These are a pair of movies made of a Loligo opalescens mating frenzy off the shores of La Jolla. Squid do everything with gusto.
Squid Run from David R. Andrew on Vimeo.
Stevie Johnson, a player for the Buffalo Bills football team, dropped the ball in a catch that would have won his team a game. I have to commend him for some consistency, though — most players just credit their good catches to the Man Upstairs, but not Stevie: he got on Twitter and cussed out his god.
I PRAISE YOU 24/7!!!!!! AND THIS HOW YOU DO ME!!!!! YOU EXPECT ME TO LEARN FROM THIS??? HOW???!!! ILL NEVER FORGET THIS!! EVER!!! THX THO…
I’ve learned from this, at least. Stevie Johnson really likes exclamation points, and you can chew out god using Twitter. Who knew?
Meanwhile, over in Scotland, a football referee joked about the Pope on email. He apparently passed along this image:
I guess the Catholics are darned sure that their god doesn’t have a sense of humor, or at least doesn’t like jokes about priests, so one little pipsqueak in the church complained…and the referee was fired. No, not tied to a stick and set on fire, just sacked…no, not tied up in a sack and beaten, just pink-slipped…no, not…well, I’m pretty sure there must have been some old Catholic torture called pink-slipping, they’ve been so thorough in that department. Anyway, he has been released…aaargh, now everything is looking like a euphemism for hallowed Catholic death-dealing techniques.
He lost his job, OK?
So now Dawkins is calling on a letter campaign: inundate the Scottish Catholic office with pope jokes. You can just copy and paste the picture above, if you want, and send it to:
This could be fun. That office clearly needs some instruction in humor.
I once gave a lecture in which I summarized Intelligent Design arguments as simply repeating the word complexity a lot. I was wrong; I left out a word. They also use the word “purpose” a lot.
The latest example of the same tired old nonsense comes from Michael Behe, who really is just repeating the same thing he’s said many times before — in fact, he’s said it so many times that at this point it’s clear his brain is not engaged, and this is a reflex action by his typing fingers.
My contention is that ‘the purposeful arrangement of parts’ to achieve a specific purpose is the criterion that enables us to recognise design.
Wow. Circular argument is circular. What is design? The purposeful arrangement of parts. How do you know it’s purposeful? Because it has a purpose. How do you know it has a purpose? Because it looks designed. Repeat.
Let’s simplify his statement: “My contention is that things are purposeful because they achieve a specific purpose and that is the criterion that enables us to recognise purpose.” Yeah, that helps.
He has a counterargument to evolution:
The Darwinian alternative is to propose a phenomenon never observed anywhere, namely that complex machinery can assemble itself without any planning or direction.
Yet we do observe that all over the place, in the operation of the cell. Unless, of course, he’s now going to claim that thermodynamically-driven cellular processes are actually led along by tiny little invisible agents of the Lord.
If there were a hell (and there isn’t), I suppose this is as good a breakdown of deserved punishments as any.
How odd: Leslie Nielsen has died, and everyone is talking about the silly comedies he made late in life. Doesn’t anyone remember Forbidden Planet? What’s the matter with you people?
The hot topic on the chiding thread is a regular commenter who is planning to do something very, very stupid. I have to chime in: don’t. Always drink in moderation, if at all.
(Current totals: 11,416 entries with 1,196,543 comments.)
Today, Wikileaks begins releasing a huge collection of US embassy cables, and we’re about to discover the degree of skullduggery that’s been going on.
The cables show the extent of US spying on its allies and the UN; turning a blind eye to corruption and human rights abuse in “client states”; backroom deals with supposedly neutral countries; lobbying for US corporations; and the measures US diplomats take to advance those who have access to them.
This document release reveals the contradictions between the US’s public persona and what it says behind closed doors – and shows that if citizens in a democracy want their governments to reflect their wishes, they should ask to see what’s going on behind the scenes.
Every American schoolchild is taught that George Washington – the country’s first President – could not tell a lie. If the administrations of his successors lived up to the same principle, today’s document flood would be a mere embarrassment. Instead, the US Government has been warning governments — even the most corrupt — around the world about the coming leaks and is bracing itself for the exposures.
It is to be hoped that every major newspaper with some respect for its job has got people going over these documents carefully. The description above is correct: if we’re to deserve the title of democracy, we must have an informed citizenry.
Wayne Laugesen rightly points out that the Catholic church does not have exclusive ownership of pedophilia and child abuse. But then he takes a long leap into lunacy.
Today, sexual abuse of children is clearly out of control in public schools and is even more prevalent in homes. Society needs to stop acting as if it’s a problem caused by priests and look to the Catholic Church in the United States for answers. Due in part to public outrage regarding its mistakes and misdeeds of the past, the church appears to have emerged as the one organization with a formula for nearly eradicating sexual threats to children.
That’s impressively bizarre, and I admit, I never would have thought of it. What organization has the most experience with raping children? The Catholic church. Therefore, what organization should we turn to and tap into that experience? The Catholic church.
I think he’s wrong, though. There is a group with more experience: institutionalized child molesters. Clearly, with this reasoning, we should recruit a crack team of professional child rapers from our prisons and asylums, and send them on a grand tour of the country to advise schools on managing abuse. It’ll give a whole new meaning to the phrase “after school special”.
