It’s an amusing clip from The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra…I’m going to have to see that movie someday.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
It’s an amusing clip from The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra…I’m going to have to see that movie someday.
I saw the movie Underworld: Evolution last night. Stop looking at me like that—it was research. It has the word “evolution” in the title, doesn’t it? Besides, I have this idea to improve the promotion of science by having all of our spokespeople be dangerously nubile armed women with good cheekbones, full lips, and very sharp teeth. I figure the two things we’ve been lacking in our presentations to the public are lust and fear, and if we can just bring those into play, we’ll have an unbeatable combination.
As I learned at this movie, too, if you’ve got gorgeous women and slimy, ravening beasts confronting each other with big guns, nothing in the story has to make any sense at all. There was no plot: instead, there are a series of set-pieces strung together in which Our Heroine is placed in someplace dark, wet, and seedy with a supply of weapons and hapless allies/fang fodder to confront a suitably snouty or batty SFX playtoy. They aren’t even consistent in how these conflicts are resolved. Big bad immortal vampires get shot multiple times at point blank range with a shotgun, and shake it off with a snarl; but when Sir Derek Jacobi, following in the fine British tradition of slumming in some well-paying American trash, finds the movie so embarrassingly bad that he has to get out, the movie makers decide that the way to have his immortal character die is to poke him with something pointy, followed by a languorous death scene in which Jacobi completely turns off his ability to act. It was impressively flat, a cinematic vampire death scene that ranks right up there with Pee Wee Herman’s in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, yet utterly different.
Somehow this murky, muddled mess of a movie got made, and got people (like, say, me!) to attend. There’s a lesson here.
I’m going to have to get a skin-tight vinyl body suit for my next presentation.
I’ll let you guess whether I’m trying to inspire lust or fear.
I’ve always wanted to be on The Simpsons, and I think my head is probably potato-shaped enough to fit in perfectly, but the Simpsomaker doesn’t have quite enough options. More facial hair! I need a full beard with a Flanders-like mustache for this to work.
At least it’s easy to look like a Minnesotan.
(via Just a Bump in the Beltway)
Gary has a most trenchant summary, but if any Whedon/Ellis fans need the full force of the conversation, it’s here.
I was asked to show some of my hate mail, but I’m afraid I’m not going to dig through all the ancient, musty piles of old email to find it—I have a hard enough time wading through the new stuff! Here’s the most recent, though, which arrived just this evening, although I think it is in response to a post I wrote about a year and a half ago, Is Mike S. Adams a fool?. This stuff just keeps dribbling in.
Mike Adams is god. This statement of truth, however, leads me to another question. Simply put, are you a) a eunuch, b) a hairy-armed white female feminazi type with no discernible talent or c) one of those kool-aid democrats our children are taught to avoid? I would be interested in some typological clarification on this point as you seem like a very perverse bundle of mistaken beliefs and psychological neuroses.
It’s a little more coherent than the usual babble I get, but it says more about him than me, anyway. Note that the original post was about Adams’ anti-evolutionist views, yet somehow it’s been distorted into something about my views on sexuality. I guess that’s not terribly surprising, given Adams’ own insecurities on the subject.
I’ve gotten a few links to interesting CafePress merchandise today. You can now get the Immortal Pinkoski’s slogan, If you doubt this is possible, how is it there are PYGMIES + DWARFS?, on a t-shirt. Mona tells me that I can also get a fine selection of cephalopodous clothing, or samples of other interesting art—take a look at Platypus Rex.
It’s a good thing I have a wife who scowls at me when I put on something outrageous, ’cause otherwise I’d be walking around with the weirdest outfits.
Here’s a spiffy picture.
It’s almost ruined for me by the artist’s description, though.
Here, raw sexual aggression is symbolized by the sperm whale, while the squid acts as a thinly-disguised metaphor for the multi-armed oligarchies of Rockefeller, Hearst, and Morgan. Their battle plays against the backdrop of the sea, standing in for—what else?—the vastness of the unconscious mind.
He can’t possibly be serious. It reminded me more of this:
Forget the metaphors and monopolies and minds…it’s just cooooool.
Hrm. Well. Tut-tut-tut. Now we can see Flying Spaghetti Monster erotica.
Not exactly work-safe, but noodly bits are artfully draped to make it all a little less explicit.
As a proud native of the great Pacific Northwest, when an article on one of our noblest creatures was mentioned to me, I had to read it. Here’s the center of the story.
In July 2005, nine residents of Teslin, Yukon,
witnessed through a kitchen window a large bipedal
animal moving through the brush. The next morning, they
collected a tuft of coarse, dark hair and also observed a
footprint measuring 43 cm in length and 11.5 cm in width.
That’s right: physical evidence, a footprint and hair, from…Bigfoot. The Sasquatch. A sample captured in the wild and brought into the lab. Pinned against the wall, trapped and unable to escape the probing appendages of an implacable, intrusive Science.
So they extracted DNA from the hair and amplified conserved mammalian sequences. They sequenced fragments of the DNA and compared them against sequences in the databases, and got a shocking answer. Prepare yourself: here is a diagram of the phylogenetic relationship of Sasquatch to other mammalian species.
The scientists squirm and try to avoid the obvious conclusions of their results, inventing foolish excuses rather than facing reality.
There are several possible explanations for these
results. First, as suggested from molecular analysis of
hair from a suspected Yeti, the Sasquatch might be a
highly elusive ungulate that exhibits surprising morphological convergence with primates. Alternately, the hair
might have originated from a real bison and be unrelated
to the Sasquatch. Parsimony would favor the second
interpretation, in which case, the identity and taxonomy
of this enigmatic and elusive creature remains a mystery.
I wonder what Radical Sasquatch will think of this.
*Wait a minute…the scientific name for the water buffalo is Bubalus bubalis? Bubalus bubalis? No wonder they’re so mean.
Coltman D, Davis C (2006) Molecular cryptozoology meets the Sasquatch . Trends in Ecology and Evolution 21(2):60-61.
apostropher has the link to the video: penis fencing flatworms. They are impressively athletic.
