There were all these carnival notices clattering around in my mailbox from last week, and they all got lost in the chaos for a while, but here they are, a bit late.
A colleague just let me know that I’m mentioned in the “Best of the Web” section of Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News. Yay! It’s a positive review!
It’s in the April 15 issue for all you subscribers.
Christopher Hitchens will be on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart tonight! I’ll tune in, but if he tries to defend the Iraq war, it’s going off.
This worked fairly well last time around, so let’s try it again. If you’d like to have your blog on the Pharyngula blogroll, here’s what you should do:
Examine your blog with a critical eye. If you are espousing creationism, Intelligent Design creationism, the beauty of unthinking acceptance of your Lord and Master Jesus Christ or Mohammed or L. Ron Hubbard, or have a Bush in ’08 badge on your site, don’t bother. Really, you don’t want to draw my attention to you. You probably don’t like me, anyway.
There is a technical limitation. I manage my blogroll with my newsreader, so I can only see sites that have some kind of syndication feed. Most do, nowadays, but if you’ve got some obscure code you’re using to generate your blog, you might not. Static web pages also usually do not. Sorry, I just don’t have a good way around this right now.
Take a look at the current blogroll, and make sure you aren’t already on it. It’s so embarrassing to raise your hand and say “Me, me, me!” and discover that you were picked a long time ago. It would also be polite to check out a few of those other blogs while you’re skimming the list — the point of the blogroll is to send some traffic to other places, after all.
After leaping all those tremendous hurdles, leave a comment here, with a link to your blog. You can just type the url into your comment, or if you want to show off your amazing html skills, you can imbed a link, like so: <a href=”http://my.blog.url/”>My Blog!</a>. Easy! You might also want to describe what’s special about your blog, so other readers might be enticed to check it out. Regular readers or people already on my blogroll might be reading the comments to pick up interesting new blogs, too.
Write out a check for $100 and send it to… Uh, never mind. There are no catches to this, you don’t even have to link back to me. Just write good stuff.
As before, I make no promises to keep you on the blogroll, and in particular, I ruthlessly purge blogs that fail to update for over a month.
Now let’s hope the response isn’t quite as overwhelming as last time. Haven’t I already linked to most of the blogosphere already?
There’s more to invention than just slapping a new wrapper on an old device, and sometimes the superficial approach can lead to some funny results, like the Tampon Taser. The copy describing this device is weird: in addition to touting its absorbency, fresh floral scent and gentle glide applicator, it also has barbed probes and a range of 14 feet. Alas, it also warns that “It is not intended nor recommended for vaginal insertion.”
After reading my last day’s posts here, you might think I’m either a teenage girl, or obsessed with young girls, but really … it’s just what has drifted to the top of my email box lately. And really, my initial impression that here was a device that would allow women to fire debilitating high voltage sparks out of their nether regions did get me a little bit excited, so you can’t blame me for mentioning it.
But if you’re gullible enough to believe Hoofnagles actually exist, I suppose you could go say hello to them at their new Denialism blog.
I will point out, though, that if one Hoofnagle is improbable, the chances of two Hoofnagles spontaneously assembling themselves at a single place and time is so unlikely as to be absurd. In the face of such ludicrous improbabilities, there isn’t even any point to bringing up evidence—my mind is made up.
90% of teenage girls believe they are overweight, according to a recent survey. That’s something to worry about — there’s the reality, that a lot of us are overweight, but there’s also the perception problem, that many girls are convinced that they must lose weight when they really don’t. There’s an article that speculates on the cause of this problem, whether it is an obsession with celebrity, peer pressure, or pressure from the diet industry, but it comes up with a strange explanation:
Since I didn’t get in my usual god-bashing today, you’ll have to take in The Carnival of the Godless #65 and Revere’s Freethinker Sunday Sermonette. They’ll clear the piety out of your sinuses and flush the veneration right out of your colon.
Too much traveling lately. Today Skatje and I hit the big city for a couple of events.
We attended the Minnesota Atheists fundraiser in the morning. Somehow, I ended up volunteering to give a talk to the Minnesota Atheists sometime this summer, and I also volunteered to speak at Lee Salisbury’s Critical Thinking Club. Then I talked to some of the leaders of CASH, and volunteered to be their faculty advisor. I’ve heard that there is this word called “no” in the English language — could someone define it for me please? (Nah, these will all be fun, so it’s OK.)
Skatje forced me to take her to the Mall of America. I tried to explain that as a Communist Anarchist, stepping through the doors of that citadel of capitalism might make me burst into flame and shrivel into a smoking heap of bones, but she just thought that would be funny.
There was a meeting of the board of the Minnesota Citizens for Science Education, and I volunteered for a committee putting together an event for summer of 2008.
Now I’m very, very tired, and I think I lined up more work for myself for the coming few months. That’s another reason to hide out at home for a while.
Anyone want to help Joolya with her unpleasant personal fungus problem? I should warn you that there are photographs at that link, and she is naked under her lab coat.
