Look at this card a reader wrote me about. It’s a sweet, cute, innocent card, perfect for Cephalopodmas.
On the other hand—O Great Old Ones, this is so horrid I shudder to mention it—another reader sent me an ad. An ad so ghastly, I won’t put it on the front page here…you’ll have to click through to see it. If you’re squeamish or delicate of constitution, do not read the rest of this post. The War on Cephalopodmas is on.
There don’t seem to be a lot of carnival notices in my mailbox today, so I’ll just note that the Friday Ark #113 is up, and remind everyone that the next Tangled Bank is coming up on Wednesday, at Newton’s Binomium (by the way, I thought his post on the difficulty of explaining the importance of evo-devo was good—there are biologists who look utterly blank at the enthusiasm the subject generates in some of us). Send stuff to host@tangledbank.net or me by Tuesday.
People send me pretty pictures all the time…they’re almost always of molluscs, of course. I’ve put the latest below the fold.
Casey Luskin is still flailing at Carl Zimmer, and Carl has updated his rebuttal appropriately. It’s good entertainment if you find attack mice amusing.
As happened in so many places in this last election, a local Democrat won a solid victory over a Republican in the District 50 election. His opponent sent a “concession” letter—see if you can spot what’s peculiar and a bit offensive about it.
Congratulations on winning the District 50 senate race. Your phone is “busy”…no doubt with good wishes!
I’ve enjoyed much of this race, especially the people I’ve met…even you! I see your deficits–not all of them, and your potential–but not all of it. Only your Creator knows the real potential He’s put in you. Get to know Him and know yourself…you’ll be more interesting even to you!
The race of your life is more important than this one–and it is my sincere wish that you’ll get to know Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. He died for the sins of the world, yours and mine–and especially for those who accept His forgiveness. His kingdom will come and His will be done–on earth as it is in heaven. There’s more….I love belonging to the family of God. Jesus is the way, the truth and offers His life to you and each human being. Pay attention…this is very important, Satveer. Have you noticed Jesus for yourself…at some moment in time, yet???
God commends His love to us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.
Romans 5:8Death came upon all and was defeated by the superiority of Jesus’ life and His tomb is empty. God in Christ is reconciling the world back to Himself, with offered forgiveness–this is one choice we get to make nose to nose with the living God–fear Him and you need fear no other. Become His family and know the love of God that passes knowledge. See Isaiah and the Gospel of John…good reading while waiting for fishes to bite.
God sent not His son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved.
John 3:17Jesus Christ lives in His earth family by His Spirit. He said He’d be back, and He said it first. You could invite Him to make the race of your life ‘eternal’. God waits to be gracious to each person that knows they need to be forgiven. Do you? I think you do. Just ask. Christ won eternal life for you and said so. Take Him at His Word. Take some time to get acquainted with this power-filled Jesus…God with us. You could be a temple of the living God, by invitation—yours, TO GOD. :) There’s nothing like belonging to Christ…not winning, not money, not degrees…it’s the best.
Good wishes and better wishes…until you wish for the best!
Rae Hart Anderson
To make it particularly piquant, the Democratic victor is named Satveer Chaudary, and he is a practicing Hindu. I suspect that he is more aware that his religious beliefs are not necessarily shared with his fellow members of the Minnesota congress, and might be a little less oblivious…so I’m glad he was elected.
(via I’ll explain it when you are older)
Yesterday afternoon, I’d had to run an errand to our library, and as I was walking out, I saw a real treat on the new arrivals shelf: Tufte’s
Beautiful Evidence(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll). I had to sit down and read through parts of it (short review: thought-provoking ideas, but I don’t think it’s one of his better efforts. It’s still enjoyable to read.) Then what do I learn but that Neddie Jingo got to meet him and showed him a ghastly example of PowerDreck used to sell the Iraq war.
You’ll have to read the whole thing to find out how Tufte responded.
After South Park made such a botch of its portrayal, this might be some vindication: Salon names Richard Dawkins as one of the sexiest men living. It’s a bit gushy, I’m afraid.
Wonder is sexy. Knowledge is sexy. And embodying both as much as any man in the world today is a man in a tweed jacket riding his bike around the Oxford University campuses, the damp English breeze sweeping a curtain of silver hair from the delicate bones of his face. Yes, those cheekbones, those piercing eyes, that pursed bow of a mouth — but that brain, oh that brain, oh, god, that brain — is what makes Richard Dawkins, evolutionary biologist and the most famous atheist in the world, the sexiest man around.
Dawkins is the professor I never had an affair with, whose very sentence structure threatens to weaken my concentration on the content of his words. Call me deluded: I ache for his atheism; I reel from his reasoning. He is my James Bond, a well-attired, fearless seeker of truth in the face of nihilism. And yet, for all his pedigree, he enthusiastically appeared this fall on “South Park” to spread the gospel of science, his dashing cartoon figure covered in the feces of a teacher who scoffs at evolution.* While scatology isn’t my thing, straddling the highest of the ivory highbrow with the glorious lowest of the low: Now that’s sexy.
I dream of his perfectly-accented voice — Oxbridge softened by a childhood spent in, sigh, East Africa — whispering to me from his latest book, “The God Delusion,” a defense of endless curiosity in the face of omnipresent theism. “If the demise of god will leave a gap, different people will fill it in different ways. My way includes a good dose of science, the honest and systematic endeavor to find out the truth about the real world.” Take me with you, Richard: You put the “sex” in sexagenarian. Let us clinch in a godless embrace, crying out to what we know does not exist, searching, searching evermore.
Personally, he’s not my type…but still, it’s good to see an atheist and a scientist described in such flattering terms.
*The article is incorrect to assume that Dawkins had anything at all to do with that South Park episode, though.
One of the characters who frequents the ID blog Uncommon Descent is the smarm-meister Sal Cordova, an utterly clueless little git with a talent for being simultaneously oleaginous and snide. He has just posted an astonishingly foolish commentary on the apparent impossibility of evolving regeneration, and I promise, you’ll enjoy reading Mark Chu-Carroll’s reply. Cordova gets everything wrong.
So I passed on rending Steve Cornell’s inane piece on atheists, but it’s a big ol’ blogosphere, and you knew someone would step in to fill the gap. Two people did. Amanda’s always game, and here’s someone new: the Southern Fried Skeptic gives it a twist and tells us it’s not easy being a Christian.
Teamwork. It’s how we’ll triumph.
