I’m having some difficulties with my lab server, difficulties that I can’t sort out right now since I’m going to be leaving town for a week and a half. Unfortunately, this is also the server that handles mail coming in to my pharyngula.org and tangledbank.net addresses — so if you’ve sent stuff to me there in the last few days, it is now hiding somewhere in dev/null, I think. Resend it to pzmyers@gmail.com if it’s important! And especially, if you sent submissions for the Tangled Bank to host@tangledbank.net, that email is temporarily dead, so try again to my gmail address.

Sorry about all that. Skatje’s weblog is also inaccessible right now, so I might be able to convince her to go in and straighten it all out while I’m away, but otherwise it’s going to have to wait until mid-June.

Hey, classes are over … aren’t I supposed to be lazing in a hammock, slacking off until September? Instead, it looks like I’m going to be prepping and giving lectures for the next couple of weeks. Here’s the schedule:

• On 28-30 May, I’ll be attending IEDG 2008: Integrating Evolution, Development, and Genomics at Berkeley. Look at the schedule on this thing: there are some phenomenal speakers at this meeting, and I’m really looking forward to several days of solid science. I’m giving the last talk of the last day at this event.

• On 2 June, at 7:00 pm, I’ll be doing a public lecture/discussion at the Pacific Science Center in Seattle for the Northwest Science Writers Association. Science writers are wonderful people, so I’ll be looking forward to meeting this bunch.

• On 6 June, at 6:30 pm, I’l be speaking to the Seattle Society for Sensible Explanations. Seating is limited, so you’ll need to RSVP soon. A skeptics group in Seattle? Where were these people when I lived there?

I hope to see some of you there at this little tour. Later this summer I’ll be in Las Vegas, Denver, and Atlanta, too — I’m not exactly vacationing this year.

If you should ever find yourself in my neighborhood, and were to walk up to my door, I have to warn you: the welcome mat is splattered with blood stains. I didn’t do it! No Jehovah’s Witnesses are missing from the region! (They never come to my door anymore, anyway.)

We got an unpleasant surprise this morning in that the nest of baby bunnies outside our door was raided, probably by one of the local cats, and the whole family was butchered and laid out on our doorstep. And these bunnies were at that cute stage with fur and big eyes…or at least, they would have been cute if they’d all had heads and their viscera wasn’t splayed out everywhere and they weren’t lying cold and limp in a pool of blood.

I do have to wonder why, though, whenever there’s a scattering of corpses around the house, my family looks to me and expects me to do the clean up.

I just got a copy of the promotional flyer for my Seattle visit, so here it is.

PZ Myers: On Science, Blogs, and Intelligent Debates

Paul “PZ” Myers is persona non grata at the Discovery Institute. He was recently booted out of a screening of the film “Expelled”–an irony certainly not lost on him. And now the evolutionary biologist and rabble-rouser blogger is coming to Seattle for one night only. He’ll be talking about the evolution of creationism and other oxymoronic topics with the same zeal and wit that have made him one of the fittest survivors on the science blog circuit.

Join the Northwest Science Writers Association and the Forum on Science Ethics and Policy for a conversation with PZ Myers. He’ll answer your questions and take us inside his popular blog, Pharyngula. He’s been called a “godless liberal” and his blog posts have been described as “random biological ejaculations.” And that’s just what he says. Others have attacked him for his stout devotion to evolution and probably for being funnier than those he offends.

NSWA and FoSEP present…
PZ Myers: On Science, Blogs, and Intelligent Debates
Pacific Science Center, Laser Dome
Monday, June 2, 2008
7 – 9 p.m.
FREE to the public

Tell your friends. Bring your questions.

Whoa. There’s an expectation that I’ll be funny? Uh-oh. The pressure is on.

At least those expectations are offset by the fact that I’m going to be speaking in a laser dome, which is very cool. I hope I have full access to all of the controls; hecklers beware, you could be reduced to a small heap of smoking ash.

I was interviewed for mindcore — I seem to recall that I might have said some harsh things about Francis Collins in this one, but the are all kind of blurring together in my mind now.

I’ve had about enough. The last of my kids is doing these obnoxious things like graduating from high school, and now, attending the final prom.

They have to stop trying to make me feel old.

My last class for this semester was today. I’m done with the teaching part, now all that’s left is the dry, husky, tedious, boring administrative part: final exams and grading and the passing of final judgment on the efforts of my students. I get to become a mindless bureaucratic drone unenlivened by creative thought for a little while.

Anticipate continued incoherence, with light and scattered posting for a while. But there is hope, and none too soon.

I’ve been profiled in MinnPost — and it’s mostly boring stuff I already knew, but the reporter apparently called around the Morris community, too, which is how I learned this:

Myers acknowledged that he is something of a curiosity in a Minnesota community of church-goers, many of them deeply committed social and political conservatives.

Still, Myers has created no big buzz in town, said the Rev. Tom Fangmeier, an Assemblies of God pastor who chairs the Stevens County Ministerial Board. One Lutheran pastor complained to the board about Myers, Fangmeier said, but “I haven’t heard about him in the cafes or anywhere else around town.”

How … strange. I wonder what exactly they would expect to hear about me? I’m sitting in the Common Cup cafe right now, and I don’t think I could generate much of a buzz. “Oh. He’s sitting. He has a nice laptop. He doesn’t slurp his coffee.”

It’s very amusing that I’ve been reported to the Stevens County Ministerial Board. Perhaps I will be defrocked.

Tonight, in about an hour, I’m going to be on Second Life in a talk show called Virtually Speaking. You can show up there in your avatar, or if you aren’t quite that nerdy, you can just listen in on the audio simulcast.

Strangely, I just realized that I have absolutely no idea what the topic of the interview will be. I guess you can just surprise me with questions!