Pokemon, revisited

It was tough being a biologist during my kids’ brief Pokemon craze. What kind of animals were those? What was this business of stuffing them into balls? And what a horrible mangling of evolution was portrayed in those transformations! Ick, ick, ick. The game just annoyed me in principle.

Those wild and crazy guys at the World’s Fair have had an idea: redo the whole Pokemon concept with real animals. It’s going to be called Phylomon. They’ve just started assembling a few bits and pieces — not only do they need to flesh out a game, but they also need to gather user-submitted illustrations. If you’ve got ideas for game design, or are an artist, check out their site and send in ideas.

Right now, they’ve got a simple request: Name your five favorite organisms and why, and pass it on to the Phylomon art community. Easy.

  • Vampyroteuthis infernalis
  • Architeuthis dux
  • Dosidicus gigas
  • Sepia latimanus
  • Enteroctopus dofleini

Why? Because they’re awesome. And anything would be better than Squirtle and Pikachu.

Maybe they should send them to the moon, then

I guess we’ve been outdone. While the godless are raising money for the Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders, a Christian group is sending boxloads of solar-powered digital Bibles to Haiti — just what they need, I’m sure.

Called the “Proclaimer,” the audio Bible delivers “digital quality” and is designed for “poor and illiterate people”, the Faith Comes By Hearing group said.

According to their website, the Proclaimer is “self-powered and can play the Bible in the jungle, desert or … even on the moon!”

I’m trying to imagine an audio speaker that works in a vacuum. And why you would need a moon-ready Bible reader for poor lunar illiterates, anyway.

What really has me stumped, though, is trying to imagine something more useless than sending a bunch of electronic junk to people trying to recover from a disaster.

We shall win battles with our magically enchanted weapons

I don’t know about you, but I sure am reassured that our soldiers are well-equipped since I heard that one weapon supplier has been enchanting rifles with secret references to the Bible. It gives a soldier special powers to be thinking, “he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life.” as he peers down the barrel of a gun, preparing to blow the brains out of a Muslim. And don’t you think the Muslim would appreciate knowing that his killer was imbued with such saintly sentiments?

If Jesus had actually existed, that’s probably exactly the purpose he would have intended for his philosophy, too — for reassuring the consciences of arms manufacturers that they are promoting the cause of peace.

The power of organization

The Non-Believers Giving Aid project has been a phenomenal success; it raised over $150,000 in contributions for Haiti within 24 hours, and at the last tally I heard was somewhere over $180,000, with an average donation of roughly $35 per godless donor.

I’ve been seeing a lot of sniping from various corners of the web that these contributions are just selfish promotion by atheists, that we wouldn’t ever help human beings if we couldn’t get advertising for it. This is absurdly false. Before the Giving Aid site was set up, I’d put up a call for donations, and the godless community responded then — and they sent in their money without any kind of label on it. When the new call from Richard Dawkins came, many donated again, and I also heard from several people who’d had difficulty with PayPal payments and even so, also donated again without concern that their dollars wouldn’t appear under the Non-Believers Giving Aid umbrella. The important goal all along was to contribute to disaster relief, and the numbers we have now are an underestimate of how willing non-believers were to give humanitarian aid.

I will freely admit, though, that a secondary goal was to correct a public misconception. There is a false perception that associates church attendance with selflessness and social responsibility, and that because non-believers do not make showy demonstrations of giving in the name of a deity, we must be uncaring. To the contrary, the godless have been quietly supporting good causes as independent agents all along — and sometimes have even been contributing to religious charities, if they do good work. All this new organization changes is the ability to give credit where it is due, and to wave away this mistaken notion that only people of faith can appreciate the importance of assisting our fellow human beings.

I’m hoping that this kind of central organization that channels the charity of the godless will persist, and help people realize that we’re all together in the effort to make a fairer, better world…and that the absence of a church is not a reason to snub us, or to think that we shouldn’t be courted to serve good causes.

(And you can still donate!)

Mary’s Monday Metazoan wishes to register a complaint

Last week’s metazoan was a walrus, which many people mistook for a manatee. This meant that my inbox was flooded with outraged email from the manatee community, which was deeply offended at the confusion. So, today, here is a portrait of one of the handsomer representatives of the fine warm-water aquatic mammals that were insulted.

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As you can plainly see, there is no resemblance at all.

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(via National Geographic)

Hairy horde marches on

I just stagger back from yet another long day of travel, and what do I discover? You’ve filled up the las entry in the endless thread again. Does the horde never sleep?

Anyway, we will launch this one with a mystery. Watch this video of an Oregon bigfoot:

Now the mystery. Why is it that all sightings of bigfoot are such obvious scams? They are typically badly done messes like a poor and shaky camera recording, or a pile of rotting meat in a fur suit. This one suffers from overly slick choreography — isn’t it nice how the camera zooms into focus only briefly, just as Bigfoot turns to look at the cameraman? At least this guy invested in a nice hairy man suit and put some effort into the makeup, but it’s still a guy in a costume.

And wait — the creator’s name is “John E. Walker”? Yeah, right.

As if you need anything to talk about, at least you can start by ripping into this video. I have no idea where you’ll end up from there, of course.