Fair time!

i-75685437052f8865315e3dd1c87a5ac0-wendinger_band.jpg

This is the week of the Stevens County Fair, right here in bucolic Morris, Minnesota. It starts on Wednesday, 9 August and runs through Sunday the 13th, so you all still have time to start heading out this way. It’s your classic rural fair: there will be accordions, deep-fried anything on a stick, pig-judging, carnies, a demolition derby, country-western music, lawn mower races, 4H kids, and tractors, snowmobiles, and ice houses for sale. You have not lived until you have experience a midwestern county fair.

(Oh, and don’t eat the food if you want to continue living. It’s like jabbing your aorta with a turkey baster clogged full of pure cholesterol.)

I think we’re planning on having our weekly Drinking Liberally session at the beer garden at the fair, so there’s another reason for coming on Thursday evening.

I’m going to be there just about every day. I volunteered to man booths at various hours for UMM, our local humane society, and the Stevens County DFL. Come on down—the fair is free, parking is free, it is the thing to do in August.

Hooterology?

We seem to be talking about breasts a lot this week, don’t we? Abel Pharmboy raises a provocative ethical question: is it crass or is it reasonable for breast cancer researchers to ask Hooters to promote breast cancer awareness? I’m of the opinion that we ought to get every penny we can from them, but stop short of giving any hint that we actually endorse their business…although I’d wonder if even asking them for their assistance is granting them respectability, or if acknowledging the assistance of Hooters would turn a serious event into a joke.

It’s probably best to post your answers to Terra Sigillata. I’d really be interested to see Twisty‘s opinion!

(Just a wild thought…I wonder how much money doctors could get for naming rights. Offer to change the name of the disease to Hooter’s™ cancer. I know, that’s even more tasteless than getting them to sponsor a meeting.)

The ubiquitous Francis Collins

Collins has another published interview in Salon. It’s sad, actually—in every new interview, he says pretty much the same thing, but he digs himself in a little deeper. I ordered his book the other day, and now I’m beginning to regret it; it’s beginning to sound like trite Christian apologetics with no depth, no self-reflection, no insight…just compound anecdotes intended to rationalize a conclusion he has arrived at with no evidence. It’s distressingly anti-scientific.

For instance, we get an expansion of his hiking anecdote:

[Read more…]

Sundry cephalinks

Here are a few miscellaneous cephalopod-related things people have sent me lately.