B.M. short. Soon, they had I.B.M. on the run, made money on their shorts and went to Langan’s to drink champers.
As I see it, this is what traders do all day long — and especially what they’ve been doing since the subprime mess burst upon the scene. They have seized upon a fairly bad situation: a stunning number of defaults and foreclosures in the subprime arena, although just a small part of the total financial picture of the United States. They have then tried — with the collaboration of their advance guards in the press — to make it seem like a total catastrophe so they could make money on their short sales. They sense an opportunity to trick other traders and poor retail slobs like you and me, and they generate data and rumor to support their positions, and to make money.
MORE than that, they trade to support the way they want the market to go. If they are huge traders like some of the major hedge funds, they can sell massively and move the market downward, then suck in other traders who go short, and create a vacuum of fear that sucks down whatever they are selling.
Note what is happening here: They are not figuring out which way the market will go. They are making the market go the direction they want.

Weeks before this it was Goldman Sachs out to corner the market and dominate the world. Stein's allegedly being no one's toady does not rule out his having a blind spot to his embracing of this absurd archetype of paranoiac revelation, in his own words, of cliches such as "the scales fell from my eyes." I am not a biologist, but a scholar of languages and literature. The use of rhetoric, special pleading, and emotional manipulation, as opposed to sound arguments, in both of these cases leaps out at one."

It certainly does leap out at one, and the bright spot in all of this is, ideas have validity when they stand the test of time, and scholars are going to have real fun with this phenomenon in the coming years. I certainly look forward to researching the making of this film, Expelled, for therein lies the real story. From what I have seen so far of the behavior of Stein, his producers, and his writers, I can only guess at the treasures that await me. Hand-picked audiences, non-disclosure statements, a security “breech” – this film is certainly experiencing a painful birth! Come April, will it be aborted or replaced with a changeling? What will posterity say about this film?

I can guess.

Shimmies to Pharyngula.

All that Glisters is So Hawt!

"Space 1999." Good music, first season; okay music, second season. Silly premise. (Even sillier premise, second season.)

Laughable plot. (Even more laughable plot, second season.)

Inability to make audience (even the twelve-year-old audience that I was) suspend disbelief.

Dissed for its scientific absurdity by Asimov and Ellison.

Sniggered at for its English accents mouthing plodding dialogue from American writers.

New Agey "introspective" psychobabble, first season.

Goofy monsters, second season. (I'm talking about the thing in a costume, not the actors mouthing lines worthy of amateur re-dubbing.)




A script even the lead actor finally threw against the wall in disgust.*

Hawt lead actor.

Nostalgia - I has it.

*From Wikipedia: Members of the Space: 1999 cast became disenchanted with the scripts. Martin Landau: "They changed it because a bunch of American minds got into the act and they decided to do many things they felt were commercial. Fred Freiberger helped in some respects, but, overall, I don't think he helped the show, I think he brought a much more ordinary, mundane approach to the series." (Starlog 108 1986, pp. 44-47). Under the pseudonym of Charles Woodgrove, Fred Freiberger wrote three episodes, The Rules of Luton, The Beta Cloud and Space Warp, known pejoratively as the "Woodgrove Trilogy" for its simplistic approach to storytelling. One particular episode (All That Glisters, which dealt with the threat of an intelligent rock) was of such allegedly deficient quality that it sparked a confrontation between Freiberger and the cast. Landau disliked the story so strongly that he wrote the following notes on his copy of the script: "All the credibility we're building up is totally forsaken in this script!"; "...Story is told poorly!"; and "The character of Koenig takes a terrible beating in this script — We're all shmucks!"

Martin, you were a hawt shmuck.

The Lunar Eclipse

I poked my head out just briefly last night (the best nights for viewing are the cold ones), but others were more intreped and got some shots.

Wesley Elsberry did, Nomad at AtBC did, and people are posting theirs at the Bad Astronomy/Universe Today forum.

Note: Don't use a flash when trying to photograph a lunar eclipse!

MYOFB!

A pastor in Florida is encouraging couples to have sex once a day for 30 days.

Sweet, no? Well, no. That's (heterosexual) married couples only, if you please. Single people get to (oh goodie, what? What do we get to do? What? Anyone?) abstain for 30 days. No sex. None. Nada. Zip.

Even if they've been together a long time? "Even if they've been together a long time," says Relevant Church head pastor Paul Wirth.

Even if they live together?

"Even if they live together," he proclaims. "We're asking the single people to take a break from sex, maybe take a sex detox [detox? WTF?] for 30 days ... even if they've been together for years. Because maybe the sex for them has been the central theme of their relationship and maybe they're missing a part of it," proclaims he. Hmmmm.

What do you think the response of Amused Muse is going to be to this (and now this has a new meaning) busybody? Anyone? Anyone? How about...

GOING ABOUT OUR SEXY BUSINESS AS USUAL?

Minding our own junk as usual? As Pastor Wirthless should be doing?



Video courtesy of CapnOrdinary at You Tube.

I Give Up

I'm going to renew both Harper's and the New Yorker. I just can't live without these magazines.

I can face life without Astronomy, but not those.

UPDATED: For one thing, Ursula Le Guin never writes for Astronomy.

As people these days can maintain nonthreatening, unloaded, sociable conversation by talking about who murdered whom on the latest hit TV police procedural or mafia show, so strangers on the train or coworkers on the job in 1841 could talk perfectly unaffectedly together about The Old Curiosity Shop and whether poor Little Nell was going to cop it. Since public school education was strong on poetry and various literary classics, a lot of people would recognize and enjoy a reference to Tennyson, or Scott, or Shakespeare—shared properties, a social meeting ground. A man might be less likely to boast about falling asleep at the sight of a Dickens novel [as an AP reporter recently did - geez, people usually brag about not getting sleep!] than to feel left out of things by not having read it.

The social quality of literature is still visible in the popularity of best-sellers. Publishers get away with making boring, baloney-mill novels into bestsellers via mere PR because people need bestsellers. It is not a literary need. It is a social need. We want books everybody is reading (and nobody finishes) so we can talk about them.

If we bought books over from England by ship these days, crowds would have swarmed on the docks of New York to greet the final volume of Harry Potter, crying [as they did for Little Nell], “Did she kill him? Is he dead?” The Potter boom was a genuine social phenomenon, like the worship of rock stars and the whole subculture of popular music, which offer adolescents and young adults both an exclusive in-group and a shared social experience.

Books are social vectors, but publishers have been slow to see it. They barely even noticed book clubs until Oprah goosed them. But then the stupidity of the contemporary, corporation-owned publishing company is fathomless: they think they can sell books as commodities.

Gotta love Le Guin.