Chris Clarke in the Twin Cities???

That was my first thought when I read this entry, but then I noticed that the clotted, precious style didn’t quite fit. My next though was a horrific one: Lileks is guest posting on Creek Running North? Say it isn’t so! It’s bad enough that he’s there every time I open the Star Tribune!

Ah, but no, fortunately it’s just a pitch-perfect satire.

If you don’t like Lileks’ cutesie dribblings, you must read this.

For those wondering who the heck Lileks is, he’s a columnist for the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, famous for two qualities: 1) he’s one of those pissed-pants conservatives who totally lost it after 9/11, and 2) he’s very twee.

An entirely optional request

A little reminder: a look at Technorati shows me that a lot of people still haven’t updated those blogrolls. I’ve stuck an automatic redirect on the old page, and I’ve also tweaked the .htaccess file to remap all the requests for rss and xml files to the new syndication file here, so it’s easy to forget—going to the old site will still get you right here. Still, it would be nice if you adjusted the links, and changed “http://pharyngula.org/” to “http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/“.

It’s not a major problem since either address will eventually get you to the same place, but I’m sure the Seed people would like to see more links going straight to the ScienceBlogs empire.

Who will clean the litter box after you’ve been raptured?

This has got to be a spoof site, but then I would have had to think Rapture Ready was a joke, too. Anyway, when the Rapture comes and you are ascended into heaven, you need to make sure your beloved pets are cared for, so the JesusPets service is recruiting non-Christians to take care of pets during the Tribulation or whatever.

It’s a bit bizarre. One thing they have to make sure of is that the godless atheist isn’t signing up just so he can get his hands on Mr Tinkles to rape and eat, so we have to sign a promise that we aren’t just scheming to ravish everyone’s abandoned pets.

Make hard CA$H from home while the world is in flames!

Are you an animal lover; and also an atheist, agnostic, jew, muslim, or other non-Christian? If so, you might qualify for the JesusPets Partner Program!

JesusPets will pay YOU to take care of dogs, cats, and other pets. To qualify, you must agree with this statement:

The JesusPets Partner Program Statement

  • I love animals, and am willing to care for pets after the Christian Rapture.
  • I am not, and never have been a born-again Christian.
  • I believe it is immoral to have sex with animals, and have no desire to do so.
  • I believe it is immoral to consume common domesticated pets (note: this includes goldfish!), and have no desire to do so.

If you agree with, then please contact JesusPets to join our international community of JesusPets Partners!

Hmmm. If I were a cat-raper, I don’t think I’d be too troubled about breaking an electronic pledge.

These guys at the top are despicable characters, aren’t they?

I know, everyone’s making a big deal of this, but I honestly don’t care that Cheney accidentally shot a fellow hunter. People do make mistakes, and hunting is a risky sport with dangerous devices—I simply don’t see it as saying much about his character or capability that he made a potentially tragic error on a hunting trip. At best, it says that maybe he’s getting too old and careless to be armed and in public.

On the other hand, this says volumes about Cheney’s character.

Monday’s hunting trip to Pennsylvania by Vice President Dick Cheney in which he reportedly shot more than 70 stocked pheasants and an unknown number of mallard ducks at an exclusive private club places a spotlight on an increasingly popular and deplorable form of hunting, in which birds are pen-reared and released to be shot in large numbers by patrons. The ethics of these hunts are called into question by rank-and-file sportsmen, who hunt animals in their native habitat and do not shoot confined or pen-raised animals that cannot escape.

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported today that 500 farm-raised pheasants were released yesterday morning at the Rolling Rock Club in Ligonier Township for the benefit of Cheney’s 10-person hunting party. The group killed at least 417 of the birds, illustrating the unsporting nature of canned hunts. The party also shot an unknown number of captive mallards in the afternoon.

What the hell…?

