A note to readers

I get lots of email from people—it’s not just creationists and wingnuts calling me nasty names, but also people on my side who just want to express their appreciation, or people passing along tips and links to interesting stories. I rarely reply. It’s nothing personal, it’s just that if I wrote back to everyone who was sending me stuff, I’d have to do nothing but write email replies all day long. I also can’t possibly post it all, either, unless you want to see 50 short articles a day consisting of nothing but a link (I have been tempted, I confess.)

So let me just say now, thanks! Keep it coming! I don’t mind that kind of email at all, even if the volume is sometimes a bit much.

One other thing: if you send me something, I’m happy to give all the credit you want. One thing that sometimes stops me from using a piece is that I don’t know exactly what the person submitting it would want me to do with attribution. This is a brutally godless, liberal blog, and I know that sometimes people are reluctant to have their name associated with those kinds of sentiments. It’s helpful if you say something like “please keep me anonymous!” or “refer to me as Jane” or “refer to me as Jane Smith of Tacoma, WA, and I have a blog at some-name.blogspot.com.” If you pass me something juicy, I am overjoyed to plug your website, so please don’t be shy. Besides, once you become a blogospheric bigshot, I’ll appreciate it when you link back to me once in a while.

Score: Clarke 1, Goldstein banned from the sport forevermore

Civilized Celts would send skillful bards to sing satires in great competitions. I applaud the idea of returning to such a literate tradition, but really…a skilled writer who knows something of meter and meaning vs. a clumsy, chattering hack who strings words together in lumpy, clattering arrhythmia? If this were a boxing match, it’d be like pitting Mohammed Ali in his prime against Steve Buscemi with a hangover. It’s Bambi sans charm vs. Godzilla with a keyboard. It’s the Philadelphia Philharmonic playing over a gurgling drainpipe. Who put together this embarrassing mismatch?

The search is over

The Intelligent Designer has been found, and his name is Phineas J. Schwartzfeld.

Phineas Schwartzfeld, who wears a mask and a garish purple and green costume emblazoned with the letters “I” and “D”, claims to be immortal and that he invented life, the universe, and everything else many thousands of years ago. He is currently wanted on several outstanding warrants for illegal firearm possession, littering, and substandard product assembly on platypuses, armadillos and New Hampshire’s Old Man of the Mountain (a large geological sculpture which collapsed in 2003 due to inherent structural defects).

Well, I guess I’m done now then.

Summertime priorities

I say, “Fie on you, Superman Returns.” I’ll probably go see it if it shows up here in Morris, but otherwise, Jesus in spandex has little appeal to me.

i-49f465e536fb800937c67b03aaa2ab47-davyjones1.jpg

The only summer blockbuster I care about is the one with the pirates, and most importantly, the villains based on marine biology.

It takes a tortuously long time to get all the narrative plates spinning, but things fall into place once the real villain of the piece is unfurled. This is Davy Jones – of locker fame – and if that sounds like a cliché too far even for a camp pirate flick, Jones, played by Bill Nighy, and his crew are to this film what Depp was to its predecessor. They’re like a bad acid trip at the sealife centre. They sail in a living wreck and have bodies composed of aquatic lifeforms: one has the head of a hammerhead shark, another has cheeks like a pufferfish, and Jones himself has a giant lobster claw for a hand, and a wonderfully slimy octopus head with a prehensile beard of tentacles, through which he barks the fruitiest Scottish brogue this side of the Simpsons’ Groundskeeper Willie. It’s a triumph of special effects that this cephalopod creation is both unnervingly freakish, yet unmistakably Bill Nighy.

<swoon>