Hey look! I’m back! Did you guys miss me?
Don’t answer that.
I haven’t been around much lately because, frankly, my interests were deftly diverted elsewhere. Specifically, I’ve been following the farcical comedy that comprises the pre-release marketing of Ben Stein’s pro-creationism film, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. The movie is scheduled for theatrical release April 18 and if things keep following their current course, it will strangle itself nearly to death before the first showing.
Now, before I get to railing, I should mention that I personally feel Darwinian Evolution and Christian Creationism do not need to be mutually exclusive. Indeed, what is the creation story in Genesis if not a metaphor for evolution? Wouldn’t the omnipotent being that created logic itself be obliged to form the rest of its creation logically? The answers seem plainly obvious to me – even the imminent scientist Richard Dawkins admits it’s as unscientific to claim there is no God as it is to claim there is one – yet there are scads of people who choose to reject scientific fact while simultaneously embracing a hocus pocus version of man’s beginning. Why that is, I cannot say. I am forced to assume it is because believing in magic requires less effort than understanding science.
OK, so, Expelled. *sigh* At its best, it’s a warning of how utterly wrong things can go when personal agendas supersede proven actualities. At its worst, it is misinformative, anti-intellectual propaganda that obfuscates its topic by playing on the emotions of its audience. Here, do me a favor and go watch the trailer; I’ll wait.
As you see, the premise is that scientists who support Intelligent Design over Evolution are unduly persecuted and discriminated against in the scientific community. The contention of the film seems to be that the world’s notable researchers have formed a sort of scientific lynch mob and that they actively go about destroying the careers of other scientists, specifically those who reject the discoveries of Charles Darwin. A further implication of the film – and the real problem as I see it – is that the notion of Intelligent Design is as scientifically valid as that of Evolution.
In order to get at the truth about the first claim – that scientists who embrace Intelligent Design are discriminated against – we must look at the second. Darwin arrived at his conclusions regarding Natural Selection by following the scientific method. He observed, he experimented, he formulated hypotheses and, most importantly, he tested those hypotheses. He came to sound scientific conclusions based on empirical data. By way of contrast, there is absolutely no known scientific method for arriving at the conclusion that some unseen being designed us. In fact, it’s been frequently speculated that an omnipotent being could certainly have done a much better job.
So, given that Intelligent Design has no basis in science, is it really any wonder that true scientists are calling bullshit on the hacks who present it as if it does? Are we really expected to call them scientists if they reject the scientific method? Is it wrong for people who base their work in facts to insist metaphysics remain in philosophy where it belongs?
Let’s say I decide to teach Brazilian jiu jitsu. I start up a school and offer to teach anyone who will come this brutal and effective martial art. Considering my training is in Tae Kwon Do and Kung Fu, it would be completely understandable if some actual jiu jitsu students noted I was a fraud and snapped me into pieces for it, right? Exactly. If they went around telling everyone, including my students, that what I was teaching wasn’t jiu jitsu, would that be discrimination? Could it even be called persecution? Or would it just be telling it like it is?
For the record, I have no problem with people choosing to believe they were specially created by God, that they contain some piece of the divine. I happen to think it’s a rather spiffy notion myself. It’s the most significant idea in philosophy.
But it isn’t science.
Just minutes ago, I shook the hand of the great Edgar Martinez! W00T! I am happy to report that he is an extremely nice fellow with a remarkably strong grip. Having my hand crushed has never been so exciting!
He was also
kind enough to hook me up with an autograph:
This is why
we need to always live in the moment. You simply never know when something special is
just around the corner. I could have sworn when I got up this morning that
today was going to totally suck. How wrong I was. Man, I wish I would have at least taken the time to shave this morning. Oh, well.
First of all, to those who care, Happy Easter! Whether you’re celebrating a resurrected god* or an anthropomorphic rabbit with a penchant for passing out decorated unborn chickens, I hope your day is/has been filled with great times and good food and devoid of angry badgers and burning hair – unless you think burning hair is fun and angry badgers are yummy, of course.
Spent the day yesterday doing a thorough scrub of my hard drives and came across some really awesome stuff I’d saved and promptly forgotten. In fact, I found so much entertainment – dormant and anxious to end its lengthy hibernation – that cleaning the drives and consolidating files took substantially longer than it had to.