I’m not some knee-jerk bleeding-heart animal lover; I think living things should be respected and treated honorably, but that killing is part of the pattern of life. I don’t hunt myself, and I don’t think it is an unquestionable privilege, but I can respect the skill and intentions of someone who does a little game hunting.

But this…it’s simply sickening. Blowing away a horde of pen-raised animals, released in front of you to scurry into your gunsights, is not a sport. It’s disgusting bloody-mindedness, a lazy, cowardly, vicious sort of abuse.

They say that torturing and killing helpless animals is one of the signs of a sadistic sociopath. Somehow, it’s fitting that our vice-president is the kind of guy who takes glee in unfeeling butchery.

Since people are commenting on it, I have to clarify that I don’t think shooting a fellow hunter is excusable—but it’s more a matter of incompetence than malicious intent. We already know this administration is incompetent.

Gary Farber has mentioned the strange lag in reporting the accident (and he has a darned thorough roundup of stories on the matter). That’s also troubling, and it really means they’ve hit a triple on this one: dumb bloody-minded malice, incompetence, and disregard for the law. That’s our Dick.

Eldredge on Darwin

Niles Eldredge has a fine essay online on what it means to be a Darwinist (not the term as caricatured by creationists, but merely as someone who respects the work of Darwin while acknowledging the vast increase in understanding evolution since his time). It’s also useful for explaining how creationists distort the concept of punctuated equilibrium.

The creationists of the day got into the act as well. In a clear demonstration of how thoroughly political the creationist movement has always been in the United States, Ronald Reagan told reporters, after addressing a throng of Christian ministers during the 1980 presidential campaign, that evolution “is a theory, a scientific theory only, and it has in recent years been challenged in the world of science and is not yet believed in the scientific community to be as infallible as it once was believed.” The creationist who managed to get to Reagan’s handlers later bragged to me that those scientists in question were none other than Gould and me. The syllogism ran something like this: (1) Darwin said that evolution is slow, steady, and gradual; (2) some scientists say that evolution consists of rapid bursts of change interrupting vastly longer periods of evolutionary stagnation; ergo, (3) some scientists don’t follow Darwin, meaning (4) some scientists oppose evolution. Then, as now, at least in the public domain, “Darwin” is code for “evolution.” The two are virtual synonyms.

Ain’t that the truth. Darwin is not synonymous with evolution, however, which is why I reject the term “Darwinist” myself. But even so, I’m with Eldredge on this matter: Darwin was an excellent writer and scientist, and his work was the foundation for modern biology.

But I never thought the fact that Darwin—from where I stand as a paleontologist—got some of his story wrong somehow made me an anti-Darwinian. For I have admired the man ever since I took my paperback copy of the sixth edition of On the Origin of Species to read while waiting for Louis Leakey to show up and give a lecture on human evolution on the Columbia campus. I had arrived early to get a good seat, and Louis was late—so I got my first real chance to sample Darwin’s prose. I was fearful of the complexity of the great man’s mind, and of the alien nature of his Victorian prose. But I needn’t have worried, for Darwin proved accessible to the readers of his day—even lay readers—and he remains so today.

Self-loathing Coulter

I’ve been hearing about the usual despicable performances of Republicans at CPAC, and in particular the heinous stylings of Ann Coulter, and I have to ‘fess up to considerable outrage fatigue. Then I learned that she was picking on me.

That said, she [Ann Coulter] did not disappoint her fans, coming to the stage under the thumping dance house beats to deliver a string of punch lines. Democrats: “Someday they will find a way to abort all future Boy Scouts.” College professors: “sissified, pussified.” Harvard: “the Soviet Union.” John Kerry: the other “dominant woman in Democratic politics.” Her post-9/11 motto: “Rag head talks tough, rag head faces consequences.” For good measure, she threw in a joke about having Muslims burn down the Supreme Court—with the liberal justices inside.

