Happy Monkey!

Perhaps you have been pondering the meaning of the new traditional greeting, Happy Monkey! (important usage note: it is not Merry Monkey, nor is it Happy Monkey Day. It is simply “Happy Monkey”, full stop. Trying to change the phrase means you are waging war on the Monkey, and you know how they will respond.) I haven’t. I’ve been bogged down in the end-of-semester grind for the last week, writing tests, giving tests, grading tests, and there has been little room in my brain for deep philosophical thought.

But then, just a few minutes ago, I reached an end. The exams and papers were all marked and graded, and I filled out the forms and submitted them to the registrar. And I had an epiphany. Happy Monkey is not a day, not a greeting card, not just a phrase. Happy Monkey doesn’t come from a store. Maybe Happy Monkey…perhaps…means a little bit more. And what happened then…? Well, my small Monkey grew three sizes that day!

Happy Monkey is any moment that you feel the burdens lifted, that you feel a lightening of the mood, that you feel puckish and prankish and like kicking your heels. Happy Monkey can strike any time, any day!

So Happy Monkey, everyone! And may you have many Happy Monkeys in days to come!

In case you were wondering…

No, the Minnesota recount is not over yet, and we still don’t know whether Franken or Coleman will be our senator. At last word, Coleman held a 192 vote lead, but thousands of ballots are awaiting a verdict on eligibility from the state Supreme Court. It’s the most mind-numbingly tedious process ever, so far.

However, scrutiny of the ballots has revealed one vote for the Flying Spaghetti Monster for Soil and Water Conservation Supervisor, and another for Franken and Lizard People for US Senator. The latter was rejected as an overvote, but the former did also have a vote that counted for Al Franken.

If you want a deeper discussion of the recount progress, go to Greg Laden. I’ve got the news off until my grading is done.

Win a free book!

It’s easy — just follow the link from The Countess’s blog, read about weird supernatural monsters, leave a comment, and you’re entered in a drawing for an anthology of erotic horror stories.

Yeah, erotic horror. I think it’s supposed to leave you all hot and bothered in a state of tension … not erotic horror like retelling a woman’s sexual history in a church service, which is horrifying in an “eww, ick” and “cover the children’s ears, Martha!” and “ooooh, Harold, I come over all tremulous just thinking about it” sort of way. Sanctimonious dunderheads need not apply.

Here we go again — I get more email

Some online news organization has revivified the Cincinnati Zoo/Creation “museum” controversy, and they have blamed me for it all. Thank you, thank you, I appreciate the credit, but really, it must be shared with the thousands of people who responded with their letters, and particularly with the zoo administrators, who so quickly saw the folly of forming an affiliation with an anti-science/anti-education organization like Answers in Genesis.

However, Mark Looy of the Creation “museum” generously credited me by name as the ringlea…um, criminal mastermi…uh, instigator of the campaign to separate science from irrationality.

“I think so much pressure came on the zoo — not only by local residents, but [from] all over the country, including an email campaign instigated by a professor in Minnesota, several hundred miles away,” notes Looy.

“He got many of his colleagues to send very angry emails and made some nasty phone calls to the zoo — so much so that the guest relations people at the zoo were just overwhelmed with how to deal with this.”

According to The Associated Press, University of Minnesota-Morris biology professor P.Z. Myers urged readers of his blog to contact the zoo. In an email to the news service, he expressed his pleasure that the zoo moved so quickly and stated that someone in the zoo’s marketing department “lost sight of the educational mission of the institution while trying to make money.”

You know what this means. It means a new flood of angry emails from aggravated creationists. I guess the site where this was posted gets a lot of right-wing traffic, because the loons are calling. I’ve tossed a few of these letters below the fold — have fun. It’s the weirdest thing, too — the majority of them are actually written in Comic Sans. You didn’t think I picked that font for posting ridiculous comments on accident, did you?

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Awesomely horrible

We have a long history in developmental biology of studying the most amazing freaks of nature — damage to developing organisms can produce astonishingly ghastly results as the embryo tries to regulate and recover, yielding results that are almost normal. There’s even a whole subdiscipline of the field, teratology, dedicated to studying aberrations of embryology. The word is perfect, since it is derived from a Greek root that means both “wonders” and “monsters”.

An unfortunate child in Colorado was the recipient of one of these wonders/monsters. Diagnosed with a brain tumor, when surgeons opened up his skull, they found fragments of a fetus inside: two tiny feet, part of a hand, coils of intestine. The surgery was successful and the child is doing fine now, but this was the most well-organized ‘tumor’ I’ve ever heard of. It’s not clear exactly what it was; there are things called teratomas, where a particular kind of cancer recapitulates a developmental program and builds tissues, things like skin with hair or teeth or chunks of muscle and bone and gland, but those aren’t this well organized. They tend not to produce complete organs, but partially differentiated sheets and lumps. Another possibility is fetus in fetu, where a fragment of the very early embryo is isolated and begins its own independent pattern of normal development, and then is engulfed by the larger and faster growing sibling embryo. Sometimes people late in life will be surprised to learn that there is a partially developed twin imbedded deep in their body. There is no question in any of these cases, however, that the tissue is not an autonomous individual. It is a piece of human-derived tissue that has executed part of the program of cell:cell interactions and induction that these kinds of cells are capable of doing.

Something struck me when I saw the photograph of this particular surgery. Here it is, a photo of a fetal foot flopping out of a bloody baby’s brain (don’t click if you’re squeamish). As I’m sure you’ve noticed, anti-choice people love to parade about with gory photos of aborted fetuses, and they love to dwell on little details like a recognizable hand or face. This picture is exactly like those, yet realize this: there was no human being behind those little baby toes. The existence of these fragments of non-sentient tissue endangered the life of a child, and there was no question that they needed to be extracted.

This is also how we should view abortion. It’s ugly and messy, and there’s something disquietingly resonant of humanity in the pieces of the embryo or fetus, but we shouldn’t be fooled. Those are beautifully patterned collections of differentiated cells, but there is no person there.

Same as the old boss

This is not an auspicious beginning. Guess who is going to deliver the invocation at Obama’s inauguration? None other than the smilin’ face of right-wing fundamentalism, Rick Warren.

As we’ve pointed out several times before, in 2004 Warren declared that marriage, reproductive choice, and stem cell research were “non-negotiable” issues for Christian voters and has admitted that the main difference between himself and James Dobson is a matter of tone. He criticized Obama’s answers at the Faith Forum he hosted before the election and vowed to continue to pressure him to change his views on the issue of reproductive choice. He came out strongly in support of Prop 8, saying “there is no need to change the universal, historical defintion of marriage to appease 2 percent of our population … This is not a political issue — it is a moral issue that God has spoken clearly about.” He’s declared that those who do not believe in God should not be allowed to hold public office.

Obama had a chance to set a non-sectarian, progressive tone at this event, and he has chosen to kow-tow to the wretched evangelical movement.