And so, with a complete lack of anything funny or useful to say today, I’m just going to fall back on sharing some of the cool junk I found on my computer.
TROOPS
First, we have a series of short clips from a Star Wars parody called TROOPS. TROOPS was made by a guy named Kevin Rubio and is a brilliant parody of the TV documentary program COPS. The production quality is astounding and according to Wikipedia, TROOPS is considered “one of the 10 most pivotal moments in fan film history”.
Pay particular attention to who the “stolen droid” is in the third part. :)
That third part is just top notch, don't you think. Wow.
OOPS
Continuing with the Star Wars motif, here’s a killer poster spoof from a 2003 issue of Mad magazine:
I guess that's enough for now. See you tomorrow.
*be it Jesus or Attis.
The Philadelphia Inquirer reported yesterday:
A city agency yesterday dismissed a discrimination complaint against Geno's Steaks for its speak-English sign…
The case, filed 21 months ago, consumed hundreds of hours of legal time and was the subject of a seven-hour hearing in December. It attracted national attention to Vento and his sign: "This is America. When ordering, speak English."
Now, to be fair, I wouldn’t expect people of a foreign country to coddle me as I attempted to assimilate to their culture and learn their language. I would hope they’d be kind and bear with me, but I certainly wouldn’t demand special treatment. I would, however, sense a definite level of hostility once I finally ascertained the sign’s meaning, especially in combination with another message posted immediately beneath it: “Management Reserves The Right To Refuse Service”.
A split three-member panel of the Philadelphia Commission on Human Relations ruled that a sign in the South Philadelphia cheesesteak shop did not convey a message that service would be refused to non-English speakers.
Note the choice of wording. They selected the word “convey” very carefully. That indicates the implications of discrimination are fine; you just can’t convey that sentiment. It's pretty clear that if you walk up to the Cheesesteak Nazi and order in Spanish, you’re going to be turned away and I’m guessing not in any friendly manner. But since he doesn’t directly say that’s what will happen, he slides by. Very nice. The sign is undeniably racist, but two out of three panel members agree it's not discriminatory, so the rich mook proudly gets to keep it along with his shit-eating grin.
So, do I think this guy is inside his rights to post his “Speak English” sign? Sure. Do I think he’s a full-on, card-carrying shithead for doing it? Absolutely! Do I have further evidence the guy is as much of a dickless tool as I claim he is? You bet:
…he refused to remove the sign, and put a second one on the bumper of his orange Hummer.
‘nuff said.
Don’t get me wrong: I loves me some soft drinks. I enjoy destroying the enamel on my teeth and torturing my stomach lining as much as the next guy. And just like those tattooed stoner guys who make their living finding new ways to mangle themselves, I thought Mountain Dew was akin to nectar squeezed from the ample and undulating bosom of Aphrodite. But then I learned it contained something called “Brominated Vegetable Oil” (BVO). The vegetable oil part by itself wouldn’t have been enough to get me to kick the goddess squeezins, but that b-word perturbed me. It sounded... unpleasant. It hearkened to a darker time when powerful men were sexually stifled and seriously pissed-off about it and due process was yet unborn: “Thou hast been found guilty of buggery and are sentenced to have thine naughty bits... brominated! So be it before Almighty God!”
Anyway, being the consummate word-geek*, I looked it up.
bro-min-ate, v., to combine (a substance) with bromine or a bromine compound.
Ah. And...
bro-mine, n. a heavy, volatile, corrosive, reddish-brown, nonmetallic liquid element, having a highly irritating vapor and used chiefly in the manufacture of gasoline antiknock mixtures, fumigants, dyes, and photographic chemicals.
*strokes chin* M-hm, m-hm. I see what you’re saying there. Basically, you’re telling me I’ve been paying PepsiCo to FEED ME FUCKING STOP BATH FOR THE PAST TWENTY YEARS!!!!
Of course, I have NO faith that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has any real concern about my health, so I decided to find out what they had to say about this allowance of an oil-bromine mixture in my pop. Figured it be good for a groan. According to the Code of Federal Regulations, Title 21 / Chapter I / Part 180 / Subpart B / Section 30, BVO is allowable as an additive "...pending the outcome of additional toxicological studies on which periodic reports at 6-month intervals are to be furnished and final results submitted to the Food and Drug Administration." Now, you know they don't need bi-annual toxology reports on something they are completely confident isn't harmful, so I became even more curious.
