Day too full!

Oh no…the day needed a few more hours. I’ve been at the Atheist Alliance International 2010 Copenhagen Convention listening to Roy Brown, Gregory Paul, Dan Barker, AC Grayling, and doing a little yammering of my own, and the Trophy Wife™ and I were supposed to go to the evening of Godless Entertainment featuring the always splendid Robin Ince, when we were waylaid, ambushed, and pounced upon by The Amazing Randi and invited to join him for dinner. I’ve mentioned before that Randi is one of those phenomenal conversationalists one must spend time with, so we got distracted over an excellent meal…and missed Robin.

He’ll be sympathetic, I’m sure. I’ll just ask him to repeat his routine for me over breakfast.

You all remember Robin Ince. If you don’t, this will remind you:

I should have gone. But no, Randi is very cool. But Robin is such a hilarious nerd! Randi did magic tricks at the table. But Robin would have made me laugh. Gah, must finish my cloning project so I can be in 12 places at once.

Tomorrow it will be worse, with parallel sessions. Perhaps if I stand very close to the wall between the two rooms and vibrate really fast I’ll be able to catch them all.

Base flattery from Karl Giberson

Aww, it’s too sweet. Karl Giberson is apologizing for the way evangelicals dishonestly propagandize, and he mentions me.

I have to confess that the temptation to ridicule one’s debating opponents is all but unbearable, especially when playing street hockey on the Internet, where one must shout to be heard. In the past few months I have tried hard to come up with clever rhetorical attacks on Jerry Coyne, Sam Harris, PZ Myers and countless others whose ideas I was supposedly challenging. PZ once wrote the following about me, which I thought was pretty clever: “I will have no truck with the perpetuation of fallacious illusions, whether honeyed or bitter, and consider the Gibersons of this world to be corruptors of a better truth.” Of course, I responded to his evangelistic assault on me by calling him “Rev. Myers” in an essay on Salon.com. And so it goes. (I recommend against verbal swordfights with PZ Myers — you can’t win.)

I have a feeling, though, that if he’d expanded on the sentiment it would have been to explain that I put poison on the blade, carry a dagger on the left for the occasional cheap shot, and like to taunt my opponents into a brash rage. I ain’t one of them aristocratic fencers with their pointless pinking, I’m a brawler.

A day in Oslo

I have had no sleep in two days, and I think I’ll sleep well tonight — especially after tonight’s meal at Mares in Oslo. Oh my — just perfect food at every bite, and good company with a few smart people from the university here.

There will be more tomorrow. I’ll be speaking at the Litteraturhuset at 3:30, and at 5:00 we’ll be having an informal Norwegian picnic at Vigelandsparken. Come on by, it will be lots of fun.

Traveling in style

The Trophy Wife™ and I are on our way to Oslo and Copenhagen.

i-ef16bde0dda35ea5c912e7e90cff04e8-nautilus.jpeg

It’s not exactly a holiday for me — I’m voyaging to exotic locales so I can sit in hotel rooms hunched over my laptop. Expect the blog to be a bit light and fluffy this week.

Five odd movies

Jerry Coyne has put together a list of his 20 most favorite movies, and invited us all to join in. I can’t. I just don’t believe in it. There is no such thing as a best movie, just movies that some of us like a lot. I also can’t list 20, so you’ll have to settle for an idiosyncratic 5 movies that aren’t the best, but made me happy anyway.

  • Zardoz : One of those movies where I just sat there with “Wait, what?” on an infinite loop in my head. Giant flying heads spewing guns, immortals and barbarians, Sean Connery in a diaper, Charlotte Rampling in nothing at all, Beethoven’s Seventh, just weird, weird, weird. At first I was thinking that it was one of those movies I should be stoned to appreciate, and then it sunk in that I was getting stoned just watching it. Plus, Charlotte Rampling.

  • The Incredible Shrinking Man : I saw this one as a young kid, and I quite enjoyed the main character getting smaller and smaller and facing greater and greater problems, like avoiding the cat and fighting off a spider with a needle. But it was the end that surprised me: he’s facing certain doom, he knows there’s nothing he can do to stop the shrinking process, and he has no idea what will happen as he gets to the size of a bacterium or an atom…but he’s looking to his fate with curiosity, not fear. And then it ends. But wow, for a movie with no salvation, what an optimistic ending.

  • The Goonies : The best way to watch this kind of movie is with a child. Way back when we lived on Clark Street in Eugene, with our first boy, I’d put him in a little red wagon and we’d take the footbridge across the Willamette (we’d always stop there for a bit so he could throw rocks in the river) to the theater in the mall, and we saw this movie there. My little guy was so enthusiastic — he wanted to go looking for pirate treasure right away, make friends with a monster, and we absolutely had to get a plastic sword for the wagon ride home. I don’t care if the movie was crap, it was the experience.

  • Children of the Damned : I saw this in a drive-in theater, the El Rancho between Kent and Renton, way back when I was about six years old. Ah, the drive-in — the whole family bundled up into the station wagon, Mom making bags of popcorn to bring with us, playing on the swings in the dusk before the movie started, those clunky old speakers we’d have hanging from our car window, and of course, Dad would fold down the back seat so we kids could lie down in blankets and sleeping bags and watch the show. That’s the way to do it. I don’t remember much about this movie — creepy alien kids with psychic powers, glowing eyes, and British accents being born in and taking over a small village — and I didn’t see the ending at all, because in the middle of the movie my mother went into labor and we had to leave. We kids went home, the parents went away, and next thing you know, I’ve got a baby brother named Mike. Whose eyes, fortunately, did not glow.

  • Attack of the Monsters : Awful, cheesy, terrible, cheap. Not a good movie at all. But back when I was in high school, I’d watch the late night creature features on the television on Fridays (what? You thought I’d be out on dates?), and my father, who’d usually be exhausted after work, was starting to show the signs of the heart disease that would eventually kill him, and one of the things he suffered was insomnia. And this one time he joined me on the sofa to watch whatever was on, and there was this movie about a rubber-suit giant turtle that would shoot fire out of his butt and fly through space. We laughed.

    Hey, isn’t that enough? Laugh with your dad while you’ve got him.

What did you expect? The Godfather movies? Everyone picks those.

I’m a stay-at-home kind of guy

People are still asking me to come speak at various places, and I’m just going to have to put my foot down. Here’s my calendar for the next few months:

And that’s it. I’m pleased that I managed to keep this time right around now free to get some work done, and then there’s a flurry of European travel in mid- to late June, and August is free so I can get prepared for teaching. But otherwise, that’s it, I’m staying home. I’m discouraging everyone from sending me more invitations until the Spring term. If you really want me to visit Miami or Hawaii in February, I might be coaxed out of my hermitage, but that’s it.

Don’t complain, I know I’m turning into a regular J.D. Salinger here. Now go away and leave me alone.

I get email

Awww, it’s my very first Islamic threat…and it’s pretty tame compared to the Catholic rantings I get.

MUSLIM!!

Do you know by doing such things like drawing the cartoon of Our Holy Prophet will make us aggravated!.

If I`ve ever come across you I swear I will relieve myself with this burden.

Daniyal Masood

I don’t know…that sounds like he’s threatening to pee on me.