That’s all extraordinarily vile, but college professors? “Sissified,” of course, is derived from “sister” and means “Of, relating to, or having the characteristics of a sissy; timid, cowardly, or effeminate”. “Pussified” is referring to the female genitalia. She’s trying to insult college professors and Democrats by calling them a bunch of females, but her terms are attempts to insult women.

I don’t get it. Isn’t there a rumor going around that Coulter is actually a woman herself?

P.S. I just had a horrible thought, an idea that would give the Republicans a lock on their base forevermore. If I didn’t know that no right-wingers ever read this site, I wouldn’t even mention it.

CPAC should have Armstrong Williams and LaShawn Barber up on the podium, denouncing the Democrats as a bunch of shiftless Negroes. Oh, how the crowd would roar and eat it up.

Young Darwin

On this fine Darwin Day, I thought I’d just include an excerpt from Janet Browne’s excellent biography of the man, Voyaging(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll). It does a fine job of telling us a little bit about the human being behind the famous and infamous scientist.

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Charles and his sister Catherine Darwin, 1816

Charles Robert Darwin was born on 12 February 1809, the fifth child of Susanna and Robert Waring Darwin of The Mount, a large Georgian house overlooking the bend in the river with gardens running down to water meadows and the town beyond. In one of those odd coincidences of history, Abraham Lincoln was born on the same day; Tennyson and Gladstone were born a few months later. His father was a prosperous physician, one of three practicing in Shrewsbury, his mother a daughter of Josiah Wedgwood, the founder of the china company and an influential Staffordshire entrepreneur. They called their infant son “Bobby.”

…

Into this affluent, forward looking household came Charles Darwin, a dreamy, grey-eyed, thickset child, intent on his own thoughts behind a shock of brown hair, but warm-hearted and loving for all that. He was not good-looking in the conventional sense, for the square boyish face was blighted by a nose inherited from the doctot, almost too adult—”like a farmer,” someone said—for a young boy. Darwin did not grow into his nose until he was much older and was always slightly embarrassed about it, his later jokes revealing a shaky self-image and a lack of confidence in the outer man that made his manners particularly retiring. It was a nose “as big as your fist,” he plaintively wrote to a schoolfriend. Few portraits show him in profile for that reason.

Like his father, and Grandfather Darwin as well, he tended to stammer, having special difficulties with the letter w. There was a prize of sixpence waiting for the day he could manage to say “white wine”: an odd requirement in a teetotal household.

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Charles and his son William in 1842

He was so quiet that relatives found it difficult to say anything about his character beyond an appreciative nod towards an exceedingly placid temperament. To them he was a self-sufficient younger, content to wander the country paths around Shrewsbury searching for birds, watching a fishing float for hours from the banks of the Severn, or trailing helpfully after Abberley, the elderly gardner at The Mount, in his well-regulated cycle of horticultural duties.

Both the boy and his childhood appear to have been unremarkable, a point often commented on by friends and relations after he became famous. William Allport Leighton, an early schoolfriend, thought the nine-year-old Darwin entirely ordinary: no obvious candidate for subsequent achievement.

In figure he was bulky and heavy-looking, and did not then manifest any particular powers of mind. He was reserved in manner, & we thought him proud inasmuch as he did not join in any play with the other boys but went directly home from school…. Though reserved in manner he was of a kindly disposition & seemed pleased to do little acts to gratify his fellows—one instance of which was bringing plants from his father’s garden for our little gardens.

Olduvai George has another portrait of young Mr Darwin.

Prairie Home Companion at Morris

So did everyone tune in?

It was a middling show. He said good things about UMM and well, honest things about Morris, so I’m not going to complain about that.

As usual, the gospel music gives me the heebie-jeebies, but I just content myself with the knowledge that I was listening to a pleasant shadow of the richness the composers and musicians would have produced, if only their talent hadn’t been tainted with the rot of religiosity.

I sat next to Skatje, who looked weary with the burden of accompanying a pair of old fogeys to listen to some other old fogies act out skits and music that were even more fogeyish. Ah, the burden of being a teenager…