Yet another video on the Ark Park:
I agree completely with Matt Dillahunty’s impression of the Ark: it’s not that impressive. It’s filled with pointless bric-a-brac — wooden box after wooden box filled with nothing, or filled with a static model of an ancient organisms. The “information” inside consists of wall after wall of posters. I’ve said it before: they were so focused on building a great big boat-like object, they put little effort into what goes inside.
I also agree that the Bill Nye/Ken Ham debate was a bad idea. I think Nye pulled it off, because Ham was such an obtuse twit that he gave away the show. Nye got the basics right, but there thousands of people who’d have been just as competent at the debate side, and wouldn’t have granted Ham the prestige of a famous opponent.
In other news, the latest assessment of the attendance figures show that Ham has been…exaggerating. He’s been claiming to have had a million visitors in the last year, but the tax payments say that they’ve had 750,000 visitors in the last 11 months, and it’s unlikely that they had one quarter of their entire yearly attendance in one month. Either Ham is lying about his attendance, or he’s been shortchanging the county tax assessors. Either one is possible, I suppose, but neither are particularly ethical.
I don’t know whether to hope that he is shortchanging the tax assessors and will get caught or to rejoice that his attendance is lower than he proclaims, which could eventually lead to bankruptcy.
Couldn’t it be both?
The mildly deranged penguin suggests ken “piglet rapist” ham is not short-changing the tax people, but instead paying more — vastly more — in taxes than the actual attendance warrants. Almost no-one goes there, she says, with most days there being only the few employees who bother to show up, some kid on a skateboard who likes dodging the staff chasing him around the empty car park, the odd (usually very odd) lost motorist, and several thousand cardboard cutouts of glum children embarrassed to be seen with parents wearing Mickey Mouse hats and trump t-shirts. They don’t even bother to move the cardboard cutouts along anymore to make it appear the queue is moving. The total number of legitimately sold tickets each month is, she asserts, about π. (Yes, they actually do happen to sell some tickets each month and so can use real numbers, otherwise the total sales would be i.)
All that is, of course, massively embarrassing to the piglet fancier. So, knowing the public tax records supposedly provide a clew as to the attendance, he inflates the apparent-attendance by paying more money that he needs to. Of course, it isn’t his money, the mildly deranged penguin quickly points out, but letters of credit from the estate of a Nigerian prince that owns both Brooklyn Bridges.
“… but neither are particularly ethical”
If it was ethical the HAMster *couldn’t* say it since that would violate his idiot self sealing belief system.
+1
We must never forget!