I didn't have to look long to learn BVO causes bromine to accumulate in pig fat and has caused liver lesions in laboratory rats. But we all know about how they just pump those lab animals with a kajillion times the normal ingested amount, so I looked for data specific to humans. According to the International Programme on Chemical Safety (IPCS), observations in human tissues and organs showed "...high levels of lipid-bound bromine only in that country which permitted the use of brominated vegetable oil as a food additive." Ugh. The IPCS goes on to state: "Lipid-bound bromine increased in organ fat in an age-related manner and levels were much higher in the fat extracted from brain, liver and spleen than from adipose tissue."
What all this meant to me is that I had been drinking gas treatment for the past couple of decades and it was all just up there soakin’ my brain. Can’t say I liked the thought of that.
From now on, I gotta go with all natural.
*If I love words so much, why does the word for “word-geek escape me? Fuck.
I’ve been spending a lot of time over the past couple weeks exporting video from the scads of DV tapes I have piled up. Most of this video is, you guessed it, footage of my pets (and DG in particular). What the tapes lack in diversity of topic, they make up for in life-affirming things like cuteness and purring and untarnished adoration. It’s hard to write a blog post or read other peoples’ posts when I’ve this wealth of heroin-like video on which to waste my free evening hours.
Most recently, I have been working through a tape containing clips of DG when he was still a kitten. I’m thrilled to report many chaoses have been archived for posterity. I’m guessing my cat-loving peeps might enjoy watching one, so here is a look at young DG doing his best to score some “twopercent” from my cereal bowl.
Panda shot the video. Apologies for the lack of a nifty soundtrack. I couldn't come up with a song that worked. If you think of a good one, let me know!
As a bonus, I'll send a copy of DG's upcoming DVD and his 8x10 promo
glossy to the first person who can name, in the comments below, the
movie playing in the background.
IMPORTANT NOTE: I honestly do not intend to allow Cthulhu is my Copilot to spiral down the toilet of political screeds and partisan ranting. I prefer my readers glean my social leanings from my more enjoyable and thoughtful compositions. That said, I just couldn't let this one slide by...
There is this magazine called Vanity Fair that each month features on the back page their own version of what is known as a Proust Questionnaire. Theirs is a series of questions, which are pretty much always the same, posed to a prominent public figure with the specific purpose of giving the reader a deep and personal look at who that person truly is. I enjoy this feature immensely. Most recently, my favorites have been the ones from J. Kenneth Galbraith and David Steinberg...
...that is until I finally got around to reading the February 2008 issue in which the odious Karl Rove was featured. When I saw it, I at first thought, What the hell Graydon?* Why would you put that shithead in the PQ? But as I read it, the brilliance of featuring “a principle architect of the disastrous presidency of George W. Bush” became quickly apparent. By the time I’d reached the end, I was amazed Rove even agreed to do it, but I was even more astonished that he so completely failed to conceal his horns and spiked tail.
I just want to point out a couple things and let you read the whole thing at your leisure.
What is the trait you most deplore in others?
Not being authentic.
o_O Karl Rove just said he despises it when people aren’t authentic. That’s like Dahmer getting bent out of shape over bestiality porn or, more appropriately, Rush Limbaugh censuring people who illegally acquire and abuse pharmaceuticals.
What do you consider the most overrated virtue?
Patience.
If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?
Try to be more patient.
Let me get this straight: patience is an overrated virtue, but it’s the one thing he wants to change about himself more than anything else? The implications of those two statements together are staggering. Either he thinks he’s just all filled up with every other possible virtue such that patience is all he has left to work on (he’s a deluded freak) or his aspirations preempt his personal beliefs (he’s a superficial charlatan). I’m thinking it’s actually a solid amalgam of the two.
What is your most treasured possession?
My books, starting with the first one I can ever remember reading, Great Moments in History.
What, Green Eggs and Ham escapes his memory? Great Moments in History is the very first book he remembers reading? Really? What a fucking liar. See, now we’re back to the irony of him despising a lack of authenticity in others. Har!
