Sexy T-rex meets lecherous creationist

Charlie Stross has written a story, A Bird in Hand, which rather pushes a few boundaries. It’s about dinosaurs and sodomy, as the author’s backstory explains. And as everyone knows, every story is improved by adding one or the other of dinosaurs and sodomy, so it can’t help but be even better if you add both.

A note of caution, though: Charlie is really, really good at spinning out all the latest scientific buzzwords and deep molecular biological concepts into an extraordinarily plausible-sounding mechanism for rapidly recreating a dinosaur — it’s much, much better than Crichton’s painfully silly and superficial dino-blood-from-mosquitoes-spliced-with-frog-DNA BS — but I was a bit hung up on poking holes in it. It won’t be quite that easy, and it rather glibly elides all the trans-acting variations that have arisen in 70 million years and the magnitude of the developmental changes. But still, if we ever do manage to rebuild a quasi-dinosaur from avian stock, that’ll be sort of the approach that will be taken, I suspect. Just amplify the difficulty a few thousand fold.

Also, it’s way too technical to survive in the movie treatment.

The Minnesota grading system

It’s grading time up here in the chilly North; we’ve got midterms we’re plowing through, and finals will come up in less than a month, and the students are all getting anxious. This is Minnesota, though, where we greatly value our emotional equilibrium, and our language emphasizes subtle distinctions that would more typically provoke a greater range of expression than you might find in New York or the South. This is also true of our practice of giving grades.

Perhaps you are visiting Minnesota, or are newly enrolled in one of the schools here, or are perusing a transcript from a Minnesota student, and you find yourself confused by our traditional folkways. Here then is a useful translation table from standard academic A-F grades to the more nuanced expressions we use around here.

Academic Minnesotan Translation
A Not too bad. You’ve done excellent work, but we wouldn’t want you to get too cocky now.
B You betcha. I am vaguely happy about your progress.
C That’s nice. I am not at all impressed, but I’m not about to say that to your face.
D That’s interesting. Are you from Iowa, perhaps? Or maybe Wisconsin? We don’t do things like that around here.
F That’s different. I am struggling to express my profound revulsion in a way that won’t immediately incite conflict.

(Note: C, D, and F grades may be emphasized with the modifier “sure”. “That’s sure different,” for instance, is a much stronger statement. It is not a good thing.)

Just as a general rule, Minnesotans value an affect as flat as the prairies up around Fargo/Moorhead, and must be read with an appreciation of delicate motor skills. A slightly raised eyebrow, for instance, has the same emotional impact as a Brooklynite screaming obscenities at you and making rude gestures.

This can sometimes have a devastating retroactive effect on visitors, once they realize how Minnesotan minds work. You know that nice little lady at the Mall of America who gave you cookie samples and greeted you with that lovely sing-song accent and smiled at you? The tightness of that smile, once you know how to read a Minnesotan, may have actually meant “I will make you dance the blood eagle and drape your bowels from the rafters, foreign scum!”

I am not a native Minnesotan, but my mother was born here. And let me tell you, it’s only many years after the fact that I realized how angry I’d sometimes made her when I was a child.

Taking zombies to task

Oh, good — both Tara Smith and Colin Purrington are a bit peeved with the recent episodes of The Walking Dead that have the survivors coming down with a nasty form of the flu, and their resident people sending them scurrying off to pillage local zombie-haunted pharmacies for…antibiotics. For shame.

They don’t mention the other things that bug me about that show, though. If the zombie plague is also viral, why aren’t they all turning into undead voracious brain eating monsters when they get splattered with zombie slime and goo and blood? They’re ripping up zombies right and left and practically bathing in disgusting fluids. Come on, people, hygiene.

Also, how long have they been wandering around Georgia? A year or two? Some of the zombies are portrayed as far advanced in decay, but others seem to be fairly fresh. Shouldn’t the zombie population be dropping off dramatically now? The pool of live humans from which new zombies could emerge is so drastically reduced that they ought to be dealing with little more than piles of ineffective rot and the very rare occasion when one of their own dies of natural causes and goes walking around hungrily.

Finally, Rick is a terrible, incompetent, awful leader. They’ve found one group of thriving humans in a town, led by a psycho tyrant — and there’s Rick’s poor struggling group who have been shredded by internal conflicts and have been succumbing steadily to attrition. The freakish violent Governor did a better job establishing a safe haven than Rick, and they destroyed it! When will the survivors learn that they’re being guided by a dangerous idiot?

I support Movember

You go, guys, but…what can I do to support a charity fundraiser for men’s health issues when the gimmick is to grow a moustache? It’s not as if I can grow a second one. I guess all I can do is urge all of you poor barefaced men to join Movember, and let your face do its manly thing.

But then, there’s the dilemma — I have to tell you to not shave it off in December, so you won’t be able to do it again. What’s with all these guys with naked lips, anyway? Don’t you get cold? How do you filter plankton?

Welp, yeah, that convinced me

Those ghosthunter shows are all looking for evidence of an afterlife and of spirits hanging about to communicate with us, and finally a group of ghosthunters in Oklahoma have found it. They’ve been exploring a decrepit basement in an abandoned urban building — you know, the kind of place where teenagers might hang out and drink and get into mischief — and they left up a chalkboard, and when they weren’t around, messages appeared on it. Deep, cryptic, strange messages, so they must be from ghosties.

The lanky cowboy with the slow drawl is totally mystified by the paranormal message with its deep historical resonance scrawled on the board.

“THE CAKE IS A LIE.”

So profound. So inexplicable and enigmatic. I wonder what it means? Perhaps one of you will have insight into this perplexing arcane sign from another world.