So this is what that phrase means: S. Daniel Morgan tells me that you can get an Albert Einstein action figure, but I haven’t been able to find a comparable Charles Darwin action figure. This just isn’t right.

I did discover that SciAm pointed out this deficiency long ago. I checked Archie McPhee, of course…and they’ve got pirates and Jesus and Lunch Ladies and Carl Jung and an albino bowler, but no Darwin. This is a serious lacuna in the necessary office toys category.

This picture is just plain weird.

Truth is something unearthed gradually, and we have to be prepared to revise our interpretation of it based on the evidence. Several readers have informed me of recent developments that will require us to radically re-evaluate our perspective on the universe.

• Geocentrism can make a comeback! Since astronomers are arguing about the definition of something as fundamental as a “planet,” that obviously means that all of physics is in disarray, and completely wrong.
• As long as we’re resurrecting old fables, we might as well get them right this time: clearly, God is a giant squid. There’s even physical evidence.
• There’s also a mythological tradition in place! I’ve always wanted a solid gold octopus god headdress. With a hat like that, I could probably persuade lots of people to give me money.

I think that settles it: Peru is the center of the universe around which all things revolve, and the creator of that universe is a cephalopod somewhere offshore.

Somebody has way too much time on their hands: they’ve modeled a Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster…in Legos.

I’m afraid, though, that I’m such an atheist that if such a building existed in reality, I’d still spurn it as superstitious nonsense.

Southern Illinois University Carbondale is raising money for their Darwin Day celebration by selling something a little bit cheesy, but I may have to get one for my office anyway: a Darwin bobblehead. Cute, eh? Don’t you need one, too?

Creationists often bring up Piltdown Man^* as an example of an evolutionary fraud, and claim that it was the foundation of huge volumes of research. It was a fraud, and it did linger unpleasantly in the scientific literature for far too long, but you’d be hard pressed to find a serious work of science that used it any more. Until now. That genius of the modern era, L. Ron Hubbard, cited Piltdown in Scientology: A History of Man.

^*By the way, if you haven’t been reading Richard Harter’s World, you should. It’s a sort of antediluvian blog, with none of the conventions we’ve grown accustomed to, but it’s an amazing pile of entertaining and random oddities…including the Piltdown information, monthly joke collections, bits of math and poetry. It’ll keep you busy for days, at least—the archives go back to 1996.