There’s just one last thing I wanted to mention and it really is the cherry on top of this disgusting sundae. There is one question commonly used in the Vanity Fair Proust Questionnaire that is notably absent from the one given to Mr. Rove. That question is: On what occasion do you lie? I wonder if the question was left out deliberately as an oblique slam that only regular readers would readily notice or if ol’ Karl specifically requested its removal. I’m happy either way, mind you; I’m just curious like that.
Gee, it must really kill a big-time bibliophile like Rove to be mocked from the grave by one of history's greatest novelists. Way to go, Proust!
*Graydon Carter is the editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair magazine.
One of our major vendors is taking the top sales reps in the channel to the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing. I’m working from home today, tasked with designing a poster to advertise this promotional contest to our sales team. While performing the necessary research, I learned something very interesting: China’s language actually reflects their former love of America.
Going on the vendor’s desire to have Chinese characters in the ad, I began looking for different Chinese words in hopes of finding some really snazzy cuneiform writing that was both genuine and clear enough for me to accurately emulate in high resolution. It is, of course, impossible to conduct this level of analysis without gleaning info about the meanings and origins of the characters you’re researching and while I’m sure American scholars in Mandarin will roll their eyes at the quaintness my discovery, I was sincerely moved by it.
I wanted to use just a couple really big characters as a background, as opposed to a bunch of smallish writing that I felt would clutter the poster. Since the winners would be taking a trip from the U.S. to China, I finally decided that I would use the characters for “America” and “China”.
I first searched for “chinese + character + china” and quickly came to learn that there are two characters needed to represent the name “China”. The characters are “Zhong” and “Gho”.
My next search was for “chinese + character + america”. Unlike my previous search, this one did not reveal anything useful for quite some time. I dug through a lot of textbook bullshit before finally locating the characters (again, there were two required) that represented “America” to the Chinese. What I eventually found gave me a sense of real human connection.
The characters were “Mei” and again, “Gho”. Noting that the second character was identical to that used for China, I looked into that symbol’s literal meaning and found that the character stood for “country”. Of course, I had to find out what the first character meant. I looked it up and received a very profound epiphany when I discovered that the word “Mei” in Chinese translates “beautiful”.
China’s term for America is “Beautiful Country”.
I hope you find that as inspiring as I do.
I was standing in line at the grocery store yesterday and there was a man in front of me paying for his items with food stamps – actually, they use these special debit cards now, but you know what I mean. Anyway, the cashier told him his total after the government’s subsidy was six bucks and some odd cents. The man thought for a moment and then questioned having to pay anything at all.
“Didn’t I have enough on my card?” he asked.
“You have plenty left on your card,” the cashier replied, “but this chicken is from the deli and you can’t buy food from the deli with food stamps.”
“Oh.” The man looked like he’d been kicked in the stomach. “I thought I could get that. I am sorry. I have no other money.”
The checker removed the price of the chicken from the total and then something happened that caused my internal hard drive to skip: as the man stood there gathering up the bags of items that had been allowed him, he watched the cashier throw the chicken into the garbage. I don’t care who you are, irony making you its bitch to that degree is going to hurt a lot and for a good long time.
When it was my turn to checkout, I asked the cashier if she had in fact thrown the chicken away. She told me that it was required, since anything that comes out of the deli cannot go back to be resold. Health concerns. At that moment, I wanted so badly to go back three minutes in time and pay for the guy’s stupid fried chicken – not because I’m some kind of heroic comforter of the poor, but because of the frustrating absurdity of allowing to rot in a landfill perfectly good meat that a hungry person specifically tried to buy.
Now, I’m not stupid. I understand capitalism and the unavoidable dichotomies inherent in it. I get that the man should have known that the terms of the food stamp program do not allow for prepared foods. Nevertheless, there is something drastically wrong with a system that so badly wants to keep poor people from anything remotely constituting a luxury, that it is willing to unabashedly waste perfectly good food rather than allow those using food stamps to purchase it.
We humans must be capable of better than this.
Lord have mercy, it wasn’t easy, but I’ve successfully snagged some more footage of DG giving his private, super-secret lessons in Deej Fu to little Diblet. As luck would have it, I happened to catch a segment of Dibby’s green belt test and caught him performing the very complicated Brown Eye Chi maneuver! If you don’t remember the Brown Eye Chi, be sure to watch Part 1 to see it originally being taught to Diblet. You’ll appreciate Diblet’s accomplishment more if you do.
So anyway, here it is, Deej Fu 2:
