Discovering Ardi

The Discovery Channel is having a documentary about Ardipithecus ramidus at 8pm Central time (in about half an hour). I’m planning to set my work aside for a while and fix a bowl of hot soup — it’s cold here, with a snow storm on the way — and see if they actually do it right.

First half hour wasn’t bad: nice overview of the practice of finding old bones, and a good illustration of the fragmentary nature of the fossil. At the same time, though, it’s also doing a good job of showing how they know the pieces of Ardi are from a single individual.

S l o w i n g   d o w n. So far this program is taking longer to watch than it took me to read the original papers. It’s got some nicely done bits, but it sure is taking it’s time, and it’s annoyingly repetitive. It’s also got commercials, and the frequency of commercial breaks is steadily increasing.

I thought we Americans were supposed to have short attention spans. How is this sort of drawn out programming supposed to appeal to the average person with a general interest in evolution?

Nice psalm

Here are the lyrics:

Don’t need no god.
Don’t need no eternal paternal god.
Don’t need no reassuringly protective
good and evil in perspective god.
Don’t need no imported distorted,
inflated updated,
holy roller, save your soul, or
anaesthetisingly opiate gods.
Don’t need no “all creatures that on Earth do dwell”
be good or you go to Hell god.
Don’t need no Hare Krishna Hare Krishna,
Hail Mary, Hail Mary god.
Got no yen for zen, Baghavad-Gita or Gurdjieff.
No Mormon, Methodist, Seventh Day Adventist god,
no absolutes beyond refute,
no reverential preferential Judaic Messianic god.
No Bibles, no Mahayanas, Delai Lhama
instant dharma gods.
Don’t need no spiritual suicide or
prefrontal lobotomising god.
Don’t need no stoic sexless
anticeptic god.
Don’t need no neon crucifix,
no jade Buddhas, no Vedas or Upanishads,
no camels or needles or Papal decrees,
no mail-order ikons, Koran’s or Mandala’s,
no Sri Chimnoys, Meha Baba’s, or Ayatollah’s,
no Guatama’s, no Manitou, Ouspensky or Marx,
no yin/yang, no tao, no tarot or incense,
no sacred mushrooms
no dianetics,
no Tibetan prayer mats
no “Immortal invisible gods only wise”.
Don’t need no televised circumcised
incessant incandescent god.
Don’t need no god.
I need human beings.
I need some kind
of love.
I need
you.

AAI: I am an ACTOR!

Just not a very good one, but you’ll see for yourselves. I spent the morning in heaven, which consists of a well-lit white screen in Southern California, trying to master my lines for a future Mr Deity episode. That stuff is harder than it looks. We went through many takes while my brain was freezing up at inopportune moments — there’s a reason not everyone is a movie star, that’s for sure.

Anyway, “Lucy” and “Mr Deity” are actually Amy and Bryan, and they have a nice house with a couple of kids, two dogs, and a cat, and the episodes are filmed in the family room. I hope I haven’t shattered any of your illusions. Amy made me pancakes, I think because she’s very nice, but it might also have been to load up the klutzy professor’s sputtering brain with carbohydrates so that maybe he’d remember his lines.

I made it through it all, though, and I’m hoping that Mr Deity will be able to work a miracle and make me look good with some creative editing. You’ll probably see the results next week. It can’t possibly be worse than Expelled!

By the way, he mentioned that they’re hoping to build up the budget to make a half-hour pilot, which would be awesome — Mr Deity as weekly dose of broadcast irreverence for American living rooms would be an excellent and entertaining corrective. Support them if you can!